Podcasts about oh i've

We're absolutely thrilled to have acupuncturist Jost Sauer back on the pod today sharing his cosmic insights. In today's chat Jost and Mason explore the role of intuitive understanding in the Chinese Medicine model, and how going beyond the linear into the realm of the energy field and consciousness is a key factor in healing. Today's conversation is deep and insightful, Jost is an absolute wealth of knowledge and wisdom, sharing his experience as both a practitioner and student in a easy and accessible way. Dive on in to challenge your analytical mind and expand your cosmic awareness. "With being human comes obligation, and the obligation of the human is to free our blockages. If the whole planet frees the blockages, we are in Paradise." - Jost Sauer Mason and Jost discuss: Intuitive understanding as a foundational pillar in Chinese Medicine. Chinese Medicine and the energetic realms. Five Element Theory. Human beings as energy beings. The soul as our human blueprint. The physical organs vs the energy organs; the Western and Eastern concepts of what these are and what they embody. The life/dealth, Yin/Yang cycle. The importance of a daily Qi practice to creating harmony within the body, mind and spirit - consistency is key here. The definition of health - "my perception of health is the ability to transform symptom into flow." Jost Sauer The body as a crystalline structure. Tonic herbs as messengers from heaven. Fad diets and intermittent fasting. The link between your level of health and your capacity for intuition. Using herbs and practice to clear obstructions in the meridians and energy body.   Who is Jost Sauer? Jost (aka the lifestyle medicine man) was born in Germany in 1958 and is an ex-hippie, anarchist and drug runner turned acupuncturist, popular author and healthy lifestyle expert. His background includes competitive skiing, body-building, and ironman training, but after post-drug suicidal depression led him to martial arts and the study of TCM, he discovered the power of Qi, the cycle of Qi of Chinese medicine and that a natural rhythmic lifestyle holds the secrets to anti-ageing, health and success. Jost has been using lifestyle therapeutically for his clients for over 20 years. Jost is an expert in Chinese Medicine, which he lectured in for over a decade at the Australian College of Natural Medicine, he has been running successful health clinics since 1991, initially specialising in addiction recovery, and has treated tens of thousands of clients. His passion is sharing his ongoing discoveries about making lifestyle your best medicine through his books, blogs, articles, workshops and retreats.   Resources: Jost Website Jost Facebook Jost Instagram Jost Youtube Clock On To Health Book   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:00) Bro, welcome back.   Jost: (00:01) Yep, thank you Mason.   Mason: (00:02) It's so good, man. I had so much fun last time, and... well I'm just stoked that you ended up down here, Bangalow way. We're not back at work yet, but as soon as I knew you were going to be in the area, I was like "Yeah, I'm coming out of my shell," to come and rock another podcast with you.   Jost: (00:18) Yeah, awesome.   Mason: (00:21) How's it been going over... You're at the Starlight festival?   Jost: (00:23) Oh look, I love the Bangalow Starlight festival. I love festivals in the first place because it allows you to meet a lot of people from all different walks of life. And the people connection is crucial. Because obviously in Chinese Medicine, everything is contextual, nothing is absolute. And you can write a book about Chinese Medicine, but unless you meet people and you actually establish a relationship, Chinese Medicine really doesn't work and the beauty of those festivals is you meet people from all different walks of life and you can really meet what goes on in their life and you can find something that is of value to address. Chinese Medicine is... The reason I love it so much is you can... It's so versatile, you can apply it to every situation. And it's a medicine that is designed to evolve and to take you constantly to new levels.   Mason: (01:13) Some of the books are amazing but they're 2D, right? What you're talking about is blowing out that web, of that connection, that invisible web, into a 5D reality, which is the nature of the medicine. If it's 2D, and stays within an institution or a hospital or just one particular context, you're not going to get that full experiential nature of what it is.   Jost: (01:34) No, it's a colorful language. It's a colorful medicine. It's a many thing that goes far beyond the scope that we perceive in our conscious reality. Chinese Medicine, it comes from the energetic realms, it comes from the spiritual realms. So it comes from Qi, it comes from... By the time it's channeled down, and funneled into this narrow red bend reality, it has lost a lot of its meaning. The idea is to expand our horizon and consciousness, again in order to bring the whole complexity of Chinese Medicine into application. And that requires, obviously, thinking outside the box all the time. It requires for you to actually not go linear, because if you go linear you limit the medicine. And the beauty of this medicine is, you can go into any situation and if you're open to it, you always know what to do. Because the intuitive understanding is like the prime element of this medicine and we need to train that.   Jost: (02:40) The intuitive understanding, it's not the something that belongs the conscious mind, it belongs to our energy field, and our soul. And Chinese Medicine has got its origin in this spectrum of the energy field, and understands that the blueprint for everything what we see is in the energy field. And basically, everything that's going to get developed and discovered and invented, already exists in the ether. So, the Chinese already tapped into that. For it to exist in the physical, it must have its origin in the energy field. So, the good thing about that is that in Chinese Medicine, we don't have that doom and gloom thinking. So, a lot of people think, our earth is going to collapse.   Mason: (03:36) Yeah, there's not that ambiguous... That anxiety that comes from the ambiguity of the unknown, right? There's no crisis mode, as you said.   Jost: (03:48) Yeah, no, absolutely no, totally no. Because the fact is that we always find a solution.   Mason: (03:51) Yeah, and that's not just in-   Jost: (03:53) Because there are always people who would tap into the ether, it will not stop. The whole idea of Chinese Medicine, what we experience in the physical reality, is based on the five elements. The water nurtures the wood, the wood feeds the fire, the fire becomes ash, which is earth, the earth evaporates, air, clouds, it rains, it's water, it feeds the wood. It's a cycle that will continue forever. So, that's the biochemistry within the physical, but how to direct the five elements is obviously the mind, it's obviously our perception of where we are going to take that. And that intuitive understanding that takes us to direct the five elements comes from the energy field.   Mason: (04:37) So let's talk about that. You were talking about training your intuitive nature, because that's something that in the West, it seems to be the biggest struggle with taking on, in fullness, Chinese Medicine over into the West, is taking it outside of an analytical, complete system. That's what is happening in the West, everyone wants to still... We talked about it in the last podcast. We started talking about pathology, disease classification and all those kinds of things which doesn't necessarily... You can do it side by side with traditional Chinese Medicine.   Mason: (05:10) However, you try and take Chinese Medicine and make it work through the lens of Western pathology... You're going to basically cut out, which is what we do with surgery all the time, you're going to go and cut out that intuitive nature that is that 5D colourful, living web of medicine that Chinese Medicine really is. So, how do we transfer into a modern time and train that intuitive nature, and bring with it not just this... In the West a lot of people are like, "There's always a solution, always something is going to happen," But it's kind of "Cross my fingers and hope it works," verses when you really are tapped in and your intuition and your nature of where to take your five elements and where to take the healing for yourself and others is coming from a real energetic realm that you're plugged into, right. So that you're not kind of hoping, it's not like a belief system, it's just like, "Well, this is a reality."   Jost: (06:08) It really exists.   Mason: (06:09) It exists, and that's a reality. So how do you train tapping into that reality?   Jost: (06:14) Yeah, you can't use your academic mind for that. Obviously, that's why this is not possible with our daily practice.   Mason: (06:20) Yes.   Jost: (06:21) So, in Chinese Medicine, it states over and over, we are energy beings. Our energy field is structured by the meridian system and the acupuncture meridians and the organ structure exists in the energy field, so every organ is an energy organ. So that means, it's already within us. So, as a soul, before we incarnate, before we come into this physical world, we already got all the instructions about what to do, it's like a survival kit, like a mission statement, a full on instruction manual. It's in each of the energy organs. And the energy organs in Chinese Medicine are the ones, as we talked in the last podcast, are written in upper cases, to differentiate it from the western organ. So-   Mason: (07:09) And it's very important. I just want to reiterate that, that's why we we'll say, "Liver wood," to make sure that we're hitting it, that we're not talking about the lower case 'L' liver organ and that's it. It's a very... as you're saying, it's the entire encapsulation of that wood element, and it happens to be called the Liver.   Jost: (07:31) Yes. Look, the spiritual hierarchy, which the Chinese refer to as heaven, which is governed by Tao, which you could say is God. So, they have created the physical, and they have put in meditators between earth and heaven in order for it to develop, and this is what the souls are. Our souls, when we incarnate, are equipped with our mission, we know exactly what to do. We are given all the instructions for it to grow. The spiritual hierarchy want the earth to become better, it's the plan. The mission is for the earth to become a beautiful planet, that's the aim. We will not destroy this, because there is always really good souls coming in with instructions in the energy organ of knowing exactly what to do.   Jost: (08:18) So, the example I use is, someone was 50 years of age, who gets a new iPhone. They don't know what to do because the iPhone, or the smart phone is not coming with an instruction manual. So, what do you do? You give your phone to your five-year-old niece. And she immediately shows you how to use that phone. So the instruction of how to use that phone is already in the energy field of that young child.   Mason: (08:45) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Jost: (08:46) Yes? They already understand, before they incarnated, they already had all the instructions. So they look at iPhone, iPad, bang, they know what to do.   Mason: (08:54) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Jost: (08:55) Yes? So obviously we don't have that, at my age I didn't have that in my organ system, I have to learn it, I have to acquire it, but the young child has it and they get it. So, we constantly got souls coming in with information in the energy organ that will have all the solutions in order to bring the earth to the next. Because this is why, like at Bangalow, you meet a lot of conspiracists, and a lot of people who believe in doom and gloom, and there's a lot of people from the surrounding area that run around and tell you, "This is it, the earth is going to collapse next year."   Mason: (09:30) Very pessimistic, yeah. Very. And I've been there as well, it's a very analytical place. But that doom and gloom, it's hard to get out sometimes when you think, "But this is the reality of it, and if I look away from it then all of a sudden I'm going to shut down and become one of the sheep." Verse, by broadening your awareness of what is actually going on.   Jost: (09:50) Yes. It will not collapse. Why? I mean, it took the spiritual hierarchy billions of years to build all this, they've got a big plan, they've got a big mission, they know what they're doing. The fact is, it's regulated by Yin and Yang. The physical is always subject to Yin and Yang. That means creation and destruction co-exist. That means, for us to move to the next, there will be destruction. Of course we see the destruction, but the destruction is not the end.   Mason: (10:16) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (10:17) You know? It's the beginning of the new. It's a transformation. Like in therapy. 40 years in my work as a therapist, in order to make someone healthier, in order to transform, you destroy a lot. Like in my training in Chinese martial art, we create a new body.   Mason: (10:33) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (10:35) Yeah? I create a new body, every day I train I create a new body. But in order to create a new body, I destroy the previous aspect of my body. That means I'm always in pain. Yes? I'm always destroy an aspect of my body. It's like body building of a car. If you want to get a new panel done, you destroy, you wreck the car first and then you put new panels on. So, the earth goes through that process, it's an evolution.   Jost: (10:58) So obviously, if we don't understand the process of transformation and if we aren't have the intuitive understanding develop that means we are aligning with the energy field, we can get trapped in destruction. We can get trapped in the observation of "It's destroying itself." That means we are so trapped. And this is regulated by the physical body, and unfortunately, the Liver energy is responsible for that. If the Liver Qi is stagnant and the Liver Qi doesn't move, that means you actually... It's not moving proper, it can get stuck. Because the Liver is directly going to the Heart, to the Fire Element, and that's where your perception of awareness comes in. Your mind perceives by the Heart. If the Liver Qi is stagnant, the mind gets stuck on one aspect, it gets stuck on the destruction, it can't see the creation, it can't move on to the next.   Jost: (11:55) So now you see doom and gloom. You see Yang but not Yin. So you see a Yin Yang symbol but only with the yang. And so Liver Qi stagnation is unfortunately a by product of a lifestyle. So a lifestyle, if we don't develop the skills to make the Liver Qi move, we cause Liver Qi stagnation. Liver chi stagnation can come easily from inappropriate way of living. For example, marijuana, pot, impacts on the Liver. If you smoke regular, what it can do, it can actually stop the Liver Qi moving. So what happens now? It becomes a staccato towards the Fire. Now the mind can't perceive the next so it gets stuck on the destructive aspect. It sees Yang but not Yin.   Mason: (12:46) Yeah.   Jost: (12:47) Marijuana can do that. I've been observing drugs for a long time, and this is one of the side effects of pot that it can make you stuck on only perceiving Yang, not Yin. And that means now you can see it's going to get doom and gloom, it's going to destroy. Now you perceive reality, "The earth is going to die." So, the fact is that all of us actually know exactly what it's about and we just need to get to the intuitive understanding of our body, and that requires the Qi to flow. If the Qi flows, that means it goes through all the other organ systems, now we've got access directly to our energy field, now we have access to information about our mission, we suddenly understand. So this is where it goes into, we need to do the practice every day. So we need a daily practice. So, yeah.   Mason: (13:43) Well this is what I like, I mean, this is a nature of Chinese Medicine that's highly made that transfer over into the West, but not fully, is that one that, if we're talking about Liver Qi stagnation, are we going to just unlearn how to understand that and just bring into our household an understanding of what that is, or are we going to go to a practitioner. Okay, we can go to a practitioner and get some needling and get things moving.   Mason: (14:07) But as you were saying, daily practice, procuring your own ability to keep your own Qi moving so that you become your own practitioner. And then, I think from looking at that Yang side of things, whether it's conspiracy, or... we're always looking for solutions, with Yang it's doom and gloom so we're looking for like, how do we right this wrong. And so, right the wrong is the mentality of "I am a patient, I need to go to a doctor, I am sick, I've got a symptom, I need to right this wrong." And then when you do get the Qi moving, and you have the Yin, that accumulative energy and that calm and that still energy of the Yin, you can start to... The mind, the Heart energy can move and the mind can start moving towards not so much as a problem solution and what I'm fixing in myself every day with my practice, but something more exploratory, something more cultivating, something more exciting.   Mason: (15:00) So, with the daily practice. Let's have a look at that simplicity, because that's something I like hitting again and again and again with everybody. So theoretically, what does it feel like for you, when you get there and you say "Okay, there's the potential for Liver Qi stagnation, however I am in here in a not solving problems, in a not fixing myself state of mind." What is your state of mind? Are you exploring yourself? Are you looking for longevity? What does it feel like?   Jost: (15:32) I look for to free my energy field. Okay, so our job as human beings, in order to be of benefit to creation, that means we are of benefit to others and ourselves, so we benefit creation. In order to be beneficial to others and to life, I need to free my obstructions in the meridian system. So if my acupuncture meridian are free flowing, I am without... Without a deliberate action, I am good to others, I'm not planning to be good, I'm naturally good. So I'm not deliberately good. I'm not going and making a conscious decision to be good, I'm automatically good because my energy flows freely, I'm automatically embracing the situation from the best perspective, and I'm naturally considering the person as a friend. So our job as humans is to actually clear the blockages in the meridian. So I don't have actually a future thinking, because I've been doing it for so long so I perceive myself as a soul, a soul doesn't think future, because it's infinite.   Mason: (16:43) Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.   Jost: (16:46) I'm in the present, yeah? Because that's the only thing that matters to the soul. So I don't actually go far into the future, maybe I should but I can't actually go in.   Mason: (16:58) Maybe for a bit of fun.   Jost: (17:01) The fact is that every morning when I wake up, the only thing that concerns me is the blockages in my field, and I know exactly there are blockages in my large intestine meridian. If I don't correct them, it can't control my Wood. If it can't control the Wood, I will have irritability and crankiness, that means I most likely will harm someone by saying something rude, or I feel irritable and cranky and angry, that means I harm myself.   Mason: (17:30) Mm-hmm (affirmative), are you a Lung constitution? A Metal constitution?   Jost: (17:34) No, no, it's a fluctuating system anyway.   Mason: (17:38) Yeah, of course.   Jost: (17:39) It's like... Now that's like a general approach. Every morning, I know exactly, I'm going to look at whatever the obstructions are-   Mason: (17:48) What's your process of... Just scanning?   Jost: (17:50) Yeah, it's scanning, yeah. So, the dominating symptom, that's what I mean with "It's fluctuating." So it's not a dominating element, there is always a dominating symptom, and the symptom in Chinese Medicine, the symptom belongs to the body, it's subject of the physical body but it doesn't belong to the soul, it's not property of the soul. The energy field does not know symptoms, the soul of our nature is pure awareness, joy, bliss, but the soul incarnates into the physical and that means it matches itself with the central nervous system of the physical body and that causes symptoms, that's pain. And that's sensory, and that leads to thinking. So, in the mornings, I will always wake up to a dominating thinking, a thought, and a dominating symptom. So it could be a pain in the knee, it could be... With me, obviously because of my injuries from when I was hard into sport, so usually injuries come up like an aching knee, aching hip, something like that. Or if I worked too much in the day before and I got too intensely involved with transformational processes with my clients, I have energy stuck from that previous day and that gives me a squeezy sick feeling in the stomach. And so, whatever it is... Or I feel lethargic, or depression, whatever.   Jost: (19:19) The fact is, whatever is dominating, I sink into that. And then I use my body to clear the meridians. So I hold onto that symptoms, I don't drink coffee. I don't do anything to override the symptoms. I love coffee, but I drink coffee when I don't need it.   Mason: (19:36) Yeah, that's the way. Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Jost: (19:38) Yeah. It's just a... I love coffee, I love cake, I love everything, I love red wine. That's the beauty of living that way is that you can enjoy everything, I'm not trapped in you need juice diet, I'm not trapped in any diets. If you put the focus on clearing your energy field first, you are in charge of substance. That means you know what to do because you don't need it. So if I wake up and drink coffee to get going, I override the symptom, I'm giving the instructions now to the body and to my energy field, and I don't actually want to clear that. So what happens now is, I actually stop getting access to my information about my intuitive understanding. So if I wake up and get straight into coffee, into sugar, into distractions, into cigarettes, or meeting people or having a call-   Mason: (20:34) On the phone?   Jost: (20:34) Yeah, on the phone. What happens now is I'm actually stopping, what happens is I stop the internet connection to my energy field. So it's like I got my computer but no internet connection. So my energy field has got all the information. To access that information, I need to unblock the obstructions in my energy field first.   Mason: (20:59) And you're using your physical practice to do that?   Jost: (21:01) Yes. This is the beauty of... If you love yoga, you do yoga. If you do core training, you take core training. If you do stretches, you do stretches. If you love TRX ropes, you use TRX ropes. If you love martial arts, you do Tai-chi. It's really irrelevant what practice you do as long as you know why you do it.   Mason: (21:22) So talk a little bit about that. Are we talking about intent here, like if you have an intention to move through? And what you were saying before about whatever deficiency or blockage we are experiencing that day, and watching to see if you know or if you don't... We all know it really well, because we know where we get emotionally hung up during the day and we know where we lack a bit of compassion or empathy or where we get angry at people. For me, it's criticism, and it's mostly... It might come up as criticism for others but I feel that if I go a little bit further, I can feel that real hectic criticism of myself that it's emerging from. But I know that's my blockage, right? And that's an interesting thing, it was a good reminder from you the other day. I can't remember what you said specifically on Instagram, but you were like, "Look, there's no bad people or bad emotions, it's just an energetic blockage."   Jost: (22:09) Yeah.   Mason: (22:09) Right. Super fascinating. So you're saying, no matter what your physical practice is... Because I like that approach as well. It doesn't really matter what your... Everything can be your spiritual practice, everything can be your energetic practice.   Jost: (22:20) Yeah, everything is a spiritual practice, as long as you know what you do. You need to know why you do it. So if you understand that what the practice is, from a physics perspective, exercise is like piezoelectricity. It acts on crystallization and the obstructions in the crystalline arrangement. So what happens is that when we have a blockage in the energy field, that blockage is, as physics has identified, is in fact a crystalline arrangement. It's like... Your acupuncture point is in fact a crystal. So if the energy is not moving through it's because a crystalline arrangement has been. That's what pain is. When we try to avoid pain, and don't move in a certain area with our body, we actually enhance the obstruction, and that becomes a crystal, it's like crystal. And that crystal is memories, it's full with all kind of memories about issues, whatever that is.   Mason: (23:24) So that is crystalline, sedimenty, like a deposit within the-   Jost: (23:31) Yes. When you use Chinese massage therapy, which is an enormous, complex field, which takes... in China, you study medicine first, then you specialize in Tuina, which is the Chinese massage therapy. So all up, seven years, eight years before you are actually allowed to work on people. And what they do, they sit on the point with the knuckle, and they know exactly, "This is a crystal." So what they do is they apply piezoelectricity on that point. Piezoelectricity means, you are putting pressure on the crystal. If you apply pressure on a crystal, the energy that's inherent in the crystal will now be released. That's the sister of the cigarette lighter, the electric cigarette lighter. In a cigarette lighter, you have a crystal and you put pressure on it, the energy, and it gets connected to the gas that becomes the flame. Cars used to have a piezoelectricity. Piezoelectricity is a physics fact, everyone can Google it, it all comes up.   Jost: (24:34) But our body is also piezoelectricity, it's a crystalline arrangement. When our meridian system matches with the central nervous system, that merging becomes crystalline, it's a crystalline arrangement. So the meridians have got different pathways to the nervous system, but the crystalline arrangement is the result of the two. And it's the process of the energy with the central nervous system, the blood flow etc. So the crystalline arrangement doesn't belong to the soul, but it's incarnate and matched with the central nervous system, it becomes crystalline. So that's why when you sit on a certain point it can transmit energy all the way up the other part of the body.   Mason: (25:18) Yeah, right.   Jost: (25:18) Yeah, and so this is where death point striking in kung fu comes into, we know exactly what point to hit. In that moment, you hit the acupuncture point and the blockage in the crystal now gets reversed and it stops the flow and people die. Death point strike, it's called dim mak. So obviously it takes decades to study and learn and by the time you master this art you have no interest in applying it.   Mason: (25:47) Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah the way it normally goes.   Jost: (25:49) But healing is exactly the same thing. So the healing, the Tuina, the Chinese massage therapy, understands that the blockage is the cause of the problem because that crystal stops the energy being taken to the energy organ and stops the energy from the energy organ to be moved to the other parts of the body. It basically physically stops intuitive understanding to be developed. So the question we started at the beginning is how to develop intuitive understanding, the answer to that is, to free the meridians of its blockages and that means we have to go into the crystalline arrangement and actually free the blockages. Because once you have the blockages free, that means your senses, your awareness merges, your thoughts meet your soul nature and the awareness of your soul nature now influences your thoughts. Suddenly your thoughts are generated by your soul awareness rather than by conscious mind, reflection, analysis.   Jost: (26:58) So instead of going into using your conscious mind and you're looking at a rational formula, your thoughts, if the energy flows freely to the energy organ, because the crystalline arrangement has been taken care of, what happens now is that your thoughts are influenced by the awareness of the soul. Means when you talk to someone, you suddenly know... You just suddenly understand, you suddenly see a blue print of something. For example, if someone talks about a problem, and you suddenly know. That's what the seer is used in therapy, like in the old days when people had a problem, they had to see the shaman. The shaman was able to connect his thoughts to the soul awareness and suddenly saw, suddenly knew what to do.   Mason: (27:51) It's so simple as well. That was the thing... When I was first getting into it, in talking to you about it, it's real electric and romantic and it's amazing and the language can go... You're like "Oh whoa, you do this and this and the thing goes into this and goes into the energy organ," but we all know the experience. If everyone listening, and I mean, even for myself, this is a really familiar place, when you just have those days when you're moving your body a few days in a row in a way that is unblocking whatever needs to be unblocked, right? Its not like a mental idea of trying to get fit or trying to fix myself in any way, I'm just moving, enjoying that movement, exploring my body.   Jost: (28:32) And you get unblocked, that's all it is.   Mason: (28:34) Just unblocking. And then after a few days you get into a little bit more of a flow, because maybe you've been sleeping a little bit better and just eating a little bit better and all of a sudden you're popping and the ideas start coming to you and you're talking to someone and as you were saying... Everyone knows this experience, maybe I can feel what they're going through a little bit, I can relate a little bit and then you just have a really nice conversation and that person comes off feeling a little bit better. It doesn't need to get much more complex than that, that's like that flow state of a day.   Mason: (29:03) I think what's for me where I've always got tripped up is I've gone... I've thought it needed to be more complex than that and I thought I needed to work harder and I needed to move more and do more Qigong or do more stretching or more standing meditation to compound it verses just allowing it to be a nice, gentle consistent building over time and really going, and sure, Mason, that you can relate, you're going nice and slow and steady enough, and you're going to be able to keep this up for the next four, five, six decades. And that's something I'm really coming back to at the moment, just how simple it is and how simple the intention, in all its complexity, just to be, just to get tapped into your intuition, a little bit, doesn't need-   Jost: (29:48) The key is consistency.   Mason: (29:50) Far out, isn't it.   Jost: (29:51) It's consistency is the key. The latest discoveries in performance sport therapy, it's all about, you never go to the extreme, but it's consistency. When people look at my body, they always know, because I'm very conditioned and they always go like, "My god, you must be hardcore in weight training and things like..." Firstly, I don't touch weights. But it's about... The people "How do you get the cut look, how do you get so cut?"   Mason: (30:17) "How do you get chiseled?" Yeah.   Jost: (30:18) How do you get chiseled? Consistency!   Mason: (30:20) Yeah.   Jost: (30:22) Every day! Consistency! Years after year, consistency, that's the key. I'm not strong, I'm consistent. But in the consistent, you become strong.   Mason: (30:32) You become really strong.   Jost: (30:32) Yes, that's it. So, I'm not going for the strength, I'm going for consistency, then the consistency over time, that makes you strong. It's a totally different approach, in Taoist view.   Mason: (30:41) Well you completely bypass the mental idea of what strong is, as a gain and as something to own, and you start awakening this phenomena of strength from your body, right?   Jost: (30:52) Yeah. You don't go hardcore, for example if it says 50 kilos on the bench press, I would do 30. I mean, I don't do bench press. But the idea is to... In case you would do this, yeah. So you never go to the extreme, but you're going to do it every day. And that's the key. This is where a lot of really incredible physiques, like the Russian sport conditioning, they are leaders in the field.   Mason: (31:19) Insane.   Jost: (31:20) Unbelievable what that dude.. Pavlov one of my heroes, I love their bodies, let's talk about it here, this Russian sport condition. But those guys, they're in their seventies, they've got incredible physiques, they're 80 years old, they've got physiques like mindboggling. Their key is consistent. Every day, every day, every day, just build and build and build. Because what happens is, this is where, if you every day honored, you de-obstruct the blockages, you free the blockages. What happens now? The energy field is coming in. The energy field always rejuvenates the body. This is the key to longevity. You see, the physical body, which in Chinese Medicine we call Po, P, O. The physical body is destined to die, is temporary, but the energy, which we call Hun, H, U, N, is infinite. So the energy always rejuvenates the body.   Jost: (32:14) So when we talk about longevity, the interesting thing is my focus is not longevity, my focus is the obstructive blockages, but that leads to longevity. My focus is not strength, my focus is consistency that leads me to strength.   Mason: (32:28) Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, amazing.   Jost: (32:31) So it's always a secondary outcome. So my goal is always a secondary... It's almost like a secondary outcome.   Mason: (32:40) Yeah. Which takes a lot of strength within itself. To be able to hold your focus enough, and not get caught up in that... And not get invalidated right away, especially.   Jost: (32:53) Yeah, the beauty is that you develop the skills enough that after a while you just don't... I don't buy into people's... I mean, you've got eight billion people on this planet, and as soon as the soul incarnates into the physical, and that means it matches with the nervous system. In that moment, the soul experiences thoughts, so obviously that leads to an opinion. So that means we've got eight billion opinions on the earth. You can't follow people's opinions, you've got to find your own way here. And the Buddha said, "Don't believe anyone, not even me." And so I don't buy into anything. When I read something about diet, whatever, I just let it go by. But it's the energy field by that shows me where it is, the intuitive understanding needs to be, that's the key element. And interesting thing is, intuitive understanding can be only developed if you live healthy.   Jost: (33:53) So the next answer to the question how to develop intuitive understanding is to be healthy. So the interesting thing is that the intuitive understanding will not come to you if you unhealthy.   Mason: (34:03) Mm-hmm (affirmative), if you're unhealthy, yeah.   Jost: (34:05) Just because someone says "I have an intuitive understanding," you don't know where that comes from, it could be thought process from the physical body. The physical body is very limited in its knowledge, yes? So you can't go by that. So just because something comes in, you don't know what it is. But the fact that... The healthier you are, the more you know.   Mason: (34:24) Mm-hmm (affirmative). I guess what you were saying is that there's variations in health as well. I mean, the difference being, can you be on a explore what real blossoming health is for you...   Jost: (34:42) Okay, my perception of health is the ability to transform symptom into flow.   Mason: (34:48) On a daily-?   Jost: (34:49) That's health. Because that means, whatever level you are, your health is an indicator how you transform your symptom. So you're 80 years of age, and you've got a symptom, like creaky back or achy bones, you can't get out of bed. But, you transform that, and you get out of bed. That's health.   Mason: (35:06) Or even like further internally, right, if you're looking at anxiousness, obsessiveness. That's the most difficult thing, I think, that's where you see... It's where I've caught myself in the biggest trap and going like, "Right, I'm really healthy, and then I'm physically healthy and now I'm going to maintain this state of health." And then all of a sudden, because I've got more energy, it brought up my own self-awareness of my own blockages. I was talking about that criticism, and all these things. So all of a sudden at that point, you look down the barrel of going, "All right, I thought it was hard to overcome physical symptoms. Far out, now I'm going to open up a can of worms of going..." Without pressuring yourself, because there's this all this pressure to become a perfect human when you're in this world, and you're hanging out at Bangalow Starlight festival, you've got to have your sainthood on. You can't be... Can't admit that you're an overly angry person or an anxious person. There's like a cachet that comes with being in the scene.   Mason: (36:16) But the reality of it is, without... Yeah, you got to be working on your, make sure your back isn't hurting, make sure you're stretching so that these physical symptoms aren't going to get you. But then going in and working on transforming that nature of yourself which is super critical or paranoid or whatever that is. That takes a lot of energy. I feel like, that's where a transparency on, and knowing that it's okay to still have these reactions and still have these things that come up.   Jost: (36:49) Yes. We can't not have symptoms, it's not possible. Because every day, our job as humans is to expand the current state of the earth. And it will be regulated by the hierarchy, who has given us information in the energy field of what to do. So the earth will expand. Our job is to keep doing that. But while doing it, while we grow the earth and grow ourselves, we also, that means we are subject to Yin and Yang, that means we also experience destruction. So while I create, all day... Today I focus on creating, tomorrow when I wake up, I experience the destructive aspect of creation. So if I override that, ignore, I'm actually going backwards. That's what they're saying. So what that means is, I'm moving towards my physical body, rather than towards the soul. That means, now, as I move to my physical body and I become more and more the physics... But then I go to a health fair like Bangalow Starlight festival and I'm supposed to be a healer and a soul person, and if I'm in the physical body and not in my soul... If I'm in the physical body but not naturally in my soul, that means I now have to project. I have to do a conceptual view on who I am. That means I have to project, I can't be natural, I have to project. So now I live a double life. Yes?   Mason: (38:19) Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and all... Now you feel like... Now who are the fraudulents.   Jost: (38:24) So now I have to project to be the saint, whereas in fact I'm stuck in the physical. But the fact is that every morning, I wake up to be the sinner, and after my practice, I am the saint. So if I wake up and don't deal with my physical symptoms, of course I get more and more trapped and it becomes in brackets not the saint. So now I have to obviously project to others that I am the saint, whereas the beauty is once you start constantly de-obstructing, you don't actually care what you project to others, you become free of that need. I'm totally free of the need to project, because I deal with that in my morning practice and then I don't care what other people think of me. I just actually don't give a toss what other people think of me. Yeah?   Mason: (39:13) Yeah, liberating, yeah.   Jost: (39:15) And people who know me know that. I learned that from the masters that I studied under. They don't live in the eyes of other people, they don't live as an accord with your expectations, yes?   Mason: (39:32) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (39:33) They are eccentrics, they follow their path. If that suits you or not, that's your problem.   Mason: (39:36) I feel ya, I'm like... That's like-   Jost: (39:40) But you're never obnoxious, you're never bad because your energy is flowing freely so by nature you are compassionate. You're just in a slightly different way than other people think you should be, but you don't care.   Mason: (39:52) I mean, it's refreshing having someone... That's always when you go, "All right, I'm going to start... I'm in the presence of someone that's I want to procure some Shen here some wisdom but without the obnoxiousness, like not... because when I was growing up, in the West, it was either... I'm someone who is very self-aware in the sense that I'm very aware of that it's all made up. Other people looking at me and other people judging me, that's been my whole life, that has been my biggest weight on my shoulders. And then, what I could see, what was projected in the West most of the time were those people that, especially when I was young, those people that didn't care what other people were thinking of them, comes with a slice of obnoxiousness as well. And so as a young person, especially watching a lot of shitty media, maybe do I just need to be obnoxious? And then you play around with that and go through all those kinds of areas and then you get to this point when, as you were saying, awareness of this nature of right, and you can get consistency and clear that energy and, as I say, the whole point of taking the herbs is ideally to become less of an asshole and more of an awesome person. Would that kind of be it?   Jost: (40:59) Yes, that's the point.   Mason: (41:00) That's the point.   Jost: (41:03) Because herbs, herbs act on obstructions and the blockages. That's why herbs are crucial, that's why your mushrooms, your medicinal mushrooms, all that stuff, ashwagandha... It's your first step, it's essential. It's always superior to food because herbs act on the crystalline arrangement more in a concentrated form than food would do. So the example I use is herbs act on crystals, crystalline arrangements and the obstructive blockages like dish washing liquid would act on greasy pots. If you have a greasy pot and you want to clean it, you can scrub that pot under hot water all day, you go nowhere. One drop of dish washing liquid and bang you take it off. And that's to me like a good serve of ashwagandha, a good serve of astragalus, a good serve of good mushrooms, put it all together, have the tea after your morning practice. It flushes the meridian and it de-obstructs the blockages like dishwashing liquid would act on greasy pots.   Mason: (42:09) I like that. Okay so when with the crystalline arrangement, can you explain to me again the process of are we helping to align that crystalline nature or actually clear-   Jost: (42:19) No, we... The clearing of the blockage, the clearing of the crystal means you apply pressure on the crystal.   Mason: (42:25) Right.   Jost: (42:25) So that means you put yourself in a... The whole principal of the pyramids, of the Egyptian pyramids is the center of the fire, where it meets, it's about the pressure of the "Phwoar!", you're going right in. When you look at the "Whaaa!" Sorry.   Mason: (42:26) No, go for it.   Jost: (42:38) When it's really deep concentration practice, what you do... Your whole awareness, your consciousness, everything and your body becomes like a pyramid and you're compressing inside the center of fire, and that means that in that moment what you're doing, you're putting... You're applying a three dimensional pressure on the crystal from all different angles, all around. And in that moment if you apply pressure on it, like "Phwooar!" In that moment the energy naturally gets freed and now it shoots out, and now it frees itself. So you keep going, keep going, keep going so the crystal which maybe starts the size of a one inch radius, diameter, and then eventually becomes like a little coin. So initially it starts like the size of an apple, and eventually it becomes the seed of a poppy seed.   Mason: (43:29) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (43:30) Yeah? So if you sit with this, you could de-obstruct the whole body in a sitting of 16 years, according to the knowledge of the Vedas. You can become enlightened in 16 years if you just sit there for 16 years and de-obstruct every blockage. And that moment, enlightenment means, the energy just flushes through your body, according to their view of that whole thing.   Jost: (43:54) So the obstruction is the crystal, the pressure is three dimensional. So that's why it's something we need to be engaged with, so we can't just do it... We need to use the body for that. I mean, some people can do it without a body, but it takes a lot of training. Yeah, some of the Tibetan Buddhists in the Himalaya obviously don't use... But they're so strong. I studied under some of those guys, unbelievable strength. I mean, I'm pretty fit and I look at those guys and my god. It's not like... They don't do this visualization technique that you learn in New Age, you know this...   Mason: (44:34) They're like actually living it and doing it. Effortless effort.   Jost: (44:39) They are in a constant applying pressure on the crystal three dimensional constantly.   Mason: (44:46) Yeah, right.   Jost: (44:47) They can sit in 40 degrees, minus, just with a loin cloth. And the pressure on the crystal is so strong, it emanates the energy, they are actually hot and they melt the snow. And I've seen those guys and it's unbelievable training. So my training is with the Chen Tai Chi, and it focuses, it does the same thing so when we do the stands we focus and every body becomes like... You just unite with every meridians. So after about 20 minutes you can feel very meridian system, you can feel every blockage and you are just fully engaging with every obstruction, with the main obstruction, and you can feel in that moment you are just completely applying pressure on it.   Jost: (45:29) So this is something we are all trained to do, we are all programmed to do. We just have to introduce to the initial techniques and we will find it. That's the beauty of that. We all have that in our energy field. Everyone who is physical form, in human body, already has the instructions in their energy body how to do this. You just have to start.   Mason: (45:56) You just have to start and not think about it too much. You just have to... Yeah. I mean, that's always my trip up, I'm like "Should I really, should I be doing that technique, should I move on from that technique a little bit, maybe that's not..." And I'm like sitting down and just watching myself... And it's not even sabotage, it's well intended to an extent but it's just... You overthink it and it's just like "Dude, just do something."   Jost: (46:23) But before we start the practice, we are always dominated, our awareness, we are thinking, we are in the body. So, when we start the practice, we are in the body. Of course we don't want to do it.   Mason: (46:36) Yeah.   Jost: (46:37) You just... I've never had a day, I've never had a morning I woke up and said "I can't wait to get into it." Every morning it's a struggle, it's a battle. Because you wake up, you're in the energy field. Now you don't want to get up. This is why the Chinese called it "From the senses, to mind, to Qi." So when I wake up, every morning, I get immediately confronted with the sensory. What it means is, I don't want to get up, I want to give in to the pleasure of sleeping, I want to roll over, I want to stay in bed, I want to give into my senses. So I know I have to use my mind, to push against it. And my mind says, "I have to do business, I have to do work." Yes? So that's the step, that gets you out of bed.   Jost: (47:27) However, the Taoists say, "From the senses, to the mind, to Qi." So, meaning, we wake up, we resist the senses, that means we don't give into the pleasure to stay in bed. We use the mind to get up. But now we're using the mind to move towards Qi. So we don't use the mind to go to work, we don't use the mind to get to the computer and write, we don't use the mind to go on Instagram. We don't use the mind to argue with other people. We use the mind to force the body into a posture. And once the body gets into a posture, automatically, you start de-obstructing the meridian fields. Now the intuitive understanding is coming into it, that means I'm starting to feel good.   Mason: (48:12) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (48:13) Yes? So, now I understand what to do, I can follow. But I can't follow unless I'm in there. Of course, every morning it's the battle from the senses, to the mind, to chi. In the Western world this is the real battle because for getting out of bed, then you have to battle business.   Mason: (48:33) Or social obligations, communications....   Jost: (48:36) You have to battle... Yeah, it's like the mind wants to immediately ride, get involved, do stuff. Because when I wake up, I finally get out of bed, I immediately want to "Oh I've got this idea, I want to write this down, I want to go on my iPad and write this idea down, I'm just awesome, I've got this perfect understanding... I've got to write this." Of course I want to check my emails. But no! From the mind, to Qi. So I use the mind to put the body into the posture that allows piezoelectricity to happen, that means I de-obstruct the blockages.   Jost: (49:13) Once I de-obstruct the blockages, I now go into Qi. Now I am soul awareness, of course, and now I... That's joy and once I'm in there, I don't want to stop. Difficult to start, very difficult to stop.   Mason: (49:31) And then you need to use your mind like "All right, come back down to earth, mate!"   Jost: (49:36) That's why I'm always late, because once I'm in there, I can't stop. I'm always late, for the Bangalow festival, supposed to be there at a certain time. I'm always late because I'm fully immersed in my Qi, in my practice. I can't just lie, "Yeah, I've got plenty of time."   Mason: (49:53) Yeah, right.   Jost: (49:55) Plenty of time. It's too good. But when I wake up, oh I don't want to do this. And then when I'm in there, oh this is good, I don't want to stop.   Mason: (50:05) Do you share practices from your Tai Chi lineage and do you share the forms or the postures anywhere outside of a workshop?   Jost: (50:19) I have a lineage I follow, I follow the Chen Village.   Mason: (50:23) Do you teach that?   Jost: (50:24) No, I don't teach it.   Mason: (50:25) Oh you don't teach it, right, right.   Jost: (50:29) I study Tai Chi, and I practice. So my lineage is Chen Tai chi and that's the oldest Tai Chi, that's the original Tai chi.   Mason: (50:38) Yeah, that's how it was fascinating when we got into that last podcast, yeah.   Jost: (50:41) I just tell everyone, just give it a try.   Mason: (50:44) How would they give it a try?   Jost: (50:45) Yeah, well the beauty of that is there are Chen schools everywhere these days.   Mason: (50:49) Yeah, right.   Jost: (50:49) They're everywhere. You just pull it up on Google, it comes up. 50 years ago, you couldn't find it.   Mason: (50:54) It just exploded, didn't it.   Jost: (50:56) This is the best time to live because you can find access to any technique anywhere. There are courses about Qigong like for $9 or $14 on Udemy. It's mind boggling. There are masters who are showing you every move. Like Chen Xiaowang, one of the greatest master in the history, Tai Chi master, his power is unbelievable. And you can constantly research him on YouTube. 30 years ago, for hundreds of years ago, it was fiercely guarded. Now it's available for everyone.   Mason: (51:29) Boom! It just opened, yeah.   Jost: (51:31) We live in... We've got everyone, everything is available. So everyone's got a smart phone, so on a click and on a swipe of a digital device, you have instant access to the latest technique.   Mason: (51:44) It's insane, that's insane. That's how I feel. Sometimes I walk into the warehouse here, and I look at the herbs sitting on the shelf, and I know the story... The adventure over thousands of years, of that herb. Thousands and thousands of that thing in a particular little area, the hermit's understanding it and working with it to... Maybe there's a village or some grandmothers who just hold onto ensuring that they know how to go and harvest it and introduce it to their children, and the family. And then all of a sudden it becomes famous and the Emperor's just send out and horde all of the reishi mushroom or all of whatever it is. And then Mao coming in, somewhat beginning to destroy the Taoist approach to herbalism. Yet there is just a couple of masters who bring it through, and then one of those masters teaches it to a student that goes over to America.   Mason: (52:43) Then all of a sudden someone "Boom! Bang!" And all of a sudden... Not realizing as well that the people who have guarded these lineages and these martial arts and these herbal practices and even just growing methods, really fiercely the integrity. Which is sometimes the hardest thing to do but yet you still just have to get involved, get an understanding of the terrain and then you can learn what quality movement and quality herbs... You just get a little bit of understanding, you just need to get moving to begin with. And then all of a sudden, we've got astragalus, ginseng-   Jost: (53:17) In supermarkets!   Mason: (53:21) But, everywhere! I look at how many-   Jost: (53:21) I saw it in IGA the other day.   Mason: (53:24) That's like, well some IGA's-   Jost: (53:26) A big bottle of astragalus, I couldn't believe it!   Mason: (53:28) In Maleny, where were you?   Jost: (53:29) No that was in Sunshine Coast, in IGA! Beside toilet paper!   Mason: (53:31) Far out. I mean, that's like when the first... I think Maleny was an IGA that two years ago, they asked me to come and do a talk, and they had sold like 150 tickets through IGA to come and learn. And I wasn't told... I'm kind of, we'll have to... We should do an event together one day. But when I do my talks, I'm probably similar to you, you just start and like "Ba ba ba ba ba." But I'm not going, reishi is good for this, we'd go on through Jing Qi Shen and each have a little chat about it. And there we are sitting there with a supermarket conversation, supermarket customers coming in and learning about this stuff. It was mind-boggling. And to be able to get Di Tao like wild oak reishi, spring fed reishi from high mountains around places like Darby Mountains in IGA's in Maleny, IGA's in supermarkets all over the place. And for a mum of four to whose here living in the suburbs of Australia to be getting access to these Jing herbs and then at the same time they can put away five minutes to study one of the most ancient Tai Chi practices in the world because they just went and had a look on YouTube. Phwaor!   Mason: (54:50) We are so inundated with choice as well, that is what trips people up is that there is some much choice and so many, like, "Am I going to pick the right path?" It's just like, "Just get going!"   Jost: (55:01) Just get going, yeah.   Mason: (55:03) Far out, you just got to get going. And every month you have to remind yourself of that, right? Or every day, you kind of need to start afresh, yeah?   Jost: (55:11) It doesn't matter where you start, whatever makes the most sense to you and whatever you are most drawn to. I would always say the easier way is to just get herbs, get energizing herbs first.   Mason: (55:22) What are your top energizing herbs?   Jost: (55:24) I would probably always say if you want to get the ball rolling, get astragalus as your base. Astragalus has to be your basic. Then you want astragalus and rehmannia with it. And then siberian ginseng, or maybe ren shen, which is like... because according to my observation, the tens of thousands of people I've worked with in my time, and it's 40 years spanning now. That combination helps everyone.   Mason: (55:58) So good.   Jost: (55:59) Yeah. The beauty of the ashwagandha and astragalus combinations and the rehmannia is that they actually adapt to the situation. So if you've got too much Yang, it's going to focus on the Yin first. So if you're too hyper, you're going to get sleepy first.   Mason: (56:15) Well that's an interesting thing with ren shen especially, but even astragalus. But people go, well with astragalus people go like "Okay this is an energizing tonic," and they get on to it and like "Bzzzzz..." and they're like "This was supposed to give me energy," it's like, "Sorry, mate, it's too intelligent. It knows what you bloody need, and it's taken you in that direction."   Jost: (56:34) It's so intelligent. And the Veda's say that ashwagandha can actually be taken by itself. My personal view on that, I find it works best if you have a combination of ashwagandha, astragalus, rehmannia and ren shen.   Mason: (56:53) Well generally with those really strong Jing tonics you need a Qi tonic there to keep everything moving.   Jost: (56:59) For me it works because then you've got the Spleen, Stomach, Lung combination in there too. And then you can put the mushrooms with it, and then we get onto the mushrooms, the reishi, the cordyceps, and obviously my favorite one, the lion's mane.   Mason: (57:13) Yeah, you love it, eh?   Jost: (57:14) Yeah, should be every day, everyone.   Mason: (57:17) That's good. We've already stocked up on lion's mane but I want you to try, I've got a... I don't know whether it'll be out by the time this podcast comes out but I've got a Qi blend coming out with codonopsis, white atractolydes, astragalus, poria, bit of gynostemma in there, turkey tail, and some jujube and I'd like to get your feedback on that.   Jost: (57:39) Yeah, it's really important, all this stuff is... The reason I'm saying all that is, once you start with herbs, you get a feel good very quickly, and if you feel good, you feel inspired to do things. So if you go to Tai Chi school, to a class as your initial step and move, you may get bored very quickly, because it's such a slow learning curve. And then you give up very quickly, so I'm always like, do the radical approach first. I've always liked doing things radical, like just whack it, cause some chaos, yeah.   Mason: (58:16) Or feel that it works.   Jost: (58:16) Yeah, go feel it.   Mason: (58:20) I'm like that big time as well. I used to say this all the time to people, whether it's with physical practice or herbs, or hydration even, little things like that. I call it activating the placebo. So with these herbs people are like "Do they work?" I'm like, "Well, let's think about it. Over at least five thousands years these herbs have been used, and there are tens of thousands of herbs used in China and out of those there's like 50 herbs which are considered tonic. That are, as you were saying, the messengers from heaven that are helping us to basically clear blockages. And they can just be taken every day, simple, not about symptoms, they work.   Jost: (58:56) Yeah. I'm glad that I have now turned 60, I'm 61 years of age, because I can actually use my body as an example that it works.   Mason: (59:07) Yeah for sure.   Jost: (59:08) And, when I was 40 and telling everyone herbs are good, I didn't have really much weighing in my work because I was still young and fit. But once you turn 50, 55, aging hits you. And that's when you know that those herbs work. Men at the age of 60, they know. They've got the aging. There's very few who really are very fit and healthy.   Mason: (59:34) There's even few within the community that are practicing herbs and Qigong, because it just goes and shows that you can't just do the herbs, you can't just do movement. Your whole life needs to be engaged in this practice, right.   Jost: (59:50) Yes. But a good way to get started with that is with herbs. But when people say "Do they work," that's what I'm trying to say. Look at people who are in their sixties and seventies who have been taking herbs for a long time, there are the examples. Don't go by what papers say. I remember that when I was at College and studied Chinese Medicine, over 30 years ago, I already realised I need to take herbs every day. Intuitive understanding for my practice. And then I thought "You can't do this every day, you've got to stop, this is...   Mason: (01:00:25) Too toneifying.   Jost: (01:00:27) Yeah, just like, bang. I just followed my own intuitive understanding.   Mason: (01:00:30) Oh yeah.   Jost: (01:00:31) Yeah, and so I'm at the level now where I can prove to people it works. So I say, "Look, this is my body at 61 years of age. I'm able to transform all kind of symptoms because of the herbs." So I tell everyone, if you want to get guidance by herbs, and you're not sure if they work, look at those who have been taking herbs for a long time. And you will see a different person. I can tell people who take herbs, they look different. They've got different skin. My skin is not someone who is the ordinary 60. And it's not because of genetics, it's got nothing to do with this, because my father died very early. So I don't have the genes for longevity.   Mason: (01:01:20) You don't have the Jing?   Jost: (01:01:21) That's what there... I actually got the opposite, I got weak Jing. I got a lot of injuries, I got like all kind of crippling injuries in my knees from when I was hard in sport. So, the fact that I constantly transform my symptoms, I actually an example, I can see the proof of this medicine. So if someone doubts it, then I say "Okay, compare a 60 year old or a 70 year old person who takes herbs regular with someone who doesn't. You've got entirely different skin, entirely different body, entirely different muscular structure, entirely different ability to transform symptoms." Because health is the ability to transform symptoms. Health is not the absence of symptoms, that's what people misunderstand. They always look at me and think, "Oh, you don't have the issues that I have." I said, "Fuck, man, I've got heaps of issues. But I transform them." And I do lots of herbs to transform them. Lots. Not like a little bit. My car is full with, there's herbs everywhere, you should look in my bag, there's herbs everywhere. I take herbs every three hours, I take always somethings, there's always something. I take bamboo, then I take a bit of hoelen then I take a major four. I'm always something, I'm always wheeling and dealing my body with maybe a little bit of this, maybe a little bit of that. Always a little bit. Consistency. Always just, maybe three flowers.   Mason: (01:02:46) Yeah, I was thinking about maybe... It's such a nice way to invite the plants and the mushrooms and the flowers and the barks into you-   Jost: (01:02:54) Yeah, they're a part of your life. They're given to us.   Mason: (01:02:54) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Jost: (01:02:55) They're given to us in order to strengthen us. It's just like in Taoist philosophy the herbs are superior to food, it's the most important thing. Eventually the Taoist masters stopped food at all and only do herbs. I don't want to go that way because I love eating, but I don't use food to balance Yin and Yang, I use my herbs. Yeah, of course I eat essential foods. I always have a good breakfast out of grain. I always loved oats, I have good grains every day, I have good protein source every day and I enjoy and I eat really good cakes few times a week and I love good coffee. So I feast.   Mason: (01:03:40) You're living!   Jost: (01:03:42) I live it.   Mason: (01:03:43) "I feast," yeah.   Jost: (01:03:45) So I'm not into the juice diets, I'm not into fasting, I do intermittent fasting?   Mason: (01:03:49) You don't?   Jost: (01:03:49) Intermittent fasting, I do.   Mason: (01:03:54) You do, right.   Jost: (01:03:54) Yeah, I do intermittent fasting, I always have 12 hours between eating, every day.   Mason: (01:03:59) So you're doing breakfast and dinner?   Jost: (01:04:00) So I stop about, say I stop 8:00pm eating, I don't eat until 8:00am next day, or 9:00am.   Mason: (01:04:06) Oh okay, right.   Jost: (01:04:07) So, I usually have a minimum of 12 hours to 13 hours. Th

Carey Sperry:                   In this episode I speak with my good friend and business strategic Alliance firm partner Phil Graham, about how to leverage social media paid ads into 2020 and beyond. There are so many golden nuggets Phil gives us here, but a couple key takeaways I think you'll find helpful and interesting is how important it is to keep in mind the intent of the prospect of customer, and intent differs by platform. Many people have a different expectation of the experience and their intent is also different while on the Facebook platform versus when they're on the Instagram platform. Carey Sperry:                   So Phil explains how when you understand this and keep it in mind, it helps you to craft your paid ad to align with the viewers mindset, which ultimately he sees paid ads are higher than the ads are crafted with consideration of intent than when brands don't align their ads to the intent. Another key takeaway is he teaches us to approach ads with both a system and a delivery of value. Most people don't have a system for their ads, nor they do. They deliver value in their ads. They just sell right off the bat. He says, "It's like going to a party. You might be walking up to a person and saying, 'Let's get married.'" So you probably heard that analogy before, but most people out there do not keep that in mind. When they do paid ads, they just sell right off the bat, turn off. So he talks about what he means by system and also his EED framework. Educate, entertain, and differentiate this framework and how it will help make your ads convert way better than the majority of people. Carey Sperry:                   Hi everyone. Carey Sperry here. Today we have Phil Graham and we're going to talk about how to leverage social media paid ads in 2020 and beyond. A hot topic, everyone's wondering what is going to happen with paid and the algorithms and all that great stuff. So Phil Graham, he's a wonderful friend of mine who's become a friend after us working together since I launched our agency. And the reason why I really reached out to him and started to get to know him in his work is because he is very, very experienced deep in Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and YouTube ads amongst other digital competencies. And so Phil, why don't you say hello? Phil Graham:                   Hello. I am so excited to be here and thank you so much for the kind introduction, and I'm really excited to talk about this stuff because being able to run ads the right way can literally make the difference between success or failure for an entrepreneur or a business, especially moving forward. So I'm excited. Carey Sperry:                   Yes, thank you. And he's been on a several other really great podcasts. So we found this as a wonderful way to connect with our audience and share information that we're always talking about with our clients. So to kind of kick us off, what would you say is the fundamental differences between Facebook and Instagram ads? It's a question we get a lot, like which should I advertise on Facebook or Instagram and what are the fundamental differences between them? Phil Graham:                   Yeah, great question. And you definitely should ... most people should be on both but they do have differences that are pretty different. So for Facebook, the age is the big differentiators. So if you want to reach somebody that is ... and I don't like talking about age too much because there's always variables, but in general like 35 or 40 plus, you're more likely to reach them on Facebook and under 35 maybe even under 40 the numbers creeping up, you're more likely to reach them on Instagram. In this day and age, the default for somebody who's like a celebrity or somebody who's in media is going to be like Instagram or Twitter, not necessarily Facebook. So they're both great places to be. But depending on like the target, the age of your market, you want to definitely be both places but put more money, time and effort into the place where your target is spending the most time. Phil Graham:                   Just like if you want to reach 17 year olds, if you had a product for that, you wouldn't be on Facebook, you'd probably be on TikTok and some other places that are coming up. So it's audience is the biggest difference, and then also intent. On Instagram, short, punchy videos and lots of great images work well. And on Facebook, a little bit still shorter videos but not as short. You can go longer on the videos and do some different, and those are like the main differences. Carey Sperry:                   So I hear some people say, "Well, why would I advertise on Facebook when people go on there to connect with their friends and family?" Phil Graham:                   Yeah, and that's a, that's a great question. That is the perfect question because people are not on there to look at ads, are they? They're not using Facebook for that, they are using it for many other reasons and we're interrupting them while they do that. But the reason what you want to do that is because billions of people use it and it's the perfect place to actually get their awareness and get their attention. So I think of Facebook, like a social gathering, a social dinner party, something like that where there's people doing social things. And when you think of it that way, think of going to a dinner party. If you were to go to a dinner party tonight and you walked up to a stranger, you wouldn't just walk up and immediately pitch your product. If you wanted to try and sell your product tonight, you wouldn't just do that. Phil Graham:                   You would start off having a conversation and then maybe in a future conversation it would be the right time to tell them about what you do and how you can help them. But on Facebook, what most people do is they send out these ads that are literally just pitching their product, Hey, give me your email and I'll show you this. Or buy this, buy that. And they're sending these to cold traffic to strangers, not realizing that even though it's on the computer, it's no different than if you were in person. There's a human being on the other end of that. So if you do it that way, you're probably going to fail. But my version of in real life, if you wanted to talk to a stranger and become friends and then eventually let's say maybe sell them something or help them, let's say help them. Phil Graham:                   It's not just about selling them, you would just go up and start a conversation. And so my version of starting a conversation using Facebook ads is to put out valuable content as an ad. What most people do is they try and put out some value organically, but when it's time to run ads, they just do these spammy sales pitch ads. And I'm saying, "Don't do that." Do the great stuff, the educational stuff, the inspirational stuff as an ad. That's like having a conversation. And when you start doing that instead of just immediately trying to sell somebody, your whole world can change. And it's really exciting. It can work extremely well. We've had clients, it's not the norm, but we've had clients go from zero to a million dollars in sales in just six months. Again, that's not normal. It doesn't happen a lot. But the fact that it did, it's possible when you do it right. And that's exciting to me. Carey Sperry:                   Wow. Yeah, I would love that. Phil Graham:                   Who wouldn't, right? It's so amazing that, that it's possible and when you really connect with people and then follow up in a smart way, it's just like if you, let's say you were out and about and you moved to a city and you had no friends at all. You didn't know anybody, and you wanted to start making friends. Well, you have to start talking to people to enable that to happen. And if you, let's say you start talking to somebody, you just strike up a conversation like at Starbucks or something, that person is not going to be your best friend right away. Phil Graham:                   You literally just met them. Do you need more conversations. You need more frequency of conversations with them before you start to really get to know each other. And many times when you're running ads, you need the exact same thing. Now, if you've got like a $20 e-commerce product, that's a little bit different. But for most people, if they're selling a product or service that isn't a cheap impulse buy, you need frequency. You need to start conversations by giving value before trying to sell anybody. And when you do that, you stand out because guess what, nobody else does that. And 99% of the ads you see are probably spam sales pitch ads that people hate. And so when you do it right, you stand out. And that's the exciting part. Carey Sperry:                   Yes. It kind of reminds me of us being the first generation of having digital kids and we tell our kids, "Don't type something on a text," or through through whatever means you're on. It might be on a social media platform that you wouldn't say to someone's face and it's a little bit different, but it's sort of the same thing. Like don't assume just because you're going through an ad and you're not actually looking at the person and interacting with them in real life that they're going to take your content in a different way than they would face to face. I've heard you use the analogy before where like if you're at a party, you don't just walk up to a woman and say, "Hey, let's get married." You got to warm up to them. And so yeah. Phil Graham:                   Yeah. And a lot of people will run ads like that. They'll like metaphorically speaking, they run ads, I call it like they profit shoot themselves in their ads. I know it sounds kind of weird, but like they're really, immediately going for a sale or an email address. Even though the person doesn't know who they are, they gave no value or credibility first and they're just doing that over and over. And then when it doesn't work, they blame Facebook or Instagram or YouTube ads and say it doesn't work, which is not the case. So when you do it right, great things can happen. There's no easy buttons. It doesn't just magically happen for you. You've got to do it right and you've got to work hard at it. But when you do, it's awesome because nobody else does it. Carey Sperry:                   Doesn't the algorithms, depending on what platform the ads are being run on, take some time for some sets of ads where it's smart to not expect the best to happen within the first month or even second month, that really to get rolling. Sometimes it takes a little longer. Can you talk a little bit about that? Phil Graham:                   Yeah, absolutely. That's a great point. Sometimes you can get immediate results, but a lot of times it takes time and testing and there's so many factors too. Like how much is your budget, how big is your audience? And things like that. There's plenty of times where it might take a couple months to really kick in, especially if you have a larger audience or a smaller budget that's completely normal and you have to be able to give it the time. I love using analogies and there's many times somebody will start some ads and a week or two later they might freak out if they're not already making all kinds of money. And my analogy for that is like if you were in a football game, you ran two plays and you're freaking out because you're not ahead 20 to nothing yet and you've only ran two plays and you're ready to just quit the game. Phil Graham:                   And I'm like, "Wait a minute, you only ran two plays. We have a huge game left." A lot of people just run two plays and stop, meaning they run ads for a week or a month or whatever, and then if it doesn't work right away, they think it didn't work and they quit, and that's a recipe for disaster. You also have to look at intent. How are people using Facebook? They're using it many times when they're multitasking, they might be standing in line at a grocery store, or Target, or something, or they might be at a stop light, or cooking dinner, or doing two or three things at once and they may see your ad and they may actually love what they saw, but the timing might not be right for them to actually buy something at that moment. And many times it's not right at that time and/or they may not trust you yet. Phil Graham:                   They may not know who you are. They may need to see a little bit more from you first. And so when you take that into account and you don't just try and sell somebody on the first ad, but there's an actual formula here. You're not just going to send them an ad, you're going to send followup ads to people that actually watched your initial ads and you're going to keep giving them value. When you start doing that and you give it the time to work that it needs, then it becomes a beautiful thing that can work extremely well for people. Carey Sperry:                   Yes. So what is working with Facebook ads for you? Phil Graham:                   First of all, first and foremost, having a system that you can use that attracts your ideal customers or clients, whatever you call them, that attracts them, gets their awareness, attracts them to you and brings them in and then converts them into a paying customer or client. So that you don't have to number one, chase after business, and number two, since you're attracting them to you, it's more valuable and you can charge what you're worth. Having an overall system is the key. You don't want to just run a few ads. Phil Graham:                   Number two, doing value based ads. I actually have a formula I use that I call EED and it stands for educate, entertain, and differentiate. So when you're creating your ads, especially if you're doing like a video ad, you want to try and do all three in your video, you want to educate your audience and that can be through teaching them something, or it could be by inspiring them or giving them hope, or both. So that's educate. Phil Graham:                   Entertain means you just don't want to be boring. It doesn't mean you have to be like this super charismatic person or anything like that. You just have to have passion about what you're talking about. Or maybe if you're doing a video, you're doing it in a location that looks nice or you're using a prop. You're grabbing your phone to get their attention, something like that. Phil Graham:                   And then differentiate. You need to be different than all the other advertisers out there that are inundating your ideal audience with ads. And if you can do those three things in your content, you can do extremely well and you wrap those into, I like 30 to 60 second video ads. I think in this day and age, and in 2020, video ads are the most undervalued, best way to build your brand, make money and grow your business, by far. But it's not going to last forever. I remember when you could get like Google ad words, you could get keywords like mortgage based keywords for like five cents a click and the those same key words now, instead of five cents or click are anywhere from fifty to a hundred dollars a click. Carey Sperry:                   Wow. Phil Graham:                   So here's the crazy thing. I mean that's insane, right? I mean people would do anything to get five cents a click- Carey Sperry:                   Absolutely. Phil Graham:                   ... just about, in this day and age. But I believe that video ads on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are still in that, that wild West price where it's super cheap and I believe that over the next couple of years where you might, we might be getting one, two, three, ten cents per targeted view right now, that probably going to go up 10x or even more. But you've got a sweet spot of time right now where you can leverage and take advantage of that before it's too late. Phil Graham:                   As more and more big companies pour money into it over the next few years, it's going to go up just like Google ads went up, but right now you have the ability to leverage undervalued attention on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, especially video ads. And then when you do it the right way, like I've been talking about, you stand out, you can attract people to you, you'll have a system that you can scale and rely on that's not built on hope or chance, which is what most people do and that's the true win. That's the way to like Bulletproof yourself for the future and protect yourself. Carey Sperry:                   Right, and the system is a proven system that has experience behind it, whereas it's not magical where it's just pulled out of a hat, and then a couple of weeks an ads out there that seems to be good and then it doesn't work after two weeks and then, "Okay, I got to stop." Like you gave the football analogy with two plays, it takes a system and it takes also some time at times, and retargeting. Phil Graham:                   Absolutely. And retargeting, yeah. I mean, we've been working on this for many years and everything we do is actually based off of data, not guessing. So when we run ad campaigns, we look at the data, we see what works and what doesn't, and then we make adjustments. And what most people do is they just kind of go off of, "Oh I've, I think this will work." Or, "Hopefully this will work," and they don't really know how to look at the data or they don't want to. We look at the data and then we make decisions based on that data and create this framework that I've been talking about based on that. And so that gives you a great model for success when you do it that way versus most people are just not doing it at any kind of a level like that. Carey Sperry:                   So what kind of trends are you seeing currently? Can you talk a little bit about what they are and what trends you're seeing? Phil Graham:                   Yeah, great question. So a lot of trends I see are things that are not good, and that if you do these things, it's going to hurt you. So you want to make sure you avoid these things. Trend number one I would say is focusing on vanity metrics. Likes, comments, shares. There's so many people that that's the indicator of success when they see it, like if they put out content, if they get enough likes, they feel like it's successful. If they don't, then they don't. They feel like it's not successful, and that is not the measure of success. It doesn't mean put out content, it doesn't mean that at all. But what you should do is focus on something more than that and focus on helping transform your audience with great content and turn that into a sale. There's too many people ... Phil Graham:                   I'll give you a great example. The other day, actually, it was not the other day, it was about a month ago. I saw a couple of videos on YouTube. One video was from somebody who, they're going to remain nameless, but I know who they are and they make no money and they actually live in somebody's basement making no money. And they put out this video on how you can get, I can't remember the exact number, but a hundred or a thousand more followers on Instagram, and it actually had like 40,000 views. Now, same day, another video got put out by the CEO of Zoom, which is a conferencing software. He's a billionaire. He started with zero, built himself into a billionaire that had like maybe a hundred views. So that's the problem. People are like chasing after, "Ooh, how do I get 100,000 more Instagram followers?" And they're not actually focused on, here's a billionaire who started from zero, who's actually successful. Phil Graham:                   And he, he doesn't spend much time posting. But when he does, he hardly anybody was looking at it. So everybody's priorities are all messed up. I know people that make $150 million a year that if they post, I mean hardly anybody sees it and they don't care. It doesn't mean don't post. It's still important. As you know by the way, you guys Carey is phenomenal at organic social media and it's very important. So don't get me wrong that has a very important place in the success of a business. But what I'm saying is, if your primary way to get a customer is predicated on vanity metrics, you're setting yourself up for failure. You need to do a different, so that's one trend I see. Phil Graham:                   Number two, there's just too many people that use what I call templated ad. They'll find ads or templates from landing page services and they'll think, "Well, if this person did it, I'm just going to do the same kind of ad with the same kind of wording and it'll work." Well, guess what? I got news for you. That is a recipe for disaster, also. Phil Graham:                   I could tweet or do an ad or say the exact same things as somebody like Oprah, or Kanye West, or just insert any famous person's name here. I could say or do the exact same things, but am I going to get the same reaction or same results? Of course not. They're famous, right? They have this brand that literally they're ultra famous. So when you try and take a template that somebody else has done, even if it's working for somebody else, they actually have a brand behind it. There's a lot more to the success success than whatever they've just put in the ad. Phil Graham:                   And so too many people think that's all they need. I'm just going to copy company A or entrepreneur B and I'll get the same results. And it doesn't work that way. And I'm not saying don't look at what people are doing and try and get best practices, and I'm not even saying don't use templates, but what I am saying is mold them to your brand, your audience in your message. Don't just blindly copy and think you're going to succeed. Because I see people doing that all the time and it pretty much almost never works. Phil Graham:                   So those are some of the trends I see the most right now. And then also just people relying too much on hope and chance to get business. Versus if you focus on doing the right things, including paying for ads to guarantee your message gets put in front of people, then you're going to put yourself ahead of 99.9% of everyone else out there. Carey Sperry:                   Great points. I see that with the branding that people, businesses know who they are and who their customer is and how they're different, but they don't always take the time or at least circle back to it as time goes on. Because they're so busy and they're focused on so many different things, and they assume that their customers know their brand and they don't hone in on specific words and tones and things like that around their brand. And so of course when they go to try to make an ad, they're not thinking of letting that shine through. And the second thing is a lot of people just don't want to do the work with ... Yeah, it's just a lot. Phil Graham:                   That's a good one, right? Carey Sperry:                   It's a lot to learn. It's a lot. Looking at the data they might not enjoy it like you do. And so those are, those are some really important things to think about and it works. And so it's super exciting and our time has already zipped by. I knew it would go so fast. Phil Graham:                   This has been fun though, right? Yeah, it went by fast. Oh my goodness. Carey Sperry:                   It did, but what we can do is maybe talk again in a few months or something and circle back- Phil Graham:                   Yeah, for sure. Carey Sperry:                   ... and it'll be maybe 2020 by then and we can address some of the new things that are surfacing. I know you have an assessment that people can use with some of these. It allows them to kind of think through their specific what they want to sell and maybe what they want to think about through ads. Is there, is there anywhere they can find that or maybe you and I can create that and put that in the show notes and allow people to- Phil Graham:                   Yes we can definitely, sure. We can put that in the show notes. And you and I have worked together on some stuff. So I like, by the way, again I want to say this a lot, you are amazingly good at what you do. So everybody listened to this, you're in the right place. Carey Sperry:                   Thank you, Phil. Phil Graham:                   Carey knows her stuff, and it's been awesome working with you on some projects, by the way. And so I wanted to make sure and say that. If anybody wants ... so the show notes will be great. We can put some stuff in there. And then my website is philgrahamdigital.com if you ever want to get in touch. The other thing, too I want to mention is I do have a podcast on Facebook ads that I've been doing for over two and a half years. I do a weekly episode every single week and that has a lot of value. Phil Graham:                   It's just pure content every week. So it's called the Next Level Facebook Ads Podcast. You can either search for that on Google or maybe we'll put it in the show notes and it's also on my website. So if you want more Facebook ads specific stuff, there's a lot of stuff in there and there's new stuff every single week. But lastly, I do want to mention, we talked about Facebook and Instagram a lot in here. I'm also very big on YouTube ads and even Google ads as well. So I don't want to ... A big mistake is only doing Facebook stuff. You definitely want to be other places, with ads especially, as well. So make sure you guys are kind of diversifying your ad spend, and being real smart about it. Carey Sperry:                   Yes, yes. We can do another episode on YouTube ads alone. Phil Graham:                   Oh yeah, absolutely. We do a whole episode just on that because there's some really cool things that are different about YouTube ads, so that would be fun. Carey Sperry:                   Fun. Okay everybody check out Phil's podcast and website, and thank you so much. It's been wonderful talk with you as always and if you liked this episode, please give us a follow, a subscribe, and a review, and thank you so much and we'll see you next time. Phil Graham:                   Thanks everybody. Carey Sperry:                   Thanks for listening to the All Social Y'all Podcast. For free resources and materials, head over to allsocialyall.com. That's All Social Y-A-L-L dot com. Also, we'd love to hear from you, what subject areas would you like to hear about in future episodes? You can share that with us by dropping me a comment on our website or in Instagram at All Social Y'all.  

Hi everyone, and thank you for tuning in to another episode of the We Make Books Podcast - A podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between! First episode of November and some of you are probably 1/6 of the way into NaNoWriMo.  If so, you no doubt know just significant your involvement in writing communities can be with help, support, and encouragement.  But writing communities aren’t just for when NaNoWriMo rolls around and no one knows that better than our guest on today’s podcast, Miri Baker.  We got to talk to Miri about her extensive history and experience in all kinds of groups and oh boy did she have some great stories!  Miri also offered us some sage wisdom for those looking to get more involved in their communities or even just find one to join.  You can (and should) check her on her socials, linked below. We Make Books is hosted by Rekka Jay and Kaelyn Considine; Rekka is a published author and Kaelyn is an editor and together they are going to take you through what goes into getting a book out of your head, on to paper, in to the hands of a publisher, and finally on to book store shelves. We Make Books is a podcast for writer and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, concerns, and what your reactions and theories were when you first saw Azula at the end of Season One of Avatar. We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast Find Miri at: Twitter: @MiriBaker Website: https://miribaker.com         Kaelyn: 00:00   Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the We Make Books podcast, a show about writing, publishing and everything in between. I am Kaelyn Considine and I'm the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press. Rekka: 00:09   And I'm Rekka. I write science fiction and fantasy as RJ Theodore. Kaelyn: 00:13   So a couple exciting things here. Let's do first and foremost. Rekka: 00:19   Yeah, I mean this is, this is a big day. We've been telling you that you about - Kaelyn: 00:22   This is a milestone. Rekka: 00:23   Yes, you can, you know, if you've been listening that we have been asking for support@patreon.com/WMBcast and someone's heard us. Kaelyn: 00:33   Someone's heard us. We have our first patron. Thank you so much to Robert McAdams. Rekka: 00:37   Our first patron, uh, who, you know, went online and found value in what we're giving out here on this show and the guidance and everything. And so it's just fantastic. Kaelyn: 00:48   Means a lot to us. Rekka: 00:49   It really does. So thank you. And, um, if you would like to join in and also participate in that support, you can go to patreon.com/WMBcast. Kaelyn: 00:58   Um, second exciting thing. We have a guest on this episode. Rekka: 01:01   We have kidnapped someone. Wait, no, the lawyers are telling me, I can't say we kidnapped somebody. Kaelyn: 01:04   She came here of her own will. Rekka: 01:06   She might've been coerced with pizza. Kaelyn: 01:08   And we did let her leave eventually. So I think essentially that doesn't really count. Rekka: 01:13   I mean we got gotta we got the airline in on our whole conspiracy to keep her longer. Kaelyn: 01:18   Miri had quite a hard time trying to get outta here. Rekka: 01:20   So there it is. Miri Baker is our guests today. Uh, this is a friend of mine that I met through Twitter. Um, and then we met in person, uh, about a year before this recording at um, world fantasy con in Baltimore. And we have just been peas in a pod since we started talking. And Miri is a fantastic person, a fantastic writer, fantastic cosplay costumer. Like there is no - Kaelyn: 01:47   Astounding. Rekka: 01:48   Miri is kind of like me and that like she will say, I want to topple that and then go topple it. And um, so Miri is just a fantastic human being and as happens with fantastic human beings, they make friends. And, um, so Miri is here to talk to us today about the writing community. Um, the different forms that can take Miri's experience with which extends over half her life. Kaelyn: 02:13   Yes. Um, you'll hear some stories in this episode. She has been not shy about getting involved in things right from the get go. Rekka: 02:20   Yeah. And, um, and the value that she finds in that, and I think it's important because, uh, writing tends to be a very solitary act, but I think we've talked about before in other episodes that you need support from the outside and there are different kinds of support and Miri talks about what they are and where she's found them and the recommendations and some tips and tricks from that. Kaelyn: 02:43   You know, um, it can be a little intimidating to uh, dip your toe in the water here and a Miri's got a lot of thoughts on why it shouldn't be. Rekka: 02:50   Absolutely. Kaelyn: 02:51   Even if you are still intimidated, some, uh, suggestions and advice for how to mitigate that. So, um, we had a really great time talking to Miri. We'll probably, definitely have her back again in the future. Rekka: 03:01   Almost certainly. Kaelyn: 03:03   Almost certainly. Rekka: 03:04   And yeah, Miri is just fantastic. And here comes the evidence Speaker 2:       03:15   [inaudible] Kaelyn: 03:24   There's going to be awesome, uh, a mulled, things to drink. Rekka: 03:29   There's a uh, oh, what do you call it? The thing that I have been doing and the word is not soaking. Kaelyn: 03:37   I mean, soaking is not wrong. Rekka: 03:41   It is literally technically correct. The best kind of correct. However, not the word I was looking for. Well, um, uh, an infused bourbon. Kaelyn: 03:48   Yes. Rekka: 03:49   And I basically took mulling spices and - Kaelyn: 03:51   I'm very excited. Rekka: 03:52   And it smells amazing. So, um, if you can't tell we were recording this on or close to Halloween. Kaelyn: 03:57   Yes. We're very excited about this. Miri:    03:59   A lifestyle. Rekka: 04:00   Yes. And so as we have, um, a company in one of these company happened to be another writer in my circle of writing know, know these peoples, yeah. Kaelyn: 04:11   I mean petition to officially change communities to Circle of Know These People's, Rekka: 04:16   I mean that's obviously going to be the episode title. Now we've hit it already. Miri:    04:19   Yes. Humans. I am also a people. Rekka: 04:22   So, um, why don't you introduce yourself, A People as you claim to be, and we'll get into actually doing this episode so we can get to actually eating all the food that we've just mentioned. Miri:    04:33   It's delicious, delicious food. Hello everyone. My name is Miri Baker. I write fantasy for adults and weird fantasy, paranormal, sometimes Gothic whatever nonsense for middle grades and young adult. And I am just about to be working on a middle-grade Gothic for one of my very favorite things of the year in National Novel Writing Month, which I'm sure no one on this program has ever heard of before. Rekka: 04:55   Definitely not. Kaelyn: 04:56   We didn't talk about this at length two weeks ago for sure. Miri:    05:00   So we wanted to talk about, um, sort of one of the side benefits of NaNoWriMo and um, lots of other venues of writing with other people. Speaker 1:       05:09   Yeah. We haven't actually said what we're talking about in this episode yet. Rekka: 05:13   It didn't people listen to the intro? Kaelyn: 05:13   Well, there's an intro, but I'm, you know. Rekka: 05:15   We always assume that they are all with it and together they're like obviously we were up all night talking and just chatting last night. So we can't make, do good words. Kaelyn: 05:25   We're talking about writing communities today. Rekka: 05:27   And Miri has fingers in many writing community pots. Miri:    05:30   Extensive interactions. Rekka: 05:33   Miri washes her hands by the way. Miri:    05:35   Yes, human I do wash my hands. Kaelyn: 05:37   Yeah. So, um, why don't you tell us a little bit about like some of the communities you're in an active in? Miri:    05:44   Yeah, so I've been involved in local and online NaNoWriMo communities since 2005. I have held regional in-person write-ins. I hold zoom, uh, online write-ins I'm participate in online Slack groups, uh, writing Twitter. We all know about writing Twitter. Kaelyn: 06:04   We do. Miri:    06:04   I have dug up coworkers in my tech organization who I found out also, write. And taking them out to cafes where we also write. Rekka: 06:10   Necromancy is going to be a theme, by the way, when she's digging up people like, let's just assume she means literally. Miri:    06:17   Look, there's a skeleton inside you right now that wants to be free. Let's see. I have attended the writing excuses retreat workshop. Which is held on a boat. And that means that you can't get away from your community unless you just go hide in one of the many wonderful looks on the ship. And I'm several online Slack groups, discords etc. Etc. Rekka: 06:36   So if there are people you will find them. Miri:    06:39   And dig them up. Rekka: 06:41   And dig them up [laughs] reanimate them if necessary. So start with like your first intro into, I think it is going to be the NaNoWriMo story or yeah, so the Kaelyn was excited for the story. So let's get - Kaelyn: 06:52   It's a good story. Rekka: 06:52   She twitching until you tell this story. So go ahead. Miri:    06:55   It even goes back a little bit further than we were talking about before the show. So I don't know if anyone remembers Gaia online, but there was a writers' forum on Gaia online and that's where I first found out about NaNoWriMo. I think it was June, 2005 something like that. And I had clicked over to the NaNoWriMo forums, reading the NaNo wisdoms thread, looking at all these hilarious mistakes people made and then posted to drag themselves. And I went to my mom and yes, I was 12 at the time, to level set, went my mom and said, "Mom, there are people on the internet and they write a book in a month and it sounds really cool and I want to do it." And her response as a good mother is like, "Yes sweetie, that sounds interesting. That could be fun." "And some of them meet up in our town and I want to go meet them." "I'm sorry you what?" And I distinctly remember forming this whole contract of all the chores I would do and all the good. I was already a good kid. Miri:    07:45   I didn't actually have a whole lot of leverage here to get my mom to take me to this in person, pre November meetup. And she finally agreed to, I found out later that she messaged our ML and said, Hey, my kid wants to come to this thing. It's not going to be a problem. Like I can tell her no, that's fine. And my ML said no, that's great. We'd love to meet her. That's, that'll be fun. So we go to this little coffee shop that we did not even know existed, uh, less than two miles from our house. And we're waiting in the parking lot because they're getting late opening and she's looking around looking for weird people and readers, she, she did find weird people, but she also found some - Kaelyn: 08:20   I'm sorry, from an internet group? Miri:    08:21   No! Um, but also just people getting someone from the local theater group that she knew and it's like, Oh, Pam, uh, I didn't know you wrote. And she's like, Oh, I do. I do. I write. And she did a little bit. And by the end of that first meetup, we had convinced my mother to do NaNoWriMo and then we slowly convinced the rest of my family to do NaNoWriMo and hosted regional meetups at our house. And now we have both been doing and winning NaNoWriMo for 15 years, and neither of us can blink first.   Kaelyn: 08:53   So, all right, who is going to give up first eventually down the line? Miri:    08:59   Oh. Oh. I don't want to think about that. Kaelyn: 09:03   All right, well keep us posted every year. We're going to check in. Miri:    09:06   Sounds good. I, to be fair, I'm the person whose life is going to go through more stage changes between now and whenever. So it's likely to be me, but I'm going to put that one off as long as possible. Kaelyn: 09:19   Alright. Rekka: 09:19   Refuse to believe. Miri:    09:20   Yeah. Kaelyn: 09:22   So, um, you've been active in writing communities, this kind of thing for over half of your life. Miri:    09:28   Yes. Kaelyn: 09:29   That's, that's a lot. So no, but like you keep going back to it. So obviously it's something that's really important in, you know, your writing and your career as a writer. So, but it's also time consuming. Miri:    09:43   Yes. Rekka: 09:44   But still important. So can you talk about that, like what it is that makes you still take the time to do all of these things? Miri:    09:52   Yeah, I think a lot of it does go back to that first nano group. I was, I was 12, I was the only person younger than 21 in that group. And it was the first time I felt like I'm having a conversation with a bunch of adults as a peer, we're all in this thing together. I can contribute, we can all have these shared jokes and kind of build that relationship. And there's something about writing communities where you don't quite have to do small talk in the same way. You can just skip straight to what are you working on, what are you writing? And you learn so much more interesting stuff about somebody in a very short time when they're answering that question. So it's sort of a fast track to friendship has been my experience with it. And after that you have this, this group of people who understand something that's actually very weird in the grand scheme of things that humans spend their time on a, it's like, Oh, I'm making up stories, but it's, it's being made up wrong. How do I deal with this? Um, and just that level of understanding of listening, of getting to know people on this very kind of deep level almost immediately is something that I've sort of been chasing the highest I've ever since. Kaelyn: 11:02   Okay. Rekka: 11:03   So you've chased it into many directions. You manage to be a participant in all of these almost simultaneously with the exception of Writing Excuses cruise. Because what will, with the exception of the Writing Excuses Retreat, because you're on a cruise ship with terrible wifi, so you can't participate in all the others at the same time. But um, all those things you listed, like you, you have an ongoing relationship with all those communities pretty much throughout the year, even if they are time basedevents. So why so many, I mean semper majus but you know like why, what do you get out of each one? Like are there different aspects that you're getting or some of them more for professional advice are some of them more for like bonding, friendships, emotional support. Like - Kaelyn: 11:56   Yeah. Rekka: 11:56   I'm listing things that I know are part of community. Um, I'm leading the witness. But yeah, like talk about like why so many groups and like could you give up one, I mean like, could you pick a favorite? You know, stuff like that. Miri:    12:09   Yeah. It's interesting cause I don't think I've ever thought about specifically what I'm getting from each one that's different. But there definitely are things. Obviously writing Twitter is a little bit more of a shout into the world brand building, sort of - Rekka: 12:22   If we scream into the void together, we're not alone. Miri:    12:24   Exactly. Yeah. Um, why didn't that, um, the ability to passively keep up with what's going on or what's not going on? Kind of pick up all the pieces there. Uh, and that is, you know, where some of my deeper relationships have formed. For example, I just kind of showed up in Rekka's DMS one day. Kaelyn: 12:44   This is true. Miri:    12:44   But I definitely see Twitter as a place where relationships start, but it's a little bit harder for them to deepen. And then I've got Slack communities where depending on the makeup of the Slack community, it could be more professional advice oriented or more emotional support oriented or just everybody key smashing in a very collective supportive way, which is an underrated form of community I find. And then in the Writing Excuses Cruise, the part of that that's really good is that you are spending, you know, 24 hours a day minus whenever you turn into a pumpkin and hide under a tablecloth somewhere with these people. So you form those much deeper relationships very quickly. And then that alumni group is much more close to knit in a shorter time and continues to do in person meetups at conventions or digital write-ins and Hangouts throughout the year. So there's a slightly different tone, like I'm more likely to know that someone I've met in person has kids for example, which is something that might not come up on the internet. And that just gives me something else to talk about. Another point of experience that, that they're drawing on that I can draw on too. Rekka: 13:50   So as being part of all these online communities, then you can take this into this one space that we left off that initial list I think, but we did talk about before we were, I'm planning the episode is now you can go to a writing conference and what does that do and like how does that defer or how was that built in? Miri:    14:10   Yeah, it's, it's been a really important part of definitely feeling the community and being able to talk to people. I know humans bad. Yes, human. I'm also a human, but my first conference, for example, world con San Jose, I would not have gone to if I didn't know someone who was going to be there and who told me, Hey, I have an extra spot in my hotel room. Kaelyn: 14:31   So wait, your first conference was Worldcon San Jose? Miri:    14:34   Writing conference, yeah. Kaelyn: 14:34   Writing conference, that's like, that's a dive into the deep end. Miri:    14:38   My first convention at all was DragonCon. Rekka: 14:41   Yeah. It was just, for Miri, that was walking backwards. Miri:    14:46   Yeah. So someone invited me into their room, which meant if all else failed, I had friend or at least one place to go hide. And then of course there were other people in the room and I got to know them and they were awesome and I was invited along to dinner where we're meeting even more people or I'm introducing, Oh Hey, there's this person that I met on writing excuses is going to be here. Anybody want to come out for ice cream with us? And just sort of forming those natural connections. And it's really easy to think like, yes, I will learn my way into the hotel room with the fancy people. And that's, that's, that's, that's just so much energy y'all, that's not an efficient way to go about it. In addition to the other obvious problems but - Rekka: 15:28   Also slimy. Miri:    15:30   But also there's the, I'm in person, I can present myself in a more immediate way than I can online. Like I can have all of the goth paraphernalia on my personal profiles as I want, but if I'm just out on Twitter, that doesn't always come through. Whereas one of my actually local writer friendships I made at a conference because I was wearing some kind of nonsensical doc Martins and another wonderful writer was also wearing kind of nonsensical doc Martins and we are now bonded for life. Kaelyn: 16:01   I think that's definitely how that, yeah. Rekka: 16:03   Yeah. I've had a lot of people approach me at conferences because of the earrings I'm wearing and they just, I don't know if it's really that they see the earrings and they have to go talk to the person who wears those earrings. But it definitely gives you like, like I can talk to you about something. Kaelyn: 16:16   Yeah. Rekka: 16:17   When you have in your, when your brand is out there and you're, you know, displaying something that is interesting in some way. But then also, yeah, you find other people who know exactly. You know what you're about when you're wearing them and then they just walk up to you and they don't even have to say anything. They just, you know, this person can stick their, their foot out and you see the shoes and you're like, all right, cool. Kaelyn: 16:37   Yes. Rekka: 16:38   So I'll see you. Yes. Miri:    16:39   My people. Rekka: 16:40   We are - Kaelyn: 16:40   I found my clan. Rekka: 16:41   Yes. So, so aside from, um, having someone to go have ice cream with, you know, like what, where do those relationships go after the conference is over? Miri:    16:53   I think I'm still in a phase of figuring that out, but there's definitely sticking around on Twitter, being able to engage in more conversations, generally knowing more of what's going on because I know more people who know what's going on.uh, there is always so much going on and I've, I mean, if we want to go super transactional, whether it's like I met this person who introduced me to these people who introduced me to this community and I can just trace this back to that one hotel room in San Jose. Kaelyn: 17:20   Well, that's, I mean, and we've talked about this previously on this. There's, I think there's like this weird guilt of like showing up to conferences and with this idea of like, I'm not just here to network, but it is okay to go to conferences and meet people that you're hoping to work with or to develop a professional relationship with in the future. And you know, conferences are a great place to do that. Rekka: 17:41   Yeah. I mean Miri used the word transactional, like yeah, if you go in with the attitude of what can you give me in exchange what I can give you, then your networking is not going to grow organically in the way that you're describing. Um, you are going to have to claw and fight for every business card that you get because you're going to be putting off that like used car salesman vibe that everyone in the room can smell. Miri:    18:07   Um, yes - Kaelyn: 18:08   It's smells like weird cologne and plasticky suits. Rekka: 18:11   Yeah. And that new car smell, air freshener, that does not smell like new car. Um, but when you go in and sincerely and then you have a great conversation and you realize like, Oh, I need, I want to go attend this programming for example, then it's okay, do you have a card? Because like I am desperate not to like lose this connection that we just made as opposed to like whipping out the card before you even get your name pronounced all the way. Like I guess that's where you visually, that's the definition of transactional for me. It's like, I'm, I'm here to give you my card. If you've ever been to a, um, a trade show that's, uh, like, uh, electronics trade show or security trade show or all this kind of stuff that I've attended where people leap out into though aisles to scan your badge, that is the like extreme end. But that's kind of what that feels like. Where someone's looking like, I know what book you wrote, I'm going to talk to you. Do you know an agent for me? I'm like - Kaelyn: 19:11   No, that's, yeah. Kaelyn: 19:12   Yeah. Kaelyn: 19:13   But other good communities. Rekka: 19:14   So yeah, we have, we have to touch on how to be the good community. Kaelyn: 19:19   You know what, and that's actually, you know, a thing too that we can talk about too is bad community participants and people who maybe aren't improving the community by their presence. It's a thing that happens. Miri:    19:36   It is. Kaelyn: 19:37   And it's something that, you know, you don't want to be that one in the community. Um, so you know, in your experience, because you're in a lot of these communities, what would you say, like how should you come to the table and what should you not bring to the table in terms of expectations and why you're there and behavior and behavior? Miri:    20:00   So there are two sides of this. I think the obvious one is don't be a jerk. Well that, I mean rule number one, right? But there's the specific implications of that here are don't only show up when there's something out there for you. Like it's very easy to tell when somebody is only in a community for the perks or maybe advanced reading copies of something show up occasionally or maybe, Hey, there's this cool opportunity that I'm extending to you, my community first. If somebody only shows up in those moments, you're like, all right, okay. Um, and then if, if they don't show up in the times when other people in the need them or want their input or just want that connection. Um, the other side of it is, and this is more of a, I guess like caution, I would warn against showing up only to be helpful and only two be seen being helpful only to be seen being helpful only to hope that you can give enough and do enough that the important people in the community will notice you and you can, you can do a lot of genuinely helpful things under that motivation and you can feel very good about it for a little while, but it'll just never end up being enough. Miri:    21:29   So there's the side of this that's, you know, try not to engage in a community just because of the fancy people or whatever you think you can get out of it, but also don't completely discount your own wants and needs as part of being part of that community. Kaelyn: 21:42   That's a good thing you brought up. You know, an interesting thing is the power dynamic of like the important people in the community. There are going to be important people in any community you go into. Miri:    21:52   There always are. Miri:    21:54   And I think some people, you're right, we'll come in with a need to ingratiate themselves to said group, but you know, at the end of the day you still are in this community for a reason. And do you need to get something out of it as well? Rekka: 22:07   I do see, um, for instance like between the three Nebulas that I've gone to, there are obvious like high school reunion feelings from a lot of - Kaelyn: 22:20   Oh absolutely. Rekka: 22:21   Family reunion, like in a positive way. I know like some people go, Oh, high school reunion. I mean like the positive aspects where you get to see someone that you only see on these occasions because we are spread out all over the place online. So, um, you knew if you go and you are not creating relationships that the next time you see that person, their face is going to light up to see you, like maybe rethink your approach. Miri:    22:46   You're, you're missing an opportunity. You're missing the key opportunity of these impersonal events and they're not for everyone. They're expensive there. There are lots of reasons to not engage, but if you are engaging, take advantage of that. Rekka: 23:00   Yeah. And people will want to help you and you know, you will, you will go to them like you go to friends because they are your friends now you know when you need support and it's not in the like, you know, Hey, I, you know, where you have to add, like we'll pay a fee in the same statement because you're looking for help and nobody knows who you are. Miri:    23:18   Yeah. Rekka: 23:18   You know, like if you just, you go into these communities and like just let yourself fall all the way on like memory foam, you know, like these, I mean then maybe that's a better analogy than I meant. Um, you know. Kaelyn: 23:32   It's got layers. I like that. Rekka: 23:34   Well it's got layers. So the community remembers you as long as you keep showing up to leave your impression. Kaelyn: 23:40   Yes. Rekka: 23:41   Leave a good impressio, a healthy impression. Be a good human if you are a human. Miri:    23:45   Yes, human. Kaelyn: 23:47   So, you know, the conferences, aside conferences are a once a year thing, you know, you go there, great. You meet people, you see people you don't always get to see, but then you're done and you leave. What you're actually using and interacting with more are your online writing communities. So when you're having a problem, when you're, you know, stuck on something, you're feeling unmotivated, that's who you're going to go to. So do you have like an example or a story you can tell us about? Like, you know, something you, one of your communities, your writing communities has helped you work through. Miri:    24:20   Yeah. I, I think recently I've been a little bit more on the rah, rah, you can do it side because what's better when you're feeling unmotivated than to try and motivate someone else? Um, this is how we create value, right? But I definitely had a book that I've since put aside for a little while that was just kicking my ass for about three years. And I had friends who had been my friends through all of that time or who came in midstream and went, Oh wow, you've been kind of working on this for awhile. And I don't even remember a specific time, but just being able to pop up in one of the channels and say like, Hey, I'm really feeling it today. Miri:    24:52   Like I want to be writing and I'm just not, and it's terrible. And having a bunch of people not necessarily go the shallow like, Oh no, you can do it. But like, yup. Sucks. I understand. Just the like onslot of we see you, we hear you, we've been through it. Um, and since we've been through it, you can see what it looks like to get through it to the other side. It's just the constant parade of examples of all of us on this wacky sign wave of I'm the best writer ever. No wait, I'm the worst writer ever. Kaelyn: 25:26   Are you implying that writers have emotions that fluctuate quite a bit? Because I've never encountered it. Rekka: 25:35   And you remind me that uh, there's that phrase like you are, you're comparing your rehearsal to someone else's, like - Miri:    25:43   Performance. Rekka: 25:44   Performance and stuff like that. Miri:    25:45   And when you're in this community to that level, like you get to see other people's rehearsals as well. And it kind of helps, you know, it's like, Oh, if the person who wrote my no favorite and novella of 2017 is just sitting here key smashing about how words are hard, yo, then maybe I'm okay, maybe it's fine. Well it's, if I got, never underestimate the power of just a repeated, sustained stream of cat gif. Kaelyn: 26:11   Okay. Rekka: 26:12   Distraction when you need it. Miri:    26:13   Yeah. Yeah. Rekka: 26:14   Cuteness when you need it. Warm fuzzy thoughts and you know, taking torches to the brain weasles. Miri:    26:20   Yep. And then also like you, you mentioned a little bit earlier, just like people who know what's going on. Miri:    26:26   And sometimes you think you are in a struggle completely alone that might be like related to the business of the industry itself. And you go to your community and find out like, Oh no, I am not the only one going through this. And that other person that you find going through this realizes, Oh, I'm not the only one going this. And then you can all join hands and care, bear stare at something and fix it. Kaelyn: 26:47   So, you know, along those lines of people realizing they're not the only ones going through something, someone who's maybe like looking are interested in getting involved in writing communities. What do you suggest? What do you recommend going about doing this? Where do you start looking for the, for the community that's right for you? Miri:    27:06   Yeah. It's a hard question because a lot of what we've been saying is, Oh, just go make friends and I know I have to go straight to the inner sanctum. Yeah. And especially I was just out of college, you know, doing that. Oh gosh, how do I make friends as an adult thing? It was like, yes, I will just pick friends from the friend tree. That sounds reasonable. Rekka: 27:24   Um, well maybe I think Old Navy has seasonal sales on friends. Miri:    27:28   Yeah, I think so. The buy one get one is the deal you want to wait for. Rekka: 27:30   Yep. Miri:    27:31   But I think it starts from whatever platforms you're most comfortable interacting on or most familiar with. Kaelyn: 27:39   Okay. Miri:    27:40   And because then you sort of don't have to take on the burden of learning. Um, for example, Twitter. Twitter is an acquired language and it's an acquired language that varies by community and there is a lot to be said for working and learning the norms before you're trying to I guess, speak that language. So I was, I was a longtime lurker on Twitter before I showed up in Rekka's DMs. Um, so it, it can be, it can be very slow. Uh, if you can just go to an event and meet people in person, uh, not everyone can again, for many reasons, but that tends to be the fast track. Rekka: 28:18   But that's sort of like starting from the outside and working your way in. Another way to do that with far less costs would be like to start at the NaNoWriMo forums. Miri:    28:25   Yes. Rekka: 28:26   Because that is expected that strangers will show up and start talking to them, um, as opposed to like suddenly finding access to someone's private Slack group showing up one day and everyone goes how did this person get here? Do I know this person? And even, and even that, if you're starting from nothing, it's even hard to do that. Kaelyn: 28:46   Yeah. Miri:    28:47   The NaNoWriMo forums are great for that there where I spent a lot of time between ages 12 and 18 and look in the other places that you already are. Cause there might be a writer there. There's, there probably is. We're there . Rekka: 29:01   You mentioned coworkers - Kaelyn: 29:02   They're pretty, pretty prolific, you guys are popping up in weird places that I'm - Miri:    29:09   Like daisies. Kaelyn: 29:10   I am very surprised in talking to people as soon as I mention anything about like I work in publishing either, Oh I've written something or I know someone who's written something. There's, there's a lot of, and I feel like there that a lot of isolated writers who just kind of write at home like, Hey, if that's, you know, if that's what works for you, that's great. But to any isolated writers that may be listening to this, there are groups of you, what do we call a group of writers? A Confusion? Miri:    29:38   A Murder. I've used flock a few times. Kaelyn: 29:43   A Complication of writers. Rekka: 29:46   An Anxiety of Writers. Miri:    29:47   Oooooooh. Kaelyn: 29:48   An Anxiety. Yeah. Nailed it. That's it. Miri:    29:51   That's it Kaelyn: 29:51   Yes. So, um, there are Anixieties of Writers. Miri:    29:55   So many. Kaelyn: 29:57   Out in the wild. Rekka: 30:01   I feel like I've reached my peak self. Kaelyn: 30:04   Nope, Rekka's we can just stop the podcast. It's not this, thank you everyone. This has been wonderful, but it's not going to get better than that, so we're just going to leave. Miri:    30:12   We're going to be very nervous about it. Kaelyn: 30:15   Um, but yeah, there, there are so many, like writers are everywhere. Um, go find them. Miri:    30:21   Yeah. I like take my mom as an example. Her writing community came from her kid wanting to do NaNoWriMo. Kaelyn: 30:28   And she stumbled into it. Miri:    30:30   Um, I, I didn't find out until that point that my nap time when I was little, which had gone on weirdly long and turned into my, just go to your room and be quiet and read time was my mom's writing time. I just never knew. It never came up. And I definitely consider myself really lucky to have stumbled across the NaNoWriMo forums because that was that first community that was the people who treated me like adults. That was the people who showed me that, Oh, it's, it's not just me because I was the weird kid. I think writing is a large collective of the weird kids because you, you stick with the imaginary friends thing way longer than is socially acceptable. And from having that community and feeling that I started plucking other isolated writers that I noticed out of my high school, out of my tech job, out of my college. Anyone I talked to, if you've ever met me ever on the street, if it's been more than 20 minutes, you've probably heard about writing, you've probably heard about NaNoWriMo. Just because going from going from nothing to something is such a big jump that it doesn't even necessarily matter what that something is. Miri:    31:41   Um, going back to using the communities you're already part of, maybe they're totally different. I used to be very involved in the Avatar, The Last Airbender fan community back in the 10 months. Kaelyn: 31:47   A worthy pursuit of your time. Miri:    31:49   Such a good community. Kaelyn: 31:50   We're going to talk about that later. Miri:    31:52   I was so excited in the 10 months between seasons one and two, mind you, we had just seen a Azula's face for the first time and we didn't know who she was. It was great. And I was on this theories forum and saw somebody else's forum, a signature who had never talked to that said writing a novel back in December and I'm like, aha, I see you. I have found one and I sent her a private message and you know, we're both like 13 flooding into the DM, sliding into the DMS before it was cool. We're both 13 - Kaelyn: 32:23   Or before it existed. Miri:    32:24   Yeah. We eventually convinced our parents to let us talk on the phone and then we both convinced our parents to take us to DragonCon that year, which I'm still not very clear on - Kaelyn: 32:34   You have really cool parents. Miri:    32:36   I have pretty cool parents. Yes. My name is Miri Baker. I am literally named after the Star Trek character, literally. Kaelyn: 32:43   All right. Yup. Miri:    32:44   Okay. I'm still not clear on how the dragon con thing happened because my parents are cool, but they're also very introverted and now my family has visited her family on vacation. Our moms went to New York city together for their 50th birthday. Kaelyn: 32:58   That is so sweet. Miri:    32:59   Like she's going to be in my ways and it was just me going, I know what this person is talking about. Rekka: 33:07   But that speaks to the depth that you get to with these communities if you do them sincerely. Miri:    33:11   Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing, if you're, if you're in these other communities like maybe you're really interested in, I don't know, model rockets, I guarantee you there's someone in that model rocket community who writes science fiction. Rekka: 33:23   Yeah. Miri:    33:24   Or romance. And even if you're not the person who's going to slide into a stranger's DMS, just signal. Speaker 1:       33:31   Yeah. Miri:    33:31   Do the internet version of wearing pins on your jacket though. Kaelyn: 33:34   It's funny cause I always think there should be something you can just like put - Kaelyn: 33:38   Yeah, just be like I write things, somebody, if anyone wants to talk to me about it. Miri:    33:44   There's a standard emoji lower left fountain pen that I've found to be very useful for that. Kaelyn: 33:49   That's yeah, we should make that a thing. If you're involved in writing, that can be your little signal. Miri:    33:54   It's a thing now. Kaelyn: 33:56   And a something next to it that's like and yes, please talk to me about it. Rekka: 34:01   Like green checkmark, smiley face. Kaelyn: 34:03   I am open to conversation. Rekka: 34:05   So what happens if you can't find a community like you are seeking and you do not uncover groups in your area or you do not uncover forums that it feel welcoming to you? Miri:    34:17   Uh, you start your own. Um, because I was the only child in my, in my NaNoWriMo group, I just started talking about it at school and I was in middle school or don't, don't be a middle schooler. That's my advice. Rekka: 34:33   Yeah, skip that entirely. Miri:    34:35   Don't, don't be in middle school. But it was weird enough and different enough that people would notice like, Oh Miri has an awful lot of colors of ink on the right side of her right hand this month. And sometimes people will ask, sometimes you get to be that person who's like, look what I am doing. If your place of employment has any kind of social channels or listservs. Rekka: 34:57   A bulletin board made of cork. Miri:    34:59   A bulletin board made of cork. Kaelyn: 35:01   A yes, an actual bulletin board. Miri:    35:03   A thing that humans used. Rekka: 35:05   I just want to be clear, I'm not talking about internet bulletin board. Miri:    35:08   Yeah. Physical place bulletin boards. I've had success just sending out messages into those voids? Not quite voids of Hey there's this thing, it's NaNoWriMo or I will be, I will be writing at this cafe at this time. I would love for you to join me. Miri:    35:28   Yup. And creating that place where people can come if they want to and you'll still be there doing your thing if they don't. I really enjoy that because if I am in charge of planning something I lose hours of sleep over it. It could be an act of God and Oh no, there was an earthquake, nobody had fun and it's all my fault. But if I'm doing something anyway and I can say I am doing this, I have done all the work of planning it, it is very low key. I would love for you to join me. That creates a very easy space for somebody who's isolated or hasn't even really jumped in, has just thought maybe I would write something that's something I could do to show up and bam. You have ducklings? Rekka: 36:11   Yes. Kaelyn: 36:11   Gooslings? Miri:    36:12   HONK! Kaelyn: 36:12   Ah, okay. Yup. Rekka: 36:15   The zeitgeist is strong in this podcast - Miri:    36:17   I was wearing my honkus ponkus shirt. Rekka: 36:18   In three years, will anyone know what that meant? Kaelyn: 36:21   Does it matter? Miri:    36:23   We don't. We are all the goose. Rekka: 36:23   We don't want that negativity in our future. Miri:    36:25   The goose without a name. Kaelyn: 36:26   Yes. Miri:    36:27   A goose has no title. Rekka: 36:28   So before we wrap up, what are favorite things about the writing community? Miri:    36:33   My favorite part. Uh, the thing that really makes it worthwhile to being in these communities and make these connections is being able to see and genuinely celebrate the successes of our peers. And they don't have to be these huge successes of, Oh, I got this massive book deal, or Oh, I've landed my dream agent. Sometimes the success, and especially if you're this isolated writer kind of doing your own thing in the corner. Sometimes the success is, I wrote a sentence today and it that she's laughing, but this is so true. Speaker 1:       37:06   Yeah, no, no, I get it because sometimes my successes are, I edited a sentence today. Rekka: 37:11   All right, we're all on the same page. Kaelyn: 37:13   There's the occasional one that gets very tricky and - Miri:    37:17   Okay, from the outside that doesn't seem like a success. So why would you celebrate it? But in these communities, if you're saying maybe people you look up to or people you would just never seen that side of go, I wrote a sentence today and it was the hardest thing I've ever done and everybody cheers and you understand that, Oh wait one, we're, we're just writers or I'll just writers here and two - Rekka: 37:39   Human writers. Miri:    37:39   Human writers, definitely human writers. Kaelyn: 37:41   Carbon-based for sure. Miri:    37:43   And two: maybe I've been comparing my day to day trying to write, trying to do whatever to everybody else's curated social network. These are the highlights of my life moments. Whereas within the community you see other people's normal carbon-based human life moments and being able to celebrate your friends successes and even celebrate, you know, your friends huge successes. Rekka: 38:15   Yeah. Miri:    38:15   Without just wanting to be seen, celebrating them. And it builds that sense of - Rekka: 38:21   A Slack chat full of high fives. Miri:    38:22   It's a slack chat full of high fives, right. Or just, you know, ta-da emoji or whatever it is. Um, it really does feel like that that group coming together and just being happy for each other. [inaudible] and I feel like that's something we could, we could all stand to do more of it. Kaelyn: 38:43   Yes. Rekka: 38:43   Yes. So I like on that note, we do have a party to get to. Kaelyn: 38:48   Yes. Kaelyn: 38:49   Yeah. So it's, Oh, any last thoughts closing things that one piece of advice that you would give anyone looking to join a writing community? Let's, let's go with that. Miri:    38:59   Ooh, just one. Kaelyn: 39:00   Just one. If you could only - Rekka: 39:01   Wear skeleton doc Martens. Miri:    39:02   Absolutely. Kaelyn: 39:03   If you could only offer one piece of advice. Miri:    39:06   One piece of advice, if you're looking to join a writing community, be both open to getting involved in anything that you may see at the edges of your existing communities. Be it a link that somebody sent you or that the one weird cousin posted on Facebook. Just be looking. And at the same time as you're looking, find a way that feels natural to you to signal that you would like to be involved. And that lets other people like me who will slide into your DMS a have that hook to pull you in. Kaelyn: 39:36   Miri is actively recruiting. Miri:    39:39   Constantly, always. Kaelyn: 39:42   So, okay, well thanks so much for talking to us. Miri:    39:46   Oh, thank you. Kaelyn: 39:48   There's a, there's a party to get to and there's couple pumpkin's that need to be carved. Rekka: 39:51   Before we get to the mulled bourbon, um, where can people find you online? Miri:    39:55   Yeah, you can find me, well, uh, since we have established that I apparently every writing community elemental, uh, the most reliable way is going to be @MiriBaker on Twitter. I also have a website MiriBaker.com that currently just redirect to @MiriBaker on Twitter and I appear occasionally in the NaNoWriMo forums as MiriMirror, which was a very funny Snow White joke when I made the account in 2005. Rekka: 40:20   Sure. It's still very fun to - Kaelyn: 40:22   It holds up. Miri:    40:22   Yeah. Thank you. Kaelyn: 40:23   Yeah. Well thank you so much again and um, we'll see everyone in two weeks. Kaelyn: 40:28   Absolutely. Kaelyn: 40:29   Thank you all. Kaelyn: 40:31   Thanks everyone for joining us for another episode of We Make Books. If you have any questions that you want answered in future episodes or just have questions in general, remember, you can find us on Twitter @WMBcast, same for Instagram or WMBcast.com if you find value in the content that we provide, we would really appreciate your support at patreon.com/WMBcast. If you can't provide financial support, we totally understand and what you could really do to help us is spread the word about this podcast. You can do that by sharing a particular episode with a friend who can find it useful, or if you leave a rating and review at iTunes, it will feed that algorithm and help other people find our podcast too. Of course, you can always retweet our episodes on Twitter. Thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you soon.  

Think BIGGER Real Estate Show is Facebook Live event where Justin Stoddart shares ideas and methods for real estate professionals to help them build, grow and scale their brand and business. Justin is real estate and marketing entrepreneur.  He started in real estate as a custom home builder.  Since then he realized his passion was building people rather than buildings.  Today he works with real estate agents as a representative at Old Republic Title in Lake Oswego, OR.  So many real estate professionals are caught up in the daily grind that must be performed to get the work done, that they have no time to think about, let alone execute, creating a brand and growing beyond the transaction mode.  There are multiple opportunities to spend money on different tech platforms to advertise and get leads.  But at the end of the day, is a client you work with from Zillow your client or Zillow’s client? Zillow is working to become the Amazon for residential real estate.  They draw the attention of the prospective buyers, agents pay to be seen on Zillow, and it works.  But will the client remember you, the agent when they are ready to buy again? Unless the agent has distinguished themself as something special, the customer will likely go back to Zillow, not the agent. In order for an agent to avoid being displaced by tech platforms like Zillow, they need to create value and position themselves as a brand.  If the consumer sees no value in the service provided by an agent, why would the customer look past a tech platform? Think BIGGER Real Estate Justin recognized that real estate agents need help to grow their business and their brand.  To help his clients, real estate agents, he created theThink BIGGER Real Estate Show. It is both a resource and an example for his agent clients on how they can bring value, and stay relevant in the eyes of their clients and prospects. The Future of Real Estate The future of real estate is certain to change.  Real estate investors and home owners will continue to buy properties.  Presumably, as technology advances and AI is more fully adopted, the division between Fiduciary & Functionary tasks will become more defined.  Fiduciary tasks: Decisions made by the real estate agent on behalf of the client that put the clients interest ahead of the agent.  Functionary task: The many task which are necessary to complete a real estate transaction such as filling out a form. Over time, these lower level task will be transferred to tech platforms.   Ideally, by transferring the lower level Functionary Tasks to a tech platform the real estate agent will be able to work more on the Fiduciary Tasks, to better serve their clients.   Time previously spent doing the functionary task, will give the agent time to spend educating oneself on where the market is going, engaging the client.   This higher level will not be for all of your clients, but you will be able to provide this for a small group of your clients & prospects.  When you ask better questions you get better answers. The more you listen and learn your clients wants and needs, the better you are able to serve them.  Ultimately, this better experience will provide a happier client who is likely to refer more clients to the professional agent.   BIGGEST RISK  Each week I ask my guest, “What is the Biggest Risk Real Estate Investors face?”   BIGGEST RISK: I think actually interviewed a gal yesterday and she said. I asked her the question which is kind of my signature question get on my shows which is, "what do you do to intentionally think bigger? And I 'think it's a great response actually for your question. She said I work too. I work really hard to avoid complacency. And I think the biggest risk that all of us face in a world that's rapidly innovating and rapidly moving forward is to get complacent with our own personal growth in our own personal network. And I'm going to put up a plug for you. You didn't ask for this but to have somebody who's whose business is insurance. But goes about adding value to their clients really modeling media. Modeling marketing at its highest form. I think it's it's brilliant on your part because you're becoming a much more, even if nobody listens to this. I know that's not ture, we had this conversation before. You've got a great audience. That just affect the person that you're becoming by having these conversations. Just makes you when you show up with a customer you're so much more valuable to them than had you just been going about as a typical insurance agent. And so I would encourage anybody who's listening that the biggest risk that you have is to not surround yourself with partners like Darrin and knowledge that's helping you grow and your business grow. Because we can't really complain and say, "Oh I've had such and such for so many years and you know they're you know they've done fine". Which I'm all about loyalty, don't get me wrong. Like I'm not. But what I am saying is all of us need to be aggressively seeking out how to grow ourselves and grow the value to our customers. And sometimes that entails actually taking a look at our partnerships instead of these people becoming somebody that can lead me? Are these people the growing network that can be a value to me and my customers as the competition stiffens. So not growing and being complacent I think is the biggest risk.  For more go to: www.ThinkBigger.Realestate

BIGGEST RISK: I think actually interviewed a gal yesterday and she said. I asked her the question which is kind of my signature question get on my shows which is, "what do you do to intentionally think bigger? And I 'think it's a great response actually for your question. She said I work too. I work really hard to avoid complacency. And I think the biggest risk that all of us face in a world that's rapidly innovating and rapidly moving forward is to get complacent with our own personal growth in our own personal network. And I'm going to put up a plug for you. You didn't ask for this but to have somebody who's whose business is insurance. But goes about adding value to their clients really modeling media. Modeling marketing at its highest form. I think it's it's brilliant on your part because you're becoming a much more, even if nobody listens to this. I know that's not ture, we had this conversation before. You've got a great audience. That just affect the person that you're becoming by having these conversations. Just makes you when you show up with a customer you're so much more valuable to them than had you just been going about as a typical insurance agent. And so I would encourage anybody who's listening that the biggest risk that you have is to not surround yourself with partners like Darrin and knowledge that's helping you grow and your business grow. Because we can't really complain and say, "Oh I've had such and such for so many years and you know they're you know they've done fine". Which I'm all about loyalty, don't get me wrong. Like I'm not. But what I am saying is all of us need to be aggressively seeking out how to grow ourselves and grow the value to our customers. And sometimes that entails actually taking a look at our partnerships instead of these people becoming somebody that can lead me? Are these people the growing network that can be a value to me and my customers as the competition stiffens. So not growing and being complacent I think is the biggest risk.

Nina Meijers discusses FoodBytes! (San Francisco event showcasing startups disrupting the food and agriculture space) and former FoodBytes! alumna Claire Schlemme, CEO & founder of Oakland-based Renewal Mill that is fighting food waste by upcycling okara.Transcripts:Lisa Kiefer:This is Method to the Madness, a public payer show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer and today I'm speaking with Nina Meyers of Foodbytes and Claire Schlemme, CEO and founder of Oakland based and alumni startup of Foodbytes Renewal Mill. Welcome to the program.Nina Meyers:Thank you.Lisa Kiefer:I'm particularly interested in what's coming up next week with Foodbytes, but first of all, Nina Meyers, tell us what you do for Foodbytes, how it got started, what's the history and what's the problems that you're trying to solve.Nina Meyers:Sure, happy to and thanks for having us. Pleasure to be here. Foodbytes quite simply is a pitch competition and networking platform for sustainable food and AG innovators. So it started four plus years ago. We're actually about to do our 15th Foodbytes, which is in San Francisco, which is where it all began. So it's founded by Rabobank. Rabobank is one of the largest food and agriculture banks in the world and in North America, our clients are some of the largest and mid sized food and AG companies. We started to see that we're working with a lot of our corporates and they're facing a lot of challenges in innovation where we're all faced with this idea that we're going to have 10 billion people on the planet by 2050. We need to feed those people and we need to do so efficiently. There's lots of environmental challenges and there's a lot of startups that are starting to create nimble ways and test and experiment and are basically building technologies and products that are solving those challenges.So we, four and a half years ago said, we want to do something that's just for food and AG. There's lots of pitch opportunities out there for tech startups. There's lots of things that are cross-disciplinary, but we said, let's bring our knowledge to the table. Let's bring our corporates to the table and investors that are just looking at food and AG start to create an ecosystem where those startups can make the connections to help scale their technologies and on the converse side of that that the corporates can start to build relationships and really start to think about these ways that innovation is happening to bring it to their own businesses.Lisa Kiefer:Tell me how it operates. Is it a competition?Nina Meyers:Yeah, so it is a competition in its most essential form. We look through hundreds of applications. We score them and we come to 15 startups that we select to come and pitch from all around the world and we're looking at on the product side, on the tech side, on the agriculture tech sides. We're looking at like AG tech, food tech and food products and they basically have a two day experience jam packed, but we basically bring together our network of mentors in the room, experts in legal deal structuring, branding, PR and they have intimate mentor sessions with them. They get to build camaraderie and relationships with one another as the entrepreneurs. They get to practice their pitches for the judges that are going to judge them the next day and they really have this full day of just like, it's kind of like a mini business school. Learn as much as you can.Lisa Kiefer:Do you find that many of these startups don't have business skills?Nina Meyers:I wouldn't say that. I think it's like you're just trying to build your business day in and day out and you have to focus on that and this, we're doing this one day kind of takes them out of it a little bit and that they're like, "Oh I've been a tech company. I've been really focused on how do I build a relationships with corporates or how do I build the MVP of my technology, but I wasn't thinking about the brand. I wasn't thinking about how I should structure my series B round when I'm fundraising, when I'm just in this infancy of my seed stage." They start to just have a lot of information around them.Lisa Kiefer:It would seem like creativity doesn't have to go hand in hand with business skills. I mean getting the right people together.Nina Meyers:To an extent. It depends on which entrepreneur, which startup, but I would say that they kind of say, "I took a day out of my life, my building, my business life, but I got to get all these different intros and different insights and also of course the insights from the other entrepreneurs that are there who are facing similar challenges, building similar businesses." So they do that and then there's a pitch day, which is a traditional pitch competition. There's hundreds of people in the room. It's focused on investment, but it's also focused on Rabobank bringing our corporates into the room so that they can pitch for these potential partners.There's a lot of media there covering it to see what's kind of the cutting edge of food and AG innovation and then what we started with was this pitch competition. Now it's built into two days and we started to build a continuous community around that. We say, "Hey, do you want to meet with X, Y and Z?" They're really interested in thinking about partnering with you. We have a database of thousands of startups and we're always thinking about how can we continue to build relationships?Lisa Kiefer:Do you sometimes do that with those who maybe didn't make it, but they have a great idea? Maybe they don't have the right skills but you match them up with somebody else?Nina Meyers:Yep, absolutely. So we have a database of thousands of companies that have applied, but we also, we have 250 now alumni of the platform. We're looking at everyone who's ever sort of come across our radar who is an innovator in this space. So that's what happens over the two days, but we kind of say that it's a discovery platform, but it's also like the beginning of a relationship where Rabobank can kind of be this connector, be this matchmaker, be this champion for both sides of-Lisa Kiefer:Tell me about the judges. How many and who are these people?Nina Meyers:They change. Every food rates has had a different grouping of judges. I think we've had something like 75. It's probably closer to a hundred and mentors, but essentially they're some of our sponsors and partners. They're legal experts who work with startups to help them structure their deals and figure out how to engage with investors. They are actual investors in need of a CPG space or on the tech side. They are sometimes policy experts who are really focused on sustainable food policy and-Lisa Kiefer:So some academics?Nina Meyers:Yeah, academics. Exactly. So literally we've had judges sort of from all across the board. We've also started having an alumni come on as a judge to sort of speak from that first hand perspective of this is what happened when I was there. We have-Lisa Kiefer:That's a great idea.Nina Meyers:Yeah, we have Abby Ramadan from Impact Vision who is an alumni of our platform and she's been very involved. She's also based out here. We want the judging panel to be able to provide varying expertise.Lisa Kiefer:Does it always happen in the same city?Nina Meyers:It's global. We've been in San Francisco the most. We've been in Silicon Valley the most. This is our sixth San Francisco edition, but we've been in Australia. We've been in London. We've been in the Netherlands, New York. We're headed to Chicago in September. Oh, we were in Boulder. We were in Austin, but yeah, we're-Lisa Kiefer:So how many times a year are we talking?Nina Meyers:So we were doing three to four for awhile globally for 2020 and 2019 we're doing two so that we can really focus on doing more and providing more value for everyone in our ecosystem and the in between.Lisa Kiefer:So this year you have how many participants?Nina Meyers:We have 15 companies.Lisa Kiefer:And two are from the Bay Area?Nina Meyers:Yes.Lisa Kiefer:One of them I'm particularly interested in. That's SnapDNA.Nina Meyers:Yes. We talk a little bit about some of the challenges that the companies are solving and one of them is sort of this idea of transparency. It's this idea of we all know about recalls that are happening in food all the time and there's a lot of opacity around what happens from the fields to your plate or wherever it comes from. So there are companies, there are a lot of innovation in this space that's happening around food safety and pathogen detection. So that SnapDNA is one of those companies that's really creating a real time test for folks in the food supply chain to get that information on whether food is safe or whether it has certain pathogens and we've seen a number of different sort of innovators come through that are focused on this, but this is something as a point I just made that's very, very well event to the corporate focus in the room.Lisa Kiefer:That can save so much money.Nina Meyers:It's about efficiency. It's obviously about safety. It's about consumer trust, which we know consumers want safer food, more sustainable food, healthier, more nutritious, cleaner and they're willing to pay more for it as well. So this is something that's important to all those players.Lisa Kiefer:Okay, and the other one is Planetariums and they're out of Palo Alto. Do you know much about them?Nina Meyers:Yes I do and the Planetariums is an up cycling company, which what does that mean? So it's and Claire I'm sure will talk more about this, but it is a waste stream that's up cycled into a new food essentially. So they are taking defatted seeds, which are a byproduct of the vegetable oil process and they are basically making that into a very nutritious protein rich flour. So they just announced today that they got, that they just raised a $750000 seed round and one of their investors is Barilla, which is the largest pasta producer in the world. So for a company like Barilla, to just give you an example is looking at this up cycling space and saying, "Yeah, of course we make pasta out of wheat, but we know that consumers want different things. Consumers want chickpea pasta. They want gluten free pasta. They still want traditional pasta, but let's look at ways that we can really provide something that consumers are starting to relate to.Lisa Kiefer:That's interesting. I've had a couple of your alumni on this show and one of them was Andrew Brentano who does cricket protein.Nina Meyers:Yes.Lisa Kiefer:And the other people were in perfect produce and they also, we're trying to save money by getting rid of waste in the food marketplace.Nina Meyers:Yep.Lisa Kiefer:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today I'm speaking with Nina Meyers of FoodBytes and Claire Schlemme, CEO and founder of Oakland based Renewal Mill. So I want to kind of shift over here to Claire Schlemme and Claire, you were an alumni of Foodbytes a couple of years ago.Claire Sclemme:Yes.Lisa Kiefer:We got up to the point where it's talking about judging. You made it to the finals.Claire Sclemme:Sure.Lisa Kiefer:What happened?Claire Sclemme:So as Nina mentioned, it's really it was a two day event for us. So the first day before the actual pitch competition, we had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different experts in different fields, which was, which was really great. So I think going back to that point, even with some business experience under our belt, it was a lot of really quick concentrated information that we were able to get from that day, which was excellent. So a lot of touching on all these legal issues, packaging issues, marketing issues, so really being able to touch all those different points and then also being able to have a pitch in front of the judges before the actual competition was also-Lisa Kiefer:So like a practice pitch.Claire Sclemme:It was a practice pitch. We got feedback on it, which was great. We could incorporate the feedback into our pitch for the next day, which was also very helpful and it really-Lisa Kiefer:Maybe you should tell us about your company.Claire Sclemme:Absolutely. So, so I'm the cp-founder and CEO of Renewal Mill and Renewal Mill up cycles byproducts from food manufacturing into high quality ingredients and products. So essentially we're building a portfolio of ingredients that are all being sourced from different byproducts. So the first-Lisa Kiefer:Like what?Claire Sclemme:So the first ingredient that we brought to market commercially is called Okara flour and it's made from the byproduct from soy milk production. So it's basically taking the soybean pulp that's generated when soy milk is made. We dry it, mill it and turn it into a high fiber, high protein, gluten free flour. So that's one example. There's a lot of other other places in the food system where this type of waste is happening. So particularly in food manufacturing waste is a really good place to be looking at food waste because it's kind of low hanging fruit in terms of being able to attack the food waste problem.Things coming out of a food manufacturing facility are food safe already because they're in this facility and they're often very concentrated in their scale because it's food production is pretty concentrated. So you have the ability to hit that economy of scale that you need to make a profitable business or make a business that can make sense. So we're focused primarily on these fibrous byproduct streams. So anything that's coming from really coming from that first step of bringing in anything from the field, the fruits, the vegetables, the beans, things like that and you get a lot of fiber rich byproducts because a lot of what we're processing out of our food system right now is fiber.Even though that's the one macronutrient that western diets are very deficient in. So we're starting with Okara. Okara production in the US is very concentrated actually. There's just a handful of major production facilities. So it's a strategic starting point for us from that point of view. From there we're looking at other byproducts of nondairy milk production. So within this big world of fibrous byproducts, we're looking specifically at these nondairy milk byproduct streams. So the byproducts coming out of almond milk production, oat milk production, that's where we're going to be headed at next.Lisa Kiefer:So anything with [holls 00:12:31].Claire Sclemme:Exactly, yeah.Lisa Kiefer:So you're up before the judges and you know your company well. What happened? What did they ask you? Give us the scenario.Claire Sclemme:That's it. That's a great question. So a lot of the feedback, the feedback always helps you kind of see things, obviously from outside eyes that haven't heard your story a million times. Basically a panel with different backgrounds be able to weigh in on things that are causing confusion for them or things that didn't quite come across.So really being able to make sure that we can really hone in on the right story that we want to be telling and making sure that it's coming across that way and being received that way by the judges and also making sure that we're presenting all the information that somebody would want to know. So making sure that we've addressed issues like competition in the field or kind of what our growth strategy is and making sure that we haven't left something kind of major out that a judge would want to see. So that was very helpful and I think it was also just helpful to get a sense of what the space is like and it's a pretty big event with quite a few attendees. So it's nice to feel comfortable on the stage and in front of the judges [crosstalk 00:13:35].Lisa Kiefer:How many minutes are you up there?Nina Meyers:It's three minutes now. So as far as-Lisa Kiefer:Wow, that's not much time.Nina Meyers:[inaudible] competitions, it's pretty tight, but the judges also ask questions after the companies go. So that it's like another layer of sort of engagement and that's-Lisa Kiefer:And do they get materials ahead of time?Nina Meyers:Yes. So they spend, obviously they're with each other the day before, but they also get materials many days in advance and they now they have meetings with some of the startups. So Claire participated two years ago and we've really continued to evolve what the programming looks like as people. We always get feedback. So the entrepreneurs say, "I actually want more time with investors that are, I know I'm going to meet the right investors." So we're doing actually an investor power hour for the first time this time around where we're strategically matching them with one or two investors and we're doing, it's not a speed dating because it's like 20 minutes, but basically meetings with those specific folks whose investment these align with what the startups are doing.Lisa Kiefer:Is the networking what they win or do you actually get funding?Nina Meyers:There isn't direct funding as a result of Foodbytes, but there are a number of prizes. One of the main ones is for all the three winners is that they, Rabobank hosts a huge summit in New York at the end of the year. So December and all of our corporate clients, so big food and AG companies are there and the winners across all the events from that year get to come and pitch and have targeted meetings with the corporates that are relevant for their businesses and they have a few days where they're just really targeted and meeting with folks that can potentially help them as partners. So that's one main prize and then a lot of our sponsors who are, like we said, experts in many different fields, there's also consultations with them so that they can get five hours of legal consultation on how to structure their deal. They can get PR consultation and branding consultation on how to build the best investor materials and DAX and present their brand in the best possible way.Lisa Kiefer:Claire, what was it you found to be the most useful out of winning this competition?Nina Meyers:So we weren't the winners from our cohort. We were in the finalists but actually kind of going back again to all the people that we meet during the two days, that was a very valuable thing for us that made the participation in the event very worthwhile for us. So we actually continued to have some conversations with some of the lawyers that we met there to talk about some of the legal structuring, some of the agreements that we were currently in the process of structuring and we also had continued conversation with folks that were very knowledgeable about packaging for food products because there's a lot that goes into making sure that the product fits all the legal regulations and the requirements. That was great to have both of those connections coming out of Foodbytes.Lisa Kiefer:Once you get involved with say a VC or some sort of funding source, do you ever worry about losing your company's mission? That it will begin to sort of move away from you?Claire Sclemme:Yeah, that's a great question. So actually one of the things that we did when we first founded the company thinking about that very point was that we incorporated as a public benefit corporation. So we wanted that to be really built into our mission and so we structured that into the type of business we actually were and one of the pieces of kind of feedback that we got at the very beginning was that maybe you don't want to do that because you might be closing yourself off to investors that aren't interested in investing in a benefit corporation and we said, "That's exactly why we want to do this, because it essentially is going to kind of self select the types of investors that we're looking for." So that was kind of the first layer and then the second of course is making sure that when we're talking to investors that we do have that mission alignment as we're taking on investment.Lisa Kiefer:Getting back to you, Nina, you've done this for several years now. What trends in agriculture are you seeing pop up from the startup companies? I mean, you talked about some of the problems in the AG industry. What are you seeing overall?Nina Meyers:Yeah, well a major trend. I'd say a cross food tech, AG tech and CPG as is this idea of waste mitigation. So up cycling is one avenue in which that's happening. Another one is of course packaging. We're seeing more and more edible packaging. We're seeing more compostable packaging, plant based packaging. We have a company that's pushing in Foodbytes called Coremat and that's exactly what they're doing. They're making compostable, plant-based packaging that's basically-Lisa Kiefer:That's awesome because all these cities are now saying it's too expensive to recycle.Nina Meyers:Exactly and from a regulatory perspective that this sort of clampdown is increasing. It's happened in Europe, forcing lots of innovation in the packaging world in Europe and it's starting to happen here. That's one massive trend and huge need that startups are really looking to solve and obviously an incredible opportunity for collaboration on the corporate side of things as they start to realize we really, really need to be focusing on it. It's happening [crosstalk 00:18:31-Lisa Kiefer:Why are you giving me a plastic bag?Nina Meyers:Why are you giving me a straw? Right, exactly. So that's one place where we're seeing a lot of innovation and then on the waste mitigation side as well, right? Stopping waste before it can happen. So more and more technology companies are saying, let's use data and technology to stop waste before it can happen. So a company like [Winnow] who's come through our platform, they basically have a scale for food service and back of house at restaurants that weighs waste as it's going out and then gives restaurants a better picture of their wastage so that they can decrease that. That's the-Lisa Kiefer:What's the incentive for someone to reduce their waste at the restaurant level?Nina Meyers:Money. They save restaurants globally $25 million a year and they're not that big yet. I mean they're just starting out. So it's money.Lisa Kiefer:It sounds like you've put together a lot of qualitative data.Nina Meyers:Yes, we, like I said, we started with a very, very small team and over the last year or so we've built up the team like I said. So we've just brought in a data analyst who is amazing and we're sort of at the tip of the iceberg for what data are we sitting on and what are we saying? But yes, we have a really good picture of trends that are happening. That's one major, major trend that we're seeing. The other one is sort of just the environmental impact of food-Lisa Kiefer:Climate change?Nina Meyers:... Production, of climate change and also to hand in hand with that that consumers have more and more knowledge of that and are demanding better, cleaner products.Lisa Kiefer:Yeah, look at the Midwest right now.Nina Meyers:Yes.Lisa Kiefer:All the flooding and that used to be our bread basket.Nina Meyers:That's when it has to change and startups are really heeding that call on the plant based foods side of things as well. Just if we're talking about packaged foods in general, we're seeing so much innovation in that space. We're seeing at least 40% of the companies that apply that have a product that apply to Foodbytes are in some way related to the plant based space. To sort of talk about some of the companies that are pitching coming up in San Francisco we're seeing new and novel plant based proteins. So we have a company called [Tali] and they are making waterlily seed puffs. So we see the puffs as like a huge category in the food product world, but this is a new type of puff. It's basically bringing in an heirloom varietal.It's gotten more protein, more nutritious. They're doing some really interesting flavors. So we're seeing companies like that who are bringing this plant based protein view to snacking. We also have a company called Gem and they basically have the first FDA regulated supplement product, food supplement. It's for women by women. It's made from algae and a number of different plants. Real food. It's clean food. So we're seeing things in that type of space. I was just at Expo West, which is the largest natural foods show in the country and I think it's 1500 exhibitors, 90000 people.Lisa Kiefer:Where was it?Nina Meyers:It's in Anaheim. It's 90000 people. So it's very, very intense and there's a lot of companies that are doing very similar things. There's the plant-based trend just continues to grow year over year. So whether that's new algae products, that's lots of cauliflower products, you see the confluence of a lot of trends.Lisa Kiefer:Are any UC Berkeley professors or policy people judging this year?Nina Meyers:Not this year, but next year we're going to make it happen.Claire Sclemme:Oh excellent.Lisa Kiefer:Can anyone go to this?Nina Meyers:Yes. It's open to the public. We really want people there who care about these issues, who care about sustainable food and AG, who want to see what the innovators at the bleeding edge of sustainable innovation are doing. Next Thursday, the 28th of March, starting at 2:00 PM, it's really an opportunity to see these 15 startups pitch, to engage with them and see their products and technologies, have some delicious food and drinks and if you want to get into food or if you're a journalist or if you're a student and this is where the world you think you want to go into, we absolutely encourage you to come. If you're an investor or you're a food corporate and you're trying to figure out what's next, we 1000000% encourage you to come.Lisa Kiefer:And you have a website?Nina Meyers:Foodbytesworld.com. Instagram is Foodbytes by Rabobank. We've profiled all the companies who are going to be pitching. There's lots of content. Claire's on there somewhere. So check us out on Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and then Foodbytesworld.com is where you can get tickets to come and see us next week.Lisa Kiefer:And Claire, your business is located where?Claire Sclemme:Oh, we're in Oakland.Lisa Kiefer:Okay, what have your challenges been since you participated in Foodbytes?Claire Sclemme:Oh, that's a good question. Our biggest challenge I would say is that, so working in the byproduct space, we're really a bridge builder between the production and then bringing that into the market. We have less control over being able to scale in a way that other companies might be able to have as they're creating products. So we're really bound to the amount of byproducts that are coming out of certain facilities. So being able to match that production with the sales is really, I would say one of our biggest challenges. So it kind of swings back and forth from having more demands than we have a production for to having more supply of the ingredient than we currently have sales force. So it's kind of bouncing back and forth as we try to strike that perfect balance as we bring these ingredients on board.Lisa Kiefer:And are most of your sources local?Claire Sclemme:So right now they are. So our first source is in Oakland, which is why we started out in Oakland and why we're based there. So our first partner facility is Hodo Foods and they're a tofu manufacturer. So the first step of making tofu is making the soy milk and so that's where we're basically harvesting the Okara from is from Hodo and our next two facilities that we will likely be using as our sources of production are also in northern California.Nina Meyers:When you sort of spoke about what do they get out of this, the alumni who come through our platforms have raised a combined 550 million. I believe it was something like 150 last year. So even though it's not directly a prize, this is what we've seen as the companies who've come out of who we've chosen, who we've selected, this is how they're moving forward and getting that investment to scale their companies.Lisa Kiefer:You must be checking the failure rate of these companies as they-Nina Meyers:Yes.Lisa Kiefer:... they leave Foodbytes. What is the failure rate?Nina Meyers:It's under 10% because we're doing really like a lot of due diligence in the process of picking the ones that we think are really going to be successful. It's relatively low. It's lower than the average.Lisa Kiefer:Do you have a business background?Nina Meyers:I actually went to college in upstate New York at Skidmore college. I studied at a liberal arts school and I had was working in a sustainable restaurant, a farm to table restaurant the summer after college and my Mom is a chef and so I grew up around food. Food is my whole life and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next when I moved to New York during the recession in 2009. I started working for a restaurant company in New York in the creative department. I got sort of my foot in the door there and started working on marketing and design for the restaurants.So that was really a sort of honed my skills there on the marketing side of things. Started to realize through being in New York that what I really cared about was sustainability in food and agriculture and trying to figure out what to do next. I then went onto work for Food Tech Connect, which is a site of record for food innovation essentially. We did a lot of events in this space and meetups and consulting and hackathons, which is really all focused on sustainable food and agriculture. So I was there. I was working with startups directly. Spent about four years there and then we started working together with Rabobank to build Foodbytes out from its infancy.Lisa Kiefer:Claire how did you get into this pat of the world?Claire Sclemme:Yes. So my background is actually in environmental management. So I have in my masters in environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry. I had primarily actually been involved mostly in the space of sustainability and energy and so I'd worked at a renewable energy startup in India and worked with UN climate change, but I started to realize how important the food system is in the space of sustainability and I, kind of my first transition into into food was actually co-founding a juice company in Boston where I was living at the time. So we started as a food truck and we were connecting farmers to folks in the city through juices and smoothies and then in that process saw how much waste is created when you're juicing. It was really kind of like this moral issue.At the end of the day we'd sourced all this great produce from these farmers and it was all organic. It was mostly local. You'd spend a lot of money to buy all this produce and we're throwing out a huge amount of it at the end of the day, ll that pulp that's left over from juicing. On the the other side, of course we're selling the product that we are making, we're selling at a price point that's pretty high for the, it wasn't a super affordable food for much of the city and so those two pieces together kind of where you know really struck me as a challenge and that was a space that I really wanted to continue working in after I left that company.So when I had really just a fortuitous conversation with the owner of Hodo Foods in Oakland, the owner of the tofu factory and saw that he had this challenge with his byproduct that he was producing, which was very similar to what I had seen at the juice company, but at this much bigger scale and that it wasn't just a Okara, it was lots of different opportunities and lots of different sources of these types of byproducts. That was really the beginning of Renewal Mill was looking into how we can solve both food waste and also increase affordable nutrition in the food system.Nina Meyers:Claire really pioneered this space and now there's a company that's much younger than you, but it's called Pulp Pantry and they're doing, they're solving the problem that Claire just outlined. It's like entrepreneurial serendipity. They saw the same problem and they're making value added snacks out of juice pulp.Lisa Kiefer:Wow, you should all join forces and become the next Nabisco.Claire Sclemme:I know. Exactly, exactly.Nina Meyers:[crosstalk 00:28:19].Lisa Kiefer:[crosstalk] better.Nina Meyers:That's exactly what Foodbytes wants to have happen.Claire Sclemme:Yeah.Lisa Kiefer:Well, was there anything else that is coming up with Foodbytes besides this conference next week?Nina Meyers:Rabo has a whole other food and AG innovation platform called Tara. It is basically the next step in the cycle for startups to engage with Rabo after Foodbytes. That's what Tara is all about. We're going into our fourth cohort and applications are open now. Tara is like, how can we do the best possible matchmaking for startups and corporates? So applications are open now. That website is Taraaccelerator.com. They're open. They close on April 26th. So any startups, anyone you think is interested, you can learn about the corporates that are participating to see and so you can learn more there.Claire Sclemme:In addition to kind of all of the structured support that's coming out of Foodbytes, I think the other piece that was really valuable to us was actually meeting the other companies that we're pitching and there there's been some valuable connections that we've had in terms of the the business and actually finding uses for our flour with some of the other companies that have been on the platform, but also just really to talk to other entrepreneurs and be able to just talk about some of the other challenges that you're facing from a business perspective and also from a personal perspective as well. So it's a really, I think it's a really great community of entrepreneurs that are being brought together as well.Lisa Kiefer:Well thank you so much for being on the show.Claire Sclemme:Thank you.Nina Meyers:Thank you for having us.Lisa Kiefer:You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll be back again in two weeks. [music] See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week’s episode brought to you by Indy Wrestling US, Slice on Broadway, Occupy Pro Wrestling, and THRIFTY Podcast! Matt Conard and Bradley are in studio this week to talk wrestling news and views with Mad Mike and Sorg. This week's topics include: Matt Light was supposed to be on the show, but had to cancel - for some good reason, guys. So, we got a different Matt to replace him! We've got Matt Conard! There's big news from this week - Ronda Rousey had her first match on WWE RAW. We don't know about you, but we were a little scared for Alicia Fox in her match against Ronda Rousey. Bradley watched wrestling with his dad. And, his retelling of the experience is amazing. Everyone has opinions about how WWE is currently utilizing Ronda Rousey. Did you know WWE isn't the ONLY wrestling company out there? All In is looking great, guys! OH: I've heard things. Like the ICP Great Milenko album. All In is going to be available on Fite TV and Honor Club. The pre-show will be on WGN. Stephen Amell v Christopher Daniels?!?!? Matt Conard is going to be in a bouncy house...in his cloak. You're welcome for that visual. Matt Conard is telling knock-knock jokes. Mark Cuban is headed to New Japan to take on WWE. This week's Big Question: If the Hall of Fame had a cap, and you had to take someone out to put someone in - who would you put in, and who would they replace? We're talking about the WWE Evolution commentary team announcement! Kane is an elected official, guys. *head scratch* What did YOU learn in wrestling this week? Shout out to Marshall Gambino who will be facing off against Chest Flexor in a cage match for the FINAL match of Gambino's career with IWC Wrestling. Follow our stable on Twitter: Matt Conard (@ReaperMattC), Bradley (@HeelBradley), Mad Mike (@MadMike4883), and Sorg (@Sorgatron). If you are in Pittsburgh, you’ve got to go to Slice on Broadway (@Pgh_Slice) and get their food! (sliceonbroadway.com) You can support the show at Patreon.com/wrestlingmayhemshow! Go to wrestlingmayhemshow.com for more entertainment! Thanks to Basick Sickness (@basicksickness) for the awesome intro for the show. Remember to LIKE and FOLLOW us on Facebook for updates and video.

This week’s episode brought to you by Indy Wrestling US, Slice on Broadway, Occupy Pro Wrestling, and THRIFTY Podcast! Matt Conard and Bradley are in studio this week to talk wrestling news and views with Mad Mike and Sorg. This week's topics include: Matt Light was supposed to be on the show, but had to cancel - for some good reason, guys. So, we got a different Matt to replace him! We've got Matt Conard! There's big news from this week - Ronda Rousey had her first match on WWE RAW. We don't know about you, but we were a little scared for Alicia Fox in her match against Ronda Rousey. Bradley watched wrestling with his dad. And, his retelling of the experience is amazing. Everyone has opinions about how WWE is currently utilizing Ronda Rousey. Did you know WWE isn't the ONLY wrestling company out there? All In is looking great, guys! OH: I've heard things. Like the ICP Great Milenko album. All In is going to be available on Fite TV and Honor Club. The pre-show will be on WGN. Stephen Amell v Christopher Daniels?!?!? Matt Conard is going to be in a bouncy house...in his cloak. You're welcome for that visual. Matt Conard is telling knock-knock jokes. Mark Cuban is headed to New Japan to take on WWE. This week's Big Question: If the Hall of Fame had a cap, and you had to take someone out to put someone in - who would you put in, and who would they replace? We're talking about the WWE Evolution commentary team announcement! Kane is an elected official, guys. *head scratch* What did YOU learn in wrestling this week? Shout out to Marshall Gambino who will be facing off against Chest Flexor in a cage match for the FINAL match of Gambino's career with IWC Wrestling. Follow our stable on Twitter: Matt Conard (@ReaperMattC), Bradley (@HeelBradley), Mad Mike (@MadMike4883), and Sorg (@Sorgatron). If you are in Pittsburgh, you’ve got to go to Slice on Broadway (@Pgh_Slice) and get their food! (sliceonbroadway.com) You can support the show at Patreon.com/wrestlingmayhemshow! Go to wrestlingmayhemshow.com for more entertainment! Thanks to Basick Sickness (@basicksickness) for the awesome intro for the show. Remember to LIKE and FOLLOW us on Facebook for updates and video.

This week’s episode brought to you by Indy Wrestling US, Slice on Broadway, Occupy Pro Wrestling, and THRIFTY Podcast! Matt Conard and Bradley are in studio this week to talk wrestling news and views with Mad Mike and Sorg. This week's topics include: Matt Light was supposed to be on the show, but had to cancel - for some good reason, guys. So, we got a different Matt to replace him! We've got Matt Conard! There's big news from this week - Ronda Rousey had her first match on WWE RAW. We don't know about you, but we were a little scared for Alicia Fox in her match against Ronda Rousey. Bradley watched wrestling with his dad. And, his retelling of the experience is amazing. Everyone has opinions about how WWE is currently utilizing Ronda Rousey. Did you know WWE isn't the ONLY wrestling company out there? All In is looking great, guys! OH: I've heard things. Like the ICP Great Milenko album. All In is going to be available on Fite TV and Honor Club. The pre-show will be on WGN. Stephen Amell v Christopher Daniels?!?!? Matt Conard is going to be in a bouncy house...in his cloak. You're welcome for that visual. Matt Conard is telling knock-knock jokes. Mark Cuban is headed to New Japan to take on WWE. This week's Big Question: If the Hall of Fame had a cap, and you had to take someone out to put someone in - who would you put in, and who would they replace? We're talking about the WWE Evolution commentary team announcement! Kane is an elected official, guys. *head scratch* What did YOU learn in wrestling this week? Shout out to Marshall Gambino who will be facing off against Chest Flexor in a cage match for the FINAL match of Gambino's career with IWC Wrestling. Follow our stable on Twitter: Matt Conard (@ReaperMattC), Bradley (@HeelBradley), Mad Mike (@MadMike4883), and Sorg (@Sorgatron). If you are in Pittsburgh, you’ve got to go to Slice on Broadway (@Pgh_Slice) and get their food! (sliceonbroadway.com) You can support the show at Patreon.com/wrestlingmayhemshow! Go to wrestlingmayhemshow.com for more entertainment! Thanks to Basick Sickness (@basicksickness) for the awesome intro for the show. Remember to LIKE and FOLLOW us on Facebook for updates and video.

Linda: Has it already happened? Katrina: Yeah. It still says starting. Get your head in the picture, because otherwise you're revealing the trick about our cushions. When your head when down, it just looked like a weird cushion arrangement behind us. Linda: There's some crazy talking going on over here. Katrina: Get rid of it. Kill it dead. Linda: What is this? Katrina: Is that a cage to keep humans in? Linda: Oh my God! No, he's wearing pants. Katrina: What are you doing? Linda: He's wearing pants, it's okay. But I got excited there for a minute. Katrina: Creepy cage for humans. Linda: Hello! Katrina: I'm just getting a little insight into this YouTube selection. Alright. Linda: Hi, we need to pay attention to this. We're here. Katrina: We're present and in attendance. I was on a plane like an argon, I'm just like a freaking professional. Linda: You literally just walked up. Katrina: I just walked off a plane. There might have been three full-blown temper tantrum on that plane had by one of my children. It was much wine required. Linda: And, this took a little bit of time. Let's just be - Katrina: This took a little bit of time to make the set fabulous. Wait, wait. I haven't even shared this. Only on my business page. I'm going to share it to my own page. Hang on, everybody. Just wait. You're going to have to wait. I'm just going to entertain you. Linda: I'm going to entertain you. Katrina: I'm sitting with what will come out of me, I'm unsure. Linda: We were about to call ... What were we going to call the live feed? Katrina: You wanted to call it "Whatever the Fuck Comes Out." Which is actually very accurate. Linda: Yes, we have this amazing set up going on. Katrina: It is amazing, look at it. Hang on, we've had a cushion fail. Linda: Oh my God. Katrina: There's been a cushion fail already. Linda: Fail. Katrina: Hello, hello, hello people in my live stream. Linda: Hello, kids and hello people in mine. We should introduce each other. Katrina: Oh that's an idea. People could just figure it out. Linda: People could just figure out who we are. It would be pretty cool if I choose you to my people. My people. You introduce me to your people. Katrina: That's impressive between peoples. Begin, begin. Begin while I share this. I'm going to share it into my group and then to my other page. Linda: Aw look, that's us. Katrina: We look amazing. It is what it is. Linda: Katrina Routh is a serial internet breaker. Katrina: That's actually true. She just wrote me a small, beautiful card. And in there it's some flowers and my favourite chocolates, and some vegemite. Linda: She deserves it, let's face it. Katrina: I came home to this little, I'm going to call it an alter, to me. But in the card- Linda: It was an expression of love. Katrina: But in the card she said, "to the woman who breaks the internet every day." Linda: I did, I did. Katrina: It was beautiful, actually. Thank you. Linda: No worries, well thank you. For having me in your space. But I mean, who wouldn't want to have me in your space. Katrina: All the time. Thank you M.D. alright, last introduction. I think I [inaudible 00:03:22] your introduction. Linda: You did. That's all she cares. No, I'm kidding. Katrina: You can figure the rest out. Linda: She breaks the internet, apart of that, she's my soul sister friend and she's a kick ass entrepreneur. I really, really honour and admire how much she's standing on truth and just kick ass on the internet. Katrina: And all. Thank you. For those who don't know the amazing, talented, and fabulous Linda Docta, here she is. I've prepared her in the flesh earlier. Many of you know us both and follow us both, but for those who don't know, Linda is one of the ... I'm going to say it this way, because this is the simplest way to explain just how highly I think of this one. Linda is one of the few people in the world whose post I consistently read because she's an incredible messenger and writer. And you know, I'm a content creator, not a consumer. I don't consumer a lot of content from other people. I do consume some people. I consumer some people, and I consume some people's content. But Linda's posts are incredible. She's an incredible [inaudible 00:04:37]. You're one of the few people who is not afraid to say what's actually inside of her, and to share what's coming from the soul. As you know, that's what I believe its all got to be about. That's just one reason why we gt along so well. We have a relationship that is predominately on, somewhat, almost an embarrassing amount of audio messages per day. That goes back and forth from all around the world. Linda: They do. Even in the house. When was it? Before you went to Melbourne. You were downstairs, I was upstairs. And you were audioing me and listening to my audio. Katrina: So we don't hang out in person that often, but Linda's here staying in my home for a few days before she jets off again. And often, I don't know, I'm over in American and she's in Sydney, or I'm in Bali and she's in Melbourne, or wherever we are. Now you're going to be in other places around the world, and I'll be here. That's how it is. So we don't see each other in person that often. What just happened? Okay, Linda's phone literally just turned itself off. Katrina: Alright, well you're going to reboot your phone and we're going to start again. Linda: What is this? Katrina: That's it, you broke the internet. Linda: I did break the internet. Katrina: You can't go around saying shit like that. Linda: It's okay, I'm going to share your post onto my ... Oh. Katrina: Yeah, but that shouldn't have turned itself off. Linda: I don't know. Katrina: Oh, well that's because of that. The turned off because that turned off. Linda: Yeah, it did. Katrina: Linda's phone just completely powered itself down. Linda: We're just going to do it on one phone. Katrina: Just start it again, I reckon. So, we don't meet in person. Katrina: Would you want to put yours back on again? Do yours. Katrina: We don't meed in person too often, but then when we do, it's like no time has passed because we're speaking on audio all the time, every single day, and that's how I feel about all my soulmate people around the world. You sometimes feel confused as to when you last saw them in the physical world because you're connecting with them in other worlds so continuously, right? But anyway, she came in here, when was is? Thursday last week or something. And I'm downstairs eating my little midnight snack, as I do, standing at the kitchen bench. Katrina: Okay, let's wait until this starts again. And we'll tell the story. And I'll just tell it anyway because it might take a while to get going. Yeah so, I'm downstairs in the kitchen, which is just through there. And I'm listening to audios as I do often at 1 A.M. or something, and so then I'm listening to Linda's audio message, and then I realise she's actually upstairs in the bedroom, in one of the spare bedrooms. I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm so addicted to listening to audios from you that I'm still listening to audios from you when you're in my house, upstairs, sleeping." And then I'm writing back. Even though I'll see her in the morning at 6 A.M. I'm like, "I can't wait for that, I'm going to need to audio now." Linda: Peoples! We broke the internet. Yes, I already did tag that girl. She's tagged. Peoples, we already broke the internet. Katrina: Linda's phone spontaneously combusted itself. Linda: It did. Katrina: Self-combusted. So, anyway. You missed the story over there on Linda's side. Linda: Sorry, guys. Katrina: Sorry about that. Linda: She was just telling an awesome story, and I kind of feel a bit like I should have gone more with my intro about you. Because that was really beautiful, thank you for that. Katrina: You made me an altar. Linda: I did. Katrina: That was pretty next level. I've got to take a photo of it, later. Linda: Oh I've got to post that stuff. But that was a beautiful expression, because what you said about speaking truth, because I'm just a reflection of you. You know that, right? You are a woman who just stands in her power, in her truth. Katrina: Thank you. Linda: And you always have been. You're just not afraid to say what's flowing through you. Katrina: It's sometimes scary, though. But thank you. Linda: Yeah, no it's amazing. I admire that. Katrina: Well it's been agreed we're both amazing. I just think we can finish there. Linda: See you, later. Cheers! Katrina: Cheers to being amazing. Linda: Cheers. And this is funny because I never drink. [inaudible 00:08:37] Katrina: Never, never. Linda: I feel so naughty. Katrina: Continually breaking the internet now. Well my new programme is part of the internet, so it's only appropriate. But, it is so relevant because the more you stand in your power and in your truth, isn't it true that you're just going to attract in those soulmate people who stand in their truth, and so then you honour that person, like I honour you, for the way you sharpen them, you're honouring me. And then it's just going to turn into a never ending cycle of we both think the other one is amazing, which means that it's a reflection of us. Linda: Yeah! Katrina: It just keeps going. Linda: It's like, you're amazing. No you're amazing. You're amazing. Katrina: Exactly. Linda: And then, it ends up being an altar on the kitchen table. Katrina: You end up coming home off a flight from the other side of the country, and you walk in and your soul sister forever finds you an altar on the kitchen table, vegemite included in the altar. Linda: You know what I should have done? I should have just laid myself down on the table, naked. Katrina: You're reminding me of this thing from Sex and The City, where the guy lays ... No, she's about to lay down naked with sushi all over her body. What's his name? The young guy that she's dating? And then he doesn't come home, though. And then she's laying there on the table for hours covered in sushi, and he just never comes home. He comes home like four hours later or something. And she's still laying there covered in sushi. Katrina: Okay, I was going to do a nice segue into the conscious relationships conversation, but instead we're talking about Samantha from Sex and the City covered naked in sushi. Linda: See, we should have called it Whatever the Fuck comes out. Katrina: Well we were just saying, it is the perfect union to the topic of conscious relationships, which may or may not be what we talk about. Because it will be whatever the fuck comes out. Linda: Exactly. Katrina: But that's ... People say to me all the time, I'm sure you hear this as well. But probably one of the most common things I do hear from people in my community is what an amazing friendship, when they see me with my soul sister friends, right? Like I'll get comments on that a lot, like, "Wow, what an incredible, beautiful friendship." Okay, oh my God. Jermaine literally just wrote what I'm talking about. She wrote, "Gorgeous ladies, #soulmatefriendgoals." Linda: Aw, that's amazing. Thank you. Katrina: So I hear that all the time because I do only have women in my life who are deep, soul sister connected friends. Deep soul sister, however you want to say it. And that's definitely ... Katrina: Okay, you have a marriage proposal over there. I think we should address it. Linda: Aww. Katrina: That's not a wall, actually, Maria, that's a painting that my sister-in-law painted for me. It's not a wall, it's a painting. Linda: Do we need to address this marriage proposal? Katrina: Linda's been proposed to. Linda: I've been proposed to. Katrina: On her live steam. Linda: What should I say? Katrina: We'll consider your offer. We'll get back to you. Linda: Let me sit with it. Katrina: What does your soul say? Linda: Stop, stop now. Stop now. Katrina: What does your soul have to say about this? What are we going to talk about? Where is this conversation going? Linda: I don't know. Katrina: Do you think that life just gets better and better and easier and easier? Linda: I think so. Katrina: Do you think that we have almost an inappropriate amount of fun, except that nobody realises that you meant to have so much fun all the time? Linda: Yeah but here's the thing. I go in and out of having a lot of fun and then sometimes I get very, very serious in my work. Katrina: Sometimes you get a litter angry. Linda: What do you mean? Katrina: When the passion really comes out. Warrior Linda. Linda: You've had some amazing audio from me lately. Katrina: I've seen the warrior ninja come through a few times. I've seen the [inaudible 00:12:13] ninja, as well, in fact it was doing back flips in my bedroom the other night. Linda: She calls me an "it." Katrina: I meant the ninja. I'm calling it an it, it's an extension of you. Okay, go, you were saying about getting serious. Linda: No, but I have another story. See, I swap stories. I'm a Gemini, just to let you know. I'm a Gemini, so I start a sentence, and then I never finish. And I start another one, I don't finish that either. So I start three different stories in one go. Katrina: And then meanwhile, I'll be doing the exact same thing [inaudible 00:12:46]. Linda: And then she cuts me off and we never get anywhere. Katrina: So, if you're hoping to take some kind of orderly notes from this evening's session, we're going to need to let you know that's not going to happen. But sit back, buckle up, enjoy the ride, and trust you will receive whatever it is that you'll hear divinely to receive. Linda: Whatever your soul is wanting to receive, it's always the perfect timing. Katrina: Exactly. Linda: What I was saying - Katrina: You said sometimes you get really serious. Linda: No, before that. There was another story that cuts off what I was saying. I need to finish this story, first. Katrina: Just let it come on. Linda: It comes out really fast. So, only today, because you were talking about the ninja stuff. I only got a reminder in my phone, in my memories, that it was only a year ago exactly, I was competing in the ninja championship. Katrina: Was that already a year ago? Linda: Yeah, yep. It was. Katrina: So cool. Linda: So what I was saying before the ninja, that yeah, I feel myself going in and out of having a lot of fun, and fun is one of my highest values. Katrina: Yeah. Linda: And play vibrates the same as prey. Play is one of the highest vibrations, so - Katrina: Explain that. Linda: Imagine having fun, like think about the vibration you're in when you're having fun. Like think about how you're actually feeling, there's no ego when you're just full of joy. When you just ... you're immersed in this bubble of love and joy. An ego doesn't exist in that moment, it's just an embodiment of excitement, fun, love. Katrina: You're completely present. Linda: Exactly. You're fully present. Katrina: An ego can't be there when you're completely present. Linda: No, it can't. Katrina: I just had breakthrough moment, already. Not being a smart ass, either, it sounded slightly like I was. Isn't that a powerful concept. Linda: Is it. It is. And I continue to remind myself to have fun, because sometimes I feel like, oh shit, maybe I'm just caught up too much in my serious side, or introspection. Katrina: You are one of the most fun people I know and I'll give you a case study. Linda: Case study? Katrina: Case study. Linda: I cannot guarantee what she's going to say tonight, so. Katrina: It's not that outrageous. But one time I wanted to take my friends to the indoor ... children's ... my friends? - I wanted to make my children to the indoor, you know they have the indoor play centres, right? It was a really rainy Saturday on the Gold Coast sometime last year, back in [inaudible 00:15:14]. My kids are driving me crazy, I'm like, I've got to go to the indoor play centre, but I was like, I need some adult time. I was actually just losing my shit. And I was like, "Who can I invite to come to an indoor kid's play centre with me?" And all my friends who had kids were occupied or busy already, and I'm like which of my friends who doesn't have kids could I invite to come to the indoor play centre with me? I'm like, Linda. Obviously. Katrina: So I audioed her, I'm like, "Hey do you want - it's called Juddlebugs - I'm like do you want to come to Juddlebugs?" She's like, "What's Juddlebugs?" I'm trying to describe it, I'm like "There's like a netting thing you get trapped in and you fall down, and there's slides and you can shoot people and then there's a foam pit." And she's like, "How have I never heard of this?" Linda: And I was going off on you. How dare you not tell me there's a place called Juddlebugs? How dare you? Katrina: But we had the best afternoon. We got trapped upside down in the spiderweb for an unreasonable ... We nearly did a live stream up there. Linda: We did, almost. Katrina: That would be inappropriate. But you are a fun orientated person and I think I've learned a lot about having fun. Kids themed party for adults, that's an awesome idea, AJ. Linda: Oh, yeah. Was I having this conversation with you, AJ? We need to create, yeah you were only saying that the other day at breakfast, yesterday. Katrina: Yeah, I've learned a lot about having fun from you, but I think that that concept of there being no ego in it, is really, really interesting and really powerful. And it's a reminder that if we can get into being present, then I think ... Okay, fun is one thing, then I think we also, that is the place where we access our highest [inaudible 00:16:53] areas, in terms of, for example, greatest creative flow, right? I know that when I get into silliness, playing, silliness, being frivolous, maybe a little bit reckless, or kind of making a fool of yourself, that sort of thing, sometimes I don't know, I'd be curious to know if you feel this way, sometimes when I get really silly and really kind of frivolous and lighthearted, I'll feel a slight shame feeling afterwards. For self-consciousness, where I feel a little - Linda: Like you're judging yourself? Katrina: Do I embarrass myself, did I make a fool of it? Linda: The ego comes back in? Katrina: Yeah, the ego's coming back in afterwards. But then, at the same time, and I'll notice it afterwards, and it feels kind of like a walk of shame type of feeling. Like, did I really do that? And the thing is though, that I don't allow that to infiltrate me and stop me from going wherever I go in my energy when I'm on a live stream, for example, or whatever it is I'm doing in any situation. Because I know that I get into such an amazing creative flow and I get all the downloads when I'm in that place. But then afterwards, my human mind will come back in and be like, "Oh you probably pushed it a little too far," or, "You're making a fool of yourself," or, "People probably think you're off your head." All my judgements come through. Linda: Yeah, yeah. Katrina: But I still do it. I still do it. I notice them and observe them. I'm like, "Okay, thank you for showing up and telling me all the reasons I'm not good enough. I'm going to keep going anyway." Linda: Yeah, yeah. It's amazing to be your own observer. Here's the thing, we all have an inner child within us. We all have an inner child, and sometimes when we get in on this conscious journey of growth and conscious growth and there's ego and then there's a spiritual ego that can come and slap - Katrina: Oh, that's a [crosstalk 00:18:39]. Linda: Yeah, yeah. So I've definitely been wacked left, right, and centre by the spiritual ego sometimes. As you start moving through this experience, you go into that judgement of, "Now I can't be silly because I'm conscious or spiritual." Katrina: Ah, I so nearly put a post up tonight, I'm not even kidding, the only reason I didn't post this on Facebook an hour ago is because I just posted to say we're going to do this. Linda: Well, see, who's a mind reader. Katrina: And I nearly wrote something like, "Be careful not to get so fucking involved that you can't," I don't know. I can't even remember what then ending of what I was going to say is. That like, you become so freaking involved that your whole thing is how involved you are. Linda: Yeah. Katrina: Be careful of the ego that is attached to walking around being like, "Oh I've had all the ego deaths." Yeah, but that's ego, so. And we all do it. Spiritual ego. Linda: Yeah, it's a very interesting concept and to ... I love being my own observer of just allowing myself to be with ease, I don't go into judgement that often. I'm like, "Okay, that was a fascinating, internal response." Katrina: Right, that's similar to what I'll say to myself, like curiosity. Linda: Yeah, it's like, okay. Katrina: Observation. Linda: Okay, that was fascinating. I'm interested why I responded internally that way. Katrina: Yeah, that was an interesting [inaudible 00:20:06]. Linda: And still, I've moved away from that judgement , I'm just like, "I wonder where that came from?" Katrina: Yeah, that's actually really similar to ... I talk about that a lot with clients, as well. I definitely still have those self judgmental reactions come through, but the way that I persist them is curiosity or lightheartedness. My two favourite ones. Linda: Really important. Katrina: When I say lightheartedness, let's say you said something or did something, maybe on a Facebook live like this, or maybe in a one-on-one conversation with somebody, and you really feel that you went quite far with vulnerability and you exposed yourself, and then you go out of that situation and you feel like a need to protect yourself or you feel like maybe you went too far and you put yourself in some vulnerable space or place, and then maybe the judgements comes up, like it could either be, "Yeah, well that was an interesting choice, I wonder why I chose to do that, let me get curious about that," or it could literally be like, "Oh, how silly, how cute. That's really funny, I wonder why I chose that." Or it could even be you did something that really caused some sort of sabotage, right? We've both spoken publicly many times about backgrounds of self-sabotage, and then those old patterns can sometimes try to continue to knock on the door. Many times, people ... I don't want to call it relapse, maybe not the best word, not my favourite word anyway. But many times, people will pick up an old sabotaging pattern and then they'll tend to feel like, "I'm bad, and I'm weak willed, and I got to hate on myself, and why did I do this?" Katrina: And instead, and I speak about this a lot with a lot of clients who have struggled with binge eating and if the binge eating comes back ... I have bulimia for 10 years, so I understand it, right? And they'll be like, "Oh my God, this is fucked up, what did I do?" And I'm like, "Wait no, what if instead, it was 'Oh, wow. I wonder why you needed that? Let's get curious about that. What was it inside you that needed that?'" Or also, even to smile about something that perviously felt so heavy and to make it lighthearted. It takes the power out of it and actually gives you back your power. Linda: Yeah, yeah. And conscious, when I say, because we said in the title "Conscious Relationship" it's not just conscious relating with another person or in an actual partnership or relationship, it's also how we're consciously relating to ourselves and what kind or relationship we're having to ourselves. Katrina: 100% Linda: And I think that's even more important to dive into, because if you don't understand yourself, then how can you consciously relate to another human being, if you don't understand your own ways of internal response and dimension and your operation system. Katrina: Yeah, I love that, and it's funny because I think when we said we'd talk about conscious relationships, we said that to each other earlier today, and I think we sort of thought, relationships with other people, but when I was on the plane just before, I was thinking, I feel like this is going to be more about the relationship with self, because the place that we create epic relationships with other people from, even an amazing friendship, an amazing client-mentor relationship. I always say that my clients, so many clients, it wasn't always that way. It could be a romantic relationship, as well. All the different relationships. In order to call it or allowing or flowing to incredible incredible conscious relationships with other individuals, we have to first be in an incredible conscious relationship with our own selves. Linda: Absolutely. Katrina: And in a space of non-judgment, understanding, compassion, and full acceptance. Linda: I only wrote a blog about that this morning. That I got inspired by someone who asks me yesterday, "Linda, why haven't you been swept off your feet yet?" And I didn't get triggered or anything like that, it just simply inspired me to talk about it openly and to express myself why that is, and just put a little slightly different perspective on it, as well. And take it into the relating with self, because if we want someone to show up for us, if we want someone to be present with us, we have to be present with ourselves, first. We have to show up for ourselves, first. Linda: Quite often, we're longing for something, we're wanting, we're even needing. So there's a needing ness and you are filling a void within us, that we haven't even actually given ourselves. And if we're not giving ourselves, then how can we truly experience that outside of ourselves? Katrina: Well you learn you receive from others what you're giving to yourself. That's the reality. So if you feel, maybe sometimes you get frustrated or angry, this happens a lot with coaches and with their clients, and it happens with men and women in romantic relationships, it even happens in friendships and family dynamics, also. I guess I hear it fairly frequently in the coaching industry, "I seem to have all these clients who are behind on their payments," or whatever, right? Some sort of pardon like that. And it's always like, "Okay cool, this is great, this is great feedback and information because this is a great opportunity to look at where am I not honouring myself?" Linda: Absolutely. Katrina: And yeah, the think with relationships that I think sometimes we all forget, I know give forgotten this or put it aside at times, is there'll always be instability there. The goal is not to get to some sort of place of done, sorted, everything's predicted and predictable. Imagine how fucking boring that'd be, anyways. But it's growth, relationships are there for our growth, right? Exactly, AJ just that's where we attractively show our voids. Linda: Yeah. Katrina: So when you have people in your life, any area of your life, who you feel like their causing you to feel something, it's always "Wow, thank you, because this allows me to see an area in myself where I wasn't paying attention, where I wasn't honouring myself." Can I give an example that's a little bit naughty? Of course I can. Linda: Are you asking for permission? Katrina: I don't know. I don't know. When I was on the live stream last week, Chris told me not to swear, I was like, "What?" But it's because we were going to use it for a Facebook ad. I'm like, "Mother fucker." He's like, "You can't swear." I'm like, "What do you mean I can't swear?" Katrina: Okay, so I had an awareness only very recently, actually. I had always thought, not always, but I had frequently felt frustrated that when I have sex with Mare, he would very rarely pay attention to my breasts. All men, I don't mean one individual man, right? But it was a pattern that I noticed. I felt frustrated that men would just kind of ignore my breasts. They would sometimes even just leave my top of and just go down there, and not always, but a high percentage of the time. And I definitely had a story in my head that this is because I have fairly small breast and that's the reason why. And I was 100% certain about that. And then, long story short, I realised that, "Holy shit. I never give my breasts love and attention. I never pay attention," previously never. I was never paying them attention, I was not giving them any love, any touch, any affection, I didn't really consider them ... I didn't dislike my breasts at all, actually I find them very practical for fitness reasons, but if we take that story even further back, though, and I did blog about it. Yeah, Marie, I did blog about it a week or two ago. Katrina: Because I'm actually having breast enlargement surgery in two days. And I'm so grateful I realised all this before that was coming through, right? Because that's coming from a place of desire, not from a place of trying to fill a need. But with this, if you go back even further, when I was a teenage, I had really big boobs. And when I was in my late teens. And people would comment on it often and I would wear low cut tops often, and I wasn't heavy either. I just actually had big boobs. But then I would learn from my mom, about be careful because men are going to whatever. I got the message that I was being too sexual, and I really think when I look back now, I think I manifested them way. Because now look, they're like an A cup or whatever, they're a small B, maybe. But yeah, it was just this interesting realisation of I'm walking around going, "What the fuck is with these dudes that don't take the time to touch the rest of my body because that's what I really want and that's really what opens you up as a women, to have that attention to all areas, not just, obviously." Katrina: Whether or not it's obviously, if it's not obvious, now you know. Welcome. And then I'm like, "Oh my God, holy fucking wake up call. I get to love on myself in that area." And I'm not kidding, within four days of when I started to give attention in that area and then I had a sexual experience and it was like, "Yeah, I'm like ..." Linda: But see, this flows into all areas of life. It's not just what we experience with relationships. It's actually in all areas. So I'm just going to invite you into a moment of introspection and to really reflect on in what area of your life are you feeling that, "Oh I'm not receiving what I'm actually wanting?" And you're kind of blocking yourself from that. In what area of you're life, is it maybe money, it is money stuff? What's your relationship with money, how you speak to money, what do you feel about money? If you're someone who wants to contentiously create that or you want to consciously create a beautiful relationship, or experience certain things. Then you have to look inside, first, and check in, are you giving yourself that? That was a beautiful example. That was a really beautiful example. Katrina: And that's a physical example, but it's also with the emotional stuff. Linda: Yeah, yeah. Katrina: And any time we're looking for something to fill a need in us, money is a great example, if I had that money then I'd be safe, I'd be free, then I'd be credible, then I'd be good enough. It's always like, "Oh, wow." As soon as you realise that, how can I give that to myself. Well actually, how you can give any of these things to yourself is to decide to. It's not something you've got to go out and work for. You can do it in this moment. Linda: Absolutely. It's simply a choice. It's decision to do so in an instant because we can so easily get caught up, and like you said before, when I get there, then I'll be good enough. When I lose this weight, then I'll feel good enough, or then I'll feel beautiful. Or that was just one example. Katrina: Or when I make the money then I'm safe or then I'm worthy. Linda: Then I'm successful. Katrina: Then I can relax in my life, then I can have fun in my life, then I can be happy. Or when somebody loves me then this, then this, then this. So anything that we're putting onto a pedestal like that, we're saying, "If I have this thing outside of myself, then I can experience and live in the emotions and energies that I desire." It causes you to actually push it away. It means that you hold the thing that you want at arms length, it's a lesson that you've got to learn. Is that you get to give that to yourself. So when you continue in that pattern, it's kind of like, "Oh, okay cool. I see that you just want to keep learning that same lesson again and again and again." Interesting choice. Linda: Isn't it interesting when the universe continues to teach you the same lessons until you learn? I'm just reflecting back on some of my own patterns, and like, oh my God. Katrina: Right, right. Linda: And it just clicks. I'm like, "Okay, well I haven't been honouring myself in that area," or "I haven't been giving myself attention in that area." Katrina: Yeah. Okay, we're back. We just froze over here. Linda: She broke the internet again. I mean, we broke it. Katrina: You put it into words on the card over there. Linda: I did. Katrina: Now it just keeps happening. Linda: We're manifesting it. Conscious creation. What was I talking about before? Going on tangents. Katrina: You were talking about how there's been times where you've noticed you learning the same lesson again and again and again. And then it's like, "Okay. I'm finally done with learning that lesson." Linda: Yeah, yeah. And the learning can be in an absolute instant. You choose to shift your internal matrix and you just chose to observe what's happening. And you chose to - Katrina: It's an instantaneous decision. Linda: Yeah, absolutely. And how quickly your outer matrix can shift with that. Katrina: Yeah. Completely. Linda: So phenomenal. Katrina: It's amazing. I mean, earlier on this week, you know I was in Bali until Wednesday. I remember Monday, I think ... Well we audio every day, anyway. But I was really feeling kind of stuck and in some heavy energies, and you know where it's up in your face, I get anxiety sometimes. And I was having a pretty extreme anxiety day, which I hadn't had in a while, and I was really just not enjoying that feeling of it. But at the same time, I remember I walked into the gym and I remember saying to myself, "This will shift. As much as in this moment of insane anxiety and feeling frustrated or whatever it was that I was experiencing, as much as that felt real." I was so aware, I guess, from all the work that I've done over the years and the way I live my life, I was like, "This could shift any moment." And from now on I might feel on top of the fucking world and completely understand all my madness and why I was making something into a really big thing. Or I might stay in a state or feeling stuck and anxious and frustrated or trapped or whatever for the whole day, and either what it's okay, either way it is what is, and that's all it is, and that's okay. Katrina: But I think that sometimes when we're in that state of feeling like, "Why can I have what I want and why is money evading me or why is this happening or why is my business here or why are my relationships like this or whatever," that we get so caught up in this kind of story of "This is not fair and why am I getting [inaudible 00:34:18] this instead of just being like this could change in an instant based on your own thoughts," I don't mean based on something happened. I mean based on you suddenly get some new perspective and on that day earlier this week, I said just kind of a simple loose intention in my mind that this will get to shift and that they'll be a way for me to be empowered by this situation that was causing me to feel a bit panicked, and I felt like, "How could that happen?" Because there is something that makes me feel upset. Katrina: And I'm not kidding, like two hours later, I was like, "Holy shit, wow. I feel so grateful for this now because I just realised how I'm not addressing whatever area inside of and that I now get to learn about this, and oh my God, I'm so glad that this happened to cause me to go into this anxiety of this crazy tail spin." I had to sit in it and marinate in it and it didn't feel fun, but even when you're in that state, like we know that it's for our greater good, right? Linda: Always. Katrina: So we might be like, "Ah this feels like shit. This has been dragged through the ringer, and put on a freaking spin cycle and then you go ten rounds after that, and then somebody" ... But you still know that it's for your learning and growth. So even in the mists of the worst of it, you're like, "And I'm getting fucking strong as a mother fucker." Watch me grow. Linda: Watch me grow, watch me expand. Katrina: We talk about this all the time. Linda: We do, we do. I think it's really powerful how we can go into, even when we're triggered, so this is the thing, previously the gratitude always comes after, the learning comes after. You're not going to get clarity and learning and wisdom when you're full of emotion. You need to left that shift. You need to be with it. But can you be your own observer at the same time? And instantly, while you're having that experience of, "I feel really shit. I feel really challenged." Can you be your own observer and go, "Hey I'm still grateful, because I'm being shown something that I'm not quite getting yet. Katrina: Right. I don't know what it is yet, but I know that it's here for a reason. Linda: It's here for a reason, it's here for my greater good, and I get to learn something. I get to be a better version of myself as I come through this. Katrina: Yeah. It's just when I'm triggered, I'm secretly happy because I know I'm healing. Linda: Yeah. I love that. I love that expression. Katrina: Well even on the plane just then, my four year old had three next level tantrums on the flight that were just so bad, so full on. I'm first I was conscious as fuck. I'm using conscious communication with my child, everybody probably so impressed by me. I was staying super calm, I was very proud of myself, right? And I got him through the first tantrum. Katrina: But then he had another one. And I felt myself start to break a little bit. I was like, "Fucking." I didn't say that, but that's what I was feeling, right. I was going to be like skanky bogan mom on the plane. But I didn't. But I was feeling it. But it was so full on. He's just like that when he's not ... he's a free spirit. Linda: Auntie Linda never gets those attacks, let's just leave it like that. Katrina: You can freaking fly with him. But honestly, at the same time, there was this small part of me that was like, "I'm becoming a warrior right now as a mother." I'm learning and growing. Okay he did break me a little bit, there was one point when the stewardess come up and I may have just been sitting on the tray table ignoring him while he jumped up and down in the seat and threw a marinate sauce on the guy in front of me. Linda: What? You didn't tell me that part. Katrina: I didn't have time to tell you anything, I got home and we went straight into the live stream. It was a small moment there where I was like, "I'm just going to pretend this is not happening and I'm not even going to try to do anything about it." Linda: As he was throwing sauce at people. Katrina: And the stewardess is like, "Could you stop standing up on the seat, please, the captain's going to come out and get you." And he was like, "No he's not." But he goes, "Never!" He refuses to sit. Linda: I love Nathan, he's just so unapologetic in his stuff. Katrina: Yeah and then she's like, "Wow, he's quite stern mood isn't he?" I'm like ... Linda: He's just unapologetic. He doesn't take no for an answer. Katrina: I really did break a little bit. I was like, "This is too hard. I just want to drink my wine and write in my fucking journal." Linda: I honour all the moms out there, honestly. I really honour all the moms because I don't have kids myself, yet, it might be an experience that I get to have in this lifetime, it may not, you know, either way I'm okay. But it's beautiful to watch from a distance. Katrina: Honestly, even through that, I'm just like, you go into this place when that shit happens on a plane where you're like, "I'm just going to choose to not allow anyone else' perceptions to impact me right now. I'm going to be in my space, with my child doing the best I can fucking do and now worrying about what everybody else is thinking about it." But there was definitely that part of me that was like, "I'm growing from this experience." And it's like what AJ just said about when you get triggered, and yeah, anything shit's going on for us and we always share what we're working through and what we're processing and stuff that's coming up. Linda: But we still have our tantrums, as well. Katrina: Ah, yeah. Linda: Some of our audience, like yesterday - Katrina: Sometimes we're extraordinarily immature. Linda: Oh my God. I just make - Katrina: Yesterday was an interesting day. Linda: Oh my God. But we also have these tantrums. Conscious tantrums. It's hilarious. Katrina: #concioustantrums. We do. It's release. Linda: Yeah, it is. Katrina: The thing is, even when we're having a tantrum through, we're aware and we know what we're doing. Linda: Yeah. Katrina: And we talk about it, usually at the same time. Not even afterward. But you won't be like, "losing your shit," or "I'm losing my shit," or whatever, and in the same audio, we're like, "Oh, well then I also understand that blah blah blah." And it's like, people don't talk like that normally with their friends. We give ourselves credit and give yourself credit if you are catching yourself, even a little bit. Because it's not about being so fucking involved that you're not in a human experience at all. But I think that one of the most powerful things is to be able to catch yourself and to notice it. Linda: Absolutely, absolutely. And like I said, be that own observer on the side. And go, "Okay, I'm allowing myself to just be [inaudible 00:40:56], I'm allowing myself to be with this." Katrina: Right. Linda: I'm allowing myself to be a little brat. And like I was saying yesterday, I just want to fucking kick and scream. But I'm not going to. [crosstalk 00:41:07]. And then just verbalise it, which is an expression of releasing. What was I saying? I either feel like having two litres in wine and I hardly ever drink or I want to have two litres of ice cream, which is not an option, or give me a bucket of peanut butter, or - Katrina: What is that, that's on the table over there? Linda: Where? Katrina: That packet of interesting items that I threw on the table down there. Linda: It's for you, my dear. Katrina: Did you buy me peanut butter? We needed some peanut butter in this house. [inaudible 00:41:43] Linda: We have peanut butter cuddles. Katrina: Well, you know what, what do you think ... peanut butter orgasms are also a thing that people need to be aware of. But that may be a topic for another live stream. But what do you think about, we were talking before about having fun and how important fun is, so fun is something that's often thought of as a childhood type thing, right? Children naturally know how to really be in a set of higher fun. Well children are also fabulous at having next level temper tantrums. So do you think it's just totally okay to be ... if you're going to be in that child energy of play and fun and lightheartedness and frivolity, why don't you get ... This is still live, Patrick - Linda: Yeah, it's life. Katrina: No need to replay. Why don't you get to also ... Well you don't necessarily get to lay down on the floor in the airport like my son does and kick and scream. Linda: But could you imagine though? Next time we go travelling, we should ... you have the phone, I'll do the thing. Honestly, we can do some skits. Katrina: That would be hilarious. [crosstalk 00:42:51]. I want the fucking peanut butter! They took my peanut butter off me at security! Totally. But it's actually not that funny because we're talking about, as adults, we learn to restrict our expression of our emotion. Linda: Right. Yeah. And we get so suppressed, but it's a form of release and no wonder we're so programmed to repress and not express ourselves, no wonder all of the sudden all these things are bubbling up inside, and then we just snap at the smallest little thing because we haven't been taught how to express ourselves. We haven't been taught how to create healthy containers to release our emotions and the energy from our bodies. And here's the thing, our physical bodies are going to store emotion and if we're not creating healthy containers to let go of that and to constantly release, like crying is a form of release, and we've even made crying bad. That crying is weak. Katrina: Right, right. It's a method as well. Linda: It's a mode of healing. Katrina: Absolutely. But it's also, if you continue to hold back what you're acting thinking and feeling from yourself, nevermind the other people in your life, then actually over time, you accidentally created yourself into a version of yourself which is not the real you. Linda: Yeah. Katrina: Because every single time you make a choice to respond from, "This is how I should show up or behave in this situation, as opposed to this is my true self, my true soul," you just made a small adjustment off track. And if you're doing that day by day, multiples times throughout the day, you kind of cultivating yourself into being this service based, masked version of yourself. And so then you wonder, why your relationships aren't working, why you can't seem to attract in those ideal soulmate clients, if you're an entrepreneur. I had a client a year or so ago say something about there's always these conflicts like friendships, and at the time I was like, "Wow, I don't have any conflict in my friendships." Now, I'm saying I don't experience conflict ever in my friendships, but it certainly not something where ... I don't expect it or I don't really think of it as normal, right? I wouldn't expect that we are friends would have some kind of conflict. Of course it's possible, nothing's impossible, but to me that's a soul aligned relationship, whether it's client or a friend or something different in the personal life. Katrina: I don't look at that as there should be currents of turmoil. Now if there would, that would be okay as well. Because it is what it is. But it's more that when the soul connection is there, there's an actual real true understanding of who we each are as individuals. It's not based on some service masked foundation, is what I'm saying. Linda: Right, yeah. Katrina: So therefor, there's actual legitimate acceptance of each other on a soul level, not just, "Oh yeah, you say the things or do the thing or have the things in your life that similar to me and so we'll be friends." Linda: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you and I are similar in many ways, but we're also so different in so many ways, and I think I remember ages and ages ago when I was just playing at a different level of consciousness, to just observe my human connections and relationships that I had back then and it was kind of like this ego game of, "Oh why wouldn't you like that? We can't be friends now." It wasn't honouring people ad accepting people for who they were. And now that I find with all of my friends, who I connect with on a soul level, we may not agree with everything, we may not do everything the same way, but we're fully honouring each other for who we are. Katrina: Completely Linda: And accepting each other for who we are. Katrina: Yeah. Linda: And life really isn't about, like you said earlier, touched on how we tend to lose ourselves because we're told who to be and we're told how to live our life, we are operating from this mask. And we're not even ourselves. And quite often we hear this expression of I just want to go and find myself. It isn't about finding yourself. Life is about remembering who you aare. Because everything is inside of you. We've all been born a free spirit of love, we all have an inner child within ourselves, so it's the programming of society that puts you in a box and tells you how to live your life, what to believe, how to ... We're even been thought what to think. We're being thought what to feel, in this type of situation, you should feel this. Katrina: Right. [crosstalk 00:47:34] Linda: And every single part of our life is manufactured in this system. So quite often we hear about, "Oh I'm going to go around the world to find myself." We don't need to go around the world to find ourselves. We can literally sit in stillness and just think right here and start to peel back the layers of who we're not. Who we've been told to be. And that's really powerful. It's not about, "Hey I want to figure out everything at once," that's not how it works. You figure something out about yourself, start to remember who you are on certain levels. It's like the onion. You peel back one layer and then there's something else under that. Linda: We run away from ourselves, yeah. I definitely run away from myself. A lot, in fact, back in the day. Because I couldn't face and stand the person who I was. So I did everything and anything to continue to numb and escape from my reality. Katrina: Right, yeah. There's a lot of things that are on the surface that could look like fabulous life choices, travels one of them. Which people might use in some cases, for numbing or escaping, but it's all about the place it's coming from. Because it can be coming, obviously from a place of hiding value and grounding and expanding, or it could be coming from a place of hiding. Like alcohol is one example of that. Sometimes people drink alcohol to obviously escape and run and hide, and then other times alcohol is expanding a higher vibe of abundance energy, basically. So it's all about where you already are, but either way, you've got to be giving yourself everything you need. If you think going on a silent meditation or going to a retreat or doing a course or getting a coach or getting a partner or whatever it is that's going "to change everything for me, that's going to fix me, that's going to give me what I need. I need this, I have to do it." It's like, "Well cool, do it if you feel called to do it, whatever it is." But you're actually still going to need to figure out how to give that to yourself at some point. Linda: Really good point. Katrina: You're not going to get it from going to that thing, paying that person, doing that thing. Linda: Yeah, absolutely. People can guide us, absolutely, but at the end of the day, a good coach is someone who guides and teaches for you to how to heal yourself, how to be more of you, how to connect to your truth and your believes around things, and how to be your own observer. So you're not relying on an external coach all the time. Or you're not relying on another external resource. Katrina: Yeah, I read about this. I did a little [inaudible 00:50:14] as my plane was taking off about maximum abuse learnings around relationships, business and personal, and like I mentioned specifically, a mentor shouldn't be telling you what to do. I believe a mentor is to help you remember how to be your be your own [inaudible 00:50:32], but a mentor is there to be more of who you are and connect to your soul, connect to your intuition and your own guidance and wisdom. Not to tell you, "Here's the rules and you must do this in order to get this result." Linda: Yeah, absolutely. And it's powerful when you can start to tune into yourself and listen to your own soul and allow your inner compass to guide you, and I'm very big on that. Katrina: Yes. Your soul always knows. Linda: Your could always knows. I actually have to admit to one thing. This year, I ended up getting caught up with events, like person - Personal growth is one of my highest values, and I love ... I can throw my money on personal growth. Coaching, mentoring, events, all this stuff. And I found myself doing one event after another, one course after another - Katrina: Yeah you were in a - Linda: ... I'm like, "Holy shit, this is actually too much." What am I actually searching from these events? Is that thing of, "Ah, I want to expand more, I want to evolve my consciousness more. And I don't feel good enough." So that was really interesting to obverse myself in that. But I caught myself. I was completely honest with myself. I'm being honest with you here as well. It doesn't matter how much you continue to evolve, you'll never get to a stage where, "Okay, I've had enough now." Katrina: Yep. Linda: But also, be careful that you're not going the other way of "I want more and more and more." Because you can't be okay with what you have inside of you. Katrina: Right. Like learn ... yeah. Learning, growth work, is a great example of what we were just saying. A lot of people use growth work to escape from being in the now and from living their lives. In fact, you know Bali, like we're both obsessed with Bali and we both go to Bali a lot. You're leaving back again Tuesday for Bali, right? And I just came back from Bali on Wednesday and I go there every month. Linda: And you're coming back for my birthday. Katrina: I'm going back to Bali for your birthday, of course, in a few weeks. So Bali though, is a place ... There's an expression about Bali I remember hearing, it's like, it can be a place for the internal wanderer. Now, nothing wrong with being an internal wanderer, but specially there's a lot of people who go to Bali and 20 years later are still in Bali and have not, as I would call it, pressed fucking play on anything, they're just floating around freaking Bali being healed and cleansed. Bali cleanse. Linda: That is starting. Katrina: We have our own detention of what a Bali cleanse may entail. But there is. There's a lot of people in Bali who are amazing artists and messengers, but who have not put a single bit of work out in the world or barely anything. They're just caught up in their energy and the obsession and the vortex of Bali, and I'm healing and I'm learning and I'm exploring and I'm wondering. And it's like, cool, when are you going to fucking do something? Linda: Yeah. Katrina: So there's going to be that part of it, as well. Linda: Absolutely. Katrina: And Bali's a good example of that. But life is a good example of that, as well. And in this industry, for sure, you see so many people who are continually learning, continually healing, continually absorbing new content and regurgitating stuff on the internet, I guess, but when are you going to actually admit that you're scared to let what's inside of you out? And then just do it. Because that's what's going on. You're becoming addicted to the growth work as a way of escaping doing your own fucking work. Linda: Yes, and we're hiding under the spiritual masks, then we become, like we start to awaken our self worth and our beliefs are still at a level where we think that, for example, money is bad, or we can't do certain things because it's bad. And we actually have a lot of limiting believes in operating from that space, and then we just hide under this spiritual façade of spiritual masks where, oh no, no, but I'm spiritual and I'm a good person - Katrina: Bold as fuck. Linda: And we hide and we use that as an excuse to cover up and limiting where you're thinking or our low self worth and how we're operating. So we're using it as an excuse and I'm masking. Katrina: It's hiding. Linda: It is hiding. And at the end of the way, we can get so caught up in the whole, "Let's just do yoga and meditate every day and do nothing else." Katrina: Right. Linda: But at the end of the day, yes those are daily practises and very important, I believe in them very much. I'm a yoga teacher - Katrina: Yeah, journaling. Obviously I'm obsessed with journaling, I talk about it all the time, but one time I wrote a post, something like, "Put the fucking journal down. Stop fucking journaling. Go and do some work." Like, okay journaling is that work, I get that, obviously I teach that. But yeah, there's go to be those ... it's that dance, back and forth between, okay I'm going within and I'm accessing guidance and I'm learning and growing, or connecting with others who are helping me to grow. And then it's like, okay now I'm in creation mode, because as humans, we're all brought here to create. We're not brought here to consume. Consumption of content or growth or whatever - Linda: That's what we're taught. Katrina: But creation, I believe, is of higher value for the majority of us, or certainly, at least, for people in this community. We're creators. Linda: Yeah, yeah. Katrina: So are you creating or are you caught up in that continual, perpetual, wondering and seeking and never being ready to press play, and there's always something else to learn and nother fucking healing session to do, and another journaling session to do, and at some point it's like, put the journal down. Linda: Yeah, and you know, it can be uncomfortable to observe these things about ourselves and we don't always want to admit to that. But it's really powerful to just own that space and not just own your story, but own everything where you're at. First of the changes is awareness and then acceptance. Accept where you are, and go, "Okay, awesome, I acknowledge where I am now, and if I'm not aware, then how can I create change?" And like I just own up about the whole event thing. I'm like, "Oh my God, I just being going from event to event." Katrina: Well you said yes to all those events in alignment, though. Like you're the opposite of a person who doesn't do the work. But then, at a certain point, you noticed that it was too ... it was feeling like, this is not what I need. Linda: Yeah, yeah. Katrina: To be continual. But you weren't saying yes to those events in a place of trying to escape or avoid anything. It was the opposite of that. Linda: Yeah. Katrina: It was aligned to say yes, and then at a certain point it was like, "Oh, okay cool. I can learn what I need to learn here," which partly is that I don't need to go to events back to back to back to back. Linda: Oh my God. Katrina: In different cities continually. Linda: I'm having a month off, okay. A month off. Katrina: Yeah, but now, you're falling out of that and you're into more growth and time and taking actual time, it's a perfect balance, right? Linda: The integration - Katrina: You're allowing it all to just sink deeper into who you are. Linda: Yeah. The integration is a really interesting topic and I think it's a really important one to discuss because we can, for example, if you're using the event example again, we can continue to do courses, events, blah blah blah, and we take all the information in, or we do healing. But are we allowing ourselves to integrate? Are we actually applying also our learnings? We can get caught up in the personal development world, as well. We just continue to do all the courses, learn all the stuff, but are we applying it? Are we actually embodying - Katrina: Are you testing it out? Linda: ... the teachings? Are we embodying the wisdom of what we're actually being taught? Because knowledge is not power. It's what you do with the knowledge. Katrina: Yep, that applied knowledge is power. Linda: Yeah. Applied knowledge is power. Yeah, I definitely believe that, too. Katrina: Yeah. Linda: So it's powerful to observe where you are and just be up front and honest with yourself. Okay, cool, well I get to see from a different perspective. I'm going, "Okay, well I own that part of myself. And now I can create change." But if you're not accepting those parts of yourself, then you can't change it. It's like this with anything in life. If you're not accepting where you are and you're not accepting a previous experience, you can't shift from it. You have to accept it. Katrina: You have to continue to receive that same lesson until you learn it. Linda: Acceptance is part of the healing process in anything in life. Super powerful. I accept that you're here. Katrina: I'm just thinking about the Bali cleanse. Linda: On the audio you're like - Katrina: We're going to have a fabulous Bali cleanse when I come over again in a few weeks. Linda: And it is my birthday in a couple of weeks. So [crosstalk 00:59:16]. How am I going to make it? Oh yeah. 34. Age is only number [crosstalk 00:59:25]. Katrina: That's why I'm like, I think I know, but I'm not [crosstalk 00:59:27]. Linda: Yeah, it's like ... sometimes I'm friends with people, like close friends, and I'm like, "How old are you?" After couple years, I'm like, "How old are you, even?" Age is just not a thing that we know. Katrina: Not at all. Well I like that expression, I don't see faces, I see souls. It's the same with age, I think. It's a soul thing, not an age thing. Linda: Guilty on consume too much learning. Yeah, if we're not taking aligned action or applying the stuff, nothing's going to happen. We've got to step into the actual taking responsibility for our actions. Katrina: And pressing fucking play. Linda: And pressing fucking play. Katrina: Or pressing go live. This is an example, right? We're really just having a conversation here that we would have by ourselves anyhow, and we do all day, every day, and how hard is it to just go live and do it as content for your audience. It's not hard. But people make it really hard. And if you wanted to build brand for example, and then maybe you're like, "I've got all these powerful, cool stuff inside of me," and you talk about it with your friends or maybe some groups or your mentor or something like that, well, that's being stuck in the cycle of I'm learning and I'm growing and I talk about amazing, interesting things with people, but are you showing the world? Are you sharing what you're here to show the world? Linda: Yeah. Katrina: Marie says, "I'm 49 and [inaudible 01:00:51] I feel 35." Yeah, well, that's what's funny right. I would never think of you by being 49 based on what the conventional definition of 49 is. But I think, even my ... what's his name? The yoga teacher? In Bali? Linda: Yeah. Katrina: So he asked me once how old I was, because I mentioned having an eight year old, and he was like, "How old are you?" And I told him, and he was like, "Holy shit, I thought you were like 30, basically." And I've gone, "How old are you?" And he's 49, right? Linda: Ah is he 49? Wow. Katrina: I was like, wow. So then we both congratulated each other on how young we look, of course. And he was kind of talking about how people don't take care of themselves and stuff. But I said to him, "But how you look at 49 and how I look at 38 is what it's meant to be like. What if that is what 49 is suppose to look like? It's just that most people are all fucked up, basically." So it's not even that you look younger or I look younger, it's that we're the ones who have actually honoured our bodies and taken care of ourselves and this is what ... 38 is not suppose to look like what most, sorry. What most women look like at 38. It shouldn't look like. Or what most men look like at 50. It shouldn't look like that. It should be, if you took care of yourself. I don't know. That's my theory. Linda: Longevity. Katrina: My theories that when we meet people when we're shocked at their age, and that they look like, Marie's a great example of this. Marie's in my inner circle. And I've met her in person, obviously, as well. Not obvious, but I have. People like that, where you think, "How can you be that age? Doesn't make nay sense." My theory is that they look the correct way that you're suppose to look for that age, it's just that everybody else is ageing super fast because they didn't take care of themselves. Linda: Yeah, and I guess, yes the numbers are ticking in our linear timeline and we get "a year older ... pardon? Katrina: That we've been in time and space. Linda: Oh, we do. There's so many different timelines. The talk about time is just a whole other live feed again. But at the end of the day, we celebrate these birthdays, when really we're just one day older, every day. Katrina: Yeah. Linda: It's actually really interesting because we're not going to feel ... We're still this infinite soul, we're still this person that's inside of this physical body that we carry for life. We're not going to feel any different in 20 years time. We're still going to be this soul - Katrina: Everybody says that. Linda: We're still going to feel the physical restrictions because the body starts to shut down, so the only difference you're going to feel is your physical limitations that you'll eventually have because your body is getting older. Katrina: Yep. Linda: So that's why its so incredibly important to look after your physical being, health and wellness is not just - Katrina: It's not negotiable. Linda: Yeah. Yeah. And it flows into mind, body, and soul. Looking after every parts of self, and we can't continue to neglect that. Even as an 80 year old, we have child. Katrina: You look fabulous for 80. You're like, "Even as an 80 year old." You're looking fucking amazing. Linda: I met this man. I live steamed about it last night. I met this beautiful man - Katrina: The guy that you shared your food with? Linda: Yes! Yes. I want to share it again, can I? Can I? In a really, really short version. I was feeling very triggered yesterday. And I was sitting outside eating my little rice crackers and my avocado, and this elderly man, he was about 70. Katrina

"I do believe that at the core, people feel something different about barry's - because it is different," Joey Gonzalez, CEO of Barry's Bootcamp said as we sat surrounded by the glass walls of his West Hollywood office, talking about the future of the company. Just down the street, you'll find where Barry Jay created the first Barry's Bootcamp with two partners in 1998. When the lore of the treadmill-slash-weightlifting concept spread across Hollywood, drawing in celebrity clients, Jay just wanted clients to be on time, see results and have a an unforgettable time in the process. Gonzalez started at Barry's Bootcamp as a client and was soon helping to fund its growth as a partner, he said. He was named CEO in 2015 after serving as the company's COO for more than nine years. Benefitting from slow and controlled growth before, during and after the studio fitness boom, Barry's was able to find its tribe, voice and culture. That thoughtful growth led to an investment by North Castle Partners in 2015, which yielded - you guessed it, more growth - to bring Barry's to more consumers across the world. With all of that expansion, one thing is top of mind for Gonzalez: culture. "My biggest fear is always - as we scale - maintaining the culture of the company, which is what makes it what it is," he said, reminding me quickly that the word "fear," was really just a word. "It's not that I'm scared - it's just top of mind, which I hope is an indication that it will work." And the lack of fear that Gonzalez has is palpable. In the episode, I jokingly refer to him as "terrifyingly calm," but the more I think about it, the more I really meant it. He is the eye of the storm that is studio fitness, staying just still enough to understand clearly what's happening around him and only reacting when it makes sense for the culture, strategy and clients of the company. The company, he said, is committed to innovation, but it's also committed to the standards of a workout that shows true results. That's the challenge in being first - it's an act of balancing emerging competition, clients who were with you at the beginning and new standards in the industry. "When you are an original, it's really difficult to quantify what makes it that way. It's hard to articulate what it is people experience," he said. "It's a lifestyle, it's a workout, it's like church to some people. It's such a meaningful thing ... you have to be authentic." Listen now to this episode of #WeGotGoals featuring Joey Gonzalez and find yourself sweating just thinking about all the work that goes into these workouts. This episode produced by Cindy Kuzma and is another thing that's better with friends. So share this episode with yours and leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts if you love it as much as we do. ### Transcript JAC:            Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talked to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen and with me I have Maggie Umberger and Cindy Kuzma. MU: Good morning Jeana. JAC: Good morning Maggie. MU: You spoke with Joey Gonzalez the CEO of Barrys Bootcamp. JAC: I sure did. Joey Gonzalez is the CEO of Barry's Bootcamp, a growing fitness brand that has arms and legs all over the world at this point. But he actually started as a customer of Barry's Bootcamp years ago. Joey will be the first to remind you that Barry's Bootcamp was the original when it comes to studio fitness because they were. Barry, who started Barry's Bootcamp, had a dream and an idea that he could get people fitter and give them great results through running and weightlifting. Joey now has sort of the burden and the honor of carrying that legacy forward. CK: And he doesn't take It lightly which you can tell. He has a passion for the brand and the business and what I loved was that he still teaches. He had worked at the front desk that morning like he hasn't lost touch with the actual clientele which I think sounds like has really enabled him to be focused on continuous improvement and on that customer experience. Is that kind of what you got out of it too? JAC:            Definitely. Joey goes to I think almost every single studio opening which wasn't that much of a feat maybe three years ago but these days they're opening a new studio sometimes monthly sometimes weekly they open. I think Atlanta and Dallas in the same week. So it's pretty incredible to watch him in this grueling business schedule while also managing a team in LA while also managing a family with two kids under two. MU:            He talks a little bit about taking on an investor recently so that they can continue to grow at this rate but also still maintain the Barry's brand. Can you talk a little bit about that? JAC:            They recently took on investment from North Castle Partners. And what's interesting about this investment is that North Castle invest in predominantly fitness brands. They've helped to take Equinox from a couple of locations to many and they've worked with a number of other brands that you know in love in the fitness space. I had the chance to hear one of the partners from North Castle speak about why they invested in Barry's Bootcamp specifically and they chose Barrys because it had scalability in many markets. They had been successful in more places than just West Hollywood where they started. They also had sort of a community that knew it and loved it and would follow it and wear the brand and drink this smoothies and fall in love with their fitness instructors on Instagram. So the investment made sense to the group. But on the Barry's end taking on an investment from Joey's perspective was the right thing to do because it helped them grow. But it also was the right group to invest in them because they allowed them to grow the way that they had always grown, authentically true to Barry's Bootcamp MU: In addition to staying true to what Barry's is. Joey has it in his mind to constantly innovate. He talks about that being really key in staying a top player right? JAC:            Yes. They are always looking to innovate but they're also always looking to stay true to the two things that have helped them be successful. They run and they weight lift. Those are the two functions of the classes and those are the two things that help them bring success to their clients within that format, they innovate in interesting ways--foam rolling deep myofascial release. Bringing in a couple of different tools to their classrooms but it doesn't sound like anything is ever  going to happen to the treadmills in those classrooms. And Joey is incredibly focused and terrifyingly calm. So I think that his focus and his ability to weather storms and stay calm regardless of the trends that are maybe fluttering around him will help Barry's Bootcamp really stay successful in a cluttered marketplace CK: Incredibly focused and terrifyingly calm. I love that. Here is Jeana with Joey. JAC: First and foremost. Kate please introduce yourself. JG:       Sure, I'm Joey Gonzales, CEO of Barry's Bootcamp. JAC:      Joey, you haven't always been the CEO of Barry's Bootcamp. You sort of started as an instructor and worked your way up isn't that right? JG:            I started as a customer and fell in love with the workout and the brand and then became an instructor next. And then I moved into like a general manager position and then eventually became a partner and I was like the COO for many many years. I moved into a CEO position in 2015. So I have really seen the business from a lot of different angles JAC: All angles. And I read somewhere that you still hope behind the front desk here and there? Are you still able to do that? JG:            I'm 100 percent. I did it this morning. My employees think it's so funny because I still love like answering the phones. I still teach once a week as well. So I try to put on as many hats as possible. JAC:            So what is a goal, Joey Gonzalez, that you have accomplished? And how did you get there? JG:         So professionally I would say bringing Barry's to as many places as possible was a goal I set 12 15 years ago. And I think how I got there was, two things come to mind. Number one choosing the right people. Which is like, Barry's is a human capital business and the people are the reason why the clients show up and being a good judge of character is imperative in my business. And so I just happened to select the most incredible people to support me in the business and that's evident I think no matter where--take Chicago for example you've been like just such an incredible team. So I would say first and foremost the people that I've picked. And then second just never never assuming that like we know it all and always being willing to learn and innovate and change the business like when it needs to change and add things to it maybe that didn't exist. Barry's was around before any of the other boutique fitness concepts and it was just like a tiny little hole in the wall with a bathroom built into the studio. And like almost no lobby and you know there has never been a moment where we've hesitated from evolving and growing and expanding and whether that is like building out luxurious locker rooms and showers or you know adding towel service building a whole separate business called Fuel Bar, right that has its own P&L and is labor intensive and has product that expires. Yeah, so just never being afraid to like test things innovate and be one of the, I  think that is how you can sort of identify yourself as being a leader in the industry. JAC: So over the years you've had help from people within your team with different skill sets than you as well as outside investors. So he talked about what happened when you took on investment and how you were able to grow from there. JG:         So Barry's was grown exclusively from investments from myself and my three partners prior to 2015. And I think that's one of the things that makes it so magical is like the amount of time we had to build a very authentic community. And I think there's a huge contrast between that and how a lot of other boutique fitness places have grown. Right. Which is like they're five years old and they have 30 locations already and there's definitely nothing wrong with that. But there's just like a brand narrative and like stickiness with consumers that happens I think when you are 20 years old and you've taken the time in a slow way to connect with your people. In 2015  we did a process to raise money and take on private equity partners and ended up selecting North Castle and they're solely focused on fitness, wellness. They helped take Equinox from you know single digit studio to the like in the 40s and are the most incredible group of guys and girls like that they're just so smart so collaborative and so sensitive so they made an investment in the company and we're actually just now starting to see you know with our most recent announcement a lot of studios coming down the pipeline. Five in studios in the next three months which we've never done before. Yeah. So that's the story of taking on investors for the first time. JAC:            So a lot of news in the past couple of years. Nobody is sleeping around here, obviously. So as you're looking forward obviously you're opening a lot of new studios. What is a big goal that you want to accomplish with Barry's Bootcamp, with the company, and how are you going toget there? JG:            So my biggest fear is always as we scale maintaining the culture of the company which is what makes it what it is today. And Barry's is the type of place or at least it always has been the type of place where when people come to work they don't feel like they're working. And that's in part because of how they feel about one another. And of course how passionately they feel about the brand. And so. My goal is in opening so many new markets and in infilling in existing locations to be able to preserve all of the things that made us what we are today and the way to go about getting there is to evaluate and define our values which we're currently going through right now we're doing a lot of exercises that are like value driven. And then also for me personally as the CEO having touch points and like traveling to these places and being in the studio as much as I possibly can because I do think that makes a difference to people having a relationship with somebody you know that is you know the visionary if you will of the company and making decisions ultimately about the future of the company. It's meaningful to people right. And super meaningful to me to be able to see these places in action. So maintaining the culture as we scale is my biggest goal. JAC:         Yeah I think you're also sort of nervous about that when you were taking it outside that was that the fear in growth, was losing the culture? JG:        I don't think I'm-- I am not very driven or controlled by fear. So I'm not that I'm, like, scared. It's just top of mind, right, and it's a priority. And it's like something that I focus a lot on which I hope is an indication that it will work. right? Because if I was just saying we're going to scale and everything is going to be great and I wasn't thinking about how important the culture is. Then we'd have our problem right. JAC: In the next little bit you'll be maintaining culture as you open new locations. Anything else you're thinking about doing within Barry's? Yeah so we in a couple locations like River North and Venice we signed on extra square footage to do stretch lounges and offer some like ancillary class options that we've never done before and this is in part due to my commitment to continuing to innovate. And so you know we're we're going to have like my myofascial release and just some really great stuff that compliments the workout. JAC:         Over the years I have read that it's been challenging for Barry's specifically because you were the first to exist in a world with all these competitors who are trying to catch you--it's just the nature of the beast. How do you how do you think you've been able to really stay at the top of all that? Because Barry's Bootcamp is  one of the best workouts in the world. The best workout in the world. JG:         I was actually thinking about this today in class how when you are an original. It's really difficult to like quantify like what makes it that way. it's hard to articulate what it is people experience. But what I can say is that Barry's was around and created by a fitness professional who was genuinely trying to help people get the best workout possible. Barry Jay himself is like the least money motivated person on earth and what we have today is you know. capitalist society like everybody trying to make money off of this emerging thing called boutique fitness. And I don't know if consumers can smell that necessarily in that they walk into studios and they feel like oh I am supposed to buy these things. But like, I do believe that at the core people feel something different about Barry's because it is different, right. And that's something that like Barry passed on to me and when I did my transaction with North Castle one of the first things I said to them is like you know I am not someone who is driven by the bottom line. And they said that's why we think you're the perfect leader to take us to the next level because it's a lifestyle. It's a workout. It's like church to some people it's just like  such a meaningful thing to people that you have to be authentic. Right. You have to create a space and a team that genuinely want people to have fun and feel great. JAC:         That permeates through everything here really the fun, creativity. And how do you continue to innovate when it comes to fitness? Because you've got this tried and true method. The originators of Tread & Shred. How do you continue to push people to do bigger better things within that Barry's format? JG:         I think we are always testing things. We just launched like a mace class in New York City which is I don't know if you're familiar with the mace equipment. And like I said earlier like the stretch lounges that were experimenting with so one thing that has always been true of Barry's is that we have a very back to basics mentality. And so there there isn't anything that we've seen works quite as well as running and lifting. Right. And so. While we experiment with different types of programs within those parameters that will always be our baseline. JAC: Anything else that you're excited about within the parameters of Barry's or outside of it? Any other goals you're setting personally? What's personal? JG:         I think my goal personally, is to, for it to a certain extent I think this is like fantasy but to somehow be able to find a balance in life. JAC: So you have a new daughter or new or a newer daughter. JG: I have two under two. So I have a daughter who's 20 months and a son who's four months JAC: So since I've met you you've had  another child. Congratulations. JG:         And yeah for me like currently I feel like there is no such thing as balance there's just disappointing somebody every morning, which is not the best way to live. But it's just it's I think most people who are listening can relate to the fact that like it it's when you are somebody who is tenacious and has a lot of like objectives and a lot of people who depend on you. It's a stressful situation. And so you always just want to make everybody happy and feel supported and that can be really challenging. So that's like an ongoing goal that I have that will never be accomplished. JAC: That's life, that's life. Here you have, these people are your family too and they depend on you like a parent because you have to. JG:            Oh I've been Papa to people already for like 10 years that's been my nickname. So like I have so many children it's not it's not funny. But you know it's a role that I love and I have always been even when I was just a kid like somebody who people would turn to and that friend that would like somehow play the psychologist and you know it's it's fun for me and I obviously get something out of it. But it's just hard to like cut yourself into a thousand pieces. JAC:          I heard you say  you aren't money motivated and you're not fear motivated. Good. What's sort of the thing that drives you. JG:         I'm super results driven which is probably what attracted me to Barry's in the first place. Just like very efficient and results driven and then extremely relationship driven. So I don't like to waste time on things that don't work. And I can deal with any situation as long as I'm with the right people. JAC:            And how can you teach these things to people or those just intrinsic. JG:         I don't know that's a great question. Can you teach people how to be results driven and relationship driven? Definitely not the latter. I think like either you like--the way that people interact with one another is something that is I feel like for the most part set in stone. Unless you go through like a lot of therapy to try to figure it out. And there are so many nuances to that. Right. Like I am highly tolerant. So like I can get along with like a wide range of people but I have a lot of friends that aren't right. Their tolerance is like super narrow. So I always see that how interesting that is when it plays out in life. I know it's a good question. I don't know if you can teach people I've seen a lot of people at least in the exercise format become very  results because they will do so many other things whether it's like a personal trainer or a spinning gym or whatever it is they're doing and then they'll come to Barry's and like their whole body will change. And I've kind of seen people go through this metamorphosis where they realize that anything's possible and that the results aren't just things they can think about but they're things that they can get right. And whether it's Barry's or some other thing that teaches people that I have seen that switch flip before. JAC:         I ask because those two trains I think if you look at this industry people who are really successful seem to have those things. They're result oriented and they're relationship oriented--that seems to make people really dangerous. That's interesting, because  here you are. The most dangerous man in fitness. I think we should end it wit that. Most dangerous man in fitness, Joey Gonzalez. Setting goals, taking names. JG: Look out people, I'm coming for you. JAC:            Thank you for joining us. CK:         This podcast is produced by me. Cindy Kuzma and it's another thing that's better with friends. So please share it with yours. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're at it please leave us a rating or a review. Special thanks to J. Mano for our theme music, to our guest this week Joey Gonzalez, and to the team at Tech Nexus for the recording studio and technical assistance. ###

The groundbreaking FAYR co-parenting app is taking off due to the dedicated efforts of its founder Michael Daniels and its senior advisor Gwyneth Paltrow to improve the lives of co-parents and children. The challenges of co-parenting can be overwhelming and can lead to significant conflicts. Michael Daniels came up with the idea of creating an app for co-parents to help them effectively manage their time, their finances, and their co-parenting communication. FAYR is a groundbreaking app that simplifies everyday matters for divorced and separated parents.  As a separated father of two young children, Michael found himself overwhelmed by the legal, financial and emotional costs of divorce on his family. After 20 years in the homebuilding industry, Michael hung up his hard hat to create a tool that would not just improve his family’s life, but would also help the other 55 million divorced co-parents in the US. Despite his success on the Apple tv show "Planet of the Apps" and partnering with Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael's guiding light remains the same: working everyday to be his best self for his kids.  Your host, Christina Vinters, is a nationally designated Chartered Mediator on a mission to inspire and facilitate healthy family transitions. She is an “ex” Divorce Lawyer (Non-Practicing Member of the Bar), Author of Pathways to Amicable Divorce, and the  DIY Divorce Manual, and Peacemaking Business Consultant. Guest Links: Website: https://www.fayr.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/befayr/ Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/befayr Twitter:https://twitter.com/befayr Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/company/fayr/ Modern Separations Links: Website: https://www.modernseparations.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/modernseparations Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/divorcewell Twitter: https://twitter.com/cvinters LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cvinters/   Christina: Hello and welcome! I'm super excited today to be talking to Michael Daniels. Michael is the founder and CEO of the new Fayr app (spelled F-a-y-r), and it's a groundbreaking app that streamlines key aspect of family management for divorced parents. That includes sharing a parenting temp calendar, tracking shared expenses, recording communication, and more, all in one location. Fayr debuted really in 2017 and drew interests from Apple TV, who invited him to audition for the reality series "Planet of the Apps". Michael was selected for the show and he had huge success, securing a partnership with his now head adviser Gwyneth Paltrow. Gwyneth is well-known as an academy-award winning actress of course, but she's also an active entrepreneur, with a highly successful lifestyle brand goop.com. She's a passionate voice for improving the experience of divorce for families and drew a lot of media criticism a few years ago for her announcement that she and her husband were consciously uncoupling. It's so exciting to see Michael and Gwyneth working ways to make life easier for co-parents, which is going to make a healthy and respectful divorce achievable for more and more families. Check out this interview with Michael to find out all the things that Fayr can do and how it can make your life better. Alright, let's hop in. Christina: Welcome Michael thank you so much for being here with me today! Michael:  Thank you for having me, Christina.  Christina: I'm really excited to talk to you because of the super positive project that you got involved with to help co-parents do a better job. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got inspired to create the Fayr app? Michael: Well, I would say my background can't be any further from this subject, I'm a home builder, I mean, I started building homes when I was a teenager, just an able-bodied worker. Later on, I went to work for the largest homebuilder in America and worked for them 6 years before going out on my own to become a custom home builder. And you know, like everybody else a lot of people go through divorces and it was just a very trying period for me. Family is important for me, I come from a military family and my father was an army officer for 30 years or so and you know traveling around a lot, family was always just important - we're always together. And I would say that that had a lot to do with feeling my interest in trying to do what I could for my kids and so, yeah, that being my background, I think it all really fed into my interest to communicate better, be as much a part of my children's lives and in a positive way. Christina: Well, the fact that you're outside of the standard legal divorce industry gives you a whole new perspective, I think what the industry needs. Michael: I think I relay to people really well, I find that the people I feel most comfortable and most effective in communicating with are just the regular people. I kinda leave it up to my team, they kinda do a better job than communicating with the professionals in this industry. Christina: And so how did you get inspired to create the app? What was the thinking behind that? Michael: What was the ah-ha moment? Christina: Yeah. Michael: Well you know, it's a culmination of a lot of things. You go through like these unexpected things can happen at any point. And so you get divorced, and then as the time goes on, the whole process was just tremendously arduous when you think about the two years it takes before from separation to finally getting through things, you fight over custody stuff, you know, whole bunch of money spent, and this is the measurable process and then when it's done and when you finally sign your parenting agreement, you think everything's gonna be okay but it's not. Emotions pop up, and next end, like you know, 6 more years went by and it's still not at rest. And so you never know when you're gonna be caught with this need to go back to court. And are you documented? Most people lose, not because they're bad parents, but because they're insufficiently documented. And I did, it's not fun to reconcile with laws all the time, and I would have to reconcile these laws every night and just miserable way to live thinking about this stuff constantly and so. Then you go to court and then the other person can very well say, "well you made that up". And there's really no way to prove anything, you know. You can't verify some of this stuff. So I thought to myself, "if there was something that could just galvanize, Google docs, Google calendar, your emails, Google spreadsheet, all of these things that I was happy to use constantly, text messages and everything, have it wrapped up and a one app - specifically like a go-to resource just for co-parents to either co-parent together or just document, just to avoid mitigate future problems. Assuming that was it, it was just a culmination of many years of these things and I just one day started looking into this. I mean, if nothing else, it's gonna help my life and probably help a lot of other people too. Christina: Okay. So I think this sounds like a good place for you to tell us a little bit about what the app does.That sounds pretty cool, the calendar and Google docs and so forth. All of that being rolled into one. What does the app do, and I'm wondering you mentioned that you can either use it together for co-parenting or it sounds like you can just also use it on your own? You don't need the cooperation of the other if you're just looking for documentation? Michael: Yeah absolutely. I mean it's basically an all-in-one digital ledger for child custody. So it's just the place you can go to let's say for example, things that parents run into. Let's face it, and I say this sometimes because I don't think people are very conscious of this, is that there's no other area in life that you can be in a simple lawsuit with another human being and you're forced to continue communicating with that person for years to come, you know. So it's a very stressful situation but the importance of communicating constructively with that person is paramount. And so how do you bridge this problem between the necessity for the benefit of the children (in my case 2 children) that you love the most in life, and then you have this horribly frustrating situation where you don't communicate well  because you were in a very bitter, emotionally, hard suit with this person. Because that what these things are - they're lawsuits. So anyway, I thought, what the app can do for you is let's take the calendar feature for example. It's color-coded so mom stays in one color, dad stays on another color, you put in your time-sharing agreement. And then if you need to switch a day, you can just let your day request just a fourth of the day to the other parent. The other parent instantly gets a notification saying "oh, Bill wants to forth his day to you". You can either accept or deny. If you accept it, it changes to your color, and it doesn't switch back to his color unless you release it again. But that way, if anything doesn't rise, your building this incontestable audit trail of information as life is happening. And that's just the calendar feature. But, it just streamlines things to where it's sending a new notification, it's letting you know when soccer is, you can set it up front where repeat this for the next six months every Tuesdays and Thursdays. And then every other year switch your Christmases, so everything's put in upfront and then it's just laid out for you. No more arguing, no more disputes over this particular issue. And I just wanted to simplify, take out all the arguing that goes on. And then the next feature, let's talk about expenses for example. I mean, people are very good about keeping a mental inventory of their own contributions for their children. But there's seldom real knowledge what the other person is doing. And no one's very good about keeping receipts, and no one's very good about all of the things that we have to juggle. And when your attorney tells you, "Hey, Friday I need all these stuff", it is terrible to have to start digging all that up and reconstruct that audit trail information. I had to call two different banks. my insurance company, doctor's offices, and dentist offices have reprint stuff and just have to dig it up and I'm sure there's still stuff missing. And if you dump it all at your attorney's office and your paralegal, just put it in a court-ready format, you know. That's costed you per hour. So it just all gets very expensive, I mean, I just spent nearly sixty thousand dollars in total on all these legal fees. And you think about what that could have done for what I have for my children. Anyways, the point is with this app, as things are happening I don't have to keep receipts anymore, buy something and I simply snap a picture of the receipt - it's there, it's recorded. Then I plug it all in,  and that's it. She can see it instantly, she can see everything that was purchased. Right now it's four categories and I'm about to expand that. So I called them involuntary expenses, it's either your medical, your dental, your personal or educational. And some of these things are tax-deductible. So the app also know which are tax-deductible, and at the end of the year, you can just say "give me my tax-deductible report", and it'll give you everything you've spent on your kids that you can deduct from your taxes as well. So just organizes everything, you don't have to save any more paper, and that's really beneficial. And again, at a glance now, both parents can see what's happened, and shortly you'll be able to settle up with each other within the app. You can just say, "okay I'm gonna settle up". You click the button and automatically transfers money to the other parent. You can pay child's support alimony, everything's gonna be able to be documented paid right thru the app.  Christina: Oh that will be handy. Michael: Yeah it will be great. And you can set it again. I want to make a co-parenting app that just lets you co-parent on autopilot. So yes you may do some work upfront, plugin all the stuff in. But once it's in, from then on out its just small little adjustments, here and there, as life is going on and you still make adjustments. But for the most part, you're just gonna get these "just go through life and things are gonna be nice and easy". So the next feature is my Geo pen points. The reason I have these is 'cause there are a lot of hidden cases where you're supposed to be somewhere but timely dropoffs or pickups, and there are court orders a lot of times, and to prove that you were there on time is an important thing. So with this feature, you can show up, you can simply say "I want to check in" and you log yourself and there it is - a time, date and stamp that you were on the planet in that spot at that time. So there's just no more he-said-she-said when you go to court. It's just you're good. You know you can prove that you were there. That prevents people from using children as chess pieces. And then the last feature that we currently have is our invisible text messaging. So every lawyer tells you, communicate email, 'cause emails are invisible in court, text messages are not. Well, with these, you have the best of both worlds. You have the ease of text messaging with the invisibility of email. It works just like the IOS messaging, super easy. And at any time you can just say "I wanna generate a report", and all of this stuff, every single day you had them the percentages, everything from whatever time, period you want to look at, just be instantly printed out in a PDF or Excel format. And there you go. Shortly though, right out just the two parents that can be on it, they are onboarded on in the system but shortly you'll be able to have third-party users for this login, to actually grow our user base tremendously. But you can have grandparents who are involved, step-parents, aunts, uncles, legal professionals, they'll have an interface too if they need to monitor just make a guardian light them for example. It's just gonna make everything much more simple, much more honest and fair - that's the name of the app, it's "Fair". It stands for Family, Advocacy, Your Responsibility, just to help make things easier that is in a very difficult situation. Christina: Sounds like it's streamlining a lot, saving a lot of time, and kind of peel back and take away some of the emotion out of the communication? I'm wondering if for example if we go back to the Calendar, and your request to switch a day, is that just very black and white like that or you switch it where you make the request, or do you have the ability for example to say, you know I have to work late next week. Michael: Every single one of these functions  - I know I'm just doing kind of a brief over if you're here, but if you select to switch, it actually requests you know, give a reason. You have to write a reason in so that it's notified "hey I'm working late" and you can put notes down there. So when this is printed off in the main report, it'll show that on Saturday, at 4:36 PM, you requested a fourth of the day, the notification was sent, it was accepted at this time, so the whole record is there for a judge or anybody to look at and they'll know exactly what happened, and the notes will be attached there too. "Oh I've forth of the day because I have to be here or this happens", so the communication is there, let's face it, six months from now I'm not gonna remember why I'm not gonna remember what happened. So, I've definitely thought all of that, I wanted to make this thing just as useful for people and just take out the anxiety that we go through later on. Christina: It sounds like some of these features might tend to actually encourage, better behaviors, so I'm wondering if, by using this app, maybe court applications are actually reduced or eliminated in some cases, what kind of feedback have you received? Michael: I mean I know from my own personal experience that it definitely mitigates problems that usually escalates to costly, you know court motions, and look you know, that's what we all want. I mean, our family courts... you correct me if I'm wrong I know you're more of a guru on this than I am but they're the most backed up courts in America, I mean that's why in some places it's up to three years, backlogs. So, hey if we can reduce problems and keep some money in some families pockets cause you know, it's they're sad statistics you know. I think most people know this what's sad is that you don't go in any sort of parenting tutorials. I don't know if they do this everywhere, but here in Florida, when you go and get divorce they make you take an online little... watch all these videos and take retention quizzes, and things like this that educate you in parenting, it's like "Man I wish I did this before when I became a parent." And then of course in this process just learning more about the effects of these two home situations on children nationally, it's pretty scary. I mean when you look at some of the statistics out there, and I'm not saying the answer is people should stay together cause I'm a firm believer that a lot of people if they're properly communicating it's a better situation for kids, for two people who don't like each other to not stay together. But the statistics actually show that if your kid is being raised in a broken home, they are twice as likely to drop out of high school, they're four times as likely to go to prison, twice as likely to actually attempt suicide. They're medicated for things like depression and anxiety and insecurities. They suffer from speech defects, asthma, and headaches at a higher rate. And I don't know what, I'm sure there's a lot of things that contribute to those statistics but, I think that kids growing up feeling that their parents are butting heads all the time, that can't help but believe that that causes some emotional duress on them. Christina: Oh absolutely, I think a lot of the studies have shown that it is the conflict that occurs in separation, not so much the separation itself, but that exposure to conflict between parents that's really traumatic for kids.  Michael: Totally. Christina: This app, I think has huge potential and you've already had a really exciting launch this summer, tell us a little bit about the Planets of the apps show that you're on. Some of our listeners might not be familiar with that. So what that was all about and what your experience is like there? Michael: That was pretty phenomenal the whole experience honestly, I was.. it was July 4th, 2016 and I was at my cousin's boat. And I'm kicking around this idea of building this app. So I priced it out and you know it was gonna be quite a bit of money, and I'm like "Man do i do that or I'm not... this a lot of things I can do with that kind of money " and he said "You know Mike, it's something that's.." he's like "I've been listening to you for 8 years complain about all the things you go through"  you know he's like.. "I think it's a good place to direct your energy and you gotta be passionate about something in life and you're really passionate about this" so I said, Okay I'm gonna go and pull the trigger. So 2 days later I put my deposit down, I started building it. And fortunately I did, cause if I had waited four days, I would've missed the window to be considered for Planet of the Apps. And it was very fortunate, and I didn't know they started with nearly 10,000 applicants and they narrowed us down to about, I guess about 80 of us that made it. And then of the 80, I mean less of a third of that made it to the final round, that I did. So it was really exciting cause I'm not an app builder, I mean I got out there and I was just overwhelmed by all these crazy smart people, I mean they cruise at that intellectual stratosphere that I can't look at from the ground binoculars, it's super smart people out there. And anyway, it's a good experience, so I go out on Planet of the apps, and we're filming this thing and I was lucky enough to have all four of the panelists there, you know Jessica Alba, Gwyneth Paltrow, Will i.am, and Gary Vaynerchuk, all four of them wanted to partner with me, and I think I was one of the only ones who have that. And super exciting, and again my app that time was just a concept, it was a Beta, it had to be in Beta but it was far from being in the app store. Far.  So I ended up choosing Gwyneth, and I chose Gwyneth because, one she's the only person who'd gone through a divorce, two you know this is a subject she's very passionate about, and you know the whole conscious of coupling that you've referred to as well. She gets it, and that's an important thing. I think I'd go through life and I think most people listening would probably agree that you just run into people especially when you're back out in the dating world, and you meet people who just don't get it. Unless you've been through it, it's something that kinda connects people. My dad was an army guy, so I kinda equate it to people who had gone to war, and you just talk to another guy and they just get it, you know. So anyway, I partnered with her, we met many times, we corresponded, we still correspond via email. And she's just been very very supportive, that I mean I'm about to launch Android and when android launches at the end of this month, I'll be re-engaging her efforts to get, start tweeting about it again. She's tweeted for me in the past and that's very helpful, I always get a good spike in downloads when she does that. And hey you know, it was a phenomenal experience, I gotta tell you I feel very lucky and I'm very happy that I have somebody like her who isn't just... she's not just bottom line focused like a lot of people are, who are just like "So how much money is this gonna make?" She's more concerned like when we met, it's like "is this gonna help people? Let's just focus on helping people and everything else will take care of itself." And I like that, I really really appreciate that.  Christina: Yeah for sure, I can see that in addition to her acting career she, of course, has the eCommerce lifestyle brand goop.com, which is also focused on having a great lifestyle, and you know the various different aspects of that, so having a positive co-parenting relationship I can see that would sort of fit in to that. Yeah, and she did have that very high profile divorce a few years ago, where the media was quite nasty towards her. I found it to be really discouraging that the intention and the desire to have an amicable divorce would be considered by the general media as being sort of a ridiculous goal to have or you know, just something the general public could aspire to.  So I love that she's putting up her energy behind this with you.  Michael: I think she's such a gracious person, I think Gwyneth is a really, you can just see it like when you're talking to her that she's really, you'll never know, you know I mean most of the media unfortunately for her, they portrayed her in any way that they want to, and they could do that with anyone, they could do that with you, me, anybody they wanted to. And I think it's unfortunate cause it's a "yeah you got your head in these clouds if you think people can do this amicably". But she's, you know, she's told me that she has a better relationship now with her ex-husband Chris, than ever before! She says "you know we have the best relationship we've ever had!" and that speaks volumes to her because that takes work. That takes a real concerted effort to just be able to say that, and to have done that cause she's doing better than I am, you know I mean like.. most people just don't do that well, with that. And I think most people like she said like most people get caught up in trying to be right... I'm right, I'm right. But it's like, it's not about being right, it's about being effective. Let's be effective for the benefit of our kids, let's not worry about being right. I listen to that, cause I'm.. just one of these guys who just want to be right. You know, I wanna win the argument. But you know, I got some maturing to do as well, you know. Christina: You've done some learning over the years. So in what circumstances do you see the app as being useful? Is this something you can see rolling out to most separating couples? Michael: Oh my goodness. I gotta tell you, I think married people should use this. I mean, let's face it, the number one reason above infidelity and religion - it's funny as it is, and if people would use this app, 'cause so many times, you know in today's world, and this isn't 40 years ago, but today's world, not our parents' generation, but you have 2 separate incomes, 2 separate bank accounts, and 1 person oftentimes paying the lion share of the expenses, and the other person's dropping it on a Harley Davidson or something like this just toys, and that becomes a point when things get tough. That becomes a real point of contention in a relationship. And so, I just think that anybody should. But obviously, that's a little lofty when you think that much married people are gonna jump on it. But, I gotta tell you, I see it ideally if two people can co-parent constructively together, it is a great platform for that. But if not, man do yourself a huge favor, use it because it is so much easier to just stay on top of things that document now than try to dig up those receipts later on. And you never do it, you never end up doing it, in fact, most attorneys tell me "I'm so frustrated with my clients because I tell them document... document and they just don't do it, and then inevitably they lose, and you know, that sucks".  Christina: Well there's so many things going on in life where you're separating trend to figure out where you're gonna live, maybe do you need to change your job, how are your children doing, and so the documentation just falls through the cracks. It's not high on the priority list, even though the lawyers might like it to pay. Michael: Yeah exactly. You've got life happening. And let's face it, it's not a fun thing to do. It is just the whole time you do it. You just dread it. It's not fun, I mean, and most people aren't organized with a lot of that stuff, so I just try to make it as easy as possible. And I think Fayr has a sincere effort at accomplishing that.  Christina: So having been divorced yourself and now being part of this industry trying to improve the experience for separating couples, do you have any advice? For couples who are in the process right now? Michael: Yeah I do, and it would be, you know it's tough because as you know, once you're years passed it you look back, and it's just like don't live with regrets. Really, really try to power through the nasty things that you kind of do, the unfair things that you do, because you're gonna regret the impact that it has on your kids later on because you wanna be the best you, you wanna be the best version of yourself for your kids. And the only way you're gonna be able to do that is just suck out the poison and they always say, you know, it's not the snake bite that kills you, it's chasing the snake that sends the venom to the heart that kills you. So just don't chase things. Just like what Gwyneth said, "don't worry about being right, just be effective and just be fair." I don't know, it feels like it's so easy to say, it feels like a cliche, it's like to put myself in that position back then, and I would say, "man, what the heck", he doesn't know what he's talking about. He isn't in my situation but, that's so I could tell parents it's just really trying to be fair with one another, 'cause it just hurts your kids when you're not. Christina: I think that's excellent advice. For people who are interested in trying out the app, what's the best way to contact you or to get a hold of the app? Michael : Yeah, so we're obviously on Facebook,  Fayr. On Twitter, it's Fayr Dad, and on Instagram we're @BeFayr. www.fayr.com. We have a lot of great information out there, you can google me as well, Michael Daniels Fayr, and you'll see up just a bunch of plan of the apps stuff, videos. We've been in the news all over the place even in England and Germany, actually. We got a lot of exciting things happening.  Fayr is doing great and we're gonna keep growing it as 55 million people across America who are living in a sort of two-home situation raising kids co-parenting, and I'm gonna keep marching forward and helping every one of them out that I can. Christina: And right now you said Fayr is available on the Apple App Store? Michael: Yes it is available in the App Store, that's Apple. And in another 2 weeks, it will be available for Android. Sorry Android has taken so long but we're constantly improving things and that's just more development time.  Christina: So for people who are not hearing this at the time of the original release, that will be around the end of November 2017. Okay Michael well thank you so much for your contribution to improving the lives of co-parents and kids out there. Michael: Christina thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it being here. Christina: And a pleasure talking to you.  

How Kate Fisher found herself at the brink of death, having to choose between this world and the next. Plus one of the best foods to feel grounded: for keeping a level head and making good decisions(!) Hi everybody, I'm Barbara Fernandez, the Rocking Raw Chef, here with my Clean Food, Dirty Stories: one to entertain, the other to inspire.I help people stamp out stress, depression and fatigue over at RockingRawChef.com, and today's title is:This world...Or AnotherIn addition to this story, at the end of this episode I'll share with you one of the best foods to feel grounded – in other words, to help us stay clear-headed and even make better decisions in our lives.OK enough hints from me, I'm sure you have no idea what that food is...or maybe you do, so let's get on with the story.Our guest, Kate FisherI am super excited to be joined here today for our story by Kate Fisher. Kate is a shamanic practitioner who specialises in helping others to connect with the power that is already within them. She is also an artist, and she works with drums, paint and clay to create shamanic tools, paintings and ceramics. And she works with people not only face to face, but also at a distance which I think is very cool. She has a pretty incredible story to share which I think you're going to love!So Kate, welcome to the Clean Food, Dirty Stories podcast!Kate: Thanks Barbara.Me: Yeah, it's great to have you. I'm looking forward to sharing your story.Kate's storySo you work in Norfolk, you live in Kent, but do you have a lot of trees surrounding you now? Because I know that you spent a lot of your childhood in trees, is that what you told me? Is that where your story begins?Kate: Yeah, it kind of is, I was much more into sitting in trees and hanging out there and not really with the other kids. It just felt calming and I later found out that what was actually happening was that I was speaking with the tree deities and the tree spirits themselves. Me: So like when most kids had imaginary friends, like little playmates and stuff, then you just had your playmates that were like in the trees and nature spirits and everything.That's really cool, when I was little actually, I didn't play with the other kids either. I was with them but I was a tiger roaring and crawling on the floor. So there were no nature spirits for me, just a bunch of crawling around.On to herbalismAt one point you studied herbalism, is that right? How did you come to study that?Kate: Well, I began studying it. After doing my art degree, I actually got a job in Neal's Yard Remedies in Norwich. And so that just kind of brought me back to plants and their uses. The medicinal uses were the sort of thing I was drawn to. I was going to move to Australia to do the whole course of naturopathy. There was something still missing from that for me. So from that I actually found magical herbalism.Me: Okay.Kate: Yeah, so that's kind of like hedge witchcraft. It's understanding that everything has an energy and you can use that energy to help heal and help rebalance.Me: I know about wild plants, you know, and collecting wild plants and just eating them because they taste really good, and I know that nettles for example are really good for arthritis, just little things that you kind of pick up. But that's kind of all I know. So is it like making teas for people and poultices and things like that out of plants and stuff?Kate: No, no, it's purely energetic, so it's basically like spellcasting.Me: OK.Magic herbalism, then on to the PhilippinesKate: So you would use certain herbs and plants that have certain attributes and they often correspond with the medicinal uses as well. And you'd kind of enchant them and then you'd make them into little sachets to hand to people and once they'd got their use from it, they would bury it. It was always just for an energetic purpose.Me: Oh OK.Kate: It's like the old wives' tale of putting certain things above the door so things can't come in.Me: I get it. OK. So you were doing herbalism but then I think you stopped, is that right, and you moved to the Philippines? Is that right?Kate: Yeah, that's right. So magical herbalism still wasn't doing it for me and I still felt there was something more. And I came across a book and it was called Chance Spirit Shamanism, and this just sent me off! I knew that I had to do something with this because it would take me deeper into that plant realm. The way I actually got to the Philippines was through my ceramics, with a job as a teacher over there.Manila and the Saturn returnMe: How did you get that job? That's really cool.Kate: A Filipino lady, her family ran the college there and she approached me and asked if I would teach there.Me: Wow!Kate: Unfortunately it was in Manila and for me that was just too busy. It's a really built city with really rich and really poor areas. I found this place called Bahay Kalipay which means the House of Happiness. So I went there, I volunteered and from there I taught this process called The Inner Dance, and this was precisely when my Saturn return hit. I had just turned 28 and I decided to drop everything, I sold everything that I owned in England basically, and I decided to move to the Philippines.Kate's Saturn ReturnMe: Wow. So can you just...sorry, can you explain to people, some people that may not know, what is a Saturn return and why does it just – cause I've experienced one too – what is a Saturn return and why does it turn your life upside down?Kate: Yeah, well, OK. The Saturn return is...Saturn's in a certain place in the night sky and what happens is when that then comes around which obviously it takes 28 to 30 years to come round in your astrological chart, that changes everything. You're then kind of pushed or encouraged onto a path that you should have been taking that you may have been diverted from. Some people's is really turbulent, other people it can be quite free flowing depending on what their life path life has taken. And then this happens again normally in women's time, it's normally around the menopause.Me: Well it would be like 28 years later, right?Kate: Exactly, yeah, it's on that time scale. So it really can turn your life upside down because Saturn's known as the teacher. If you haven't learned your lessons, you're gonna learn them!Why the PhilippinesMe: Yup! I've experienced that so I know exactly what you mean. Yeah, so it can be quite big life changes and stuff, right? What made you decide to move to the Philippines?Kate: Well, in all honesty a man.Me: (laughs) As so often happens...Kate: And he worked at the retreat center that I went to. Yeah, I kind of knew that it wasn't gonna work out but I'm always this kind of romantic person, I'm just gonna follow my heart...I loved it there anyway because it was just so beautiful and I felt so held there, just on the land.Me: Yeah. So you moved to the Philippines, so if you moved because of him, did you stay with him and then, like, what happened?Releasing inner blocksKate: Well, I think I moved in with him to begin with, him and his family. And then I went back to work at the retreat center for meditation and the inner dance which is kind of meditative. It allows the flow of energy and any blockages to come out, it can be quite cathartic and transformative in itself. So I went back there and lived there, and I did that for 8 months. I was looking for land to buy as well.Me: So you were gonna buy land in the Philippines? That's very cool. You said at one point that you had a kind of like dark night of the soul, was that related to the guy? Or...Kate: It was all, you know, a whole lump of stuff rolled in together (laughs). That's what happens, isn't it?Me: All at the same time, of course, yeah.Crying in paradiseKate: All at the same time. So yeah, for me, I was in paradise but I was crying my eyes out every day.Me: Oh!Kate: Yeah, and it was just this kind of ultimate depression, but this was something different, it was a transformative kind of time. And I ended up not really seeing the point in life, so I went from, you know, being on a real high and feeling the connection between all things and all of this and then just fell apart and thought, “Well, if everything is nothing and nothing is everything, then what's the point?”Me: Oh, yeah, I've felt like that before so I can relate, yeah. Wow.From the Philippines to PeruMe: And so from there, how did you...you said that you then went to Peru, right? So how did you go from the Philippines to Peru? Did you just one day up and decide to leave, or was there a specific incident where you thought 'OK I've had enough, I'm going to leave now'? Or...Kate: Well I, I'd gone to America to visit my friends over there and then while I was there I phoned this person...Me: Somebody in Peru?Kate: No, sorry, I phoned my boyfriend at the time. Yeah, and he ended up going “Oh I've decided I'm going to be a Peace Pilgrim”.Me: A Peace Pilgrim? What's that?Kate: So it's someone who walks around without anything, but just goes spreading peace and basically relies on anyone around them to support them. He said “This is my highest excitement”. So I was like, “OK, fine”. Obviously I was a bit heartbroken because I'd just travelled the other side of the world, but it made me suddenly realize that I wasn't following my highest excitement. So I thought “OK, what's happening right now? Where's the mother of all plant learnings?” And it's happening in Peru, with Ayahuasca, with Huachuma... Ayahuasca and HuachumaMe: What's huachuma? I mean, I know Ayahuasca and in fact I spoke about that in a previous episode, but what's huachuma?Kate: Huachuma is also known as San Pedro. San Pedro was the Catholic name they gave when they kind of came over to the South Americas. Huachuma is the original name for it. It's a cactus that is mescalin-based, so it's similar to the peyote which is a mescalin-based medicine.Me: Oh OK. So it's a similar kind of experience with...like a journey like you would do as if you were taking Ayahuasca but you're taking Huachuma?Kate: It's similar, yeah. Huachuma's much more about the earth and less cosmic. Ayahuasca is out there, attaching to everything that is. Huachuma's about the heart, about connecting back to the earth.Me: Wow. OK, so you did both of those when you were there?Kate: Yeah, that's right, so I spent 6 months being an apprentice to both of those plants.Me: Oh wow! So now are you able to perform Ayahuasca and Huachuma ceremonies for other people?Kate: I believe I can hold ceremony for Huachuma for other people. With Ayahuasca I decided that I'm just always going to be her apprentice (laughs). I just don't see how people hold space for that, it's such a powerful thing.Temazcals (sweat lodges)Me: OK. So you did those, and you also mentioned temazcals, you know, the sweat lodges, what were those like?Kate: It's really magical.So for somebody who doesn't, who doesn't know about a temazcal, can you say a little bit about like what it is? Because I've done one, but not everybody knows about it, right? Could you say a little bit about like what it is and what happens and why you might want to do a sweat lodge?Kate: OK. It's a really sacred ceremony and our ancestors have always used it to cleanse, to rebirth. To go into those sweat lodges is like going back into the mother's womb. You go in there with thanks, knowing what you want to get rid of or what you want to transition into. And you bless the rocks which are put into a sacred fire.Me: Sacred fire?Kate: Yes. They then heat those for several hours and then you will go into the lodge. You normally go through about four, yeah, four rounds. They'll bring in a certain number of rocks, and then water is poured onto the rocks once the door is closed.Me: And it gets really, really hot, I remember.Kate: It does. But it builds, it's not like going into a sauna. Your body gradually kind of gets used to it until it gets so hot that you're just like “Oh no I can't do this!” But quite often, we always say that the heat is your friend. Because that heat is sometimes not physical heat, it's sometimes you know, coming up against maybe a blockage of the energy of the thing that you're trying to shift, so if you can, stay in.The eyebrow of the Peruvian jungleMe: And so how did you...how did you go from doing the sweat lodges and the Ayahuasca and Huachuma ceremonies to the jungle? Cause you said that you were...I know that you mentioned to me that you were in the jungle with some friends and you had a pretty scary experience there. Can you say a little bit about like how you came to be there, and what happened?Kate: Yeah, definitely.I was a, I suppose an assistant to the woman that owned the retreat center. And we'd become really good friends because we obviously worked really closely together. We were offered a piece of land possibly in a part of the jungle called Manu which is known as the eyebrow of the jungle of Peru. So we went to visit, and our friend who also went with us, he was also an Andean priest. He went and hired a boat and took us to this special island which had quite rare breeds of certain animals, mammals and things. So he takes us over there and we're just so excited to see a different part and see rare species. Onto the land, you know you just start walking around and admiring things and I think it was about a third of the way around this island and all of a sudden something hit me.When the jungle gets angryKate: It felt like I'd suddenly started menstruating but it wasn't that time, it felt like all of my guts were just turning around. I just suddenly went white. Me: Wow!Kate: Literally it just felt like, I don't know, I could have eaten something that didn't agree with me, all that kind of stuff. So my friend tried to do an echo cleansing on me. Now all that did - this is the dirty part of the story – was give me diarrhea. It was awful. My body was emptying, everything was too heavy. I was getting rid of everything. It was really quite scary as it progressed.And then this feeling came over me that the jungle was angry. There was always this element of kind of doubt, skepticism I guess.Getting lost in another worldBut I was about to get lost in another world. The jungle felt like it was pulling me. The world that I knew, that part of the jungle that I was seeing with my physical eyes was disappearing. Me: Wow! That's scary!Kate: Terrifying. And interesting at the same time.Me: Yeah, kind of like 'this is really scary but this is really cool!'Kate: I mean I got really scared up until the point where I thought, 'OK, maybe I'm going to leave this other world that I know and I'm gonna be taken to another world'. And when I reached that level of acceptance, you know, that strange place of like 'OK this is just happening', I told my friends to go on without me. I said, “This is where I stop”. And it was like, it was, I don't know, it was like I was disappearing.Me: Wow.Kate: Yeah, I...after feeling scared it was suddenly this peace that took over. But then my friends became scared because they realized how real this had become. You know, they couldn't just leave me in the jungle.Me: Yeah.Kate: And the Andean priest, he was suddenly panicking around me. He was saying in Spanish, in Quechua, panicking about “Oh I haven't done it, I haven't done it, I haven't done it!” He was going on about the ritual or the ceremony that we were supposed to do when we arrived at this land.A hurried ceremonyKate: And so all of a sudden he's scrambling in his pockets to get things out and I was just flopped on the ground at this point and I had no idea what was going on around me other than his scrambling. He got out the cocoa leaves and he made like a little fan of these and he started doing ceremony. And he was doing all these different things around me but I didn't have any awareness to be able to learn or witness or anything, it was like I was being absorbed into the jungle floor.The next thing I know he's yanking me up off the ground saying “Stamp on the floor! Stamp on the floor!” Like this. And I was just like “I can't do it, I can't even lift my leg,” like I had nothing left, no physical ability whatsoever. But he was so persistent I just went and I just, I just kind of just flopped my foot on this space and I later found out that he'd buried the cocoa leaves there.And as I touched my foot down, something happened and I felt a little bit stronger. So then he went, “Again!” I stamped again a little bit harder with the strength that I'd found. And he said, “Again!” I stamped my foot even harder, and every time we did this, my energy started coming back and my color started coming back and I felt myself being drawn in, like my energy bodies being drawn back into this physical body. Until we'd done it enough that they felt comfortable with us making our way away from there.Me: Wow. Yeah, and then you just left at that point? Were you supposed to stay longer?Kate: I had to lay there while they went off in the boat for a while so I had to lay in the jungle for a bit and stop. Just to kind of recoup and make sure that I'd gathered all the parts of me back together I think. Me: Yeah, of course, yeah.Fear as teacherKate: And I gave my thanks and you know, and I said, “Sorry for not knowing better”. I should have known better, that's what I was there to learn, you know. How to respect these places.Me: Yeah, but you were there to learn. I would have thought the Andean priest would have... I mean, I would have been blaming him! (laughs) Right? Wasn't he kind of there to, you know, to guide you and look after you? I mean I would have been like, “Dude you forgot something! Look what happened to me!” No?Kate: Well, I suppose, but I didn't see things that way at that time. I kind of overtook responsibility if that makes sense. But I gave my thanks to the jungle at that point because that's when my skepticism left and I really started to trust that Spirit is there to guide. And it really showed me its strength, and the only way it could do that was through fear.Me: Wow.Kate: Yeah, I was really, really grateful to have learned that lesson because without that I wouldn't be able to practice, you know, the techniques that I do today.Me: I bet the Andean priest learned a lot too, right? I bet he never did that again! (laughs) Right?Kate: (laughs) I don't think so!Me: Almost killed a tourist, can you imagine? Oh my goodness. Wow!What Kate does todaySo then you said that that experience helped you do the techniques that you do today, so how? Like, how come? What was it about that particular experience and what did you take from there I guess is what I want to ask, that you now use? Yeah, that you use now?Kate: Well it's just the level of trust.Me: Ah, OK. That makes sense.Kate: When I'm doing the healings or ceremony or anything, I endeavour obviously – I mean sometimes ego gets in the way and makes you feel small. But that's quite rare these days. I just allow Spirit and the ancestors to guide me.Me: Yup. Yeah, because you have that trust now thanks to your experience in the jungle. I get it, yeah. Wow!So then, yeah, what do you do now to help other people? Because I know you do lots of different things, do you want to say a little bit about that?Kate: Yeah, well the main thing that I endeavour to do, like anyone that I come across I try and support and empower. Even if it's the smallest thing. And give people that different perspective on themselves. I think we're so made to feel belittled and that we think that, you know, to think good of ourselves is to be arrogant. But actually we need to come to a space where we can be comfortable and love ourselves without that. Me: Yeah.Kate: It's really hard to explain! I lead retreats and...Finding the Wild WomanMe: So what kinds of things do you do at the retreats? For example, do you take people on shamanic journeys as a group? Kate: So for the retreats, what I focus on at the moment is women. And I do this alongside a lovely lady called Amy who runs SoulShine social enterprise and we, well we call it Finding the Wild Woman. And it's all about rewilding, so finding that part of you that's been repressed through, you know, all the things that we should and shouldn't do and expressing your authentic self.Me: Oh I like the sound of that, yup!Kate: So we do all sorts of things.Me: Wow, that sounds quite fun.Kate: Yeah, we use all the different elements as well. So you know, we run through kind of water, earth, fire, air, spirit...so people can connect back with those. The very base elements of this world.Me: Wow, that's very cool.Individual help, even at a distanceMe: So you do those at the retreats, and then I think you said for individual people you help them find balance and things? Like what do you do for individuals? Because I know you also said you do some things at a distance as well. Kate: Yeah, so whether it's distance or whether people are there, I'll connect with them and I'll allow Spirit and ancestors again to work through me. I use my drum, rattle, feathers, anything. I always ask if the person's comfortable with it. Yeah, and then I use the vibe to kind of realign, as everything's made of vibration. The intention is to realign those things, on any level that person wants to work.Me: OK. So do people normally come to you...yeah I would imagine people would come to you with a really specific problem, right? Can it be any kind of problem? Like, I don't know, like everything from physical problems like physical ailments to maybe emotional problems or mental problems? Kate: Yeah, definitely.Me: So a bit of everything. Super! OKKate: The most common tends to be physical or emotional, but actually you find out that they're all interlinked so you just follow that path until...Me: Yeah, I know what you mean. Training for the Celtic sweat lodgeMe: So do you run sweat lodges? Do you use that tool in your work at all?Kate: I'm not running them yet, I'm gonna do another 2 years learning the Celtic lodge.Me: So how long does it take then to train to learn the Celtic sweat lodges?Kate: Well, I'm taking three years to do it.Me: Three years, OK. Is that your choice to do it over a longer period?Kate: Yeah, I know that you can learn the practicalities in a couple of weekends, but to have the experience of actually supporting people through that process...Me: Oh yeah, that's the biggest bit, yeah.Kate: It's a very different ballgame.My own experience in a sweat lodgeMe: Yeah, of course, cause I know, I mean I know for me that when I did a sweat lodge, yeah it was years ago now. And at the time I was...I was a total mess!And so when it got really, really hot, I could feel that kind of...how can I describe it? It was kind of like as if there was a well at the bottom of my being that was filled with all these like dark stuff. You know, fears and things like that that never got to come up to the surface, you know? That never got acknowledged.Just like really primal stuff, you know, almost as if you could tap into your most primal fears because there was no cultural barrier. There was no mental barrier, you know.You were just so hot that your mind...I mean for me my mind almost just left my body really because it was just so hot. And I thought that was...that was quite an amazing experience.I mean for me I was like wow! It was scary but it was also really cool and I can imagine that for some people... I mean, I like to think that I'm a pretty strong cookie but I imagine it would be scary for people to come to grips with what they find and to have to kind of, yeah, deal with that. I mean if they uncover something they didn't know about themselves before, maybe something that's super scary, then yeah I would imagine you have to have the tools to deal with that, right?Kate: That's right, yeah. You've got to be able to support people after they've kind of gone through the sweat lodge process. Like you say, sometimes people are left with things that they need to kind of then kind of speak through or go into a bit more.Me: Wow, yeah. But I'd definitely say better out than in, right? All that stuff.Where to find KateKate thank you so much for coming on to share your story. There's a friend of mine that also mentioned that when you hold any kind of retreat or workshop or any kind of event in nature, she said just ask the spirits there for permission so you're on their terrain as it were. So that's a really good example of what can happen if you don't, right? I'll have to tell her about it. Well, I'll have to get her to listen to the episode.But thank you so much for sharing that, I really appreciate it and I'll link to everything that you do below, but do you just want to say where... Where can people find you? What's the easiest way to find you?Kate: Yeah, it's easiest to find me on Facebook at the moment because I'm still working on my website but that's at kfheartwisdom.Me: Super! OK. I'll put the link to your site as well. Is it katefisher.co.uk? Is that right?Kate: Yeah.Me: Thank you so much, I really appreciate it, and I think I'm going to dive into our food tip.Foods to feel groundedAnd it's really funny that there was all this stuff about stamping on the ground and everything because...I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that I would share one of the best foods to feel grounded. And first I do want to kind of emphasize what I mean when we say grounded.When we feel grounded, we feel more connected to the earth. Now this might sound airy-fairy, but it's actually really important. So you can think of feeling grounded as the opposite of scatterbrained. In other words, instead of feeling confused, all over the place, not knowing what to do, when you're grounded you actually have a clarity of purpose. It enables you to not only get things done but to know what those things actually are that you need to do for your own happiness.And believe me, this is really, really important. I speak from very personal experience. The other way that you can think of being grounded is eating foods to feel grounded. It's kind of like getting the benefits of comfort food without gaining weight, if that makes sense. You do get that, yeah, that sense of comfort from these particular foods, but you're eating good food, you know? Rather than junk.And for those of you who want to do some of your own shamanic journeys as Kate did, this particular food that I'm going to talk about can help you stay connected to this world too.So although there are many foods to feel grounded, the ones that I want to mention here, or the one specific one is...squash!Benefits of squashAnd when I say squash, this actually covers a variety of vegetables: so you've got spaghetti squash, summer squash, zucchini, marrow and pumpkin. Those are all types of squash. Gourds as well, those are squash.Squash is one of the oldest foods around – it's been cultivated for at least 10,000 years, and it may look kind of ordinary, but it has a lot of health benefits.Now you may not know this, but squash is listed as anti-fungal, antibacterial and anti-inflammatory! It contains vitamin A, several B vitamins, folates, magnesium, potassium, iron, copper, zinc, manganese, calcium, and beta carotene among other antioxidants.So it's insanely good for a whole host of things, including managing our blood sugar, keeping our lungs healthy, helping keep our eyes sharp and strong, having strong bones, and reducing the risks of many diseases including lung cancer, emphysema and glaucoma, and that's just to name a few.Squash has many other benefits and I'll link to an article in the show notes if you'd like to read more about it.Now however before you decide to start eating bushels of squash, I do have to warn you about one thing. Squash is very good at lowering blood pressure, and if you have low blood pressure already, squash could lower it even further. So if that's you, best to eat other veggies instead. Fortunately there are lots of other alternatives that I do mention in other podcast episodes!How you eat squashNow as to how you eat squash, well there are so many ways to eat it! Most people puree it and make pancakes, or they slice it and fry it. My favorite way to eat it – and if you know me you'll know what that is – it's to spiralize it! I'll link to an article in the show notes where I show you how to do just that. You can make great pasta using squash, and you don't even have to boil it. Plus it's naturally gluten-free, so everyone can eat it!I've also got some delicious recipes that use squash in my 5-Minute Mains recipe ebook that I'll link to as well.So I hope you've enjoyed our story this week!Have YOU got a story to share?And if you've got a crazy, true story to share (and you'd like to know what food could have saved the day or enhanced your particular situation), I'd love to hear from you! Email me at barbara@rockingrawchef.comIf you enjoy my stories and want to hear more, join us and subscribe! I share one amazing, true story a week. And if you've got any questions, just pop them in the comments! And if you're listening on iTunes, do give me a review, that would be awesome.I hope you have an amazing day, thank you so much for being here with me to share in my Clean Food, Dirty Stories. Bye for now!RESOURCESHow to spiralize veggies: http://rockingrawchef.com/what-is-a-spiralizer-and-what-can-it-do-for-me/5-Minute Mains and other recipe ebooks: https://rockingrawchef.com/5-minute-recipes/Foods to feel grounded: https://www.sarahpetrunoshamanism.com/blog/12-foods-for-feeling-grounded/Benefits of squash: https://www.organicfacts.net/health-benefits/fruit/squash.htmlKate's bioKate has studied many esoteric and spiritual practices to a basic level from an early age (13). When her Saturn return began (age 28), Kate moved abroad to study different healing techniques with healers and shaman of Philippines and Peru. She learnt that to know and embrace all parts of yourself is where true healing happens. With a holistic attitude to life and endeavouring to approach life from the heart, Kate believes that all aspects of the self - mind, body and spirit - play a part in the health of the person. Finding balance in all these aspects, we can live to our full potential.Kate's website: http://katefisher.co.ukKate on Facebook, YouTube​

Movie Meltdown - Episode 278 This week we come to you "live" from the "Days of the Dead" convention in Indianapolis. As usual, we stake our claim right in the middle of the action, and not only reminisce about our celebrity run-ins of the day, but also talk to other passers-by and get the general consensus of horror fans.  And as we plead with older celebrities - to stop falling down, we also mention… lose the bandana, the Frankennipple incident, P.J. Soles, I don’t sweat… I glisten, Polly Holliday, Assassin's Creed: The Misty Cut, toddler pants, David Naughton, From Paris with Love, the sequins fairy, Streets of Fire, I don’t think he can make human expressions, Hitler’s new kitten plan, Ashley Laurence , Tito Puente's gonna be dead, and you're gonna say – Oh I've been listening to him for years, The Devil Rides Out, curly mustaches or mohawks, Hey… come join in with our talking of smacks, poking Gary Busey with a stick, stupid gravity, Nancy Allen, Romantics Anonymous, coming soon… Stairs, Nightbreed, Sabrina, pulpy horror, baby crips, Grandpa getting a drink, John Heard, Zombies: Deadtime Stories, Doc of the Dead, you can see the trail of sequins from here to his table, Corey Feldman and his angle, House of Frankenstein, 3D naked chicks and Tara Reid.  Spoiler Alert: Major spoiler for "Eddie and the Cruisers 2". Someone spills the beans on whether Eddie lives or not. You have been warned.   “Why would you put your e-mail address on there? I wouldn’t want these people e-mailing me… I’ve seen these people. I AM ONE OF THESE PEOPLE!”  For more on the "Days of the Dead" shows, go to: http://www.daysofthedead.net/