Podcasts about patrick it

Neuvotteluklubi Väisänen Enbuske Itäniemi Suomen lerpsahdus #neuvottelija 304. Neuvotteluklubi on Tuomas Enbuske, Kim Väisänen, Patrick Itäniemi ja Sami Miettinen. Jaksossa pohditaan miksi Suomen talous on nähtävästi pysyvästi impotentti, miten Suomi tyri terveydenhoitonsa sekä miten me ollaan rojahtaneet pohjoismaiden kelkasta ojan pohjalle. Lopuksi Kimi kysyy kuka voisi olla Suomen Elon Musk Suomen tarvitsemaan DOGE:een? #neuvottelija Sisäpiiirissä pohditaan mikä olisi Tuomas Enbusken Esa Saarisen tiikeritakki. Kaupallinen yhteistyö, Gasgrid Finland https://open.spotify.com/show/19XFAVLLrQP5z8KQRLTGE7?si=2378dfaba34a4f53 #neuvottelija Sami Miettinen

Neuvotteluklubi | Suomi mamukieleksi Yhteisövero | #neuvottelija 292. Neuvottelijaklubi on Kim Väisänen⁠, ⁠Patrick Itäniemi⁠ ja ⁠Ian Mac Eochagáin⁠. Aiheena kaksi isoa kokonaisuutta, työperäinen maahanmuutto, erityisesti pohtien miksi suomea kannattaa vaatia ja vaalia myös maahanmuuttajilta, eikä tyytyä englantiin. Ian kirjoitti aiheesta Helsingin Sanomien vieraskynään kuvauspäivänä. Toisena aiheena on yhteisövero ja sen globaali harmonisointi 15% minimitasolle. Trumpin hallinto aikoo laskea myös USA:n yhteisöveron 15% tasolle ja Irlanti taas nostaa 12,5%:sta. Mikä on Suomen 20% veron kohtalo? Liity kanavalle ja nauti eduista: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRI34L9OtDJuZpaWicbNXzg/join #neuvottelija Sami Miettinen

Neuvotteluklubi Roininen Valkonen Itäniemi #neuvottelija 288. Ensimmäinen Neuvotteluklubi! Suomalaisten enemmistö on markkinatalousmielisiä, mutta silti sosialismiasteemme on 56%. Miksi vain 3% suomalaisista omistaa listaamattomia osakkeita, vaikka he vastaavat 49% yksityisestä työllisyydestä? Mikä on 5 veron kiila, joka lahtaa markkinataloutta joka päivä? Miksi ruotsalaisten luovutusvoittovero toimii perintöveron toteutusmuotona? Miksi se tulee saada Suomeen jo tällä hallituskaudella? Paljon kysymyksiä mutta toisin kuin YLE:llä, Neuvotteluklubi myös vastaa niihin! Eikä millään retoriikalla vaan faktoilla. Neuvotteluklubi on Sami Miettinen, Petri Roininen, Ville Valkonen ja Patrick Itäniemi. #neuvottelijat Sisäpiirissä Ville, Petri ja Sami pohtivat mm. oliko Juha Sipilä yritysjohtavana poliitikkona suomalainen köyhän kansan Elon Musk, onko ESG:stä lähtemässä vihreät ilmat pois ja miten Petri yhdistää toimitusjohtajuuden politiikkaan Liity kanavalle ja nauti eduista: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRI34L9OtDJuZpaWicbNXzg/join #neuvottelija Sami Miettinen

Perjantaistudiossa keskustellaan kiihkeätsi kesän ajankohtaisista kulttuuri- ja mediailmiöistä sekä arvokysymyksistä. Mukana Perjantaistudion raadissa ovat kirjailija Virpi Hämeen-Anttila, kriitikko Leena Virtanen sekä ekonomisti Heikki Pursiainen. Ville Talola juontaa. Karjalaisista aktivisteista koostuvan Ruškiemustu-kollektiivin mukaan Elias Lönnrot oli kolonialisti ja sortui kulttuuriseen omimiseen kootessaan Kalevalaa. Ja me suomalaiset olemme varastaneet tämän kulttuuriperinnön omaksemme. Tästä syystä he katsoivat tarpeelliseksi kirjoittaa Elias Lönnrotin patsaaseen spraymaalilla sanan kolonialisti. Nyt selvitetään, oliko Lönnrot tosiaan kolonialisti ja karjalaisten kulttuurin varastaja. Kesällä käytiin vilkasta keskustelua Ylen journalismista ja DEI-koulutuksista. Toimittajat Sanna Ukkola ja Ivan Puopolo kritisoivat Yleä ideologisesta doktrinaatiosta ja poliittisesta korrektisuudesta, mikä herätti laajaa huomiota erityisesti X:ssä mutta mediaan aiheesta valui vain pieni osa. Keskustelussa pohditaan nyt, säilyttääkö Yle journalistisen integriteettinsä, ja minkä verran DEI-koulutukset vaikuttavat sen toimintaan. Miten raati arvioi Puopolon ja Ukkolan väitteet? Mikä on Heikki Pursiaisen mielestä isompi ongelma Ylen kaltaisessa isossa mediatalossa? Miten nuorten julkisiin kannanoittoihin pitäisi suhtautua? Nuoruudesta huomauttelu on nähty epäasiallisena kuten sukupuolen tai etnisyyden. Greta Thunbergin ja Patrick Itäniemen tapaukset osoittavat, että nuoria suojellaan kritiikiltä, mutta nuoruus ei saisi olla kritiikin kohde. Itäniemen tuloeroja puolustaviin mielipiteisiin vastataan usein opettajamaisesti. Nettikommentit ovat myrkyllisiä, ja nuoria kohdellaan samoin kuin aikuisia, mikä herättää kysymyksiä argumentoinnin tasosta. Onko meillä vaikeuksia puhua nuorelle asia-argumentein? Psykoterapeutti Katarina Meskanen ja lihavuus- ja kehotutkija tutkija Hannele Harjunen varoittavat HS:n artikkelissa otsikoltaan Kehopikamuoti (14.8) kehoihanteista, jotka voivat muuttua entistä epärealistisemmiksi, vaikeammin saavutettaviksi ja ahdistaviksi. Artikkeli käsittelee kehonkuva- ja kauneusihanteiden jatkuvaa ja nopeaa muutosta, joka muistuttaa pikamuodin kiertokulkua. Aiemmin kehopositiivisuus nosti esiin kaikenlaisten kehojen hyväksymisen, mutta nyt laihuuden ihannointi on tehnyt paluun, erityisesti sosiaalisen median ja tekoälyn vaikutuksesta. Tämä trendi korostaa ulkonäön merkitystä, mikä voi luoda paineita erityisesti nuorille ja heikentää itsetuntoa. Miksi ulkonäkö on niin kipeä asia?

Patrick Itäniemi Tuloeroraivo kolumnista #neuvottelija 262. Suomen talouskeskustelun kapeus paljastui kesällä 2024 kun Helsingin Sanomain uusi linja varovasti kokeili mielipiteiden diversiteettiä ensin sallimalla Sanna Ukkolan kirjoittaa kolumnin ja kun se kutsui 19-vuotiaan kauppatieteiden ylioppilaan Patrick Itäniemen kesäkolumnistikseen. Patrickin kaksi ensimmäistä kolumnia olivat liikaa isolle osaa väestöä, osoittaen niiden tarpeellisuuden. Jaksossa Patrick ja Sami oikovat niihin liittyviä väärinymmärryksiä, taloudellista teoriaa sekä avaavat keskusteluun myös pääomaverot ja perintöverot. Näissä aiheissa löytyikin erimielisyyttä. HS kolumni 1: Patrick Itäniemi: Pienet tuloerot ylläpitävät köyhyyttä: Meidän pitää keskustella enemmän siitä, miten ihmisille saadaan enemmän tuloja ja vähemmän siitä, miten nykyisiä tuloja voidaan tasata. HS kolumni 2: Patrick Itäniemi: Talous ei tarvitse apua valtiolta: Suomessa valtioriippuvuutta pitäisi vähentää verotusta perinpohjaisesti uudistamalla, sääntelyä purkamalla ja ennen kaikkea määrittelemällä hyvinvointiyhteiskunnan tehtävät uudelleen. Ota kantaa, kommentoi, kritisoi! #neuvottelija Sisäpiirissä Patrick avaa tietään Aalto-yliopiston kauppakorkeakouluun, jossa myös Sami on suorittanut yhden tutkinnoistaan Liity kanavalle ja nauti eduista: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRI34L9OtDJuZpaWicbNXzg/join #neuvottelija Sami Miettinen

Christine chats to her youngest sibling Patrick to try to make sense of all the new, modern methods of communication that appear mystical to many of us in the older generations. What lessons can we learn from a new generation's ease and skill with these seemingly complex and technical ways of communicating and what is changing over the ages? CHRISTINE AND PATRICK REVEALThe meaning of Snapchat ‘blue' and ‘red' chats. The social impacts of the new methods of communicating.Possible dangers in modern social apps.Some of the new “lingo”!Healthier approaches to social media.Fun filters and fake filters.  Maintaining a healthy balance in communication. BEST MOMENTS“Social media is the first thing that comes to mind for me and how it's communication for everything now. I suppose that's developed from phones just as text messages and now Snapchat.”-Patrick“When you have the screen it's much easier to be yourself sometimes than in person. Not just Snapchat, to be fair, that's relevant to all social media.”-Patrick“You'd think that the goal of an app like that would be to create connection, to allow people to meet new people, to make new friends?”-Christine“They prefer to see the person naturally because they're not really ‘catfishing' I know, they're people who are pretending to be someone else. But the word ‘catfish' is used for mainly girls who because you look like a model on Instagram and then in real life not like that.”-Patrick“The Snapchat filters are funny. I love them, especially recently. There's so many more than they used to have.”-Patrick“It's this whole attempt at creating a sense of obligation in people to behave in a way that a greater or broader section of society approves of.”-Christine“Keep using it but limit your time on it. Use Snapchat when you need to talk to someone.”-Patrick  CONTACT METHODEmail: christine@languagecouragecoaching.comInstagram: connected_communicationWebsite : www.languagecouragecoaching.comTraining: www.phenomenalpresenters.com ABOUT THE PODCASTCultivate confident English-speaking skills with Connected Communication, the podcast series for anyone communicating in English as a global lingua franca. Join host Christine and expert guests as they explore effective cross-cultural communication, vocal mastery, and the intriguing interplay between communication and the brain. Transform your career with unique tricks and techniques. New episodes, challenges and quests every Tuesday. Listen on any device, and rate and review if you enjoy it. Communicate to connect today!ABOUT THE HOSTChristine Mullaney is a TEDx speaker, certified brain-based conversations and English neurolanguage® coach, cross-cultural trainer, and the founder of Language Courage Coaching, offering services in English Pronunciation and Communication, Public Speaking & Presentation, Intercultural Communication, and Personal Development Coaching.Her content blends over 25 years of training and practice in speech & drama, Englishteaching, public speaking, and customer service with her new-found love, neuroscience. It is designed to pump your dopamine, unblock fear and shatter shame, while nurturing natural confidence, courageous beliefs and new behaviours. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Patrick Tanguay is a self-described "generalist, synthesist, and curator of eclectic ideas." His weekly newsletter, Sentiers, surfaces deep posts about highly relevant topics and provides insightful commentary and ideas. In this conversation, we discuss the tools and methods that enable his curation and sharing process. Show notes @inervenu on Twitter About Patrick The Alpine Review Sentiers RSS Instapaper INFORMA(C)TION newsletter MailChimp Pinboard Delicious WordPress Eleventy Readwise Obsidian Pocket What is a static site generator? (Cloudflare) DuckDuckGo rsync cron Bear Markdown The Informed Life episode 54: Kourosh Dini on DEVONthink DEVONthink Keep It EagleFiler Grant for the Web GitHub Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Patrick. Welcome to the show. Patrick: Thanks! Glad to be here. Jorge: I'm very excited to have you on the show. I've been subscribed to your newsletter for a while and always find insightful links and information there. So I'm very excited to talk with you. For folks who might not know you, would you mind please, introducing yourself? About Patrick Patrick: Sure. Thats always a... it probably shouldn't be, but it's always a bit of a hard question to answer. I've started using "generalist" which I kind of resisted doing for awhile, but that's ... like my Twitter bio is "Generalist, Synthesist and Curator," and that's probably the best description. I've worked in a number of fields, and I realized a little while ago that the red thread connecting everything, was that I always ended up figuring stuff out and explaining it to others. Even when I was a front-end web developer, it was often the fact that I could explain to the client, and if I was working with others, explain across their disciplines. Like, of course the actual craft, if you will, of the front end was of course part of the contract, but kind of the selling point or that people would refer me to was the fact that I could explain it and kind of make sense of what we were going to build. And then that transferred into a print magazine, "The Alpine Review," and I liked doing that so much that even though we closed it down or put it in a deep freeze, I try to recreate that experience with my newsletter. Jorge: I love the three terms: generalist, synthesist and curator. It reminds me of a phrase that I believe was coined by Stewart Brand to describe Brian Eno. He said that Eno is a "drifting clarifier." Patrick: Whoa! That's nice. Jorge: And your trajectory here reminds me of that. Yeah, Sentiers is the newsletter I was referring to when we kicked off the conversation. Tell us a bit more about that. What's the newsletter about? Sentiers Patrick: There's kind of the... the official description and the real description. The real description would probably be, "anything that Patrick finds interesting." The kind of official description is, "exploring technology and society, signals of change, and prospective futures." Which... like, "technology and society." Technology permeates so much of the world in a growing number of areas that you end up being able to talk about anything if you look at technology very broadly. And "signals of change." There's so many things changing that that also brings you to many topics. And I try to — more and more — to make sense of it with an eye to where we're going or where each topic might be going. Each field. But Sentiers is French for "paths," and the path is taking more importance in the curation in the last year or so. Jorge: I don't know if this distinction is emphasized in the French: I see "path" as a distinction to something like a road, right? Like where a path is more emergent. Patrick: Absolutely. Jorge: Is that a part of this? Like when I say that you're detecting signals for change, that to me implies that you're not dictating the path, you're somehow seeing it emerge. Is that fair? Patrick: Yes, absolutely. And I use, for example, as many of the people I read and learn from, I use future in plural — "Futures" — because they're always guesses at where things might be going or sometimes guesses that you're wishing for that direction, sometimes because you're dreading a certain direction. But there's definitely always different potentials. And one thing that I should have paid more attention before, but I'm paying more attention to now, is also the diversity of voices. So, some futures that we look at are already someone's present. Like climate change. In the Western side, we're starting to feel it, but some other people have been feeling it for years. Some technologies... so there's also that, someone's utopia is always someone else's dystopia. So, to always try to listen to a greater diversity of voices — and necessarily, as you do so, you realize that there's multiple potential directions and futures and paths. Picking the signals Jorge: How do you pick up the signals that you write about? Like, what are you paying attention to that leads you to elucidate the path? Patrick: It's layers. Layers upon layers of people I've discovered through the years, or publications. It's usually more individuals than specific publications. I've used Twitter. I think I'm user 6,000- something of Twitter. So I've been there for a while and using RSS for even longer. So, it's, adding and replacing people as I go and feel, "okay, this person is... I realize now, was too naive about technology or too positive" or, on the contrary, "this person has evolved in their thinking and introduced me to this other person." And so I try to build this network, I guess, of people I'm listening to. And also using The Alpine Review before and Sentiers now to a lesser degree perhaps, but to introduce myself to those people and then to also pick up on their networks and be part of the discussions and get a better feeling for what's going on. And then, being... I was going to say "too curious" — but being very curious about a number of topics, and adding them to the number of things I follow. Jorge: That brings me to another question I had for you, which is this idea of spotting signals for change and another idea that I think is implicit in that, which is kind of spotting patterns, right? Like in order to detect change, we have to somehow be aware of the trajectory of something or the pattern of something, or having a sense for the context. You've hinted at the fact that you've been doing this for a while; like you said, you were an early Twitter user and you've been following things like RSS. And I would imagine that you have a way not just of detecting signals, but also of building a corpus of ideas somehow, that allows you to keep track of those patterns. That allow you to spot the signal from the noise. And first, I was wondering if that was the case and if so, if you could share with us what that looks like. Patrick: It's the case and it's been more purposeful in the last few years. It used to be, I guess, just piles of magazines when I was selling computers before starting the web. And then when I started doing web development, a series of bookmarks and bookmarks, and then quickly blogging, which then... it's only recently that I've been specifically taking notes to refer to later. Originally, the notes were more blogging publicly, and then as you write something, it sticks in your mind. And so for a while, the library was mostly in my mind and in the blog. And then as... I guess it's starting with The Alpine Review, as we needed to collaborate and to keep track of whom we wanted to include, it needed to be more documented. And then, yeah! Then Sentiers becomes a great... often even for some clients, I'll just first go through the archives of the newsletter and re-find everything I've found before and compile it in a different way or see new patterns. And now more recently with the new website, the goal is to integrate the website with my note taking and my reading in Instapaper often and kind of having the information flow more directly so that I can take more notes more easily. And I was going to say, "trust my brain a little less," but I guess it's more expand my — augment — my brain more purposefully. Personal knowledge management Jorge: I actually wanted to find out more about that because as someone who publishes a newsletter myself, I have found myself doing what you're talking about here, which is thinking, "oh, I remember writing about that in my newsletter. And where was that?" And I send out my newsletter through MailChimp, which creates a web version for each issue of the newsletter and that is published elsewhere, right? Like it's in a different place than my regular website, so I can't search for it using the same search engine and it's almost like suddenly I have this separate set of information that I need to refer to. And I have the sense that you've recently made changes specifically to the relationship between content on your newsletter and content on your website. Can you tell us more about that project specifically? Patrick: Sure. Well, one of my interests that isn't often in the newsletter, but that is an ongoing interest is with PKM or "personal knowledge management." And finding ways to find again. Because I think people trust search engines a lot, but it's hard to search Google for, "this guy I remember seeing on Twitter was talking about this thing." So, I try to make the haystack smaller, and the longest going tool I have is using Pinboard, the bookmarking service that Maciej Ceglowski started after Delicious started.... I'm going back — just a lot of people won't recognize those tools. But one of the interesting things of Pinboard is that if you're a paying member, it archives the pages. So, first of all, you don't lose something you've bookmarked that suddenly disappears. And also you can do a full text search of only what you've bookmarked. So, to me, that's a much smaller haystack to search and I'll often find things through there quicker than trying to find it again with a search engine. But that wasn't linked to my note taking. So, when I write the newsletter, I write it to the text file in Markdown, and then I convert it to HTML and put it in MailChimp. So, when I say that I searched the archives of the newsletter, it was always the text files that I have on my computer. So, often to look for something, I would look at the bookmarks and I would look at the newsletter. So, now I've tried to connect all of those things. The website used to be in WordPress, and now I've built it with Eleventy, which is a file based system. So it's not a database anymore, it's just, again, a bunch of text files. So without going into the details, or too much of the technical details, the interesting part is that the website now is a bunch of text files on my computer. And then when I want to publish a new version, it basically crunches that into an actual website and I just put it online. And it's... first of all, it's much, much quicker for readers. It's also much lighter. Because I'm trying be mindful of bandwidth and server usage because so many of those are using "dirty" electricity. So it's good if you can save on that side. But the first reason was that it's text files on my computer. now when I'm searching, everything is together. You tell me if I'm going too much in the weeds, but the other change is that now I'm using Readwise — readwise.io. And that allows you to connect the things you've highlighted in various places. And recently it started offering a sync with the text editor I'm using, which is Obsidian. So now... for years and years, I've been reading either in Pocket or Instapaper, two apps I think a lot of your listeners probably use. Now everything I highlight in there goes through with Readwise and straight into my notes, which don't necessarily make it on a website, but now it's... so there's more of a direct flow of everything I've read and the chunks I found interesting all end up in text files locally and can be oriented towards the website. Details about Patrick's setup Jorge: I'm hearing you say this and thinking, not only do I want to get into the weeds with you on this stuff, but, uh, I I'm afraid we're not going to have enough time to get as far into the weeds as I would like, because you've touched on several things that I've been exploring myself. I have been contemplating making this very same move that you're describing — going from WordPress to what is often called a static site generator. And for many of the same reasons you're pointing out here, I would love to have my site as text files — as Markdown specifically, which I use as well. And I recently posted about this on Twitter and a lot of folks came back to me recommending Eleventy, so it's one that is very much on my radar. I'm wondering about what you might lose by doing such a transition. And I can tell you two things that I'm aware of, that I would lose for my own instance. One is that WordPress provides a pretty good site search, which I don't believe static sites have. And the other is, WordPress provides the ability for me to preschedule posts. So, I can write something and say... say on a Monday morning and leave it so that it's published on a Tuesday afternoon, right? Are you dealing with those in any way? Is that an issue? Patrick: Yeah. Those are pretty much the two issues. You've hit the two issues directly. The search, of course people can be unhappy and not tell me, but I haven't had any people telling me that they miss the search engine. Although I did include one, but it's... it basically searches DuckDuckGo, by specifying my website. And so it gives a result only on the website. It's been working pretty good. There are a couple of solutions to do web searches on a static website. But it mostly ends up being work done on the client's side. So, in the reader's browser and so I haven't implemented that yet. The scheduling is more of an issue than I thought because like my newsletter goes out at 6:00 AM every Sunday. And I try to have it online exactly at the same time as the email goes out for people who want to read it online and share it. So that's... it connects to the biggest issue, which is... it's a lot more technical to run a site like that than it is to run WordPress. WordPress, you can just go on wordpress.com and create a blog and even have it on your own domain and you have nothing to do basically, other than use the interface, which is very broadly known already. A huge number of people have used it for themselves or at work or somewhere else. And so this is... it's harder. But I figured out the way. It's like, I'm actually... I'm getting back from vacation and there's one going out on Sunday, and it's going to be the first one using the new automation to put it online at 6:00 AM. It's basically, it's... it's going back to the command line. It's having rsync and a cronjob running on the server. That could probably be done some other ways, but I found that that's actually... because the way I've built the new version is that my newsletter is usually four or five featured articles that I have a summary and comment on. So each of those has been split, so each newsletter has become at least five chunks — five notes. And I might issue 184, so it can take a while to transfer the whole thing. So automating it that way is a timesaver. Jorge: That's very encouraging. And I'm kind of desperately trying to make more time to experiment more with these things because I do find very appealing the idea that at the other end of this, you end up with this more consolidated, personal knowledge management base that you use... you used that phrase, PKM, right? And, I find the idea of having it as a set of text files on my file system very compelling. You touched on Obsidian, which is another tool that I've been recently migrating to. I am using Readwise and I was not aware that they had enabled Obsidian sync, so I'm very excited. Now I'm like thinking... it's like the moment that we hang up here, I'm going to go experiment with that. Patrick: I think it's been active for like five days. So it's a really, really new feature. Obsidian Jorge: That's amazing. I was using it with Roam, to sync my highlights from Kindle and Instapaper and all these other things, sync them over to Roam. But, it's very exciting to hear that they've enabled Obsidian sync. How are you using Obsidian? I'm curious. How does it play into this workflow? Patrick: I'm hoping to transition completely to it. Right now, I 've used Bear for a few years, which is also in Markdown, but it's very visually polished, so it's fun to use and it syncs between phone and iPad and laptop. And it's Markdown that can be exported in Markdown, but when it's stored, it's not Markdown. It's in a proprietary database. So that was one of the things that kind of bugged me. Although I would have kept using Bear if not for Obsidian and the fact that it's pure text and you can actually open any folder with Markdown files. Open it in Obsidian and it becomes a bunch of notes and you can do back linking between the notes so that... because we often use links, but only in one direction. So, when you get to the destination, the destination doesn't display in any way where you came from, unless you're staying on the same website, then there's an indication. But if you're going from site to site, you don't know. And you don't know who else might have linked to that same page. And so with backlinks or bidirectional links would be another term, then you know at least within the corpus of your notes, which links to which -which has been in Wikis for forever, and which we even had on blogs 15 years ago with trackbacks which is coming back now with digital gardens which is kind of a personal Wiki. And Obsidian supports that. And I found a way to have them work in Obsidian and when their live on my website in the same way. And so, I'm still using Bear because it's kind of my reflex to go to those files and client notes and articles in the works are all in there, but I'm trying to switch more and more of them to Obsidian which is so far a great surprise because it's very modular. There's a hundreds of plugins, and so far I haven't seen it slow down. I've been wary of activating too many but so far it's super fast. So, I'm very encouraged, up to this point, and the advantage is of course, is that I have nothing to do if at some point they start... or they stop developing it. The app is local, the files are local... everything keeps working. Jorge: This idea of digital gardening is something that I am very interested in and we had earlier this year another guest on their show, Kourosh Dini, talking about the use of a tool called DEVONthink, which is designed for this type of personal knowledge management. And I mention it because DEVONthink too allows you to monitor folders on your computer and it indexes them and builds... it uses an artificial intelligence engine, and I don't know the details of how this works, but it uses AI to spot relationships between pieces of content in your computer. And I have been using Obsidian. My Obsidian folder with Markdown files, I'm indexing it with DevonThink. So building this bridge between the stuff that I have in Markdown there with things like PDFs and bookmarks and all this other stuff, and it just feels like... for me, it feels like my little personal knowledge management system, which has been scattered for a long time, is finally starting to come together with these more open tools. It's really exciting. Patrick: Yeah. It's... I was going to say the less exciting thing is the fact that we have to go back to old formats to get back that open function. Like Markdown files have been around forever and they're text files, which has literally been forever for computers and PDF is also a very old standard. But it's great to have that. I wasn't aware of that function by DEVONthink so I'm going to have to try it. I've actually... I've been doing some cleaning of stuff on my computer and I've been putting PDFs in Keep It and I've actually grabbed again, some old email archives that I'd archived to make the mail app snappier again. And I've put them in EagleFiler, which are both kind of... they both do the same thing you were explaining about DEVONthink, which is they do some search optimization and tagging and stuff, but the files remained in the finder and just on the Mac file system. So, but maybe I'm... after doing the cleanup, I'm just going to have to switch over to DEVONthink or add DEVONthink, because basically since it's indexing existing folders, that's the duty of it, you could have 10 applications doing different work on the same files. Jorge: Yeah, that's what I'm finding as well. I've stopped obsessing with the idea of trying to bring everything together into a single homogeneous system and more trying to find tools that are open about the data that they use so that you can get different perspectives on your information. And I can relate to this challenge you were talking about — the challenge of migrating stuff that you've had in more proprietary formats for awhile. We're coming close to the end of our time together — unfortunately, because there are so many more weedy areas of this that I would like to explore or with you. But I'm wondering what the future holds for what you're doing with Sentiers and how you see your system evolving. Evolving the system Patrick: Well, one of the main reason I was able to spend time doing that was that I used a grant by Grant for the Web, which is a project by the Interledger Foundation. We do web monetization. And a lot of the words they use sound like blockchain, but it's not actually. It can be related to the blockchain, but it's not. And they're basically developing a standard that they want to be accepted by the W3C, to be able to stream money to the website where you're spending time. And so the way I presented the project is that I'm already somewhat monetizing. I don't like that word that much, but that's... with memberships, paid memberships, but the archives and that's the case for most anyone doing those kinds of like... another word I dislike but the "creator economy." Often, their archives just fall by the wayside. So, that was a way of keeping the archives evolving and accessible and useful for readers and having the web monetization work underneath and possibly be a new revenue stream. And the other reason is that by making it text files, they can be on GitHub. And that's kind of... a lot of people have spoken about it with digital gardens, but not many have actually opened it. And I haven't found a way yet to do it — a way I'd be satisfied with. But potentially having people participate in the notes and appearing on the website would be something interesting that could be done with GitHub. And so the goal is to... it's kind of a forcing function for myself to note things beyond just highlighting in articles which then become notes that don't necessarily make it in the magazine because they're not necessarily interesting to read in themselves, but they can be super useful as you're browsing through different notes and adding context to something and adding to the topic. So, growing the notes, making it potentially a revenue source. The nice thing about this system is that if people are spending a lot of time, it means it's useful for them. So then it's a great way to transform it into a source of revenue because you're not forcing anything. They're just using it then. And then potentially bring in people on... I don't know if it would be specific contributors? If it would be a way of, for example, you and I joining some of our notes, or something else that's not... that's kind of on the roadmap, but not planned yet as to how it would happen. But that's another of the ways I hope to use it. Closing Jorge: That all sounds so fascinating. I would love to check in with you sometime in the future when this stuff has developed more just to see how that is going. But for now, where can folks find out more about you and follow your work? Patrick: The simplest is the newsletter, which is santiers.media. So sentiers.media. Or @inevernu on Twitter. And on the Sentiers website you can subscribe, and you can also look at what we've been talking about. So, how the notes connect together and so far, it's a lot, the existing archive. It hasn't been digital garden-ized as much as I would've liked, but I'm adding to it constantly. So yeah, those are the two... and I write the articles about monthly. So there's the newsletter, but there's also some articles to read. Jorge: Fantastic. I will post links to all of those things in the show notes. I want to thank you for being here and thank you for your work because like I said, I learn a lot from the work that you're doing. So thank you for sharing it with us, Patrick. Patrick: Thanks! Thanks for saying that and thanks alot for inviting me! It's been fun. It's always fun to discuss what you've been working on. It's sometimes bring us a different perspective as you're answering. So, it's always useful. Jorge: I hope that we can do it again sometime. Patrick: Sure.

This week on the podcast we tackle Gravel Bike Fit 101. Randall interviews Coach and Fitter Patrick Carey about the fundamentals of fit with key takeaways for every rider.  Patrick / Speed Science Coaching Website  The Ridership Support the podcast Automated Transcription (please excuse the typos): BikeFit 101 with Coach Patrick Carey [00:00:00] Randall: Hello and welcome to the gravel ride podcast. I'm Randall Jacobs, and today I'm joined by Patrick Carey. Patrick was on the pod with us in February of 2021. Craig and him had a conversation about the five skills every gravel cyclist needs to master.  [00:00:17] Patrick wears a few different hats. He is the founder of speed science coaching. He does full-time training for cyclists and endurance athletes. He's a skills coach with Lee Likes Bikes and Ride Logic, and he travels all over the country, teaching bike skills. He is an SICI. I train bike fitter and their approach is very much integrating some of the thinking from the medical and physical therapy fields into bike fitting. And in a previous lifetime, he was a mechanical engineer, so he really understands how mechanical systems work, including, biomechanics. [00:00:45] Before we get started. I'd like to remind you that if you'd like to support the podcast, there are a few different ways you can do so. Firstly, you can go to buymeacoffee.com/thegravelride and make a donation or become a recurring supporter. [00:00:58] All proceeds, go directly to Craig and offset his costs in producing the pod. Secondly, you can join The Ridership and contribute to the conversations that are happening there.  [00:01:06] And lastly, if you'd like to support the work that I do, thesis currently has a limited number of build kits for complete bikes for delivery this fall. If you're a friend you're interested now, it'd be a great time to schedule a consult so we can work together to create the perfect spec for your unique fit, fitness and terrain.  [00:01:21] And with that, Patrick, welcome back to the podcast.  [00:01:24] Patrick: Hey, thank you. I'm so happy to be back. This is going to be a lot of fun. [00:01:27] Randall: Yeah, this is a conversation I've been wanting to have with you for quite some time. So let's just dive right in. How do we even define a good bike fit?  [00:01:34] Patrick: I think that's a great place to start. My take is that every good bike fit starts with the bike fitting the rider, not the other way around. And unfortunately, oftentimes what happens is people are shoehorned onto their bikes and that's really the opposite of what we want to happen.  [00:01:50] We want to set every bike up for each rider so that the rider just naturally falls into position on the bike. There's no pain points. You're not running into impingements and you're also not contorting yourself in any way you're not overreaching. You're not bending your wrist some awkward way, and in that same idea, if something hurts when you ride your bike, it's not right. Don't ever let someone tell you "oh, that's just how riding a bike is. It's supposed to be a little uncomfortable". No, it's supposed to be joyful and it's supposed to be wonderful. And when you get your bike set up correctly for you, it can be that.  [00:02:25] Randall: This is very much aligned with what I often talk about. We're not creating a bicycle. We're creating a cyborg. And the interface between the animal and the machine is how you achieve that. Let's dive in even further. So different approaches to fit.  [00:02:37] Patrick: Probably what most people have been used to it's the throw a leg over it approach.  [00:02:41] You literally stand over the bike. If you can clear the top tube, that's probably a good place. And then, when you throw the word fit in there usually what ends up happening is, you eyeball the saddle height, the stem maybe, gets flipped. It probably does not get changed. And then also, a lot of that is relying on fit charts, right? So bike companies put out the fit charts that says if you're five, seven, you should be on this size bike. If you're five, 10, you should be on the size bike. And I personally believe that very often, unfortunately, results in people being on the wrong sized bike. Typically a bike that's too big.  [00:03:17] Which means that they are overreaching on that bike and you ended up chasing the front end of the bike. So the front end become somewhat fixed in space and you can always shorten the stem so much. So then that rider ends up being shoved way, way forward on the bike. And yeah, bikes are meant to create enjoyment. This takes away from it. [00:03:35] Randall: And when you go with too short of a stem. It does take some of the mass off the front axle. So for say high-speed canyon carving that front end is not gonna feel as planted. Works fine. Say for gravel. But in a road application, it can really make the bike feel vague upfront. So it's this handling issue as well.  [00:03:53] Patrick: It can work okay for gravel, I think one of the beauties of gravel bikes is their versatility. [00:03:58] For me personally, I have a couple of dedicated cyclocross race bikes, mostly because they're the ones that I blast with a pressure washer after every race. But my gravel bike has become my only other drop bar bike. I have wheel sets that I switch around so that I have a set of road tires a set of gravel tires.  [00:04:14] But that bike has amazing versatility. And so what you don't want to do is compromise the handling to a point where, okay, it feels good when you're sitting up going slow on a dirt road, but then boy, it feels nervous at speed, down that same dirt road or on pavement.  [00:04:28] Randall: Yeah. Let's keep going with this. So we have the throw the leg over it approach. What would be a better approach? Let's go soup throw nuts starting with a new machine. [00:04:36] Patrick: Okay. So if we call the throw leg over the approach the worst case scenario, the best case scenario as a coach and fitter would be to work with someone before they ever buy a bike. So work with the athlete and figure out first what they want to do with the bike. What their ideal setup would be, but then look at their body completely separate to the bike.  [00:04:55] First thing we would do is a functional movement screening. And this is something I do for any bike fit, where I'm actually looking at people's ranges of motion. I'm looking at any impingements they have. We're looking at their specific body proportions. [00:05:09] There's a great book called Bike Fit by a guy named Phil Burt, and he worked for many years with Team Great Britain, which is a pretty dominant force in the cycling world, and he starts the book off right away by saying that if you look at just average proportions and you define things off of average proportions, you're only catching about one third of the population you're catching the middle of the bell curve. So you're right away missing two thirds of the population. Okay. If you take that then into bike fit, if you just look at, say someone's height, that doesn't take into account their arm length that doesn't take into account their inseam versus their torso length.  [00:05:47] So that's really important to factor in any kind of bike fit and the beauty. When we're talking about this approach is that we can really factor that in because the next thing I would do after that functional movement screening is I would put someone on a fit cycle, which barely looks like a bike. Other than that, it has crank seat and handlebars, but it allows you to move those points in space in the X- Y axis, and that way you can adjust and find someone's ideal position, right? The position where they just fall right onto it. They're able to comfortably generate power. They're able to ride in that position for a really long time. And then we take that position. And we can now compare those points in space against actual bikes and come up with a list of bikes that fit them. So someone might come to me and say, I'm looking at these three different bikes, right?  [00:06:37] Either, they tick the boxes. I like the idea of them or they're available right in this day and age. And so then we can say, okay, this is the size for that particular bike. This is the size for that particular bike. And it's quite often they're not the same size, right? Because that sizing, as we will talk about a minute, that sizing is oftentimes misleading, meaningless, right? Doesn't refer to real measurements. So we're able to go by actual, stack, reach measurements like that. And then, depending on what someone wants to do, we can come up with a complete custom build all the way to their custom crank length bar with, everything, or they can buy a bike off the shelf and, we can say, okay, this is going to get us the closest possible, and then we're going to change the stem and that's going to get us there. Or maybe, for some particular proportion that you have, you really do need to change the bars or something like that. But that really would be best case scenario because now you're totally eliminating the risk of someone ending up on the wrong size bike from the start.  [00:07:41] Randall: Yeah. And fit cycles the most advanced ones, have quite a few degrees of freedom in terms of what you can adjust. Everything from crank length and Q factor and stance. And you can adjust all these variables in real time, as you're seeing the rider pedal and that ability to calibrate the machine to the rider and see the rider in motion is vastly superior to just having, static measurements and trying to graph them onto the bike. It's a good starting point, for sure, especially if you're trying to just select a bike and know if a bike is going to work at all, you could start that way, but going and getting this functional analysis, this analysis in motion is just next level. I can only go so far. For example, when I'm doing a bike consult for one of our bikes and I can get everyone, somebody the right frame size, crank length. Handlebar with and those types of parameters through asking some questions and having them take some measurements, but stem length I can't get for sure, because that's an output of all these other variables that need to be locked in first, the crank length, saddle height, saddle for- aft and so on. And then also I'm not able to see, what you had mentioned about their flexibility and looking at their physiology and then seeing them in motion.  [00:08:50] There really is no substitute for this sort of analysis with somebody with a scientific mindset and a lot of experience seeing lots of riders on bikes.  [00:08:59] Patrick: Absolutely. And this is probably some of the best money you could possibly spend. If you're going to make the investment in a bike. We're talking in the range of two to $300 probably is what a complete, pre- purchase fit like this would cost, and that's going to a professional fitter that has a fit cycle. That's going to spend.  [00:09:19] Upwards of a couple hours with you laying all this out. And then it's also going to be available to you to walk through the process of buying your bike. Because maybe you come up with some ideal setup and then. Ugh that bike's not available. So now you have to go back to the drawing board. That person will help you through that process.  [00:09:34] That is the best money you can spend because even if that represents a significant percentage of what you're going to spend in the total in the end, right? Like maybe you're going to, maybe you're going to spend. $1,500 or $2,000 on a bike. Spend $300 upfront and that bike will fit you better. You will enjoy it more. You will have it forever.  [00:09:54] As opposed to you don't spend that money, make a mistake on something and now it's never what it could have been.,  [00:10:02] And the other extreme of this is the person who spends a lot of money on their gear, gets the Aero wheels, the Aero helmet, and, carbon rail saddle, and all of these things that are really marginal gains at best. [00:10:13] A bike fit, it's not something that you can show off to your friends. It's not something where you can hand the bike off and have people pick it up and be like, Ooh, it's so light. It's so fancy. But it is this animal machine interface and having that just be as dialed as possible unlocks performance in a way that no components can. [00:10:32] Track 2: Absolutely. And I see all the time, I'm always at events, I travel around the country coaching and it's just so often it's actually rare for me to see a person who's bike is totally dialed for them. [00:10:42] I hate to say it, but it is rare. And I oftentimes see people are like, wow, like they would enjoy riding so much more, riding would be so much easier for them. Even if it's as simple as cut that stem length in half. You oftentimes see it, people have their seats slammed as far back in the rails as possible. And it's surprising. Sometimes it just ends up that way and they don't know any better or it came that way from the shop and they didn't know they could change it. And oftentimes you're talking about close to free as far as some of these changes. [00:11:13] Randall: Yeah. And if you have to spend a few bucks to swap a stem or something to get that dialed fit again, some of the best money you can spend.  [00:11:20] So we've talked about two extremes. One is how most people end up on the wrong size bike with the throw the leg over it approach the other is this really ground up clean slate sort of approach. But what if you already have a bike, how do we make that bike fit better?  [00:11:33] Track 2: Yes. And to be fair, this is probably 80 to 90% of the people that I work with as a fitter. And and this is also probably 90 plus percent of people out riding in the world. We're talking about, if you have a bike that is close to the right size for you, right? Maybe you could have split hairs and said that you should have a slightly smaller, slightly bigger bike, but this is how I work on a regular basis with riders as they come to me for this. We would confirm that bike is a close starting point. And I always use reach as that cornerstone. And reach in the sense of the stack and reach those two measurements to define where the top of your head tube is. That's the thing on a bike you can change the least, reach then affects where your front end is. And yes, you can absolutely can and should change stem length and amount of spacers above or below, or flip the stem, but. Compared to say saddle height, where you can telescope that seat post up and down a tremendous amount, reach actually is the least adjustable thing on the bike, your front end. So we would always start there.  [00:12:37] Randall: And how's reach measured. We should probably talk about that.  [00:12:39] Track 2: Oh, yeah. Thank you. So reach, if you were to take your bottom bracket, which is the spindle that your crank spin on, and if you draw a line vertically up from that, It would be a measurement from that line horizontally to the center of your top tube. And usually that oftentimes includes the headset cap as well. And then stack is if you measure up, it's where those meet. So it's how high the front end of your bike is above the bottom bracket. So that gives you X, Y coordinates for where your head tube is. That's your starting point.  [00:13:14] Randall: yeah. Center of the crank spindle vertically to the line that intersects with the height of the center of the headset bearing. And there's some other measurements out there that people will talk about virtual head tube. Seat tube. We've already debunked the idea of sizing being universal, but let's talk about that a little bit.  [00:13:30] Track 2: Oh, yes. I'm glad you brought that up.  [00:13:32] Used to be, years ago when we were talking about road and cyclocross right before what we now think of as gravel bikes, road bikes generally speaking had the exact same head angle and the exact same seat angle almost across the board. And you could use quote unquote standard sizing and before that bikes were also what they were called square, meaning the length of the seat tube and the length of the top tube were the same. Some were along the way in the last 20 years that has moved away. A lot of it is that there's no need to have the top tube cranked all the way up. We can get better stand over that way.  [00:14:10] But then bike companies have also been shifting around the angle of the seat tube. And so The horizontal top tube measurement can become a seriously misleading thing. If your seat tube is pressed way forward. It's going to create a shorter, horizontal top to measurement. If it's pushed way back, it'll make it longer.  [00:14:32] To make it even more confusing for riders, unfortunately, companies have clung to putting number sizing on their bikes, right? So they call a bike, a 54.  [00:14:43] Or a 56. And if you look at the actual measurement chart for that bike, or if you take a tape measure to that bike, it's not uncommon that nothing on that bike measures that dimension anymore. They call it virtual sizing. And unfortunately, I'll use myself for example, I'm five, 10, somewhere along the way. Someone told me that someone who's five, 10 belongs on a 56 centimeter bike. So for years and years, I was riding 56.  [00:15:11] And I could not understand why, no matter what I did with adjustments, I had all kinds of neck and shoulder discomfort. I'm talking tingling hands, right? All kinds of tension. And somewhere along the way I went, dammit like all this fit stuff, it's not actually correct. Some of this stuff is definitely outdated. And I got a 54 and lo and behold, it was super easy to get that bike to fit me well,  [00:15:35] So that's an important point for riders too. If someone told you in the past that you're a particular size, don't let that guide your future decisions.  [00:15:45] Randall: And I want to take a second to hit this from a different angle, and then I can cue you up. One of the things I also want to make clear to listeners that a lot of companies still use number sizing. They'll quote things like virtual top tube, or top tube length or seat tube length, all of these parameters can change without changing the reach, or the stack. And the reason why we use reach primarily, and then stack secondarily, is because these variables don't change. Even when you change the seat tube angles such that the seat tube angle is more slacked back, you could always run the saddle further up on the rails or flip the saddle clamp to allow a more forward saddle position and your points in space would be identical. So this is an important point that people really need to understand. All these numbers that are quoted, most of them are entirely irrelevant. reach most important stack is number two and then stand over just to make sure you have enough clearance. And that's really it. And the rest of it is really getting into how the bike will feel and perform and handle given how your points in space are grafted onto it.  [00:16:50] Does that resonate with you?  [00:16:51] Track 2: Absolutely. It does. Absolutely. It does. And one more thing that I see, we're finally moving away from it, but there was a period of time companies were making quote unquote women's geometry bikes. Because again, they were looking and saying if you look at the typical woman's proportions. Long legs, short torso. Longer arms. Okay. But if you look at the cross-section of the population, there are so many people that don't line up into that. And there's plenty of guys that line up into that.  [00:17:20] I think it's very important to not let labels cloud that don't say I'm a female, I must need a women's bike or I'm a guy I must. Luckily companies are actually abandoning a lot of that whole shrink it and pink it idea which I think a lot of people were really misserved by.  [00:17:38] I think that's super important. You are a human being. You are not a man, a woman, a six foot tall person. You're a human being and you have unique proportions that we can address by finding those right points in space. [00:17:50] Randall: Yeah, women's specific was much more of a marketing ploy than anything else.  [00:17:55] Track 2: Yes, that's all it was. And I'd like to say too. Most of it was defined by a bunch of six foot tall dudes, right? I always love when those people absolutely are convinced that they know the experience of a five foot two woman.  [00:18:09] Randall: Hmm.  [00:18:09] Track 2: Okay. Yeah.  [00:18:11] Randall: Yeah, I may have seen some of that behind the scenes.  [00:18:14] Let's continue on. What's next.  [00:18:17] Track 2: Okay. So if we said, okay, we've got the right size bike, we're in the ballpark. Now let's actually come up with a bit of an actionable list of steps. And this first one is probably gonna seem very counterintuitive because it doesn't have a lot to do with the bike. And that would be that your bike fit actually starts with your foot.  [00:18:34] If you think about it, you have five total touch points on the bike, right? Two hands, one, but two feet. Your feet are responsible for all your power transmission. Every time you stand up on the bike, they're bearing all your weight. So if we don't have proper support in the form of the correct shoes, and also support in the shoes, you may have issues that will never be addressed by any other part of the fit process. And on that, if you ever go to a bike fit and they don't look at your feet, they don't look at your shoes, they don't leave your cleat position, they just put you on the bike and start adjusting things, they missed a lot. And that's a question you can ask before you even go to a fit. What's your process. And if they don't talk about this, that should be a red flag.  [00:19:17] So first and foremost, if you were going to buy shoes, go to a shop, go to a brick and mortar shop. Ideally have your feet measured. If you remember the old Brannock device that we all used to get our feet measured as kids with. I still use one as a bike fitter. They make a Euro sizing Brannock devices.  [00:19:36] And that tells you the length of each foot and it tells you the width of each foot. So go to a shop and get the right size shoes. It's so common for me as a fitter to have people come and they've got shoes that are one, two sizes too big. And then they're crushing those shoes down to try and take slop away. It's putting the cleats in the wrong position. And then when I say, how did you arrive at these shoes? They say I bought them online, I tried to match my street shoe size. I bought them online.  [00:20:03] Don't do that. Go to a shop. Buy the shoes from that shop, pay them the money because they had the inventory there. They're providing you that service. [00:20:11] Randall: Yeah. you really need to try on the actual shoe and see if it is a good fit for your foot. The measurements may even work out, but it just doesn't feel right. And that is enough reason not to buy a shoe.  [00:20:22] Track 2: Absolutely. And some brands are higher or lower volume, a wider or narrower lasts. Yes. You want your foot to slide in. And the closure system is there to just do the final snugging. It's not there to. To crush the shoe around your foot.  [00:20:37] Randall: Great.  [00:20:38] Track 2: Yeah. And then just by carbon soles if you're going to ride clipless pedals where carbon soles it's only the lightest riders that can get away with either a carbon plate or a thermoplastic sole. You're talking about putting a lot of power transmission and a lot of force through a pretty small area with that pedal.  [00:20:57] It's just worth it. And they'll last longer. Sometimes the thermoplastic, so we'll be stiff enough to begin with. And then they will start to gain flex over time and over time, it'll feel like you're standing on golf balls. Because we're talking gravel. Some riders like using flat pedals and shoes.  [00:21:12] That works great. Everything we're going to talk about still applies. Use good pedals that have grippy pins. Metal pins and then aware of bike specific shoe, like a five 10 or something like that, because that shoe is actually going to be built in the same idea of transmitting power and supporting your weight. Not to mention, it's going to stick to the pedal. Now you've got these great shoes, right? You've spent real money on them. Don't cheap out here, spend if necessary, spend another, whatever it is, $40, something like that on proper insoles that support your whole foot. If you look at how our feet are made to move, our feet are built not for bike shoes. Feet are built for running, walking. Where you would, your foot would naturally pronate. And I think of that as you would land on the outside of your heel and your foot is going to roll across and your arch is going to flatten as you leave off your big toe.  [00:22:04] That's just normal pronation. That's how our feet are built to move. The problem is on a bike you're in a constrained plane of motion and if your arch collapses, what ends up happening is now your ankle collapses to the inside your knee, collapses to the inside. Sometimes that can translate all the way up to your hips, and a tremendous amount of discomfort that people have is just simply because maybe they have higher arches and they don't have high arch insoles.  [00:22:30] Randall: And just as a sidebar here this is often the source of a lot of pain and repeated stress injuries. So to the meniscus or to the IT bands or what have you. So this is a an issue that I used to have, and I tried everything I could, but there are other parameters of the bike. And finally, I got some custom insoles made and everything aligned. [00:22:50] Track 2: And I bet you've had those insoles forever, too. [00:22:52] Randall: Coming up on 13 years.  [00:22:54] Track 2: There you go. So they probably an expensive investment to begin with, but man, they've changed riding for you over the  [00:22:59] Randall: Yeah, I even run within souls and it makes a world of difference.  [00:23:02] Track 2: Same here. And so just to put a bow on, that if you pull a rider's insoles out and marks individual marks from their toes that means that they're calling inside the shoe to try and create stability. That can be solved with proper insoles. Sometimes people have a verus twist to their forefoot. I think I forget what the percentage is. It's approaching half the population has this. I certainly do. And so I put a very thin angled shim under my forefoot. Inside the shoe between the shoe and the insole. And the goal here between all of that is to create so much support for your foot, that you pushed down through the entire sole of your foot. And there's no arch movement.  [00:23:41] Everything can just move smoothly. You don't want any kind of tension in the foot, the ankle, the knee to try and stabilize that motion.  [00:23:50] Randall: So we've talked about shoes. We've talked about insoles. What's next.  [00:23:53] Track 2: And now the last part of that is how does that connect to the bike. So cleats and pedals. If I had to put money on what I'm going to see when someone comes to me for a fit, it almost always includes that their cleats are slid too far forward. We're typically talking about mountain bike shoes for people riding on gravel, so if you look at the underside of your shoes, there's two sets of threaded holes for whatever reason most people put their cleats in the front set of holes and then they might even be slid forward from there because there is some sliding adjustment. If you want a catch all for the easiest thing to do, put them in the rear set of holes and slide them all the way back.  [00:24:29] They're very few shoes that actually have adjustment ranges that will allow you to put it back further than is comfortable. And you'll know that you're feel like you're peddling behind the ball of your foot. But even in that case, there's no downside to pedaling from a midfoot position.  [00:24:44] But there are a lot of downsides to pedaling with the cleat towards your toes. If you think about it, you don't walk upstairs by putting the tips of your toes on the stairs. Cause that would add all kinds of tension to your calf, just to be able to walk up the stairs. So why do we want to pedal from the front of our foot where we're going to have to tense our calf and our ankle with every single pedal stroke.  [00:25:07] It's amazing oftentimes just by moving someone's cleats you'll they'll have a history of calf cramps. Just go away.  [00:25:15] Randall: Or tendonitis in the Achilles, which was an issue that I had until I made that adjustment all those years ago.  [00:25:21] Track 2: Yup. Absolutely.  [00:25:23] Randall: I'd add in addition, this is really why getting the right size shoe is so critical because if you have a shoe that's too big, you're not going to have sufficient rearward adjustability in that clique in order to get this optimal position.  [00:25:34] Track 2: Absolutely the longer your shoe is the further forward those cleats go and you can't get them back far enough. And then the last part is the pedals themselves. this is this pretty simple, I always recommend people onto an SPD style nothing wrong with the others that are out there. But the reason that I do, if you look at either the Shimano XT or the XTR pedals, and I have no affiliation with them  [00:25:57] They have these two small machined areas on either side of the mechanism on the pedal itself. Those are for the tread of your shoe to sit on. So you actually get a massive amount of contact area. I don't even ride road pedals anymore. Again, I said my gravel bike is my only drop bar bike, but I'll go on 200 kilometer rides with my SPD pedals. Because you're getting such a big bearing surface. It's like you have a big road clean. You're essentially getting the best of both worlds. [00:26:27] Randall: Yeah, I definitely second that the SPD style with a bigger platform to interface with the tread of the shoe is really the way to go. I could see some opportunities to improve on that, but maybe that's something that I explore in the future.  [00:26:40] Track 2: I would love to see that. Okay. So those things aren't going to feel like they're super connected, but if you miss that, you're going to have potentially knees wobbling all over the place. You're going to have all kinds of little problems that you may never be able to chase out otherwise. So let's come up with an actionable list as far as what would that process look like? This is something you can do at home.  [00:27:03] The very first thing to do would be get your rough satellite correct. In my fit studio, I use motion capture software. I use angle measurement device. I do all kinds of things. All of those line up with the heel method where you need to be balanced against a wall or even better on fixed trainer, but the idea is. Be in the saddle and unclip from your pedal. And now push the pedal all the way till it's at its furthest point away from you at the bottom of the stroke and with a totally straight leg, your heel should just be making contact with the pedal. If you're making firm contact your seat's too low, if you can't touch the pedal, your seat's too high.  [00:27:45] And when you get it in that range, what happens is when you bring your foot back to the ball of your foot's on the pedal, you end up with a pretty nice knee bend. So that's a really good starting point. And depending on your flexibility, you can adjust up and down from there, but it's pretty darn easy for anybody to get their saddle correct that way.  [00:28:04] Randall: Yeah. I'd like to add to this that it can be good to say backpedal and make sure one, you don't have any leg length discrepancies, but also that you're not rocking your hips or otherwise reaching While you're doing that one legged check. So backpedaling we'll help you to ensure that you really got that dialed as well as possible given the method being used. There's another way that this can be done that I often use in virtual fits, which would be the 92% of barefoot inseam. Again, this isn't gospel. This is just a starting point for getting the appropriate saddle height.  [00:28:35] But in this case, barefoot against a wall jam, a hardcover book between your legs firmly so it bumps right up against the bottom of your pelvis, make sure it's square and then take that measurement. and 92% of that would be a rough approximate saddle height.  [00:28:48] Track 2: Where would you measure that satellite from, and to when you translated that to the bike? [00:28:52] Randall: So center of the crank spindle, along the seat tube to the top of the saddle. Now as you can see depending on whether the fat saddles more four or more AFT, it's going to change the effective distance to the sit bones, right? So it's not a perfect method. It's no substitute for actually going to a fitter, but it gets us in the ballpark in the same way that the bare foot inseam does and combining these two methods, one can have a nice checking effect on the other.  [00:29:20] Track 2: I totally agree. And then we're going to talk about some things too, that should hopefully help you tune in from that standpoint? As far as okay. If I'm experiencing this, what do I do?  [00:29:29] So the next step, once we've got the rough satellite, we would want to set rough draft. And if you're doing to the measurement that Randall mentioned, you probably want to do this first. So that, that way you're setting to the same point. Years ago. I'm thinking late nineties, early two thousands timeframe, essentially all the leading minds and fitting. Had this idea that we wanted our saddles as far backwards as we could get them so that we would be able to bear all of our weight on the saddle. And this is a case of where they were thinking in terms of physics, not biomechanics.  [00:30:03] That really is outdated. What ends up happening is you're pulling your hips back and you're closing up the angle between your thigh and your torso. Most people don't have phenomenal hip flexibility. And what ends up happening is if you're pushing yourself into the back seat like that, you're closing that angle up and you run out of your active range of motion.  [00:30:26] And you end up now starting to stretch your hips with every pedal stroke. And if you've been behind a rider and maybe you've experienced this yourself, but it's easier to see it on someone else. If you're riding behind someone down the road and you watch their knee come out to the side with every pedal stroke.  [00:30:43] That's their hip angle being too closed up. Now it could either be that their saddles too low, or what I see very often is that their saddle is too far back. [00:30:52] So if we want a good starting point. Start in the middle of the rails. But be mindful too, of how much setback your seat post has. If you have a seat post with, say 15 to 20 millimeters or setback, you may have to set your starting point pushed forward. I'm finding more and more.  [00:31:09] That that most riders are best served with a zero setback seatpost, and when you have that, now the saddle generally falls right in the middle of the rails. Okay, so next step, as you're doing this, don't stress out over your knee- over pedal spindle. One it's pretty darn hard to measure yourself, but two, if you use that as a guiding principle, it will oftentimes push you back too far. And you'll, again, end up with those hip impingement issues. I measure knee over pedal spindle at the end of a bike fit, but I don't drive the fit around it. Whereas years ago you would set everything using that.  [00:31:45] Randall: And using and doing it in a way that actually ended up putting more strain on the front of the knee. Used to be you would take a plumb Bob from the front of that bony protuberance just below the knee cap and wanted that to go directly through the center of the pedal spindle. that puts more strain on the front of the knee. The newer thinking on this, which is something I've adopted long ago. And I use in my remote fits is a slightly higher and more forward saddle position opens up the hip, and that ends up putting more of the center of the joint over the center of the spindle. Not that it has to be perfectly there, but that more forward position ends up seeming biomechanically more sound, more comfortable or efficient.  [00:32:26] Track 2: Absolutely. And it's, and you're just, you're running into these impingements so much less, so it's much easier to get the pedal over the top of the stroke. It's much easier to get into the downstroke, the power stroke. And we want no dead spots in the peddling. And we don't want to be creating them with some of these artifacts of fit.  [00:32:43] And then as far as where your knees are tracking, I mentioned before knees flicking out to the side, that's usually a saddle that's too low or too far back. If your knees are diving to the inside, that's usually Back to support inside your shoes. But don't chase those things with side, decide adjustments on the bike.  [00:33:04] Certainly never use adjustments in your cleats to try and constrain your body into a certain path of motion. And on that same idea. We all have a natural stance. Some people their toes are pointed out when they're just standing. Some people, their toes are pointed in. There's no good, bad, right wrong there.  [00:33:24] Unless you're trying to force yourself out of that natural stance. So don't say okay, I'm naturally a little bit of a pigeon toed, so I'm going to try and crank my cleats or my adjustment to try and straighten that out on the bike. That's the worst thing you can do, because that is how your body was built.  [00:33:41] That's okay. And don't let people say, oh, your heels need to track behind your toes. No, your body needs to track how it naturally does. [00:33:49] Randall: Yeah. And forcing it is really where injuries come into play.  [00:33:53] And so having your cleats dials right into the center of the float for that cleat pedal system is ideal. There should be no restrictions whatsoever in your natural motion is essentially what you're getting at there.  [00:34:06] Track 2: Okay. We've got the saddle in the right spot. So we'll move on to the front end. And this will set the rough handlebar position. And this is the thing it's. It's very difficult to do by feel yourself. It's much easier if you say film it or have someone take pictures or help you eyeball these things.  [00:34:25] What you on the bike? Them standing there. In the terms of our goal for upper body position. No matter how high or low your front end is, we want to get about a 90 degree angle between your upper arm and your torso. Within a gentle bend at the elbows. When you do that, you end up naturally bearing your weight so that your shoulders are being pushed back, your shoulder blades are being pushed together.  [00:34:52] This carries your weight really comfortably. You don't have to have tension. You don't have to to engage muscles, to hold yourself there. One of the most common ways I see people go wrong here. Is that if you're feeling, say discomfort in your hands or your shoulders or your neck, They will shorten up their reach and they will sit themselves up higher. And the idea is we're going to get more weight on the saddle. We're going to get weight off our hands.  [00:35:19] The problem is not weight in your hands. The problem is how you're carrying that weight. And when you close up that angle between the upper arm and the torso, right? When you take that from 90 degrees and you start shrinking that angle. Now if you picture your arms down more close to your sides, when you push up, push your elbow up.  [00:35:39] It's now hunching your shoulders. That's not a comfortable place to be. So what you end up doing is you tense your shoulders and your neck to hold your arms back down. And now try holding that for a couple hours at a time, through bumps and while you're always trying to stabilize a pedal.  [00:35:56] And so it becomes this losing battle. Oh, I still have a sore neck and shoulder, so I'm going to shorten it even more. And then it never goes away. In this case, don't be afraid to go a little longer and certainly don't be afraid to go lower. I very commonly lower riders front ends, especially if they've been playing this game, as far as trying to get away from that pressure. What ends up happening is when you move yourself into that position of carrying your arms, your upper arms at 90 degrees. From the torso, all your weight almost feels like it disappears. And if you were to do the physics free body diagram of it, there's more weight in your hands. There's more weight pushing through your arms, but biomechanically you're carrying it in the way your body was designed to carry it.  [00:36:42] Randall: And that in turn has an impact also on handling.  [00:36:46] Because one, if you're not comfortable, it's hard to handle the bike over a long duration ride. That's one thing. But then too, in terms of the planted ness of the front end, if you're constantly going. More and more upright taking mass off the front end. That can work in a straight line dirt descent, but if you're trying to plant the front end on a high-speed road turn, for example it's exactly the opposite effect that you want. So having your body balanced on the bike, so the bike can dance under you in a way that maintains optimal control is also something that comes into this fit component too.  [00:37:15] Track 2: Absolutely. And if I put on my bike skills, coach hat for a moment one thing that I see very often when riders sit too far upright, or they push themselves into the back seat, they extend their arms completely. And what ends up happening is when your arms are totally straight, you can't really lean the bike very well.  [00:37:33] You end up having to steer instead, and bikes really are not built to be steered. They're built to be leaned. And then the geometry of the bike takes over and does the appropriate amount of steering itself? So by getting a little bit lower and by getting a nice, comfortable, say, 15 degree bend in your arms, and also, then when it's now cornering time, get that little bit lower.  [00:37:57] You now have room to reach and lean the bike, which makes a massive difference in how confident the bike feels. And it will essentially, the way it would manifest itself is if your front wheel is constantly washing out on you, you're steering, not leaning.  [00:38:10] Randall: That's a great pointer. Let's continue here. So what else? What's next from here? [00:38:14] Track 2: Okay. So now when we're still on the bars There is an ideal angle for your handlebars, and there's an ideal angle for your hoods. And there are two independent things, meaning just because your bike came, with the hood set at a certain place, the hoods, meaning the shifter brake levers. Just because they came in a certain place and they're all taped up and beautiful and neatly packaged does not mean that someone was thinking about you when they set that up. Most of the time, those hoods are too far down, they're tip too far forward, and what ends up happening then is you have to cock your wrist downward. So it almost be like you're pointing your thumb downward and you're creating this pressure in your wrist.  [00:38:57] That is not something you want to be doing for hours on end. And when you're on gravel and you're handling bumps like that, man, that is not fun. It can result in a lot of discomfort.  [00:39:07] Randall: Or injury. There's a on the carpal bones at the base of the wrist.  [00:39:10] I've definitely made that mistake and had to rotate things back to, to alleviate it.  [00:39:15] Track 2: Yeah. So the, if you truly don't feel comfortable on taping your bars, you can roll the bars themselves back, but I'm here to tell you don't be scared of bar tape. It's it's very easy. You actually only have to untape as far as the hoses themselves. And then the hoods just have a simple band clamp that holds them in place.  [00:39:34] Bring them up to a point where you can put your hand just naturally falls right onto it.  [00:39:40] Don't want to have to cock it up down. What you'll also find too. It because it's now coming up a little bit more. You will have a far more secure grip on it. All of my drop our bikes, just by coincidence, have the SRAM hydraulic levers. They have a big horn on top, that can feel pretty secure. Most of the time. It feels like a joystick. When you have them tipped up like I'm talking about.  [00:40:02] But on say a Shimano lever that's got a much more subtle horn. When you're going down bumpy stuff, if you feel like your hands are slipping off the front of the hoods, this will make that go away because you'll bring it up to a place where you're actually catching the web of your hand in that.  [00:40:18] Randall: Yeah. And one thing I want to throw out for folks too, is that if you have an existing bike, If you're reaching in order to get your hands into that natural position on the hoods, if you're having to stretch and you find your hands sliding back when you are going in a straight line and relaxing that means your front end is probably too long.  [00:40:35] And so that would be one way to get some anecdotal indication that your stem length is off or some other fit parameter is off.  [00:40:43] Track 2: Yeah. I would absolutely agree with that. And I see that, like I mentioned, most people come to me on bikes that are on the big side for them. And then their hands, their happy place where they're hands naturally fall, was somewhere between 10 and 30 millimeters behind the hoods.  [00:40:59] So you want to adjust where your front end is using the stem. That way the web of your hand every time naturally falls right into the bend of the hood, where you're just naturally locked in there and you're not having to grab the hell out of the bars to have a good purchase on the bike. [00:41:15] Randall: Yeah. And you're not constantly moving your hands back on the bars to, to, get comfortable because the natural position is on those hoods. Cause they're positioned properly. Now. There are some other things that, that people can do to get a more dial fit. And I think especially for smaller riders, one of these things is crank length.  [00:41:32] Track 2: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Our traditional crank lengths. I'll just go out and say, if they're too long for most riders And the only reason that this stuff sticks around is because we have not as a community been asking the industry consistently enough for shorter stuff. that's really what it comes down to. And so people don't know that they should be on shorter cranks. I'll give a personal example. I just went down a three week rabbit hole, trying to find a set of 1 65 millimeter cranks for my mountain bike. Partly, I was trying to gain a little bit of clearance off the ground with it because it has a low bottom bracket, but mostly I was trying to smooth out my pedal stroke. And I'm someone, I'm five, 10. I literally am a professional writer. That's what I do for my living. I ride bikes and and yet I was finding that one 70 fives, even with decent flexibility, they were just too long for me.  [00:42:26] So I finally found one set and bought them. And man, it is like an instant difference. Pedal strokes, moved out, comfort increased. I can spin up faster. It's mind blowing.  [00:42:39] Randall: And I'm going to jump on this this soapbox with you for a moment and just say that. from my perspective crank length is the foundation of fit. Meaning you start with crank length in that circle, you get the foot position dialed, then you get your saddle position, dial and then you get your hands in the right position and that determines frame size and so on. But really that circle that you're spinning in is a key driver and should scale proportionally. Saddle height is a good proxy. So the ratio that we use is a 22%. Ratio of crank length to a properly set saddle height. And that works for the vast majority of people.  [00:43:14] Now some people will be concerned about, oh, I'm losing torque.  [00:43:16] Every five millimeters at that scale is only a 3% difference in torque, but at the same foot speed, your cadence is 3% higher. So you're not really losing power. Torque is not power. Torque is torque. It's a component of power.  [00:43:29] So really this is one of those areas that for riders of our scale, I'm writing one seventies, I think you're writing one 60 fives. It has some benefit. Are you on five 11? You're five, 10.  [00:43:40] But for smaller riders, especially a lot of component brands don't even offer anything below 1 65. So just finding something that is proportional scale, I do find it an entirely different vendor and then push them hard to create a whole new tool, to create a 1 55 length crank so that we could accommodate smaller riders properly. And that's really unfortunate because there's a pretty large market for riders who are, five foot. To five six that are not being taken care of currently by the market.  [00:44:08] Track 2: No. And unfortunately too, if you don't know any better, you just assume that the bike must come with the appropriate size. So in my coaching, I work with a lot of women and I work with a lot of women who happened to be on the petite side, in the five foot to five, four range. And we've had this conversation and they are very frustrated that their bike, an extra small bike is coming with 170 millimeter cranks. And actually, I was just working with one of my athletes this weekend and she was getting low back pain. And she notices that when she rides the pike with one seventies, she gets a low back pain when she rides pike with one sixties. And I'm sorry, not even one 60 fives. So tiny difference note and we have the Fitz dial. It's really just the matter of that, that longer crank really does push out beyond the natural range of motion. [00:44:57] Randall: Yeah. And this plays into gearing. If you're using a one by drive train, and you're concerned about the jumps if you're using a proportional crank, then you're able to spin at a wider range of cadences more comfortably. And so the concerns with jumps go away.  [00:45:09] Also when you're pulling your leg up to go over the top of the pedal stroke you're working against your glutes. And so if your crank links are too long, your glutes are pulling even more against you trying to get your foot over and thus impacting your power over time. So there's a lot of benefits that come from going with proportional and for the vast majority of people. Shorter cranks that I guess I'll step out, step off the soap box. At this point, we can move on to the next  [00:45:34] Track 2: No. What I appreciate though, there is like you put your money where your mouth is there on that. In that you actually did go out and develop short cranks, right? You were not satisfied with what was available. You spent considerable time and effort to go out and develop short cranks. Actually, when I was going down that rabbit hole, I was like, God, I should just put thesis cranks on my mountain bike. And the only reason I didn't was because the spindle would not be long enough to fit a boost mountain bike.  [00:45:58] Randall: Yeah, I believe FSA does a good job here that they recently released some shorter length crank. So if anyone's looking that might be a good place to start. And now hopefully other brands come around on this as well, because it's a place where a significant gains can be had. So what else would we like to wrap up with here in terms of fit considerations?  [00:46:14] Track 2: Yeah. Let's see. It. Even though it does not necessarily determine the geometry of your fit. I think a dropper post actually is a contributor to good fit. Reason being, if you're talking about a gravel bike that you want to be able to handle comfortably, in chunky terrain then.  [00:46:31] You don't want to run a lower saddle height all the time with a fixed post, just to have more comfortable handling. It's much better to have a dropper post that you can then push down to an even better position. But then the rest of the time, spin on an optical satellite.  [00:46:48] Randall: Yeah. I'll often tell folks who are concerned about the weight that you're adding say three quarter of a pound. to be less than half a percent. and you're gaining by having the appropriate saddle height. You're probably gaining more than that half a percent in terms of efficiency and comfort and the sustainability of being in a given position for a long period of time.  [00:47:07] And so it's one of those ways along with certain other, other things, wider rims and so on. Bigger tires were adding weight to your bike can actually improve your speed and your performance.  [00:47:18] Track 2: Unquestionably. Yup. I absolutely agree.  [00:47:21] Randall: How about saddles?  [00:47:22] Track 2: Yeah. Saddle shouldn't hurt, man. And I really mean this to female riders as well, because I think that oftentimes, some dude at a bike shop tells them yeah, it's just how it is. Your saddle hurts. No.  [00:47:36] Unquestionably no. And this is from also a medical standpoint too, and an injury standpoint. If you have discomfort that you are enduring for hours on end, that can lead to tissue damage, that can lead to blood vessel damage. No, to not do that.  [00:47:52] You don't have to spend a fortune on saddles. What you need to do is find one that works for you. And this is again, another place where your local bike shop can really come in handy.  [00:48:03] Saddle right. have demo fleets of saddles where say a company will send them one of every kind of saddle in every width, and you can take that saddle home and ride it for a few days and say, oh, okay. I like this, except it's not wide enough. I like this, except it's not padded enough or whatever those things are. And they can help you tune in so that you're not spending money only to find out that you don't like that.  [00:48:30] Randall: Yeah.  [00:48:30] Track 2: And just, oh my gosh, the seats that come on, a lot of bikes are oftentimes downright horrible. And do not assume that just because your bike came with a certain seat means that seat should be comfortable for you. This is a case of spend a few bucks and you will change your experience drastically. [00:48:48] Randall: Yes. And the other end here is that if you have a saddle that's not comfortable while it may not be the saddle, there's some adjustments. Some tilt adjustment in particular that may need to happen in order feed a, find your sweet spot on that saddle and the right angle and the like.  [00:49:03] Track 2: And those adjustments are really minor.  [00:49:05] When I'm doing fits, I actually use a digital level because you oftentimes can't see how fine the adjustments are required to make a change. I'm usually making about a half a degree change at a time. You cannot see a half a degree. If you're making adjustments by eye, you're probably oftentimes overshooting.  [00:49:23] Randall: Wide nose saddles. The specialized power was one of the first ones there. back  [00:49:42] There's a bunch of different ones out there that are using the same philosophy ours included. And these generally can work for a wide range of riders. And they got their start in the triathlon world where you're in that extreme position for a really long period of time. So comfort is that much more important there, but now you're seeing them adopted, in road, in, in cross and gravel and even in the mountain bike spheres.  [00:50:03] Track 2: Yeah. And to that point, I actually ride the exact same saddle on every one of my bikes. Once I found the right one that really works for me, I then put it on every single bike. And that includes mountain bike cyclocross. Gravel bike. Find the right one for you because it's out there. [00:50:19] Randall: What about someone's considering getting a new handlebar for whatever reason, maybe it's comfort or maybe they want to try a new flare so on how do they determine bar with.  [00:50:26] Track 2: Okay, so this is super common in the gravel world. I think the easiest way to think of it is you want to match your bars to your shoulder width. You can go wider, I would say up to about 20 millimeters. And that would be the measurement at the hoods, that would be your center to center measurement at the hoods. if you want to measure that, what you would do.  [00:50:46] Is put your hand on the outside of your shoulder and you'll feel like you're in soft tissue. And then work your way up, just creep your hand up until you come over and you'll feel all of a sudden, a bony protrusion, you'll feel where your arm goes in. And your shoulder bone comes out. Find that on either side. And have someone else measure that on you. you can't take this measurement by yourself. You want your bars to match that and they can be up to about 20 millimeters wider. [00:51:15] Now I'm sure you've seen all the fashion trends in gravel bars lately.  [00:51:21] But what's your take on that? [00:51:22] Randall: wider bars. Um, but But if you're looking for my philosophy with these bikes is I want a bike that is going to perform well on road.  [00:51:35] And on dirt. And I don't find that I have any handling deficits, even on the most technical dirt that I can tackle with my six 50 by 47 tires and dropper posts, which is some pretty rough terrain. And. What you gain from going wider is that you have more leverage. But if you are shifting your weight down and back over the rear axle and lightening up the front end while you're reducing the torque loads that are being applied through your steering column by the terrain as you're traversing it.  [00:52:05] And so really a dropper posts negates the need to go super wide there. But there were other considerations. Some people just prefer it. That's fine. Wider is better than too narrow is a problem. And then also if you're a bike packing and you want to have a huge bar bag up there that can be another consideration as well.  [00:52:20] Track 2: are coming in with really flared bars.  [00:52:27] I find that oftentimes those lead to more compromises than they than they help. And I'm talking about bars that are 15 to 25 degrees of flare what ends up happening with that? Or in the drops.  [00:52:46] But it's very difficult. And it requires a tremendous amount of iteration to try and get all of the positions on the bars, comfortable with those. And then it also, oftentimes even if you can get it there you're crushing your hands with the brake levers when you squeeze the breaks in the drops.  [00:53:02] My personal take, I'm riding bars that are 10 degree flared which is not insignificant. But I think that's about the the widest flare, you can go to have really natural use of all the positions on your bars. [00:53:14] Randall: Yeah. I'm with you there. All right in closing, anything that we didn't cover today that you want to bring up.  [00:53:19] Track 2: No, I think we went pretty deep. I hope this spurs a lot of thought and some questions in the community. And then, what I'd like to do is keep the conversation going. Let's all get better at this. together. And what's that's a big part of what's so cool about gravel is that, that growth in the community. Do what I say and you'll be happy. This is let's all learn together.  [00:53:45] Randall: Excellent. Can you take a moment, just tell folks where they can find you. [00:53:48] Track 2: I made it super simple recently. It's just coach patrick.bike. And so from there you can find all the different things that I do and and all the social links and you can interact with these super easily through that. [00:54:00] Randall: Yeah, this is the bike fitting. This is the coaching. This is the skills camps. And so on.  [00:54:05] Track 2: Absolutely. [00:54:05] Randall: Also Patrick is a member of the ridership, so if you have questions, you can definitely jump in there and we will have the episode posted in some conversation around that as well. So if you have questions or feedback on some of the things that we covered today would love to have you join us in that conversation. [00:54:18] Patrick, thank you very much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure chatting with you and catching up, and I look forward to seeing you this summer and hopefully revising my personal bike fit using your expertise.  [00:54:30] Track 2: Yeah. I think we're gonna be able to be together in a month or so. I'm really looking forward to that. [00:54:33] All right. My friend. Be well. [00:54:35] Track 2: you very much. Thank you. Thank you. 

Brands are facing fierce competition in this ever-evolving ecommerce landscape. More often than not, shoppers do a general product search on Google or Amazon, where hundreds, if not thousands, of brands fight for the sale. It’s a hard arena to win in, and every company is trying to find shortcuts and strategies to give them an edge.You’ve probably seen some of those strategies — for example, the products with a bunch of random SEO words jammed into the title so that the item appears higher in search. There are plenty more wacky Amazon tricks of the trade that brands have tried. Goal Zero is one of those brands trying to figure out the secret sauce but approaching it in a much different manner. Patrick Keller, Head of Marketing and Ecommerce at Goal Zero, may have finally solved the mystery — but the answer is not what you might be expecting.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Patrick tells us that there are a few key strategies to unlocking more conversions on Amazon, and how they view authenticity and increasing brand awareness.TLDR: it takes great messaging, some big bets, and a lot of long-term thinking. Oh, and some pretty cool products, too. Hear all the details on this episode! Main Takeaways:Always Be Iterating: Producing marketing material is not a cut-and-dry process. Define your target market, set KPIs, and establish a timeline, then create a system that lends itself to AB testing and iteration. Don’t be afraid to create assets and then break them into pieces to test in different ways. You’ll learn more about your customers and the market in general that way, which you can then expand on when you embark on larger campaigns.Dream Big: Taking bigger advertising risks with a long tail is often a good way to get more bang for your buck. By investing in large-scale projects with a cinematic quality, you have more of a chance to use that content for much longer and build brand awareness with a larger audience that might miss a one-off campaign.Consider This: Figuring out a way to bypass the consideration phase on Amazon is one of the big challenges facing brands today. Because of the amount of options Amazon shoppers are presented with, companies that might have converted easily on their own site are losing out on Amazon. Whether through influencers or targeted campaigns, building brand awareness and loyalty is one of the methods brands are using to start bypassing that consideration phase and actually convert more.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO over here at Mission.org. Today on the show we have Patrick Keller, Head of marketing and ecommerce at Goal Zero. Patrick, welcome to the show.Patrick:Hey, thanks for having me. It's fantastic to be here.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you on. I think I needed Goal Zero back in the snowstorm in Austin. So I'm in Austin, I forgot to tell you that. But we did not have power. We were struggling over here, and I did not have any products that I apparently needed. Now I went to Goal Zero's website, and I realized, this is all I needed. I just didn't know about it.Patrick:That's it. That's it.Stephanie:I'd love to start there. What is Goal Zero?Patrick:Yeah, exactly. Goal Zero makes portable power. It ranges from small portable power to use to back up your phone all the way to really massive energy storage that you can use to run key segments of your home for days. We play in that portable power. It's all battery based, so it's clean, renewable and really easy to use. That's it in a nutshell.Stephanie:Yeah. It also looks nice. I mean, I saw in some of the product pictures it's on your counter. You have this huge battery power portable battery station. I'm like, "Okay, I would have that around because it's not a big, huge thing like other energy sources," at least like backup generators and whatnot that I know my parents used to suggest that I get back in the day.Patrick:Yeah, no. It's new technology, but exactly right. I mean, I think that's one of our differentiators, and our industrial design is something we're proud of and we spent a lot of time working on.Stephanie:Yeah. That's great. Before we dive more into Goal Zero, I was hoping we could walk through your background a bit. Because I've seen you have had an interesting ecommerce journey, and I'd love to hear where you started and where you've been.Patrick:Oh, man. I hope we don't take up the whole interview with my background because it wasn't a straight shot, that's for sure. I left college with a marketing degree and became a fly fishing guide and then followed my passions to a company called Orvis based out of Vermont, where my first role was really analyzing the performance of catalogs. Now, do we give pants more square inches? Do we give shirts less? This product needs to be more heavily promoted. This was back in 2005, 2006, when ecom was still in its infancy. It was a lot of educational resource. Yeah, we should have a website, but we don't really know exactly what to do with it.Patrick:My next role really was, well geez, you're doing a good job of building the overall conversion rate on our catalogs. Can you do that with our website? So we started building out the early days of web merchandising. Can we promote products and boost and bury and use common metrics like sales per page view to actually drive a significant improvement in website conversion? Honestly, it was a huge success. That was big.Patrick:That led to eventually me taking a side step into catalog, and I managed the Orvis catalog business for a few years as well as their email. That was really good at understanding customer segmentation, how to go through and parse lists, how to find demographic overlays and psychographic overlays and just really use customer data to make sure your catalog was mailed to the right people and the right message was delivered. That set me up really well for a foray into digital advertising. How can we make sure that our digital ads are as focused as our catalog ads? Ran the digital advertising for Orvis for a few years.Patrick:Then I'm from Utah originally, and I wanted to move back out West to the Wasatch. So I took a job with Sundance catalog. Same thing, grew their whole ecom business and then eventually Goal Zero approached me after about four years at Sundance and said, "You want to come work for this scrappy startup down in Utah?" I said, "Yeah, let's give it a shot." It was absolutely awesome. It's been just a rollercoaster of a ride, and Goal Zero has in the last five years, has 4Xed their revenue, so really explosive growth and really fun.Stephanie:That's really fun. What does your best day in the office look like at Goal Zero? What are you doing these days versus when you first joined this scrappy startup?Patrick:Yeah. Well, I mean we're a lot bigger, so we have more resources and we're doing a lot of different techniques that we're just... We couldn't even imagine these types of techniques four years ago, mass media, television, some of those things that we're stepping into. A good day at Goal Zero we still like to be outside, like to be active people. So a couple of us will go and do a backcountry ski in the morning, come down to the office, have some meetings, talk strategy, talk about how we're going to deliver messages, who we're going to target, what's the best way to convey a message about this somewhat nascent product and category. And then finish it off with maybe a beer after work and call it a day.Stephanie:Man, this is the life. I need to come over and join you guys for-Patrick:It's not bad. I'm telling you, we have a lot of fun.Stephanie:... banging beers.Patrick:Yeah. We have a lot of fun.Stephanie:That's awesome. How does it differ? I mean you're at Orvis. I mean, I think they've been around for like 150 years or something.Patrick:Exactly right.Stephanie:Okay. You're selling a fun, leisurely fly fishing type products and all that, then moving to a utility product where you feel like you don't really need it until you need it, like my Austin experience. Did you have to shift your mindset to selling a product like that?Patrick:You know what that hardest part is, is everyone knows what a fly rod is. Everyone knows what a pair of khaki pants is. There's no explanation. You start at a certain just understanding and then you talk about benefits. With a portable power station, very few people in the US know what a portable power station is, so you actually have to start a step back and say, "Let me introduce you to something you have never heard about, and then let me convince you why you need this anywhere from $400 to $5,000 thing in your home."Patrick:It's a much longer burn and really, it's a lot more complicated in how we educate customers. It doesn't start with oh, do I buy an Apple iPhone or a Google Pixel? It's just not that simple. You have to say, "Hey, let me make you aware of this thing and that this thing exists and then walk you down the funnel for just a long consideration?" A few people will buy who have done research offline or through other various means will buy the day they come to the site. Most of them, it's a 90-plus day transaction.Stephanie:Wow.Patrick:We'll see a slow burn for 90 days and then a lot of conversions.Stephanie:What are you doing in those 90 days to bring them down the funnel? What do those tactics look like behind the scenes? Because I'm even thinking of me, me trying to explain the product at the very beginning. I'm like, I don't even know what you would call it and how do you even explain this, because it's just not something that I'm even used to buying and talking about. So I'd be interested to hear, what does that look like behind the scenes for you?Patrick:Yeah. We break it into two parts. There is the before you've come to the website, and that could be PR. That could be trade shows. That could be television, radio, podcasts, a variety of ways where we're just trying to say, "Here's something that could be really beneficial to you and your family and just all the things you like to do. Come to goalzero.com.Patrick:Once they've come to goalzero.com, then we can open up a whole host of opportunities of how do we get educational messaging? How do we do differentiation between us and our competitors? How do we do differentiation between us and gas generators? We'll spend a lot of time reviewing our website saying, "I'm not sure this is the best way to talk about home energy storage. Let's change that up." We'll put you through and try to get you to sign up for emails. We'll do a bend and browse. We'll do a marketing display. We'll try to find you on Amazon. We'll try to find you in retail stores and say, "Hey, if you want to actually see this thing in person, check out our retail finder."Patrick:We use a company called Locally, which actually does an inventory feed to us so that we know now what do they carry at Goal Zero in a blanket statement, but we know that this product specifically is in stock at this store at this time. So we can drive customers to go see it in person and give them a chance to touch, feel, pick it up, explore it a little bit before they transact.Stephanie:Yeah. That's really interesting. In talking about top of funnel, you're saying you guys are trying everything, like TV, mass media, podcasts. What are you exploring there and how do you view things like TV versus podcasting, which everyone is seeming to try and lean into that now? What are you guys seeing on that front?Patrick:Yeah. It's funny, we're definitely stepping our toes into it. We're not doing anything full scale national wise yet. I think the first one we're doing is probably a national podcast. Last year in 2020 we did a lot of TV commercials. We said, "Let's start with something that seems to have a high level of success, so there was two areas. Number one is California with the power shutdowns, right? Any time the winds get over 20 miles an hour, Northern California shuts the grid down to prevent fires.Stephanie:Oh, I know. I lived through that.Patrick:Yeah, exactly.Stephanie:I moved to Austin, and then a snowstorm hit. I'm like, "What the heck?"Patrick:Exactly right, right? We said, "Geez, if it's going to work, it's going to work in California first. Let's try that." So we did a really kind of cool TV commercial. We spent a lot of time walking customers through the versatility and just showcasing this product and saying, "Come to... " Then we hit them up with immediately social media messaging. We had a custom landing page where they could come to and just really say, "Chances are, you've never heard of this. Let me just explain and walk you through all the benefits this product provides."Patrick:We got them to sign up for emails. We were able to hit them with display. Then we mirrored some of that over on Amazon as well saying, "What we're doing at goalzero.com, should people choose to shop on Amazon because it's easy and convenient, let's make sure that a lot of that content is transferred over there as well." We also did the Gulf Coast, so Houston all the way down the Miami. We targeted a lot of TV ads there as well. It was a record year for storms, for things like tropical storms and hurricanes, and so we wanted to make sure that this is the people who are highly aware of power outages. Their power was out for a good portion of weeks on end in some cases for a good portion of the summer.Patrick:We targeted those two areas, and we had very specific metrics all the way through. Some of it was how much traffic are we going to drive to the website? Based on that traffic, what does the conversion rate and the AOV need to be in order for us to hit our sales goals? We worked closely with other agencies to say, "As we're planning this out, do you think we can drive this much traffic? What are the reasons or what do we need to do differently? What is the call to action?" Then we did a lot of AB testing.Patrick:We would have the full 30 second commercial, and then we'd cut that down into 10 and 15 second shorts that we can do a lot of YouTube and digital advertising with. We'd have five different variations that we could just go through and say, "This one seems to be driving the most traffic to the site. This one seems to have a higher conversion rate. Let's blend these two together and target those."Patrick:Long story, I think that it was a really cool experience. We learned a ton and I think the results were promising enough that we're excited to continue to push into broader audiences and more and more mainstream.Stephanie:Yeah. That's a really cool test. How did you think about attribution from TV, whereas YouTube, very easy running your 15 second clips on there, but did you have a certain CTA on the ads on TV to be able to go somewhere, or how did you think about tracking that? And what did that ROI look like versus just something anyone could get into, like a YouTube or yeah, direct advertising?Patrick:Yeah. We did a lot of it in just comparison saying, "Here's the geographic DMAs these things are running in. How does that compare to areas where it's not running? Do we see a lift over time?" And then just measure that. I'll give you an example. We took a look and said, "During the time these ads were running, what was the daily average traffic to goalzero.com from California?" Right? We said, "Oh, we saw a 300% increase." What was it on non-target DMAs? Oh, it was flat. We're down five. We can get some just basic looks at saying, yeah, it appears to have driven high levels of traffic.Patrick:From there, we went through and said, "How many of those people came specifically to our landing page that we had set up," which used power landing page. That was a good indicator of whether they were just randomly coming or were specifically coming because of this. In the case of the Gulf Coast campaign, it was nice because even within a specific state, there were some DMAs that got it and some that didn't. California was all of California. You had to make a few more assumptions about yeah, this appears to have really increased traffic over the control group.Patrick:But with the Gulf Coast we could say, "Well, geez. We hit Houston, but we didn't hit Austin. What are the differences between there?" We hit Houston but not San Antonio. So we could go through these specific DMAs and see lifts. It was a rudimentary kind of AB test that we learned a lot from.Stephanie:Yeah. That's great. What was your favorite campaign that you guys ran? Because I could see some really fun, creative ways to sell Goal Zero. So what kinds of things did you guys experiment with, or any fun campaigns that you're like, this is a good one?Patrick:No. I came from a highly analytical background, so when I took over the creative team, I was always like, "Well, we got to put numbers behind it, and we need to... " And that learning to embrace my creative side has been really cool. We ran a campaign for our 10-year anniversary called Ode to the Road where we went on a two-week road trip and stopped at all these cool places and produced a lot of really cool content. It was this traveling video blog, and we could follow along as you went. It was so much fun. I mean, you have to watch it.Patrick:It's just really cool people, really engaging content, and just again, it goes back to showing the versatility of what we can do and what our products could power. It's things like we set up Dometic fridges full of cold beer and ice cream in the middle of the Pacific Crest Trail. So people would be coming out of the desert after these long, arduous miles and they'd say, "Do you want ice cream? Do you want a cold beer?" It was like, "Oh my God, trail angels!" It was just fun, cool stuff. We had a massive outdoor dinner on the coast in Santa Barbara, and the entire thing, the grills, everything was powered by Goal Zero. Yeah, it's creative, cool, engaging content. It's a lot of fun.Stephanie:Wow. Yeah, that sounds really cool. I mean, that also just makes me think branded content, and it could be full on series, Netflix series is the way of the future. I mean we've heard from so many guests that organic and natural is definitely the way to sell nowadays, but also having your product integrated in a way that doesn't feel salesy. To me, branded content like that seems like the way of the future. Have you guys thought about exploring that even more? I mean, which also goes back to the whole companies turning into media companies and thinking that way now going forward. How are you thinking about that for the next couple years?Patrick:Yeah. Well, I think a lot of it is we're listening closely to the voice of the customer, right? One of the things I really like about Goal Zero and I really like about my job is it's just, there's surprises around every corner. Right? You'll hear these stories about, "Hey, I used Goal Zero to power this obscure, weird thing," that you just never even thought of. Suddenly, you hear that there's a ton of people doing this and you can start building campaigns and start building content around that.Patrick:One of the things we like to do is we'll run periodically a how do you Yeti. Yetis are portable power stations, it's been called. You get these great stories back of people being like, "You know what? I use it to power my insulin pump when I'm outside. Normally, it's prohibited. I can't be more than a couple of hours away from an outlet because I need the power for my insulin pump working. Now I can go backpacking."Patrick:We had a story on that Ode to the Road. A man was powering his prosthetic limb with some of our products to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. So I think you're right. I think there is a ton of stories that we look at and say, "How can we tell a story that aligns with our core values, that aligns with us as a brand, and then softly references some of our products in the background?"Patrick:It's mostly a question of is it authentic and is it engaging? And is it engaging to a mass of people? If we can answer those questions and then we can say, it has a loose tie to a specific product or to a group of Goal Zero products, then yeah, we're looking at producing higher quality content, more cinematic style content that we can then use on TV, we can use in a variety of ways. Then at a larger scale, we always partner with cinematic expeditions. So a lot of our ambassadors will go out and say, "We're climbing Everest. We need to power all of our RED cameras and power our drones and power all of the backup storage." Our stuff does that, and so we'll sponsor that movie or that Nat Geo episode or whatever.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, I think that's also just much longer term thinking than quick hit campaigns and always having to think about adjusting ad units every single day and ad fatigue. I feel like sponsoring or creating content like that will have longer ROIs and could be relevant if you have them shot in an evergreen way for years to come, which I think is why it's such an exciting angle to be thinking that way.Patrick:I think for us, what we always look at is brand and category awareness. It's one of those things going back to what we discussed earlier, which is nobody knows what a portable power station is. It is a really long burn to get somebody to understand it, identify that they need it, and then pull the trigger on a very expensive item. We do, we go back and just realize that part of that brand building, part of that awareness is just, it's critical. We have a product that when people get it and they're like, "I need this," yeah, it clicks. But we have to continually get that word out there through really engaging, authentic content.Stephanie:Yep. Did you have to make any quick pivots when the pandemic hit? Because I could see in person, like you're mentioning, touching it, being able to pick it up, see how light or not light it is would be an important part of the sales process. Did you have to pivot to a different strategy when people could not as easily go in stores and maybe even now are still reluctant to go out and see it in person?Patrick:We saw a massive shift to online, for sure. Our partners were selling predominantly online. Our goalzero.com and Amazon increased dramatically. I think the biggest shift we had to make was just the unexpected surge in business. We didn't plan for 100% growth as a result of COVID, so our inventory was an issue. Kudos to our supply chain team. They were pulling in orders and doing whatever we could to actually get enough inventory to support it, and even then, we still ran out for periods of time, long periods of time.Patrick:I think that was probably the biggest thing we faced was it wasn't a lack of interest or people weren't willing to buy online. It was yeah, they easily transitioned and then we just managing inventory, managing expectations, how do we alert people that we're back in stock? Those are all things that we had to deal with as well as just managing growth internally as an organization.Stephanie:Yep. Did you have to change anything substantially around your inventory management and the logistics and the backend that now are completely different than what they were maybe a year ago?Patrick:Yeah. I think that we set up an allocation meeting between all the departments and just said, "Here's how we're going to look at this and make sure that we're trying to service all of our wholesale partners, make sure we're servicing our utility partners, make sure that when people come to goalzero.com, they can use Locally to find product or hopefully be able to buy it there as well."Patrick:I wouldn't say that it was a massive shift in how we did things, but it was a lot more focused. We would have meetings twice a week with the executive team specifically on that topic of are we servicing our customers to the best of our possible ability? I think that was just the amount of time spent, it used to be a monthly meeting, and now it was two times a week. So really, more than anything it was just the focus was always on, when's our next shipment coming? When will it arrive? When can we start selling it? When can we get this out to our wholesale partner? I mean those were very common conversations.Stephanie:Yeah. That definitely seems hard, especially when you're growing as quickly as you all were, to try and scramble. But I also think that now customers seem to be okay with things, inventory, maybe not having something in stock as long as it says it's going to be in stock this date. And you can buy it now and I'll ship when it's ready. It just seems like that messaging maybe was missing before all this where it's like, if I have clear expectations and I know when I could get it, I'm fine if it's not in stock right now. But a lot of times you would just try and order something a year ago and it just wouldn't be there and you wouldn't know why. And is it coming back? It was just kind of like a black box.Patrick:Yeah. We stubbed our toe a bit on customer service side of things. So Goal Zero, we measure NPS religious. It's just something that we really hold near and dear. We have best-in-class NPS. The last few years we've averaged about 70, which is Costco, Apple, in essence, leading NPS levels. A big portion of that is our solution center. People can call in, ask questions. And just the inundation of calls, it was taking half an hour to answer the phone. So having to rapidly staff up as well as just implement new technology, the ability to have customers leave their number and we would call them back when they finally met their queue.Stephanie:And changing...Patrick:Changing the verbiage on the website saying, hey, our call center's completely swamped. Can we chat with you here? Can we answer you in an email? There was just a whole bunch of things that we had to implement very quickly and very effectively because just the unexpected volume that came through was a bit shocking.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean that's cool to think about how you guys pivoted, though, to just send customer service requests in different directions depending on where the resources were strapped at, which I think a lot of companies still need to do that or even just a simple, "Let me call you back," type thing, as long as you call back.Stephanie:Now that you're out of scramble mode, what are some of your favorite things that you're testing out right now? It can be around the website. It can be around logistics. What are you most excited about where I think this could have big results on conversions on reducing the 90-day sales funnel, but we're not sure yet?Patrick:Oh, totally. Yeah. I think there is endless opportunity. I think it's not a matter of opportunity, it's how we prioritize it. What is the biggest bang for the buck? We're actually in the process of re-platforming right now as we speak. Patrick:I think the thought process there is we have the ability to... We're currently in a lockstep environment, so we have to outsource all of our dev work. It's just, it's slow. I think we want to be a lot faster, a lot more nimble, and the ability to go through our funnel and make sure that we are converting at the best possible rate is a key strategy for 2021. Right now we have a group of executives, my ecom director, and some of my senior staff all focused on how do we explain our home energy storage, right? Because, it's complicated.Patrick:I think, Stephanie, you said, "I was in Austin. I could've used your stuff." But if you would've come to the site, you would've been like, "Geez, there is 40 things I can choose from here. What's the right one for me?"Stephanie:Yep.Patrick:The questions we get all the time are, "What will it power and for how long?" On a singular item, that's easy. Oh, this will charge your cellphone three times. This will run your full-size fridge for a week. But when you start putting in mixes, hey, I want to run my fridge. I want to run my kitchen lights. I want to run my ceiling fan. There's all these circuits you can wire in or hard wire into your home. Now you start complicating things and making a very complex process.Patrick:So we'll go through that process of saying, here's all the things that a conservative user can power for how long and this is the kit for you, all the way to hey, if you want to just live high on the hog with power usage and not conserve at all, yeah, here's the kit for you. There's various myriad of things in between. It's a complex, complicated conversation that is very easy in store. It is very easy at a trade show. It's really hard online, and so we spend a lot of time thinking about how to best say that.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, it brings me back to my Google days trying to think about how to explain how much storage people need on phones or what that looks like and talking more technical terms of how much storage you need. No one knows you need this many gigabytes, this many. Who the heck knows?Patrick:Totally.Stephanie:Versus you could say, "This'll hold 20,000 pictures and all the podcasts you could ever download," or whatever you want. That's when you're like, "Oh, okay. I'll just choose that," or I don't need that much. And putting it in more layman's terms or just pictures, I can imagine you just being like, "Steph, you can power your whole house if it's under this square feet and you have this many appliances and you're good."Patrick:That's it.Stephanie:I'm like, "Okay, great." I just want to just know that and nothing too technical.Patrick:That is absolutely it. On the flip side, there is absolutely people who want to get crazy in the weeds. Some of our engineers, because we bring them into the conversation, they're like, "Oh, this is not enough data. I need to know exactly the watts and the amps and the voltages." They're dissecting everything. Then there's me, who shows up, to your point, I'm like, "Just tell me what to buy. I want it and we're good to go." So we have to find that balance of providing both customer types, both shoppers the experience they're looking for.Stephanie:Yep. You're just like, "Will this run my kegerator?"Patrick:That's it, yeah. After I get done skiing, will my beer be cold?Stephanie:Yeah. That's all I need. That's all I need in life. That's cool. Are there any other big things like that that you're also focusing on other than the messaging? Which I think a lot of brands struggle with that, especially as they approach something more technical or when they're trying to... We've heard a lot of them talk about the difference between selling your mission and selling your product. How do you think about that and all that, so it's definitely a theme that I've heard. But is there anything else that you guys are working on that you're excited about?Patrick:Yeah. We've got a couple big initiatives. I think the next one is looking at how we target potential customers and really getting deep into the not just demographic but psychographic conversation. Our current customers I think we have a really good understanding of. And our ability to target them, to message them, to find out how and where they're shopping, why they buy our products, I think we do a reasonably good job of.Patrick:People who are not in our current sphere but are absolutely looking for our product, we got to get better at saying, how do we speak to these people who may not be on social media? They may not be Amazon customers. How do we find them, engage with them, speak to them? That's a big push for us and something that we're spending a lot of time on. Some of the other things we're looking at is, again, expanding our mass media campaign, doubling down there, continuing to push TV, podcasts, radio, billboards, just getting on a broader level again all through this kind of brand awareness.Patrick:Then lastly, we're coming out with a new content series, to your point. Super high-end cinematographic-type shooting and camera work and really robust, engaging stories that we're excited to share with our customers.Stephanie:How do you think about selling on Amazon? Because to me, people who are on there, they get a much different experience versus going on your website, they can go through all the video series and really get in with your brand and go from start to finish in probably a better way than when you're on Amazon. And you're clicking around and browsing, and you've got competing products all around you. How do you approach those two different platforms?Patrick:Yeah. That's a recent discussion for us. Historically, Amazon is always an afterthought like, hey, we're just going to throw our things up there and people who want to shop on Amazon could shop on Amazon. If they want to buy from Goal Zero, that's where they're going to find the rich content. That's where they're going to find all the great stories and the great videos. We're going to send them to retail stores where they've got experts. So Amazon was like, yeah, we'll put it up there. And for the people who want to just type in Goal Zero, buy our product, we're there.Patrick:We went and did a sizing exercise, and we said, "What is the size of the power station market on Amazon?" It's grown tremendously, significantly. We said, "Well, we got to start playing here meaningfully." So this year, specifically, we're doing a lot of work around top of funnel. Can we look at attracting customers and making them aware who are starting their shopping process on Amazon? Normally, what we're saying is, "Start it via TV, PR, trade shows, goalzero.com, and then eventually come and transact on Amazon."Patrick:We're saying, "We want to actually find people who their very first search for backup power or home resiliency is on Amazon." Attracting those people and then working them down the funnel, I think that we're a premium product. Amazon is a marketplace that really stresses on lower cost value products. So what we've seen is we're really good at driving the traffic and we're really good at converting the traffic. Where we get stuck is in that middle phase, consideration phase, where people are like, "Well, geez. There's 25 different power stations I can look at." And we convert some of them, but some of them get spun off into competitors.Patrick:I think one of the things we're looking at is saying, how do we actually take that middle consideration phase and almost eliminate it? Can we bring people back from Amazon to goalzero.com, where they learn without all the noise of the marketplace, the myriad of ads, and have them really get the full Goal Zero experience, see our differentiators, see why we as a brand have succeeded, and then bring them back to Amazon to convert.Patrick:I think that in conversations with Amazon and just around, I think that's one of the things that premium brands struggle with across the board is geez, we're really good. Our content's good enough to capture them. Then people who see the premium differentiators are going to buy. It's that consideration phase where just you lose a lot in the shuffle. That's our focus is make them Goal Zero diehards before they actually are ready to convert on Amazon.Stephanie:Yep. It does seem like Amazon's also changing when it comes to customer expectations of going there and being ready to buy more expensive products. I mean, I do think back in the day, like you said, you would just go there and just be like, "I just want the cheapest commodity type good. It's probably on Amazon." And now I mean Amazon's selling high-end furniture and live plants that are really expensive.Patrick:Totally.Stephanie:It seems like they're shifting their customers. They're adapting to their needs and being ready to sell higher end things, which to your point, is maybe a great place to start when it comes to getting the people right where they start searching in there and then targeting them afterwards to get them to convert in either place maybe, as long as they just don't lose sight of why they were looking for, potentially, your product to begin with.Patrick:Yeah, no. I agree. I think Amazon is making a concerted effort to not always be the budget brand or the value brand. I think that from my own personal experience and just talking to consumers, sometimes you get burned on Amazon. You'll go and you'll buy a product because it's the cheapest, and it's a knockoff or it doesn't work, or there's no instructions, or there's no customer services. It's just a poor experience.Patrick:I think Amazon is recognizing that and saying, let's make sure that it's not only price that's driving the flywheel, that service and that credibility and that it's going to be right the first time is there. Because they're super focused on customer service, and these bad experiences are bad for them and bad for the other brands on the marketplace. Yeah, we've had that engagement and that conversation with Amazon, and they seem like they're willing to help us as a premium brand reach our goals.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. I think when talking about credibility, to me user-generated content is a big part of that, of being able to go on Amazon or on your website or social, literally wherever you are, seeing someone who looks like yourself maybe or reminds you of your situation. And being able to see them having that product is exactly what is needed, especially for a product that's maybe harder to sell, that's more technical.Stephanie:If I saw someone like me, single mom, three kids, living her best life, but then needs something like that, I'm like, "If it's good enough for her, it's good enough for me." I think that's the way of... Amazon, I think, is trying to head in that direction, but I still think needs more help when it comes to encouraging people to continue to post their organic photos in a way that's going to help your brand sell.Patrick:Yeah, no. I agree. We've just started dabbling into driving traffic to Amazon with influencers, right? Normally, we drive them to goalzero.com, again, going back to the fact that we just have a much better experience on goalzero.com than we do on Amazon. But if we can take people who have big followings of trusting people that say, hey, this is why I use Goal Zero, this is how I use Goal Zero. There's videos, there's content. It's real.Patrick:They're actually using it and then we drive the transaction to Amazon. That seemed to be a good way to bypass that consideration phase, like get them adapted in saying, yep, I'm absolutely buying Goal Zero because it reflects my core values, because it aligns with who I am as an individual, absolutely.Stephanie:Yep. Have you seen higher conversions or did you do any split testing between having an influencer drive to your site versus to Amazon? And did you just see higher conversions on Amazon, I guess, because that's a platform that everyone recognizes, you trust the shipping on there? Is that what you saw, or did you see something different?Patrick:No. The campaign is actually just starting, and so the early read is yes, we are seeing that we can effectively drive consumers at a less expensive rate to Amazon. They're going to convert at a higher level than what we've seen in the past. We're not doing an A/B test per se, but if our conversion was X percent, it's now gone up by three or four or five points.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, okay. Very cool. Then how do you think about interacting with your customer if they came from Amazon versus if they came from your website and they are much more knowledgeable already about your brand and your mission? Do you approach those customers in different ways?Patrick:Yeah. That's a good question. I think that we definitely approach customers in an educational standpoint, meaning if you know exactly what you want, you're a lifelong Goal Zero fan, we're not going to talk to you and force you through this funnel of education and learning about the brand and all our differentiators. We're going to fast track you right to the buy box. But absolutely, we've increased the number of videos. We've increased a lot of our A-plus content, and we're actually going through and just really talking about our differentiators.Patrick:I think one of the things that we got caught up in was trying to play the Amazon game, right? As premium brand, we'd be like, "Well, let's keyword stuff our titles, and let's try to figure out how we're going to drive thousands of reviews," and all these things that you just felt you had to do on Amazon. We took a step back and said, "All of the stuff we do for goalzero.com is going to absolutely work on Amazon. We just have to do it the same way. We have to be ourselves and be authentic to our brand."Patrick:We stopped talking about keyword stuffing and started talking about hey, we're designed in the USA. Our offices are in Salt Lake City. We give back 5% of our profits to humanitarian efforts. Come check out our social impact and what we stand for as good citizens and stewards. We started talking about who we are, why we're premium, what we are and what makes us different from the rest of the competition, specifically on these budget brands on Amazon. And we're starting to see improvements to...Patrick:I think more than anything, I think just we're getting back to doing what we know how to do, which is really good marketing and just applying that really good marketing to Amazon versus trying to be like, "Let's say it completely different and be this whole and weird alter ego on Amazon," and just getting back to our roots. I think I'm proud and I'm happy of where we're heading.Stephanie:Yeah. That's a really good reminder, too. Yeah, get back to your roots and not get caught up in the frenzy of the platform. I mean yeah, I'm thinking about the certain listings on Amazon with the titles of so many keywords, and you're like, "Wait, is this the newest iPhone cover or not? I don't need to see every single iPhone that's ever existed since 2000." Yeah.Patrick:Totally.Stephanie:A good reminder for anyone, large or small companies, to stay grounded and focused on what your goals are and not get caught up in the platform.Patrick:Yeah. And it's easy. You're like, "It's Amazon." It's going to make or break you. What we found is Amazon, fortunately for us, Amazon has always been a small channel for us. It's never been a primary channel. Our wholesale, our utility, our goalzero.com are all significantly larger. The ability to come back to center on that is easier than if you are an Amazon brand and 90% of your revenue is flowing through there. I can imagine it's a very different conversation, but my recommendation is absolutely, stay true to your brand and do the things that got you there in the first place.Stephanie:Yeah, I love that. All right, let's shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you read, Patrick?Patrick:I hope so.Stephanie:All right. What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Patrick:The nicest thing anyone ever did to me was early in my career I got a bit of advice that has helped me throughout my entire journey. It was the CEO at Orvis, and he said to me, "Success is easy when people want you to succeed." I've built my entire career around that saying, how do I add value to myself, to the organization, to everyone around me in a way that makes a lot of people's lives easier, makes people lives better? If I can do that, then yeah, success just comes naturally. That bit of advice has stuck with me for 20 years, and I still, I think about it daily.Stephanie:Okay, that's a good one. I like that answer. I'm going to start thinking about that too in my daily walks of life. No, that's great. What's one thing that you believe around ecommerce that many wouldn't agree with you on? It can be a trend. It can be something you're bullish on right now. Maybe you get pushback from your current CEO.Patrick:Yeah. Yeah, no. I don't know if a lot of people disagree with me, but I think there's a tendency to have a hard time differentiating between common practices and best practices. For me, a common practice is something that everybody does and it's just easy to say, "Oh, we should do that too. We should absolutely have an email signup box when the popup the second you come to the homepage." I hate those comments. I always say, "No, let's test it, make sure it's right for us." Sometimes they are and sometimes they're not. I think that making it a best practice means it has to be for you and your business and your company and the ability to differentiate is really critical to success.Patrick:Secondly, I would say there is no magic bullet. Success in ecommerce is a ton of elbow grease. It's a constant hustle and just always working a little bit harder and a little bit better. Because there's no technology, there's no new platform, there's no new nothing that's just going to solve all your financial troubles. It's elbow grease.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, that's great. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Patrick:If I were to have a podcast, it'd probably be something outdoors, skiing, fishing, whitewater rafting. Let's see. Yeah, I think my very first guest would probably be Steve Rinella, and we would talk about hunting. I think we would go and talk about the nuances of it. Not the harvesting of animals per se, but the higher level just headiness of it, like how you be able to get out there and become a true conservationist, to truly explore nature in a way that's just so much more intimate than going for a hike with your dog. It's a really cool experience, and I would love to just pick his thought on it because he aligns with me.Stephanie:That's great. I know nothing about hunting or any of that, so I would for sure listen to that episode. What's up next on your Netflix queue?Patrick:Oh, geez. I'm probably way late to the game, but we've been watching two shows. I think the first one is Outlander. It's like this woman travels through time in Scotland and it's a cool story. Then the other one is just more comic relief because it reminds me of my big Irish family. It's called Derry Girls.Stephanie:Okay. I have not checked out that one yet. That's great. All right. Then the last one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Patrick:In the next year or long term? I think-Stephanie:In a year.Patrick:In the next year. In the next year, I think just the shift... The aftereffects of COVID are continually forcing customers who were brick and mortar to jump into the ecommerce space. I think that's going to drive competition. It's going to drive awareness. It's going to elevate the whole ecommerce world. I think that it's going to be a big push, and I think that we're going to see people realizing that you have to be on ecommerce. You can no longer be solely a brick and mortar. Now, you can do both, but I think that's going to be the biggest thing we see in 2021 is just the continued rapid growth of ecommerce as a whole.Stephanie:Great. Patrick, thanks so much for hopping on the show with me and spilling all your secrets. It's been really fun. Where can people find out more about you and Goal Zero?Patrick:Yeah. Go to goalzero.com. I have a bio on my management page, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. Yeah, I think that's the best way. Thank you for having me. This has been fantastic, and I really enjoyed the chat. Hopefully, we can, post-COVID, go skiing and have a beer.Stephanie:I hope so. I would be so down for that. I need that in my life right now. Thanks so much.Patrick:All right, thank you.

After this podcast recording, I wrote Technical Community Builder is the Hottest New Job in Tech which went into further detail on my thoughts on Community! Audio source: https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/developer-love/ep-15-learning-in-public-with-shawn-swyx-wangSHOW NOTES Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm /r/ReactJS Taming the Meta Language by Cheng Lou Avis is No. 2. We Try Harder Metcalfe's Law Reed's Law Clubhouse CMX Udemy The Community Fund Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal Hacking Communities by Laís de Oliveira Prettier Transistor.fm Stripe TRANSCRIPTPatrick Woods: Awesome. Swyx, thanks so much for coming on the show today.I'm really excited to have this conversation.I'm sure lots of folks are aware of who you are and probably follow you on Twitter, but for those that don't, would you mind giving us a little bit of an overview about who you are and what you're working on?Shawn "Swyx" Wang: Sure. Thanks for having me on.Been enjoying the podcast, and this is my second Heavybit podcast alongside JAMstack radio.So I'm Shawn, I also go by Swyx, that's my English and Chinese initials.It's a complicated history, but I was at Netlify, passed through AWS and most recently just left AWS to join Temporal.And have been primarily active in the front-end/ serverless space.And I've been very interested in this whole idea of developer experience.I did not know to call it developer love until I came across Orbit.And I think Orbit's model is fascinating and really nails it.But to me, the way I've been breaking down developer experience is developer tooling and developer communities.So kind of straddling both.I was a moderator of r/ReactJS subreddit, going from about 40,000 members to over 200,000.Recently stepped down from that to help run the Svelte society, which is the community organization for the Svelte framework. And I think it's just a magical thing to be able to enable a community around a certain technical topic. Patrick: Yeah. Thanks for the overview.So you mentioned developer experience as a concept and a practice that you're very interested in.What do you think led to that point for you?Swyx: Honestly, it was Netlify branding their developer relations people as developer experience engineers, which I was pretty skeptical about, because if you are devrel, just say your devrel, don't try to put some unique spin on it.But then I think they really envisioned something bigger than traditional devrel, which was building our integrations and also working on community building, which is not like me talking to everyone, but also enabling others to talk to everyone else.And so I think many to many is a really noble goal.It's very challenging obviously, because you have to influence without any formal authority, but it's also a very appealing goal economically, because then you don't have to scale their number of employees linearly with your number of users, which I think makes a lot of sense.Patrick: So you mentioned developer experience for you is really comprised of tooling and communities.Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between those two pillars?Swyx: I don't know if I have a formal relationship in my head.The framework that I come from is actually from Cheng Lou, who used to be on the React Core team.I think he's on the Reason or ReScript core team now. And he gave a talk at Facebook's internal conference called Taming The Meta Language, and the argument of that--And it's a very good talk. I recommend people check it out.The argument on that talk was essentially that every programming language or every framework has a core and a periphery, and the more developed it gets, the core which is kind of like the code that runs, is a smaller and smaller part of it.And really the middle language starts to go around it, which involves tutorials, docs, workshops, community, jobs, third party libraries, yada yada.And so in his original slides, he had a long list of these things that are wrapping around a very popular framework, which for him was reacts, but you can extend this to basically anything.But for me, I think it essentially just breaks down to, okay, the code that is not core but makes all the developer experience much better, so that's the developer tooling, and then developer communities, which is all the people around the code, which isn't core to the code, but makes using that code a lot better.So it's just code and people.Patrick: Yeah. I love that.So as a project or a framework grows the core, maybe it becomes smaller as a percentage of the overall footprint with the periphery, the middle language increasing.What's that tipping point look like, do you think, when it switches from code to community being the bigger part?Swyx: Yeah. This is something you can tie in to Geoffrey Moore's idea of Crossing the Chasm.So for people who haven't heard about this, it's like a five stage adoption process going from 0% of the total population to 100% of the total population.And then it's a bell curve from 0% to a 100%.So the early stage is kind of the hobbyists, like super early adopter types.The only thing that they care about is this is cool.I can hack on this in the weekends, and this is technically better on some basis, right?Like in theory, I really want this thing to exist. I look at all the existing solutions out there and none of them fit me, because I have very specific needs.And they don't need a lot of documentation.They don't look for other people like, is this used in production by some big company that I recognize.They don't think about stuff like that. They're just like, does this fit a very specific need that I have?That's it. If it does, good. That's enough for them.But the majority of people don't work like that. Right?They do want to see documentation. They want to see a thriving job market.They want to see that like whatever, Netflix has used this in production.All that stuff that's not core to the code, but does provide some measure of faith that this is tested at scale, that this is reliable and dependable and a good technical bet. As you go from early adopters, you cross the chasm into the early majority and the late majority. The requirements of the early adopters versus the majority are very different. The earlier adopters require a lot less essentially handholding. I'm not trying to demean the people in the majority.They just have different needs for that specific domain.And the people in the majority are more conservative, probably as a good measure of technological conservatism.You don't bet early on everything because you're going to get burned.So I think it just makes sense to bet early on some things where it really, really counts, and then just be conservative, use boring technology on everything else.But it does make a lot of sense that the crossover is a very challenging thing.Because when you start a framework, when you start a programming language, you're just like one person or like a small team just hacking away, right?You just care about the code and making it run fast or more securely, or have special features that nothing else in the world has.That's great. And then suddenly a community grows around you and then they're asking for things like, "Can you make better docs? Can you integrate with my thing? This doesn't work well with my existing worlds."And you're like, "Okay, sure. I want you to be happy."But that takes you further and further away from just working on the thing itself.So I think as a project grows in importance and adoption by the majority of the community, you start to embrace different parts of the population with different needs.And I think that that's the crossover point. I don't have a number for you, but people typically peg it at--I don't know, 5% or 10% of the population where it really starts just crossing over already.Because there are a lot of people in the middle.Patrick: Thinking about your experience with the React subreddit, what were some of the learnings or observations you had as that community scaled through those different phases?Swyx: It's a challenging one because Reddit is a constraint format.It's essentially a link aggregator with a voting and some comments.So, JavaScript is the largest programming language and React is the largest framework within JavaScript.Arguably there's some other measures.But when you have such a large community like this in a constraint format where basically only one link or one question can be in the top position when you sort by up votes, then there's a matter of what target audience do we want to target?Because there are a lot more beginners than there are advanced people, but people come for engaging events, knowledgeable conversations.So there's always this tension between, there's a lot of beginners who don't know any better and we should be welcoming to them, of course.But at the same time, if we make it too beginner-focus, the events will go away, and it will lose its quality.So there's a very challenging tension.One of the ways in which we solve that is to basically contain the beginning of questions to a dedicated thread.And that's something that I did when I was starting out.Basically the promise you make is that you will answer every single question that goes in there, which is a step up from stack overflow, where you can ask a question and it just gets crickets.Patrick: All right.Swyx: And so that contains the beginner questions and allows other types of contents to come up, which can be more advanced.And you try to make the two extremes happy, even though you can never really do a fantastic job.So there are other ways, for example, you can forge the community and create as specifically beginner focused one.But then you get what you get, which is that there won't be that many experienced people frequenting that subreddit, therefore the answers may not be as good, or you just have a glut of people asking questions and nobody's around to answer them.Patrick: Yeah. In terms of tactics, were you the one answering the questions in the beginner thread or were there other moderators that jumped in or did the community help out?Swyx: I started doing that. So there were some months where it was like 500 pushes and answers, and the vast majority of them were me.Patrick: Wow.Swyx: And it's not so bad, once you find repeats, then you can just copy and paste.But I think when you're leading the community, you do have to lead by example, and then people who see what you're doing in the service of the community, start to jump in and help out.That's where I recruited a couple of my other fellow moderators, because I saw that they took the initiative and joined in with no expectation of any personal benefit.They're just serving the community.I think there is some personal benefit in the sense of, you get to answer all these questions and you strengthen your own knowledge, which is really good.And you also understand the pain points.So you can go write blog posts and articles and even libraries to solve those pain points.So having a very close ear to the ground for what people are facing helps you just be relevant to everyone else.So I think there's a lot of benefits for doing that.But yeah, it's actually a pretty good recruiting ground.Basically, if you want to be a leader of the community, just act like it and people will see what you're doing, and then they'll formally give you that position.Patrick: You mentioned that by being heavily involved with these beginner questions, things like that, it leads to inspiration for blog posts, tutorials code, things like that.We think a lot about the second order of effects of an active community.And one of those is content like that, where if you have a thriving community, one second order effect is you probably have ideas for blog posts, guides, tutorials, things like that.And I'm not sure everyone realizes the sort of power of that type of output.Swyx: Oh yeah. We have people who teach React for a living.They actually go through the Reddit to browse for people's pain points so that they can write articles. It's pretty effective.Patrick: Yeah. That's awesome. So you're working today with Svelte Society.Can you tell us a little bit about what you're working on there, and the nature of the community that's around that?Swyx: Yeah. So, Svelte Society started off as a meetup in New York, because I was friends with Rich Harris, who created Svelte.And I had basically ignored him for a full year because I was so deep into React, that I was just like, I don't need a new framework in my life.And I think we were both speaking at a conference and he gave a really convincing talk where I reached a point where I was just like, "Okay, I got to try this thing out."And of course I was impressed.Of course it solves major pain points that I had with React.And I just ignored him for a year, because I'm one of those not early adopter types.So there was a meetup that was going to happen in London, which is going to be this first Svelte meetup in the world.And I was like, "We can't have that. We're in New York. We have Rich Harris in New York. We need to meet up as well."So I just decided to tweet that. I wanted to launch a meetup. I had no speakers, no guest list, no venue. I just set a date, that was it. And then people got together and within a week we actually organized a met up with 50 people, someone from Microsoft stepped up and offered their location.And we did the very first Svelte meet up just scooping London, and eventually Stockholm also did one.So eventually the three of us got together when COVID hit.The three organizers from New York, London and Stockholm got together, and then we created Svelte Society as a global online community. We've done two conferences, we're about to have our third in April. And a few thousand developers, I think we're at 7,000 and something. And it's a small, tiny community, but it's actually a lot of fun growing something from scratch, rather than taking over something halfway and growing into something already huge. So I'm enjoying that difference in vibe. I think that developer communities where you are not the default, so everyone comes to you as the second framework or the second tooling, is a very nice position to be in because you get people who know what they're coming to you for.For example, when people choose React, they just choose React because they're told to do it, right?They don't actually know the difference between JavaScript and React, or they don't know anything else apart from React.And so some of their questions might be very off topic or just kind of not discerning.They don't actually know what they want.I kind of call this second framework syndrome, which is just actually like a positive.So I need a different word than syndrome.But essentially, once you've picked one tool in some domain, and you've gone onto the second tool, you're much more discerning and you're less likely to identify so strongly with one tool, because if you've left a tool before, you're never going to say like, "Okay, this is the solution for everything."Because you might leave the tool for something else again.Whereas I think people who are first time to a framework or to a tool might be too loyal to it and try to solve everything with it. And that's a recipe for pain.Patrick: It reminds me of the classic advertising campaign from Avis.They were number two in the market.And so this is like 1950s, 1960s mad men era, and their whole campaign was, "Hey, we're number two. So we'll try harder for your business."Swyx: Yeah. This is great. Acknowledge that you don't have the top spot, but there are things that you can still bring that people still really value.And if you just say that, I think people recognize it and respect that.I do a lot of marketing types in my line of work, and I don't like marketing that just denies reality.I think it's way better to just accept it head on, call it out.The other famous example is Domino's, right?They're just like, "Hey everyone, we know our pizza sucks. We revamped it. Come try us out." And it worked.Patrick: Big time. Yeah. Well this reminds me of a tweet you shared recently of talking about the advice, to talk about benefits versus features, but your view is that the opposite is true for developers.Swyx: For developers.Patrick: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about features and benefits when it comes to communicating with developers?Swyx: Yeah.This is one they struggle with back and forth, and specifically the tweet is about me relearning it.So the advice in traditional marketing is to sell benefits over features, right?Sell people on the vision of what they will be with you rather than without you.Instead of, you're specific how you get there.And that's why, I guess when people sell perfume or clothes or whatever they show you someone in a fancy dress or some dude with a fancy watch on a yard or something.It's association and that's how you do marketing in a traditional sense.But I think developers have been lied to too much, where we just stopped believing in people in marketing.So if you tell me your library's blazing fast, I don't know what that means.So tell me why it's fast, show me why it's fast, don't just tell me that it's fast. Because, sure, that's a benefit.Obviously that's an improvement to my workflow.But if I don't know why it's fast, then I'm not going to accept it on faith, because I've been burned too much or I'm not going to be able to explain it to the rest of my team or my boss when I try to adopt it at work.You have to have a logical reason, because there's also going to be a trade-off right?There are some free lunches, but usually there's no free lunch.You have to be able to answer the question of like, "What am I giving up in order to get this benefit?"And usually, marketing you only talk about the benefits, and you don't talk about the sacrifices.And I think that the most concise way to do all of that is to tell you how it works.Show you under hood and give you the logical explanation for, okay, all these alternative solutions that you're used to, they all use this legacy format, and we use a different format that is just way optimized without those legacy assumptions.In exchange for all these benefits, it will not be compatible with some legacy features that you now no longer care about.And you're like, "Ah, okay, that is me and I'm sold."But if you skip all of that and just go like, "This will be faster." I can't get behind that.So I think that's my insight on developer marketing that we want to know how it works.And I think that's which is partially why open source is something that's so appealing as well. We are able to see the code.Patrick: Yeah. Do you think that the continuum from features to benefits, do you think where the messaging lands at the timeline maps to where a potential user is on the chasm?Maybe early adopters care more about how it works and late majority we're about?Swyx: Exactly.Patrick: Yeah.Swyx: Yeah. So I got some pushback on my tweet saying people don't understand how React works, and it's a black box to most people.And that's true, but because React has already crossed the chasm, it doesn't have to.So I definitely am focused more towards early adopters, because I guess I work on earlier stage companies.If you're IBM, nobody knows how Watson fricking-- What is Watson?I don't know, but it does Jeopardy.I don't talk to the type of developers that buy IBM.And no shade on them, it's just really, I think when you're dealing on cutting edge stuff you really have to open the hood.Patrick: Yeah. Agreed. Shifting gears a bit, you champion the idea of learning in public.And you described your writing on this topic as your most impactful essay.So I'm really curious, how did the concept of learning in public become so central for you and your work?Swyx: I think that it was a reflection of when you look back on your work for the past year, for me, it was like the past six months, and try to understand what parts of my work was the most impactful, and what parts of my work didn't matter at all.I realized that it was the stuff that I did in public.And sometimes got wrong in public that contributed most to my learning.And I think this idea, there's a name for it. I actually got from Kelsey Hightower, who is sort of Mr. Kubernetes now.But he's very much someone who learns in public.Something that he just learned, he'll share it because it's was valuable to him from three to six months ago.Therefore it will probably be valuable to a lot of other people. It may not be the most insightful thing in the world.He's not presenting himself as the expert in something, but that's not going to stop him from sharing something fundamental that he learned, which is useful.And if you do that, you'll not only learn faster, because you get feedback from other people.Both from people who know more than you, and also people who are with you in your journey.But also you get to demonstrate your interests, which is very good for your career. It's a two-way street.It turns your network from outbound network, you reach out whenever you need a job, to an inbound network, people understand what you're into and they reach out to you for stuff that you are interested in.And I think that's a fundamentally different way mode of operation that most developers are used to.And they don't even realize that this is possible.They're like, "Oh, you got to be internet famous to do this."And surely you can get internet famous by doing this.But to me, that's not the goal. The goal is to just have a record of what you learned.Because when we do interviews, for example, we try to have this really lossy compression algorithm.We compress all that we are, all that we can do and that we've done, into one piece of paper and hope that the other side has the right decompression algorithm to unpack that.And then we complain about how broken the hiring processes, because we stick to this completely useless thing.It's much better to have a, let's say like a site or a GitHub that just shows that I've been interested in this.I've been hacking on this for three years and here's all the things I've done. It's instantly verifiable.It's like a cryptographic proof of work. And you don't need some massive following for that.All you need to do is actually do good work.Patrick: What's a tangible example of learning in public?What does that look like in practice?Swyx: So one of my talks was about how React Hooks work under the hood, because Hooks were a major feature of React that were launched.And those launched in 2018, and a lot of people were talking about it and not trusting it, because it was a little bit magical.So I thought about this question and then I tried to make a small clone of it.And it was just a very simple, like 29 line proof of concept. And I tweeted it out. This is a career hack as well. Whenever you tweet about a company's products or a framework's features, probably the people who wrote that feature will see it. Especially if there's a company involved, they will have a Slack channel hooked up to their company's Twitter account. That's how it works, right? And so, Dan Abramov and the React core team actually saw it.And it was like almost there. There's some flaws.So he actually gave me suggestions to correct it, and I just went and did it.And then that actually got a lot of traction.So that actually led to a blog post, then actually led to a workshop that was conducted with egghead.io.And then eventually a conference talk at GS conf, that was my biggest talk to date.And all that just because I tweeted out a tiny thing that I was trying to work on myself.And I could not have got there without help, without feedback from other people.And the other thing is I would never have thought that this was something that I could do, like do a completely live coded presentation on stage without all this validation and support and help.And it's one of those things where you don't know what you have until people sometimes pull it out of you when you share it.It just wouldn't have happened if I didn't share it.Patrick: Have you seen this concept work for non-technical people as well?Swyx: I think so. So I used to be in finance and I still follow a lot of investing people in the investing sphere.So, Patrick O'Shaughnessy is, I guess, a well-known investor by now.His approach is very much in the learning public phrase as well.So he also uses that term. But he uses it to just talk about the industries that he invest in, right?He can be much more in-depth in, let's say, minerals or energy, but let's say if he wants to learn about tech or consumer retail or shipping, he can just invite a guest to go on his podcast and he'll talk about it.And that's a form of learning in public as well.You're putting a beacon out there and having real conversations.You're never presenting yourself as an expert, but you become an expert if you do it this enough.And the rate of learning is way faster than if you just did everything in private.So the argument is very much like you're not putting everything in public, but if you put it just a little bit, you actually get a lot of benefits, because there's such a great network effect to learning in public.Patrick: Yeah. It's interesting to think about the gradient of self editing that has to happen when you're deciding what to put in public versus what not to share.Swyx: Yeah. And some people, especially women, have to do more editing, just because they get attacked more.And that's really unfortunate, but it happens.And I think you have to have a thick skin, actually my preferred way of saying that you should have a thick skin is that you should divorce your identity from your work. When people criticize your work, they're not criticizing you, they're criticizing the work that was produced by some past version of you. And if you're growing at all, you should look back on your work like a year from now, and just say, that was totally horrible.So you should agree with the people who are criticizing you.And in fact, if you build a reputation of someone who takes criticism well, then they'll criticize you more and you'll learn more.And if you just don't take it personally, and as long as they don't make personal attacks at you, of course that's not acceptable, but if you don't take it personally, then yeah, you're totally fine. So the way I phrased it is that you can learn so much on the internet for the low, low price of your ego, and just get you out of the way. Are you here to be good or are you here to feel good?Patrick: That's a pretty fundamental distinction that not many people may draw.So you've mentioned before the idea of learning in public and the phrase you use is building a habit of critical learning exhaust, which I think is very poetic.What do you think the relationship is between learning in public and the communities you're a part of?How do those two aspects interplay for you, do you think?Swyx: So there's a selfish reason. And then there's a selfless reason.The selfless reason is that I think we need to make it easier for people to learn in public, to create receptive and welcoming communities that recognize that you're just trying to improve yourself just like everyone else is improving themselves.And sometimes we don't have a space for that. And when we don't have a space for that we just clam up and just not try.So if we just foster a community of people who are all improving and working on things, I think that's just a better net positive for the world and net positive for everyone in that community.The selfish reason for that is that there's a scaling law that scales beyond me.So the way I think about this is that, there are few scaling laws.Some people are very familiar with Metcalfe's law in tech, which is that, the value of a network scales according to a square of its number of nodes.And that's analogous to me having a very big "Rolodex" which is like, my friend's list is very long, then I can call upon these as experts or friends or mentors whenever I want.That's really good. But it could be better, which is what's better than Metcalfe's law?Metcalfe's law is great. But what's really explosive is Reed's law.So Reed's law is sort of an exponential growth of the number of nodes.Because each of the number of nodes can form subgroups independently of the central node, which is the reason why Facebook, when it grows, the value of Facebook grows not as number of the members, it also grows by the number of interest groups within Facebook, right?That's why Facebook groups is so powerful as a value added to Facebook, to the point where most people would just use Facebook today for Facebook groups.And Facebook just doesn't care. Doesn't have to know.And you can be in a thousand different groups and it doesn't matter.But they're all valuable to you. Okay. How does that tie back to the community?A community is a many to many ongoing sustaining relationship between all of them, and me being able to grow them.I grow at that accelerated pace faster than Metcalfe's law, because Metcalfe's law is limited by Dunbar's number like--Sorry, I'm pulling in so many concepts, but there's a limit to the number of people that I could possibly know.But if I enable each of them to talk to each other and collaborate with each other, then I benefit as well, partially because I help to be a central member of that community.But then also when I find them, they will be innovating without me there.And that's a benefit to me as well, whether I've realized it or not.Patrick: Yeah. The distinction between Reed's and Metcalfe's law is really quite fascinating.Swyx: That's community. It really is, Metcalfe's law scales, but it's so much effort to add each node, because you have this central dependency, right?Which is, let's say the company or the core team of a framework, but once you have a community, then they're just all interacting on their own basis.And you don't really have a say, which is a little bit worrying, because it's out of your control.It's adding value to your network, whether you've realized it or not.Patrick: So a lot of Orbit's customers and folks in our own community have this question where they're early on their journey.Many of their early community members are just users of their product--t he early adopters, we would call that, or the Orbit one.And they're starting to ask this question of, what's the tipping point when a community goes from mostly people talking to the company about the product or the project to talking to each other about the project, about ideas and their job and broader concepts.Can you talk a little bit about when you've seen that occur, and if there are any tools or tactics or frameworks that the project maintainers or the company founders can implement to accelerate that tipping point.Swyx: Yeah. I think I definitely am not the authority on this, because I haven't seen this occur too much.I've seen instances of it. And I just don't know if I have the authoritative story.If said like, this is the general theory of how to make networks, I think I'd be a millionaire.That's a very valuable information. But I'm actively researching this.So with all that said, I think that what can be very helpful is that you make the identities and the interest graphs of your members of your network discoverable to each other.So a lot of the times when you hire a community manager, their job is to know the community members very well, and they typically store it in their heads.But if you have a listing of them, where people can actually independently search and discover, then you really find that independent connections start taking shape.But you as someone who manages that community needs to make that happen.Because that's not going to happen in any organized fashion on its own.So one of the ways in which I do see it happening very effectively for a company or a framework is sort of an official partner designation.So you do have the ability to bless some people as the recognized experts.So at AWS, we have AWS Heroes, like we'll anoint like external parties as serverless heroes or data heroes or machine learning heroes.These will be recognized experts. I just saw that Webflow actually, and Vercel have Webflow experts or like a Vercel partners program, where these are sort of the key system integrators, I think they're called, or like agencies or whatever you call it, that are very keen on working with Webflow.So then they get a lot of benefit from associating themselves with you as experts, or just as long as they derive significant value from hiring or finding business off of you, then they're a very engaged community members, and they're very incentivized to contribute to the value of your community.And it's just like a reinforcing loop, because as you build that then more people know to come to your community to find these people.And because more people come to find these people then more people on the supply side sign up and it's like a demand and supply side marketplace type of thing. So I do think that a marketplace is like the ultimate business model. I am a huge fan of marketplaces, but it can be hard to start. And sometimes you have to bootstrap one side versus the other. But essentially what you're doing is a marketplace, where you set the rules, you make it easy for people to transact and you establish reputation systems, you establish trust, you establish like this conflict or dispute resolution mechanisms.These are all traditional forms of a marketplace, but you can actually bring all those lessons, all of it, to communities.Patrick: I love marketplace as a metaphor for community.Swyx: The other thing that you can do as well is to organize events.Because I think we as humans, we like-- Okay, most of the time we like async, we like to do things on our own.We like to build our own networks independently, but every few months we love special occasions to announce some things and to gather to celebrate something you, like a woodstock, or I don't know, basically a conference.But the definition of a conference is changing in the COVID world.And another thing that you can do is definitely organize events where people would just get together.And sometimes it can just be a small dinner, let's say we can all meet up again in person.You can just have a day when everyone just gets together and just talks, and you as a community organizer, that's a minimum viable market place, which is just like, "Hey everyone, we're all going to get to get together in this room at this time and day."Which is what I did for my meetup, right?There's no economic transaction, you're not taking a fee or anything, but you're just making it possible for people to find each other.That's a marketplace.Patrick: Thinking more broadly about communities in general.What are some trends that you've been seeing in the way communities are being built or platforms are using or methods you're seeing as we go into 2021, and what are some of the community building concepts that you're excited about?Swyx: Oh, I'm so into this. Yeah.To a point where I do have an ongoing research collection about dev communities and people who are innovating in community space.I always thought that things were sort of going online, things are going asynchronous, and then Clubhouse changed everything for me.I realized that people actually like real-time connection and the ability to ask questions and participate in chat, and sometimes video and anti-feature, which is another interesting concept, right?Because Zoom was the darling, and now Clubhouse is. A nd Clubhouse is like Zoom, but worse.So yeah. I think people are realizing that connection is real.Having events like a clear before and after is a real thing, which I think is a reversal of some of the trends that we were seeing.We were moving towards more async online chat-based communities.And I think now we're seeing some revival in live events and live ongoing discussions in spontaneity and imperfection.Beyond that, I'm not really sure I have-- Okay, so the other thing that's also happening is cohorts, right?Which Wes Kao and Gagan Biyani from Udemy are championing.Which is basically communities gated by when people join. So most communities they're just open at all times.So you just come on in whenever, and whenever someone says hi, they're just like, "Okay, it's another person it's not something special."But when you make something into a cohort, suddenly groups have identities like, Oh, I'm sort of class of spring 2019.That's Y Combinator, right? But that's also college, and that's also a cohort of communities.And those cohorts are prebuilt, it's an event.Everyone is new and everyone knows that there's a group that's going through the same experience as they are.But then there's also broader group with more experience than they are. And they can access that as well.I think cohorts are an interesting twist on how people run communities.None of this is new, right? But we're just taking lessons from maybe other domains and applying it to online communities that may not have been applied before.And I wish I could go back in time and tell myself from three years ago all this stuff, because I didn't know any of this, but now it's obvious.It's obvious to me because I watch all these people closely, maybe people who are listening, if it's not obvious to you sit up and listen, because this is real.This is very valuable. And this is happening at a very, very fast pace.Patrick: Where would you suggest people tune in or the resources or people that you follow that are particularly insightful when it comes to these topics?Swyx: Yeah. Wes Kao is pretty much leading the core based course league.Rosie Sherry, from Indie Hackers is definitely collating a lot of community news.There's also Greg Eisenberg, he runs a consultancy that starts communities for people.The only problem I have with him is that he thinks of himself very highly.So he rubs people the wrong way, I think. But he does have valuable insights, which is very frustrating.Sometimes arrogant people are worth it.Patrick: Yeah. I think it's complete opposite of someone like Rosie, who is such an intellectual heavy hitter, but also so humble.Swyx: Yeah. I got more resources for you.So by the way I collect all this in my circle community.So, codingcareer.circle.so is where I collect all this information.So there's Get Together, which is a book and podcast for people who form communities.There is CMX Hub, which is, David Spinks, who has been doing this awhile as well.There's a bunch of people in this community space.Oh, Lolita Taub is a VC who just launched the community fund.So they're specifically a venture capital firm that is focused on companies building communities and companies building tools for companies building communities there's a whole circle of that.Patrick: Yeah.Swyx: There's a lot of stuff. And then there's also a couple of books that people really like.So Nadia Eghbal, Working in Public has some sense of community building in her stadiums and whatever and village metaphors.And Laís de Oliveira, has a book on hacking communities, which I haven't read, but I've definitely singled that out for reading up.Anyway that's just my resource dump.And I'm keeping this list because I think it's a growing knowledge base of what it means to run a community, and what are all the different ideas that people are bringing to their communities.Patrick: Awesome. Thanks for sharing that.So zooming out a bit to a question that I ask pretty much every guest on the show, what do you think is the secret to building things developers love?Swyx: So in that tweet about development marketing, I actually also mentioned another concept, which is a wow moment, right?And I actually expanded upon that by saying a wow moment should be something that inspires you to talk to your friends, tell your friends about it.It makes your jaw literally dropped. And it makes you never want to go back to the old way of doing things again.It creates a clear before and after. There was you before seeing this demo or seeing this tool, and then there's you after. And it creates a gap, because it makes everything that you used to do before the old way, you didn't even use to call it the old way. It just became the old way once you saw this new thing. And I think developers love something that takes away some pain that they might feel at their core, but maybe sometimes they don't even know that they have it.So I'll give you one example, which is Prettier in the JavaScript ecosystem.Anyone could have built Prettier in any of JavaScript's 25 years of existence, but nobody did.Until it was some-- It's Christopher Chedeau, but someone just went like, "Hey, Go has this really nice formatting tool. What if we just had that in JavaScript? And what if it was just standard."And he built it, and now it is standard in the span of two to three years in JavaScript, which is massive.And people love Prettier for what it does. Which is pretty funny.The thing is you'll never make everyone happy.There's a very strong band of people in JavaScript who don't like Prettier for their own reasons.But you make a lot of people happy and they do say that they love Prettier.So I think that's one of those examples where, there was an old way, which is you manually formatted your code and you had code review stand up meetings, where you argued over the spacing.I've been in those meetings, okay?And then there's an after, with this tool, where you no longer spend any time on that, because you just have a standardized tool that just does all that for you.So I like that. And I think that's one example of making things that developers love.Patrick: Aside from beautiful code.I always ask people, what's one thing you're loving right now?Swyx: I'm loving Transistor.fm for hosting my podcasts.I do run a couple of small podcasts, nothing like yours.But it makes it very easy to host stuff and generates a website for you.And it just takes away all the pain for me that I don't want to do.So I will pick Transistor.I guess I also pick Stripe, because it's such an easy--I wrote a book and I run the entire fulfillment from beginning to end, and Stripe checkout was so such an easy thing to integrate that I happily paid them their 3% or whatever it is.Patrick: Yeah.Swyx: Not a very non-consensus pick. I have to pick Stripe. But I do have to give them credit.Patrick: Well, you've been super generous with your time today.We've covered a lot of really fascinating topics.If people want to learn more about you and what you're working on, where online would you send them to go do that?Swyx: Yeah. Thanks for having me. My Twitter is where I'm most active.So twitter.com/swyx. And you can find my blog at swyx.io to get all my talks and book and whatever else you want to find out about these ideas.Patrick: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show.Swyx: Thanks for having me.

A discussion with international speaker, author, comedic entertainer, partner of Bliss Champions and co-author of "Unlocking Your Purpose" found on Purpose Code.com. Patrick has become one of my all-time favorite people because he lives in a state of bliss. He has found his purpose and he's filled with unlimited peace, joy and love. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. This one is definitely a highlight for me and hits home as I continue my own journey to find my ultimate bliss. Enjoy! Joe Patrick Combs: Connection with Patrick: https://www.facebook.com/patrick.combs "Unlocking You Purpose": purposecode.com Bliss Champions: blisschampions.com Patrick's website: patrickcombs.com/ Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: All right. Hey, Patrick Combs, welcome to the podcast. So glad to have you here. Man, I've been waiting for this, as you know, for quite a long time, a few few months now. I think. So I'm   Patrick: Yeah,   Joe: Really excited   Patrick: Thanks,   Joe: To do   Patrick: Joe.   Joe: This. Yeah.   Patrick: As as I have been too excited to be here with you.   Joe: Well, thank you, I appreciate it and I do appreciate your time. I know you're busy, guy. So so what I like to do is, you know, I was very intrigued by us meeting, even though it was all, you know, via the Web. But, you know, I had this opportunity to see you talk to the group that I was in and, you know, learn a little bit more about you. But what's amazing, and you already know this about yourself is your storytelling and all of that. But before we get into all that, I want to kind of give the audience the back story of who you are and where you know your progression, where you came from. And then we're going to talk about all the cool things that are happening today, because I know you have, like me, a lot of irons in the fire, but you have some really unique things. You're working on things that actually, you know, that resonate deeply with me. And that's the connection I have with you. And so I'd like for you to kind of explain, you know, who where you came from, who you are. And then we'll get into the nitty gritty of everything.   Patrick: Ok, that's nice, Joe. Well, I am, I am I was raised by a single mother. In Bend, Oregon, which a lot of people are familiar with these days, because I guess been super big and super nice, but when I was in Bend, it was super nice, but not super big was sixteen thousand people. And I was my mother, a licensed practical nurse, raised my brother and I on a very small salary in high school. We were living in a trailer house, which was no problem. But, you know, let me just sort of sketch and nobody from our family had ever gone to college. But my mom was a pioneer. She was the one from our family tree that was reaching for Moore, and her primary way of doing that was to encourage my brother and I with phrases like Do what you love. Learn to work with your mind. Don't worry about your mistakes, look it up for yourself in the encyclopedias. That's what I bought those damn things for. And so I was the first person from my family to go to college and. In college, it's first at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and then at San Francisco State, I began to really realize that my purpose had something to do with uplifting and performing.   Patrick: And today, I know I'm fifty four and I know my purpose very clearly, it is through performance and story to uplift. And so but but, you know, you're in your 20s, you're trying to figure out what to do with your life. I felt all the calls, all the tugs in the direction of my purpose. And I could not be more grateful that just by by God's grace, I feel so I don't feel very responsible. The older I get, the less responsible I feel for my choices. I just feel grateful for them. But the greatest choice I ever made in my life and I think the first greatest choice I ever made in my life was that I was going to be an inspirational speaker. Come hell or high water is starting at twenty six years old and an author. And so without any connections, without, quote, the appropriate background or credentials or accomplishments, I did that. I became a paid professional, inspirational speaker, and it's twenty five years later and I've spoken all over the place, but there's been a million people that have that have been in front of me and my audience is listening to me waxen. And then along the way, I expect, you know, I took that purpose and and I expanded into other joyful callings, this the the second that I'm the second sort of biggest imprint that I'm known for, I think, is that I created a comedic.   Patrick: Solo comedy show for and I performed it all around the world in theaters. So if you look in broad strokes at me, if you go Patrick Combs, who is this guy and you read my bio and stuff, you you read Hall of Fame, inspirational speaker. You read comedic performer with the smash hit show and an author of five or six time author. So that's what I look like on paper. And behind the scenes, you know, I have just I have I just live doing what I love. That's been the great game of my life to live doing what I love. To place my joy. Even above my my above money, because somehow I knew early on that if I placed money above Joy, I would not end up joyful and probably not even end up healthy. So so today I have a third company and it's called Bliss Champions, and I and my business partner and I help people really lock into that great truth, unlock their purpose and maximize their joy.   Joe: So I have so many questions. OK, first question this is going to speak to well, no, actually, I want to go back to the early part of this, which is you were lucky enough to have a mother that instilled what she did in you with, you know, that positive reinforcement. I think if when I listen to other people talk who had struggles creating the life that they would ultimately wanted, it seems that we trace a lot of that. Back to how you were brought up and what was said to you by your parents. That's the ultimate it seems to be the ultimate catalyst of what you end up becoming. And the people that had an incredible reinforcement and, you know, go ahead, make mistakes, whatever. Follow your dream, follow what you love. All of that stuff. They end up becoming these incredible people and the ones that didn't have that struggle through ridding that from their brains and flushing all of that garbage out and then having to kind of rebuild themselves at a at a, you know, somewhere in the middle, at an older age. And then eventually the hope is that that that   Patrick: Yes,   Joe: Leaves them so   Patrick: Yes and no,   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: Right? So for me, one hundred percent, yes. My mother my mother gave me the foundation. The schemata and the foundation, both the both the sort of the loving, the loving, positive self reinforcement of positive self-esteem. Combined with really great directives, I mean, she was my first Joseph Campbell, right? He   Joe: Hmm   Patrick: Said, follow your   Joe: Hmm,   Patrick: Bliss. And   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: She said, do what you love. But when you when you counter correctly and you don't want to add something to it, when you say, well, and then what if you got negative messages from your parents? Well, you know, that's Howard Stern and that's Bono and that's Oprah. So what I know is the difference between, though, is that because I'm really fascinated with how Howard, this conversation Howard Stern and Bono had once both sharing that. So it seems like if you if you got no love speaking for men specifically, you got no love from your if you're trying to somehow live up to a father that beat you down, seems like tremendous successes often created. But then you have to reckon with why you created it, what foundation it was created upon emotional, psychological foundation. It was created on some point. I think there's a reckoning for all of us in our childhood, you know, to say, hey, no one gets out of their childhood unscathed by the by the inadvertent or accidental mistakes of their parenting or perceived mistakes. No one gets out of that. You know, I came out of my childhood heavily damaged by my mother's suicidal nature. You know, so. I just wanted to sort of add that footnote, Joe.   Joe: Yeah, no, I and I and I look at this sometimes through my own lens, that my mother struggled, you know, her family struggled financially. Her father was an alcoholic, left them her mother had to, you know, take care of them all. And so when she when she was raising us, it was always a very cautious sort of raising. It's like, you know, do something that that makes a living. You know, you get health insurance like a very sort of secure, protective sort of thing. And I think that in my own brain caused me to not necessarily do all that I thought I could do, because I just always felt this this limitation of, you know, you shouldn't do that, you know? And I was pursuing a music career. So I you know, that's very, very hard career path like acting and other things like that. Right. And so so when I when I think about this and we have this conversation, my father was very much would push me to say, go, do you know, do that. But it would be more quiet like my mother took care of us. Right. He was working. So she got the say. And it was like, you can't you just can't go do something like that. You have to take the safer route.   Patrick: Now,   Joe: Right.   Patrick: That's   Joe: So.   Patrick: That's impactful, right,   Joe: Right.   Patrick: That that's your first introduction to the rule book for how to proceed   Joe: Yep.   Patrick: In your life, and you were given the one that said proceed with caution.   Joe: Correct.   Patrick: Boy, that I mean, yeah, I was given the opposite rule book.   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: I really was I was given a very different rulebook, and it that matters, doesn't it?   Joe: Yeah, totally,   Patrick: It matters   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: Until it doesn't matter, as Secretary says, about suffering. Suffering matters and is helpful until it doesn't matter and it's no longer helpful,   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: Right? So as soon as we wake up to oh shit, that's the rule book I had. Now we're free to grab a different one off the   Joe: Yeah,   Patrick: Shelf.   Joe: Yeah, and it's just whatever that triggers that, you know, and whether that's, you know, reading different things and being around people that, you know, like yourself, that create this this aura of like, no, this there's another way. You know, it's just it's this is one life. Go do it.   Patrick: Right.   Joe: You know, one's around anymore to tell you what to do, especially people that are older. Right. Is just   Patrick: Yeah,   Joe: Go.   Patrick: And there's no safety in playing it safe.   Joe: Right.   Patrick: It would be the rulebook, no safety in playing   Joe: That's   Patrick: It safe. That's   Joe: Hey,   Patrick: The greatest   Joe: That's   Patrick: Risk of all.   Joe: That could be the next title of your next book.   Patrick: Yeah.   Joe: All right, before we get to all that other stuff, so then the next thing that you talked about was the speaking part of it. And I know there's so many people out there and and, you know, they'll definitely be people in my audience that listen to this and and eventually watch the YouTube version of this that look there. They would love to do that sort of thing. And and it's hard to get someone that has had such great success at it like you to where I have you one on one at this moment, say, well, how did you do that? What was the first step? And then what was the part that finally went to something much bigger? And then where you are now, where, you know, the audiences are huge, you're speaking fees. You know, they could be I don't know   Patrick: They're   Joe: What they   Patrick: Big,   Joe: Are, but they're big,   Patrick: They're   Joe: So.   Patrick: Big,   Joe: Right. So   Patrick: Joyfully big.   Joe: Good. So what was the first how did you get into it?   Patrick: So let's I'm going to go fast and I'm going to speak to two different directions, because I heard you very specifically. First, I'm going to go fast on how I got into it. But   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: Second, I'm going to couple that, if you don't mind, with what I would do today if I was starving,   Joe: Perfect.   Patrick: Because there are different worlds.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: But what they both have in common is the psychology that's necessary. OK, so let me address the psychology last year, OK? What I did is it twenty six years old, I naively said naively and powerfully, impotently said I want to be a speaker, so I want to be paid at it. So how do I get a paid speaking engagement? And it didn't take much looking to say I have to tell people I'm a paid speaker. So I made I bought a mailing list of every college in the United States, half of half of all colleges in the United States of America, those that were part of an association looking for all kinds of talent. And and then I made an ugly ass flyer and I licked and stamped one thousand two hundred and fifty envelopes and I put them all in the mailbox. And and then I and then I waited for the incoming interest, interested prospects, and I cold called and and failed 40 incoming prospective cold calls, a failed 40 out of 40 of them. And then the universe's magic that is always present will always show up, kicked in. And another lead came in and I followed it up. And after four months of failed, failed calls, I got a yes from black out Black Hawk. Technical college in Wausau, Wisconsin, for one thousand two hundred dollars, total airfare included,   Joe: Wow.   Patrick: And I was off and running.   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: You know, so you can hear both, but you can hear them, you know, the challenge of it and the mechanics of how simple. I somehow intuited. The path to be and I see people overcomplicate marketing all the time, especially in today's world where marketing super sophisticated and you know your call, it looks like you have to be you have a billion followers and all this stuff and none of it's it's rarely ever true.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: So anyhow, if but but I was launching myself as a speaker in 1992 when if you wanted to have a voice in the world and you wanted to be paid for it, there was, you know, a keynote speaking. Was it? You know, I was looking up to the Tom Peters of the world   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: Who are being paid 50000 dollars in and they were like, oh, Jesus, Tom Peters has a job where he gets up in front of people. They pay him to give his opinion and his advice. Jesus, I wanted that so badly. I wanted that so freaking bad. So I went after very directly who would pay me to speak to them and give them advice? Who could I command their attention of and be 100 percent confident? I can tell you something that's beneficial.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: In Wisconsin, as I said, oh, I know what to say to college students because I was there just three years ago and they're not getting the truth about what it takes to to to grab that job you're passionate about and go for it. So and therein lies the the deep psychology of what it takes. It's it's answering a tug on your sleeve from your soul that says you have something to say, you want this and you've and you've got something to say. But the hardest choice. The first three steps are the hardest one is to recognize you got a tug on your sleeve. Your soul is saying, that would be incredible and something is there for us. I believe in that more than I believe in anything in the world. Something in Steven Jobs said it's something inside you intuitively knows what you already want to be. Something inside me intuitively knew I wanted to be on stages, inspiring people, uplifting people to answer that call is difficult. It's hard as hell, only the most courageous. No, only those who find them. Their moment of courage will do it. So you don't there's no such thing as being courageous, there's just being courageous in the right moments. So once you answer that, then the second giant hurdle you got to get over, even in today's world, is what's my message? Because the number one thing, the Powers's speaking career is confidence.   Patrick: That you deserve to be on that stage. And it's hard it's hard to find if you don't know where to look. And so that confidence has to be built on who can I confidently be certain I could make a difference with because of what I know and I've experienced and I've overcome. Twenty six years old, I could not have built a successful speaking career speaking to corporate audiences. Why? I had fantasies about it because Tom Peters was the guy I was looking up to, but I could not find. A firm grant firm ground to stand on, say, I can walk into a corporate audience and tell them what's up. At twenty six now, I haven't worked at a corporation. So so the deepest the second deepest question, the answer for yourself is who come on, just tell me who in front of you. Who do I put in front of you that you go, Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, I can do this. And when you nail that boy, you're like nuclear powered. Now all you've got to do is say, great, how do I tell them I'm available for hire? How do I tell the right people I'm available for hire? But so far in today's world, though, so here's the nuance in today's world, though, Joe, I wouldn't start a keynote speaking career in today's world if I was if I was saying I want to be a speaker,   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: Because now social media exists because a messenger, I'm a messenger and a messenger. And that just means you got the messages you want to share. So so the messenger and me saw. Oh, well, in 1992, that was stages. If you were the keynote speaker in 2000 and 2001, it's every day on social media.   Joe: Right.   Patrick: And that's where so anybody that, quote, wanted to be a speaker said, no, no, you don't want to be a speaker, you want to be a messenger, constantly sharing your messages and often getting invited to stages in stages. Now look like Zoom's. They look like webinars. They look like 20 minute Ted Ted talks.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: They look like anywhere where you are the authority getting to share your message.   Joe: So let me ask you this, I don't mean to interrupt, but I want to know why, when you first did that speaking when you started on this path, what made you think only three years out of college that you had something to then go back and teach the college kids? What light bulb went off and said, I can go back and explain to them that I'm doing what I love?   Patrick: None of none of my peers, I looked around and none of my peers, all of them that were smarter than me, all of them had better grades than me, even my peers that went to better schools than me, UC Berkeley and Stanford, they all seemed to lack a fundamental understanding that I was benefiting from, which is you should do what you love. Isn't that wild?   Joe: Yeah, it's it's I mean, you're lucky   Patrick: Yeah,   Joe: It's.   Patrick: They they they all seem to have bought into the giant myth or lie or distortion that says you should do what's hot. You should do what you can get. You should do what pays you good money,   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: All of which to   Joe: Mm   Patrick: Me   Joe: Hmm.   Patrick: Look like I'm in a casino. Astonishing bullshit. Like, I think one of the greatest blessings God ever gave me was a radar that said, that's inferior bullshit.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: That's not what a great, meaningful life of purpose is built on, it's not built on what's hot on what makes money, you know, on what other people will think is cool. It's built on what your soul thirst to do.   Joe: Yeah, it's it's powerful, it's just, you know, and I just had this conversation with our our friend Chris hey, where I feel like there's I don't I don't know how to even say this, but it feels like we're fixing ourselves later in life. And I wish what you did on that first stage for that, those college kids, we could even go a little earlier in life and and, you know, talk to kids that are I don't know what the age, what the mentality is and what the age group and what they can absorb at a certain age. I don't know that scientific research that's been done, but it would be nice, you know, how sometimes a young kid will see something they'll see   Patrick: It's   Joe: On Michael   Patrick: Happening.   Joe: Jordan?   Patrick: It's   Joe: Yeah,   Patrick: Happening,   Joe: I   Patrick: You   Joe: Just   Patrick: Know.   Joe: Wish we could move it. I feel like we're all trying to fix it now   Patrick: Right,   Joe: In   Patrick: But.   Joe: Midlife where I wish we could move it earlier.   Patrick: What you know, I mean, the role models for today's kids that that are young, that are below 10, they're tremendous   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: Because I have a 12 year old son. And if you've never seen Mr. Beast in, my son loves   Joe: Oh,   Patrick: Mr.   Joe: Yeah, I   Patrick: Beast   Joe: Have   Patrick: And I love Mr. Beast. That's an that's a messenger. That's   Joe: A.   Patrick: An inspirational messenger. Who is role modeling. Hey, you can not only do what's wildly joyful and fun, but you can give your that guy understands giving it a level   Joe: Yeah,   Patrick: That I dream of learning that   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: I dream of embodying. So, you know, every jet I view this next generation as Savea as more enlightened and it's so awesome to see.   Joe: Yeah, I.   Patrick: But Mr. Resum role modeling for my son, you know, I thought I think I'm a role model for my son, that you can do what you love and have an abundant life. And Mr. Beest is better role model. You know, Mr. B gets it earlier and at a level that's in almost incomprehensible,   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: You know.   Joe: Yeah, well, OK, so you've talked about the speaking part of it, and then how about a little bit about the one man show, because that was a really interesting story to me about   Patrick: Ask me   Joe: How   Patrick: A question,   Joe: That came about.   Patrick: Would you benefit me with a question?   Joe: Well, I want to know, like what I remember the story, how you saw it on TV and a trigger, you were like, I want to do that. Like when you said, I want to create this show. And just that one night in that hotel room that triggered it all for you, just like that, you're still on stage, but it's a step in a completely different direction.   Patrick: Yeah, thank you, Joe. OK, so then let me think about. Making the super relevant for anybody listening. OK, so what's really remarkable to me is that we can be successful. So maybe someone's listening to say, I love my life. I like my life. I'm Ahmad, I'm successful, and you're just clapping along and you're saying, oh, yeah, I got this. I couldn't be happier for you, but I want to I want to tell you a true story from my life about when I felt that way, but I wasn't. But I wasn't. But there was something much bigger that was tugging at my sleeve that was very hard to acknowledge. So I was this quote, by my standards, very successful speaker all over the country, whatever. And then but. There was this secret unrealized ambition, Joe, and you haven't you haven't heard this sort thing, and the secret unrealized ambition was to be a story teller in the theater, just the only guy on stage, enthralling and entertaining an audience and making them laugh with just a personal story from my life. This and this was a dream that came to me that was inspired. It's not a dream. It's this was a. A soul calling. That I felt when I was about, oh, twenty two or twenty three years old, because it even before I became a speaker, my girlfriend took me to a theater, not a movie theater. And we watched Spalding Gray, a legendary theater performer, just tell us a story for an hour and a half from behind his desk. And I walked out of that theater, Joe, and I turned to my girlfriend in her old 1964 Rambler. And I said, thank you for bringing to me that that was amazing. And she said, Oh, yeah, he's so great, isn't he? I said, I looked her in the eyes. I said. Now, that was unbelievable,   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: I said what I would give to do that. Because I thought I just seen the best thing a human being could ever do with their life and, you know, and this woman who loved me very much and meant nothing harmful by it responded. Yeah, but you'd have to be funny. Bakersfield was super funny, and what she didn't know is, is that was like shooting an arrow accidentally right through the chink in my armor because I heard it and said, oh, yeah, what was I thinking? I just sat in there with a master. And I'm not funny and I'm not even good storyteller, so I'm just sitting here in this 1964 Rambler having myself a pipe dream. I can't do that what he just did, he made it look effortless because he's a master and so I built a speaking career, which I very, very, very much love, but I still had this secret, unrealized ambition in it. 30, what you were referring to is at 33 years old. Well, another theatre performer had come on the scene, a named John Leguizamo. And John Leguizamo was in my book was Spalding Gray Times 10. And no disrespect to Spalding Gray, the creator of the medium. But but where Spalding Gray sat behind a desk, John Leguizamo tore up use the entire stage became 18 different characters, male, female, young or old, and was 10 times funnier in my book. So he came on.   Patrick: I was there in a hotel room and he has his HBO special came on. And I've never felt worse about my. In some way about my sort of career self and, well, this really I got this horrible, horrible ache pain in my solar plexus, and it was the pain of fear, of paralysis, of envy, of self-loathing. Because what? Because it was this swirling ball of hell in my stomach that said, I love what this man is doing and I want it so bad for myself, but it's impossible for me to get to because it's it's. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough to ever do what I dream of doing. And and that was that was the that was my fear of not doing it. You know, built up for 10 years is, as we like to say in my business, Bliss Champions. Your purpose left on, attended to becomes a purpose, curse becomes a curse. And so on that hotel room bed, I felt the curse and the pain. And fortunately, I grabbed for a pad of paper and I wrote at the top, what are you so afraid of? And I started freeriding. And I wrote all these fears, you'd expect them looking bad, looking stupid, being awful, wasting my time, you know, wasting money, taking away from my really good speaking career. And then in the end, I wrote something that really surprised me. I'm afraid I won't be as great as John Leguizamo or Spalding Gray.   Patrick: And when I wrote that sentence. It like took the lid off of something super dark and evil in me, because when I saw that sentence in the light of day, I never realized that was one of my fears. It looked absurd. I laughed out loud at the absurdity of I have never told and I've never even attempted what they've done and yet. And yet the reason why I'm not going for it is because I not I might I'm comparing myself to the greatest human beings on planet Earth at this craft. And it just struck me as ridiculous, and then a voice came into my mind, a thought that I never had before, couldn't you just do it for fun? And the weight of the world was lifted off that secret, unrealized ambition, me, who's so success minded, had never thought of just doing it for the sake of fun, the pleasure of I should try that. Who cares if I fail? And that was my ginormous breakthrough on my greatest bliss ever. And so I so I started doing it for fun shortly after that. And to make a long story short, for 15 years, I toured with my one person solo show. I and this is a metric I care about, but is not why I did the show. I did the show for the love of doing the show, for   Joe: Hmm.   Patrick: The love of learning to do the show, for the love of hearing audiences laugh. But in the end, what blows my mind is a hundred thousand people bought tickets to see my show. Hundred thousand people sat in my audience for 15 years. I had a red carpet tour of the theater world and today it's being made into a Hollywood movie.   Joe: It's amazing.   Patrick: Right.   Joe: And it's incredible.   Patrick: So.   Joe: So what you said or you said, why not just do it for fun if someone's in the same spot that you are in that hotel room, when you were watching him perform on that HBO special, would you say that that's a good starting point for some people who just can't seem to to to do that thing that they so want to do as it just. Is that a good trigger? I don't know if that's the right thing,   Patrick: It   Joe: But   Patrick: Is.   Joe: Is that OK?   Patrick: In Bliss Champions, we've learned we've got a real extraordinary map for for these for these kind of we call them bliss journeys, going into speaking was a blitz journey for me. A journey to follow my bliss. Going into the theater was a journey to follow my bliss. Writing a book was a journey to follow my bliss. So we've got a really detailed map. And what's surprising is the biggest pitfall we know of on the map is the desire to monetize what's possible to use to Zoom to early. So   Joe: Interesting.   Patrick: You think of your bliss, right, and then immediately society is trained us to think, but how will you make money at that?   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: And that kills more bliss journeys. The two biggest killers of all blessed journeys is not getting started and trying to monetize to even think about monetizing too soon. So they're the antidote to monetizing too soon is forget about monetizing. Do it for fun. Do it for fun. The benefit is Joy.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: The benefit is fun fund, the benefit is aliveness, then the benefit is ball in motion, and momentum has to be included in anybody's realistic formula of great success. Momentum is one of the major ingredients of great success. So as long as you're sitting around not doing something, trying to figure out how you how you can guarantee success on it, you got no momentum. You got nothing.   Joe: Yeah, yeah, that's   Patrick: So, yeah, just do it for fun.   Joe: I love it,   Patrick: That's my mantra now, Joe, is   Joe: I love it.   Patrick: Is I don't wake up my career and figure out how to do things for money, I wake up and I figure out how to do things for joy and the money. I mean, you know, I care about money. I make good money. But the money is and is a secondary thought. It is the longest money has that rightful positioning in my life, it's secondary,   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: Like once I once I figured out what's joyful to me and I've got emotion in it, we can figure out how to monetize it. No problem. You know what we teach English champions. If you can't monetize your your most blissful activity, don't blame it on your bliss. Blame it on your on your business skills. And you don't have to blame it on your business skills, you just have to know it's not my bliss that I can't monetize. I don't have to change my bliss or forgo my bliss. I have to learn to monetize.   Joe: Yeah, it's you hit it on the head and it's a it's amazing how many people have such great talents, great ideas, great aspirations, and it's just that putting that one foot in front of the next one. And the one thing I think you hit it right on the head is just how I can make a living at that. How can I do that? And it's it's it would be so cool if people just did it for the fun of it and then the joy and what they bring to other people, all of that other stuff the universe delivers because it just realizes that's what you were meant to do. Right. It's just.   Patrick: Yeah.   Joe: Well, so you mentioned Bliss Champions, you know, throughout this conversation. And I think this is the appropriate time now to sort of clue in because, again, we're we're limited on time and I have a million things. So let's talk about this champions. So I would like to know I ran across it just because once we got off that call where you were teaching us how to tell the story, you know, tell our story and a very creative way, I then was doing all my own research and I said, who is this guy? Man, I love the way he talks. And I can tell that there's just something about him in his soul that's on fire. And I want to know more about it. And then it took me to Blessed Champion. So I'd like for you to explain to the audience what this champion is, what it does, what you know, how, and then we'll put in the show links all of the other stuff to get in touch with you. But I you know, to explain what it what its purpose is would be awesome.   Patrick: Ok, well, I'll give you I'll give you us a scoop, Joe Torre, I don't know when you're going to publish this. I actually should ask you, when are you going to publish this? Probably.   Joe: I can do it whenever.   Patrick: Ok, well, you   Joe: I do   Patrick: Know.   Joe: What a week, normally I can postpone this, I can I can   Patrick: Ok, well, look, in   Joe: Do   Patrick: About   Joe: It tomorrow.   Patrick: In about one in about one week, two weeks tops, we're going to announce our brand new book   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: And I'm so excited about it. It is the conversation we're having. So I'm going to tell you the first person I'm going to tell, it's called "Purpose Code", How to "Unlock Your Purpose", maximize your joy, astound yourself and if someone says, oh, jeez, I am interested in this free report we made about it, which is the 10 reasons why people don't unlock their purpose and go to purposecode.com. So no one knows that website exists yet. So.   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: So but they're going to find out first through going to purposecode.com.   Joe: I love   Patrick: So   Joe: It.   Patrick: Bliss Champions. Bliss Champions, so the surprising thing, Joe, is in, you tell me how much you've seen as I can't believe how much I've seen, it's shocking to me is how many successful business owners there are. Who are lacking joy. These are people I'm telling you, like Mega Millions dream home, not one dream car in the driveway, as many as they desire looked up to by all their peers and all their employees. Happy that they built the business, happy they overcame all this stuff and made it to the top, but their deepest secret. Is something's missing. And so my business partner was one of those guys, you know, he cashed out for 50 million bucks. And still, something was missing. So his story is quite remarkable. He's not here, so we won't tell it, but but. As you saw, so he both knew it through personal experience and sitting in on groups like on the IS. Know, as the entrepreneurs organization, you got to be a successful entrepreneur to qualify to get in. Well, one of the first things that my business partner saw up close and personal through that organizations, wow, so many people here have secret unrealized ambitions that they're not going for because somehow they're successful business.   Patrick: Has it been a little bit of a bind? And somehow along the way, while they were flexing their entrepreneurial muscles. They their their muscles for joy and bliss atrophied or were never developed, and so we both inherently understood how much impact if you can shift a person at the top of an organization to be joyful, they will spread. They will spread that message through the entire organization. Leaders that lead from Joy and that follow their bliss want everybody to follow their bliss and maximize their joy. That is the you can't be living joyfully and blissfully, truly without wanting to spread joy and bliss. It's impossible. Love, it's impossible for love to not desire to spread love. So. So. Bliss Champions is our remedy, it's we're four years into into seeking out and accepting individuals who who are successful but know something is missing. They don't know how to figure out what what is missing in what would be in their lexicon, a smart move, because they're used to everything being, quote, smart, right. What would be a good, smart, legitimate move that would bring them more joy? And we're experts at that. We help them unlock their purpose, because once you know exactly what your purpose is and you can put it in words, you have a true north and you not now you don't make missteps.   Patrick: And then but once you unlock your purpose, then then the great opportunity is to feel great, you know what your purpose is, what bliss journey should you take up? And there's a lot of choices. So you have to have good decision making structure. So we call ourselves Bliss Sherpa's because we've been up and down the on our own bliss journeys through our whole lives. That's that's been the blessing of our lives. We know the territory. We know the mistakes. We know the pitfalls. We know where where people quit and why they quit. So we Sherpa people up on blissful journeys and all of our secrets to doing that, that we've you know, I've been on I've been Sherpa and I've been a Sherpa for people following their passion and living their dreams and following their bliss for twenty five years. And Eric has been doing it for an equal amount of time as a CEO of large organizations. So this is why I'm so thrilled that we wrote a book together on it and the book's called "Purpose Code". And all of our secrets are in that book.   Joe: That's great, it is was there some momentous occasion that how are you and Eric connected?   Patrick: Yeah, Eric cashed out for millions of dollars, and he and the day after he cashed out and he went to lay in by his pool, just view overlooking his wine estate. He was rushed to the hospital and almost died from   Joe: Uh.   Patrick: Poor health while he was laying in that hospital bed contemplating his mortality. He realized I didn't finish the job of my purpose. And he knew that Eric's always known I've known Eric twenty five years, Eric has always known his purpose is to help other people, is to help is to inspire himself to live joyfully and to take that inspiration and spread it to other people. This is the thing about purpose. Here's a lesson and purpose. Your purpose is, first and foremost, what selfishly brings you joy. And you can't support your purpose if you're looking for if you're looking outside of yourself for where to save the world, you will you'll you won't see it when you say, look, it's just selfish. Something inside me always, you know, is always finds joy when I'm in this direction, when I'm doing this kind of activity, I'm my best self. Once you identify where your best self, what you'll see is then that when you give yourself that gift, you automatically give it to others and desire to give it to others. And that's where your purpose becomes a service to the world. So so, Eric, figure it out, man, you know, I I've always been living my purpose, but I slipped off track. While I was going on flexing his entrepreneurial muscles and going on this incredible monetary tear.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: And so he got out of the hospital, began working on his health and called me up and said, let's start list champions. There's a there's a he said there's you know, the one thing you and I have always been united on is wanting to help people follow their bliss.   Joe: Now, that's really crazy. That's.   Patrick: And the reason why I said yes is because I had hidden from my bliss for 10 years in in fear, right, my secret ambition seemed   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: Impossible. And so I knew the cost of doing that. I knew the falsehood of doing that. And I and I knew that I knew the tremendous pressures that await anybody on the other side of finally finding the wherewithal to   Joe: But.   Patrick: Do it. And so, as I said, once you've experienced that kind of joy and bliss and truth, you want to share it with others. You want to say, like, I'll show you where your greatest life is and society just doesn't it just doesn't have enough messages. You know, it's societies has too many messages about smart, about practical, about money, about status. And all that stuff comes with following your bliss. But it can't be it can't be the deciding factors or you won't know where your bliss is calling you to.   Joe: Yeah, it's like we have it backwards, it's like the cart before the horse, right. And if we can just flip it, it's everything just sort of opens up and through Bliss Champions, you help people to work through this. And then ultimately the goal would be is is it a week long?   Patrick: It's a six it's a six month program.   Joe: Six month program, so.   Patrick: Yes, it's a month program, people apply to get in.   Joe: A.   Patrick: We we we work with seven people at a time, cohorts of super small seven. So it's super individual. And and then it culminates after six months of coaching and masterminding, it culminates in our super, super specialty. We take you to Bliss Island, which is in Hawaii where we own the property and we run an extraordinary five day retreat to try to really launch our our participants and into their bliss.   Joe: Yeah, it's incredible. I   Patrick: It's   Joe: Love   Patrick: Fun,   Joe: It.   Patrick: It's   Joe: You   Patrick: Super   Joe: Know you   Patrick: Fun.   Joe: Know that I love it. I just   Patrick: Yeah.   Joe: One of these days I'm going to be a blessed champion and I'll have to figure that out. But sooner than later,   Patrick: Now, we've   Joe: I'm   Patrick: Launched   Joe: Not.   Patrick: We launched Authors', we've launched we've taken people that that thought this isn't a this isn't worth a book. And now they're published on the best publishers on Earth and they've got a multi thing deal with one guy has only he said his bliss was motorcycle's writing Harlesden. He thought, what can I do with that, that you can't monetize that? And and now he has one of the only dealership licenses in the country to rent Harley's and take people on Harley tours, Harley Bike Tours.   Joe: Mm   Patrick: He   Joe: Hmm.   Patrick: Has his own Harley bike tour dealership. We've taken CEOs who had giant companies but weren't happy and now they're super joyful, super happy. Their marriages are better. And they're and in addition to running their company, they're joyfully doing this thing they always dreamed of doing. They're they're more amplified, express self. So our stories sound like that, you know.   Joe: Yeah, that's great. So how can someone find out about this champions and how do they go about doing what they need to to become a part of that program?   Patrick: Well, let's I'm going to answer that really quickly and then let's go to a different territory, if   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: You don't mind, OK, because I don't want someone listening to this. I'm looking at the clock here and I think that we have about 12 minutes. And I   Joe: I   Patrick: Like   Joe: Just   Patrick: To maximum   Joe: Want to I think   Patrick: My.   Joe: It's amazing. I wanted to   Patrick: Thanks.   Joe: Give it its time because I   Patrick: Well,   Joe: Think   Patrick: Everybody   Joe: It's, you know.   Patrick: Everybody should start "Purpose Code", because the biggest value that they can get right away is truly to read this report that I wrote. And it's called "The Ten Things That Stop People From Unlocking Their Purpose". You got to know, how come I don't know my purpose? What am I missing here? So go to purposecode.com and just grab that free report.   Joe: Perfect.   Patrick: And then and then it'll it'll lead you to learning about Bliss Champions. It's an application process. I would love people to apply. It's free to apply, you know, and then we individually interview you get to know you and and we have all kinds of ways to serve. And   Joe: Perfect.   Patrick: You can get the book in your hands.   Joe: Ok,   Patrick: But   Joe: Cool.   Patrick: But let's let's let's see how many more how much more insider. Something super helpful we can pack into the last ten minutes here.   Joe: Perfect. So I have something that I totally wanted to ask you that if you can put it in an understandable layman's terms where it doesn't come across as being overly spiritual and fufu. But you talk about being present in so many people these days are talking about that. But I love watching your talks. When you you know, you're out doors taking a walk and you have your phone and you talk about it. But how do you put it in and like everyday   Patrick: Layman's   Joe: Terms   Patrick: Terms,   Joe: For it? Yeah,   Patrick: Yeah,   Joe: Because, you   Patrick: Yeah.   Joe: Know, everybody looks at and go, wait a second, you want me to sit in silence for ten minutes, meditate, or you want me   Patrick: I   Joe: To   Patrick: Don't write.   Joe: All of those things to pull yourself back in, to be centered, to have, you know, hold space for yourself, all these things. And it's just so hard these days. We're getting bombarded from all sides. So because of you and how you can communicate these things, I want to know from you what being president means and how someone could practice it on a daily basis   Patrick: Ok.   Joe: Where it's not this.   Patrick: You're   Joe: This.   Patrick: Making me. You're making me super happy because now you're bringing up my next favorite subject.   Joe: Perfect.   Patrick: So   Joe: Awesome.   Patrick: So I. I am both deeply spiritual about this, but but there's no need to talk about it in that way because I didn't approach it that way. I just approached it from man, I need I need a different way to do my life. And I found that different way to do my life. And it was the most revolutionary, impactful, beneficial thing I've ever learned or done in my life. And so you'll see me spend the majority of the rest of my life has boiled down to two two things. Two things on one hand, follow your bliss. And we've been talking about why, why, because it's your bliss, it will bring you bliss and, you know, as we say in Bliss Champions sometimes. Is there something better than BLIS because BLIS means perfect happiness? So what are you looking for if you're not looking for perfect happiness? So but in follow your bliss, there's a doing this to it, right? It's it's OK. We don't similar, but there is another path to bliss. And so I have a right hand and a left hand strategy to life in my right hand because I love having a career. I love to have something to do every day. I love making, you know, while having a career. I follow my bliss and in my left hand, I, I. Nowhere Bliss's without doing anything, I know how to find BLIS every single day of my life, no matter.   Patrick: What happens, no matter the circumstances, no matter the hardships, no matter the challenges, I know where bliss is, even in storms. So my career could not be going well, but in my left hand, I still know where Joy is every single day and how to get there in a concrete fashion. So that to me, my this left hand strategy I'm talking about that you brought up that I call a presence practice. That's where it sits in my life. So. Let's see, it's a good window into this. I'm taking a little quiet space for it to find me. Why would someone want to practice presence? Because what I didn't know I was well into my 40s, Joe, and I had never once wielded the word ego. And and up until the point when I got a new definition and it became very meaningful to me, Igoe to me meant don't be egotistical. It meant, oh, or you have a healthy ego. It takes a healthy ego. That's all I thought of ego when I was in. And then, to be honest with you, I hit a rock bottom in my life sometime in my 40s, my ego, the my shadow self, my bad behavior, the worst of me. The worst of me put me in a position where I were where I was at my rock bottom, and I thought to myself, there's got to be a better way.   Patrick: And I reached for there had been a book sitting on my cell for a long time that I had no interest in. It was called.    "The Power of Now", Eckard Tolle. And I grabbed this book and it re educated me and it re informed me and it completely transformed my life. The book didn't transform my life as much as my adherence to what the book said for the next seven years on a daily basis transformed my life. It did it very quickly, but I was so in love with what I was discovering that that I just kept being a diligent student of what Eckhart Tolle calls presence. OK, so in a very short amount of time, here's what I would love somebody to experiment with on this call that is non-spiritual. The only thing that is ever causing you a bad feeling. Is your thoughts? Now, so I had to wrap my mind around that first experiment with that, because I used to believe, no, I'm having a bad feeling because this shitty thing happened. And I was positive that was true. Until I wasn't until I began to say, wait a minute, is there a buffer in me that's causing the pain, not the situation, this is easily answered, but you should but everybody should try it on. That's life changing, because what if situations and bad circumstances are not causing you bad feelings? What if it's what you think about those bad circumstances, how often you think about those bad circumstances that are causing you a bad feeling? OK, for instance.   Patrick: I want to talk about the pandemic and then I'll talk about the pandemic, for instance, the day that it's announced that we're going to be in quarantine for however long, an indeterminate amount and 20, 20 people in the world had multiple possibilities for a thought about it. Somebody sitting in their home could have taken that news and began thinking all kinds of really bad thoughts that, hey, are well justified. I'm not here to argue with the with the with whether that thought is justified. But somebody could have been sitting there thinking, this is awful. I might lose my job. I like going outside now. I can't going outside. What are the implications of not going outside? What if I'm in my house forever? What if I get covid-19? What if my friends get covered and I die? What if they never leave? The governor is terrible. The president is terrible. The vaccine is terrible. Was it made in the lab? Those thoughts are causing in a bad and negative emotions in the body. And what if and some people thought those every hour of every day. Not not by choice, but by by habituated pattern of their mind, getting to think without ever being safety, without ever any but any other force saying hold on.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: Do we want to think like this 24/7? Is it serving us? OK, but equally to lots of people did that. So lots of people had horrible emotions. And I'm not saying don't do that, I'm just saying be aware that's why you had horrible emotions. What didn't happen is the pandemic is the the announcement the pandemic did not reach into anybody's body invisibly and say you now feel bad. Outside circumstances cannot reach in your body and and flip switches and say you feel bad. They cannot be the cause. If only a fox can be the cause, equally so and wildly true, unbeknownst to me just six years ago, but now perfectly known to me and the most exciting thing I've ever learned is some people heard the news of the pandemic. And fought and fought like this. Oh. We're going to go into quarantine. Now with to wash the dishes. And didn't have further thoughts about it until there was more news or until those thoughts were necessary. And didn't feel negative emotions, or if they did feel the negative emotions, only felt them for as long as that emotion lasted, while it wasn't being sustained by unchecked, unreasonable, insane, incessant thinking. So a president's practice is simply, well, on one hand, a presence practices the deep recognition that circum negative circumstance circumstances don't cause you upset your thoughts about them do and your ego. Ego should be defined as when when you're not thinking your thoughts, they're thinking you. And you don't even know it. So I learned to not be the crazy guy, the insane guy who is washing dishes, who is physically washing dishes, but who mentally in my mind for 15, 20, 30 minutes is having an imaginary argument that I'm winning with somebody else.   Patrick: I learned to not be that guy, I learned that I that I was concerned that we're all constantly that guy. And that you don't have to be that you can wash dishes while you wash dishes. And that if you do so, here's what I promise you, because I know from experience, if you learn to quiet, to say presence means I'm not going to be in the future, I'm not going to be in hallucinatory future scenarios. I'm not going to let my mind run off to hallucinatory past scenarios. I'm not going to hallucinate about the future. I'm not going to hallucinate about the past because those can only be hallucinations or call them imaginations. You cannot make the future real. You cannot make the past real. The only real is ever. But you can find through your five senses. So presidents practice means live in the real more often. Want to think about something, think about what you're doing. Be what you're doing. Washing dishes, wash the dishes. If you're working on your book, work on your book, if you're talking to another person, talk to another person. If you're watching the birds in your yard, watch the birds in your yard. So here's the let me give this for me, the big wild finish, first of all, if that's all I ever knew and I figured out how to do that six years ago without any other further teachings, I would be right where I am today.   Patrick: I and these are not light sentences to me, these are the greatest revelations of my life piece. A profound sense of constant peace, a profound sense of joy for no reason and a loving feeling. You know, that filled what I used to have this black hole of, gee, I wish I could get more love. And now I have a fountain of love that just comes from inside me for no reason, peace, love and joy for no reason are what automatically and guaranteed come from being present doesn't require meditation. It requires noticing that your thoughts are running rampantly out of your control and you can distance yourself from them. And then once you distance yourself from them, you can I I like to call them the roommate, you can notice your thoughts are not you? They are a crazy roommate that's always stirring up shit in your head and never stops talking. And you are not that roommate. And you can move that roommate to the garage in the day you move. And it doesn't happen in a day the more you put that roommate in the garage. One hundred percent, peace, joy, love, for no reason other than you moved your roommate to the garage and. Miracles will begin manifesting in your life. For some reason, the entire universe is more capable then of coming to support your happiness.   Joe: It's incredible. I just I can sit and talk with you all day, and we've already gone over our man. I could just I literally could sit here and then do this. So before we leave this one subject, I think it's important. Is there is there any sort of when you talk about the practice, is there any little tidbit of how someone can do that in the simplest way? Because I think everyone gets bogged down with all of the things that are just, you know, for example, we talk about meditation. Is this hard? I mean, I used to get up every day that I made it a promise that I wouldn't do anything until I just put my headphones on, put the app on on my iPhone, turn. Everything else also wouldn't be interrupted and just did it. And I felt like that was my most productive. Let's say it was a year that I did it straight. I haven't done it in so long. I feel like I got to get back to it. I can do it like I don't mind meditating. But first there are people that will never do that. So what is of super   Patrick: I'm   Joe: Super   Patrick: One of those   Joe: Simple.   Patrick: People that doesn't matter to me.   Joe: Ok,   Patrick: I was one of those people that will never meditate,   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: And I'm really happy to say that that both are fantastic choices, whichever you feel called to clearly. And they both lead to the same way. But if someone if if in some crazy really hypothetical, I can tell when I'm saying something stupid, I'm saying something stupid. But in some crazy, stupid hypothetical situation, it's a pattern. You have to choose one for the world meditation or presence practice. I would say we got to go with presence practice. It's easier. OK, so, yes, I have two things that are really simple and super practical and bless you for asking Joe the number one thing and and wildly enough this what I'm about to say is the prescription and the advice of seemingly every great. Teacher, you know, on the planet, that's that is spiritual and it's it's to be conscious of of one single breath. So at any point in time you go, Oh, I want to do it. I want to try this president's practice. You would simply take a one breath and be aware of that of your breathing for one breath. And your awareness, you can shift around, you just say, look, my job is to be aware that I'm having this breath so that for you that might mean, oh, I'm going to focus on the feeling of the air. Coming into my body and exhaling from my body. Or you might say, I'm going to become aware of the feeling of my body expanding and contracting, or you might you're awareness might say I'm going to be aware of the sound of my breath. Doesn't matter one conscious breath because it is impossible to be conscious of your breathing and think a thought at the same time. But conscious breath is both a great it's a great present to practice because it will be difficult for most people at the beginning of their journey to complete one conscious breath without becoming aware. Fuck, I   Joe: No,   Patrick: Started   Joe: That's right.   Patrick: Thinking. I started thinking during I, my mind got off the leash and started thinking something halfway into that breath. And so that's the great teacher one because that's OK. That's a president's practice of presidents. Practice isn't isn't stopping all thoughts. It's becoming aware. Are of the thoughts of the roommate. It's becoming you're you're you're winning when you go to the roommate came in and started talking shit while I was trying to take a breath. So that's called a wake, that's a state of a weakness that in as long as you're awake to your thoughts, peace, love, joy and miracles will begin pouring into your life. Mark my words. So but as you will practice that, too, you can take a conscious breath without thinking on most given days. Wonderful. OK, the second practice, right, is that built my life on this. Is. Step number one, notice when you're feeling anything that's bad. The only thing this doesn't apply to is physical pain. OK, so I want disabled people to eliminate physical pain. It can be applied to physical plant pain, but let's just say that's an advanced course. OK, but the step number one, the most important step is to notice, oh, I'm feeling upset in any way. And there should only be one word. It would be helpful if if people change and said there's only one word now we're going to throw out all these different various words hate, depression, loneliness, sadness, grief, worry, overwhelm, stress, anxiety, who cares? Fear.   Patrick: They all deserve really one word. Suffering. They're all a form of suffering, so notice the next time that you're suffering a negative emotion. Boom. Now there's a great opportunity for step number two, OK? And usually when you notice this, what's fascinating is you'll have been feeling it for a long time. That's how long it takes for awareness to come in and say, well, I'm feeling something bad here, but I did this very for at least a year and I got to choose my life. So first, I know I have a bad feeling. Step number two is built on the awareness we already learned. Every bad feeling began with a thought that was against something happening. Every bad feeling is caused by a thought that always follows the same structure. This shouldn't be happening to me. This shouldn't be happening. OK, so when you have a bad feeling, like you're like a person trying to defuse a bomb before it really blows up, and so you trace the wires knowing at the other end of the wire there will be a fire. You had a thought at the other end of those wires that was something about you thought it shouldn't be happening. Let me give you some examples. He or she should have spoken to me like that. I should have gotten that job. I shouldn't have gotten that. There should be more money in my bank account. There should be a different president there. There. That guy shouldn't be president.   Patrick: That shouldn't have happened through my television screen. I shouldn't be in this condition. I shouldn't have that ailment. I shouldn't have this pressure. I shouldn't have been raised that way. I shouldn't. So all you're doing is tracing those wires to what did I think shouldn't be? As it is. That was the source of your pain. Now, once you have that, the third step is to take that shouldn't it shouldn't have. And. See if you can find any part of yourself and you always can. It's harder at first that says. I can allow that it. That it is that way and you're why your justification, why can you allow that it is that way can always be. Sanity because. It is. That way. And as soon as you accomplish any ability to allow that, what you are against, to just allow that, it is it's even if it's temporary allowance, it's not saying I'm OK with that person being president forever. It's not an allowance of forever. It's I'm OK. I can allow that. That person is president. Currently, because they are. So you just looking for this momentary allowance of what all spiritual teachers say of what is to be against and I love it when they point out to be against what is is insanity. Because. I'm against that this can exist really, because it exists. Could you allow that it exists? I can allow that exist, why? Because it does exist, right?   Joe: So, so far   Patrick: Right   Joe: Of.   Patrick: Now, it's not a total acceptance of and I and I can I'm and I'm allowing that these cans will exist for forever. It's not saying that. Can you allow that exist right now? At first, you'll hear your ego go, no, I hate that can. But can you allow that it exists right now is anything. Yeah, why does it exist right now? And   Joe: The.   Patrick: And all all the it shouldn't exist or they shouldn't exist. It shouldn't exist. You can do that for 12 years. Twenty four, seven years can will still exist.   Joe: It's just.   Patrick: So if you can allow that, it exists. You have accomplished. A presence practice, because presence will what will happen next will always happen, you will feel better and you'll notice how I feel. I'm returning to peace. And once you accomplish returning to peace, you'll notice or I just feel in general more love, and then after a while you'll notice, someday you'll take a measure of your life, you'll say, is my lecture. If I say my life's joyful all the time everywhere. Why? Because you moved your roommate, your ego to the ground.   Joe: Oh, it's awesome.   Patrick: Now, there's a fourth final step to that, and I think of it as advanced, but so sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's easy, but it's super fun. The fourth step, the third step was, can you allow that? Something is what it is. And the fourth possibility is can you embrace. That it is what it is. Is there anything in you that could embrace that could say not only can I allow the can is there, but I can embrace that the can is there and you can see why that's a harder step because something you were previously just totally against, could you embrace it? Now, it's a that's a different sort of class, it's not complicated, but it takes more words, my journey towards learning to embrace things I was previously against. But I'll tell you, like some of the greatest revelations of your life come when you learn to embrace everything. Everything's.   Joe: It's really powerful, man

It's Royal Rumble preview time as Derek Montilla joins the crew to pick who should win and who will win at kickoff to the Road To WrestleMania! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Greg DeMarco, Miranda Morales, and Patrick O'Dowd bring the all new Babyface/Heel Podcast, where there's Two Sides To Every Storyline! Greg is the heel, Patrick is the babyface, and Miranda is stuck in the middle! This week Miranda Morales slides over to the babyface chair as Derek Montilla fills in for Patrick: * It's Royal Rumble preview time! * Who should win and who will win the title matches on this card? * Miranda and Greg are forced to pick their side of the fence (babyface and heel) for both Royal Rumble matches, and Derek has a shocking pick for the Men's Rumble! * Plus this week's Babyface/Heel is current NXT superstar Johnny Gargano! *Follow the Babyface Heels on Social Media* * @WrestlngRealist * @TheHashtagMiranda (just not on Twitter!) * @ChairshotGreg * @ChairshotMedia *About the Chairshot Radio Network* Created in 2017, the Chairshot Radio Network presents you with the best in wrestling and wrestling crossover podcasts, including POD is WAR, Women's Wrestling Talk, The #Miranda Show, Badlands’ Wrestling Mount Rushmores, The Outsider’s Edge, DWI Podcast, Bandwagon Nerds, the Greg DeMarco Show, 3 Man Weave, Five Rounds, Turnbuckle Talk, The Reaction and more! You can find these great shows each week at theChairshot.com and through our distribution partners, including podcasting’s most popular platforms. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/chairshot-radio-network/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In episode three of the new podcast, Path to Well-Being in Law, co-hosts Chris Newbold and Bree Buchanan check in with lawyer well-being pioneer Patrick Krill.  Recognized globally as a leading authority on addiction, mental health, and well-being in the legal profession, Patrick is an attorney and a licensed, board-certified alcohol and drug counselor.  He serves as a trusted advisor to large law firms and corporate legal departments throughout North America and Europe, educating them about and helping them navigate addiction, mental health, and well-being issues on a daily basis. Patrick's groundbreaking work in the area of attorney behavioral health includes: initiating and serving as lead author of the first and only national study on the prevalence of attorney addiction and mental health problems, a joint undertaking of the American Bar Association Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs and the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation; creating the framework for the ABA Well-Being Pledge, an innovative campaign to improve the health and well-being of lawyers that was launched in September, 2018; partnering with American Lawyer Media to conduct the first-ever survey of AmLaw 200 firm leaders regarding their beliefs and attitudes related to addiction and mental health problems in the legal industry. Transcript:CHRIS NEWBOLD:                     Welcome to the Path to Lawyer Well-Being Podcast, where we talk to cool people doing awesome work in the lawyer well-being space. My name is Chris Newbold and I'm joined by my cohost, Bree Buchanan.BREE BUCHANAN:                     Hi, everybody.CHRIS:                    We are again, super excited about the opportunity to have one of the pioneers in the lawyer well-being space join us today as our guest, Patrick Krill. Patrick is somebody who really has been influential in his work on the science side to the lay the foundation for what has become a vibrant movement and a discussion in the legal profession about the current state of lawyer well-being. So let me kick it to Brie to introduce Patrick and get us going on our question.BREE:Thanks, Chris. Yeah, I think we really are so honored to have Patrick here today. I have a little disclosure. Patrick and I work together, he's my boss with Krill Strategies, but everything I say, none of this I'm saying to just flatter you, Patrick. All of it is absolutely true.PATRICK KRILL:                Oh, great.BREE:Absolutely, but some of the words that come to my mind. Chris has already tapped on it, pioneer. A pioneer in the research around substance abuse and mental health issues in the legal profession because it was Patrick's fabulous research that was published in 2016 that really kicked all of this off. We're going to talk about that research a little bit and also talk about what he's been doing since then, in regards to updating and expanding upon that research.He's also what I think of as a true thought leader and sometimes I tease him of being our guru around these issues in the legal profession because he spends all of his time reading, researching, talking to others. Really is, truly is a thought leader on this. He's authored over 70 articles, including [inaudible 00:02:13], CNN, been in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on NPR. So we really are very lucky to have Patrick today.So Patrick, thanks for being here.PATRICK:Thank you, Bree, and thank you, Chris. It's a pleasure to be with you both.BREE:So I'm going to start off with a question that we're really trying to ask everybody that comes on the podcast, for us to get an idea a little bit about the person themselves. So what brought you to the lawyer well-being movement? So what in your life really drives your passion for this work?PATRICK:Yeah, so it's a great question and I think to really answer that meaningfully, I have to go back to before my work in the lawyer well-being space, and to really talk a little bit about my career trajectory generally.I was an attorney, I was someone who went to law school, and then as I was getting ready to wrap up law school, made the decision to go for a further degree to get an LOM in international law. I approached the legal profession with a lot of enthusiasm and with a lot of plans about the type of law that I wanted to practice. Then what I was met with was a reality that was very discordant with what I had expected. I'm a first generation lawyer in my family, I didn't have a lot of experience with or exposure to what being a lawyer actually meant. So I had all these preconceptions.Then I got into the field and while it was fine, it was pretty clear to me right off the bat that once I got out of the academic, once I got out of the classroom setting and stopped studying about law and had to do the work, it really wasn't a good fit for me. I didn't particularly enjoy it. The idea of billing my time in six minute increments really was, I just couldn't do it. It was [crosstalk 00:04:11] water, in terms of my personality, but none the less, I did practice law for a number of years and I worked in a number of different roles. Started coming to the realization that this wasn't longterm sustainable for me. It didn't get my out of bed in the morning. Right?BREE:Right.PATRICK:           A question we always ask people is, what gets you out of bed in the morning? It wasn't being an attorney, despite my best intentions, really. I'm fascinated by the law and I still think about and read about the law all the time, but the mechanics of practicing law weren't for me.I also had my own experience overcoming addiction really early out of the gate. In the first couple of years of the legal profession, my practice I should say. So I had exposure to and experience with what it takes to overcome a behavioral health problem. That experience and that exposure to that world introduced me to this idea of counseling. So I knew what a mental health counselor was, I knew what an addiction counselor was.So when it came time for me to reevaluate and think, do I want to do this longterm? I knew that there was a field that seemed a little bit more interesting to me, it seemed a little bit more aligned with my personality and intrinsically who I am. So I went back to school to become an addiction counselor. That ultimately translated into my work with lawyers specifically. I became the director a treatment program for lawyers, judges, and law students at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. So it's a long rambling answer but I think you have to understand the bigger picture view-BREE:Absolutely, yeah.PATRICK:... how I even got into the mental health space, let alone the lawyer specific mental health space.BREE:Right, well thanks for sharing that. I mean there typically is a personal story that brings us to this work. I think that what you just said, Patrick, about really not having the best vocational fit once you get into it and start seeing what it's like day to day. I hear that as a common refrain from lawyers who are really struggling. So yeah, thanks.Listen, I want to get you to share a little bit about the lawyer study that was done, now four years ago, that you did. I think you started while you were still director of the legal professionals program at Hazelden. That has proved to be the basis for really, the lawyer well-being movement. So I'm wondering, what do you think is the most important information that came out of that study now that you can look back over the past four years?PATRICK:It's hard to say. I have a hard time identifying one thing or even two things as being the most important takeaways from that study. I think the most important result, excuse me, result of that study has been its overall impact to the extent to which it raised awareness about the nature and the scope of the challenges we face. It provided much needed data to back what a lot of us who were working in the lawyer mental health space in a clinical or other capacity knew. We knew lawyers were unwell and were struggling disproportionately to other populations, but we didn't really have good data to back up our argument. So this study provided that and it really opened the door to a much needed and overdue conversation around mental health and well-being in the legal profession. So I think it was really more the impact than any one precise piece of the study.I will say, one of the things that surprised me the most was that it was younger lawyers who were the most depressed and struggling with or exhibiting the most signs of problem drinking. The drinking piece you can get, right?BREE:Mm-hmm (affirmative).PATRICK:Think about [crosstalk 00:08:11], people drink excessively, and it doesn't have as much of an impact on them. But we were surprised about the mental health piece as well. Simply because that wasn't the profile who was showing up in treatment programs or going to the Lawyers Assistance Program or who was getting disbarred because of their mental health or substance use problem. So we went into that research with a preconceived notion of who the most at-risk population was.CHRIS:                  Patrick, how much of that was, do you think, driven by the expectations gap between... it's the same type of expectations gap that you had, which was, this is what I thought the law was going to be like, this is what the law was actually like. How that's affecting, I think, the most recent generation of graduates coming out of law school.PATRICK:Yeah, it's such a great point, Chris. I think that's a profound problem. I think you have a lot of people coming out of law school and finding themselves adrift in a profession that doesn't potentially resonate with them. That it is more overwhelming than they had anticipated, assuming they're able to get a job. Right?CHRIS:                  Yeah.PATRICK:          Get a job that meets their needs and provides some opportunity, but then they get into it and they say, "Wow, this is not what I signed up for," or, and this is, I think, I'm putting the spotlight a little bit on the law school experience. It's not what they were prepared for. So there are these mismatched expectations and what that can result in, I think you're right. I mean, I think what you're getting at is, does that play into the high levels of distress among young lawyers? How could it not? I mean, how could it not? If I had done a survey 20 years ago when I was coming into the professional, I would've been scoring off the chart on all of those assessments.CHRIS:Yeah, I mean you can see a scenario where you go down a path you feel like you're too far down that path, that it's probably more rare for someone to make a pivot like you did to say, "This isn't for me, I'm going to go and pursue my studies in an area that then interconnects the behavioral health side with the law side." We know how much student debt and other factors play into the-PATRICK:                No doubt.CHRIS:[crosstalk 00:10:28] of... how do I get out of this? Then that spirals into a set of conditions that just generally move toward more unhealthy-ness for that particular community.PATRICK:Yup, I agree. I'm sure Bree has some thoughts about that as well with her background in vocational discernment. How do we bridge that gap? How do we make some progress there, because we need to. I don't know if it's modifying law school curricula or just more truth in advertising around what the legal profession is. I don't know.BREE:It makes me think about Larry Krieger's research, what makes lawyers happy. The idea of even thinking about, it's the extrinsic things, the power, the prestige, et cetera, that draws us to the practice of law but what we know now that what makes us happy are more internal factors of meaning. That's just not made known to people who are contemplating going to law school or people that are there. It's something you have to trip over and fall down to figure out. Yeah, yeah.CHRIS:Patrick, I think it's fair to say that the lawyer well-being movement likely doesn't get ignited without the study itself because we are ultimately an evidentiary based profession. We needed the data, I think, to ultimately launch the discussion. Talk to us about that notion of how important that was to kick start the national discussion. Obviously, followed by the report subsequent to that, but how important was to lay the foundation.PATRICK:           I think it was incredibly important. I think you're right, we wouldn't be where we are with this movement had we not had that predicate of the data, and had that not been something that caught the profession's attention.In addition to the data and the value of that itself, it was also a multi jurisdictional study. So we had 16, 17, 18 different bar associations from around the country participating in this survey. Participating in this research, recognizing the value. So you saw some seeds of the interest being planted there where you had all these [inaudible 00:12:52] stakeholders, but you also had... this goes back to my overarching strategy when I was conceptualizing this study, you had the ABA and Hazelden Betty Ford, two large stakeholders with a lot of credibility in their respective spheres, coming together to conduct this research. I think that was an important piece of the puzzle. This wasn't something that could just be ignored. You have all these bar associations from around the country participating, you have the ABA, you have Hazelden Betty Ford, putting their names behind this project. I think that allowed it to get the attention that it did, and to really open the door for this conversation.Something I'd be really interested in hearing both of your perspectives on is looking back on it. I have a sense that in a way we were almost pushing on an open door. What I mean by that is, there was an appetite to have this discussion. People knew that there was a problem but it was under the surface and there wasn't an easy way to bring this up or there weren't a lot of pathways into this conversation, but then once you got that ball rolling, people were basically acknowledging, yeah, we've got issues here. Finally, can we talk about this? At least that's my perspective looking back over the last five years.BREE:Yeah, and I think that societally outside of law, more and more people were talking about these issues. So law, a conservative industry, comes up last, but then you have younger people who are coming in and onboarding into the legal profession and there's just not the stigma around these issues about depression, anxiety, or even a substance abuse problem, that there used to be. So you're starting to get a shift, and I think once we got that data, it opened up the door which as you're saying was already open.Then the other thing that I found going around the country talking, inevitably, people who have been practicing law even for just a little bit, know someone who has taken his or her own life. Once that has crossed your path, it really shapes you. It's not something that you forget about. We always want to know, well, what could've been done differently? So I think that this is a manifestation of that too.PATRICK:Yeah, and at the risk of... I don't want to dominate the conversation but I do want to say something to both of you, share something with you that hasn't really received a lot of discussion because it wasn't published. With that study where we had 15,000 responses, there was the opportunity for people to submit comments at the end. There was basically like, do you have comments? We compiled all of those and I have binder of them sitting on my bookshelf. We weren't able to publish them, the format didn't lend itself to that but we had thousands and thousands of comments, overwhelmingly they reflected a theme of, this is a huge problem in the profession. We're glad you're conducting this research. Maybe that's where I began to develop this notion that people want to have this conversation, people recognize that people around them are not well. That people around them are struggling, and they feel like they're in a profession that's tone deaf to it. But overwhelmingly, that's what the comments reflected. People saying this is a big deal.BREE:Wow.PATRICK:This is a needed endeavor.BREE:Yeah, so I know that that research was so important but there were other questions that you wanted to ask. So could you tell us a little bit about the most current research you're involved in?PATRICK:Yeah, I'm actually really excited about this. Along with a colleague at the University of Minnesota Medical School, I designed a new survey that we administered to lawyers in California and the DC bar. So we partnered with the California Lawyers Association and the DC Bar to conduct new research, bi-coastal research. I had a couple of aims for this project. One, we did want it to be a random sample, so it would meet that gold standard for research. The 2016 study, while I feel very certain that those numbers were represented of what was happening in the profession, it wasn't a truly random sample. So it didn't meet that gold standard for data. So I did want to have a random sample, but I also wanted to explore the why. Not just prevalence, not how many lawyers are meeting criteria for depression or a substance abuse disorder, but why. To ask questions that could get at lawyer motivation, lawyer personality. Then look at those responses in relationship to their mental health.So we were originally supposed to launch that research project right around the time, and I mean what a year we're all in. So right around the time when the pandemic was hitting. The survey was supposed to go out, I think, the same week that California announced stay at home orders. So obviously the California Lawyers Association said, "We need to pause," and we agreed with that. What that gave us the opportunity to do was to revamp the survey and to modify some questions to actually measure the impact of COVID-19 and quarantines and all of that on lawyer mental health. It was ultimately disseminated, we finished data collection about a month ago and we're analyzing the data, getting ready to write up the manuscript.Basically what I can tell you, I can't talk about the data in any precise way at this point prior to publication, but what I can tell you is that the problems are real, there was nothing anomalous about that 2016 study. In some respects, they appear to be getting worse. Also, the impact of COVID-19 has been material. It's been real, I mean, people are feeling this as it relates to their mental health and their substance use. Beyond that though, we're going to have some really interesting insights to share about the why piece. Why are lawyers so likely to experience depression, for example.So I'm really excited about it, really grateful to the DC Bar and California Lawyers Association. They helped us get a big data set, we had really robust participation and a random sample. So it'll be useful, useful data for the profession.BREE:Do you have a sense of when it might be published?PATRICK:Yeah, well that's that million dollar question. Our goal is to have it submitted to a journal by the end of September. Then it's that sort of, out of your hands. It's journal's own publication schedule. Best case scenario it'll be published in December, but that could easily go into January of next year, February. I mean, just given all of the delays that everything seems to be experiencing and all the uncertainty, but we're moving pretty expeditiously. We're moving about as quickly as you can with a study of this size and nature.CHRIS:Patrick, how much do you think that the research side of well-being is important to the discussion, because we really don't have a lot of good... I mean we have research, we have some groundbreaking studies. We had yours, we had the law student one, we have your followup here, but it still seems like there's a lack of emphasis on the research side as we think about the well-being movement. I'd just love for your insights into, what's the next generation of research as you think on the horizon?PATRICK:Yeah, I think personally, research is a very important piece of the puzzle. That's not just because I'm involved in it, it's because you have to understand the dimensions of the challenges that you're trying to address. You can't just be spit balling about what's going on.We're also a profession that's trained weigh and evaluate evidence. Lawyers are prone to scrutinize things and want to know, is that backed by data? Is that science driven? So I think if you want to persuade people that there needs to be a change you have to back up your argument, in addition to people like us being able to understand the nature of the challenges. So I think it's vitally important.In terms of next generation or ongoing, I think further exploration of what causes the problems, which is probably going to be further exploration of the lawyer personality, beyond really important work like Krieger and Sheldon's work and other research that exists. We need to understand that a little bit better. I think we also really need to get at the disconnect that we started by talking about. That expectation gap or the mismatched expectations between what people think they're getting with a career in the law, and what they end up getting because that's got to be a big piece of the equation as to why many people find themselves, to put is charitably, less than satisfied.CHRIS:Yeah, and if we have a profession of folks who are less than satisfied, that doesn't bode well to the profession generally.PATRICK:No, right, exactly.CHRIS:Let's pivot real quickly before we take a break. I'd love to hear your perspective. Each one of us comes at this from a different angle, the well-being. Bree obviously originating from the lawyer assistance programming side. I spend a lot of time thinking about small firms and solo practitioners and preventing malpractice claims. A lot of your focus professionally has been on big law. More than anybody else, you probably have your finger on the pulse of how big law is adapting to the new emphasis on well-being. I'd just love to hear your perspectives one what you're seeing out there. Do you think big law is paying attention, because oftentimes I think big law, if they embrace it it has a trickle down effect to the totality of the profession. So I'd love to hear your perspective on big law and the interconnectedness to well-being.PATRICK:Yeah, so it's an important area of discussion. I think you're right that often, big law does have the ability to set the pace. They're almost like the pace card for the profession, who have an outsize influence on the profession despite the fact that they employ a minority of practicing lawyers.I would say if you compare where we were four years ago, big law has made a lot of progress. It started with this overdue recognition and acknowledgement that this is a real problem. We have an issue that we need to get our arms around. Five years ago, there was profound and widespread institutional denial of the scope of the problem. Maybe if it wasn't denied, it was simply a lack of awareness. You can characterize it however you want, but the reality is that these issues were not being dealt with in a deliberate way. They weren't even really being acknowledge, despite the fact that it tends to be a pressure cooker environment. It tends to be one of the most intense professional environments out there.Now what you have is widespread acknowledgement that these problems are real. Widespread acknowledgement that their competitors are taking steps to try and [inaudible 00:24:32] the problems or at least mitigate the problems. So there's momentum, there's real momentum that has developed.All of that said, there's a fundamental tension between the business model of big law, which again, tends to be really high expectations, a pressure cooker environment, a lot of billable requirements and other demands. There's a tension between that model and being able to take care of yourself the way that you might want to, and having any sense of balance in your life. So I think to try and resolve that tension is going to continue to necessitate incremental efforts that are sustained over time. It's not going to be an overnight fix. It's going to take a long time.That said, many firms are making a good faith effort. They're trying, they're trying to bridge that gap incrementally where they can. One of the problems with incremental progress, especially in an environment where so many people are not satisfied, is that it takes patience. So you have some people in those environments or some people, external to big law, commenting on big law saying, "This is all window dressing. All of these changes that they're making don't really get at the heart of the matter." But the reality is you have to start somewhere and you have to start taking steps. As long as those steps, like I said, are sustained and they continue to move in the right direction over time. I think the model can be adjusted to the point where people experience greater levels of personal well-being. To some degree, that's already happening.BREE:Yeah, and now that all three of us are being coauthors of a task force report, we can remember all the thought that went into how we make a good argument to the legal profession for this culture change. There was the financial, it's good for business. It relates to our ethical obligations. Then the humanitarian, it's the right thing to do. Which of those three do you think are motivating the firms and the people in the firms that you're dealing with? Are those [arguments 00:27:01] resonating?PATRICK:Honestly, maybe I just have the good fortune of working with some really amazing firms, but my experience has been, all three resonate. I mean, you tend to have really good people leading these organizations. It's not like they're unfeeling individuals but they have to operate within the bounds of their business model. All three points resonate.The one that is probably driving the progress the most is the financial but it's not necessarily financial the way I think that we were contemplating it in the task force where good mental health translates into less expenditure and better performance and all of that. It's financial in the sense of wanting to present a firm culture that attracts and retains the best lawyers. So it's almost a hybrid rationale, it's certain that if you boil that down, firms want to attract and retain the best talent so that they ultimately perform better financially. But it's not the precise calculation of how many specific dollars they're going to save by having fewer depressed lawyers. If that makes sense?BREE:Yeah, you bet.PATRICK:Does that make sense the way I'm explaining that?BREE:Yeah, and one thing that I hear that really resonates when I speak is the issue around the recruitment and retention. That's a big deal, and getting back to talking about those younger lawyers that we were talking about at the very beginning. They expect that they're going to work for somebody who has an interest in them personally, that cares about them as a human being. That's just what's out there and what they're dealing with, with the new folks. So yeah.CHRIS:Yeah, certainly feels like the talent acquisition side where these firms are competing for the best and brightest talent coming out of the law schools, that many of those students are coming in with a different mindset from a work life balance. That has the potential to be a real game changer, it probably has you more optimistic thinking ahead to the future, in terms of the generational change that will ultimately evolve in big law.PATRICK:      Yeah, absolutely. I do think that the younger generation of attorneys, assuming that their priorities aren't co-opted by the machines, if you will. Assuming that they maintain that level of desire to have a different work life experience. As long as they continue to prioritize well-being, then yes, I think that they can be a driver of real transformational change and sustained change in the profession. As long as they don't get co-opted or swept away by the current that exists. I don't see any evidence that they will, I'm just offering that as one potential caveat. Does the prevailing system ultimately prevail?CHRIS:Yeah, yeah. Well hey, let's take a quick break. Patrick, this has been a fascinating conversation. I love the again, your thought leadership in this space. Your experience, your ability to see the macro trends, I think is really critical as we think about the well-being movement on the horizon. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back.—Your law firm is worth protecting and so is your time. ALPS has the quickest online application for legal malpractice insurance out there. Apply, see rates, and buy coverage, all in about 20 minutes. Being a lawyer is hard, our new online app is easy. Apply now at applyonline.alpsnet.com.—BREE:So, Patrick, continuing along the line of what is happening in big law around this whole lawyer well-being movement. There is a pledge, it's the well-being pledge for legal employers. That is being conducted by the American Bar Association, specifically, the Commission on Lawyers Assistance Programs, but you really were the instigator of that. So can you talk a little bit about why you thought that was so important and how that project's going right now?PATRICK: Yeah, so I'd be happy to. I'm really, really gratified with how the pledge has turned out, especially given how it began. What I mean by that is, I first proposed the idea of a pledge campaign to ask legal lawyers to publicly state a commitment to various principles around well-being, back in, I want to say 2015 prior to the study. At the time I proposed that and had this idea, the profession was in a different place. This conversation wasn't really happening or resonating in the profession. So that idea gained no traction.So when I had the opportunity to present it again in 2018 under the [inaudible 00:32:24] of the ABA, Working Group to Advance Lawyer Well-Being, the group liked it and we ran with it and we launched it in September of 2018. Starting with 12 law firm, and those were basically firms that I or others in the working group had a relationship with. We approached them and said, "Would you like to put your name behind this campaign and help us generate momentum and interest to hopefully change the culture of the profession?" So we started with 12, I would say very courageous law firms. We're now up to close to 200 organizations.BREE:That's right.PATRICK: [crosstalk 00:33:00] pledge, which is really, really remarkable. We still have a lot of room to grow and a lot of stakeholders that we want to get on board, but it has already in my view, amounted to a vehicle for cultural change. That was the idea from the beginning. We need a vehicle for cultural change, something that provides concrete, tangible guidance about steps that organizations can take to reduce the impact and prevalence of mental health and substance abuse problems. I really couldn't be more pleased by how well it's going.I'll say it's simply signing a pledge and saying we're going to do X, Y, and Z, in it of itself is meaningless unless the organization follows through. It's not hard to imagine why some organizations may want to sign on just for PR reasons or peer pressure, whatever. But we just finished evaluating, we circulated commitment forms, recommitment forms, after organizations had been signatories for a year. We're just finishing evaluating all of those responses and the overwhelming majority of signatories are really taking meaningful steps. I mean-BREE:That's great news.PATRICK: [crosstalk 00:34:16] they're trying to live up to that commitment that they made.BREE:Yeah, wonderful. Can you talk just for a minute, because my thought is maybe some people who are listening who may be interested in getting involved in that pledge. So it's for legal employers, it's not just big law. Right?PATRICK: Yes, exactly. So we are-BREE:Bar associations?PATRICK: We have an overwhelming number of big law firms who have signed on but Bar associations, law school, corporate legal departments, sector legal employers. A large public defender's office, a state attorney's office, the Department of Justice. If anyone from the DOJ is listening, we want you to take the pledge. There are lots of other stakeholders that it would be great to get on board because this is about changing the culture of the profession, not the culture of big law firms.BREE:Right, right. So also, Chris, what do you think about the pledge as being someone who works in day to day in risk management for law firms? Do you see it as a helpful tool?CHRIS:Yeah, I think again, what we're trying to do is get the discussion going amongst partners in any size of a firm or in any type of a legal employer environment. So the more that those conversations are being had, I think that the more that you're seeing people see... I know from our perspective, we believe that happier, healthier lawyers ultimately lead to fewer claims. So the pledge, I think, has been really a catalyst for... What I would love to see is again, 200 signatories to become 1,000 signatories, to become 2,000 signatories because I think we continue to want to be able to see this filtered down if big law is the pace setter, how do we continue to see small law, solo practitioners, and others come into it? Then also, a geographic representation.I know one of my aspirations is to have pledge signers in every state in the country. So it is really a catalyst for the national discussion, the national movement, and people saying, "I'm in." We need people to say, "I'm in," because I think that that is going to be critical to the success of our ultimate goal, which is the culture shift.PATRICK: I think that's right. When we get to that point of having a really wide base of buy in and a wide base of participation, in for example, the pledge. I mean that's when you start to see this idea of well-being really associated with the idea of being a lawyer. It becomes part of the notion of what a career in the legal profession involves. Part of that role, ideally one day be a focus on taking care of yourself.CHRIS:Yeah, let's shift here quickly. I know again, we'd be remiss to not talk for a few minutes with you, Patrick, about the impacts of the pandemic. You referenced it a little bit in some of your current research. Just hear your thoughts on the effect of the pandemic on lawyers, to the legal community, substance abuse, mental health. We're seeing it amongst our [inaudible 00:37:35]. It's a tough time out there.BREE:Yeah.PATRICK: Yeah, it's an extraordinarily tough time, I think for anyone in society. Different people have been experiencing the events of 2020 differently. That's one thing that I think is important to recognize, that although we tend to say we're all in this together. That's true, but also really not true. We're in the same storm but we're not all on the same boat. That's really evident in some work environments, where you might have some people who this has amounted to a significant inconvenience for them. Maybe they're riding it out from their beach house or whatever. Then you have other people who are in a 700 square foot apartment and they've been traumatized by what's been going on over the course of the last four to five months. So that experience has not been universal.All of that said, I'm hearing on a daily basis at this point from people, from organization, from firms who are saying, "Our people are struggling." I've had four or five emails, today's a Wednesday, I've had four or five emails sent Monday on that point saying, "Can we talk? We need to talk to you about what's going on. Some of the trends we're seeing." So it's real and it's important to recognize, going back to the data that we were all discussing earlier, the legal profession was starting off on shakier ground, as it relates to our mental health and substance abuse risk. We already had higher levels of those problems. Now the pandemic has come along, and not only the pandemic. The stay at home orders, the economic uncertainty, the racial tension that's been [inaudible 00:39:25] the country. I mean, there's a lot happening in 2020 that has really pushed some people to the brink or in some cases unfortunately, over the brink.BREE:What are you telling these folks when they call? To the extent that you can share that. What is some general advice?PATRICK:            Well, almost always these conversations involve letting them know that what they're experiencing internally in their organization is not anomalous. So helping them understand the dimensions of what's happening throughout the country and around the world. Normalizing that experience, but also I think it's really important for organizations to be mindful of how they're communicating with their people around this and how they're trying to make accommodations and adjustments to culture and expectations where possible. If I were to call them several months ago, I think back in March, about this phenomenon essentially known as emotional dissonance, which is the disparity between how we feel inside and how we feel we have to present in order to conform with workplace expectations or other expectations of us. Right now for many people, that level of emotional dissonance is quite high because they are a mess inside and they're really struggling to hold it together or they're completely burnt out and they're completely frazzled, but they're a lawyer. There's a very real set expectation for how they present themselves and how they comport themselves.So I think it's important for organizations and employers to recognize that and to try to move the needle a little bit and show some flexibility around those expectations because the higher that level of emotional dissonance, the greater the risk of burn out, unwanted turnover, all sorts of problematic outcomes.CHRIS:Patrick, let's spend our last couple minutes talking about just your motivation. You are somebody again, first generation lawyer. In many respects, you're both nudging and blowing us, opening up new doors in a national discussion. I've called you at times the fire alarm puller, which means that you're shining the light on some of the problems of our profession, which I know that it's motivated by a desire to drive it in the right direction and to return it to a level of professional satisfaction that we can all be proud of and excited about.I'm just curious on, what's it like to be in your role, to be talking to lawyers about the challenges and also I know that you are amongst, in our community, one of the primary solution drivers. You're always thinking about, how do we move it forward? So as we think about this culture shift, I'd just love your perspective on both raising the alarm on one side, but yet putting the fire out and looking for a bluer sky, a better horizon in the future.PATRICK:          Yeah, well they're both, I think, equally important. I think the fire alarm has been raised at this point. That's a great question, Chris. Thank you, I should say, for asking that because I think it really gets it to equally important things. We needed to raise awareness, we needed to get this conversation going. I think on an ongoing basis we will need to keep that level of buy-in, and that level of awareness raised. So that's one of the reasons why I'm conducting new research. We can't rely on research from 2016 in perpetuity. We need current data to continually drive the conversation. But beyond that, it's only so much utility if you raise awareness, and then don't have any next steps outlined. Talk about, how do we get to a better place? It's a problem and it's a solution. Now we've identified the problem and we all have to be focused on developing good solutions.I love problem solving, not in the math sense, I'm terrible at math but just in a conceptual sense. It's always what I've enjoyed is trying to figure out problems and solutions. So that piece does really motivate me and I enjoy that. I like wrestling with concepts and theories and testing different propositions and figuring out what might work. So that's a really important piece.I've got to say, I appreciate you saying that I'm driving some efforts here, but this is a team effort. Both of you and all of our other wonderful colleagues on the national task force and other people around the profession who are contributing to this cause, we're all rowing in the same direction and contributing where we can to turn the ship. I don't know how many different lame metaphors I've used but it's certainly not just me. We really are doing this together. But I'm grateful, I experience a lot of gratitude for the opportunities that I've had in my life to allow me to be doing this work. Most days it's good to get out of bed and it's good to get up and do what I have to do that day.CHRIS:If the goal is the culture shift, I am curious on what your greatest fear is as we look ahead.PATRICK:  [inaudible 00:45:05] you stumped me, because I don't know what this says about my personality but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. I don't know that I have one.BREE:                   I know that with the task force when we first started our greatest fear is that nobody would pay attention or we'd write this report and it would sit on a bookshelf.CHRIS:Yeah.BREE:So that's not happening.CHRIS:That's not happening. My greatest fear is always, I've been around the legal profession for 20 years now and you see issues rise to the level of national discussion, and oftentimes then peter out. I think we collectively, I think we're both trying to build the infrastructure and the sustainability of the movement and the architecture of the movement so that it continues to be front and center, a front burner issue. I feel like we've done a pretty good job thus far but boy, once we let our guard down we could lose the momentum and we can lose momentum.PATRICK: Well, I couldn't agree more fully. I have no intention of letting that happen for my part. That would be fully antithetical to who I am at my core. So I'm going to keep pushing this as long and as hard as I can. Knowing that there are so many other people invested in this process, I think will probably overcome some of the what may have been long odds at the beginning, about whether you can really achieve a cultural change in the legal profession. I think we're getting there and we will ultimately get there.BREE:Patrick, you truly are making the profession a better one. So, thank you.PATRICK: Well, that's kind, Bree. Thank you.CHRIS:Yeah, it's been awesome. Again, we talk about awesome people doing great things. You are definitely in that camp and Patrick, we thank you so much for being on the podcast and being one of our first guests.PATRICK:                 That was great. Really good to chat with you both. I hope this podcast is just a tremendous success, as I'm sure it will be.CHRIS:Awesome. Well, everyone, be well out there. We'll be coming back with a podcast in a couple weeks. Thank you.BREE:Thanks, bye, everybody.

How does a guy who used to sell fighter jets move on to build an Ecommerce company that sells single-blade razors? It’s an interesting question with an even more interesting answer, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Patrick Coddou tells the tale, and gives some insights into the world of Ecommerce along the way. Patrick is the founder and CEO of Supply, and even though the company has been in business since 2015, has seen 80% of its total profits have come in over just the last several months. So what’s Patrick’s secret? In today’s interview, Patrick dives into the nitty-gritty of what changed, including how he finally discovered exactly what profit margins he — and most companies — need to hit in order to achieve sustained success. Learn what that number is and more, on this episode.  Main Takeaways: Always Be Testing: To achieve the best user experience and optimize sales, you need to constantly test new ideas. Whether it’s pop-ups to showcase new items, implementing a legacy program, or experimenting with video, you learn something new every time you test. Plus, sometimes the failed tests are even more valuable than the successful ones.    It’s All About the Margins: Businesses live and die based on their gross margins. If you are not charging enough and/or pay too much to have your products made, you’re putting an unnecessary financial strain on your business that could break it. Riding the Ecommerce Waves: There is a ton of volatility in the Ecommerce industry. In order to achieve sustained success, companies need to be nimble and able to adapt to the changing tides. Keep overhead low, focus on your P&L and build processes that allow you to make quick shifts when needed. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles and today on the show, we have the founder of Supply, Patrick Coddou. Patrick, welcome. Patrick: Thank you for having me. Stephanie: Yeah, we're excited to have you on. I was doing a little bit of LinkedIn stalking and your background... At first, when I stumbled on your LinkedIn, I'm like, "Is this the right guy?" I saw a background in selling fighter jets and I wanted to start there with you of kind of like a little bit of your background before you founded Supply. Patrick: Sure. So I spent my education as a mechanical engineering and before starting this company, I spent eight and a half years in the corporate world. I worked in the aerospace industry and in particular I worked on military aircraft. We make some fighter aircraft here in Fort Worth, Texas where I'm from. Stephanie: Very cool. And what does that look like behind the scenes of working on aircraft? I saw that you did, I think an $8 billion deal. So I want to hear a little bit more details around that. Patrick: Yes. I worked on it. It would be very, very arrogant of me to claim that I was responsible for that deal. Yeah. So in general, and I'm happy to go deeper if you want to, but in general, the US government works with foreign militaries to arm and equip them with certain pieces of equipment that we think that are necessary for them to have and to support interoperability between allies. So one of those aircraft was called the F-35. And I think the deal you're talking about was maybe the deal with South Korea we did probably five or six years ago where the US government sold, I don't remember how many, 60, 70 aircraft to South Korea. Patrick: So that was a really phenomenal experience getting to fly there and negotiate with our partners over in South Korea and spent a lot of time kind of immersing myself in their culture. Just a cool, cool thing to be a part of. So I learned a lot there, but at the same time was ready to get out when I left. Stephanie: Yeah. So let's hear a little bit about you're almost a decade at, I think Lockheed Martin and you're starting to get the entrepreneurial itch. So what was happening while you were there and what had you make the jump. Patrick: Yeah. So as outrageously cool as the subject matter was of what I worked on in my previous life, it was... As awesome as the subject was, it was as equally terrible to work in a corporate environment like that one for me personally. Not for everybody, but for me. And especially working with the US government. Just procedures and processes and just layers of bureaucracy. It just led to boredom and frankly anxiety and depression personally. Just wanting to be fulfilled in my work and not finding the ability to be so in what I was doing. Patrick: I tend to plan and think ahead a lot. When I visualize the future of my life there, it was like I could literally see myself sitting at the same desk like doing the same things that I had been doing for like the next 30 years of my life. For years, I wasn't raised as an entrepreneur. I don't really have that in my family. I didn't know the first thing about starting a business, but for years I was always thinking about kind of what is kind of my path out of this life and kind of into the next one. Patrick: I always had ideas and never really kind of jumped on them because I wasn't a risk taker, I was an engineer. Taking risk was the furthest thing from what I was used to. And I finally have this idea for a razor that I wanted to invent, and we can kind of get into that if we want to, but in general I've always kind of struggled with irritation and ingrown hairs with shaving since the first day I started shaving. I came across this old style of shaving, shaving with a single blade safety razor and just fell in love with it and decided I wanted to try to kind of make a modern version of this old razor that I found. Patrick: Then in addition to that just decided like this is kind of... It's kind of now or never to make the leap from this job to doing something on my own. So it was kind of a perfect storm of the idea came and the necessity came and the opportunity came at the same time and just decided to go for it. Stephanie: Yeah, that's awesome. I think a lot of people probably have those same feelings of getting stuck somewhere. I know I have in the past. There was a point in my previous life when I was working at Fannie Mae and I had the same kind of thing. I'm like, "Oh my gosh. Do I want to end up in a semi-government job or corporate job?" And even at Google, it's like, "Oh, things feel so great right now. Should I leave? I feel like I'll stay here for a long time because it's so comfy." So I think a lot of people have the same kind of feeling of now or never. I better jump before I get stuck here for the rest of my life. Patrick: And the further you go in those career paths like the harder it is to leave. What can an aerospace engineer that has worked as an aerospace engineer for 20 years do other than that after they've been there so long? Stephanie: Yeah. I had the same feeling. What year did you start Supply or did you start something before then or was Supply your first company? Patrick: Yes, Supply is my first kind of real company. Prior to starting Supply which we started in... The company started in January of 2015, but we launched publicly in August of 2015 with our first Kickstarter campaign. And prior to that, I started a website with one of my best buddies called razorpedia.com and that was like, I think, we started in 2012 or 2013. Long story short, it was a kind of razor review website that really was kind of a... Just kind of a stupid fun thing to do with a buddy on weekends where we wanted to kind of test razors and try to find the best razor on the market. Actually, the website ended up getting pretty popular and we ended up selling it later. But that's really where the razor kind of story began with shaving. Stephanie: Yeah. I mean, I read that the Razorpedia was like the number one google search result and it had like 1 million organic page views over 30 months. So it sounds like it was actually a pretty big deal. Patrick: Yeah, it was pretty successful. We were fortunate enough to like... We literally launched I think the same week that Harry's launched. Stephanie: Good timing. Patrick: Yeah. It was good timing and we wrote a blog like the same week about Harry's. We ended up like kind of being... If you searched razor reviews online or Harry's razor review, we were right at the top of the search results. So it was kind of dumb luck. So we started to kind of monetize it with ads. We didn't know what we were doing. We were making it up as we went. The best thing that came out of that was the realization that all these multi-blade razors that we tested were all... In my opinion, were all trash and just not good razors. It was that website that actually led me down the path to find this old style of shaving, which is this single blade style shave. Stephanie: It's really interesting how marketing can really train us like "Oh, the more blades the better, and this one has two. Oh, this one has three." You wouldn't even think like getting back to the roots of like you're talking about a single blade is maybe actually the best way of doing things. Patrick: Yeah. There's an old Onion article from like 2002 and I think the most blades in a razor was maybe three or four at that time, and the title of the article was Screw It, We're Doing Five Blades. So they actually foresaw the five blade razor. I think you can actually buy a seven blade razor today. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. So you have this idea of Supply. What did the early days look like? I mean you have this old-time razor where you're like, "Oh, this actually works really well." What was it like to actually start the company and find a way to create and manufacture this razor? Patrick: It was very challenging to say the least. So I had the good fortune of one of my friends. I wanted to just make the leap and just go cold turkey and go all in on the company and the idea from day one. I had the good fortune of having some friends in my life that I listened to that said, "Why don't you try to figure out how to make this product work before you just leave your paycheck behind?" That turned out to be really good advice because it took me about a year and a half if not two years to go from Kickstarter campaign, which was kind of the initial rough prototype to no kidding supply chain or product that I could actually sell at scale. Patrick: I have no background in consumer products at all, whatsoever. So a lot of that kind of two-ish years was just me making it up. I had no investors. I had no real network or people to rely on to help me figure out how to kind of make this product. So a lot of it was just kind of figuring it out as I went and making a lot of mistakes and fixing those mistakes when they happened. Stephanie: So how were you finding ways to... I mean, you get a really well-funded Kickstarter. What was the next steps after that? Did you go and start meeting with people who manufacture razors already and you're like, "Here's my new design idea?" Or since you're an engineer, were you actually like trying to make your own? Patrick: Yeah. No, I did not make my own. We've always done outsourced supply chain and production since day one. We're currently actually not working with any of our early manufacturing partners. We've got a really phenomenal network of manufacturers that we work with today. But in the early days, it was a lot of googling although that doesn't really get you too far when it comes to manufacturing. Patrick: And then just a lot of calling and cold outreach to anybody that I could get to pick up the phone. So I think I probably called somewhere around 50 or 60 different suppliers that I just found through Google or recommendation from somebody who would talk to me, but didn't want to do the work for me or something like that. I eventually settled on... And this is a very common practice in the consumer products space. I eventually settled on... I never really know what to call them, but kind of an outsourcing kind of middleman sort of company where they're a... This is what they do is they go find factories to make you your product. Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Patrick: Yeah, I found a guy local to me. I don't remember how I found him. I think he was on Upwork maybe and he managed the manufacturing of our first batch for me. Stephanie: Very cool. So what led you to change manufacturers? You said in the early days, you had one manufacturer two and then you don't use them now. What happened and what kind of lessons did you learn through switching manufacturers? Patrick: So we launched our campaign August of 2015. I promised delivery by March of 2015, and that was in my mind plenty... That was more than enough time. That was like I was being generous with that timeline. And the manufacturer knew that. They were on track with that. March came and went. No products. April came and went no products. May. And then June I finally... I'll never forget, he literally shows up on my doorstep with a big old dolly of... I think we had ordered maybe 2,000 razors or something like that and he drops him off inside my house. Then as he's walking out the door, he says, "Oh, by the way, there's a problem within." Patrick: I'm like, "Oh, now, you're going to tell me there's a problem." Anyways, it turned out there was an issue with the razor to where if it wasn't used properly, it actually wouldn't even really shave at all and you couldn't load a blade. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Patrick: Yeah, just a little problem, which was just devastating because I had already spent all my money that I had raised, I think about $8,000 on that production batch. Essentially what we did over the next kind of two to three months is I set up a little shop in my garage to try to kind of adjust the razors to make them work and we did the best we could with that. We were very open with our backers and that's always like number one thing. I always tell young founders or operators is like when things go wrong trying to cover it up or not being honest about it with your customers is just going to make it worse. Patrick: You need to kind of be honest. We were telling our customers what's up like here's what happened, here's what we're trying to make right about it. Oh by the way, if you want to wait, we're going to start up a second batch with a new manufacturer, but it's just going to take some time. Patrick: Anyways, we ended up kind of salvaging some of that initial bash. We ended up having to scrap a lot of it, lost a lot of money on that first batch and then we started up a second production line and eventually made it right with our backers and delivered everything we promised, but it took... I think it was the following March before we finished delivering what we had promised. So it took a year longer than what we had told people it would take. The lesson for me is and has always been at the end of the day, all I have personally that's keeping my business alive is the relationships with the people that I work with. Patrick: Those relationships and that trust is everything. It's extremely difficult to, on the front end, determine if you can trust somebody. But I always highly leverage towards trust when I'm evaluating a new partner rather than capability, right? Because capability is just kind of table stakes for us to even have a conversation. Something is going to go wrong and what happens when it goes wrong is what makes all the difference. Patrick: So that first vendor, his true colors were showed when something went wrong. The vendors, I'm with now, things go wrong all the time, but what happens is they make it right. So that's kind of the biggest learning lesson for me and the biggest advice I can give people is going into business with people that you not only enjoy working with, but can trust to make things right when things go wrong because that's literally all you have. What's written on the contract doesn't even really matter when you're as small as me, right? Because I can't sue somebody. It's just... Anyway. Stephanie: Too much time, too much money to even try and do that to begin with. Patrick: Yeah, exactly. So it's all about relationships. Stephanie: Yeah, that's a really good point. So on your Twitter I think I saw that... I mean, you guys have been in business for a few years, but 80% of your lifetime profit has come in the last six months and I was wondering what's the catalyst behind that? Why are all the profits coming in now? Is it better marketing? What's behind the scenes to drive that profit now? Patrick: Two things, supply and demand. So on the supply side, I worked all last year. This is another kind of big learning point. I've gathered over the years. I worked all last year to significantly improve our gross margins or essentially how much our products cost to make versus what we sell them. The first four basically years of my company, I wasn't charging enough for my products and they were costing me too much to make. So 2019 was a big kind of cost cutting year for us. Patrick: Then in addition to that... So those cost cutting initiatives went into effect on November 1st. So that's the supply side and then the demand side is November 3rd we aired on Shark Tank. So that was the beginning of a big tidal wave of orders. So those two things coincided very nicely to bring us to a place to where we're significantly profitable in the way that we've never been before and that really changes a lot of things for us. Stephanie: That's awesome. So how did you go about figuring out what areas needed to have cost cut down? What does that process look like? Patrick: Yeah, for us, I mean it's less about... We've always had very low overhead. Started the business with my wife. We've barely ever paid ourselves much... We've had a very small team always. We worked out of our house for the first three years. So overhead has always been very low for us. I always, always, always urge young businesses and founders to keep overhead as low as possible. I think a lot of the reason you're seeing a lot of companies go out of business or have issues this year since COVID hit is they don't have the flexibility in their overhead to withstand volatility in the marketplace which is what's going on right now. Patrick: So that's always been low for us. It's always been a thing that I've held important. What it costs us to make our products versus what we charge for them, I had what I'd consider a friend/mentor get on a phone with me. He runs a very successful men's clothing business that's probably 10 times larger than mine. He shared with me, "If you're not charging at least 4X for your products what you make them for, you're never going to be able to scale in a meaningful way because customer acquisition costs are just too high to let you be able to scale with any less margin than that." And he's right. Stephanie: Did you take his advice exactly and do 4X of how much it costed you? Patrick: Yes, I did. Stephanie: Cool. And what was the price before for a razor and what did that jump to? Patrick: Without getting into the engineering side which is maybe a little boring, but we didn't really necessarily change the price of the razor. We have two versions. We have what we call an alloy version and a steel version. The steel version we increased the price probably about 20 to 30% and we introduced an alloy version which is a lot less expensive to manufacture and we actually kept and almost kind of lowered the price on that one because we were able to bring our production costs down so much. Stephanie: Got it. When you're lowering your production costs, I know you mentioned overhead is a big thing, but was there anything with your production costs or the materials that you also looked at decreasing the prices for? Patrick: No. I mean, we kind of kept the packaging the same. Another thing that you'll probably hear a lot of people, supply chain guys talk about is we're always trying to get like ahead of the curve when it comes to ordering because historically we've always had to rush shipments via air. Not all of our stuff, but a lot of our stuff is made overseas and air shipments cost anywhere from five to 10X more than ocean shipments. So that's always really painful when you got to spend 20 to 30 grand just to ship something versus two to three grand. Patrick: So getting better forecasting so that we can order far enough ahead of time to put something on the ocean instead of the air is another big thing we're doing. Otherwise, it's just like constant... I live in my profit and loss statement where I'm just counting every single penny that goes into my cost of goods sold whether it's the cost to ship to me, whether it's cost to ship to my customer, the fees I'm getting charged by my credit card companies, cost of my boxes. Patrick: I mean, it just requires relentless dedication to constantly being in the numbers to make sure that... It's just like... It's like entropy. All things tend towards chaos. Well, everything in your P&L tends towards higher costs if you don't stay on top of it because you're just going to spend more and more money. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. I think a lot of founders oftentimes avoid looking at it because, one, it's kind of hard to read a P&L or a balance sheet or something like that if you haven't taken the time to figure out what all the line items mean. But then also like you said like a lot of things start adding up behind the scenes whether it's subscriptions or just stuff where you're like, "Whoa, I didn't realize my credit card fee is this." Maybe it's actually cheaper just to you know get a loan or do this and start thinking differently about how you're spending your money. Because a lot of those costs do add up especially in the early days. Patrick: They do, and software too. Stephanie: Oh, yeah. Software is a big one. And forecasting. I thought that's a really good point about forecasting in a way that you don't have to airship things. We actually haven't had someone on the show talk about air versus ocean, so I found that very interesting. Patrick: Yep. Stephanie: So the other thing I was wondering I would love to hear more about is your Shark Tank experience. We've had quite a few Shark Tankers on here and everyone's had a slightly different experience. I want to hear a little bit about what that looked like. Patrick: Awesome. I mean, it was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of deal. Never will forget it. We had a blast. I went on with my wife. We both pitched. We filmed in June of last year, so June of 2019 and then we aired in November of 2019. Just all the way through from the very... I applied three years in a row. It took me three years to get on the show and from the first day I applied the first time all the way through the last interaction I had with them after filming, it's just a really class act. Up and down, just phenomenal people. Patrick: I'm not talking necessarily about the sharks, although they're all great. You work with them for literally 30 minutes to an hour. You never see them again, but all the people behind the scenes are just a class act. Just the experience of standing in front of these people that you've watched for close to a decade, if not more than a decade on TV and actually talking to them and them talking back to you and saying your name. It's just like this very kind of out of body experience to where you kind of like in a sense like black out a little bit. Like don't even really remember what happened, at least personally. But we had an absolute blast. We ended up getting an offer from Robert and accepted his offer. We actually didn't end up closing that deal, but just had an absolute blast. Stephanie: Oh, and you said you didn't end up closing it?   Patrick: No, we did not. Stephanie: I think that's also interesting to know that not all the deals close and there's things that maybe happen afterwards that could impact that on both sides. Patrick: Yeah. About half of them don't close. Stephanie: Yeah. So what was it like after you went on the show? I'm sure you had a large increase in demand? Did you guys have any website issues or inventory issues or what did that look like? Patrick: Yeah, a huge increase in demand. I think in November, we did you know 4X our previous monthly record. So big increase in demand. It really strained our customer service. It strained our supply... Not our supply chain, our warehouse a bit although we had just onboarded with Shopify Fulfillment Network. They were doing a phenomenal job of keeping up with things. It was more of what was straining was getting stuff in stock from our vendors on time. Patrick: So we had some orders that took us like three to four weeks to ship and that made some customers pretty upset since they were Christmas presents. We did get everybody everything they needed before Christmas which was like my one thing that I wasn't going to sacrifice on. We ended up getting it done. But between November 3rd and Christmas, it was pretty painful, in a good way. But the response was pretty phenomenal. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. And are you seeing continued demand from that or did you start leveraging other maybe customer acquisition strategies or marketing tactics to kind of build on that demand? Patrick: Yeah, so it really put a ton of wind in our sales. It's really helped us kind of upgrade a lot of our business kind of to the next level. But in terms of like sustained demand, no, you're not getting a ton of like post Shark tank people streaming it and coming to your website. Although, I'm sure that happens. What it has done for us is it's given us kind of a social proof of being on this national platform. Patrick: So we've used a lot of footage and assets from the airing in our advertising. So if you go to our website, you'll probably get retargeted with some Shark Tank style ads. And just in general, it's given us the ability to taking us from this quiet kind of nobody brand to... I won't call us a household name, because we're certainly not, but a lot more people recognize us like, "Oh yeah, I've seen that before." Patrick: So it helps with everything. I mean, it helps with not only the company but your partners and your vendors are now even more excited to work with you. Press finds you that hasn't found you in the past. We'll be in The Wall Street Journal this weekend. Stephanie: Oh, cool. Patrick: We are in GQ's best single blade razor of 2020. These things just kind of slowly snowball. It's been a really phenomenal experience. We're very grateful for it. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. It's such a good reminder of how PR can work if it's done the right way because there's all these PR companies who always say that they can help you, but it depends and that's just a good reminder that it can work well if you get the right outlet and getting featured in like Wall Street Journal or places like that. Very beneficial. Stephanie: So what kind of digital channels are you finding the most success in right now when you're going about... You're talking about retargeting and different marketing tactics. What kind of channels are you finding success in? Patrick: Sure. I mean, no surprise Facebook, Instagram and Google in that order for volume. We've always wanted to test these other channels like Snapchat and Tik-Tok and whatever and we probably will sooner or later. But there are some other things we want to spend some more time on building before then. We do a little bit of affiliate. We do a tiny bit of influencer, and that's really kind of I think what we're going to start turning our eye to for maybe the next phase of our growth. But yeah, those are really the big channels for us. Stephanie: Yeah, cool. So when you were building up supply and you mentioned Harry's earlier. The razor market feels like it's been pretty popular for people to start companies in. You've got Dollar Shave Club, you've got Harry's. How did you think about that competition and making sure that you stood out among the other brands that were launching? Patrick: Yeah. So our value proposition is very much kind of anti-Harry's and anti-Dollar Shave Club. Then our positioning and our pricing is similarly the complete opposite. So they're clearly competitors of ours, but I don't really consider them necessarily direct competitors. What I do consider them is people that I can steal my customers from. So it's a single blade. I haven't really talked much about the product. It's a single blade. Stephanie: Yeah, let's hear about that. Patrick: Yeah. It's a premium single blade razor and the value propositions are there's a few. Number one, it's not a cheap product. It's a $75 handle, but the value prop is you invest a lot up front, but then you save tons of money over time. So our blades are 75 cents a piece and they last somewhere between eight to 10 shaves. So after you buy the handle, you're spending... If you're shaving every day, you're spending maybe 24 bucks on blades a year. Then you've got this handle that lasts forever. We actually guarantee it for life. Patrick: So you never have to buy the handle again. But then aside from that, the value prop is a single blade gives you just as close of a shave as a multi-blade razor. But for roughly 30% of guys, they experience like myself a really severe razor burn and or bumps typically on the neck or in the sensitive parts of the face. And a lot of that is caused by multi-blade razors. We don't have to go that deep into it, but the way they're designed is works for some guys in terms of giving you a close shave, but for guys like me who have sensitive skin, it actually does the opposite. It makes things worse for you. Patrick: Anyways, so going back to Harry's and Dollar Shave Club. So a lot of guys, they just use these razors and they just think like this is the way everybody shaves and they just have to deal with this issue and just deal with the razor burn or just not shave. So what we're telling them is no, it's not the case. You can actually shave and enjoy it and not have your face be a train wreck after you shave. Patrick: So we're slowly helping guys kind of wake up from this myth that multi-blades are better and that's like the only way to shave. If it doesn't work for you, then too bad. Just keep shaving and tearing up your face. Stephanie: Yeah. How are you going about that education process because I was going to say that it does seem like there's quite a bit of education required for that and just for like... I mean, you mentioned shaving eight to 10 times. I'm like, "Oh, I think a lot of people probably shave with the same blade for long time." I'm thinking about myself, I'm like, "Oh, man. I'm pretty bad at that." So how do you go about getting people to change their behavior? Patrick: Yeah. Honestly, it's tough. I mean, I'll give you an example. We present in our ads like why multi-blade razors are bad for your skin and we literally present it the same... We present the same data that Gillette presents. It's on their website. Multi-blade razors are literally designed to lift... The first blade tugs the hair out of the skin and like the second and third blade kind of cuts it below the surface of the skin. That's literally how Gillette has designed them to work. Patrick: People accuse of us of lying and making that up. And it's like, "No, just google it." You'll see it straight out of the horse's mouth. So the point is like it takes a lot of education. When they don't even believe that you're just saying what your competitor says, clearly they they need a lot of education. Patrick: So we do it through video. For example, if you buy the razor, you get four emails from me, the first four days after you buy it and each one is a short 60-second training video. It's not like this outrageously complex course of learning how to shave with our razor. It's 60-second videos. But guys, we've learned are very prone to throw instructions out so they don't read anything that we include with the product. Stephanie: You think they fancy videos like you call them, "Hey, come look at this." Patrick: Exactly. It continues to be a challenge, but in general video seems to work the best in terms of teaching guys how to do. And actually, we're starting up our YouTube channel next week to kind of help that process as well. Stephanie: That's really interesting. Another thing I read. I don't even know why I know anything about razors because I did read an article about the marketing behind them, how a lot of the traditional companies show the razor getting like water all over it and sitting in the shower and that actually degrades the blades and then you have to change it more frequently and that was like their whole plan. Do you think that's true or am I just reading conspiracy theories behind razor blades? Patrick: Yeah, I don't know exactly what you've read, but I mean it is true that water, what it does, I mean, if it sits on a blade it causes it to rust which degrades the edge. I mean, we tell our customers don't leave your razor in the shower in a damp environment. We tell our customers not to do that because that's very... That's true. Stephanie: Yeah. I mean, all these things I think most people probably are doing right now, I'm thinking of myself and our producers typing in there that how long she goes from changing her blades. So I think there's a lot of education to do in the market in general. How are you guys also thinking about new products because these are designed for men, but I'm like women definitely have a lot of the same issues. Are you thinking about launching new products geared towards women as well or are you just strictly focused on men's products? Patrick: The short term, we're focused on men's products. We do have women as customers. My wife and my co-founder is a user of our product. So we're more than happy to have the ladies buy from us. But what's really, really difficult or at least I've found is to position our product as both a men's and women's product at the same time. I don't know the best. I'm sure there's a good way to do it, but I don't know what it is because shaving your face and shaving your legs are too... They seem similar, but they're very, very different things. Patrick: I'd love to do like maybe different landing pages or product pages because the value props are basically different, right? So I don't know, man. Maybe I could use some advice for how to sell... Maybe the problem is I just don't know yet how to sell razors to women. Stephanie: It sounds like my team. We've got ideas and we'll team up with your wife and we can all figure it out together. Patrick: Yeah, yeah exactly. It is on the to-do list. It's just something we haven't been able to get to yet. Stephanie: Very cool. So tell me a little bit about how you developed your website like the experience... I mean, when you're selling something that kind of needs to be tried out or you need to hold like the handle to see like wow, this is a good quality like piece of steel here, how do you convey that to the customers who are coming on and how did you develop your website experience. Patrick: Yeah. It's tough, it's really tough. I don't think we've arrived by any stretch, but certainly, certainly made a lot of progress. We have a very, very talented development company. We work with agency called Fuel Made. Good friends, just good people and they do amazing work. So they handle just from the front end and the back end design. They're handling most of that for me. Patrick: Prior to that when we were smaller, I think it's a complete, complete waste of money to spend any money on complex web design. There are so many free or very cheap templates out there that work so well. I would encourage people to not spend any money on development and take any money you have and invest it all in creative and start with just phenomenal photography. Patrick: Find a very, very talented photographer and spend your money there if you're going to spend your money anywhere. So I have a very good friend of mine who is that person and he takes all of our photographs. And so we over index on beautiful photography. We're now at a point to where we can afford kind of an expensive agency to develop our site and otherwise, we do just tons of AB testing. Every month, we're testing something new or we're launching a new feature. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails miserably. Each month is just an opportunity to get better. Stephanie: What kind of tests have you seen work versus fail because I think a lot of people may be thinking about trying out some of the same kind of features or tests that you're thinking about. So is there anything that comes to mind where you're like this really worked well with conversions or increase cart value versus this one did not work at all and it seems like it would have. Patrick: Yeah. I probably have more this didn't work than this does work. Stephanie: Let's hear it. I like those stories just as much. Patrick: Well, man, I'm really sad about this one. We just did one where once you add the razor to the cart, there's a pop-up that immediately shows up that says, "Hey, do you want to upgrade this to our starter set which is our second best seller aside from our razor?" We tested different variations of that pop-up. We tested it against no pop-up and there was like no clear winner after, I think it was two weeks and a very significant amount of traffic. No clear winner. Patrick: So we decided not to go with that pop-up. I launched a membership/loyalty program in April. The way I designed it was outrageously complex and I put a lot of development work and dollars into it, let it run for eight weeks and then I canned it. That was painful to do because it was just too complex. Stephanie: What made it complex? Because I've actually heard similar themes from a few other people who've been on the show who said that they thought that a loyalty program would work for them, but it ended up not working like they thought. So what do you think made it too complex or would you have done it differently or are you just like, "We're not trying that again?" Patrick: Yeah. Two things on the front end and on the back end. So on the back end, the code, it was completely custom designed from a code using scripts on Shopify and it just got really complicated. But on the front end, it was kind of confusing to the customer. So the program was essentially like it was kind of like buy a razor and get a free lifetime of blades offer which sounds like a really compelling offer, but there's always kind of... There's got to be a caveat to that statement. Patrick: So it was like you could get a shipment every quarter of blades, just pay for shipping or you could buy our premium membership, which was like 20 bucks a year and then get the blade shipped to you once a quarter, which is a great deal, but offering them those two options was really confusing and then just the way we made them sign up for it was confusing. Patrick: In general, we're going to try to launch another program in the future, but it will be far less complicated. If you can't explain it in a sentence or less and have people get it immediately, then you've set yourself up for failure. And that's what we did. I've explained the program to people and they'd be like, "Okay, wait. But if I buy this, what happens?" Stephanie: I need my Google spreadsheet out like which way will I save an extra dollar? Patrick: Yeah. So anyways, things that have worked. We actually launched international currency on our website because we do a pretty big chunk of business overseas and that actually increases conversion rates quite a bit for us. I'm blanking right now. We've had other wins, but I'm blanking on it right now. Stephanie: That's all right. If you think of any more, we can circle back because I actually think it's very interesting diving into some of these tests like this because I'm sure other founders are thinking about similar tests. Patrick: For sure. Stephanie: Very cool. So a couple general Ecommerce questions. Now, that you've been in the world for a while and kind of doing a bunch of tests and you launched your company, what kind of trends or patterns do you see coming down the pipe right now especially with everything with the pandemic. Are there any changes that you see coming in the future around Ecommerce? Patrick: I guess this is probably cliché, but the only thing I know is that I have no idea what's coming next. I think there's a ton of opportunity in the future and a ton of volatility in the future for Ecommerce. I'm very, very grateful, number one to be in the industry I'm in to continue to operate and be healthy and growing. I have friends in the restaurant business that cannot say that. Patrick: So I'm very bullish and grateful for the industry I'm in. I'm not planning on changing anytime soon, but at the same time, I think consumer behavior is going to continue to be like challenging to kind of forecast. People say this all the time on Twitter, but I just don't get the fact that our stock market is so high and our GDP is so low and so many people are out of business. Patrick: To me, it's like, okay, when is this... Part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop and when is this all going to come crashing down and the other part of me is like eCommerce is 30% of retail now and like that's not showing any sign of stopping anytime soon. So I don't know if that's a direct answer, but in general what I'm doing is I'm doubling down. I'm building processes and teams for growth. Patrick: So we actually just left our long time marketing agency that I had a great relationship and love and really enjoyed working with and it was really difficult to leave them. But the main reason I left is like I'm convinced the brands that are super nimble and able to react and adapt really quickly are going to be the ones that survive and thrive in this environment, in this volatile environment. Patrick: So whether Facebook CPMs are up or down or what's going on, I think we're just going to be really flexible and part of what I'm doing to be flexible is building more internal teams to move quickly rather than just being a bit slower. Stephanie: Yeah. That's such a great point and I think a lot of other companies are probably starting to think about that too especially around like being able to move quickly and not having costs that are recurring for like the next three years that you can't get out of or long-term contracts and even around like not relying on just a single manufacturer and being able to kind of like move around if needed. So definitely being more nimble will probably be how a lot of companies are thinking about this going forward. Patrick: Yeah, and it's tough because at the same time you also, I think... We started the call off kind of like this, it's like you have to keep overhead low at the same time. So you've got these competing priorities to be able to move fast and have an internal team, but then also not have a bloated internal team that you just can't respond. Your overhead can't respond quick enough to any kind of unforeseen events. Stephanie: Yep. Completely agree. So is there anything that you wish I would have asked you that I did not bring up? Patrick: Let me see. I don't think so. No, nothing I can think of. Stephanie: Man, I'm just the best. All right. Cool. Then we can move on to a quick lightning round, if that sounds good. Patrick: That works for me. Stephanie: All right. So the lightning round brought to you by SalesForce Commerce Cloud. This is where I will ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Patrick? Patrick: I am ready. Stephanie: Cool. So if you were to start a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be? Patrick: Okay. I know the answer to this one. Stephanie: You're prepared. Patrick: This is no offense to you at all. Stephanie: All right. I'll try not to be offended. Patrick: I would start not like a one-on-one podcast, but like a round table debate style podcast with roughly three to five people. I want vigorous like vitriolic... I don't know if that's a word, but debate. I want people that are so ingrained in their opinion that they're willing to fight other people to the death about what they have to say. The topics would be all Ecommerce or retail related. Stephanie: Okay. Patrick: So anyways. Stephanie: I feel like I see that happening on Twitter right now though. Patrick: Yes, it's Twitter and podcast form. That's exactly what it is. Stephanie: Yeah. I see all these people getting very angry about stuff with certain Ecommerce or someone calls something like D2C and they're like, "That's not data saved." I'm like oh my gosh. Patrick: That's exactly what I'm talking about. Stephanie: That's funny. We at Mission have done roundtables before, but they're usually with like three CMOs and then one of us hosting it. So it does not get that heated. So I'd be very interested to see how your podcast goes. Patrick: Yeah, it would be a requirement for yelling to happen. Stephanie: That sounds great. What's up next on your reading list? Patrick: Let's see. I just downloaded been a book by Ben Horowitz. I don't remember the name of it but it's about building culture. Stephanie: Oh, yeah. What is that new one? Patrick: I don't remember. But it's all related to this kind of transition I'm going through right now is what I call a transition from founder to CEO and focusing less on doing things myself and focusing more about delegating and building a team that can accomplish things without me involved. So a huge, huge, huge part of that is culture and I have no clue how to build good culture. So I want to learn from the best. Stephanie: What You Do Is Who You Are? Patrick: Yes, that's it. Is that new or is that old? Stephanie: Yeah. That one is his newer book. I was listening to it on Audible and I like it because it ties in history along with building a culture, but it's like here's what happened a long time ago and why these themes are still relevant. So I'd recommend that one as well. Patrick: So you liked it? That's good. Stephanie: Yeah. I thought it was great. Patrick: Okay, good. Stephanie: What's up next on your Netflix queue? Patrick: I don't really watch a whole lot of Netflix. Stephanie: No? Nothing? Everyone always starts by saying that and they're like, "Oh, wait. I just did this. I just watched this whole series." Patrick: It's funny. Me and Jennifer will turn on Netflix to watch something new and we always default to just watching The Office. Stephanie: That's a good one. That's a good go to, to Keep you smiling. Patrick: I will say we did just start. We dug up an old DVD set of Seinfeld and now we're watching Seinfeld right now. Stephanie: Oh, nice. Pulling out the DVDs. That's awesome. Patrick: Yeah, the DVD. Blu-Ray though, yeah. Stephanie: Yeah, got to be. What app do you enjoy most on your phone? Patrick: What app? I use twitter probably too much. It's a good thing and a bad thing. A lot of the good things that have happened to me over the past year have been through connections on Twitter, but it can also be a time suck. Stephanie: Yes, I agree. All right. And then the last one, what is a favorite piece of tech that you use or a trying out that's making you or your team more efficient right now? Patrick: More efficient. Well, we're trying out a productivity app called ClickUp? Have you ever heard of it? Stephanie: I think I have. Tell me a little bit more about it. Patrick: It's kind of like a monday.com or an Asana. So like project management, task management. I've never found one I like or that works. We've tried doing it in Notion before, although I love Notion. So we're trying that in ClickUp. I don't know. We'll see. I like it so far. Stephanie: Cool. Yeah, we'll have to check that out. We use Basecamp for almost everything, but I'm open to other things. Patrick: Go ahead. Stephanie: Oh, go ahead. Patrick: I was just going to say, I don't know that I'm a huge fan of Basecamp. I could never get it to work for some reason. Stephanie: Yeah. It is a little high when it comes to like starting up and teaching the team and everyone learning from it, but it gets better. Patrick: Yeah. Stephanie: All right. Well, this has been such a fun interview, Patrick. Thank you for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you and Supply? Patrick: You can find me on Twitter where I spend most of my time. My handle sounds like canoe. Because my last name sounds like canoe, it's Patrick Coddou. So you can find me there and that's really where I spend all my time. And then our website is supply.co. You can see our company and all of our products there. Stephanie: Awesome. Thanks so much and have a great day. Patrick: Thank you.  

John: Hi this is Doctor John Dacey with my weekly podcast New Solutions to the Anxiety Epidemic. Today, I have a friend of mine, Patrick, who is going to talk about his own anxiety and what he’s done about them. How are you doing, Patrick? Patrick: Very good, John. Great to be here. John: Well thank you for coming. I’m just going to name the 8 kinds of anxiety and let’s start off with you saying which one has affected you the most. Is that ok? Patrick: Absolutely. John: Thank you. Those are simple phobias, which we won’t talk about those since everyone has them, separation anxiety, social anxiety, generalized anxiety, those are the 4 sort of lower ones, more common. A little less common are the 4 more difficult ones: agoraphobia, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Do any of these ring a bell with you, Patrick? Patrick: For me, it’d be a panic disorder. Yes sir. John: So tell me, what does it feel like when you get a panic attack? Patrick: Sure. I think to get a better sense of how it happened to me, what it’s been like, I’ll talk a bit about my experiences in recent years and where it lead me and where I’ve come since then. John: That would be great Patrick. That’s just what we’re looking for. Patrick: A little bit about me: I’m a senior neuroscience major at Boston College, almost graduated now, from Massachusetts. I love playing golf, love my friends, love my family, especially my pug, Charlie. For me, I had a very happy upbringing, very happy childhood. John: Where did you grow up? Patrick: Attleborough, Massachusetts. So not too far from Boston. My brothers, best two friends. Very loving and supporting parents. Middle school, high school, college, it was all very good. I loved it. Things for me came to a standstill in the middle of my junior year. So this is end of 2018 to 2019. This is when I started my experience with panic. So I never experienced anything like that before. At the time, when it first started, I really had no idea what to do. Everything was so unfamiliar and so unexpected. I didn’t think that there was any way that whatever was happening could possibly happen to me. John: Can you describe it? What did it feel like? Patrick: So I’ve thought a lot about it and what it’s like when it happens. As much as I describe it in hindsight, it’s always very different when it’s happening in the moment. It’s a lot of confusion. I can really never quite understand what’s going on when it happens. It’s a lot of overwhelming sensations. I really just lose any sense of control over what’s going on at the current moment. John: Does it come on you all of a sudden? Patrick: Yep and a lot of times for me it happened in recurring places so if I had a tendency to have a panic attack in one certain type of location, then anything that was similar or the same type of location, then I would feel that sense of panic again when I would return. So for me, my solution, early, was avoidance. I went on a pretty crazy string of avoiding things that did or may cause panic. I mentioned this to some people where I had times where I couldn’t go to certain classrooms. I felt like I had a few panic attacks in those classes and I would do anything to get avoid those classes and those places and I hated that feeling. John: Who wouldn’t? It’s an awful thing. Patrick: Another one was cars. Here I am, I’m 21 at the time, I’m a college kid, I’ve been happy my entire life, I’ve got tons of great friends, I’m handsome, modest -that’s a joke, but things are getting out of control. I feel like I can’t even get into a car. That’s when I started to think, “that’s really no way for me to be living.” Mentally, emotionally, academically, it’s affecting all parts of my life and in the back of my mind, I knew that but still, I didn’t quite know what to do about it. It basically took me hitting rock bottom, for lack of a better term, to finally make a change. I mentioned this to you, I have this friend who has this quote that he always says to me: “You know what they say about rock bottom?” I know how it goes but I’ll tell him, “What do they say?”  and he says, “It makes a great foundation.” So he’s always telling me that after his favorite sports team loses or he loses a bet or something. I never really took this quote seriously, but rock bottom for me was about February 2019 so close to a year ago or so. Again, junior in college, I’m 21, supposedly the best years of my life right now but I walk out to the reservoir at Boston College. It’s February but it’s beautiful. It was one of those very lucky February days. It’s sunny, not a cloud in the sky. I sit on the bench and there’s kids laughing, there’s dogs going by, all these people. You really can’t picture a better day but I vividly remember myself sitting on a bench thinking, “I’m probably the only one thinking about God right now.” I’m sitting there, I’m born and raised Catholic - Catholic in elementary and high school, Jesuit college, mass on Sundays and that beautiful February day, I’ll never forget asking if anyone was listening up there. For me really, that was the first time I had had doubt about faith in my life, about spirituality. I learned much later that doubt is the very thing that makes faith just so beautiful. Eventually, I realized my friend was right, and rock bottom can make a great foundation, so right there, that was the perfect place to do something and make a change. That’s how basically anxiety lead me to rock bottom. Obviously now, I’m in one of the happiest places I’ve ever been. John: When you say “make a change,” what kind of change did you make? Patrick: It was a process of building a few habits, I think. After consulting with people, after telling other people about what was going on, and seeking help for myself, I had to build a few habits to get me back to where I am now. One of the first ones was I had to know that I was very far from alone in this process. Early, hearing other people’s stories, seeing other people who have gone on to live happy and successful lives, was such a great source of comfort and peace. I hope mine will maybe be one for someone too. The second was I really had to tell myself that there’s not a damn thing wrong with me. There’s really nothing more than that. One of the big faults, especially during times of panic, is thinking something’s wrong with you and thinking that you’re different or thinking that “I can’t do anything about this.” I keep telling myself that nothing’s wrong. The third habit was patience. I really wanted to rush things back to a normal version of life, if there ever was such a thing, but I had to be patient with myself. I had to let myself take little steps, whatever I could do each day, just get a little better. Things aren’t gonna go away immediately, but just be patient. It all came down to building a habit of learning. Learning to be grateful for every experience in the past and know that whatever happened in the past, I can use that for today, right now, for tomorrow, and for the future. John: Patrick, can you say a few words more about why you think this worked? First of all, do you have a theory about why you got this in the first place? Secondly, have you got a theory about why this solution worked for you? Patrick: I’ve thought about it quite a bit. I’ve mentioned this, I really thought this was something that would never happen to me. Basically, I’m stubborn as hell so, at the early on, I very much bought into the stigma of being a man in the sense of if you have a problem, I have to figure it out myself. I didn’t see other people around me who had this similar type of problem. I didn’t know that this was going on to other people. I thought if this is going on, I’ll just figure it out by myself. John: You must have felt kind of weird about the whole thing too, right? Patrick: Absolutely. That’s another big fault that I had was thinking that it was only me. I really don’t know where it came from. I never would’ve imagined it really. So it’s interesting. It’s interesting how things happen. That’s life, I guess. You never know where life is gonna take you. John: That’s for sure. I can tell you almost with complete certainty that it’s coming from a part of your brain called the amygdala. The amygdala sets off a lot of alarms for reasons we can’t really understand because the amygdala has no contact with logic or reason. When it gets fired off, we’re never really sure exactly what the cause of that is, but you can be somewhat aware that it’s coming if you’re on the lookout for it. It sounds to me like you began to realize when one was coming on sooner. Is that correct? Patrick: Oh absolutely. Over time, I’d realize that panic is really such an interesting experience. There’s a really unique paradox in the way that I’m understood to how to deal with it I believe that for me, panic, its biggest weakness is entirely disguised in what makes it seems so bad. It seems so bad because it makes you feel like you’re losing control. It’s completely taking over. In the way I feel has worked best for me to sort of deal with it is sort of let it run its course. I develop a mantra of not caring whether or not I have panic and whether or not I have anxiety in these certain situations. I say, “so what? I’ll be ok. I’ve been fine every single other time.” So I say, “who cares?” John: There’s an expert on this whole thing by the name of Claire Weekes and she calls this experience “floating.” You imagine yourself floating above yourself watching yourself and saying, “what a shame that that poor person is having this tough time.” But its not exactly you. You float above the whole thing. It sounds like that’s part of this also. Patrick: I absolutely get at the Dacey motto of not caring what other people think because they aren’t. I know nobody’s thinking about me if I’m sitting in a class and maybe I’m having a panic attack. I say, “who cares what they think of me anyway. See me in 20 minutes and I’ll be perfectly fine.” It’s worked. It really has. I give that anxiety no more power over me than it deserves and it’s worked really well. John: That’s wonderful, Pat. There are some other questions that I’d love to ask you but our time has run out on us here. Would you be willing to come back sometime and let me ask you some more questions? Patrick: I’d love to. Absolutely. John: That’s wonderful. Thank you so very much. Patrick: Thank you, John. I appreciate it.

Today’s episode features a conversation between Santi Siri - Founder of Democracy Earth Foundation, the Y Combinator-backed non-profit enabling token-based community participation - and Patrick Stanley, Blockstack’s Head of Growth. Together, they explore the concept of democracy, the decline of nation-states, and the potential of open-source protocols and crypto networks to enable free, sovereign, and incorruptible governance. 00:42 Patrick tells the story of how he and Santi met in San Francisco through Balaji Srinivasan. https://twitter.com/balajis https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transition-Information/dp/0684832720 02:19 Patrick: "For the folks who don't know you: who are you and what have you been working on?” 02:24 Santi: "For the last six years or so I've been implementing new kinds of democratic experiments... which led to the formation of The Democracy Earth Foundation where we explore this intersection of using blockchain based networks to deploy democracy over the Internet." https://democracy.earth https://twitter.com/democracyearth 04:03 Patrick: "Can you unpack your tweet: 'The Internet is not compatible with the nation state?'" https://twitter.com/santisiri/status/998028341633568769 05:40 Santi: "If not even the US is protected from foreign influence meddling with domestic affairs, then the nation state is no more. We have to acknowledge the fact that we live in the Age of Information.” 06:05 Patrick: "Presuming that's correct, what's next then?" 06:13 Santi: "I think it's the most interesting moment in time to be working on software." 06:55 Santi: "Democracy is simply an idea that can be extremely helpful when you really need it the most: when you face disagreements as a society or organization." 07:25 Patrick: "Where do you believe democracy should be applied in the context of deep disagreements in the crypto protocol space?" 07:36 Santi: "It is challenging in crypto because it's an environment where creating an identity is extremely, extremely cheap." 08:11 Santi: "Most of the governance happening in crypto today is fundamentally proof of stake or coin voting. For private endeavors, it works very well - it's like shareholder voting. Often less than 1% has over 50% of the vote." 08:38 Patrick: "Something about that sounds wrong, doesn't it?" 08:41 Santi: "Governance is tricky because it's not just the elite that understands how the system works. There are other constituents that are the people impacted by an economy. Not everyone is an economist, but everyone is impacted by the decisions they make about the economy." 9:00 Santi: "So if you don't want to have an elite running a society and you really want a society where everyone's input is considered, democracy becomes very useful. The challenge is not just reaching the best decision in a collective way, but reaching a legitimate decision - one that the greater constituency supports, and not just a powerful minority." 9:58 Patrick: "You've been working on quadratic voting. Can you tell folks what this is and what hopes you have for it?" 10:10 Santi: "Quadratic voting is an idea that comes from the Microsoft researcher and founder of the RadicalxChange movement, Glen Weyl..." http://glenweyl.com/research/ https://radicalxchange.org/ 10:27 Santi: "The idea is you can vote on any issue and every voter gets the same amount of credits, but the more votes you put on a specific issue, it will cost you an exponential amount.” 10:58 Santi: "If you really care for one issue, the opportunity cost will be really high for not supporting other issues." 11:11 Santi: "This leads to this outcome where the winning option is something that is the preference of the community, but also - because of this interesting quality of square roots - it's also an option that has the greatest support among the quantity of voters." 11:29 Patrick: "The one catch there that I'm thinking of is Sybil attacks... how do you stop those?" 11:50 Santi: "We're actually researching using quadratic voting to validate identities themselves." 12:32 Santi: "The two requirements of quadratic voting (qv) is that you need to have a strong consensus and identities participating. This is a requirement of any democratic system. And then you have a Universal Basic Income mechanism of some kind." 12:54 Patrick: "You mentioned previously a fear of becoming Facebook in the process of solving this problem. What's the concern there?" 13:21 Santi: "Facebook became a relevant attack vector for legacy democracies because they've become the largest identity registry in the world." 13:36 Santi: "There are two ways to subvert democracy: one is control the identity registry of voters and the other one is gossip - false information that confuses the voters." 13:53 Santi: "If we're going to do any kind of formalization of identity... to help people trust that there's a human behind an address and that that human doesn't hold the keys to any other address within a consensus... we should do it in a way that prevents the formation of a monopoly." 14:20 Santi: "If you end up having a monopoly like Facebook or the People's Republic of China, then you have this Orwellian situation that works against the interests of democracy: free speech, the right to legitimate information...." 14:40 Santi: "The challenge is how do you have a marketplace that does not allow for the formation of monopolies?" 15:29 Santi: "We've been very lucky at Democracy Earth to do the first quadratic voting implementation for the state of Colorado." 15:58 Santi: "It's an incredible precedent. The first official quadratic voting round under the US government." 16:15 Patrick: "Do you feel online voting has more or fewer attack vectors than traditional voting?" 16:46 Santi: "Where there are deep disagreements, the stakes are high, and where the stakes are very high, attacks will happen." 17:21 Santi: "In traditional democracies, I think the best recommendation I've seen is actually from the German Supreme Court in 2009 where they argued... that hybrid models are ultimately best." 17:47 Santi: "The idea of paper is important because in large populations there are still not 100% digital natives. ... Our parents and elders are really digital migrants and we need to respect that reality." 18:12 Santi: "Democracy, at the end of the day, is always a work in progress.... It's really an ideology about how we make decisions." 18:47 Santi: "We cannot surrender this battle in the world of crypto." 18:56 Santi: "If this is the new world that we're creating... a new kind of plutocracy or oligarchy... we deserve better... and we should be daring to think about what democracy means in all of these contexts." 19:12 Santi: "We can really make something better that what the nation state has given us." 19:17 Patrick: "What are you excited about and see as worth pursuing in the next 20 or so years?" 19:48 Santi: "The rise of nations and the idea of nationality was a consequence of information technology. The printing press allowed for people to start writing and publishing books not in the language of power - that was Latin - but in their vernacular local languages. ... that gave this sense of being part of a large imagined community through literature." 20:23 Santi: "With crypto I think we're witnessing a similar phenomenon. In the rise of maximalism and these new protocols are a kind of nationalism." 20:32 Santi: "It's very clear these are nations founded not in a common language, but actually in a common ideology. If you're an Austrian economics money fetishist, you'll be a Bitcoiner." 21:22 Santi: "We troll each other too much, but we're really good, nice idealists." 21:35 Patrick: "The great thing about Twitter is you can lose your mind in public." 21:50 Santi: "The revolution of our generation is in crypto." 22:01 Patrick: "I would classify Bitcoiners as probably more libertarian, conservative leaning, less likely to be liberal - not to say there aren't any liberals in Bitcoin - and very much in the Hayek/Austrian school of economic thinking." 22:38 Patrick: "It does feel like people are splitting up into their own ideologies, but it still does feel like it's very early on and we're kind of in the Germanic nation state building era." 22:51 Santi: "We're discovering where the boundaries and new geographies and frontiers are. But there are frontiers and maximalism as nationalism is a very real thing." 23:06 Patrick: "Definitely. And I also think there will be fights and violence and - at a minimum - cyber warfare and meme warfare and potentially physical warfare between protocols. There's a lot at stake - especially over a long enough timeline, if these things accrue value." 23:33 Patrick: "Crypto is inherently political." 24:10 Santi: "I recently was with an expert on military defense and strategy and the way they approach the idea of how the world is at right now around in terms of cyber attacks and this whole new ground of the battlefield is that we're not in war or peace, but a world of un-peace. Everyone has to assume they've already been attacked." 25:10 Santi: "In China, you have to use a VPN. It's interesting. ... being there really pushes you to think about how you're being observed." 25:38 Patrick: "What changed in your mind about China visiting recently?" 25:43 Santi: "It's the one place where Communism took over and won and it's been the highest growth country on the whole planet for the last three to four decades." 26:08 Santi: "It turns out the Communist elites are the best administrators of modern capitalism." 26:23 Santi: "You feel the authoritarian state everywhere. You see cameras everywhere." 26:46 Santi: "There are some things about the transformation of China that you can really see being there. Of course, they are the worst about free speech - you have to access the Internet through a VPN. But on climate change, the silence coming from every single motor [being electric] in Beijing is really mind blowing." 27:31 Santi: "Communism was this terrible thing in the 20th Century. I watched the horror of Venezuela very closely and went to Cuba for a month when I was very young and it was a heartbreaking environment. It really was a big failure." 27:45 Santi: "But the Chinese experiment - at the same time - had this tremendous potential of bringing 300 - 400 million people into the life of the middle class." 27:58 Santi: "I come from a developing nation and I scratch my head how we can deal with 30% of the people in my country that are below the poverty line." 28:19 Santi: "There are a lot of things going wrong [in China] - I mean they're persecuting Muslims... that's why we need the Internet." 28:32 Santi: "For Democracy Earth, I think there's no bigger, killer use case than a Chinese democracy." 28:43 Patrick: "What do you think China got right that Cuba got wrong?" 28:46 Santi: "Deng Xiaoping allowing private property and capitalism." 29:12 Santi: "It is the labor of the world - the proletariat of the world. All of our iPhones, all of our computers, all of our chips...." 29:35 Santi: "In this age where we do perceive rising inequality, we do perceive the advance of automation. ... I don't think we should be so afraid of these ideas." 30:15 Santi: "All of the revolutions that happened in the 20th century happened in poor countries." 30:47 Santi: "People are talking about taxing AIs and robots - that's kind of what Marx was talking about." 31:02 Santi: "I don't believe much in revolutions because they all have this original sin of violence and I think we have much better tools than guns." 31:26 Santi: "We can definitely use computers to create better societies." 31:34 Patrick: "If some democracy is good, is absolute democracy better? And how do you avoid the Kyklos?" 32:46 Patrick: "It's democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. And the three degenerate forms of these are ochlocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny." 33:08 Santi: "These thinkers are trying to find the gears of history, which are very hard to find. But if they are somewhere, I think it's looking through the lens information and information theory." 33:27 Santi: "I don't like absolutist ideas in politics. We need to use different tools for different means. It's evident that private endeavors and companies are much better governed by dictators - some people call them CEOs.” 34:04 Santi: "What I'm reading a lot lately is 'An Introduction to the Theory of Mechanism Design’ by Tobin Borgers." https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Mechanism-Design/dp/019973402X 34:43 Santi: "I began my career as a video game developer and today I find myself reading a lot about game theory as it applies to the context of crypto." 35:10 Patrick: "Any other recommendations for books about game theory?" 35:24 Santi: "George Gilder's 'Knowledge and Power' which applies an information theory lens to understand capitalism." 35:46 Patrick: "There's probably a lot of listeners trying to learn more about how democracy can work online and what are the hard problems being solved... what would you recommend checking out?" 36:04 Santi: "I feel compelled to recommend the work we've been doing at Democracy Earth at democracy.earth and @democracyearth on Twitter." 36:43 Santi: "Everyone I talk to is very confused about things right now." 36:50 Patrick: "What do you mean?" 37:16 Santi: "We lost our compass in terms of what's democracy in modern day America - in the civilization we're creating. So we're all in a state of confusion." 37:31 Patrick: "Any other books or blog posts you'd recommend to listeners on democracy?" 37:37 Santi: "Hélène Landemore's 'Democratic Reason'" https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9907.html 38:07 Goodbyes. 38:19 Credits. Santi Siri: twitter.com/SantiSiri Patrick Stanley: twitter.com/PatrickWStanley Zach Valenti: twitter.com/ZachValenti See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

PJ Bruno sits down with Enterprise AE Patrick Forquer and VP of Growth Spencer Burke to discuss online grocery shopping, Reddit raising a huge Series D round with a near $3 billion valuation, and Warby Parker's new augmented reality shopping tool.          TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] P.J: Hi everyone and welcome to Braze for Impact. Your weekly tech industry discuss digest. So this is a place where we get together each week and just talk about what's happening in tech. This week I'm lucky to have with me my pal Patrick Forquer who is on the sales organization here at Braze. Next week we'll hear from someone from a different department, probably Customer Success, something like that and then the following week maybe someone from product and then so on and so forth. So we can get multiple different angles at what's happening in the tech industry. Like I said today, I'm lucky to have Patrick Forquer and also Spencer Burke. I'll have them introduce themselves.   [0:00:51] Patrick: Hey, I'm Patrick [inaudible]. I'm a strategic account exec here at Braze.   [0:00:55] Spencer: Thanks PJ. I'm Spencer Burke, the VP of growth.   [0:00:58] P.J: How are you guys doing? How's the week trucking on?   [0:01:01] Patrick: It's going okay. No, it's going great. It's great to be here with you P.J. Looking great in your Heather Gray shirt and as always.   [0:01:09] P.J: It's a good color. Spence, how are we doing?   [0:01:11] Spencer: Going well. Got a ski trip planned for this weekend driving up to Vermont, so can't complain.   [0:01:16] P.J: Always at the skiing Spencer Burke.   [0:01:19] Spencer: It's a winter. I got to get it in.   [0:01:20] P.J: Got to get it in guys. You know what, without further ado, why don't we jump on to what's happening this week? This first article, 'Why people still don't buy groceries online'. This is a very interesting thing to me. Actually, let me set up the story because I think they did a really good way of setting this up in the article. Nearly 30 years ago when just 15% of Americans had a computer and even fewer had Internet access, Thomas Parkinson set up a rack of modems on a crate and barrel wine rack and started accepting orders for the Internet's first grocery delivery company, Peapod, which he founded with his brother Andrew. Back then, ordering groceries online was complicated. Most customers had dial-up still and Peapod's web graphics were so rudimentary that customers couldn't even see image of what images of what they were buying. Delivery was complicated too. So the Parkinson's drove to grocery stores in the Chicago area. They actually did this and bought what customers had ordered and then delivered the goods from the backseat of their beat up Honda Civic. When people wanted to stock up on certain goods, strawberry yogurt or bottles of diet coke, the Parkinson's would deplete whole sections of grocery stores. This is, this is wild. I mean it's interesting because we were all constantly talking about convenience and delivery of all sorts of things. Why not groceries? What's the deal?   [0:02:41] Patrick: Yeah. So when I was reading this article, the first thing that came to mind was if, if we rewind 10 years from today and we took a poll of everyone at braise about, which would be more successful grocery delivery or an app on your phone where you tap on one button and a stranger in a Honda Civic pulls up and drives you somewhere. I think we all would have bet on the grocery delivery piece of that. Right?   [0:03:07] Spencer: Every time.   [0:03:08] Patrick: So it is crazy to me and the numbers are super low. I mean 3% of people getting grocery delivery. Spencer, what was your initial take?   [0:03:18] Spencer: I'm curious, have you guys used the grocery delivery service?   [0:03:22] Patrick: So I have, I had a really bad experience actually, so I haven't done it since. And I think that's part of the challenge in this article where-   [0:03:31] Spencer: Can you get into that bad experience or is that...   [0:03:35] Patrick: So we tried to use the grocery ordering off of Amazon Alexa and my wife ordered paper towels and-   [0:03:46] Spencer: Just paper towels?   [0:03:47] Patrick: Yes. And a couple of other things, but I kid you not, they delivered us what must have been the majority of the warehouses paper towels to the point where-   [0:03:58] P.J: Jesus!   [0:03:59] Patrick: ...for two and a half years, we were using paper towels off of that one order. So obviously that's an outlier. But yeah.   [0:04:08] P.J: It seems like it's also, apparently America is really not adopting it as much as other countries like it seems like in Europe. Also in Asia it's like up to 20% or something like that of consumers are using online and it's only 3% here in America. Does that speak to anything that we're doing or what do you guys think?   [0:04:27] Spencer: Well, I mean I think part of it is most people... Most people have cars. Most people live in an area where they have some kind of large grocery store chain and so if you're driving to work, stopping at the grocery store on the way home, it's not changing the convenience kind of function for everyone in the same way that like Lyft or Postmates or Seamless might for your average consumer. Personally, I've tried it here in New York. I recently moved to somewhere that just doesn't have as many large stores as close to me. I just thought, sure, why not? Let's try Amazon Prime. Amazon just bought whole foods recently and let's see how it goes. I think there's a lot of challenges with it. You don't see exactly what you're getting. If something's out of stock, you're relying on them making replacement or not providing it at all. So, if you're planning on using one of these services to plan a dinner you might not actually be able to cook what you intended to or you might not be able to put that meal together because the delivery service wasn't 100% versus if you're in the store, you can kind of course correct as you go.   [0:05:32] P.J: Right. I feel like a lot of us order all sorts of things through the Internet. I'm sure that list goes on, but as far as grocery shopping something that...it's ordering Seamless as one thing, right? It's prepared and sent right over to you as opposed to groceries. People probably a little concerned like you want to feel your fruit, you want to see your meat, you got all these things. I feel like there's a little fear around that probably. For me anyways.   [0:05:59] Patrick: Well definitely. And then you know, they talk about the challenges that these companies have. It's a lot more complex and it would look to me that on the surface with things like some items you have to keep warm. Some items you have to keep cool, you have to do it all really quickly. And so the people put, you know, preparing the packaging, have to know where everything is and then there's delivery and it's mostly in urban areas. So then there's parking challenges and all these things that I didn't necessarily.   [0:06:25] P.J: There's tons of complications that go along with it. Apparently surveys have shown that shoppers are still concerned that they're being charged higher prices when it comes to online delivery and also complain about delivery drivers being late. Those are the two biggest complaints apparently.   [0:06:39] Patrick: Yeah. And the last thing I noticed was in the second article that we were looking at on grocery delivery, there's the casual drop of Google in partnership with Bain, with Bain commissioned a research study, which as we know working in tech means that Google paid Bain to run this survey for them likely with a hypothesis that grocery delivery was about to explode.   [0:07:03] P.J: I feel like they had an a hypothesis in mind. Yes. Something tells me, yeah.   [0:07:07] Spencer: So I don't know if this was entirely altruistic on behalf of a like, yeah, let's do it. Let's go for it. We'd like you guys.   [0:07:13] Patrick: And you know, I noticed Walmart recently pulled their products from Google Express, which is Google's grocery delivery service. So I think there's increasing competition around this for an incredibly small market at the moment. And I guess we'll see where it goes.   [0:07:31] Spencer: Yeah. Before we move on. I, despite our skepticism, I think there clearly is something here and you know, whether it's Instacart or Postmates or Amazon or anything Walmart or Jet tries to do, there's clearly value to having a hall. You're grocery shopping, just show up at your door essentially. And I think like a lot of things on the Internet, whether it was a couple of years ago when everyone's like no one's going to put their credit card into their phone to buy something online. It's like there's all these articles about how many people abandon their carts because it's on mobile and they need to go back to their desktop. No one talks about that anymore. You just do it. I think we're not that far from whole foods being a warehouse of food for Amazon delivery rather than a grocery store. Right.   [0:08:18] Patrick: Delivered by robots.   [0:08:20] Spencer: Yeah, exactly.   [0:08:21] P.J: And that's what the future looks like. Groceries delivered by robots.   [0:08:24] Spencer: You heard it here first.   [0:08:25] P.J: Yeah, we'll leave it to you guys. Next article of the day. Reddit is raising a huge round near $3 billion valuation. So Reddit is raising one. Sorry, $150 million to $300 million to keep the front page of the Internet running. Multiple sources tell TechCrunch. The forthcoming series D round is said to be led by Chinese tech giant, Tencent at a $2.7 billion pre-money valuation. And now depending on how much follow on cash Reddit drums up from Silicon Valley investors and beyond, it's post money valuation could reach an epic $3 billion. Yikes. And now my first concern that comes up immediately for this, and I feel like maybe you guys felt the same way. Censorship, right? I mean, maybe it doesn't matter, but Reddit remains a relatively safe space for trailers and conspiracy theorists alike. The currently banned apps and websites in China though, like massive lists just to shortlist as Google, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Insta, Youtube, flickr, Tinder, and Reddit of course. And that doesn't even include news publications, cloud storage products and email. So I don't know, there's something feels weird about this, right? Also like Tencent is also one of the most important architects of the great firewall of China. This is serious. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of meat here.   [0:09:53] Spencer: It's like this is a different than I expected.   [0:09:54] P.J: Oh really? It just seems like there's strange things at play.   [0:10:00] Patrick: Spencer, I know you had some hot takes on this.   [0:10:02] Spencer: No, go ahead.   [0:10:03] Patrick: Well, yeah, I think it's interesting that Reddit has had a lot of challenges over the past couple of years. And PJ, you alluded to some of that where they've had some really bad homophobic, misogynistic, racist, threads that have propagated conspiracy theories and hate speech and they've dealt with it in different ways. Some of the ways that they've dealt with it has been good. Some of it's been not so good. I know their CEO was editing comments and specific threads to make them look a certain way. And then he got caught doing that and had to apologize. If they had been a bigger company, can you imagine if Facebook did something like that? He'd be hauled in front of Congress immediately. So, and I was thinking about the valuation piece of this too, where if you took all the bad stuff out, and you're looking at their monetization model, it's through ads, right? Like most companies. They're like most social companies but they've really only recently started monetizing through ads and their real strength has been a very supportive and loyal community of Reddit users. I don't use Reddit, but I know people who do and the people that use Reddit, love Reddit. They love it. They're like in the community, they're posting and commenting and all that stuff. And the challenge as we know scaling a business model where ads are the primary revenue driver is that you can lose some of that early days, communal feel when you start layering in promoted posts and different types of advertisements and it kind of loses its initial bespoke early day feeling those.   [0:11:54] Spencer: Yeah. I think the flip side of the darker elements of Reddit is that Reddit, can be a place for really specific groups of people and that can be people in a city, someone with a certain medical condition, people who play a sport. Like recently I've been looking and there's a subreddit for woodworking and it's like, oh, this is maybe a hobby that I'd be interested in. And there's just a ton of resources and people who are helpful. So for everyone who's out there trying to make a joke, well, if there's a lot more of these people, but for everyone out there who's, who's kind of trolling and you're trying to be a little bit silly, there's a lot of people who are just passionate about something and go to Reddit to share it. And I think it's kind of inspiring actually, that those communities exist on the Internet in a place that it's not just a website for those people. It's a website that can serve any community and it happens to be Reddit for a lot of people.   [0:12:50] Patrick: Right? Do you think that this changes anything for Reddit potentially down the road?   [0:12:58] Spencer: Well, they stay in business for a little bit longer. I don't think so. I think you're probably reading too much into the the Chinese[crosstalk]   [0:13:07] Patrick: have you been spending some time on Reddit recently PJ?   [0:13:09] P.J: Actually, I've only been on Reddit maybe once in my whole life. I'm not a big ... My roommate is like obsessed. Anytime we're doing anything like watching a movie, he just is looking at his phone the whole time and he's in Reddit constantly living in the comments. Right?   [0:13:23] Patrick: Nba Reddit as a really good, yeah. Community. Right. Community.   [0:13:27] Spencer: I feel singled out now because I actually do spend a decent amount of time on Reddit   [0:13:32] Patrick: That's all we need to hear from somebody.   [0:13:32] Spencer: Don't use Facebook, don't use Twitter. Casually though love reading Reddit. The comments can be hilarious. But like I said, just moved recently. So looking for cool areas, restaurants, bars in my neighborhood and there's a subreddit for it. So just reading through it on a couple of times a week can pick out spots, find somewhere to go check out, and it's actually really interesting to see and it's like having a good neighbor or a friend recommend some places to you. You just there and it's a different feel than just going on Yelp and looking at aggregate and total summation.   [0:14:08] Patrick: Are you getting into woodworking? Is that what this is?   [0:14:11] P.J: Yeah. What do you, tell me more about that.   [0:14:13] Spencer: I won't go down the rabbit hole of the hobbies that Reddit has inspired or there's some really, I'll just ... There's some really specifics. I'll read it. That's all. That's all I'll say.   [0:14:23] Patrick: I mean, but what you're describing though, Spencer, is the kind of dual nature of all of these social media sites. On one hand, they can connect people who feel lonely or who are passionate about a certain topic that maybe others around them aren't passionate about and find that community that they'd been looking for. On the other hand, there's Jonses with hate speech and things like that and who knows, maybe Reddit Will start handling this really well and it'd be a success story, so I'll be interested to what they do with all this capital and it's a huge inflection point for their business and kind of their all or nothing shot I feel like so.   [0:15:00] Spencer: Just as an example, they're on the weeds podcast of ox podcasts. They're talking about a study of where they paid people to give up Facebook who are on the platform. They weren't planning to give it up. And those people who are basically just happier, they socialize more, they watch a little more TV, which is maybe the one question one thing.   [0:15:19] Patrick: And they have some money now, which is nice.   [0:15:22] Spencer: But they were less politically divisive. They were a little less informed on some things, but just like genuinely happier. I think one of the interesting things that happens in Reddit versus Facebook, that the communities are moderated by people from the community. So there are subreddits to help people quit smoking, to quit drinking. And when those people will talk about their success, there's so much positive in encouragement and positive feedback and the negative elements of that. Unlike Facebook where anyone from high school that you don't really know anymore can come in and comment and make you feel pretty bad about something or give you that kind of fomo feeling. There's a community of people supporting you trying to do whatever it is. Whether it's something you know, trying to get rid of some addiction or learn some new hobby, which I think so that moderating the fact is it makes it a little bit different than other types of social networks.   [0:16:14] P.J: A little more like true democracy going on over there.   [0:16:18] Spencer: Or a benevolent dictatorship. In the case of moderation.   [0:16:22] Patrick: If Reddit is the front page of the Internet, does that make Facebook like the national enquirer? Who's to say, hi,   [0:16:33] P.J: Let's move on. We got a little of time left. Last article of the day. Warby Parker's new shopping tool lets you try on and buy glasses virtually using your iPhone's camera. So now this article is Warby Parker announced new shopping tool and it's more convenient for iPhone owners, Virtual Try-on. The tool, which lives inside the glasses by mail companies app is available on February 4th. So this Monday it just launched. The caveat is you'll need an iPhone X, iPhone XR or iPhone XS to take advantage. So not just for iPhone users. If you have an old school iPhone, you're not going to be able to use this thing either. Spencer, you wear glasses sometimes, right?   [0:17:13] Spencer: Yep. You got me.   [0:17:15] P.J: You guys can't see. But sometimes he wears glasses. Do you have feelings on this? Do you get ex ... Does this get you excited?   [0:17:22] Spencer: [inaudible]radio? Yeah. Not really. I'm pretty straight forward. When I went to go buy my most recent pair of glasses, went to a store in New York, asked the guy for some help. He picked out two pairs, tried them on, chose one, locked out. And I might be an anomaly there, but I think from-   [0:17:41] P.J: Boom! I love that.   [0:17:42] Spencer: But I think this is really interesting to me because it sort of solves two problems. One is it's helping people try glasses. It's lowering friction to make a purchase. The second is it's giving people a better sense of what they're going to look like without going in the store. So it's going to reduce the likelihood that they need to go in and make a return or [inaudible] me back in, which of course has a cost to Warby. So hopefully for for them the business outcome is it's increasing revenue, making the purchase easier and they're reducing their operating costs by reducing the number of returns.   [0:18:16] Patrick: Yeah. To me, reading the article and there was a lot of buzz about this. This story appeared multiple of the new sources that I read on a regular basis and while it's cool and definitely the benefits that Spencer's talking about are real. I also didn't understand necessarily the getting as much buzz as it did because to me it just feels like they took Snapchat filters and turn them into [crosstalk] Whoa, we can do now what Snapchat could do two years ago and it's just Warby Parker glasses instead of like Elton John glasses. I mean it's cool, but I want the Elton John one.   [0:18:55] Spencer: Yeah.   [0:18:56] Patrick: So it's just definitely cool and I think there's obviously a business case to be made from a technology perspective. It wasn't super exciting. I think there's other use cases for AR for things like the way that Wayfair and other furniture stores are doing it where you can see, you can overlay a couch in a living room type of thing that would be more valuable than, productize smart Snapchat filter.   [0:19:21] Spencer: So you don't wear glasses do you?   [0:19:22] Patrick: I do not.   [0:19:29] P.J: 20-20 vision. I honestly just don't trust that augmented reality fit. I don't think it'll necessarily match real life. And I guess it's for two reasons. One, I just don't trust that just looking at yourself with this augmented pair of glasses on will necessarily look the way to look in real life. Also, we're not even considering the feel. the feel of a pair of glasses has to feel right. You know, so until they have augmented feeling technology out, I'm not buying.   [0:19:57] Patrick: Well, the other thing I was thinking about too, along those lines, PJ is 97% of Americans won't freaking order groceries, but there's going to be some huge wave of people putting something on their face every day that they saw on an app.   [0:20:11] P.J: That's what I'm talking about.   [0:20:13] Patrick: Hot tech Spencer. I don't know.   [0:20:14] P.J: There it is. It's called augmented reality. It's inherently different. It's like if you think about catching a charter as art in Pokemon go is so different from trying to catch on in real life. Have you ever tried, it's entirely different. Wait, one more question for you guys. What I want to hear, what's an augmented reality app that you're just hankering for that you just really want? And I'll give you a second to think. Well, I'll tell you mine and you know, growing up I was very into a Tamagotchi if you guys remember those little pet on your key chain, but just like a cool little Tamagotchi that only I can see my pet. No one can see them. I look around where is he? Okay. There he is on the ground. You've got to feed them. You got to take care of them. And then you know when it comes to having to really take care of him, like you just close the app, close the phone. I don't need to worry about buying pet food or any of that stuff. Something that makes me feel like I have a little buddy.   [0:21:08] Patrick: So an AR Tamagotchi   [0:21:09] P.J: An AR Tamagotchi you heard it here first.   [0:21:12] Patrick: Wow. Here's all my money. [inaudible]   [0:21:17] Spencer: You don't use Reddit. You don't order groceries online, you don't think that trying glasses on with your phone is a good idea. But they are Tamagotchi.   [0:21:26] P.J: I am on Facebook so you can find just about out of time here. You guys, thanks so much for being on here with me. This is PJ Bruno.   [0:21:35] Patrick: Patrick [inaudible]   [0:21:36] Spencer: And Spencer Burke.   [0:21:37] P.J: signing off. You guys take care. [0:21:39]

This show originally aired on the Big Seance Podcast - Ep 132 "Straight Dudes! Get Thyself to a Spirit Triangle!" and was produced by Patrick Keller. Where are all the straight men in the metaphysical and spiritual communities? Patrick Keller of the Big Seance podcast hosted a "triangle table" chat with Ash Riley of In My Sacred Space and Slade Roberson of Shift Your Spirits. We talk about ... the divine feminine, LGBTQ spirituality, coming out of the (spiritual) closet, and how to make spirituality more accessible to the elusive straight male. A fun, lively, original discussion of some rarely approached topics! GUEST LINKS - ASH RILEY InMySacredSpace.com In My Sacred Space Discussion Group on Facebook In My Sacred Space on Instagram GUEST LINKS - PATRICK KELLER BigSeance.com Big Seance Podcast HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Ash: I've decided that I am a connector. Slade: Yes. Patrick: Yes. Ash: That's what I do. I reach out to people, and I meet people and I connect them with other people, because, I don't know. I just feel like, oh! You guys should know each other because I like you and I like you. You should like each other. Slade: I feel very much the same way. I consider myself a matchmaker, and I used to do it even when I was in corporate. I would hire people and put them in certain places to work with other people. I have six marriages that resulted from that and... Ash: Holy -----! Slade: And there are at least three children that I can claim. Ash: You can start a business on that! Patrick: I remember you saying that, yeah. Slade: I don't know that I could do it if I did it intentionally with a romantic intention involved. But if I do it in the context of maybe work or, yeah, like you said, just recognizing, you guys should know each other. Like, my Automatic Intuition program has become this party that I host. And whenever I add someone to it, it becomes increasingly more difficult to screen people to become a part of that. You know what I'm saying? It gets to be more and more kind of delicate and intricate. And that's what I think about when somebody's like, I want to take your program! I'm thinking, okay, what's the seating chart here, at the dinner table? You know what I mean? Ash: I feel like when I meet people that I want to introduce to other people, it's because I feel like they're gonna vibe and it's like a certain energy that I get from them. I feel they're similar. Slade: Yeah, I mean I would love it if people would do that to me. I mean, it does happen. People do introduce me to people, but I have become, especially with all this podcasting stuff, really kind of aware of the fact that, it's interesting that you say that, because I feel like my power is in introducing people to other people, also on a scale of like, discovering someone, or finding this person and being like, why aren't thousands of people listening to this woman? Ash: Yeah, yeah! Slade: You know? And interviewing them and I'm not interested in interviewing people who are already famous, or have more followers than I do, or whatever. Even though Patrick does. Patrick: Do you know how many people I've had the opportunity to, and I just go, and I either drop the ball and don't do it, or it just doesn't feel right. And the ones that I have interviewed that have been, you know, bigger names, just like landed in my lap. Ash: I've always wanted to... I mean, I have a decent following for what I do and the amount of effort that I put into it. It's not spectacular, but I recognize that I have a much bigger platform than a lot of other people. When I do meet those people who I think, Gawd, people should know who this person is! That's why I always want to give them an opportunity to be exposed to my audience at least, because I'm like, if I meet somebody and I believe in them and what they're talking about, I think that that's really valuable for other people. Slade: Well you're also displaying your talent for recognizing that in other people. And people come to associate you with someone who has cool people on their platform. You know what I mean? I don't want people to feel like I have a bunch of canned interviews, or.. Ash: Right! Slade: I want them to think, Wow! He always finds these people that I would've never known about otherwise but I'm so glad that I do. That's the feeling that I want them to have. And I also want the people who are on the show to feel like it's a big deal for them. To feel like, either they love the show already so it's really cool for them to get to be on it, or they feel like, Wow, I went on the show and now I have so many more people listening to me. Or I've got so many new clients from that or whatever, and to be really excited about it. Because we do this stuff so much more frequently now than the average person that we might put on. There's just an energy about having someone be excited about being a part of what you're doing. And being excited about being a collaborator and it comes through. You can feel it. You know what I mean? When you listen to a show with somebody who's really excited and happy to be there, even if they're kind of nervous or something. Ash: Absolutely. Patrick: So, I'm just considering this thing started. Slade: Well why don't you tell everybody how we met, because I'd love to know what your perspective is on how we all three know each other. Patrick: I think I talked a little about it when I had each of you on the show, but I think I talked about it the most when Ash was on the show, and in my... it's not really a previous blogging life, because a podcast is just kind of an extension of what I started doing with the blog. I met Ash through her blog, and I think when I realized she was from my area, that's when we started talking. I think I had, you might remember this, Ash, I don't know exactly how... If like, I messaged you or you messaged me. Or maybe you commented on my blog or something, but we started communicating pretty regularly. I had lots of questions for her about my website. She had already been in the blogging world and I was still learning about it. I think we were talking about how I was experiencing the intense early part of my spiritual shift. We've all talked about this, where I couldn't get enough books about it. And I couldn't stop reading about it and... Ash: The information-gathering phase. Patrick: Yes! Yes. And I was overwhelmed and I think Ash was like, You know, there's this dude that I need to connect you with because he's real. That's how I got connected with your blog. I don't think I actually communicated with you until quite a bit later, Slade, but I was following you and learning from you at that time. Slade: Cool. Patrick: Then I think you reached out to me, Slade, before you started your fabulous podcast and Ash always pops up in topics, like, Ash said this, or Ash is so... Ash: SURPRISE! Here I am! Slade: From the closet. Ash: Like a jack-in-the-box. Patrick: By the way everybody, I made Ash sit in her closet because that's the greatest place for someone with a mobile laptop to record for acoustics, and it turns out her closet is basically a spiritual oasis and is beautiful. Slade: There's fashion in there too. Patrick: Yes! Ash: When I come out of the broom closet, it's like literally the spiritual broom closet here. Slade: It really is what I would expect your closet to be in the best kind of way. My closets are very suburban and not exciting at all. They are arranged by ROYGBIV and they all have the same exact hanger on every item of clothing, I will say that. Those are my two. Ash: You're not OCD either. Slade: No, not at all. I have a south node in Virgo, I've discovered, which is where I get all my perfectionism in this lifetime from. Ash: I have a south node in Sagittarius, which is where I get all of my bluntness. Slade: Oh good! I like Sagittarius energy. We can trust it. That we're getting the exact, undistilled, unvarnished... Ash: The unvarnished truth. Slade: Yes. I like that. I like that quality. Patrick: I just wanted to tell people that we were, when we decided to do this, I don't know whose idea it was first, but it just... Ash: It was me! I said we should do this. It would be like the Avengers except with a better ending than Age of Ultron. Patrick: It just makes sense that it happened, because... Slade: We end up talking about each other anyway. If any two of us are together, the other person's name gets invoked, so... Patrick: Yes. Ash: We're like the Holy Trinity. Patrick: Yes! And by way of joking, it's funny. We discussed what we were going to talk about and I don't know if you guys ended up being serious, but I was just joking and coming up with all these funny, ha ha things just to entertain people. And it ended up that we came up with the curious thing that there are more women and gay men in our spiritual, psychic, metaphysical world, and not a lot of straight men. Like, what's up with straight men? Where are the straight men? And I think Ash said something like, I think I copied and pasted it here, she said something like... Hang on... Slade: He's got receipts, Ash. Patrick: I apparently didn't copy. But you said something funny about, "Where are the straight men at, yo?" Or...Oh! I know! "When are straight men gonna get their sh*t together??" is what you said. Something like that. Ash: Yeah! Slade: Mmm... I have some theories about why it is a women-gay-men alliance predominantly. That's pretty easy to speak to. And it's so weird because when we were joking about this topic, we're kind of joking about it but then I was like, That's actually kind of a real thing that I observe all the time. It came up in conversation with so many people over the next few days. Ash: Oh, really? Slade: There were other people who commented on it as well. It came up in a really super woo-woo way when someone told me, at the teahouse I go to, the next day, she brought up the fact that a lot of women were murdered for witchcraft during the Inquisition are reincarnating at this time. And that there were a lot of gay men that were crucified along with them. That is a very common lore, or whatever. It's where the term 'faggot' literally comes from. Patrick: Ooo explain that more. How does that...? Slade: Well, they burned them along with the witches but in the context of like, Okay, we're going to have this big grand inquisition inquiry public burning to kill 1 or 2 or 3 women at a time, but then they just take a handful of queers and throw them in just as kindling, just to dispose of them. It wasn't even like, they didn't even waste a lot of energy on having a specific murder event for us, you know? So the term 'faggot' refers to kindling, sticks that you throw in the fire to help it start burning. And that's kind of one of the origins of that disparaging term, or whatever. So I was talking to this woman the day after you and I, the three of us, were kind of tossing that concept around. Where are all the straight dudes?? She just came out of nowhere with this idea that those souls are reincarnating right now. And I'm not a huge past-life, reincarnation, that's not a rabbit hole that I go down really often. But I will always engage anyone in a conversation about it that wants to talk about it. Yeah, she was like, "There's all these witches, the souls of all these women, who have chosen to reincarnate at this time." It's, you know, I'm just passing it on. Ash: You just recently did an interview with Susan Grace, which is a long-time friend of mine as well. One of the things that she talks about pretty regularly is how... I would need to go back and... I think she's mentioned it in every single reading she's done for me in the last year. Astrologically, we're coming back around through a cycle, and I can't remember which planet it is, but... Patrick: I can read your comment. Or actually it's Slade's comment. Slade said that she said something about the planetoid Regulus causing a 2,000 reign of men. That is over in 2020. Ash: So I think that might be what she's talking about, is the last time this happened was, it put us into the Dark Ages, which was the time when women were being burned at the stake for being witches. It was a suppression of the feminine. That cycle is ending in the next five years. And it's kind of coming on right now. So you're seeing a lot of that collective pain and energy from that time coming up from beneath the surface for healing. Patrick: Mmm... Slade: I like the thought of it being kind of a cultural zeitgeist, or like an ancestral DNA kind of thing where it's just in our collective psyche to deal with that again. So I don't even think it has to be as literal a story as 'those souls are reincarnating', like they're all hanging out, going, "Okay, now's the time. Let's go y'all!" Like it's a suffragette march. I like to back out of those things, you know what I mean? I like to zoom out a couple of notches when talking about those things and imagine it in more of a, I don't know, mystical, collective consciousness kind of archetypal thing. Ash: Mmhmm. Slade: Like for some reason, I'm more happy and more comfortable getting onboard with that. In the way that you described it, as being like, that, whatever it was that's been repressed, we're not standing on its throat anymore. Of course it's gonna get up and wake back up again. Or, if nothing else, it's gonna have to be processed and dealt with differently than it has been. Another way that this has come up, which isn't as specific as, 'Where are straight men?' and 'Why are women and gay men the allies in new age spiritual movements?' But in my Shift Your Spirits community, someone was posting about how Wicca and pagan-identified religion was really on the rise in the United States. And I told her in a comment, I said, I've actually been hearing that since the 1980s. It started in the 1970s actually, that identification as a witch is one of the fastest growing religious identities in the United States and has been our entire lifetimes. Like it's not just happening. It's something that's BEEN happening for awhile, so I'm down with that. Patrick: Well if I may come down to Earth for a second and let's just talk about, like Ash said, I can't even think of more than a handful of straight psychics, for example. Ash: Straight, male psychics. Patrick: Straight male psychics, thank you. What is it about... Is there something about the feminine, or, you know, there probably are a lot of gay men who want to smack me when I refer to them as feminine, but is there something about the brain of the feminine side or what makes... Is it more capable of getting into the spiritual and all of that...? Ash is raising her hand. Ash: So, just to back up, everybody has masculine and feminine energy in them. I think that we have genderized that concept and that's not necessarily the case. It's just a way to refer to an archetype. Think of it more in terms of yin and yang, where yin is the feminine aspect. It's the receptive. It's what's connected to the "Divine". So I think that the reason why we see more gay male psychics than we do straight male psychics is because they are more in tune with that energy. And that is the gateway through which we pull in psychic information, archetypally speaking. I'm a tarot nerd and I love going through tarot archetypes but the archetype of the card, of the Lovers in the Major Arcana, it shows that. The traditional depiction of it is a man looking at a woman and the woman is looking up at a god-like angelic figure. The message within that card is that it's through the feminine that we reach that sort of enlightenment. Divine energy. Slade: I also want to throw in the fact that I think that whenever you exclude people from a social order where they're not in power, by virtue of survival or being able to make things happen for themselves, they have to become more resourceful and they have to learn how to do things in ways that people who, let's say you're heteronormative, white male in this culture. Sometimes there's a lot of things that happen for you that you don't have to think about, in the same way that someone who is excluded from that, whether they're a woman, or they're a minority, ethnically, or they're a gay man, we have to go around and find windows, unlock doors and sometimes tunnel our way in if we can't go through the front door. So I have a theory that that's also one of the reasons why gay people are considered more creative. Patrick: That's interesting. Slade: Or that women have an eye for the way that energies are interacting in a space in a different kind of way. I don't think it's about the fact that we are... I do agree with everything you said about being more in touch with receptive energy. And also being released socially to experience that, you know? Women actually have it shoved down their throat. Gay men come to it by exclusion, well I might as well! But I think that there's something that happened with the programming of straight men that is a little bit more on autopilot sometimes. And one thing that I will say for the straight dudes, because we've got a couple out there, and I can name them, but I won't embarrass them, but something that I've noticed about the straight men who ARE our allies, who we do find at our party, is that they're the real deal. They're the coolest of the guys. They're the ones that we all want to marry and they're the ones that probably need to be procreating more than the rest. Ash: And unfortunately, there's like two of them and all the rest of us are flinging ourselves at them. Slade: Oh, they're already married. And we meet their wives and of course she's adorable too and we hate her. Ash: That bitch. Slade: Yeah, exactly. You know, I do know these men in my life. And I think, gosh, what special kind of guys they are that they're able to shake out of that matrix, right? They are able to see through the matrix a little bit and see past that. So they are more awake. So when you do find them, they are truly empowered and powerful guys. And they do exist. But we can't ignore the fact that there's not a lot of them. And they don't tend to be working in this field the same way that we do, right? Ash: Yeah. One guy comes to mind that I discovered very recently and I completely, totally, just bought into everything. His name is John Wineland, and he's technically a relationship coach but he basically teaches yogic sexuality, and he just radiates this sacred masculine energy and it's so palpable. And you don't, I don't come across a lot of people that have that kind of presence, and who are able to talk about spirituality in a way that comes from that very masculine perspective. I think he's fantastic. If you've never read any of his work or anything, I definitely recommend checking it out. Slade: Patrick, do you have any theories? Patrick: Like in college I can think of... and I'm not a psychic or a medium, or anything like that, so I'm not going to comment on it from that angle, but for example, after coming out, or being completely honest with some of the male friends that were straight that I had in college, I think were all these people that we're talking about. Because those are the ones I connected with. They were very accepting and cool. They're not, I'm sure, psychics or mystics or anything like that. But I guess that's what I was thinking of. I also think of the future of our world, my students, when I made the decision last year to officially kind of come out to my school community, meaning parents and students and no longer worried about that. Previously, I had only been out to my staff. When I came out to my school community, I had some of the, and I'll use boys as examples, high school boys who I'd had as students in middle school, either came up and gave me a hug or told me how proud of me they were. One of them came up to me crying. And I thought, those are the cool peeps. Slade: Mmhmm. Patrick: Those are the cool kids. And, you know, I have some students now, currently, they'll say, "Hey, Mr. Keller, how's your husband?" And I'm like, that's cool. They're not afraid to be seen as 'I'm accepting this' or whatever. So I think in that way, the future is very promising. Slade: I think that that's an amazing form of activism that gets overlooked, and it a cumulative thing and it's one of the reasons why being out is important. Because it's so hard to de-humanize people when you know an actual face and name of an individual person. It makes it a little harder for people to put messages out there that are bigoted in some way because if you're someone who says, "Wait a minute, you know, they're talking about my teacher and that's not true." Therefore their whole theory is bunk. I do believe that being the person who maybe you're the first out gay person that this straight guy has been friends with before, has an impact on how he raises his son down the road. That guy that you knew in college who's like, I never knew a gay dude before, but you're cool. You just inoculated an entire potential family from future homophobia and probably misogyny as well. Because the issue with all those things are about people who are fearful and abusing people that they believe are beneath them. And one of my friends who I work out with a lot that's a straight guy who's an ally said to me, he was like, "I'm not insecure about my masculinity." The only way that you could be a misogynist or a homophobe is if you are. Ash: You know, I think that's an interesting conversation too. I always share this article in my Facebook group. It's called 'Healing the Mother Wound', and the name of the woman who's worked this is... I'm trying to find it... Bethany Webster. She also has a really great article on how that sort of mother wound plays into toxic masculinity. I think I shared a link to it in one of my more recent blog posts. Women talk a lot about men needing to take responsibility for how women have been treated for centuries and centuries and centuries. But also, there's a very important aspect here of, women also have to take responsibility for how we've raised our boys to be a part of that culture as well, and how toxic femininity has fed into toxic masculinity. So I think, you know, in the midst of the #MeToo movement and how feminism is kind of gaining this momentum right now. We also have to, at some point, stop and also accept our role as women in what we've also helped to perpetuate in some ways by being unconscious. Just as unconscious as the unconscious masculine. Slade: You're right. This polarity that's introduced by genderifying it, genderizing it, I can't remember what term you use, but by making it about masculine and feminine instead of making it about receptive versus projective energy, or dominant versus receiving, or all those different kind of terms, there's a lot of ways to talk about that stuff where it's not gender. And this gender thing is kind of like the first basic form of social division, you know? We keep talking about how our culture's still so divided. That's like a basic division that has been going on for who knows how long, right? The idea there, for a little while, that, before the #MeToo movement, there was kind of a meme within feminism about how feminism was humanism. Like, to be a feminist was essentially to be a humanist. And I know Justin Trudeau even brought that up recently when asked in an interview if he considered himself a feminist. And he said yes and that's why. So I think that there are a lot of reasons why women would perpetuate a system that is misogynistic, because there are some women who would perceive themselves to be still elevated enough within that system that they wouldn't rock the boat. They'd rather indoctrinate their daughters in order to inhabit those positions of influence, however small they may be, as opposed to the real work of what Susan talked about. Susan Grace said everything is going to be re-built. And part of what's happening is, everything's gonna fall apart first, you know? In order to renovate stuff, you have to blow it up. And I think that, you know, my feeling politically, culturally and humanistically is that we are watching a lot of stuff unravel. And one of the things about her message that was so meaningful to me is: You want it to break apart. Because we can't put it back together in a different way until it comes apart. So... that may have been a tangent... Patrick: I would love to bring something up, and that is, I mean, it goes along with everything we've talked about. But I've had a few guests on my show discuss how this women's suffrage movement happened... I mean, it's hand-in-hand with the spiritualist movement. And that was maybe kind of the first #MeToo era. And so I would just be curious to know what we think, now that we are having this #MeToo movement and many people have referred to it as Another Year of the Woman, or The Year of the Woman. What's that mean for spiritual peeps? Like us? What's it going to do to, if it was connected with the spiritual movement before, what's that do now? Ash: I think you see them kind of rising in parallel. And I think that's because, again, it goes back to that connection with the Divine Feminine and spirituality and that's how we're rising right now. Slade: I think women also are more receptive and use the principles that we teach and speak and talk about. Women have already mainstreamed a lot of new age culture to be tools in their tool box. The average woman is much more likely, in the United States, and I don't know, I can't speak to other cultures but here it feels like even people that, 10 or 20 years ago, we would feel like would never be seen chanting or burning incense or in a yoga class or something like that. A lot of that stuff has just become a regular part of women's toolbox of self-care, right? Women don't hesitate to seek things like readings, as one of their sources of information. And they're much more likely to pass along a lot of their information to their spouses. Like, I know a lot of guys whose partners and wives are getting readings from me. But I've even had situations where the husband is on the phone, or the information is clearly intended to be for the couple, but it's kind of like, it seems to be women who are just really comfortable with dialing that in. So I feel like if women are in a position of power and are in a position to make more decisions, they're going to include those kind of tools and making it more available. And it will just be like, not as big of a deal to say, have something like that taught in a classroom, right? Do you understand what I'm trying to get at? Ash: I have a question for you guys, and this is something that I've kind of pondered from time to time. And this could go off on a tangent as well. I talk about coming out of the spiritual closet, and I think that there's a lot of similarities in being a spiritual person and sort of being discriminated against in certain ways for your personal beliefs. In that regard, I think a lot of that parallels being gay and having to hide who you are from the world too. So I'm curious, especially with you guys, you're real spiritual and homosexual, so how does that... I don't know, let's talk about that. Slade: Hmm... Well, I will say this. It's easier to be out of your closet as part of your sexual identity than it was for me as a spiritual identity. I withheld THAT for much, much longer. Even though they both were happening in parallel in my awareness, I was actually more sensitive to the idea that I could be victimized for talking about hearing voices, being intuitive, being sensitive to spirits, knowing things about people. I was MUCH more afraid somebody was going to throw my ass in a sanitarium over that stuff than I was that I might be victimized for my sexual orientation. That has been my experience is that, it actually might be harder to come out of the spiritual closet. Ash: I mean, I know for a fact, over the last 5, 6, 7 years that I've been doing this and have been administrating Facebook groups that many, many, many people are still afraid to be out about their spirituality. Because they are terrified of what friends and family are going to think, about how people are going to react, they're afraid of losing their jobs, their credibility, and I kind of agree with what you're saying. I've never experienced having to come out about my sexuality, but I know that in terms of spirituality, that's been a really... It wasn't something that I just, you know, threw the door open and said, "Here I am!", dressed like Miss Cleo. It was sort of slow bits and pieces. I kind of just pushed it out there and I think maybe people just kind of saw it as an evolution. Slade: Like first you're bisexual for men, women... Ash: Right. Slade: You're really gay and everybody knows you're on your way to gay, but maybe you test the waters with the bi. Ash: Psy-curious. Slade: Psy-curious. There's your title for this show, Patrick. Patrick: Well I joked around about how it's a triangle-table discussion instead of a round-table discussion and that works too. Triangle, gay, bi-curious. Slade: Gosh, right?? So many layers... Patrick: Well I can tell you that I don't know that I relate it to coming out or being gay as much because I have considered myself very lucky. I had a very smooth coming out process and I haven't really had a lot of, at least that my eyes are open to, a lot of discrimination thrown against me since coming out in my senior year of high school. But I can tell you that I think part of my fear, like Slade is saying, of coming out of the spiritual closet, which I do, like Slade, that's more of a fear for me. It's harder when you have a podcast about it because everybody's like, "Yeah, he's a weirdo." Ash: What about blog?? I didn't even want to put my face on my own blog for three years. Patrick: Yeah? Ash: You know? Slade: Okay, you're a weirdo. Patrick: But what I was going to say is that I really have been also running away from organized religion my whole life and growing up Southern Baptist. And so, also, part of even though I'm so done with that and have left it behind, and I'm still running far away from it, worried about what people think, I guess, if you start talking about certain subjects. And I do have people give me weird looks because I don't have a lot of people in my community that are just kind of open to, "Hey, so let's talk SPIRITUALISM!" That type of thing. I do remember being more concerned about it when I was early on in the spiritual shift, that time period we were talking about earlier, when I was obsessed with EVP for example, and talking about spirit voices and people are like, "Uh........... I'm gonna go now........." Ash: I remember having a conversation with... I had several of these conversations actually, in a short period of time. I talked to my mom about it. I talked to some friends about it. And I had people, my best friend, ask me if she needed to call me an ambulance. I had people basically tell me I was delusional. My mom just kind of laughed it off and was like, "Oh, that's great. That's funny." And changed the subject. Really quickly. I had a lot of people change the subject very quickly. Slade: What was the ambulance gonna be for? Ash: Because I'm crazy, apparently. Slade: To bring the straitjacket. They need an ambulance to deliver the straitjacket. Ash: Do you have a head injury? But what IS funny is that since those conversations, a lot of those people have actually shifted on over with me. Slade: Oh, cool! Can I say something about my observations with this? Because this is something that I get asked a lot, and I work with a lot of people who are smackdab right there on the cliff. A lot of people are emerging and putting themselves out, not only as a spiritual person, but identifying themselves as a psychic, right? Or an intuitive, or whatever the case may be. And so, I hear these questions a lot. And I will say this, who you're imagining.... First of all, if you're in that space where you're like thinking, Ohmygosh, all these people are gonna think I'm nuts. I want you to sit down and see if you can make an actual list of who those people are. Are there actual people who think that? And is there more than three? Because sometimes you feel like, Oh there's all these people, and it's like, Okay, who are they? Well, my mom and this person over there, I don't really know, but I bet they would. It kind of falls apart a little bit and you start to realize how much you're pumping a lot of that up to be maybe more than it really is. And I'm not discounting the people who do say beep to you like you're delusional. But they are a minority. So what happens when you do just say, "You know what? I'm not going to convince anyone of anything. But I'm going to put what I think out there." It's like you're running a flag up a flag pole and all the people who agree with you, there's actually more of them in the closet than you ever realize, and they start approaching you and whispering, "Hey, by the way, I love your podcast." Ash: Exactly! Slade: That happens to me at the gym! Like it's a secret. Like I'm a drug dealer or something. You know what I mean? Ash: I had the same experience though. Like I would also meet people who, you know, I would tell them about some kind of weird paranormal experience that I've had and they'd be like, "You know what? This also happened to me one time." And it seems like everybody HAS had at least one of those stories that they've always been reticent to share with someone because they don't know how that person's gonna react, and they don't know if that's a safe space. Slade: Right. Ash: Just by you being yourself and being open, you give them permission to also do that. Patrick: It's like a very therapeutic moment for them too. In those situations. I've had a few of those. They've been like, at the xerox machine. Those have been a lot of where these conversations have happened for me. Where they're like, "Oh, you know, I know you're into this stuff so I have this, the other night I had this blahblahblah..." Just them getting it out of their system is, you know, I feel like I was their therapist or something. Slade: Feeling somebody that could witness them. And just to tie up what I was trying to get at with, can you list the people who are supposedly going to think you're nuts? You might. You might get a handful. But now when you start to list all the people who've emailed you and said, "Ohmygod, I love your podcast", or who have emailed you with their stories, and I know both of you get emails from people who tell you their life story and it's so vulnerable and so personal, and they've chosen YOU to be the person to tell, right? And if we start to make a list of those people, the point that I'm trying to make for everyone out there who's feeling fearful of what the people who are gonna judge you negatively are going to think, when you start to really pool and list and add up all the people who are going to be connected to you because of it, or are gonna identify you as a safe person to talk to, or gonna agree with you or be interested in what you have to say, that population is so overwhelmingly larger, don't you think? Patrick: Yeah. It's just fear that keeps us assuming that we wouldn't be accepted. Slade: Yeah. We're afraid of what those 10 people are gonna think, that we don't even really like anyway. Meanwhile, there's a football stadium full of people who are like, "Bring it on!" And what you realize when you walk through that portal, that vortex, and go through to the other side, you go, "Ohmygod, there's tons of people here." That's the first thing that really happens, is people flock to you because you have run a flag up and said, "I'm someone you can talk to about this." That is a courageous act. Those of you who do put yourselves out there and do that are creating an opening for all those other people who can't. And creating a moment for them at this xerox machine, that they wouldn't have had otherwise. So I think that that's the way it happens. And I understand why it's scary, and also understand that once you're on the other side of it, you'll think, What the hell was I waiting on?? Ash: Yeah. Patrick: Kinda like when I came out this last year. I was like, why couldn't this have happened years ago? Because honestly when I started teaching 17 years ago, I always assumed that there would never be that moment. That I would be, I would have to wait until I was retired, to live that 100% out of the closet experience again. Why couldn't it have happened at least five years ago? I don't know about 17 years ago, but... Slade: Well, I mean, the reason why it doesn't happen is because there is a very real danger that something really bad could happen to you. You could be targetted in some way. I mean, I don't want to say that, just by being brave and doing it, that that will make all of that stuff go away. Ash: Your dad could try to give you an exorcism in a public parking lot. Patrick: Or your parents could throw you out of the house as a teenager. Slade: Yeah. Patrick: And those things happen. There are very real dangers of, well, I'm sure coming out of the spiritualist closet for some, there might be a very real danger of someone, depending on where you live, or what your family situation is... Slade: I live in the Bible belt. I know what it's like to be surrounded by fundamentalists all the time. To the point where sometimes I feel like, maybe I actually have some kind of programming that I'm numb to it now. Because when I travel to other parts of the country that are different in some way, I think, Wow! Even the average redneck on the street is liberal! It feels like I'm in Oz or something and it makes me aware of the fact that I do live in a place that is so conservative. But I will say this. The bigotry is on both sides a little bit because I have such an expectation of these people around me, who maybe identifies as Christian or whatever, being unable to process what I do or connect with it in some way. I'm often finding that I'm the one who's being narrow-minded. They do come up to me and approach me and sometimes people who are mystical people in a religious way are actually much more able to talk about mysticism period. I've found that little old ladies who identify really strongly with Jesus are MUCH more open to the idea that your grandfather visits you at night. They don't bat an eye about spirit visitation at all. Or the existence of angels, some of these things that are part of the new age... Ash: In some cases, I feel like they've just lived long enough to have those experiences. Slade: Right. And it's a matter of vocabulary. At some point you have to ask yourself, she's using the term she's using because of the time period that she grew up in, and the education and spiritual system she was indoctrinated into. That's her vocabulary and that's her words for it. I often find myself putting it on myself to do the translating. The angry, younger version of myself was like, "Nah! This is BULLsh*t!" Like, in your face about it. Now I'm much more compassionate and empathetic to the fact that, you know what, I'll do the translating. I'm not gonna force them to accept my goddess vocabulary because sometimes that shuts people down just because they can't process what it is that... You're using a word that they've never heard before and their mind shuts off at, "What? Did he just refer to God as a woman..?" or whatever. And then they don't hear everything you say afterwards. And so I have learned to do the translating myself. And even though it wears me out sometimes, and I wish everybody was a little bit more fluid with their vocabulary, sometimes I have to look through the words that they're using and look at the energy of what they're trying to communicate. And say, "Okay, I get what she's saying. She's talking about empathy. She's talking about psychic receptivity. And she's just couching it in, a more conservative way of talking about it." So it does go both ways a little bit. I'm just owning that for myself. Patrick: Word. If I try to bring us back to the initial question, keeping in mind that we know that there are straight men, for example, who are our buds and who are completely down with all of this. And they're probably the ones throwing their phone across the room right now as they're listening. Because they're like, "Why can't you see me and hear me?" And just as there might be women who are completely lost on what we're talking about, and aren't down with it. Keeping that in mind, how do we bring straight men in, or is it possible to bring straight men in? Do they have to do it themselves? Ash: Ooo good question. Patrick: Well I am a genius! Ash: There is no off position on the genius switch. Slade: For myself, I will say this. The same thing I was kind of talking about stepping out there and running a flag up the flag pole and letting people identify with you. So I think you live your example and you gather the other people along with you and you create those spaces. And you make sure that guys feel welcome when they do show up. As far as recruiting them, that seems like a different kind of situation. I don't know that we can do that. I think that we need to make sure that we're not excluding the men that want to participate. The straight guys that wander into our meditation circle or whatever it might be. And I do think that one of the things that could be different for Ash, for example, with the community she runs from mine, I do get a lot of male clients. And I get a lot of younger guys that come to me for readings, and I think that they do feel more comfortable just because there is a man present in the room, gives them a kind of permission to participate. Even though I'm very out about my sexual identity, I do feel like sometimes the guys who show up to participate with us, it helps to see a couple of dudes in the room. Ash: I totally concur with that. I was having a conversation with a friend just a couple of weeks ago about how there's not a lot of masculine voices when it comes to spirituality, particularly not straight male masculine voices. And I feel like there's a really big... Everybody wants to be able to see someone in a space that looks like them. And we always talk about how it's always a white male everywhere you go, EXCEPT where we are, you know? Straight, white male. So I think that's also a big barrier for those guys, is that they don't see a lot of people like themselves in our communities. So I think it's hard for them to be able to identify in some ways. Slade: I send a lot of men who are looking for relationships into those environments, particularly when straight guys who are in their late 20s and they come and have readings about their love life and where they can go to meet people. I do send them into those environments because I know... Patrick: You have match-making services also? Slade: Right! Just to bring that back in. The fact of the matter is, if you are one of those men and you're really a special, unique, you know, maybe minority. But listen, if you want to be like the coolest person that ever walked through the room at yoga class, go to a yoga class as a straight man, as a place of putting yourself out there and saying, I'm a different kind of man. I can't imagine that you wouldn't have lots more opportunities to meet the kind of women that you want to meet. Ash: Exactly. Slade: You know, like those environments for the right kind of mindset, like if you're the kind of guy that thinks, You know what, I'm comfortable enough with myself. I don't mind being the only guy in the room. You get a kind of attention for being the only man in the room with a bunch of women. Even when I was in college, I would take these women's studies classes (I have a Women's Studies certificate), and back then, they would give you a certificate if you took certain classes that were within other disciplines and fields and but they didn't have a major for it yet. So if you took history classes that were designated as a women's studies history class, eventually if you had enough of those credits, they would give you a certificate. So I would often take, say, for instance, a literature class or history class or politics class that was a women's studies class, because it was more interesting. The topic was more specific and granular and meaty in some way. And I would find myself in these classrooms where I was the only man. And even though I was a gay man, I still was the only MAN. And there is an attention that you get from women when you're the only dude in the room. And so I would think, that for a straight dude, that sounds like a great spot to be in. Ash: Just walk into the room, turn to the women and go, "Oh heeeeey!" Slade: So we are recommending that for your spiritual growth and edification, as well as your dating life, straight dudes, get thyself to a... Ash: Spiritual circle! Slade: Spiritual circle. Patrick: Right away. So Ashley, what do I call this episode? Ash: Mmm... I don't know... Good Times in the Spiritual Closet? Patrick: Actually, I kind of like, Get Thee to a Spiritual Circle. Ash: Or triangle? Patrick: Or triangle! Slade: Ohmygosh. Patrick: Ash. Tell us what's going on in your sacred space, besides the closet that you're sitting in now? That could look like anyone's living room or bedroom, and it's your closet. So tell us what's going on in your world. Ash: Oh... my world is quickly shifting and changing and I'm honestly not 100% certain where it's going right now. I just kind of started a re-brand over the summer, and I'm actually getting away from doing readings and being so focused on metaphysics and I'm kind of branching more into personal development and I'm on this big authenticity kick right now. A lot of my writing has shifted quite a bit over the last year. It's kind of taken more of a creative, emotional direction. I'm not selling anything, I'm not pedaling any wares, I have nothing to tell you other than if you just like to read my daily thoughts, you can follow me on Instagram and also subscribe to my blog. Patrick: I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's awesome. Just BE. Ash: Yeah. I kind of decided that I'm doing this for pure enjoyment at this point, and I think that that's the best way to approach it. Especially if you want to grow something, do it because you're passionate about it, not because you need to make it happen. It's my passion project. Patrick: So you've made this cool move that a lot of people would be very jealous of. This chance to just kind of jump out there and be brave and start something and move somewhere. How many years now have you, you're in Brooklyn, right? Ash: I'm actually Jersey City. Patrick: Oh, okay. So how long have you now been an East coast nerd? Ash: It was a year in July, so almost a year and a half December. Patrick: Wow. I had thought that it'd have been longer by now. Ash: Still pretty fresh over here! Patrick: Tell everyone... It's InMySacredSpace.com, right? Ash: Yes. Patrick: And you said your Instagram is where it's at? Ash: Yup. And InMySacredSpace.com. I'm also on Facebook too, but I seem to be gravitating more towards Instagram these days. Patrick: Slade! Just recently, I see that you kind of revisited some stranger angel stuff going on at sladeroberson.com. Slade: I did! It was my most recent episode. Just talking about the phenomenon of stranger angels, which is something that I read about and podcasted about in the past, but I had a whole different take on it while travelling, really around the concept of how you can be one of these people. Like my past experiences have been all about receiving those experiences as opposed to, this time I was travelling with someone who is very actively likes to be a stranger angel. So it activated a different awareness about what it means to move through the world and interact with people that way. Patrick: What else is going on? Slade: You know, like Ash said, it's really not, for me, about pedaling anything in particular. I also believe in authenticity and I believe that putting yourself out there and talking about things that you're interested in and hosting a space where other people can do the same is a really powerful form of marketing, and you don't have to jump up and down and sell things in order to connect with people. I really do believe in the concept of marketing yourself as being... Find a group of people that you share something in common with and go be relentlessly helpful to them. Ash: I love that. I love that! Be relentlessly helpful. Slade: I have to give credit to Tim Grahl. He's something of a business mentor to me and he comes from the independent publishing community. That's his definition and it's one I've taken and borrowed. My interpretation of that has been to create space with my platform for other people to come and... It's not only about me making this content and putting it out there. That's one part of it. The authenticity. But also using my social media platform as a big keg party basically. I don't have control over it. It's not a... The Shift Your Spirits community on Facebook has been a surprising revelation in how... you know when you are in these groups where there are tens and thousands of people and no one is talking or commenting on anything, and the moderators and admin people are trying to get a discussion going and it's just fallen flat... Ash: I feel like that's how my group has become, but only because I've neglected it. Slade: Well, you know, it was one of my biggest fears, honestly, and starting a community like that was like, Ohmygod, how do I pump these people up? I thought I needed to be some kind of cheerleader or something and that's not my personality. And what I have found... Ash: No! Slade: What I've found is that by inviting all these people and just creating a space for them to talk about all the things that they want to talk about, they all have their own paranormal experiences. They all have their own spiritual modalities that they study and so I have been very hands off with the community. I'm hosting this community and that's my role. The people who participate, the members are the ones generating the discussion. I often don't even comment on the discussions because there are so many of them, and I love just kind of drifting through, quasi-invisibly, and seeing all the things that are going on. And I have to tell you, I'm really proud to have my name on something that I didn't make but that nevertheless I feel like I invited to happen. And it's really about other people. It's not about me. And when you're an author, you're an online personality or podcast host like we are, it's very easy to come from this ego space of being a performer and being like, the one who's the centre of attention. I have found that I'm moving into that. Weirdly I've become more collaborative, less about it being about me, and more about it being about everyone else. So for me right now, the growth in Shift Your Spirits is all about the people who listen to the show and interact on Facebook and create this cool space where they talk about cooler stuff than I might even think to bring up. If you'd like to check that out, by all means, we'd love to have you. Patrick: And I'll put all of the links that we mentioned two groups and Instagram and websites. And we'll put all of those in the show notes. Great idea, Ash! Ash: Thank you! Slade: That was fun! Patrick: You are a genius. Ash: I know. I'm also humble. Patrick: And I'm, right now, just so you know, I'm gonna take a screenshot selfie of all three of us on the screen. Are you ready for the countdown? Here's my classic smile. You ready? One.. Two.. Three..... Wait, did I do it right? OH NO I didn't do it right! I did it wrong! It's Command-Shift-3. One. Two. Three. YAAAAAAAY! Thank you. Slade: Fun.

Once upon a time I (Joe) had an AdWords PPC budget that hit $45,000 a month. Over 5 years I learned AdWords on my own, had no training, a half dozen campaigns and a handful of ad groups. I thought I was pretty savvy and successful. This was about 10 years ago and to be frank, I'm older, wiser, more seasoned and would tell my 10-year younger self that I was a novice and wasting a TON of money. Don't be like me. Since 2010 I have heard dozens of entrepreneurs tell me they outsourced their paid advertising unsuccessfully. So when Jason Yelowitz introduced me to Strike Social Founder I was a little skeptical. But success and growth speak for themselves. Patrick McKenna boot strapped Strike Social from his kitchen table in a rented home in LA about 5 years ago. In 2016 Strike Social was named on the Inc. 500 List for the fastest growing companies. Their rank? Number 17! Strike Social helps brands improve their paid advertising campaigns, dramatically. One example Patrick gives is an ecommerce company that had their CPA go from $80 dollars to $16. This created great problems for the client. The first was rapid growth and much better margins. The second was access (or lack thereof) to monies for inventory. As you likely know – running out of inventory is an issue. Rapidly growing brands lack access to capital, run out of inventory and lose ground on the path to growth. Strike Social does a free analysis of a client's paid ad campaigns, a free test, and when the client comes on board and grows so fast they don't have funds for enough inventory, Strike will provide working capital for inventory. If it weren't for the rank of number 17 on the Inc. 500 list and the fact that you don't get there without proving yourself, I'd say it all seems too good to be true. After chatting with Patrick on today's Podcast, I say try them out get a free review. At the very least you'll learn what you are doing right and wrong in your own paid advertising campaigns. Episode Highlights: Instagram's paid advertising platform is the next Facebook. It's working. In Google AdWords you should have 1,000+ campaigns, not 6. Facebook is content driven and ads need constant testing. Video ads in Facebook can be as short as 3-4 seconds. YouTube is great, but not for direct conversations and CPAs. Strike Social developed technology recognized by Techcrunch.com that helped propel them to #17 on the Inc. 500 list. Strike Social will provide working capital to clients so they can ramp up inventory to match growth. Transcription: Mark: So one of the things that I find most difficult and frustrating about running a business in today's internet world is this idea of having these coordinated campaigns across multiple channels and multiple platforms, and the degree to sophistication which you need to run each campaign across each platform. For example with Facebook and Google, it's not so much to do just [inaudible 00:01:25.5] a couple of key words and hoping everything works for Facebook bring up a couple of ads and hoping it works. You really have to delve in and get super detailed. I understand Joe that you talked to somebody today that's doing this for a living. And they started a company and not only have they just started and are doing well but they're ranked really high in the Inc. 500 list specializing in running these cross-platform campaigns that are really highly refined. Joe: Yeah. It's Patrick McKenna from Strike Social and about five years ago he bootstrapped a company, he was literally working from the kitchen table in a rented house in Los Angeles. And he developed software that would analyze paid advertising campaigns and then go way beyond what you normally do in an excel file and so on and so forth. Standard stuff right? Well, that's what I thought when he was introduced to me by our very own Jason Yellowitz, they're neighbors. Patrick's company Strike Social in 2016 was ranked number 16 … no number 17 on the Inc. 500 list. And I think you and I have talked about this that that's impressive, number 17 on Inc. 500 list, you don't get there by accident. You don't get there without being really really good at what you do. Over the years, the last six years that I've been doing what I'm doing I talked to dozens and dozens and I might want to say hundreds that [inaudible 00:02:49.9] of people that started their own Google Ad Account and developed it as their business grew and managed it themselves and then got to a point where they said you know what I should outsource this. And they found somebody online and they outsourced it and what happened? It failed. That cost for acquisition went up, the budget went up and they had to bring it back in-house. Dozens of times I talked to these folks. So when I first connected with Patrick I was skeptical but then we talked, went into detail and he gave me some success stories that are really truly just incredible Mark to the point where I need you to listen to this podcast and consider talking with him about Quiet Light Advertising. They do testing for free. They do an analysis with their software and they'll do a test for free as well. And then they prove themselves and then like every other agency they get paid on a percentage of spend. But here's the kicker they've taken some clients and grown their businesses so dramatically that clients run out of inventory. That's the number one thing we tell folks is don't run out of inventory. It seems so simple but when people bootstrap the company and they grow they don't have enough working capital. And I've listened to other podcast, you know the EcommCrew Mike Jackness podcast where they talk about trying to find sources of working capital for inventory. Well, Strike Social will be that source for their very own clients. Because they've run into it so many times where it was so successful the client ran out of funds to buy more inventory. So they became that working capital source. So really impressive story, I would encourage everyone to listen all the way through to the 31 minute mark where he starts to talk about the working capital aspect of it. But there's a lot of good stuff here. He talks about some basic things that everyone should do. A quick story and then I'll stop talking. But when I ran my own Google AdWords campaign for the company that you brokered for me back in 2010, the most I ever spent was $45,000 in one month on paid advertising. I worked my way up that, up up from that in 2005 to 2010. Of course, after the crash, it was much lower but at the max … at the peak, I had a total of 10 campaigns set up in Google AdWords. And I had it all done with my keywords and I used all the software at the time to find those keywords and develop them; 10 campaigns. So in talking with Patrick, he talks about that their clients have an average of 1,000 to 6,000 campaigns and that's for one product, Mark. And that just makes me think about … again, yet again how much money I lost in two ways, really on wasted advertising spending and on not making it so good that my cost for acquisition came down dramatically. And I just want to encourage everyone that's listening to think about it and listen to what they're saying and have a conversation with them because odds are you're not doing it as well as you could be if you're doing it yourself. Just like what we talked about with book keeping, Excel is not accounting software. The basic pieces that you pull together for managing your campaigns across multiple platforms is not as good as what these guys have either. And it's worth to listen to him, worth a test I think in my opinion and experience. Mark: Yeah and I really have to agree with the fact that if you're doing it in-house and look I'm running some campaigns in-house right now for both companies that I own. That for a variety of reasons … but you have to understand if you're going to run it in-house, if you're not going to have a specialist, chances are you're not going to be doing it as well as it could be done. Because AdWords is an environment that really takes specialization. Facebook is an environment that really takes specialization. Frankly, I'm saying up a good automation sequence falls in the same category as well. So I'll be interested to listen to this. I definitely will be listening to this. I'm always looking to pick up on some information. Joe: Yeah and look Instagram is also in there as well. It's something we talked about. You know when AdWords was it that was the player Facebook came along and started to become the second option. Well, Instagram is now that option to Facebook and it's really starting to work. So those that have not expanded to those channels, listen, take a look, learn. And the other thing look this wasn't a pitch for this guy's services. This was helping people understand what they may or may not be doing right or wrong in their campaigns. And he talks about three things that you can do and focus on. And at the end Mark, I didn't ask him for a contact information like at all. It's in the show notes of course but for those that only listen the company is Strike Social. It's strikesocial.com and you can email them at hello@strikesocial.com that's hello@strikesocial.com it's a … we didn't talk about it at the end so I want to throw it in now. Mark: Awesome well let's get to it. Joe: Hey folks its Joe Valley of Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got Patrick McKenna with us from Strike Social. How are you, Patrick? Patrick: I'm good. How are you, Joe? Joe: I'm fantastic. Folks, anybody that knows Jason Yellowitz here at Quiet Light, you should, he's been around for I think longer than everybody except for Mark Daoust the founder of Quiet Light. Jason was my broker when I sold back in 2010 and he happens to live across the street from you right? Patrick: That's right we live in Reno, he's right across the street. Kids are always running in my house. Joe: Jason is a good man and I wouldn't mind having him as a neighbor. I often poke fun at Jason and his Bathrobe Millionaire book but it's a heck of a success story and I still don't have a piece of the bathrobe. Have you ever seen it laying around his house? Did he save it? Seriously is it like behind like a glass case hanging on the wall? Patrick: It's on the mantle sitting up there. He's very proud of that. Joe: Next time you're in I want you to take a selfie in front of it and send it to me okay? Patrick: [inaudible 00:08:47.7] Joe: Look in all seriousness Jason is top notch. He's my mentor. He's mentored to many. He's a terrific guy. And he introduced you to us. And as I mentioned before we started recording we do not do fancy introductions here at Quiet Light on the Quiet Light Podcast so I know it's going to be hard for you but I want you to brag about yourself a little bit because you have a heck of a success story. Tell us about Strike Social and what you do, what the background is and all that good stuff for us. Patrick: Sure, yeah we … you know Jason and I are sort of kindred spirits. We've been through the battle, it sounds like you have too … I mean a business is incredibly challenging. We did it like anyone else does it. We take the plunge, you bootstrap on a kitchen table out of our rental house in LA. And we started that process in March of 2013 and then we launched some technology and we got recognized in TechCrunch for this advertising technology, this analytics platform. By November after that article came out we're selling like crazy and that was some different challenges. You think initially that wow this is great and that my products rate and the market loves it. And then you start to realize that you're putting yourself out of business because you're trying to fund invoices and all those types of things that come up when you're running a business. So we went through all that stuff, raised a little money in 2014, raised a little bit more in 2015 and it's standed globally and by 2016 we're recognized in Forbes Fast 500 fastest growing companies in the US. Joe: What number were you? Patrick: Number 17. Joe: 17 out of 500? Patrick: Yeah. Joe: That's incredible. Patrick: Pretty amazing. That was up 2016 revenue numbers and we're excited to see where we land this year for Fortune List. It will be the 2018 release that will be 2017 numbers so- Joe: Got you. Patrick: It's that it so. Joe: It sounds exciting and painful all the same time. You've literally started on a kitchen table at a rental in LA. and then grew the business, bootstrapped it from there. Probably like many of the listeners who are you know the listeners that are sellers and entrepreneurs and listeners that are hoping to step into the entrepreneurial role that you're playing now. That's pretty incredible. Tell us about what Strike Social does and who your typical customers are. Patrick: Right. So initially we went out to the largest agencies in the world and we sold execution services around advertising. So initially we started with YouTube now we're across all the social platforms and search as well. But we would basically like take on and execute buys for their largest customers. So our customers will be X-box in PNG and pick any Fortune 100 brand, the big guys. And then we started doing that here in the US then we went to Asia and then went to Europe and I don't know if you know who the holding companies are but you know WPP [inaudible 00:12:17.3], the big guys that I mostly don't talk to a smaller company. So it was really nice to have that reign for us to go sell in to and it was a really profitable situation for us. And we kept building technology and investing in technology and people and locations. We have a location here in Chicago where we're headquartered. And then we have a location in Poland and a location in Manila. We've got about a hundred people here now and we've got boots on the ground from Japan, and Korea, and Australia, obviously the US, Singapore, Europe. So it's been a really really fun ride and yes you go through all of the emotional ups and downs of running a business when you're buying one. Joe: Yeah. Good problems with that kind of growth, really good problems. Talk to me about the technology that you developed that originally got you recognized in I think you said TechCrunch and you said analytics platform. Can you talk about the actual service and why someone would use … like why these B2B advertising agencies would use yours versus having an expert in-house do it. What does it do and what's different about it that made you the 17th fastest growing company in 2016? Patrick: Yeah I think when video first came out I think it was really challenging for companies to understand, it is kind of a new medium, how do I be successful here? So our analytics platform so they showed them how to be successful. But what we did is we executed the media guys. So we look like a typical agency, we don't really like that word because we built software solution to help us with that. And then overtime what we've done is we built this incredible artificial intelligence box that allows us to go across platform, plan and execute strategies. And so it's all … it's a human and technology solution combined. And like I talked about advertising now it's a complicated orchestra. And what you need at the end of that is execution so … and we can talk about that more but it's very challenging to stay up to date on these platforms and you need a partner and a technology solution to really execute and do well. Joe: Okay. And you started out with YouTube, so at that time there were not a lot of experts in the field of buying advertising, buying that advertising space on YouTube. Patrick: That's right. Joe: You know when I … when Jason sold my business back in 2010 I was spending a boatload of money on Google AdWords and I learned it from the ground up. I did it myself starting in 2005 and I … at one point I never had any training so I can't imagine how much money I wasted over the years. I mean it was a point where I topped out at spending $45,000 a month. I mean Jason loves to tell the story of how I got mad at American Express because I went above my average so I cut my advertising in half and it's the stupidest thing I've ever done. But I did it because I got mad. It is a ton of money; I blew a ton of money by not being the expert. But you guys learned that expertise in terms of buying ad space on YouTube and then you expanded to the other social media platforms. So are you now doing paid ads on Google AdWords, on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, things of that nature? Patrick: Absolutely DBM, Amazon, all the ones- Joe: What would DBM mean? You got me right there. Patrick: Sorry … Doubleclick Bid Manager is Google's DSP solution to get the rest of the web that's not … that you can't do in AdWords. Joe: And what's DSP stand for? Patrick: Digital Supply-side Platform, so that's how Google goes and buys display advertising on say the [inaudible 00:16:36.9] within New York Times. Joe: Okay. Patrick: Yeah. So it's another Google product. It's part of their Google Suite and actually it's interesting that you bring that up that's … that they had a tagging solution there that … and we find this a lot in companies that are running small businesses on just AdWords that you can get really good multi variant testing on that platform rebuilt technology to allow you to expand that. I don't know how extensive you got with your test. But one campaign maybe you have 40 different variables, maybe you're really good and you get up to a hundred. We'll do like 6,000 with their technology. Joe: Wow. Patrick: So yeah we're testing age, demo, interest, topic, keywords- Joe: Let's get really down to it. People that are listening, their ears might be perking up and this is why we're talking because you don't get to be number 17 on the Forbes fastest growing companies by screwing up. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: Because you wouldn't have the clients that would be referring and helping you grow your business further. Patrick: That's right. Joe: So my initial thought as I said on our first call was more often than not I do valuations and exe-planning for people and see that they were doing fine on their own advertising. Managing it themselves and then outsourced it and it totally blew it up as in bang and their cost for acquisition went up. And usually, in my experience, it's not a great thing. Your success in having people use your services changes my mind. So let's talk about specifically we've got folks that are … was their physical product owners and of course there's content as well but I think you said you don't really do a whole lot of content stuff. Correct me if I'm wrong but let's say we've got physical product owners that are mostly because of the crazy growth on Amazon doing Amazon sponsored ads our advice is always go well beyond Amazon grow your business so it's not one revenue channel. Your value is going to be higher but they are challenged with how to do that. So do you do an analysis on a business and you're looking at Facebook advertising for that physical products, do you take over the Amazon, sponsored ads, do you do Instagram all of these things? Patrick: Yes, all of them. And you know what before we start with any business we start with an audit to get to a genuine conversation. You'd say okay here in the platforms you're on tell us about your objectives, lets pull your data into a dashboard that you'll own and take possession of. And more so you … where we see some quick wins and easy gaps and then we'll go take you know what if you like what we're saying we'll go run a test for free to see if we can improve what you're doing. Joe: How much is the cost of the audit that you do? Patrick: It doesn't cost anything. Joe: Okay the audit is free and the test is free. Patrick: The audit is free, the test is free. That's right and we just rolled out this … the reason I'm talking to you and I'm just talking to Jason about this is you know we just rolled out this Strike Marketing Partnership. You know we have a very large e-commerce company under our belt right now and we are able to take that business and improve their cost per lead from $80 to $16 and it really grow their business. They were able to- Joe: Were they profitable at $80? Patrick: Yes. Yeah, they were. Joe: Okay. Patrick: Dramatically improved their numbers and now they're on a path to being a billion dollar company. Joe: And so you took it from $80 cost per lead … was it cost for lead or cost for acquisition or both? I guess it doesn't matter but you took it from 80 to 16 and then where they able to use the same budget or I mean- Patrick: They were able to increase it. Yeah you see that's the key and I think the one point I want to make Joe is that we are entrepreneurs here and we're in the advertising marketing space and like one of the guys that's on our staff started panatea until he started the March Air Movement and sold it to a very large Japanese company because he doesn't need to work. But he's passionate about entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship and he's an expert in building that brand. And when you said content you know content is critical in … when you start talking about AdWords and multi variant testing you can't apply that same learning over to Facebook. It's a completely different platform. Everything is grouped together. You have to be a little bit patient and let Facebook find that first customer for you. And then it starts to learn who your customer is and it's started in and it's off to the races. But if you're open at that platform and if you're doing it the same way you're doing it on AdWords whether it's YouTube or just AdWords so you're not going to perform there, you're just … you're not doing it right. Joe: Okay. Patrick: So- Joe: What are in that Amazon Seller account? Do you guys handle the sponsor ads as well? Patrick: That's right yeah and we have a seat on Amazon so we have a partnership with them. Seat means that we get a seat. Joe: You know I was going to ask that. Patrick: Yeah sorry. I can see it on your face, what's a seat? Joe: Okay. Patrick: And seat that means that we're in their partner program and we can log into their technology and buy inventory at stale. Joe: Sure. Patrick: So … yeah and that means we also have a rep, and that's the other thing to is that these platforms change all the time. And one of the recent ones was GDPR it's made a … GDPR oh. Joe: Come on now GDPR what's that? This is going to be the acronym show. What is it? Patrick: Yeah the acronym … I'm sorry, I spend a lot of time in advertising so you know neither all … there are all things … GDPR is a … it's a European Union situation where the user is in control of their own data. Joe: Okay. Patrick: And the platforms, you have to basically ask permission or I think you've probably seen on sites you go to now. They're saying a. so do you like content, you need to accept my cookie. And if you're in someone's database right now and you have a European client in your database you needed to e-mail them and say hey by the way I need you to okay the fact that you're in my database. Initially, don't do that, I mean don't be that; you can get fined significantly. Joe: Most of our … the people in the audience, the people that are listening I shouldn't say most I mean it's anywhere from somebody doing a hundred thousand a year in revenue to you know 40 to 50 million in revenue. So it's all over the map there a little bit. Let's give some stuff away for free here that I don't want this to be obviously you do the evaluation and you do the test for free. And then let me just answer that; let's answer the quick question because people are going to say well what happens after that? Do you get paid on a commission basis part of the advertising how does it … part of the advertise you spent? Patrick: Yeah I think that's why we fall in that advertising agent bucket because we get a percentage of the media. Joe: I did the same back in my Media Mind days when I used to buy time on radio; percentage of what you're spending. Patrick: There you go. Joe: And about the job you do on that cost for acquisition the more you're able to spend because the budget goes up. So it is the right- Patrick: Portion. Joe: Way to do it. Yeah. All right so let's talk about that aside do you have any sort of hot tips? What can someone do just on their own looking at their own advertising budget in whatever platform you want to talk about? Patrick: Sure. Joe: Give away some tips or what can somebody do that's using … let's start with Google AdWords. What's the biggest mistake people make and how can they fix it? Patrick: Yeah I think that one of the biggest mistakes, I mean you can kind of take this across all platforms is trying to figure out the audience and the actual attribution and then finding the adjacent audience. So I'll give you an example, and our artificial intelligence does this. The idea is that you need to expand your audience. So you find an audience that gives you a high lifetime value and you recognize that in keywords or interest in Google AdWords. For example, you might be targeting 18 to 54 year olds in AdWords. You need to break each one of those segments up and realize that 18 to 24 year olds aren't interested in the same thing as a 45 and through 54 right? So if you're trying … if you're targeting people who are interested in the NFL, the 18 year olds that also have that same interest are interested in the UFC. And so you have to find those adjacent audiences to lower your cost of acquisition. Does that make sense? Joe: Yeah. Patrick: You expand the reach of the audience size and that's something that our technology does and our big people are doing that. Joe: Okay so it's finding out their like audiences. I always hear something on the Facebook algorithm in the paid advertising part of that similar audience or look alike audience, is that what we're talking about? Patrick: Kind of, on Facebook it's different. So AdWords is a multi-variant test platform. You're basically setting up … hopefully, you're setting up somewhere between 10 and 150 different campaigns. We're going to set up about 1,000 to 6,000. Joe: I think I had five or six and I had multiple things underneath there. So you're talking about 1,000 to 6,000 campaigns? Patrick: What was what was your target audience age range? Joe: From the women 25, 54 but I honestly can't recall if I even know. No, not much. I don't want to talk about that because I lost a whole lot of money the more we talk about it. Patrick: Oh my gosh. Joe: Wasted money. But you're doing a thousand campaigns inside of Google Ad Words? Patrick: You can [inaudible 00:17:10.1]. That's the only way, get out to get that. No, no, no, that's my product. That's the only way to get down to how am I going to expand this audience? What does this audience …. what is this audience also interested in? So it … what you basically said, what you told the platform was I want women 18 to 54 is that what you said, 18 to 54? Joe: 25, 54 but- Patrick: 25 and 54 and you basically said they all have the same interest and they don't. Joe: No they don't. Patrick: And they're not even on the same device. So you've got to break it out by device; tablet, mobile, desktop. And you've got to break it out by each age group. You've got to break it out by each interest. And you got to break it out by each keyword. Because if you don't get that data in there you're science is [inaudible 00:28:04.6] value is. Joe: Okay so someone doing this on their own in an Excel spreadsheet doing … think they're doing fairly well odds are that they could be doing a whole lot better. Patrick: Basically. Joe: Right. Another … okay so the tip there was I keep, I want to call it look alike audiences but it's not. Patrick: Just call it multi-variant testing. In AdWords, you've got to multi-variant test, and you've got to get as granular as possible to get the learnings out of that, out of that platform. Joe: Multi-variant testing, okay. Patrick: Yes. Joe: Second so the tip, the next thing you'll sit down and tell somebody to look at? Patrick: So on Facebook, it's completely different. You can't, you have to bucket everyone together and then as soon as Facebook finds you that acquisition and that's you know obviously Facebook and Instagram then it starts to learn okay now I know who you're looking for and it starts to find all the people that look alike. That's where the look alike part comes in. Facebook's AdWord is working in the background to figure that out. When we first set out it might be looking at your return and saying oh my gosh I'm doing way better on AdWords. You have to stick with it. And one of the things that we see as well is that you have a longer sign up or click to buy solution in your platform. What you'll see is people will start that buy on Facebook and they'll get to your form and realize that they don't have enough time for this and they need to go sign up on the desktop. And they'll go to Google search, look up your brand and you have to be able to do that. And that's where that DCM code comes in to play; from double click. Joe: Okay. Patrick: It actually digi up and see the assist on Facebook to AdWords, give the credit to Facebook that was the person who … that's where they saw the ad. They'll just go in to the desktop to finish filling it out Joe: Okay. Patrick: That makes sense? Joe: I did evaluation maybe three weeks ago for someone that back in the first quarter they reduced tremendous volume in their business by Facebook advertising. And then the algorithm update hit in I think April, you know by May. And they went from let's say a half a million a month in revenue to 40,000 a month in revenue. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: Incredibly painful. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: They then jumped to Google AdWords and made adjustments on Facebook. But that type of algorithm update how do you and how does your agency … [inaudible 00:30:34.3] agency, how does your service address that, fix that, take care of that, and make sure that your clients are not going to be suffering from that major algorithm update that Facebook seems to be doing on a regular basis? Patrick: Yeah, it's a good point Joe I mean we're all sort of at the mercy of the changes that happen. That update may have been Facebook's response to Cambridge Analytics which was kind of like on the back end of that GDPR stuff I was talking about. So they have made changes and all these platforms change all the time. What we had is like when I was talking about Amazon with the seat, we're in Facebook's Ad Manager; we have a Facebook rep so we … those changes come to us before. Hey look here's how you're going to have to set these campaigns up in the future to be successful. Be prepared for this, this is going to be our algorithmic change and they'll never tell you what's in the science behind it. But you bring up a valid point about Facebook; it is a very content rich platform. You have to be testing instead of multi variant testing, different light items of campaigns. What you're really doing there is your multi-variant testing creative. So you have to look at an audience and you have to understand is the audience tired of my ad? They're seeing the same ad over and over again. Are they tired of that ad or is the audience exhausted with my product? They don't want it anymore and I have to go somewhere else. But typically what we're doing in Facebook is a lot of creatives popping. So well create a slot, 15 different pieces of creative image a week period [inaudible 00:32:19.0]. Joe: So with AdWords the campaigns you could have a thousand plus potentially. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: Maybe at least 6,000 with Facebook it's more about the creative and fifteen different creatives over a two week period. Patrick: Yeah that's right. Joe: And then you'll continue to test that and swap it out to just continually monitoring the click rate and conversion rate. Patrick: That's right. Joe: What about video on Facebook is that something you're doing and recommend? Patrick: Yeah you know [inaudible 00:32:46.1] there are working really well, there's video component in there. But yeah we're seeing great conversion off of short video. And you know you … on that creative side you have to have high quality images and the videos don't have to be very long; two, three … three to six seconds perfectly in there. Joe: I think the quality I think the audience gets because that's the number one thing in terms of their own website and the Amazon seller accounts is top quality photos that should be the first thing. All right so we talked about Google AdWords, we talked about Facebook, any other thoughts in terms of you sitting down with somebody having a drink and what they should look at if they're running an e-commerce paid advertising campaign? Patrick: Yeah I mean actually on the paid advertising side I … you just have to keep exploring the platform's interest, is that really good … if you know how to use that platform it's becoming a very good conversion platform. And it's interesting when you start to see these new platforms come out typically because they're new there's not a lot of complex decision there so if you can … it's kind of a land grab. It's kind of like what Facebook did to Google. Facebook was a new platform, they finally got their Ads Manager to work properly and Power Editor is what they call it. And people have done really really well. Same thing is happening with Pinterest now. They've got their advertising technology and algorithm is starting to do really well in the backend of collecting data and saying oh this person who bought this is also buying this and they look alike kind of thing. Pinterest is becoming a CPA platform. Joe: Okay, so AdWords, Facebook, Pinterest … and when we say AdWords when we say that we are talking about Google content searches plus I assume were talking about YouTube looped in there as well. Patrick: Yeah YouTube is very tough in terms of direct conversing. What you have to do on YouTube is you use YouTube as a mid-funnel driver to your branded keyboard search. So I know that that sounds challenging but your creating an awareness campaign but you're looking at how that's driving cheap CPA in AdWords because it's your brand and that costs less than say some generic term that like clubs or something like that; whatever you're selling. Joe: Okay. So when you work with a client do you work on … obviously, you've got a budget that you work on, goal setting with either cost per lead or cost per acquisition things of that nature. People … my point is that I know that when I was in the audience is just listening thinking about hiring someone that I was worried that they're going to blow up my budget on it. Patrick: Oh yeah. Joe: Do you work with them on all those goals as well? Patrick: Oh absolutely and everybody is logged in. We're typically buying on your account so nothing's getting taken out of there. And again like everything starts with that audit. But back to your point about I think what entrepreneurs do is they need that margin or store ad to be really high to afford the inventory. And what we go about with Dave and some of the other entrepreneurs here is we want to help you with that. So we'll [inaudible 00:36:19.8] with you so that you can take a little bit more risk on the advertising side. And we talked about this a little bit before the show and it's what I talked to Jason about- Joe: Yeah let me just jump in and get to the point so people understand. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: Part of the biggest problem that a bootstrapped physical products company has is amazing growth and lack of capital to buy more inventory; they're growing at 100% month over month, year over year. And they're taking all of that working capital and putting it right back in inventory and just trying to keep up. And what I do or anybody at Quiet Light does evaluation for that business we talk about planning. One of the simplest things to be more profitable is just don't run out of inventory. But it's kind of hard because they run out of money and can't keep up with that growth. So what you're talking about is as an agency, as a firm, as a partner- Patrick: As a partner. Joe: You're willing to work with them and lend them money to buy that inventory. Patrick: That's right. When we went from $80 to $16 CPL, we broke our partner's logistics. That … I can sum up what you're talking about in just amazing growth; we have the same problem. So you don't have enough capital, no bank is going to give you a decent loan, your business is too young in the first three years and so we recognize that. We're able to look at your advertising and we'll tell you what we can do on the execution side. But we have to make sure that you have the logistics down in the inventory to go take those risks. And we want to take those risks with you. So overall it's to grow your business as big as you possibly can. So that's the goal. That's how we make money. Joe: It's [inaudible 00:38:11.9] it's not all that different from Quiet Light, we're here to help. We have that … sometimes that stigma of oh you're a broker and that was the hardest thing for me going from entrepreneur owning my own business to entrepreneur that's a broker advisor is that those entrepreneurs they say you know I never want to sell my business. I don't want to talk to you. I don't want you to talk me into something. But we are here to help and help you grow your business and build that relationship so that when you plan to sell you'll exit and you'll exit well. Patrick: That's right. Joe: And what you're doing is the same thing is you're helping more than anything else. Of course, you're a business trying to make a living too and obviously doing it very well. But you're going to do the audit for free, you're going to do the test for free. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: And then you're going to dramatically reduce that cost for acquisition or cost for lead whatever the case might be in what the parameters are that you set with the client. Patrick: That's right. Joe: And they're going to have a problem which is dramatic growth and they're not going to be able to keep up with the inventory. They probably already can't keep up with the inventory purchasing and you're going to be there to help fund the inventory purchases and keep this growing which allows you to spend more money on their behalf and a great cost really a great cost for acquisition and make more money for yourself along the way as well. Patrick: Yeah. When we started our company we did it on American Express and Google AdWords buy in YouTube. It [inaudible 00:39:37.5] credit card every $700, so you know I feel your pain that you were feeling and we get it and it's real. Growth is tough to manage; very tough to manage. So for me, I like to consider myself sort of a scaling expert whether that embodies locations and sales. I'm good at that. I mean there are people here that will just do that … building a brand from scratch and selling it for hundreds of millions of dollars. Joe: That's amazing that you get that kind of talent that is choosing to work with you. It's kind of a great working environment for these folks. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: Ok look I never have to work again for the rest of my life but you're making it fun and we're changing people's lives so let's go ahead. Patrick: Yeah and think about Joe, I meant it's exciting. I mean you're in this business because you get to meet really interesting other entrepreneurs. And they all bring something interesting to the table. When they take a nap on we've all been in that battle together and this is a new sort of idea like why are you doing this so- Joe: It's great. Patrick: Yeah it's got to be a part where we're really excited about it and happy to bring it to the market. Joe: Yeah listen, I want to end it here simply because people should be reaching out to you. It's a very least they're going to learn something in the review process. They're going to learn at the very least what they're screwing up on, what they're doing wrong, and what they can do. Choose to do it themselves or- Patrick: Anything works, that's right. Joe: Have you test it and prove that you can do it better than they can. And then they can free themselves up for other things as well like additional product development and clean documentation on their financials. So I say that in every podcast episode hire a good [inaudible 00:41:23.0]. Patrick: That's right. Joe: And one priest, they've heard me preach before. Patrick listen thanks for being on the show. Thanks for taking time out of your day I know you're very busy. We'll go ahead and get this produced get it out to folks and share it with you as well so you can share it with your team. Patrick: Joe thanks for having me. Joe: It's great man, thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Patrick: All right man, take care. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast for more resources from this episode head over to quietlightbrokerage.com. If you're enjoying the show please leave a rating and review on iTunes. This helps share the messages from the show with more business owners like you.   Links: Free review and test: hello@strikesocial.com Inc. 500 Ranking Strike Social

Patrick R. Krill, JD, LLM shifted from the practice of law to addiction counseling at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. In partnership with the American Bar Association, Krill collaborated on a study of substance abuse among members of the legal community surveying approximately 15,000 lawyers in 19 states. Mark was able to sit down with Patrick to discuss the study and what can be done to combat addiction and promote lawyer well-being moving forward with a particular focus on solo attorneys and young lawyers. This is the second episode in the Wellness Podcast Episodes. ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte.   MARK:                  Hello. Welcome to another episode of ALPS in Brief, the ALPS risk management podcast. We're coming to you from the ALPS home officer in the historic Florence building in beautiful, downtown, Missoula, Montana. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the ALPS risk manager, and I have the pleasure today of sitting down with Patrick [Krill 00:00:25]. Patrick has been involved with the National Task Force for Lawyer Wellbeing, and we've been having some podcasts on lawyer wellbeing, and it's really a pleasure to have Patrick with us. Patrick, can you take a few moments and just introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about yourself. PATRICK:             Sure, sure, Mark. Thanks for the invitation to join you today. Quickly, my background is that I'm a former practicing attorney who after about seven and a half years in the profession, realized that I was, as many people at some point in their career do, I was looking for something else and so I made the not easy decision to return to school and I actually pursued a Masters degree, earned a Masters degree in addiction counseling. I knew that counseling, something in the sort of psychology field, was a little bit more aligned with what I was trying to do and what I was seeking in my professional journey to be more in a helping profession. So I got my Masters in addiction counseling and I did my clinical training at a place called Hazelden, which has now become Hazelden Betty Ford, as the two treatment centers merged, and I was then hired as the director of a treatment program for attorneys, judges and law students at Hazelden Betty Ford. I was with that organization in total for about six or six and a half years, during which time I had the opportunity to counsel hundreds of lawyers and judges and law students from US and some international patients as well, who were struggling with substance use disorder, so what we would typically think of as addiction or substance abuse, but often they were also struggling with a mental health disorder as well, like depression or anxiety. And so I really did, through that work, have the opportunity to understand many of the challenges that lawyers face both in the onset of addiction and depression, but also in what will be probably interesting to your listeners, how do you go back into the practice of law and really maintain whatever wellbeing you may have established while you were away, healing and getting well. Because, as you know, the practice of law is quite demanding and it can be quite stressful and it can put a lot of strains on people. So I was there and I then I left there in 2016 to launch my own consulting practice and I now work primarily with large law firms and midsized law firms to help them navigate addiction and mental health problems. So whether that's helping them draft policies, or doing in-house training school, or when crises emerge, helping them deal with those crises. It's a variety of things that I do in that space, but it's all related to addiction and mental health. That's where I've been professionally and what my experience looks like. In relation to that, I'll just mention quickly two things, I was the lead author of the 2016 ABA Hazelden Betty Ford study on addiction and mental health problems in the legal profession, which gave us the most robust look at these issues in terms of data that we've ever had. It was a comprehensive survey of about 15,000 lawyers in 19 states and all geographic regions of the country. What we found there really did lay the groundwork or served as the predicate for the second thing that I wanted to mention, which was the National Task Force on Lawyer Wellbeing in the report published, that group was formed largely in response to what that ABA study found. From there, we then brought together stakeholders from around the profession, formed this task force and worked for about a year on a report that outlines things that all different sectors of the profession can be doing to try and reduce the prevalence of both substance abuse problems and mental health problems and to just sort of improve the overall wellbeing of lawyers and the profession generally because, I'll just conclude by saying this, the quick and dirty or thumbnail version of where we are in the legal profession, is we have a lot of problems as it relates to the health and wellbeing and psychological distress of practicing lawyers. So we've got a lot of work to do. MARK:                  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I have taken a look at the study, the Hazelden study you referenced and authored, incredibly well done. I have been doing some lecturing on it in recent times, and what one of the surprises for me was ... I've been in the risk management sector here for 20 years now, and we've been doing our part, there's lots of us involved in trying to deal with mental illness and addiction issues, and I always thought that we were making progress, but if there's anything that I learned from the Hazelden study is over the past 20 years, it seems to me the problem has gotten more severe. I was really surprised by that, looking at older studies and data sets, so you are absolutely spot on, we've got a lot of work to do. I think the task force is a great place to start. Can you tell us a little bit about the work being done in the area of lawyer assistance and impairment? Where is the task force taking us? PATRICK:             Sure, yeah. So what the task force report did, really, it broke out recommendations for various stakeholders in the profession. So for example, there is a set of recommendations for the judiciary, things that they can be doing within their own sphere of influence to improve lawyer wellbeing, there are recommendations from law schools, there are recommendations for professional liability carriers, legal employers, lawyer assistance programs, and it's meant to provide tangible, concrete recommendations that each of these different groups can look to and begin to incorporate in their own world. There are also general recommendations for the whole profession to try and reduce the level of incivility and toxicity in the profession, which as you might imagine, feeds into depression. It can also feed into substance abuse in the form of self medication. Just as a quick aside, I can tell you that a lot of the patients that I treated in my program would report that they never really even liked drinking that much, or certainly it was never their intention to find themselves addicted to alcohol or drugs, but it was really self-medication. It was the only way that they knew how to blow off steam. It's just a form of dealing with psychological distress and then it turned into its own problem. We know that that's a real phenomenon in the legal profession specifically. But beyond there, beyond that, there are other recommendations for the profession, for individual stakeholders. I would encourage anybody listening to this podcast to simply Google or perhaps you can publish it as a companion to this podcast or otherwise circulate through  your listeners, the task force report, it was published ... Open access, there are no restrictions on its use, you can copy it, distribute it, do whatever you want with it, there's no restriction at all on that. I would encourage people to take a look at it and see what they might be able to take from it and bring into, for example, their own local bar association or their own other professional group that they might belong to in the profession. So it's just out there in the public domain for lawyers to begin incorporating. But beyond that, there are also formal efforts underway at the state level, to bring the recommendations down from the national, to the state, to the local. So for example this past week I was at the National Conference of Bar Examiners Annual Meeting and I was on panel with a couple of my task force co-authors, and we were surveying the audience, there were about 40 or so chief Justices from jurisdictions around the US in attendance at our session, and we were surveying the audience, and it's clear that in more than a dozen states around the country, the chief Justices are taking the lead on this initiative and they're saying we should form a statewide task force to look at implementing these recommendations at the state level. They really are trying to filter it down in their jurisdictions. And those states that aren't already forming their own internal, if you will, task forces, are being encouraged to do so, and I'm sure that a lot more are going to be coming online over the course of the next 12 to 18 months. That's how you can visualize this, if you will, changing the culture of the profession, which is what we set out to do. It was this national report intended for the whole US legal profession, all of the different sectors and stakeholders. But now in terms of implementation, since there isn't one national body that, for example, controls the profession, it really does come down to statewide and then even local implementation of the report recommendations. MARK:                  I will see that we get a link to that for our listeners. We definitely will post that with the blog. As I listened to what you're talking about, you made a comment about transitions, and I'd like to explore that briefly in this way, what do you think, if you will, the roadblocks long are as a profession, has there been much discussion or look at that? How do we remove the roadblocks to the degree that you see them? PATRICK:             Yeah. Well, I mean that was also one of the goals of this task force report to suggest some things that we can do. I can tell you my view, which is also consistent with the task force view, is that one of the biggest roadblocks that we have to lawyers to taking care of themselves and getting help when they need ... Let's just frame the issue more specifically, let's focus, just for now, on the more narrow issues of addiction and mental health problems. When it comes to those specific issues, when lawyers are struggling or they think they may be struggling, what keeps them from raising a hand or reaching out, picking up the phone, trying to get some sort of help, telling a colleague they're struggling, is a fear of what that's going to do them professionally, a fear that it could jeopardize their reputation, jeopardize their clients, possibly it could somehow impact their license, and so there's just a lot of fear around these issues. That's why lawyers tend to try to deal with the problems by themselves, on their own, or to just ignore the problems and pretend like they're not there. So to the extent that we can change that culture, that we can begin to destigmatize seeing a therapist, destigmatize going to treatment, destigmatize being in recovery from addiction or having overcome depression or chronic anxiety, that's going to go a long way towards improving the landscape around these issues. That's one area that we need to work. The other is really chronic, the chronic stress and the demands of the profession. Now, some of that is probably not likely to change, I mean if you think about client demands, if you think about the expectation of being available all the time that technology has now brought into our lives, some of that is just ... I don't have easy answers for how you solve that, but what we can do is to try to reduce the level of toxicity and incivility amongst and between ourselves. If we, as a profession, begin to just be a little bit more civil and maybe take a little bit of the adversarial nature out of our adversarial system, that, again, could reduce some of the stress and anxiety that lawyers experience which leads to other problems. MARK:                  In my experience, again, in terms of reading various articles and studies, lots of this initially is directed to Bar Association, directed at large firms, these kinds of things, but the reality is a tremendous percentage of lawyers practicing, at least in the United States here, are in the solo law firm setting. Do you have thoughts or does the report in terms of the recommendations ... Do they address this segment? If so ... I just, again, I'm curious of your thoughts, how do we deal with the problem on the front lines of the solo, small firm setting? PATRICK:             Yeah. Well, I think you're absolutely right, the majority of lawyers don't practice in large or really firm of any size settings, and they are in fact solo or small firm lawyers. The report doesn't include solo practitioners as a stakeholder, if you will, for the reason that it was really geared towards institutions rather than individuals because the thought was about making change at the system level, the systems of the profession. That said, I know that lawyers who are in solo practices or small practices, they often face really, really ... The burdens they face are greater than lawyers practicing in larger farms and the challenges they face in terms of being able to take care of themselves are also sometimes greater. For example, if you're a solo practitioner and you're addicted to alcohol and you know it's causing a problem and you know you should probably get some help, you just can't go away or you don't have the resources, you can't take time away from your practice, you don't have anyone to help you, that's a real challenge. Similarly, if you're in solo practice and you're struggling with depression, you don't have somebody that you can offload some of your work to for a period of time so there are real logistical challenges that solo attorneys face that aren't present in the bigger firm setting. Unfortunately, in that arena, we don't have resources that are as robust as they should be systems. We have lawyer assistance programs in most states around the country, have a lawyer assistance program that is in some ... Some of them are very well developed and very well staffed and they have great programming, others in less populous states, they might be just a less effective resource because they don't have as large a staff or they don't really have the ability to serve as many lawyers. But that's one place that solo practitioners have historically been able to find some assistance when they don't have the resources to come along with being a larger firm. So to the extent that anyone out there is not familiar with your state's lawyer assistance program, I would encourage you to explore it because they may in fact be a really good resource for you and have some, if not, live counseling sessions that they would offer or groups that they may facilitate that you would be able to attend. Chances are they're going to at least have the ability to direct you to other resources and to provide content and just put you on the right path. MARK:                  Yeah. I want underscore for listeners that these programs are confidential. PATRICK:             Yes. MARK:                  I think at times people are afraid to reach out. Again, as you mentioned earlier, I don't want to be labeled mentally ill or something like this, but the resource that you're talking about here, in many, many states, is really a very good resource. It is not about weeding out the week among us, it is about helping, those of us that have these challenges and struggles to get back on track and to get back into the profession in a stronger, more competent, healthy way. So I think, again, to those of you listening, if you're personally struggling with a problem or know someone who is, please don't minimize the value of this particular resource. PATRICK:             Yeah, I agree with that and I just want to pick up quickly on something you just said about it getting back on track. I've worked with a lot of lawyers who have gone through the rehabilitative process, and if I haven't worked with them professionally, I've known them, and you really can come out, not only as good as you were before, but better. So you can have increased confidence, and increased performance, and focus, and reliability, and stamina, and clarity, I mean there's just so much value in getting ahead of the problem and doing something about it and getting some assistance. It is, by no means, is it an indication of a weakness or a flaw. In fact, I think that getting help and saying I need some help, I need to take care of myself for a period of time, that is in fact demonstrative of good judgment, and that in my view, makes you more professional. MARK:                  The last brief topic or issue I'd like to talk about is when I think about, again, the solo, small firm setting in terms of the majority of lawyers practicing here, and also just thinking about some of the data in the study, which surprised me, and that's that younger lawyers are really struggling, even in the law school setting. It seems to me  that that in terms of the institution or an institution that can really assist in changing this long-term, I mean this isn't going to happen overnight, but is working with law schools to change some things, is there anything going on in that arena, in that space? PATRICK:             It is, and you're right, because that is essentially the beginning of our professional journey and that is also where a lot of the problems start, it's where a lot of the mindset really takes hold that if you have a problem you better keep that to yourself. So there is a lot happening at the law school level there within the American Bar Association's commission on lawyers assistance programs, which I'm a part of, we have a lot of energy devoted to facilitating change in law schools, but I know a lot of individual schools are beginning to take a long, hard look at this. Some schools are being forced to, Harvard Law School, for example, which is arguably where some of the best and brightest lawyers in the country, they recently published a study on the health and wellbeing of their own law students because the students forced the administration to conduct the study because they knew that there was a lot of distress happening all around them. The results of that were pretty, in their words, grizzly, and so the students themselves are beginning to wake up to these issues and they're really tuning in to the increased focus on lawyer wellbeing and they're saying, this isn't what I want for my professional life, this isn't what I want waiting for me after the end of three years and all of this hard work. So there's change happening at the grassroots level there, which I think is very encouraging because that is where the change needs to start, because if you come into the profession, law school is a transformative process, it changes the way people think, it changes their attitudes around things like substance use and mental health, and it really kind of makes them view their reputation as being more important than anything else. If we can start chipping away at some of that problem thinking, that's going to do a lot of good for the younger generation. MARK:                  Well, Patrick, I really, really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today and I really wish tremendous success for you and your fellow members of the task force. We're off to a great start. I should say you're off to a great start, and it seems like we're getting some real traction more and more at a grassroots level, and I really hope that that continues. To our listeners, I would like to say thanks for listing in yet again. If in future you have a topic of interest that you'd like to see discussed on the blog, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at mbass@alpsnet.com. That's a wrap. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.  

Kat: Okay. Oh. How do I do this? Wait for it. Patrick: Got to do it. Kat: Are you going [crosstalk 00:00:42] through the snow? Patrick: Yeah I'm going through the snow. I got it at like 60 degrees in here right now. It's 60 degrees in my house, I have no idea why. Kat: Is that cold? Patrick: To me it is, yes. Kat: Does that mean cold, I don't understand your language. Patrick: To me it is very cold. To me its subzero temperature, I'm absolutely freezing right now. I'm about to die of a cold or flu. Kat: Your dying? Patrick: Yup. I have not gone [crosstalk 00:01:11] Kat: It's a sad state. I'm going to ... Patrick: Hold on let me [crosstalk 00:01:18] Kat: I'm finding out what temperature that is. I'm Googling it so everybody understands what's happening. Patrick: Oh yeah, it doesn't translate. Doesn't translate in your language. Kat: Oh, it's 15 degrees. Hang on I've got to shut the door, there's window men right outside my door and it's super noisy. One second. Patrick: 15 degrees. Holy shit, what the fuck happened to my computer. So what's up everybody, hello, hello, welcome everybody. I'll go ahead and say that. Hello? Kat: What's up? Patrick: [inaudible 00:01:47] everybody's already said something. I don't know, my computer just took a shit. I've no idea. So did you say 15 degrees, your words? This is retarded. Hold on. I can't hear you. Kat: [inaudible 00:02:04] must be dying. Patrick: I can't, what the [crosstalk 00:02:06] Kat: Am I back? Am I back? Patrick: Yeah you're back. Oh, I forgot we're on my internet connection. Kat: Yeah I had ... No, it's because I put my earplugs in because my house cleaner is upstairs vacuuming. Patrick: Oh well how fancy, how fancy. Kat: I'm very fancy, you know that. Patrick: Very fancy with your extravagance earbuds. Kat: So I said that everybody should send you a love heart shower because you're surviving in only 15.555 degree Celsius right now, for the Australians. Now, if people are from Melbourne though, which is my hometown, they're going to be like, "Harden the fuck up, that's warm," but here where I live that's horrible. Horrible. Nobody should have to endure those sort of ... Patrick: Yeah, these are very horrible circumstances. [crosstalk 00:02:58] Kat: Nobody should have to endure those sort of subzero temperatures. Patrick: Nobody should be asked to endure these subzero temperatures, I'll tell you that. All right. Kat: All right. I might need some assistance. Can you help me out? Patrick: What do you got? Kat: Should I wear my hair like this? Should I wear my hair like that or behind? Or on one side? What's the best livestream hair? Patrick: I kind of like it behind. Kat: Out? Patrick: That looks good. Kat: Behind, all right. There you go everybody. Patrick: There you go. That looks good. Kat: We're going to talk about [crosstalk 00:03:37] Patrick: That's the queen Kat look. Kat: [crosstalk 00:03:39] Cleopatra. Patrick: She says, Angela said, [inaudible 00:03:43] I'm in Texas right now. Texas by way of Bali, very, very soon. In the next month, no, no, this month. This month, I'm going next week, next week. Kat: This week maybe. Maybe even tomorrow. Patrick: No I have to wait till the weekend. Kat: Oh well. Patrick: Have to wait till the weekend because [crosstalk 00:04:04] I have to move my stuff. Kat: Time and space is just, time is just an illusion anyway. The weekend could mean tomorrow. Could mean today. Could all be one day. That's extended into itself. Patrick: Time is an illusion [crosstalk 00:04:18] Kat: I think I'm going to take these out again now. I'm going to take these out again now because they're annoying me. Patrick: What is [inaudible 00:04:25] giving you a delay? I'm going to drop this in my [crosstalk 00:04:30] Kat: No, I just prefer no earbuds and the vacuuming stopped. But check it out, I'm sorry that I keep doing this to you Patrick, but I'm going to do it anyway. Are you ready? Patrick: I'm ready. Kat: I'm just eating my bacon and eggs with my Vegemite while in waiting for us to go live. Patrick: Oh my God. Oh my god. Kat: I was halfway through eating. Patrick: How are you destroying this fucking meal with that shit? That's an all American meal, and you're just going to destroy it with that. Destroy it, it's completely just- Kat: Look, pay attention. You want to put the Vegemite straight onto your eggs. Straight on. Patrick: What's that green thing? I don't want to put that Vegemite anywhere near my eggs. I don't want it anywhere near any of my food. Kat: That's avocado. Patrick: Oh that's an avocado? Kat: That's avocado. Patrick: I thought you all had green eggs and ham over there or something because I don't even know. Kat: You want to eat that with, look, pay attention. Patrick: I have no idea what you all have over there. Kat: You want to put a little bit of Vegemite on the avocado, eat it like that. I don't know why I get so much enjoyment from doing this to you. Patrick: [crosstalk 00:05:29] it's just crazy how different people's taste buds are. Kat: It's so good. Patrick: What you just did- Kat: It's just because- Patrick: What you just did was the equivalent of somebody spraying a cat turd on a fucking piece of toast and eating it to me, that's just what I just saw you do. Kat: I'd love to have some toast. [crosstalk 00:05:52] I'd love to have toast with avocado. You also- Patrick: What's up [crosstalk 00:05:57] on here. Feel like we're getting delayed [crosstalk 00:06:00] again, we're delayed. Kat: We're not delayed. The internet just doesn't know how to keep up with us, but really you should also always dip your bacon straight into the Vegemite. Pay attention. Look. Patrick: I'm not paying attention to that, it's fucking heresy. Kat: Because salt with bacon. The saltiness, it's like extra salt in it. It's great. Patrick: That's the most disgusting thing. Kat: So yesterday- Patrick: You're so beautiful and then you do such disgusting things to yourself. It's just weird. It's like [crosstalk 00:06:37] weird, it's like- Kat: It's part of my mystique. Patrick: Why did this very creative hot chick just do the nastiest thing. It's like watching a shizer video. Know what shizer is, [crosstalk 00:06:44] the German [crosstalk 00:06:45] Kat: I'm sorry, but thanks. No. No. But I appreciate the compliment. Patrick: No. Have no idea [crosstalk 00:06:51] Kat: But I can't help it, it's part of my mystique. Patrick: That's not mystique, that's not. Kat: But it's actually ... Do I need to know? Patrick: What'd you say? We've got a delay, we've got a delay. Kat: Do I need to know? No I was waiting for you, do I need to know or understand? Patrick: Well you're from Germany, so you should know. It's basically German scat porn basically. You know what scat porn is? Have you ever heard of it? Kat: I don't watch any German porn. Currently I don't watch German porn. I watch regular, all American or Australian porn. Patrick: Well I'm saying that you can know of it, you can know of it. There's different types you know, when you're scrolling through you're going to see some different categories. There's grandma, there's all sorts [crosstalk 00:07:38] of different types. Then there's German shizer, there's scat porn, you just happen to be scrolling by it, see it, sometimes. Kat: So basically what's happened here is we came on to do a recoded conversation about art and resistance and flow and we're talking about German porn? Patrick: Yes. Particularly the scat variety. You invited me on here. Kat: I just like to keep- Patrick: You fucking invited me on here. Kat: I think you said we need to record our conversation. You said I believe ... Thank you. You said I believe it's time to record our conversation again or something like that I believe it is. You messaged me yesterday and then you must have rudely just gone to bed straight after messaging me because I needed help, I was stuck in the resistance, I wrote back to you with a happy faced emoji. Then you must have gone to sleep so I just had to live in the resistance all by myself with nobody to kick my ass. Patrick: Yeah, I saw that, I was like man [crosstalk 00:08:38] Kat: And that's how I ended up with [crosstalk 00:08:39] Patrick: That was a weird thing to wake up to, I was like wow, you were in the, you, Kat of all people in the resistance? Now that's the part usually reserved for me. I'm the one that likes to play in the resistance. Kat: I know, it's mind blowing. The truth is maybe I just don't talk about it enough. It's like quicksand, it was dragging me into it. It was probably a Vegemite deficiency in my bloodstream. There was definitely a flow deficiency in my bloodstream. Patrick: It's all coming to a head you know. It's finally attacking your nervous system. Kat: The Vegemite? Or the flow? Patrick: Yes. Kat: So then okay, so this morning I went to Muay Thai and I was doing my rounds in the ring and I couldn't breathe properly. It's fucking annoying because I'm very fit, but my fitness just wasn't there. He's like, "What's going on?" And I said to him, my trainer, "I think I'm just not connected to my body properly yet." Like I haven't connected into my body yet because my mind's thinking about other stuff and we had already done maybe three or four rounds. I was going hard, but I was just like kind of breathing like that, but I wasn't feeling anxious about anything. So then it was just fucking annoying, but as soon as I, like we got to maybe 30 or 40 minutes into the session even, and then you feel that switch click and you connect to flow and you're just like holy shit, it's on and you're in that dance and that super flow. Kat: It's exactly like business. I was saying to my trainer this morning it's like, you're like, ugh, even I get this, I get it every fucking day. Like people maybe think I'm motivated because I do so much content. Well I'm driven by, I hate the fucking feeling of when I don't do my content. I just feel like shit if I don't do my art, but that doesn't mean that when I sit my ass in the chair that it's flowing. It's often exactly the same as at the start of that workout where the first 10 or 20 or 30 or even 40 minutes, you just feel like you're wading through quicksand. You don't feel connected properly and you're not breathing deeply and then you're thinking, this shit, what am I even writing. Even yesterday after I messaged you then I was like fuck you, apparently you're not going to message me back and save me, so I'm going to have to write something myself and figure it out. [crosstalk 00:11:07] Patrick: [inaudible 00:11:10] all the time. Kat: And I write something, I write a blog anyway, but it was so shit. I posted it anyhow on Facebook, it was just the lamest thing I've ever posted in the history of time. It's still there, everyone can see it from yesterday. Even my team are like, "What is this, is this a blog? Are we supposed to put this on the Instagram story? What is this actually, there's no photo, it's not long enough." No, they weren't really ... But my point is you just got to do that damned thing anyway. You don't wait for flow, you get into flow. Sometimes you've got to get in and it's like a tumultuous, whitewater river and you just got to get pounded under the water again and again and knocked back down. Then at some point it's like boom, I'm in the flow zone. Everyone just wants to be in the flow zone, but you don't get there without being willing to go through the quicksand a bit. Patrick: No, it's funny you mention this now and I glad we're on here talking about this because I actually had exactly what you're talking about happened today, but fortunately ... So, did you ever get back into, did you ever reach flow or did you just spend the whole day just not, you didn't get there? Or did you finally get there? Kat: Yesterday, you know what, I wrote the damn post anyway. I published a post, I put a sales call to action on the end because I fucking show up for my art, that's my commitment. I'm very consistent. I'm probably the most consistent person on the internet with content, I believe. And I'm personally doing all my content myself as well, it's not like you know some people put a tonne of content out there, but how much content are they actually doing. Patrick: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Kat: I think I'm like the most consistent person out there. So I posted the damn post anyway, I had to cut it short because I was meeting somebody and I knew that he was going to be there any minute. I was like all right, I didn't even have the time to get into my flowzone, I had like 12 minutes. I'm like fuck, I'll write something. I still wrote a damn blog, I still put a sales call to action on the end. I was like, this is bullshit, but, I don't know how many likes or comments are on it, but the people who commented and liked it, the people who commented were like, "This is exactly what I needed." And so it's about getting out of your own way, but then after that I went on a walk for like two hours. Had a good conversation and then came home and I still wasn't quite in that flowzone and I thought I could livestream last night and snap myself into it. But I didn't, resistance got me by the ass. I sat around for a bit, fucked around, pretending to do things on the computer and then I just went to bed. Kat: But, this morning, I don't know if you read my blog this morning. It was so good, it might be one the best posts I've written this year. It's called, "You're not a marketer you're an artist. A tortured one or not, and you'd better start fucking acting like it," or something like that. When I wrote that [crosstalk 00:13:55] blog ... Huh? Patrick: I saw it, I usually read your stuff at night on my time, nighttime you know. At the end of my day I'll read it. So you kind of catch me whenever I haven't read it yet. Kat: You're going to like that one. I'm so happy with that. You know when you write something or you do a livestream and you're just like oh, yeah, I fucking nailed it. Or, I didn't even know what I wrote, but I got what I want from it. I got that release and that connection to soul and then I went straight to training to Muay Thai then I was disconnected for 35 minutes. Then I got in the zone and holy shit, the last 15 or 20 minutes of my workout this morning, I have not brutalised myself like that in a while. It was so good, like I was nearly collapsing onto the floor. It's like that voice in your head that's like oh, are you going to die, are you going to die, you think you're going to fall down and die? You can't keep going? Are you dead yet? No, then keep fucking going bitch. I was just smack talking myself and I was so on the edge of being like I need timeout, I need to stop early. Kat: I just kept going and I kept thinking of, like I always remember Arnold Schwarzenegger saying that your body can go so much further than your mind. Like when you think that your body is done, whether it's in training, but also with the business. Your writing, your art, it's such a load of bullshit. I love nothing better than kicking my own ass and being like oh, you think you're hurting, you think this hurts? Keep fucking going. It's the most empowering feeling in the world. I literally collapsed onto the floor in the ring at the end of the session. Within a second though I had the biggest smile on my face already even though I was in agony. Kat: It's just, I don't know, I don't know how many people relate to that, but I love the pain, the purposeful pain. Otherwise, you just feel like you're not alive. So that resistance got me yesterday, but then today I eliminated it. Patrick: Well I know we were talking, the night before I believe, we were talking about how to say enjoy resistance. We were also talking about some of the things that were going on with your spot and where you were living at and things like that. We were talking about being where you were at and that you might have to create new challenges for yourself. You think this is maybe a product of that? Maybe your mind switched over to that, maybe you wanted some more resistance and you brought that to yourself? Kat: Maybe, that's a good point. Yeah, we had a phone call the other night that went for nearly three hours. At the end we were like fuck, we forgot to record our phone call again, so that we can sell it to everybody. It was so good. So now we- Patrick: It was good. Kat: No we're doing this for everyone. You can send [crosstalk 00:16:38] us a love heart [inaudible 00:16:40] huh? Patrick: Some love hearts to what? Kat: To thank us for being here and speaking. Patrick: Oh yeah, for sure. Check this out though, so we talked about that right and then so now that was happening, this resistance was happening. Now I've been like, the resistance is easing up on me. I've been going through fucking resistance because I'm a glutton for punishment. I don't know what do they call it, sadistic? No, it was masochist, what's the one where you like to get kicked in the balls? Kat: Isn't one of them like means you like to hurt other people and one means you like to hurt yourself? Masochist is you like self punishment I think. Patrick: Yeah, I think that's the one. Kat: And sadist is you like to hurt other people. Patrick: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, one of those two, the one where you get kicked in the balls. Obviously that's what I'm going through right now, I like to kick myself in the balls here. I've been going through that resistance, what we talked about on the phone. Maybe I want to, obviously yes, of course, why the fuck, how could it be any other way? How could it be any other way? Anything that you're going through, any resistance that you have in your life is because you want it to be there. Plain and simple. There's no other way around it, if you take responsibility for everything in your life as you should, as you should. If you believe in manifestation, if you believe it's all in your control. If you fucking believe in manifestation, [inaudible 00:18:03] you can alter your body by eating donuts or ramen noodle soups and still lose weight. If you believe that you have that [crosstalk 00:18:12] kind of control- Kat: Who said anything about donuts? Patrick: If you believe that you have that kind of control over the universe, then you better damn fucking well believe that you're making this shit up. That you're making up the resistance, you're creating the resistance. You're creating the despair, the feeling, the thoughts or the anguish. All that shit you want to, you fucking masochist you. You want the kick in the balls for some reason. Patrick: Okay, well I'm tired of the kick in the balls I guess. I must be done with it because today, so and then we're talking about now we're talking about my day. What's up Johnny? What's up Pistol Pete. Then we're talking about, now it's kind of easing up on me right. I woke up this morning and I saw your message, I'm like damn, I left her in the cooker last night. She's just, it's like I can't believe I saw this message of resistance here. I'm like, I was blown away by it you know, but I knew you were asleep, so obviously went about my day. Patrick: I started out my day just like you're talking about. I couldn't get into where I was trying to go. I was getting wrapped up and started right out the gate getting into shit that's not my art. Started getting into stuff pertaining to my other business, which I had put a cutoff date. We had just got done talking about that, saying fuck everything until noon or whatever, you know, until we get going. Right off the bat I start getting things happening though that were saying to me that some resistance was being overcome in the other business. So I was like huh, so I took the bait you know. I took the bait. Patrick: Not only that, last night I had found a blog post that I had written and I had never posted it. I got scared about it and I didn't post it. I was acting like a little bitch and I left it there. And so I discovered it and I was like fuck, I had already wrote a blog post that night. So, I had two blog posts and so I was happy about that, I'm like okay, I've got two. I'm going to drop those tomorrow. So I'm feeling good about that. I went to sleep and I woke up and immediately some things started happening at the other business, some resistance was overcoming the other business. I'm like fuck, okay, okay we're making some headway here so this is good. I jump right in this, it's like 8:00 in the morning, I jump right into that and start going to mess with my other business. Patrick: I get caught up with all that and next thing you know 12:00 comes around. I'm slugging, but I had been throughout the day doing tiny things because I'd been, I'm going to post content all day. Today, I'm just going to have a day where I post all content. You know on my Instagram, I'm going to post content throughout the day on my Facebook, I'm going to post whatever. I had just been starting to feel it again. Started to post things and they were getting a lot of engagement on them you know, just things that I would think, I'd post it and just small things you know, not real boring blog posts. Patrick: Then I drop my blog post on there, sprinkle that because I had that ace up my sleeve, so I drop the blog post, bam. I drop the other blog post, bam. Then it just started to come together, right. Then we rolled right into, right about 12:00 noon or so I took a little nap and then 1:00 PM and then the resistance just started to go down. All just starts to crumble right? Kat: Yeah. Patrick: Everything starts going right. I just start banging out all sorts of stuff. Me and Travis ended up doing, we just got done off of a livestream, which generated a lot of new people into our circle and to his audience. I'm jumping on here with you and now this is going, this is a great one right, so just like all the ones that we do. And so, it just started rolling, that's been my day. It just started rolling, and it started out just like you talked about though. It's very sluggish, but it took me till about 1:00 PM till it just started to roll really good, but I stuck with it. I stuck with it, I just kept on thinking I've posted, but it was like bite sized pieces of content that I kept dropping that led up to it. Kat: Yup. Exactly. Exactly and we talked about this when we were on the phone the other night that was like until 2:00 AM my time, that massive phone call. I said the same thing about when you're working out and it's like the first 10 or 20 minutes or however long, you just feel like fuck this shit. I don't really want to be here, I'm not feeling it. That was me this morning in the ring, I was like oh, fuck. Okay, yeah, I'm here, I'm doing what I need to be doing, but my mind was like why am I here. I'm not really vibing with this and I wish I didn't come today or whatever. You just fucking learn over the years, you figure it out finally when time is passing you by in your life and then you still didn't do the damn shit that you said you were going to do. At some point you just figure the shit out where you're like, oh fuck. Kat: I can remember, probably five years ago I can remember feeling like I think I was waiting, I thought there would be a point in my life where I would evolve to being a person whose always motivated and always ready, always has the inspired ideas and wants to do the damn thing. I remember one day it just kind of smacked me in the face like a wake-up call where I was like, oh shit, I just realised that for the rest of my life I will still battle resistance because it's part of the human condition. Particularly as an artist, resistance is inherent to being an artist, that's why I wrote this morning about the tortured soul. Probably your blog influenced my post this morning a little bit because you know, like I told you, when I got up in the morning before I journal I always read something. There's only like five people whose shit I'll read and I checked if you posted something new. I checked, you had posted something new so I read your blog and it was full-on. For me I found that full-on to read to hear the voices inside of your head. I was like holy shit that was so raw, it was like everybody should go read that blog. It's on your personal profile right? Patrick: Appreciate it. Kat: Go read it. But it was kind of painful to read, I found it kind of painful to read. Patrick: That's so funny you said that, [crosstalk 00:24:31] somebody messaged me, two people messaged me and they said the exact fucking same thing. They said, "I can't believe that shit. I did not know you wrote like that," and they said that it was painful. I said, "Well, what's painful about it?" It was like, "Well, it's painful to read." Two women you know, so I was wondering why is it painful for you to read it, you know what I mean? That's what I was wondering because I really was thinking about connecting with guys for it you know, more along the lines with the guys. Kat: Well, for me personally I found it painful to read because I care about you. I was like, that's like hearing somebody that you care about saying that shit about themselves, it's like fuck, it just felt painful for me for that reason. I don't know about what other people's reasons are, but also because I could relate to it. At first, I was thinking this so fucking full-on I can't believe you say that shit inside of your head, I found it shocking. Kat: Then I was like wait, why do I find it shocking, it's only shocking because you're writing it down because I've said all that same sort of shit to myself many times over as well. In my way, about my own stuff and if people heard the voices inside my head I'm sure they'd be shocked. Like you were taken aback even by me just simply saying that I'm in resistance, right? Now think about the shit that you put in that blog, it was extreme. Well I think that's why at first I was like, this is so full-on, like I felt shocked or upset about it just relevant to you personally, not in a general sense. Then I was like wait, no, it's just because this is a very raw, extreme thing for somebody to write down. I definitely have said so much to inside of my own head. Kat: Then I loved the way you finished the post like where basically you choose each day, every day you have those voices in your head and then you have the voice that's saying that you can and that you will. Then that is now what you do, you do your damn journaling, you do your content, you're showing up for your business and for your art. That's exactly the same as me and that's what I've always done and that's what I've done to get to this point. Now, for sure I don't have as much of those voices as I used to, it is less because I guess I've proven myself, to myself to whatever degree. Kat: But it's still here and that's what I think so many people don't understand about me. I'm not, or about anyone, about you as well, you do your livestreams every day, I do my content every day. People then go, oh no well I couldn't be like Patrick or I couldn't be like Kat. They're motivated, they're good on camera or whatever it is, but then go and read what you wrote about how you feel about yourself some of the time. Or if somebody could hear inside of my head and the smack talk that goes on in there. It's about realising that yeah, as you keep going and as time passes it will get easier, and I think you said this in your post, it gets easier because you learn how to deal with it. I feel like I learned how to dance with resistance and I can see it for the bullshit that it is, whereas maybe earlier on in my life I tended to believe it more. Kat: Now even if I feel like I'm believing it a little bit, I'll be like, yeah, no, I know exactly what's going on here. I do know what the answer is because fucking 20 years of training, of fitness training, has taught me how to get into flow and how to breakthrough resistance and discipline my ass and if you're not dead yet you keep going. Then many, many years in business as well has taught me the same thing, so I always know that the answer is too fucking bad, sit your ass down and do the damn thing. Sometimes it will feel fucking incredible, like today when I wrote my blog I was on the biggest high. I got in the car and I was just slamming my best tunes and then driving down to the fight gym. I was like, this is the best day ever, I'm so in the zone and that's an amazing feeling. Kat: I wish I could have that feeling every day, but yesterday felt like quicksand day. It doesn't matter right, like some days you'll feel superflow, some days you won't, so the fuck what. Either way you keep going, but for sure because I read your blog first and then normally I read a piece, I read if you write something or [inaudible 00:28:44] or whoever else I read, like such a small handful of people. Then I go into my journaling and then usually I write my blog after that. Today I read your blog first and then it really did impact me a lot, then I went straight into writing my blog, I didn't even do anything on [crosstalk 00:29:00] yet today, which is [crosstalk 00:29:01] Patrick: Damn, did my blog fuck your day up? Did my blog fuck your day up? Kat: No, no, it's the opposite because I had to write straight after that. Patrick: Oh, that's good. Kat: I went straight into writing that piece, but I was partly responding to you and partly I was thinking about one of my inner circle clients and partly it was for myself. Okay wait, we're going to need to start again because Brandon just jumped on and he asked that we start again. So where we started [crosstalk 00:29:26]- Patrick: I believe we started without him. Kat: Was with me dipping the bacon into the Vegemite. We got to start with the bacon and the Vegemite if we're starting from the top. Patrick: Can we please not? Kat: Anyway- Patrick: Brandon dammit, this was a bad day for that. Even though you're eating [crosstalk 00:29:39] Kat: Yeah, no, [crosstalk 00:29:40] read my blog later you'll see my blog was partly like it's speaking to you and like I was talking to you, but then I was talking to myself, but then I was talking to one of my clients and I told her that. It was just, I kind of love that because something you wrote definitely impacted what I created and what I created will be impacting other people. It's just amazing, it's the collective unconscious. Patrick: Well I saw your blog post and it jumped out at me. I was like this is something that I have to read, I just saw the title and I can't remember exactly what it said. I just saw it and I was like, I'm going to have to read that later on because I immediately saw it and I was feeling like, I don't know it was kind of geared towards me or something. The words weren't like that, but I just felt that, you know what I mean? Kat: Yeah, and I knew, usually I don't tell somebody if I write a blog that's skewed towards them because I know you're going to feel it anyway. It's not always, but often I'll be thinking of a particular person when I'm writing. It started off towards you and then it became about me. I thought it was going to be, I thought the post was going to be about honouring and respecting the artist, being like my soul recognises the artist in your soul, that sort of thing. Like the respect that I have for that and then it turned into kind of like a smack down post where I was kicking ass and I think that was at myself. Then at the end I was like fuck, this was not supposed to be about me. Then I brought it back around again and it just came out however it came out. Patrick: Oh see everything that I read, I'm like thinking, everything I read from you I'm thinking this is to me right. Kat: Everybody does, especially when I do, I don't know do you get this sometimes or have you had this happen, but if I do a post that's really quite brutal I'll tend to get like 20 people message me and they'll be like, "I know you were talking about me." And I'm like, "Well, if you think that I was, then maybe I was." Patrick: That could be the case, but I used to think that all the time when I worked for Ryan. I would always say and he'd said if you think, he said the same thing. If you think it is, it is. So, you're right, it's right, in the case if you think it is, it is, right. It's for you, it's for you if you are triggered by the wording. But I wrote mine like a while back and then I didn't feel anything about posting it. When I found it I was like, yes, I found it. I was like I'm going to post this now, no problem. I remember what you told me, it was like you should just not even think about it and just post it. So I posted it and it was apparently like real full-on, people said that. Patrick: I think that you do, like what I did was I was sitting there facing resistance big time whenever I started to write that. I was facing one of the biggest challenges of my life, which was making our first sale since we went out on our own, and it wasn't happening. It was taking like two weeks, I mean we were in this thing for like two weeks, damn near a month. I was sitting there, and I'm sure I had probably talked to you the night before, something like that. I was writing, I started to write the beginning of it you know, just to start thinking about what kind of shit you say to yourself whenever, or the kind of shit that people say to themselves whenever they're facing that. I really wanted to know, I started thinking about the things that I was thinking at the time. Patrick: Then I was like, well this is bullshit because this is right around when the shit broke and we made ourselves and everything started to work out for the better. That was when I was really, really getting into it and getting into manifesting and writing and controlling it you know. Right before it happened I just said, I'm just going to take all these things that are being said and I'm just going to go with it. As much as I can I'm just going to just get it all out there. Everything that I hear on the stream of thought, I'm going to just write it down as I go. Patrick: And so, I did, I just started fucking like turned on some music and I just started. Every one of the resistant thoughts that came through, I just typed as it was coming. I was like this is some fucking creative ass ways to talk shit to myself, you know, of this voice in my head that's talking this shit. Just so creative and the ways it says, the lies it says about you. I just put it down and it was just endless and relentless and didn't stop. I just had to stop it myself you know. It would have just kept going. Kat: It was relentless. That's how, like I was reading it, I was sitting down at the coffee shop. I was like how fucking long is this going for? It's just getting worse and worse, but that's why it was painful, I was like fuck me, I thought it would be finished now, it's still going? Then I was thinking, I hope there's going to be a reframe at the end of this and it's not just going to finish. And then there was. Patrick: The end. Your life is horrible. But I got it [crosstalk 00:35:01] it was like an experiment to just fucking just see if it would stop you know, but it wouldn't. I had to stop it myself which I guess you could say something about that. You have to stop that fucking voice yourself. It's not going to stop on its own. You have to stop it because [crosstalk 00:35:21] it's there if you want- Kat: You have to see it for what it is. Patrick: Yeah. Kat: You've got [crosstalk 00:35:25] to see it for what it is. Yeah, it's the devil. We were talking about this on the phone the other night. It's a seduction right? Patrick: Yes it is. Kat: Did you read Patrick's post Maria? It's like be prepared to be upset. If anyone reads that post, just be prepared to be upset, but it will be powerful for you. I think that we all think that we're the only ones who have those thoughts. It's natural to feel like if people knew the truth about me, or if people, like I should feel ashamed of myself or whatever. Everybody has those thoughts and then everyone looks at ... Yes, so Maria read your post, she's one of my inner circle clients, she said she was in tears. Exactly, I think for women in particular it's going to upset them. I thought it upset me because I had a personal interest, but I think it probably upsets everyone. Kat: It was very upsetting because it was so raw, but it's also incredibly healing. That's the sort of blog post that will heal people and probably healed you maybe when you wrote it or maybe by publishing it because it's so raw. That's the point I was trying to make in my blog this morning ... Where can you find this post, just click on, I'll get the link. I'm so helpful. I'll put the link here in the comments. Like I'm fucking up all my shit now. Kat: It's [crosstalk 00:36:45] like I wrote about this a little bit in my post that you've got to, to impact people, like yesterday I was talking to somebody new who I met about my business. I was explaining how I market, and he's an entrepreneurs as well with four amazing businesses, but a totally opposite sort of entrepreneur to me. We were talking about how the way that I show up on social media is the exact opposite of him. I put as much of myself out there as possible, and he's got as little of himself out there as possible. I was saying my system basically, my marketing is essentially I'll write these three thousand word blog posts every single day. The people who can get to the end of that and watch all my content are clearly, they're my soulmate clients or they wouldn't be sticking around that much. He was like- Patrick: I like that system. Kat: Holy shit, big long posts [inaudible 00:37:34] right, but he goes ... Oh yeah there's the blog. He goes, "Yeah, but that wouldn't work anymore would it," or something, or, "That's because you already built that up or something like that?" I'm was like, "No, no, it doesn't matter how crowded the internet is or how crowded Facebook is there is always going to be a space for the true artist to bear their soul." Like since the dawn of time, those of us who are storytellers, messengers and who actually reveal the raw shit inside of us, like what you wrote, was the painful, gritty, even ugly parts of the soul. It's almost like you don't want to look at it directly, it's like staring into the sun. It's too much, it's too intense, it feels too painful. Then at the same time it's magnetising and you can't look away. Kat: So somebody who can share a piece of their soul like that, like you do and like I do and like many people here do, really are very few people though in the total of the internet marketing world. That person doesn't fucking need to buy their followers like you livestreamed about yesterday and we talked about the other night. Or to worry about a fucking funnel or what's the best strategy or Facebook ads. Nothing wrong with doing your funnels and your whatever right, but it's the cherry on top. Anybody who can release a piece of their soul and is brave enough or willing to do that, will always have people that want to listen because it is a magnet. Kat: It's just mind blowing to me how so many amazing artists and messengers are out there wasting their lives thinking that the way to build a following or to make money is let me get my fucking funnel right or my strategy or my marketing for whatever bullshit. And let me have a pretty website on the internet and make sure that I have good head shots. Are you kidding me? Why don't you just strip yourself naked and show it to everybody? Your soul, right? That's all it takes. Patrick: Anybody [crosstalk 00:39:38] can have- Kat: Being willing to do that even in your own resistance. Patrick: And there's a lot of ego out there too. It's like everybody's got one of those, so how do you really separate yourself from everybody else. You know what I mean, everybody's got a marketing strategy, everybody's got a marketing plan. Everybody's got an ego, so how do you get that ... I get to talk to people today, I got to talk to somebody because of my blog post. One of my people, one of my people, as I call them true believers. He was going through some serious shit in his life, like some real, real horrifying shit that he told me about that I got to help him through, today. So to me to be able to help in such a way to change somebody's life, to save a life is, fuck, that's more important to me than the other shit. Patrick: The other shit's stupid and I wouldn't get that far with somebody if I didn't post something like I did, if I didn't say what I was really feeling I wouldn't get to say that. It wouldn't probably connect like that on that level with him. That to me is more rewarding than anything else I could be doing. Even if I have to take, for a while, you know it's going to be a while. I could go out here and make a marketing webinar and be very successful with it and make money off of it you know. I could do that. Kat: Successful. Patrick: Yeah, successful. Run traffic to it and do all ... I know how to do all that, I've done it. Or a book funnel or whatever you want to do. Whatever you want to do to make money. Give somebody an irresistible offer, tell them how to double or triple their income, whatever you want to do. That's fine, but understand that anybody can fucking do that. Anybody can do that. If you hold back, if you don't say what's on your mind, if you don't actually share a piece of yourself, then you're not really like an artist I don't think. You know? Then you're just giving people- Kat: You're not and you have to decide [crosstalk 00:41:46] if you want to be an artist first or a marketer first. Like, you're an amazing marketer, I know a lot about marketing as well. We can both do all that shit. I don't even think anybody can do it, it is still a skillset because plenty of people are trying to fucking do it and they're not doing anything, they're not getting anywhere with it. Kat: I did read a blog post one time by a mentor of mine from years back and she was like you got to choose, you're either an artist of an entrepreneur, who are you? I was like holy shit, she's right, I'm an artist first. I am an entrepreneur, I am a marketer, I where those hats and I've been an entrepreneur, like it's in my blood, I've been selling shit since I was three years old. But first and foremost I'm an artist. You've got to choose, you can't be in both camps. You can't be like, oh I'm an artist and I share from my soul and I do my soul purpose, but first let me build this pretty little funnel over here and then I'll be ready. It's bullshit. Kat: Nobody said you need that you needed the internet to get your message out there and to make money. Amazingly enough artist through the history of time have managed to have people fall in love with them without a Facebook page. I know it's mind blowing for everybody and you might need therapy [inaudible 00:42:57] and some sexual healing in order to come to terms with that, but you don't need any of that shit in order to get your message out there. What you do need is to be courageous enough to put the blinders on and just art, art, art, art, art because like we said, you have a true believer client as you call them, I call them my soulmate clients, who comes to you as a result of that post. That person is so connected to you now, there's instant trust, instant deep rapport, they become a longterm client who refer their friends and just be so in love with you and your message because they see themselves in you. Kat: Most people, you could do an automated webinar and get leads from that, like you said. You could become successful and I say successful like that because even if you were making great money doing that, which of course you could do and you know how to do. You would be, and we've talked about this many times, you would be miserable. You would be hating it, your soul would be dying because it wouldn't be doing your purpose work and you're essentially selling your soul to the wrong clients, the wrong people doing the shit that doesn't light you up. Kat: Whereas, when you go all in with your art yeah, like most people are going to be horrified at the idea of reading a daily two or three thousand word blog post or listening to a one hour livestream that you do. They're going to think that's crazy, who wants to listen to that. I've had people make fun of me so many times when I've had hater-ship online. Like, "Oh ha ha, who would read all that shit?" I'm like, "Well firstly I don't fucking care if anybody reads it because I'm writing it for me bitch, not for you. Secondly, clearly a few people are fricking reading it if you look at the business that I've created." Kat: So if somebody is going to read that or watch your webstream or read your post, then they come to you and talk to you, that person is a soulmate client for life. I'd rather 10 people like that than a 100,000 people that are fucking bored on Instagram or got off a webinar. Patrick: Well there going to fall off, those people are going to like, what people realise is how much of this bullshit that's out there that's the same. People don't show you their refunds, people don't show you their attrition rates. People are dropping off. They don't show you that shit. They don't show you that shit. All they'll show you is- Kat: Yeah, so true. So true and we talked about that the other night as well. Like my refund rate is like 0.000001%. I'll get like three refunds a year and two of them is because the person accidentally bought the same product twice. They're like shit, I didn't realise I already have it, can you refund me? Patrick: And I haven't had that one- Kat: That's not normal, what's the industry rate even? It's like- Patrick: It's crazy, it's like 30. Kat: 40 or 50% some of the time. Patrick: Yeah. Yeah, it's insane. Then people don't say that and then they don't say, they don't talk about you know, affiliates and things like that that they're doing. So numbers are fucking crazy you know what I mean? You can't even get into numbers there's so much bullshit out there. There's so much bullshit out there that you might as well just be truthful and honest and just put yourself out there. I get on here and I've got now these few people that come on, I mean anything that I do, they follow me around for whatever it is that I do. I did something with Travis today, which we did marketing and I dropped a link out there for our funnels and everything. I thought we're going to pull in these new prospects right and these clients for his side of things, you know his new audience and everybody who showed up was my people. They hopped on to see that we were talking marketing, they showed up, popped up. Kat: They watch you, or my people watch me instead of Netflix. My people say that all the time, they're like, "I can't believe what time it is and I'm still watching your content." That's all you want, but it's also like what we're saying here is your going to get a better result just following your art and making your marketing strategy should be your art. Then let's not forget also the selling of the soul side of it because even if it was true that you could make more money, which I do not believe, by following straight up internet marketing Stepford-preneurship you would be miserable, in sabotage, addicted to whatever shit that's not good instead of addicted to flow. And just not happy right? Kat: I did it that way, I built my business at first to where it was nearly at a million dollars a year because I did the fucking work and I did the marketing. I was right on the cusp of a million dollars a year in my business. This was in 2012, and I walked away. I shut the whole thing down, I walked away from all of it. I remember saying to my partner at the time, if this is the path to a million dollar business, I don't want it. I cannot do this anymore, I would rather go back to being a personal trainer. I said to him, "I'm going to give myself three months, give me three months. I'm going to prove that I can make money doing what I love, but fuck all that shit, I'm going all in doing what I want. If I don't do it in three months then I'll just go back to the gym and I'll be a trainer again because I know how to make a lot of money doing that." Kat: Well, I didn't do it in three months anyway, I ended up over $100,000 in debt and blew the whole thing up. Then eventually, eventually, I stayed though, I stuck to it and now look where I am because I've experienced what it's like to make good money by selling my soul. I mean, it's your life right, you want to be, this is like right now we're not really selling anything, but this is content. This is us filling ourselves up with our art and our craft. Even though we're not directly making an offer, how many people are becoming soulmate clients or true believer clients of each of us right now because of this content. Then we drop a link or we keep saying we're going to start recoding our personal phone calls and sell them. People are going to fucking buy that shit, like who wants to buy the recorded phone calls of when we talk to two or three hours- Patrick: I do. Kat: Because that shits gold, but sometimes we've got to keep it private. But, we'll figure it out. Patrick: Yeah, we got to keep some things private, a little bit, a little bit. Those are like extreme, super, super VIP shit. But Helen makes a good point, Helen's asking a good question here though, she says, "I get what you're saying," but she's surrounded by true artists putting themselves out there every day and never make any money, what would you say about that? Kat: Okay. Okay. Good, I'm so glad I asked this. Patrick: I like that one, yeah. Kat: I was ready to preach on this. I'm going to need a love heart shout-out first, send me the love hearts. Then I'll bring the [crosstalk 00:49:37] Kat show. Patrick: Can I do it to? [crosstalk 00:49:37] Kat: Can you do it too? Everybody shower me with the love heart. Oh there they come, thank you. Patrick: Shower. Kat: All right. I already answered these same questions to two or three clients earlier today when I was answering my client audios, so I'm prepared and I'm ready. Here's the thing right, money, money is just a decision and a choice right? Like yesterday I bought a new car, I'm also getting a new house and a few other things all at once. It is a big deal, I'm excited to get the car, I feel good about it. Yeah, there's some ego attached to it for sure because I feel like yeah, look at my badass car, but at the same time I don't need that in order to be happy or fulfilled right, I'm detached from it. When they didn't give me exactly what I wanted at the dealership I just left. I wasn't doing that as a strategy, I was like okay, I'm not attached, this is what I want, if you can't give it to me I'm leaving. I got in the car and drove away and of course, they called me eight minutes later and gave me what I wanted. Patrick: Sorry guys. Kat: Either way I [crosstalk 00:50:40] Patrick: I used to be one. Kat: But, yeah, you know how it works. I [inaudible 00:50:45] I'm leaving. And I literally was about to sign and then I just put the pen down, I'm like look I've got to go. I'm going to go see the house, I left. What I'm trying to say though is, I don't need the car, I'm not emotionally attached to the car in order to feel good enough, in order to feel worthy, in order to feel like I'm now complete and whole. The thing that fills you up and lights you up and gives you your sense of freedom and completeness and your happiness, your source of all things is being true to yourself and doing your art right? So then for the money, to me the car is the same sort of thing, whether it's a car, whether it's do I want to buy the fancy Voss water, whatever it is. It's just a decision, so I can choose the car or not choose the car, either way I'm whole and I'm complete, but am I going to choose the car, yeah it's fucking badass, it's a hot, sexy car. I'm going to choose the car because I like it and I can have it. Kat: Same as with money. Get out of the idea that there needs to be an emotional attachment around money, it's only money. Choose it or don't choose it, it's infinitely available. Like you can choose am I going to wear pants or a skirt today, it doesn't matter, why get emotionally attached to it, but it's always available. That's how I feel about money. One of the courses a I made in 2014 when I first figured this out for myself was called, "It's only money honey." I called the course, "It's only money honey," one of the best courses I've ever made, because it was like a slap in the face wake up call where I suddenly realised, fuck, I've been making it this really emotional thing. Like am I good enough for money, am I worthy for money. Imagine we did this right, like am I good enough for the Voss water, am I worthy of this, what are people going to think of me? Does this add to my value if I have this amazing water? Either just pick it up off the shelf or don't. It doesn't matter. Kat: And so that was like a breakthrough for me to go oh shit, money is just a decision, decide how much you want. Expect it the same way if you're in a restaurant and you put your order in, you know I'll have a steak and broccoli, you expect it, you assume it's going to turn up. You don't go into the kitchen and be like, am I good enough for this? Do you guys think I'm worthy of the steak, can I really have that? Is it being prepared and will I get it? You just order your fucking meal and then you sit down and you wait for it and you expect that it's going to show up. Then meanwhile you're in the now, being present with whoever you're with. Kat: Same with money, decide it. It's a decision. When you get out of the emotional attachment around money being a reflection of your worth or being something that's going to save you, then you'll realise that it's just something you decide. But you fret now, you think that money would make you more worthy or it's going to save you or it will fill you up or it will make you happy. Or you'll be, yeah, safer in some way or a better person in some way. Then you'll continue to keep it at arm's length because you're trying to validate yourself and you're trying to find your safety and security from something outside of you, which is not possible. Kat: The lesson is you need to decide ... Did I just get invited to go to a cruise? Somebody's just invited me to go on their birthday cruise and I don't even know this person. I'm just magnetic as fuck. Patrick: It's your most active follower it looks like. Kat: I don't even know who that is. Hi, [Taveda 00:54:01] I can't, I can't go. I've got something on, but thank you. Kat: So, yeah, it's about realising it's a decision. If artists are out there and they're broke, maybe they're buying into the broke artist story, but maybe, maybe, and probably, they're in some way basing their self-worth on their financial situation and/or thinking to themselves that if I just had that money, then I'd be safe. Then I'd be good enough, then I'd be a worthy or a valid person. It's the same as love. You'll never find love when you think oh that person is going to make me feel like then I'm good enough, then I'm worthy, then I'm attractive, then I'm whatever. Kat: You got to figure that shit out right, like otherwise you'll just continue to hold that deep connection at arm's bay. When you realise you've already got everything inside of you and of course you can choose the money because abundance is infinite. Or of course you can choose to receive love because it is available. Or of course you can choose to have the body you want or whatever and you don't need it, well like you can need it and not need it at the same time, we've talked about that. But either way, you already get your completeness inside of yourself. Kat: Does that make sense? Did I just ramble in 49 different directions at once? Patrick: Pretty much, but I'm feeling it, I'm catching it. So, you're saying then somebody who is a starving artist, they're buying into it, which that makes sense to me. There's a lot of things that people out here buy into because that's just what people say. You know, oh you're a starving artist. Oh, you're not going to make any money. That's what they say, but how much of this shit is rooted in fact, it's just something that somebody said. You know, there's a lot of shit like that that's out there, but you have to, you know, you can't cuss if you want to make money online. You know, there's a huge one right- Kat: Really? Fuck, that's rude. Patrick: Yeah, how rude. There's all these things that they say. You have to, what else do they say, you know, you already have to have made this much amount of money before you can make any money online. You can't help anybody unless you've hit this, unless you've achieved these goals. You know, you have to have a book. All sorts of crazy shit that's just not true, but people will buy into. There's so many limitations being sold to everybody out here and they're constantly buying into them. I see what you're saying about that, it makes sense because if they're thinking that I'm an artist and I'm not making money or that I'm just going to be an artist, I'm not making money that's fine because that's just what it is. Patrick: Yet, you're on here, I'm on here and we're doing it. There, you in the back. Kat: I have a question. My question is do you think that sometimes artists/entrepreneurs, that there's ego attached to being the starving artist? Like there's an element of look at me suffer? It's almost like a badge of honour that I'm the starving artist, do you think that sometimes people are toting themselves back to that? Patrick: I'm doing it. I'm doing it. You know you get in this thing where you're like, I mean I've seen people do this too, and I do this, I'm guilty. I like the story okay, I like the story. I could have, I mean I'm sure if I opened myself up for it more and just said that it's going to be super easy and that it's just going to happen and everything's going to come to me. I'm just going to go in the superflow and do what you said and just go all in on this thing and have it happen. It's just going to boom, the doors are wide open. Patrick: When I did my first programme I sold a bunch of my first programme right. For me that was a lot to sell as much as I did. That was not even fully half assing it, that was like 10% of what I could have really done, of me going all in because I'm running like two businesses right now. There's the story that if I just got away from this one thing, it would just go so much fucking easier and everything would just happen you know. Instead, I'm choosing to build the story and now I'm going to be able to have the little ego and look back on this thing and be like, I struggled so hard when is first started out and you can go track it. Patrick: I've got that in my head, that's programmed in my head from something I've learned from somebody else. You know that you got to step your way up. You work your way up if you want to get there, you can't just [inaudible 00:58:29] you got to work your way up. So, I feel [crosstalk 00:58:33] that same way, I get- Kat: It's so interesting because ... Patrick: Go ahead. Kat: No you go ahead. Patrick: No, my train of thought just ... Just took a shit. Kat: Well, here's the truth right. I am proud of myself, I have ego and pride, not, I don't mean I shouldn't have, but there is, for me there is ego attached to I know what I fucking went through to build this business. I do feel maybe a bit superior about the fact that I know full well that most people would not do what I did and that they will not choose to be tough enough. I like feeling like I'm the one who can get knocked down again and again and again and look at me bitches, I'm still getting back up again. It relates a lot to all my fitness stuff and like I always wanted to be the most badass hardcore chick in the gym and I would definitely get triggered if I saw another chick who was training harder than me. Then it would bring me up to speed right, I would then become friends with them. Then it would be like it's on. Kat: In business, I definitely have pride that comes from yeah, I did go through so much fucking shit and I just kept getting up and every time I felt like I was on the floor and I couldn't get up again, it was that thing of are you dead yet though? No, then keep going. I do like it, I get off on it. Patrick: There you go. Kat: You know, you said this earlier on in the call, you said to me what we had spoken about on the phone the other night, about how I said to you I've gotten a little bored because the truth is I had my, I think I told you this, I told my private clients. I'm sure I told you this on the phone, I had my biggest income month ever last month in May. I haven't even published it or anything, well I told my private clients about it and I did a livestream talking about the mindset of that. But it was my biggest income month ever and it was like I feel proud of it. I feel likes that's cool, but did I get a rush from it, did I get an adrenaline kick, no. To be honest, and I know what I'm going to say now is going to make a lot of people want to throw shit at me, if you're going to throw shit I like Guylian Seashell Chocolates or Chanel, you can throw Chanel. Patrick: Or Vegemite. Throw [crosstalk 01:00:52] poo. Kat: But, it's very [crosstalk 01:00:52]. I got that all sorted already. Patrick: Fling a little poo. Kat: I just, it's easy for me to make money online and I mean look, it doesn't mean I can't relate to and resonate with where people are at in their journey and their struggle. It hasn't been that long ago where was over 100K debt, struggling and that went on for a long time. I know how to break through that and that's how I support my clients, but it's not a rush for me to, like even if I do a launch that would make an insane amount of money, I would be like that's awesome, but also, I just expect it. I'm not doing to get an adrenaline rush from it in the same way that if I cook an amazing steak, and I do cook an amazing steak, I'm not going to be like oh my God, I can't believe it, this is the biggest rush ever. I mean of course it tastes fucking amazing, I know how to cook steak. Of course the launch made that much money, I know how to make money online. Kat: What we had spoken about and this relates to what I'm saying here is, well where do I get my rush from now. Where do I get my adrenaline from because I am that person. It wasn't just that I was proud of myself for getting up again and again every time I got knocked down, it's that I do get off on it. I enjoy it, I like being like, you know, put through, I like the pain. I like purposeful pain and I feel so alive. Like the training session which I spoke about, which I did this morning was the hardest I've gone. I had to ease back into it obviously with my training after my surgery, but so today was the hardest that I've gone since then. I was dying and then within a second of it being over, or anytime I felt more knocked around, I'm smiling at the same time. I'm like this is so fucking good, it's fucking amazing. I crave that, I want it. Patrick: And you desire it because at this stage in the game you know that all these rules are bullshit. The fact that you have to, I had only $30 in my account when I started out, to get customers, to get clients, to get your soulmate clients is bullshit. You would be able to attract them without that fucking story. You know? You don't need, that story doesn't [crosstalk 01:03:05] Kat: Totally. Patrick: I don't think it brings people, I don't [crosstalk 01:03:07]- Kat: Right. And I don't even tell my [crosstalk 01:03:09] yeah. Even I told you parts of my story like when we were on the phone the other night and you didn't even know some of it because I just don't talk about it that much. I have and I do if I get interviewed and stuff, but I don't use that for my marketing. I use my art for my marketing. I just use self-expression for my marketing. Like you said, I don't need the fucking story, but what I do need is, I need to feel lit up, alive. Maybe you're right that yesterday I created resistance to knock me around and make me feel shitty so that today I could then create the contrast and today I'm on fire. Kat: There's more to it than that, like I think, yeah, I do think sometimes for people who haven't broken through on money yet. Or if you've experienced this, if you're a person who can make a little money and then you're like, yeah I'm riding high. Then it just disappears again and you crash up and down, I know a lot of people do that. I did that for years, I would make quite a lot of money and then I'd be like, where is it? Why am I broke again? What's happening? I did that roller coaster for years. Kat: I finally cracked that quota, I figured it out and I teach my clients this all the time. Because I was addicted to the ego and the adrenaline of when your back's against the wall and you don't know if you're even going to be able to buy food that day or God forbid even coffee. Then you just, like a magician, you pull a rabbit out of a hat because you're forced to, you're so back against the wall and you're going to lose, then you just make magic. You're smashing through and you create and you save yourself, but actually w

Katrina: Oh. Okay ... That's what I've gotta do ... Invite. Invite, invite, invite, invite ... Do that ... Okay. All right. How do I add you? I'm blind. I can't see anything. It says I can't bring you on the broadcast at this time ... Why? ... Invite friends ... Okay. That's odd. Do you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna restart this, because usually when I do this ... Oh no, hang on. Now it's letting me ... bring ... Katrina: Adding. Hello, everybody. Patrick: What's up? Katrina: What's up? Patrick: I don't know why I've got this thing hanging up here. A devil horn, demonic. What's up? I had to share in my group and on my wall so, rock and roll. Katrina: Okay. Let me turn this up. My sound is super quiet. Katrina: Welcome everybody. We have no idea what we're going to talk about but it's going to be amazing. Patrick: It is always gonna be amazing, always amazing stuff when me and you get on here. Always amazing stuff when you're here, I'm like, damn! Everything I watch I always send people to you and everybody I meet I'm like, "Dude you have not idea. Cat's shit ... it's changed my life more than just anything I've watched, anything I've listened to." Katrina: Thank you. Patrick: I believe in it. I believe in it though. Katrina: It goes both ways. I nearly tagged you in as my favourite live streamer apart from myself. I think you're the only person whose livestream I consistently watch, I'm very sorry to everybody else who's on here who livestream but I'm just going to admit that I'm not a huge content consumer, I have four or five people whose content I'll consistently consume but you're my favourite live streamer. Patrick: Wow, wow. Katrina: There you go. Patrick: Well I'm honoured to hear that and you know what? Are you still in Baldi? Katrina: No, it just looks like I'm in the jungle. Guess where I am? Patrick: Yeah. Katrina: I'm actually at my local shopping mall. I'm a mall rat, I work from the mall. This is just a cool little area. Whoa, shit. I just did my workout. I just got my sweat on, the gym's right there and I just hang out at the mall all day. Patrick: Let me close this door for just a second before it gets too loud. Katrina: Oh where are our comments? Who's saying hello to us? I just realised we're ignoring you guys and we're only talking to ourselves. I haven't said hello to anybody yet. Patrick: Yeah, Ryan in the house. What's up Ryan, what's up Sage, Cody ... Katrina: Hey everybody. I'm dropping all my shit. Brandon you must have not only see first notifications but you must have some kind of alarm that goes off in your house 'cause you're always instantly there supporting and representing. Patrick: He does. I guarantee he does. He's ready to roll too as well. Katrina: He's always ready to go. Patrick: I have some good news as well today, again. I sold my second programme today. Number two. Katrina: Of course you did. Congratulations. That's a virtual hug. Patrick: Yeah, virtual hug. Get that out the way quickly. Katrina: There's one for everybody as well. Hugs all around. Hey Mandy, Hey Theo, hey everybody just in. That's awesome. You're just owning that energy space that you need to be in, right? Katrina: I saw something you said the other day. Oh, it was in the post that you did about your first sale and you said how you haven't done any funnels yet or any advertising yet or anything like that. It's all been mindset, you went all in on mindset which obviously is something that I was really excited to read. Patrick: Yeah I did and it's one of those things you know? It's something I just want to stick to 'cause I got all the other things down. I can do all the other things. I can do funnel. I already know that that's something easy. Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: But I wanted to do my take, cause I know that's just a winner. I can help people out. Much more so with that, it's a bigger fundamental change they can make in their life. Anybody can run Facebook Ads. You can get on YouTube and learn how to build a funnel. Doesn't matter. Build your shit with work press and work with word press everyday, no problem. Katrina: So [crosstalk 00:05:24]. Me? Patrick: What's that? Katrina: Did you say I know nothing about funnels? Patrick: Well I mean ... when I talk to you, you don't really concern yourself with funnels, I like that. It's such a fad type deal. Katrina: I do. I run a programme for my community of funnels cause I was like I know everyone wants to know about it. And yes there are some things we could say about it, but largely my team taught the programme for me. And I just came on like a rock star and did the mind set side of funnels. Cause even when I talk about what should be in a funnel. What I talked about was creating the experience. When people come in to your community. Think about the first seven days and what is the experience you want people to have being apart of your community. You don't want them to fee like they joined another email list. Yay. It should be like, holy shit, what is this bad ass community? Katrina: What's up John? What's up Linda? Linda. Hello. Patrick: Who can you be apart of? Which can segway into my community and what we're talking about today ... cause mine is ... obviously yours is, yours is daily kick ass read for fucken leaders, but you have mostly women. By the way, the person who bought the programme today is a woman. I think she's one of your tribe actually. Katrina: Oh cool. Patrick: Yeah it'd be kind of wild to see how it plays out. But my view is Entrepreneurs Player Club. So it's for men. It's a men's community for men who wanted it all. Who want to take it to the next level no matter what it is in life. They wanna level all the way up. And so it's ... that's the experience I'm providing. You know what I mean? Katrina: Yeah. Patrick: Both have that aspect. So talking relationships I'm sure y'all do that. They were talking about relationships. They were asking about men and women communications on your streams? Katrina: It's ... not on the live stream more on the client groups and then friendships conversations as well. In fact, Linda and I were talking about this last night. Linda's one of my besties on the live stream, she's staying at my house at the moment, she might even be at my house right now. And we were talking about it and we were having some laughs about a few things ... just common thins women do that should be made into viral videos. Ways that women analyse and obsess things that men say, for example. So we were cracking up laughing at things we know we do that are really silly. Katrina: But yet, we still feel like it's a real true thing. But I have this conversation with clients all the time. Not ... I'm gonna say it doesn't happen ... Linda is my wife this week. I already had two marriage offers this week, no this is the third one. Callie Remy's offered to marry me, she's always offering to marry me. She gets very upset when she thinks that anybody else might get in there. Now Linda's offered as well ... it's fine ... I'm fine with what's the word? Polyamory. Katrina: I don't think the relationship conversation happen as much in the daily asking crew as they might. Because it is men and women in there.- Patrick: Yeah.- Katrina: So maybe people don't put themselves out there quit as much. But it happens more in my inner circle client group. We do a weekly hot seat masterminds live stream. So for all my private clients, and I would say ... 30 to 40 percent of the conversation is to do with relationships. Then also on my private clients box me everyday and they just audio update me with their questions or what's going on. Probably 30 to 40 percent what my clients ask me about is their relationship stuff. And only 30 percent is business and the rest is whatever to do with labs. Katrina: So, I noticed how when you talk about Entrepreneur Club, you say it's for male entrepreneurs but you say it's about up levelling in every are of life. How relationship all of that. And that's definitely what I feel like I do with my clients as well. That they are all entrepreneurs of some kind. They're coming wanting to up level their business, make more money. But it's actually about creating your whole life purposely. So that's where a lot of the conversations come from. Katrina: But I thought it would be a good topic because I'm not ... firstly I find it a little bit funny that my clients continually ask me for relationship advice cause I'm not an expert on this. Like I can read your ... if they tell me something they said or did or this happened with a guy and what do you think? I'm like ... I'm still learning and growing in this area as well as all areas ... but probably this area more than others I would say, at the moment. So it's not like I'm a certified expert. But, here's my thoughts so here's my feelings. But then when I try and give clients supportive feedback ... and same when I have conversations with friends about something that's happened with a guy in their life. I'm like but I don't really know the male perspective. I only know certain things that I've learned and studied. Katrina: You and I were talking about this last week on the phone. About how I've spent a lot of time over the last year or year and a half trying to understand male/female dynamics. And learning and up levelling in that, so I feel like I understand so much more than I would have 18 months ago. But still I'm like I don't know. I keep forgetting ... and this is what I wanted to talk about with you ... I keep forgetting that men don't think like women do right? Patrick: Yeah.- Katrina: There's a certain way that women think and that we approach things. And rules of behaviour that are just automatic for women. And I think that we as women, are prayed in the same way. So then if a man doesn't communicate in a way that we would, we instantly assume they're upset at us or they're annoyed at us, or that they're not interested or whatever it might be. Instead of just being like, men think this way in this situation and women think this way. Does that make any sense? Patrick: Yeah for sure. It's a communication thing. It's like, I know several people that are trying to figure this out. One of the main things is people wanna know is how they communicate better across the genders ... male and female ... try to figure that out and crack the code. I know a guy who's working on it. It's actually his life goal is to figure this out and he thinks that whenever he has figured this out, he'll have solved it and be rich beyond his wildest dreams. Patrick: Everybody, I think, is actively trying to figure it out. I hear this sometimes in my group. I asked the group to find out what they're looking for and what they want in the next ... what they want ... need frame or value on for the next thing that I drop. Patrick: They do quite frequently ask about relationship issues, it's like all across the board. But what I've figured out is that it is always a communication issue. On the aspect is, they always have a communication issue or problem. And so, what I've actually learned recently and through training ... cause I actually looked in to this stuff ... and I've always been trying to figure this out better. It hasn't been always at the top of the list of what I wanted to do. Like I was more concerned about business and opportunities. Patrick: Now later I'm trying to learn more about this. So the best thing that I've learned to do. And I've learned that works the best ... this is so cliché ... but it's just so fucken simple right? It's just being 100 percent honest about every fucekn thing. Like no matter what people just fear rejection.- Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: That's one of the most basic things, humans don't want to deal with. They don't want to deal with rejection. So they're going to put a mask on, they're going to alter the things that they say and change the things they say. And not be generally honest person. But I think it works out ... this thing is shaking like crazy ... you gave me this thing, I don't know what the hell is going wrong with it.- Katrina: The tri-pod. Sometimes of gets loose and the top and you've got to tighten that little wheel. Patrick: Yeah, how the hell do you tighten the wheel? Oh there we go. Katrina: You hold the other and then you move just the wheel bit. Patrick: There it goes. Katrina: That took me like six months to master. It used to drive me insane. Patrick: It was just bobbing around. Katrina: Hello. Patrick: Hey there we go. Being 100 percent honest, so cliché, but its what people don't fucken do. Katrina: But what if we just said what we think right? What if every time we communicated what I'm actually thinking or feeling, and maybe it is actually scary sometimes to say that or confront it. Okay. Fricken take a deep breathe and give yourself a slap on the cheek and say it anyway. Because it's never gonna serve you to hide your truth. Not in this era, not gonna serve you in this obviously. Patrick: By you saying this, and what you do and what you talk about in every other business and aspect is the key. So should come to you with relationship advice, they should come to your with communication advice. This is the thing that works the best. Katrina: Okay. Can everybody just note that Patrick said I'm an expert on relationship and now I'm gonna do a course on it. You heard it here. Patrick: There you go. You've been dubbed. Katrina: Of course I'm going the to do a course on it at some point. There's gonna be a course on everything. Your ideas of ... you said the things they want most from you is relationship stuff. It's funny cause I asked that same question yesterday in my group. And the thing that most people said they either want me to talk about backwards ageing or about sex. But then when they gave more detail about what they want about sex. I was like okay I'm not gonna do a tantra course or something. I thought they meant sex, the act of having sex. They meant the sexual energy and manifestation I think through sexual energy is what they meant. So a little bit different but still related. Patrick: Yeah they are. I'd like to get in to see what you have to say about that as well too. You know just now getting into that male to female energy. Because males ... A especially ones that are good at communicating with women. They have a certain amount of female energy. It's a yin and a yang. Katrina: Of course.- Patrick: They have that inside of them. That's me to a certain degree. A lot more male ... a lot more on the male side. But when people notice I have this, they have more female in them. They can communicate better that way. And- Katrina: Were they accessing it? Because they already have the male, they already have the feminine in you. It's whether you're allowing it through or accessing it. Patrick: Right, exactly. So another thing I've also learned as well ... everybody's got problems right? I've got a problem too about myself but, I've got a forward free attitude about things. I'm not scared to die. So some people who communicate better with women, better across the sexes. Some men who do this, are men who are concerned with security. For example, men who don't like to fly or put themselves in positions where they could potentially die. They understand security and that is more attractive to women. And that allows them to communicate better with women. Katrina: Why is that more attractive to women? Explain that. Patrick: Because women are more interested in security, for the most part. I know you're gonna say, "Well I have my own philosophy."- Katrina: Is that your impression of ... Katrina: No, no, no. Was that Katrina right then? Cause it was appalling. It was worse than when you did the accent. Which was a British. Patrick: I was gonna say, I saw the look in your eyes. Katrina: No, no. Calm down. I was confused. If you think back to when we were on the phone last week, I know that I directly said to you was women want to feel stability and security but that has to do with ... to me that has to do with full authenticity with what each person wants and knowing where you stand and knowing what the other persons true desires and hopes are. You know? And what their boundaries or standards are, right? Patrick: Yeah.- Katrina: I feel stable and secure ... as best as you can know what somebody else is thinking ... but if I know what that persons really thinking and wanting. As opposed to marriage doesn't give security, living together doesn't give security, all these things that people think, when I get that in my relationship then I'm safe, then I'm secure. Then I'm set up. Well I've certainly learned that those things are, that's smoke and mirrors. Katrina: I'm not saying you shouldn't have those things if you want those things, but that is not where security or stability is found in a relationship. And there can't be any security or stability if there's not honesty, right? Patrick: Absolutely. Katrina: And real honesty because I feel like most couples out there would say that they're honest with each other. But it's like to a point maybe. Because there's certain areas that are just taboo or consider acceptable. Or if my partner knew that I thought that, or wanted to do that then they would reject me. So it comes back to what you said before, that fear of rejection. Which is just fear of not being accepted for who you are. Patrick: Yeah, exactly.- Katrina: I was confused when you said about the thing about dying, that confused me. Patrick: Well I was pulling something up. I had a conversation and I was talking about this too and it was more of an attraction thing to have ... I do believe the sexes are different on a DNA level, they're different. Patrick: There's things that you guys find attractive about us that are totally fucking different ... totally fucking different than what we find attractive about y'all. You know? And what draws us to you and what we have to maintain. We have to maintain certain things with women to keep a relationship going. If we start acting a certain way, your DNA is gonna tell you, you gotta get the fuck rid of us. If we start changing our behaviour? Katrina: Like what? Patrick: Well for example if we went from attracting you with being more of an alpha male and we got into the relationship we start being more of a beta male. We started letting ourself go, becoming a fat fuck. And not maintaining that same energy and vibe. We weren't congruent with who you're originally interested in. And we started changing our habits and letting things go. Not only would you see not attracted, you would feel a certain thing inside you that I gotta get rid of this mother fucker or just tear him down to get him out of my life. Or a lot of women ...- Katrina: You wouldn't feel safe. If I was in that situation I would feel emotionally unsafe. I would feel like this guys can't decide if he's going right or left in his life, and on a fundamental ... I think you might need to turn your lighting on ... your in the dark. On a fundamental level, from a survival point of view ... some women might be angry at me for saying this but women want men to protect them and take care of them.- Patrick: That's right. Katrina: On some level if come guy can't decide where he's going in the course of this day, then how the fuck is he gonna take care of me or protect me or have my back. That's what I would feel. Even if I didn't assess that in my conscious mind. On a subconscious level that's what I would be feeling. Then you'd feel unsettled, you'd feel destabilised. Then that would turn to resentment and anger at the guy because it would feel like what the fuck I thought that you were there for and I could depend upon you emotionally, if not in other ways. Then all of the sudden the floor just fell out from under me. So at first I'm gonna feel scared and I'm gonna feel upset. And then if it doesn't correct I'm gonna get angry. And then I think men ... women start to get angry and they turn hard and they turn into bitches and they activate their masculine. Katrina: Then if you add to the fact that right now we're largely speaking to of audience of women who are driven, successful women or are already in their masculine in business. So then if you've got a relationship if the man's not being a man and not leading. Then the woman is gonna be so far in her masculine, which is gonna result in all sorts of whacked up shit, weight gain, angry bitch syndrome, or whatever you wanna call it. Katrina: And it becomes this vicious cycle where the guys not becoming more and more in his power and the women is feeling like she's gotta be in the power and be in charge. But she doesn't want to do that ... maybe some women say they want to be the boos in the relationship ... not the women I know though ... I know women are out there who are like fuck men, but I feel like those women don't feel that at their core. It's just how they've learned to protect themselves.- Patrick: Yeah. Katrina: I know for me and my clients, we're all very driven, high achieving women ... but we talk about this all the time so I'm speaking from my heart ... we want the man to be the man. We want the man to lead, we don't wanna be in charge in the relationship. But if the guy ... like you said ... if the guys not being in his power and not being a leader and not being a "man", then the woman's gonna feel in order to feel safe and for survival reasons she gonna be like, I've gotta fricken run this game. And then be angry at you for not doing it. Patrick: Exactly. And that's the communication thing that we're talking about. People need to know this ... like you have a great beat on this thing ... but most people are like what are you saying the DNA has nothing to do with it. It is, it's very much genetic survival level shot right here. Katrina: For sure.- Patrick: Doesn't matter if you're a woman or not. You're still gonna feel the same thing. If a dudes acting like this, you're still gonna have problems.- Katrina: Yep.- Patrick: You might not know where it's coming from. But if you trace it back to this, that's where it's coming from. It's coming from cave man shit. Cave man days.- Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: If he's starting to act out like that and you're starting to have problems and you're wondering where these communication issues are coming from. You can trace it back to this. Katrina: On a level were still cave women and cave men and our hormonal systems and our nervous systems operate the same way. And even if a women doesn't have children, psychological, hormonally, and from the nervous system she's wired to want to protect her young. Even if she doesn't have any kids, so that will come up as well, right? Even if it's a relationship with no kids, if the guys starts not being a guy, the women's gonna be worried about that for her own sake but there's also wiring in there hormonally that's like, shit you can't protect my babies, even if they don't exist.- Patrick: Yeah.- Katrina: So that brings up even more anger and hormonal responses. So it's just ... I feel grateful that I understand this from when I was in the fitness industry for years. Cause for eight years I actively studies hormonal patterns and advanced hormonal science, it wasn't just physical training that I did. So I get it all from that. So I've learned it all from business as well as my own relationships previously ending. And then watching so many clients end up in broken marriages or broken relationships. And then just looking at these patterns and it's like strong women need and actually want strong men, right? Katrina: They don't wanna be the one who's acting like the men in the relationship. Patrick: But they also need better men too. Because this is the thing ... all that stuff is true and you've got all the underlying communication going on right here. You've got the ... now we understand we've got to be this type of dude. I've gotta make sure I maintain that as well. But I've also gotta be an honest dude. I have to be congruent and say exactly what the fuck is on my mind. Exactly what the fuck is going on. Cause all this other bullshit, this hiding thinking I'm just gonna leave or whatever. That's not what a man does. A man doesn't have a problem with that. A man's not worried if she leaves her or not. That's not how she should be. It should be all of free, she should be free to do what she wants to do. If she wants to leave she can leave. Patrick: But if she wants to be with you she should stick with you. All that stuff should be lined out and laid out honestly, from the get go. From the ... if you lay it out and have a clear map of what's going on. Otherwise you're gonna have these hairline issues, but your whole shits gonna be based on this milky murky service.- Katrina: It's not stable. Patrick: It's gonna be very unstable, yeah. That's why the one key that opens everything up ... and there's never really a problem when you're honest. If you already built something based on fucking lies and stuff already and it's got so far, then you're probably gonna have a problem. Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: People are probably are married and shits already set up like this. So in that aspect ...- Katrina: They didn't just set it at the start. Patrick: Huh? Katrina: Yeah, you're right. They didn't discuss it at the start. And I ... that's a hard one cause I'm no longer in the relationship that wasn't working, right? But imagine that you're in a relationship and you loved that person ... and I know quite a few people who are in this situation, right? They're in a really fucked up, toxic relationship. They're both being assholes. They're both hating on each other. The male/female dynamics are all screwed up. But what if they're still in love. What if they still love each and they want to make it work. Katrina: Well then it's like anything ... it's like if someone ends up 50 pounds overweight ... if I remember one time I helped a client lose it would have been near 100 pounds. She went from being chronically obese to being a fitness bikini model, winning world titles, unbelievable, fucking amazing. But it took 18 months ... it was even a bit more than that. And in that time, she really fricken showed up, every single day. She did what I said to do, she gave her all to it, she completely changed her life. She wasn't just like, I want to lose weight so I'll go to the gym three days a week. She committed to her health and fitness 100 percent. And she ended with a result that is so rare for someone to go from being chronically obese to a bikini fitness model ... and by the way she was 44 as well when we did this. It was phenomenal. And to this day I think she's one of the most impressive things I've seen. Katrina: And I think it's the same thing. If somebody's in a really toxic relationship but they do love that person, they wanna stay with that person. Well both can change but you'd really have to fucken be committed to that. It's not gonna happen if you go to a therapy session every weeks. Or if you do a date. Everyone's like we do date. Okay, I'm sure going to the movies once a week is gonna fix all your problems. Katrina: What about ... how many people are communicating and actually being brave enough to share what they're really thinking. That's what it would take. I'm not an expert on it, I have done that, turning a relationship around like that. And I believe fully that of course it can be done. But it would require both parties to be committed and it would require that all in attitude, like my client had when she lost all that weight. Katrina: There was something I was gonna say there. Patrick: Well that ... look what Brandon said, he's actually saying something, he's not trolling today ... he says being able to express emotions is not from a place of weakness. That's good too. Patrick: If you're doing the date night and stuff life that. You're on that and everything trying to make it work. But the guy has to be vulnerable with still maintaining all the other shit that we're talking right? All the other vibes the alpha vibes and things like that.- Katrina: Still being a man.- Patrick: All that same stuff. Free too. I don't give a fuck. I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do, but I'm gonna continue to be social, I'm gonna go out and do what I do and have a good time. And whatever still be that way, no matter how mad you get, that's still going to happen. Patrick: But also vulnerable. Saying how you really feel about it. I don't want you to fucken leave. I don't want you to go anywhere. You're a huge part of my life and I don't want you to leave or do anything like that. To say something like that but still maintaining the other stuff, that is not said. That you just do, the behaviour that you have.- Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: That's the way to keep it going the right way. So you're maintaining on the subconscious level but also with being vulnerable to a point. You still have to have that female come out.- Katrina: Well that's huge for women for sure. I know I've heard this so many times in different relationships in my life. And I hear this a lot through client and friend conversations too. I think men will tend to assume that we already know how you feel. And they'll be like she knows I feel this way about her. She knows that I don't want her to go or she knows I love her. But you know what? We want you to say it, a lot. That's just what women want. Katrina: And this is exactly something I wanted to ask you. I was gonna get your opinion on this. My female friends for example ... my best friends, so like Linda who was on the live earlier ... Kelly, whoever my friends are. We communicate with each other every single day ... I don't know if all women do this but my friends and I do pretty much daily ... we'll update each other pretty much about everything that's going on in our days. Almost like, it's a form of journaling. I'll be driving and walking and I'll be sending audio messages to my friends. All my friends, this happened and then I thought this, and then I'm analysing my shit or giving them feedback on this maybe. Katrina: But then it's kind of like a continual communication there. Even if one of us is doing an event or really busy with something, there might be less communication but we still check in. And women check in with each other all the time. We have a continual communication. My point is that we do that even if there's nothing to talk about. Where what I've observed with men, it seems to be like, there'll be communication there is there's something to say or if there's something specific to discuss. Or if you end up talking to someone then you end up talking and communicating. But men don't do the check in communication thing.- Patrick: Yes.- Katrina: And I think women kind of want that ... well we do want that. And then when men don't stay in contact we feel like like maybe they're annoyed at us or they've forgotten about us or they're not really into us or something like that. Because we wouldn't do that. We always communicate with other women. But we expect to communicate with men and then I think it's like where's the line. I know when I was journaling last year, what's my ideal relationship I remember specifically writing down, I don't wanna feel like we have to check in with each other everyday. Like I don't want to feel like you've got to check in with me each day, I also don't wanna feel like I've gotta report back on my fucking actions or something like that. Katrina: But then I want that communication. So what's your take on that, what do men feel about communication, if there's nothing really to communicate about. Communication for the sake of communication. Patrick: That's definitely 100 percent. It just depends on the guy and how he communicates. The more he sends you messages the better, cause that's sign of good communication. He understand that a women wants to hear that. That y'all want to hear that. That you need back ... not even like check in ... but I understand like saying what's up? Just to let you know you're on my mind. That type of stuff.- Katrina: Yeah, yeah, yeah.- Patrick: If the dude doesn't do that very well then he's not communicating very well at all. I can understand how people get that way, especially entrepreneurs. Because they get so busy ... especially with social media, the computer age, your so inundated with information and your so inundated with things going and your life gets so busy that you skip past that sometimes. Patrick: Or your just constantly ... we're constantly in from of the phone talking to tonnes of clients. It can get really hectic. That's the way it is in my life at least. That's the way that I'll find myself slipping up on my own communication. And not really doing the right thing on that end. Patrick: Any guy ... every guy needs to know that you should do that. Women need to hear that, that they need to feel that. That you have to have a constant string of communication like that. If you don't then you need to find a chick .. you haven't really found the one that's worth it for you. You need to find someone that's worth it for you to do that for. Patrick: If you've got somebody then you don't need to be with them. You need to go let them find somebody that will give them that. Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: Any guy that knows what he's doing will communicate every day. At least that's from my experience. Patrick: What do you think? Katrina: Yeah, for sure. For sure. But I think sometimes also men just don't know this. I think they legitimately ... this is what I've heard or read or figured out from observing ... sometimes I think men think, what I said before. You said men need to be vulnerable and say what they're thinking and feeling. And a lot of times men think, oh she already knows that I feel that. But it's like even if we know, we still want to hear it. Kind of repeatedly. Patrick: Yeah, yeah. Still say it even if you don't get a response from it. Keep on saying it. Keep on saying it. Just keep on going. Same thing with their life. Y'all can get busy too. Katrina: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Patrick: It's the same way though. That's where the miscommunication comes in. But do never stop telling a woman the stuff that you feel about them. Should never stop doing that. It should be consistent. Consistent thing. Patrick: As far as guys go, how we communicate. Me and my best friends we just send meme's back and forth I work with my friend. So we'll pick up the phone and talk business. Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: Calling ... people don't fucking call anymore, you gotta call. And talk too. Pick up the phone and call.- Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: Meaningful talking, tell them what's on your mind. Tell them how you feel, that's what all of this is all about feelings. All feels. Katrina: It goes both ways cause I know we get really scared to say what we're feeling, cause it's just that constant vulnerability. Fear of being exposed or fear of feeling that you've opened yourself up. Vulnerability that you might get rejected or hurt. So if men what to say what they're feeling more, women need to be brave enough to do that as well. And ultimately realise that if you tell a guy how you feel and you share your truth. And then that scares them away or they don't agree or don't like it or they don't align to it. Then that's fantastic then you figured out not to waste your time. Better to say what you really think and you really want and having a discussion about or feel like, nope that's never gonna happen, that doesn't move it for me, I don't like it, I don't align to that. Well maybe you got hurt or you feel hurt but actually you saved yourself a fuck load of effort and time, rather than dancing around hoping you can ... what? Trick some body into wanting to be with you or something? Patrick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You also got ... sorry I was just reading some of these comments ... but you also got ... fuck I was thinking of something ... fuck ... my brain, I just had an aneurism ...- Katrina: Just a minor little one. You look fine. You seemed to have survived. Marsha says you love the accent. I don't know if you means your accent or my accent. Patrick: What I was going to say is if the guy also has issues in the past ... as I do .. I have issues in the past, that I've been fucked over before, plenty of times. All you have to fucken do is say it. Very fucken simple. Just fucken tell the situation.- Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: You've been fucked over. Who gives a fuck, the same way as there are as many clients in the world. There's as many women in the world. So why don't you just be honest, you're gonna run into somebody. Just be fucking honest, say what the fuck ... say what is really going on.- Katrina: Yeah, for sure.- Patrick: What think she's gonna tell her friends and you're never gonna get laid again? Don't be stupid, and turn away getting laid. Say what you really ... don't lead people down this death trap. If you've got issues, if you got shit you need to work out. Bring that shit up to the front. Let em know, boom what you get yourselves into, that way they know. That way from there it's so easy to be honest. ' Katrina: Right. Totally. Women appreciate that. I don't know if men wanna hear all that. Actually I wanna hear your answer to this cause I saw guy the other day say ... I can't remember where this was maybe a post on Facebook or something ... I saw a guy say, I don't wanna hear all your issues, I don't wanna hear your shit that happened with your ex or something. And I was kind of triggered by it when I saw this post. Katrina: Okay, I wouldn't want to be going on and on about my previous relationships all the time. But it does feel like to me it's relevant or important to talk about cause that's part of who I am in as a person and part of my growth that I'm currently doing ... for me personally for example ... is a lot of it is what I learned from previous relationships that I didn't want. Katrina: So to me it makes sense that I would speak about that to some degree, with the person who's in my life. I saw this guy put a post up like, you know, men don't wanna hear that, we don't want to hear your stories about what happened to you before or what your feeling. It was maybe kind of an asshole post but I was like, is that true? Cause women do ... we do actually wanna hear those stories. We really wanna hear where somebody's at and what they're thinking or feeling. Cause then it comes back to civility and we feel safe. Okay now I understand it. Patrick: Like if she's worth it. If she's worth it. Bad communication if she's worth it and you don't wanna hear her fucking past because that's all good shit right there. You want to know her demons are up, you want to know who her fucking enemies are because you want to go, her enemies are your fucking enemies, right? That's your job as a man. So you gotta ... this is all information you should wanna hear ... like I said, if she's worth it. If she's not then bounce down the road.- Katrina: Yep.- Patrick: But if she is, if she's worth it to you then that would be the lamest thing I ever heard. I bet she's probably not getting much ... like you said you were getting turned off ...- Katrina: Yeah I unfriended him.- Patrick: There you go.- Katrina: I only keep how bad people and I was like ... okay thank you for showing me who you are. But I was curious ... then I felt insecure by it ... because then I was thinking that I've shared things that have to do with my past relationships even with you and then I was like, shit is that an annoying thing to do. Should I not be doing that? Then I kind of questioned myself on it. And then I moved on. But I was curious if other men think that or this guy was just random dude on my newsfeed that somehow snuck.- Patrick: That's a random dude. You wanna know as a man who wants to be better man who wants his relationships to last, you should be more than interested, more than happy. And those people be like, oh my gosh I can't hear this. I know some dudes thinking this way. But fuck man you probably suck at communication. Look at your relationships. Look at what you got going on in your life. Look at the woman of your dreams, is she still there? Probably fucking not. Patrick: You should wanna hear that shit. You should want to listen to that and hear it. You wanna know what her crazy is. You wanna take her crazy. You wanna be able to handle ... just drop it on me. Drop all the bad, drop all the negative, bring it to me. I'll take it for you. We'll play these games together. Katrina: Yeah, yeah. Patrick: That's the best ...- Katrina: That's pretty cool. I think that's definitely what makes us feel safe. That's what we want. We want to feel that way, safe to express. And it's also because relationship are constant growth. There constantly giving you an opportunity to see your shit. Sometimes your shit comes up. I think the more a relationship is a soul alliance relationship the more that it actually can show you your shit and bring your shit to the surface, so sometimes it can feel a bit relentless or a bit fuck I don't wanna be faced with all my shit every fricken day. And it's kind of life with mentoring as well. With a solo mentoring, I know I'm such a mirror for my clients, that sometimes they don't want to hear it. They're like fuck off Kat. Get up, go away, I don't wanna be in that space. And it's well okay, they're gonna come back anyway cause this the growth that I know I need. Right?- Patrick: Yeah.- Katrina: This is what I need to step into. And I think with a soul alliance relationship it's the same thing. The more that there's a true connection there the more it's actually for your growth for both of you. For your growth and healing so it may or may not last forever, whatever that is, but either way when there's that connection and that time together, you're both going to continually get confronted with your shit and then it's, okay, yes it feels uncomfortable or I feel scared or I feel triggered or now I'm feeling insecure. Katrina: So the two things I've really learned from that is, like what we've just been saying, tell the other person this is what I'm feeling. I'm feeling insecure, I'm feeling this. But secondly also look at, what can I learn from that? How can I grow from that? Because is that real and true or is this my reactive story. Maybe something happens and then it reminds you of a previous relationship, where that meant something bad or scary so then you automatically assume something bad or scary's gonna happen and you get into this reactive state and this reactive story rather than actually seeing for what it is. And being like ah ... like a huge one for girls is if they message a guy and then the guy doesn't reply, right? Or doesn't reply for a few days or whatever. Katrina: We'll go into a massive tail spin drama, like clearly he hates me now. He doesn't like me at all, he's not interested and then ... my friends and I were talking ... I think Linda and I were talking about this ... and it was like or maybe he just didn't reply and that's the whole end of the story and there's actually no additional meaning to it at all. And you just created all this stuff in your head. Like maybe you did this, maybe he wasn't checking messages, maybe he didn't feel like replying. But it doesn't have to be, oh my God it was this and this and this and this and this. Katrina: So for me when I notice myself having those reactions, like oh my God it means this this this and this and then I laugh at it. I'm like okay or it could mean nothing at all. I've got all my own stories and drama coming up so this is a great opportunity for me to process that, detoxify it and see where I'm living actively in, as opposed to casting in myself. Patrick: Yeah. But he could also say something to to fix that. Like if you don't hear from me, and say like an hour or two hours after you message me just hit me back, you've probably got lost in the sauce. Probably got lost in the mix. Katrina: Yeah, yeah.- Patrick: Something he could fix right there. Katrina: But without ...- Patrick: If you're a man.- Katrina: That's a good thing to say cause what women will think though. They would think that would make me look needy or insecure, if I followed up the message. Then he's gonna think I'm hassling him or I'm needy. So that's the female mindset. Patrick: Yeah.- Katrina: Right? Rather than being more ... go ahead.- Patrick: What's that? Patrick: Hello? Patrick: We got a bad connection? Katrina: No, I think I just cut you off. We're you still talking? Patrick: I was just saying if you say something like that, then that kind of opens ... that lets you do know that that's cool to do, you know? Katrina: Right. Yeah.- Patrick: It opens it up.- Katrina: Yeah. Alright I feel like we talked a lot about what women want from men but what do men want from women then? Patrick: Well, it's pretty basic. Obviously if your a deeper thinking guy you want good conversation, good company, hanging out. But then there's always sex, the basic needs, sex ... I mean just want to ... you have to have something you really want to go for. It's like a [inaudible 00:49:22]. It has to be something you're really trying to achieve. And this could something more than, it's something you're trying to get over yourself. Something you're trying to level up yourself. You definitely want somebody you can speak with, that you can communicate with and just share stuff back and forth with. A companion is what a good girlfriend is, you know? Patrick: That's pretty basic. Guys we don't really require that much. As long as those things are there that's fine. Also, and this just ... there's a lot of different flavours of what people are looking for out there. I can't tell a guy what he's looking for in a woman or anything like that, you know? But as far as my own wife. Being open, being honest, say what I wanna say and have somebody that's down with that ...- Katrina: Shit.- Patrick: Like I said, as long as I'm being honest then I don't have to worry about ...- Katrina: Oh my God.- Patrick: I don't have to worry about the other shit. That other persons gonna bounce off, that's gonna be my flavour. It's like the perfect client or the perfect customer.- Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: As long as I keep on being myself and keep on saying what's on my mind out here, then they're gonna come. Katrina: Be fully you.- Patrick: My right person. I can't speak for all men on what they're looking for, all I know is that I keep doing this. Keep saying what's on my mind then the right person or right people are gonna come into my life no matter what. That's not a problem. I just manifest that.- Katrina: Yeah. Katrina: [crosstalk 00:51:13] Katrina: It's the same as your friends, right? We don't worry about all this stuff in order to find any amazing friends that we've got in our lives. It didn't come about through some process surveying people, trying to be cool, trying to be whatever. You become friends with someone because it just happens somehow. Wherever you met them. There's a resonance there and you become best friends. And that's exactly how I've attracted all my friends. It just kind of happens. I just be who I am and they come along. It definitely had gotta be the same with relationship ... I think there's probably exceptions to this ... I think it can be super casual or whatever, doesn't really matter as much, it's just in the moment. Katrina: But for anyone who you're gonna see ... for me at least ... anyone that I'm gonna see more than a few times, I've gotta have that connection, I've gotta have that resonance there. Or I'm gonna get really bored. But it's just not, it doesn't feel like a good use of my time. It would kind of feel like I would try and be friends with somebody just because they were my neighbour or lived on my street. I'm sure we could get a long and have a conversation but I'm really gonna not do that unless I absolutely have to. Patrick: Yeah, exactly. Or just in a particular situation, you're out having fun or whatever and it's just something happens. That's natural. If you're a person who's congruent, people are gonna find that attractive about you. People are gonna find you attractive just cause you're a nice woman, you got nice hair and everything like that. So they're gonna find you attractive. I don't discount anybody out here having fun and doing all that. But for fun if you're talking about a soul connection and things like that, that just comes ... you feel that back and forth. It's just somebody who's easy for you to talk to.- Katrina: Right.- Patrick: It's so easy for you to pick up the phone and talk to them. Or so easy for you to text back and forth and speak to them and you can speak to them for a long time and you can speak to them for a long time, it's good conversation. If you don't have that and you've just got this shit pieced together because of the persons looks or you're feeling rejecting of that person to leave. If you don't have this back and forth then why the fuck ...- Katrina: There's no connection ...- Patrick: Go ...- Katrina: Right ...- Patrick: Just figure something else out, stope having a scared fish mentality about your life.- Katrina: Totally.- Patrick: You're scared this persons gonna leave. Or your scared this persons gonna think of you or whatever. And you just so forgetting that there's seven billion people on this planet. Katrina: Yeah. It should only be soulful. The friend thing again. There's plenty of friends that I've faded out over my life in the past five to ten years as I've become more and more who I am, I guess. In business and life. There's been friendships lost along the way. It's not like I ever broke up with any friends or socked anybody as my friend. But it just faded away, like you would meet up and it would be like, so this is really hard going to have a conversation. Katrina: So to me I have the level that I expect from all my relationships. Whether it's friends, clients, or romantically, where I'm just not gonna be in that if I don't have that conversation. And with men in particular, it wouldn't even progress beyond a certain point of that connections not there. You might have somebody and go out once or twice, but for me and my client as well ... I speak for my clients. I don't think it would get past two or three times meeting up with someone where your like, well if that conversation isn't there I can't do that. This is draining my soul and my mind. It doesn't mean I can't laugh and have fun and be social in different situations. But to spend time one on one with somebody, sex alone is not enough to keep you going, to meet up with somebody. At a certain point it's like I actually have to talk to this person as well. Patrick: Yep. It's one that leads to deeper conversations. It just is. But with the internet now, with social media the way it is ... you're really wasting time ... I can understand back in the day with horse and buggy shit and they had to settle, settle for something out there. But you're an enlightened person, you're thinking higher level than you would be so wasting your time. And why would you do such a fucking thing? Why would you settle and trap yourself and be living in a prison the rest of your life? I could not imagine what that must feel like for some people, you know? Katrina: Well people accept it as normal. They accept that that's just how it is. That relationships are a drain and that they're not something that I value to you. It's like something that cost you and I felt that way for a period as well, as you know. It was just where I was at in my journey that I bought into that belief. But fundamentally I didn't believe it and I wonder ... I see so many people who are so unhappy in their relationships and they just think that's how it is. But typically the people who I observe that are like that are the people who are not creating their life purposefully in other areas also. They're just accepting the status quo in everything. Where as for people like us, and people watching this. You don't accept the status quo in business or in lifestyle or in health. So why the fuck would we accept it in relationships? Katrina: Even for me, even when I was settling. I was so out of alignment and I knew it. I knew that fundamentally I don't believe this is how it has to be, of course I can have it all, cause I create my reality in business, in fitness , with my money, with my travel, with my lifestyle. Why would I not believe I can have a standard of excellence and amazingness in that area as well ...- Patrick: That's ...- Katrina: You can believe that ...- Patrick: That's a self love thing though. I think we've talked about this too. A big thing is self love. I started looking at this shit and I used to drink quite a bit and I started getting into these bad relationships. I started thinking about, I'd get into these bad relationships and I'd drink. When I wake up the next morning I would always think these things, I can't believe what you did, you fucken, I can't believe you acted like that, you drank, you piece of shit, you're fucken worthless. You're like garbage and I fucken hate myself. Patrick: So I thought this was something that happened after I got drunk. After I would get drunk and wake up the next morning just have these thoughts. But then I really started getting into loving myself. Love myself, loving the way I talk, loving the way I speak, loving the way I do things, loving the way I write and do things in general. And thinking that no matter what, even if I'm out there fucking up, I got my meme, I love the way I fuck things up. I love the way I fuck shit up ...- Katrina: Yeah, yeah, yeah.- Patrick: Even if I fuck shit up, it's part of my journey and I'm having a good time right? Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: I love the way that I do that. I love the way I get into shit. I get into some fucken trouble in the club, whatever, you know what I'm saying? I'm having a good time, it's fun. So then I start living like that, I started waking up and started feeling like, I would even get drunk and wake up the next morning and be like, fuck ... I wasn't having these thoughts anymore, you know? Katrina: Yep.- Patrick: I'm like I love myself.- Katrina: That self acceptance, yeah.- Patrick: It's not the ...- Katrina: Totally ...- Patrick: I'm not telling anybody just go be an alcoholic, I have a few drinks right? I've gotta control myself still. But, everything's in order. I'm not doing totally crazy shit like driving. I'll take an Uber as where I go. I just go have a good time. And even if I did, it's still self love. No matter what you do, still love yourself cause it's part of the fucken journey. That person that really, that person that needs to be in your life can come into your life, you know? And be part of your life, cause other wise you're gonna be building this prison cell for yourself. Katrina: Right.- Patrick: Around these people that you don't fucken life, cause you don't like yourself.- Katrina: Right, it's gotta be total love and acceptance. Brandon said love yourself even if you eat those fries. That's a really relevant analogy for a lot of women in particular. Katrina: Like I spent 15 years of my life if I would eat a fricken cookie I would hate myself for it and then I would do hours in the gym the next day. Now I'm like, if I eat something that doesn't feel good to me I'm like, okay whatever, either way I love and accept myself and from a place of love and acceptance I'm probably gonna make good choices. Katrina: Like there's many times where I might say something ... in relationships ... where I then feel self conscious or I feel like oh my God that was stupid or maybe I said it the wrong way. But I let go of it instantly now, because I'm like, it's whatever because I'm safe to be me. I love and accept myself regardless. And either this connection is real and will go on or it's not. And either way is fine. Cause like you were saying before, there's so many people in the world. The soul mate people are out there. The cookies. They want cookies ...- Patrick: They all sound good to me right now, I wish I had some ...- Katrina: Cookies. I just think you're so grounded when you learn how to love yourself. I know I fully love and accept myself now and that's probably really been in the past six to nine months. I think we were talking about this last week. I had to actively learn to do that though. I noticed that I finally admitted and acknowledged that I didn't love myself. That I wasn't treating myself as a person who loves themselves. And I embarked upon a bit of a journey to do that. Really, through my inner work and set work but mainly through choosing it. And also it's a helpful thing to use as kind of like, in order to figure shit out, whenever you feel unsure how to interact with somebody ... in a relationship or this is true in business also ... then you can say to yourself, if I did fully accept and love myself, what would I say in this moment? Right? - Patrick: Right.- Katrina: Or what would I act like? Is it something I need or want. I feel like that person doesn't know that or maybe they don't wanna give that. Well if I loved and accepted myself I would say what want. I would be okay with saying this is what I want, this is what I need. And I'd also be okay with the answer regardless, right? Katrina: Why would I need to be scared to say what I want if I love and accept myself? Patrick: Exactly. Same thing with guys too. - Katrina: So it's a practise.- Patrick: I could see myself though, before this, cause I've heard this plenty of times before and when I was younger. So it's very hard for somebody that doesn't love themselves to hear this kind of stuff. I don't know what you're talking about loving yourself, what the fuck are you talking about? Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: That shit. Life sucks, this kind of stuff. It's very hard, maybe this will change somebody that's right on the edge of that and get it started ...- Katrina: Well people have to be ... Katrina: [inaudible 01:02:49] Patrick: What is that? You said ... a guy still needs to hear this stuff to as well. Cause you've got two voices going on in your head. You got this one that's saying, yeah you got this pump up voice that's saying let's go dominate the world, let's go crush it, let's go make this money. But you also got this one that say, you fucken piece of shit, I can't believe you fucken did this, I can't believe that you fucked up again. People do this all the time, you'll say stuff, like you just fuck up, I can't believe you fucken lost your keys again, when you gonna stop fucken losing your keys. Where if you've heard somebody talk to you like this, if you heard somebody saying things to you like this, you would tell him to go fuck himself you know? If they told you, if they said things like this in real life ...- Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: You'd tell em to go fuck themselves. So it's like another, it's about self love right? That's a big ... that's a disconnect right there. You have to get rid of that voice, you have to love the stupid shit that you do ...- Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: You have to love all the shit that you do no matter what, cause it's just your journey. You have to flip that, so I'm telling you, that's part of it. So if you cath yourself saying things like that to yourself then that's a problem. That's something you need to ... when you do, your life's gonna be better, your relationships gonna be better. Things are just gonna fall into place.- Katrina: And it just makes it so easy well. You realise that you can't screw up. It's not possible to screw anything up. And then the other thing I like to use as a guiding question aside from love and acceptance is, reminding myself that everything's perfect and everything's as it's meant the be. So sometime when something happens where at first you're like fuck, that's not good, or that's scary or bad or whatever. To then go, oh but wait, if I fundamentally believe that everything's perfect then that means this actually meant to be what's happened. So even though I don't understand it right now or it feels confronting or it's just annoying or whatever it is. If everything's perfect, than that means this is perfect, that means I'm safe. That means everything's as it's meant to be, I'm on path, even if I can't see the fucking path. So therefore, I'm free. So what do I actually choose to do. What is my action that I'm gonna take in this moment. What do I want to say. Katrina: I just think relationship in particular are built ... commonly built on so much fear ... like so much masking and ding and trying to say the right thing or trying to show not too much of yourself, cause then you might end up unsafe. But really you get that safety from inside of you and it starts with love and acceptance. And it starts with having powerful, fundamental beliefs in place. Such as I believe I always make the right decision. I fully believe that about myself, but I had to process that belief, I had to cultivate that belief and even when I didn't believe it. Cause at first my mind would have been like, uh no you don't you screw up all the time. Katrina: So then I started practising that belief. No, I always make the right decision, everything is always as it's meant to be. It is impossible for me to screw up. Even if I say something and afterwards I'm like, why did I say that? Then I'll smile and go, well maybe I can't see the reason right now but I know that I always make the right decision. - Patrick: There you go. - Katrina: So therefore I was meant to say that in order to learn something. Patrick: Yep, exactly. I know I'm doing the right thing. No matter what. Not only that you have better conversations when you're honest. You'll start seeing these conversations, you'll start having these conversations, like holy fuck this is a real conversation.- Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: What the fuck are these mother fucker talking about? You listen to them. I heard one like, can we skip TGI Fridays today and go to this other place? TG what the fuck? Shit that you're talking about when you're having an honest conversation, like this is a different fucking conversation. It's a totally different thing. - Katrina: It's a whole new level. It's a level that most people will never operate on the truth of the matter. And like you said, maybe some people watch this and they're like what the fuck are these people on about. They're just full of shit or whatever. But I think people have to be understood and pointed on their journey. Even if they don't understand this to be curious and be like, yeah I feel like there's something there that I can explore and want to explore. And I wanna open myself up to that. Katrina: Why would you not open yourself up to complete freedom? Right? Patrick: You should. And that's why, the thing about marriage, I just don't see ... there's so much fucking different, different problems along the way. If these people have built something and they've signed a contract. If they've built it on something and they've signed a contract on something that's not like this. That's not 100 percent completely honest, which most of it isn't, let's be honest. Then I feel fucken sorry for these people. I really do. Katrina: Yeah.- Patrick: It's just fucked up. Cause that's society, like we saying that's hypnotising, that's brain washing, that's why people wear these masks in the first place. That why people shut themselves down, and then they get in these fucken situations and then you know, next thing you know, get date nights and all this weird shit going on. Katrina: Yeah, but I think. I know for me, back when I got married, I'd never heard of all this stuff. It never occurred to me to share my deepest fears. I know we did speak very openly and vulnerably about a lot of stuff I guess but there were certain things where you didn't or you wouldn't or I didn't have the level of communicating or understanding that I do now have. And most people don't ... like you and I and people here, we're doing growth work every single day.- Patrick: Every day.- Katrina: In multiple areas of our lives and we're unbelieving all the time. Where as most people when they enter a relationship or get married have not even fricken heard of growth work so they might try and have an honest conversation but they don't even understand what that would mean to have a really honest conversation. So it's kind of an interesting one. I think even if you had a massive awesome level of open honest communication and then you got married ... but with or without you have this relationship, an official relationship. Well the only way that that's gonna thrive is if people are continuing their own individual growth and continuing to have those open discussions together as well. Katrina: It's just ... the reality is, there's just a few amount of people in the world, percentage wise, who do that. It still adds up to millions of people obviously but, it's not the norm. Katrina: I hear people talk about their relationships all the time or you'll observe it or you listen in. I travel so much and usually I'm by myself when I'm travelling so I really commonly will go to restaurants by myself and I'll just work on my laptop. And it's so interesting to just observe couple togeth

Kat: Alright. We cannot begin yet. Okay, one second. Hmm, approve. Kat: I feel like I'm brand new to the internet when I do these sorts of things. Patrick: Hey! Kat: I feel like such a magician. Patrick: We can begin. Kat: To me it's like a greater accomplishment to successfully do a split screen broadcast then it is to launch some massive new programme. Patrick: It's pretty badass. Kat: Yeah, I was very scared about how that would work. I felt technologically challenged. Patrick: I'm trying to get used to it. But I ... Kat: Is somebody seriously sending angry faces? Patrick: Yeah. Probably Brandon. Kat: Brandon's angry that he's not on the live stream. Patrick: Yup. Sorry Brandon, not today. Not today. Kat: Not today. I've got to say that my lighting looks better than your lighting. Patrick: Not right now. I put in my room so I can get way better lighting. Actually I'm gonna do you even ... Kat: You're view is way better. Patrick: I'm gonna do even dirtier than this. Kat: Dirtier? We're going dirty already? Patrick: Real dirty style. There we go. Okay. Actually I'll get in that bed. Kat: Is that an accent? Whose got an accent? I don't have an accent, obviously. Everybody knows that. Patrick: No way. Kat: My accent is ... Patrick: It's purely for shits and gigs. Kat: One day, maybe when you've known me for a hundred years, you'll figure out that I'm not British. Patrick: British, Australian, it's the same thing. I'm sorry to let you know it. Kat: Oh, it's so not. Patrick: Alright, so I'm all set up now. So my lighting is good. Let's see where you told me about the ... To turn the lighting on. I can't really do it. That's one thing that's missing here, is that little button you showed me to brighten it up. You know, to brighten the ... Kat: You look bright. Patrick: Yeah, let me see if I can switch that on. Kat: You look like you've got a tanning line [inaudible 00:02:26] on your face. Patrick: That's good. 'Cause I definitely do not. But let me get some more. Put that down. Boom. Kat: Alright. Now we're gonna go into it. Patrick: I don't know how you want to start this off, but I'm ready. I am in the zone. Kat: Firstly I think we need to set the tone, and let people know that this will only be serious and professional content. No laughing emojis are allowed. Patrick: Hey let me share this. I wonder if I can share this with my group? Let's see if that works on this thing. Kat: Yup. Patrick: Okay, share to group. Awesome. Players club, there we go. Kat: Hey. Patrick: Boom, it's done. Kat: I just said no laughing emojis you guys. Don't send laughing emojis automatically when I say "no laughing emojis". That wasn't funny at all. It was completely non-funny. We've actually had a serious discussion about this live stream before. We went live, it's actually taken all day, neither of us have accomplished anything. Except discussing the fact that this live stream will be only serious and professional business. Patrick: Straight professional. Only professional business. Strictly business. Kat: Purely professional. Strictly business. People wanted me to introduce you again. How did every ... how did ... You gotta go ... Sorry can't do intros again. We did intros last week. You're gonna have to go to his profile, follow his profile. You'll very quickly figure it out. You'll either be deeply drawn in, or potentially shocked and appalled and you'll leave. Patrick: Gonna be horri ... Kat: Much the same as when people [inaudible 00:03:55] my profile. Patrick: You'll be horrified. Yeah I'm on a camp chair, Meg. Meg just asked me if I'm on a camp chair. This is a camp chair in my house. Kat: Yes. Patrick: That's a quick ... But that's a good segue right there. Why am I on this camp chair? I'll tell you why. You know, I'm just recently starting new, you can go check out my stuff. You see all the stuff that has been going wrong since I actually finished my offer, and put my offer out there. Right? Patrick: So, I had quit my job to go start doing all this crazy cool shit that Cat told me about. Convinced me to go be myself and just say whatever the fuck is on my mind. Just have ... Kat: I didn't convince anybody of anything. Patrick: You convinced me. She convinced me to do it, so I just quit my job. If this fails, I'm blaming it all on you Cat. I'm blaming it all on you. And uh ... Yes you. Kat: I did nothing. I just lead my damn life and then people do whatever they want in response to it. Patrick: What I heard was "Quit your job, Patrick, quit your job." So over and over again I'm hearing this, and I left. And so ... Kat: Question. Patrick: What's that? Kat: Can we block Ryan's [inaudible 00:05:07] from being on this live stream? Patrick: Yeah he's [inaudible 00:05:09]. Very, very mad. But I think he knows that you had some kind of part in this whole thing. So, of course. Patrick: But anyways, so I just jumped off cold turkey. Needless to say, I still had a shit tonne of bills, 'cause I live a pretty expensive lifestyle. And so, yeah I just said "Fuck it". I just had a couple of skills. Patrick: Now I do have a few skills. I do build marketing automation systems. I do build for people like Cat, coaches. You know I can take your shit and boost that shit up. You know what I mean? Get you some automation going, make you some money. But, that's a skill that I'm not really trying to use. Why? Because somebody else is trying to do this shit for myself. Patrick: the first time in my life, I'm making my own bed, I'm doing my own thing. I'm doing it for myself. What's on my mind is going to come out. Putting it out there, and just to bring this all back home. The fucking deal is, ever since I started doing this, every fucking thing I can possibly think of, that could possibly go wrong, is going wrong. Patrick: As a matter of fact I'm on a cell phone right now. Because my laptop screen, my mac screen burnt the fuck out. TV burnt out. I can't even, the list goes on and on. It's just. Kat: What? The TV burnt out now? Patrick: The TV burnt out, the laptop screen burnt out. First the laptop screen burnt out. On my mac that I bought, like probably two years ago, all of sudden that shit burnt out. On the day that I dropped my offer, mind. On the day that I finally, finally stayed up all night, and crafted this thing out and wrote it all up. Kat: Tried to go to bed halfway through. Patrick: Tried to go to bed halfway through. Not being able to. And staying up and finishing it. Then waking up early in the morning and even more finishing it. And then even halfway through the day, till one o'clock today, finally finishing it. Off of a MacBook, which had a burnt out screen. That I hooked up to a big ass TV, in the living room. Kat: Which looked amazing. Patrick: It looked pretty good. Yeah it looked amazing. I was gonna do what you told me. Which was present my offer. Instead of just writing it out, I was gonna present my offer on TV. It was gonna be all crazy, badass, a great idea. I thought it would have been fucking wonderful. Had it worked. Patrick: So, you know, TV burnt out. Brand new TV mind you. Don't buy Zenio. The MacBook burnt out, and now won't connect to that TV. I took it in here to the other TV. It won't connect to that one either. And every possible thing to prevent me from doing this, has been happening. Patrick: So now, I have a little phone, and a camp chair. Because I'm not gonna sit in there, I'm gonna sit right here and actually have something go right. I'm having a good backdrop, right? Patrick: I have a good backdrop, and just ... I don't know. This is going pretty well I think. Kat: It's going exactly as it's meant to. Are you reading the comments? Patrick: I am kind of, yeah. I was just talking. I get ADD so I can't really, I'm gonna have to go back. Kat: Well, everybody's like "Your whole life is blowing up". I think Katie said, this is pretty much ... You know this, this happens. I hear this every single time somebody actually full backs themselves. Kat: Yeah exactly what Kristin said. It's an "are you sure" from the Universe. Patrick: Yeah, it's double check on it right? I don't fucking know. I don't know, but it's crazy. It's like a poltergeist, or something is ... Kat: It actually means ... Do you know what it means? It means, like all that shit happens. The more that shit like that happens, the answer is you just gotta be like "bring it the fuck on then, I'm ready". And let it go faster. And then it's a level up after that. It's the breakdown, before the breakthrough. Patrick: Yeah. Kat: Like for sure, if shit starts blowing up it's means that I'm about to go to a super high next level. And I've seen it a million times with my clients, and friends. Patrick: It's gotta be right there. You know, that's the one thing too. I'm totally, so all in with it and every single day I get even more all in on it. And just finishing that up, and just putting it out there and seeing all shit happen. It just makes me want to go even more all in, you know? So I'm like, let's just keep seeing how far this goes. And maybe, maybe you know, six months down the road I'm gonna be fucking living in a shoe box somewhere. Maybe. Patrick: But then I still have faith, and I still know that there's going to be that sales that gonna come in there. Eventually. It's gonna come. Kat: I think it's about, like everything that you would lean on outside of yourself gets striped away, and you learn how to fully lean on yourself. Patrick: Yeah. Kat: Yeah, "Arrow is drawn back before being shot forward" says Stephen. Patrick: He's in my ... Kat: Exactly. Patrick: He's in my entrepreneur players club. What's up Stephen? I dropped the link back there. Kat: Yeah, you gotta put that link for the club in here. Patrick: I gotta be marketing myself now. You know what I mean? I gotta be doing this. Kat: It's exactly how it goes for everyone. It's like, it's the test. And it's the "are you sure", and it's when you start laughing at it and be like "okay, I see what's happening here. Surrender." Then it all just starts to wash over you. Kat: But it makes you stronger anyway. Like, you're already getting stronger through it everyday. Patrick: It's tough. Some crazy stuff happened today too, though. Like just goes beyond that. Just to let me kind of know I'm going on the right path. Like, you know Travis Plum, he's on here right now. He's all in. He says "all in". Kat: [inaudible 00:10:49] Patrick: Yeah T Plum was over here today, and he is just all in. We have another sales guy that's gonna be coming on. He's doing his thing, and he just kind of popped up. So it just kind of feels like there's support now, on that. It's cool to see there's some other shit going on. It doesn't totally feel like I'm out here by myself, even though shit's still fucking up. Patrick: Shit's still fucking up for them. They're in the same boat, but now there's us. We're pouring the water out of the boat. And we're motivating each other. And it's kind of difficult when you're just by yourself doing it, but you kind of get those thoughts. You know what I mean? Patrick: The thoughts ... I don't know if you know what I mean, but you get the thoughts that ... You probably haven't had these thoughts in a long time. Kat: I don't know. Yeah, well I still remember though. It doesn't seem like that long ago for me really, since I was in that place. It's not actually that many years ago. Kat: But you know what I think is really cool? Basically nobody would talk about it, like you're talking about it right now, while they're going through it. Everybody waits till afterwards. Like even I fully talk about it as transparently as what you're talking about it right now. Kat: Nobody does that. Everybody waits till later on, and they can tell story. Or they might tell a little bit of it. [inaudible 00:12:17] your just like, "There it all is." Patrick: Hey I thought about that too, but I'm like, you know what if I'm going down through it, if I'm going to go through it, I'm like, might as well fucking do it. Just do it. Patrick: I was thinking though, and this is something I want to talk about. 'Cause I had wrote like a pretty long post earlier today, to go in company with my thing. You know. And it's like talking about how, you know I'm just gonna fucking do it. And I'm just gonna drop the parachute out and just fucking, just go and do it. Patrick: Not only that, I'm gonna show you guys ... I'm gonna let you all in to see it, and you know. I promise you that I'll take everybody through this whole thing and you'll be there, and everything like that. And there's all sorts of different options that could happen for me. Patrick: In the next month, or two months that if I don't put up, if things don't happen then there's very low levels that I can go to. But I'm totally comfortable with that. I've been there before. Kat: Right. Patrick: Be fun if ... I didn't think about that, you're right. But I have seen a couple of people do this before though. I saw one sell his, I saw one guy with line sell all of his shit and just start from scratch, you know. But I don't know how far he made it. I haven't seen him or heard from him in a long time. Patrick: You have the Demio webinar kids that created their own webinar software, and they did the same thing, and haven't heard from them in a while. So typically it hasn't worked out well for people that have, maybe like ... I guess what I'm saying I'm doing here is like how to just ... And I have been talking about it and walking it through the process of being honest about it, and saying that shit's getting fucked up. Patrick: I just gave Ryan back my car. You know what I'm saying? Like he had, when I worked for him, I'd had a fucking badass Maserati and everything like that. He'd let me use like a company car or whatever and I'd pay him the note on it and everything like that. It was nice and made me feel good. But I just went and gave it back to him. You know, so no car. Patrick: So, but I don't really need too much, where I really need a car anyway. I got my mind on, you know, bally at in about two months when my lease is up here. So you know, shit's going down. It is what it is. Fuck though. Kat: It's the all in thing. Patrick: Yeah, what's more important to me is the end treasure that's there. That I know is there, and that is there. I mean honestly, I'd rather have some different shit anyways. Kat: Exactly. It's just exactly like that meme you made with the plane flying off the cliff. Like, most people wouldn't be willing to go through it. Kat: Like the crazy thing, I used to wonder what is the worst thing that could possibly happen if I would run out of money, and if things didn't turn around, and it got down to where I had like, eight, nine cents in the bank. Then I would always end up making a few dollars to just, kind of keep my head above water. But sometimes I couldn't buy food, or anything like that. And it was always like, just can you get through that one day? And sometimes it was like, I think I'm gonna be done after this day. Patrick: Yeah. Kat: But I remember, I thought "Okay but what's the absolute worse case outcome?" And for me, it was move back in with my mom and dad. And I'm like, alright well that's not actually like the worst fucking thing in the world. I'm sure I'll start acting like a bratty teenager after like three days, 'cause that's what happens when I stay with my parents. But it's not gonna kill me. Kat: So then, it was kind of like acknowledging that I'm not gonna ... Like you're subconscious mind, or your nervous system is screaming at you that you're gonna die. Patrick: Yeah. Kat: And so that's why most entrepreneurs flake out. Because they can't handle the emotional pressure, and they can't handle the nervous system pressure. Having this nervous system response that says you're about to get eaten by a lion and a tiger. Like that's a hormonal response. Kat: When really, it's like if I totally hit rock bottom it would mean living with my mom. And then I would just get pissed about that and then I would go sell some shit. And either way, I'm gonna make it. Right? Patrick: Yeah. Kat: So then kind of go, oh why am I letting that shit get to me then? Like, can I get through today? Yes. Do I believe that I'm ultimately gonna make it? Yes. So, keep fucking going. But most people? Kat: That's why we say one percent within the one percent. Like I know for a fact, like only 0.001 percent would put themselves through what I went through emotionally. Patrick: Yeah. Kat: Or what you're going through now. Patrick: True. Yeah, and then you get stuff and you get so attached to the stuff that you're, that people get scared. And they're so secure, and they get scared to let it go. You know, and in order to get back to the big picture or to get to that next level. Patrick: But I think about the same thing you think too. I've been thinking of like options too. What's the worst that could happen to me? I'd have to go back down, 'cause I'm from the trailer park. So I have to go back down, and live with my dad. Patrick: You know, I'd have to go live with my dad. Which I also think, what's something that I would do as a very high level, once I make it? Once I'm living this fucking life of my dreams. You know what I'm saying? Once I'm like able to go and do anything, and live anywhere, and travel the world like I want to. Which is exactly what I'm gonna do no matter what, in three months when my lease is up. Patrick: I'm really just here because my lease, I have to stay here till this lease is out. You know, then I'm gonna get. Who knows, my lease might be fucked up. Sorry Travis, but he's on the lease with me. Patrick: But me and him are kind of like going hard together. He's on the same journey. And he's just pretty much like "fuck it". He's got into this as well. Riding on him doing well as well. So it's all good, it's not like I'm totally alone on this thing. It's always good to have a friend, but I think like "What's the worst thing that could happen?" Patrick: Right? And then it's just something like, if I went down to my dad's and had to stay down there for like a month. This is something that I would most likely, my higher version of myself. My higher level self who's achieved this, this is something that he would probably do. Anyways. Patrick: Maybe I'm having a good time overseas, and stuff like that. And I'm kinda like, missing the states a little bit, I'm want to just come back and chill with him for like a month. You know? Just post up and just see him for a month. It's probably just something I would do. Patrick: You know? Kat: Yeah right. Patrick: It's just something you would fucking do. Kat: I mean all the fear, reactions, and emotions it's all based on real shit. Like when money's not coming in, that's a true and real thing. But if you put that aside and you come back to what you know is true inside of you, like you fucking know who you are and that you're going wherever you want to go. And anything that you've ever decided to do in your life and you actually meant it, you have already achieved. Kat: And even like, what I said on that video today. Like you've literally helped people make millions of dollars? Patrick: Yup. Kat: And it's just continually putting aside your own ... Like for those who don't know, 'cause you might see this if you go to Patrick's sales page anyway, but it was Patrick's, not idea, but he helped me get out my idea. And actually express it properly, to launch my inner circle. Kat: And my inner circle clients know this. But that's like my highest level thing. I actually said in that video, that it makes hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then when I awoke I was like, hold on. It's on track for a million dollars per year, from one stream of income. Kat: And that was something I'd been trying to bring to fruition, actually since 2013. And I've had a few iterations of it, which just weren't right. And then I got gun shy because I felt like, I just don't fully know how to ... Like I know the vision of what I want, but I couldn't actually get it out of me. And we were sitting on the couch one time and I just was like "Man this is ... I kind of want this, but I don't know." Kat: And he's like typing away doing his thing, and he's like "Oh well you should just ..." I don't know, I wish I could remember what he said. But, blah blah blah blah blah, something something something. And I just remember sitting there going, "How the ... What? Yes, that's exactly it." Kat: It was like you read my thought. Like that's ... You've got the skills is what I'm saying. Right? Like you've helped make or build a business that makes five million dollars a year. These are, like I'm not just sitting here trying to talk you up. Kat: But it's more like, when you feel like "Well what if the worst happened?" Or "What if this or that?" It's like, wait. Look how much I'm already helping people and can help people. It's a done fucking deal. And you'll go through whatever you've got to go through. If you go through some short term period, alright you get rid of all your stuff and it's just you and the camp chair left, you'll probably be happier anyway. Kat: You'll have the freedom you want to move around the world. And like, it doesn't matter. None of it fucking matters. Whatever's going on right now. Like a year from now, you're gonna look back and be like "It was all worth it". Patrick: Yeah. Kat: And it'll be so worth it, because then you can help the people you were meant to help, because you can actually understand it. Like I can understand all that my clients are going through, 'cause I actually went through it. And I was prepared to go through it. Same thing. Patrick: I'm trying to like, enjoy it right now. That's my big goal. You know? Kat: Right. Patrick: I want to enjoy it right now. I want to savour this, and hold onto the moment. And hold onto these moments that I'm here, and learn as much as I can while I'm in these moments. You know? Patrick: Learn as possibly, as much as I possibly can. Experience and feel, and remember as much as I possibly can from these moments. 'Cause once I cross over the line, and it breaks open for me and you know people start buying my stuff then, you know. My big thing is like, how am I gonna feel after that happens? Patrick: You know, I'm gonna feel great. I'm gonna feel great, but I'm also gonna be transforming, I'm gonna also have transformed into something else. You know, and it's gonna be just ... I don't know. I don't know how I'm gonna deal with that. Patrick: That's one of my deep thoughts right there for you, if you will. So. Kat: I don't think you change. I don't know, like I don't think I've changed. Like my surroundings have changed. I don't think I'm any different to who I was years ago. I think you remember. Kat: But also because you are actually talking about it openly now you'll just be able to watch your own video advice. Patrick: Say again? Kat: Because you're actually talking about it while you're going through it, you're documenting it. So you're not gonna forget because you're gonna have the videos. Kat: But I don't think you forget. I don't forget any of that stuff. I can remember all the feelings and the emotions of it. And sometimes I think maybe I take having money for granted, or like the kind of [inaudible 00:23:00]. Kat: Like that I never look at prices anymore. Sometimes maybe I take it for granted, but not really. Because I do still, very frequently have moments where I'm like "holy shit", like is this even real? Like how is this possible, it's really only been, you know, a small handful of years since it seems like an impossible dream. But then I always .. Patrick: You've been doing this fucking shit for like 20 years. Kat: 20 years, how old do you think I am? Patrick: No, I'm saying like you been doing this since you were like 10. Since you were like one year old. Kat: One year old? Actually it was three. But, thank you. Patrick: There you go. Yeah. Rounding up. Kat: But I was making money, but I was not holding onto the money. I was in debt, and you know. I was bottoming out. I sold my house that I owned. And that like, make like 30 grand profit on that, and that just disappeared. And then I sold my Audi, which was like my first nice car, an Audi '04. And I loved that car so much, and that money disappeared. And then I sold my little Chinese share portfolio, that I had from my 20s when I was trying to get serious about wealth, and then that money disappeared. Kat: And then I was even trying to sell shit on Ebay, but back then I didn't have like Channel purses to sell on Ebay. I had things that I was selling for five dollars. But it was really like, every little dollar counted. And then I would go and buy groceries, and I'd get like 30 dollars worth of groceries and I would go through the checkout. And I would never just like, check my bank account because I couldn't handle the fear. Kat: So I'd just go through the checkout, and basically pray that the card would go through. And sometimes it would, and sometimes it wouldn't. And you just keep going one day at a time, but even though you'd feel like "what if it never works, and what if I'm crazy?" And what if, all the stuff that you think, that everyone thinks. Kat: But then when you put all that emotion aside, you go back into your core and you go "but I do fucking know though." Patrick: Right. Kat: Like when I get out of the drama, I know. Like I just fucking know. It's not up for discussion. I will keep picking myself back up again, until I get there. And then ... Kat: Now I'm so fucking grateful for all that. And I do remember so much of it. I'm so fucking grateful that it's over. But I'm so fucking grateful I went through it. Because it made me so strong. Like I feel like, I have such high levels of resilience and tenacity and those are some of the most important characteristics for us. For entrepreneurs. Patrick: Absolutely. And you know I think ... Kat: It is what you said. Like embracing it now. Patrick: Well, you know, the think is too, is that I say all this stuff to you and then you just make me think too, that like I've already been here before. And I already overcame. And I'm already pretty much hacked this stuff, you know. Just by being able ... Just like I remember the first time that I actually sold something. Because whenever I first started working with Ryan, it was like he found me. Patrick: 'Cause I quit my job at the car dealership right? Went through a bad breakup, and it just made me realise, fucking life isn't for me to be putting all my happiness ... It isn't meant for me putting all my happiness into somebody else. That's kind of what kick started, and had me first say "fuck it all". You know? Patrick: And so I quit my job at the car dealership. I just walked in and it ... This was such a big moment in my life. That I didn't even like, have the questioning or anything like that about that. There was nothing that would've made me stay there. You know? Kat: Yeah. Patrick: This is like such a earth shattering thing to happen to me. I guess I was like, I guess I must been about 26 or 27. And it was just, I had put all my chips into this thing, you know? And thought I was getting engaged and this stuff, and like that you know? And then it came crashing down. Patrick: And I found out she was married to some dude in prison. Long story short. But it was, I just put so much stock into this thing you know? And then it just fucking like, came crashing down. And that was when I first saw the reality, kind of like shift. You know? Patrick: And I saw this for what it is. And once I started like picking back up the pieces of everything, I just realised like, it's not supposed to be like this. You know? It's not supposed to be, to where I give other things power and control of me. Patrick: For example, job, security, things like that. And I really just, really, really saw that. Like about a week or two afterwards, you know, after we had called everything off, and everything like that. And I just remember it clear as day. I was just like, immediately started selling all my shit off. And started to trim up. And I started to figure out ways to get out of there. Patrick: I mean I was not gonna stay there very long, but I eventually, it just... fuck it ...

Kat: Alright, I have no idea what just happened there. Okay. That was so weird. Patrick: Alrighty, man. Kat: That's literally never happened before. It was too much power for Facebook. Patrick: Too much. I'm telling you, too much. I never really told that story before either and I'm just like, ah, I just felt like ... I haven't really told that story in this, I've wrote about the story, but I haven't really said it, you know. So, yeah. Especially not a live stream in front of a people. Kat: This is what happens because we said we were going to do being funny and entertaining and now we're just going super deep. Patrick: Yeah, yeah, we did. Kat: But this is what happens. The camera goes on and it goes wherever it's meant to go. Hey, what's up Ryan. Patrick: It goes where it goes. What up Ryan. Kat: The message goes wherever it's meant to go. But what I got out of that story was you just fucking decided and then it happened because you actually decided to change things, right? It was like boom, I'm moving into a new phase. Patrick: Yeah. yeah, so I walked in there. I walked into the newest gym I was like, "I'm out, blase, blase, blase." I went to my house and from there just started trying to push it together. I didn't have very many bills, you know, so it wasn't that hard, and I just started to do ... This is the first time that I actually like started to tamper with doing something like this, with like sending out energy and messaging and stuff like that. I just started doing my thing and in a subtle way what I was doing was like I was trying to ... This is what I was talking to you about on a previous livestream, this is where I started to do things like survival gear and anything else that wasn't really me. I sell survival [crosstalk 00:01:58]. Yeah, bonded blogs, and everything that was mine, right? Patrick: And then I was just doing that and doing that and doing that and my old friend from the dealership who had came through and done his thing left and then started his own thing, Ryan Motherfucking Stumen, he started seeing that, right? He wouldn't have been able seen this if I wasn't doing it, you know what I mean? I didn't know at the time that's what happened, but he noticed that I was out here trying to do my thing so he reached out and he was like, "You know, you need to come check out what I got over here. I know you're trying with the bondage blog, I know you're trying with the survival gear and it probably isn't working for you really well, is it?" And I was like, "Nah, it really ain't, dog." Patrick: So I went over to see what he had going on. That's when I first got into a little bit internet marketing and the real shit, you know? The best mentor to help me out and take me through all this stuff. And so he pretty much took me as like his right hand man, showed me like all this stuff. It was just a great experience for me. It was basically like college for entrepreneurs, pretty much. What happened was, though ... I remember that, though. I remember not having anything. I remember trying and trying and trying to make a sale online. I'd never done that before. I'd never sold something like a digital programme or something like that. I'd never sold any of that stuff online before. I thought it was a bunch of weird shit, you know what I mean? Like who the fuck is going to buy ... One of Ryan's first programmes was something called Show Up and Close It and it was like 30 audio trainings. Some of them are like six minutes long and he had it set to like $4.97 and I'm thinking like, "Who's going to buy this?" You know what I mean? So I didn't really believe in it like- Kat: I bought that programme. Patrick: You bought it, right, of course, like a bad ass bought this. I'm a fucking billionaire- Kat: I bought it. I bought it for my team, actually. I don't know if they did it. I'm probably one of those bad clients that buys online programmes and then doesn't ever open them or log in. Patrick: A lot of people bought that programme though, you know? Like I sold a bunch of them. So that was like my first thing that I sold, you know, like online, and from a fucking house where I was flat broke and finally ... He fired me like three times because I couldn't sell it. I just couldn't believe. And finally I remember it cracked. And I just remember that day like it was yesterday. I remember going to the mall and being able to buy ... It was like Christmas and I didn't think I was going to by my family anything like that and like eh, here's goes another Christmas of being broke and all that shit and I just cracked it open. The sales just started to come through. And I just remember being at the mall and walking through there and I was listening to the song Muy Tranquilo, it's by Grammatic. I remember the song and everything like that, and I was just jamming around the mall listening to it and fighting back tears. So I remember that. And I have broken through that space of that part, you know what I mean? I've broken through that already and now I'm out here trying to fucking do it again. So yeah, I guess I've already done it so what the fuck am I talking about? Kat: There you go. I don't think we've remotely touched on the title of the topic of our show but I think more people need to tell this part of the story and the journey because everyone goes through this shit. And then when you tell your own story, you reaffirm your own confidence and belief in yourself from telling it. You remind yourself the things that you've done where it was scary or you had to make a massive life change and then literally I always think any time I've ever really decided to do something, then I did it and I got the result 100% of the time. Alright, Pat always looks like such a badass, probably that's because I am. Frank Kern actually made a video for me on Friday that testifies that I'm a certified badass. Patrick: I saw your badass-ery too when you fucking when you were working out. I'd just never seen like nothing that. Just such a savage at the gym. I was just like, whoa. Kat: What? Oh when we went to the gym last week? Patrick: Yeah, when we worked out together you were just killing it. I was like dude, fuck, what a beast, man. It would make anybody, and I've seen people out there working out, even like trainers and stuff and just blowing it out. It was crazy. Kat: Thank you. And I know it all, but even that's another example. Actually, who wants me to do this? You just reminded me of something I thought of this morning. I think I'm going to make a programme on how to age backwards. Who would buy that programme? Because I think I've started to age backwards. You're going to buy the programme. I meant for women, but sure, we'll do a section for men. Patrick: I'd buy it. Kat: Well actually, though, the gym thing, like obviously I was a trainer for 13 years, like the life I said to you then, well you've got to hope that I know how to train after being a trainer for 13 years. But sorry, I remember when I was 19, Ryan's going to buy it. Yeah, Ryan, I've seen products from you from four years ago. You should buy that. Sorry. Not sorry. When I was 19, I was doing upright rows in the gym and I was just getting the little bit of muscle definition coming through for the first time. I started working out when I was 17 and I remember looking at myself in the mirror and I remember having the though, 'huh. If I just kept doing this every day, like really consistent, by the time I'm 40, I'm going to have arms like Donna and I'll be just looking like I made a decision in my head in that moment, I'm going to get better and better with age.' Kat: And I look at photos of me from like four or five years ago and I look ten years old than I do now because there was a lot of stuff that wasn't in alignment in my life. And now, the time ... I feel like it's egotistical to say all this, but it's also true. Like even last night, my branding guy who does all my branding stuff here in LA, we were talking about Botox and I said something about how I always thought that one day I would get Botox, but now I've decided I won't because I read a research people that it freezes your actually emotions. And he's like, "What, you don't have any work done, yet?" And I'm like, "No, I've done nothing." Or last week the customs guy was staring at my passport for so long he's like, "This just doesn't match. The age isn't right." Or something like that. And I was like yes, because I fucking manifested it since I was 19. Kat: So being a badass is a decision you make in your head in whatever form that is and you just decide that's how it's going to be; less stress. Yeah, stress maybe is part of it. I think it's decision and choice, but that's stress as well. Now that you have more money, you have less pressure. I don't think it's to do with the money. You might be [inaudible 00:08:41]. I think it's alignment and I think it's a decision. Like I decide in my head that it's easy to stay in shape, that I get in better and better shape as time passe, that well now I've decided that I'm ageing backwards and it seems to be working, so, I don't know. Patrick: Do you journal about your appearance? Kat: Yes. Yeah. I journal about everything. It would be kind of embarrassing I suppose if people saw the stuff I write in my journal, because some of it sounds quite, like, I don't know, flippant? Not flippant, what's the word? Just kind of not that important or something or just a bit silly. But I write selective body stuff. I'll write stuff like "I always look and feel fucking amazing. I love my body inside and out." I'll write stuff like, I'm journaling on my breasts growing bigger. I just started that last week. Patrick: What? Kat: I'm journaling- Patrick: You're journaling what? Kat: -my breasts growing bigger. But I only started this- Patrick: Oh, on your breasts growing? Kat: Yeah, but I only started that last week, so I don't have any data to report back on that yet. That's a new one. Patrick: Like, "They're getting bigger today. Getting bigger today." Kat: Yeah, why not? Patrick: I found out that shrivelling is a process, so, just wanted to let you know that. Kat: Well, there's research that shows that if you just think ... Like they did research on bicep muscles that one guy's doing like bells on one side and then just thinking about the other side and you got better results just from the thinking. Patrick: Just from the thinking? Kat: Yeah. So I'm just saying why has this never occurred to me before? Let's test this out. Okay, everyone's going to start journaling on their breasts growing bigger, now. Brittany's in. Patrick: And all the dudes are going to be journaling on their penis size. Kat: Well, yeah. Journal whatever you've got to journal, people. Patrick: I don't want to be this long. Kat: Whatever you believe is possible and real. That's a true thing. But I journal on like I always look and feel amazing, have great abs. I write like I have a perky butt and tight legs like I feel embarrassed with what I write, but I just write what I want. Patrick: Yeah, you brought in some detail, damn. Kat: Huh? Detail, yeah. Patrick: You're going into detail, yeah. Hold on, I've got to plug this phone in though. Shit goes very quick when you're live streaming, you know what I mean? Kat: I know. I've got to go in five minutes anyway. I've got to go catch a plane to Australia. Patrick: Damn. So we didn't even talk about the title, huh? We just went all the way [crosstalk 00:11:15]- Kat: I think we approved the tile. Patrick: True, true. Kat: We just did a live demonstration of the title. Patrick: Well I don't even know what the title is? What the hell is the title? Kat: You made the tile up. It was something about- Patrick: I know, I forgot what I made up. Kat: -how to find satisfaction in your art, which is actually what we're doing a live demonstration of right now. Patrick: Live demo right here and now. But the reason- Patrick: -The reason I did tell that, too, is because I wanted to say that in this case ... You only got five minutes, so we should be good to go. Let me plug this in. But the reason I made that is because I was telling about my thing that I dropped today, my offer that I took forever to make, and I dropped it today and there was not then one sell as of dropping it, so I'm still, it's just like ... I'm just so satisfied with it that I really don't care if it does or doesn't. But that's cool because I'll make another one and it will, you know what I mean? And I'll keep getting better at it. But the things is- Kat: That's a normal thing, right. Patrick: -I'm so satisfied. Say again? Kat: Well, that's normal because you're not hosting the workshop until a week or two away, there's no urgency for people to have to buy right now anyhow. If you had some bonus or they get something straight away for signing up, then you'll get sales at the start. But my programmes that end up with a hundred people in them, if I drop them and the thing is not happening for ten days or something and I don't give some incentive to say yes/no, I get maybe one sale or one or two or none and then it will still get whatever it gets at the end. That's why oftentimes I give people, like if you join up strait away, then you get I call it the pre-Web, like you'll get some bonus trainings or you might get added to the basic group right away. Otherwise it's all going to come at the end anyway. There's no urgency. Patrick: Okay, cool. Kat: But the offer is fucking amazing. Patrick: I was like did you just dissect my offer and tell me what the fuck was wrong with that shit? Alright, I see what you did there. Kat: I can't help it. It happens automatically. Patrick: You're like, "By the way, if you would've put this here and you would've put that there and you would've put this here, if you would've [inaudible 00:13:34], people would be buying it." Kat: Like I said, my stuff doesn't ... I'll get little or no sales when I first launch, unless I do some special by now thing, like a bonus or first ten people or something, which sometimes I do that and other times I don't do it, and then my team will be like, "It's not selling," and I'm like whatever, it's not starting for a week. No one's going to buy now. Why would they buy now? They'll buy it at the last final minute, you bunch of flakers. You should just make fast decisions, not wait until the end. Patrick: Exactly. You should have it while it's hot. That's what I say. So we didn't - Kat: I have to go. Patrick: -any of the entertaining ... I think this was entertaining enough. What do you think? Kat: I think it was entertaining, not in the way that we discussed that it might be, but I think it was fucking powerful. Patrick: I want to do an entertaining one with you soon enough, you know? It was definitely powerful, but we've got to do the entertaining stuff because you're definitely good at entertaining as well. Kat: Well, we're hilarious and it would be irresponsible and selfish to hid that gift from the world. And we're nice people, so we will share it with people. Patrick: Yes, very much so. Good. They need it. Kat: Yes. Exactly. Alright. Final words of wisdom? Patrick: That's it. I pretty much laid it out on the table, so there you go. If you're going through some shit, I am, too. Let us go through some shit and come out on the other side better people. Kat: Love it. Go and watch the replay. It's in two parts; for some reason Facebook couldn't handle the intensity. Keep pressing fucking play. Bye. Patrick: Later.

What gives a 27-year-old with no experience in apartment building investing the audacity to swing for the fence? Patrick Duffy grew up in Southern California before heading east for college. After graduating from Harvard in 2013, he returned to SoCal to work as a commercial real estate banker and later for a hedge fund, buying non-performing mortgages. He grew up around real estate, his family owning a multi-family property since the 1950's, and he had always intended to invest in apartments—as soon as he had the money to do so. Before long, Patrick was unhappy at his job, so he started reaching out to investors he had lent to in order to get clarity on how to analyze deals. Despite his lack of experience on the principal side of real estate, Patrick started studying LoopNet and set the goal of securing 100 units in two years. Eventually, he discovered Michael's Deal Desk resource, and used the Syndicated Deal Analyzer to get feedback on a 69-unit property in Memphis. The deal met Michael's criteria, and the two forged a partnership. Today Patrick explains the steps he took to research the Memphis market, how he made use of the act ‘as if' approach to secure a letter of intent, and his best advice for working with investors. Listen in as he shares the mindset that helped him swing for the fence on a multi-family deal and how doing his first deal has changed the game for Patrick, as he aspires to reach 1,000 units in the next 12 months.   Key Takeaways [3:30] How Patrick landed on the partnering strategy to finance multi-family Briefly considered flipping single-family Preferred multi-family, but biggest block was capital Looked at creative financing options Partnering seemed like most feasible route Goal to secure 100 units in two years [6:04] How Patrick found the Memphis deal Clarity re: how to analyze deals Practiced via LoopNet (comparing markets, packages from brokers) Underwriting to get feedback Memphis market seemed ideal (cap rates, unit sizes, price) Reached out to learn about Memphis market Found 69-unit deal on LoopNet Submitted to Syndicated Deal Analyzer Positive feedback from forum Called broker on New Year's Eve [9:23] Why Patrick continued to move forward Nothing to lose Deal met criteria for partnering via Deal Desk Act ‘as if' approach to secure LOI [11:13] Michael's partnership with Patrick Impressed by Patrick's thorough research Surprised by return (Memphis not one of published geographies) Got contract from seller, proposed changes Built team as went (property manager, lawyer) Patrick took initiative Under contract with seller Wire EMV Collect due diligence docs Financial due diligence process Create investor package Met in Memphis to look at property Michael sent sample deal package to investors Acquired financial commitments Hired SEC attorney Started appraisal process [13:18] Patrick's experience working with investors Michael's network eager for deals that fit criteria Addressed questions about specifics of market SEC attorney had drafted necessary documents Used DocuSign to track eSignatures [15:23] The closing process for the Memphis 69-unit deal Loan approved, investors wired funds Patrick received acquisition fee of $23,000 Also reimbursed for expenses incurred during due diligence [16:25] The impact of doing your first deal Only so much can be taught re: what to expect Once learn to partner, can scale quickly Feel more comfortable and taken more seriously Brings down barriers Patrick under contract on 196-unit deal two weeks later Expects to hit 1,000 units in next 12 months [19:50] Why size isn't a factor for Patrick It's about process Anything under 500 units is viable Don't worry about equity Finding deal is the issue (not money) [21:35] Patrick's advice for aspiring multi-family investors Take advantage of Deal Desk resources Does require high level of commitment Hard work is worth it Connect with Patrick Email: pduffy32@gmail.com Resources Deal Desk Syndicated Deal Analyzer Ultimate Apartment Investing Course The Financial Freedom Summit Live LoopNet DocuSign Free eBook: The Secret to Raising Money to Buy Your First Apartment Building

Patrick Guest is an Australian children's author, Olympic physiotherapist, and father of three. He is most noted for his children's books That's What Wings Are For - dedicated to children with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, and their parents, and The Ricker Racker Club, written for his boys when their baby sister joined the family. Find out more about Patrick's work at PatrickGuest.com.au. What you'll learn: 1. What Patrick's first career was, and why he gave it up for writing.2. The true story that inspired Patrick to write That's What Wings Are For.3. How The Ricker Racker Club is being used to touch and inspire school children in Melbourne, Australia. 4. What success means to him. FULL TRANSCRIPT Elizabeth: Welcome to Writers’ Tête-à-tête with Elizabeth Harris, the show that connects authors, songwriters and poets with a global audience. So I can continue to bring you high-calibre guests, I invite you to go to iTunes, click Subscribe, leave a review, and share this podcast with your friends. I’m delighted to introduce children’s author Patrick Guest (PG) – father of three, Olympic physiotherapist, children’s author. Patrick Guest – born into an ever loving, ever growing family, 7 siblings, in the beachside suburb of Seaford, Melbourne, Australia. Patrick was blessed with all the things that make a childhood magical – plenty of family, friends and freedom to explore this wonderful world. An assortment of careers along the way – cobbler, elephant washer, failed accountant, anatomy demonstrator at Monash Uni, national team physio for Mozambique. Little wonder he’s been dubbed the Forrest Gump of Frankston. Adventures and stories seem to follow him around and now he’s writing them down. 5 books, (signed with a little hair) in the past 2 years, many more in the pipeline. Patrick Guest, welcome to Writers’ Tête-à-tête with Elizabeth Harris. Patrick: Great to be here, Elizabeth. Elizabeth: Great to have you here, Patrick, on this lovely sunny day in Melbourne, believe it or not, we’ve got the sun. Patrick, we recently discovered we attended the same secondary college.  Patrick: We did. Elizabeth: I had to smile when I read you initially became an accountant. Please tell my listeners about that transgression - and how you escaped. Patrick: Ah, the transgression. Let’s start with that. Look. Fear, insecurity, there was a recession kicking in. But really I think, as a 17-year-old, having to work out what subjects to choose, I didn’t know how to make that decision at 17. Elizabeth: So you did Economics … is that right? Patrick: Economics, Accounting, Legal Studies, Maths. I was really probably inspired at that time by my favourite TV show, Family Ties – Michael J. Fox. Elizabeth: Wasn’t he great? He’s great. Still. Patrick: At the time, I think back now – what a dork he was – it probably says a lot about what a dork I was and still am. I thought he was cool. Elizabeth: He was funny, and you’re funny. Patrick: He was cool, and I thought “Who do I want to be like?”, and I thought “Michael J. Fox”. I went down the corporate path, which was a terrible decision. I don’t regret it – I made some friends for life, and I realized early on that money doesn’t make you happy. Elizabeth: It’s such an important lesson at that age, isn’t it, cause many people learn that quite late, if at all. Patrick: Yeah, so that’s something that has stayed with me, and I’m really grateful. Elizabeth: Was there a pivotal moment when you realized “This accounting thing is just not me”? Was there an incident? Patrick: There was. Elizabeth: Can you share that, or is that private? Patrick: No, no, let’s share this. It’s all about sharing in this session. So I’m walking down Flinders St Station, and I’m walking down in my suit and tie, down the ramp… Elizabeth: How old were you at the time? Patrick: It would have been in my first year out of graduation, maybe 22 or something. 21, 22. Walking down the ramp, with cattle class, just walking down, we were all off to work. Against the flow, this lady came through the crowd and just gently put her hand on me and said, “Smile!” Elizabeth: (Laughter) I promise you it wasn’t me. Patrick: She just said “Smile” and I’m walking down – I must have looked so miserable. Elizabeth: Was she an angel or a real person? Patrick: I don’t know. But I hear where you’re coming from there, because from that moment – and I blame Banjo Patterson – and maybe my dad for putting me onto Banjo. Elizabeth: Why? It’s good to blame other people, isn’t it? Patrick: My favourite Australian poem would be The Great Clancy of the Great Overflow… Elizabeth: Oh wonderful. Patrick: …And where Banjo writes: And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me   As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste, With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,    For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.   So that poem was just ringing in my ears as I was off to the office sitting there, and from that moment I had come to the end of my fancy – I had a lot to change with Clancy. But I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy of the Overflow. And for someone who had had that instilled in him, the spirit of adventure at a very young age, and parents – wonderful parents that had fostered that– and here I am in this shoebox, little partitioned office thing, and it just wasn’t for me. Elizabeth: Soul-destroying. Patrick: Soul-destroying. For some people it isn’t, and some of my best friends have continued along that path, and it’s a great path for them, but for me it wasn’t. Elizabeth: We need everybody, don’t we, the array of professions and tradespeople, everybody to do their bit. But you had much more important things in store, Patrick. Which brings me to – our school was really quite traditional in lots of ways, being a Catholic coed college, with all the gender bias that goes with that. And I remember going back to Economics, and I remember being one of the few girls in Chemistry and Economics, because it was always the boys who were going to be the accountants, and the girls were going to be teachers or nurses. And in fact I did go on to be a nurse, but I was very happy to do that. So to me in our school, there was a real gender bias. And you address this in your fantastic book, The Ricker Racker Club. Can you tell us more about this great book please? Patrick: The Ricker Racker Club is based on a real club, invented by real people: my two boys, Noah and Reuben. So Noah and Reuben were roughly 4 and 3 at the time when the Ricker Racker Club was formed. And there was one hard and fast rule: No Girls. (Laughter) There were a few other rules: do something incredibly brave, do something incredibly kind, but the real rock-solid rule was No Girls. And then what happened… Elizabeth: I’m sure that’s changed now. Patrick: …They had themselves a sister, little Gracie. Gracie was born, and really the story of The Ricker Racker Club is what happened next after Gracie. Now Gracie is perfectly named. She is pure grace, she is pure joy. She does have an intellectual disability, and her capacity for joy is extraordinary. And she would – as happens in the book – walk up to the wolf next door and give the wolf a big hug. Her courage, her kindness, her unique joy, won the boys over very quickly. They won us all over, and the story sprung from there. Really, it’s a celebration of the joys of being a kid, and the innocence of these rules. They’re not coming from a nasty place, these rules – just boys being boys. But then, just the power of kindness, if there’s one thing that runs through all my books, it’s the power of kindness… Elizabeth: Yes, definitely. Patrick: …to change hearts. So that’s how that happened. And really The Ricker Racker Club is about a father saying to his two sons, “Be good to your sister.” Elizabeth: And you do it so well, Patrick. Patrick: And so it’s done really well. Elizabeth: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Patrick: From the moment I could write. So I started very young. I do remember a series, ‘Powerful Patrick’. And I must have been about 5 or 6. I was doing the pictures back then and I was stapling them together, making these little books. And I’m sure Mum and Dad delighted in them. But I’m not sure anyone else did. Elizabeth: Have you still got them? Patrick: I haven’t been able to find them. Elizabeth: Oh no. Patrick: I hope I can find them one day. Mum was always a little bit of a hoarder, so it’ll be somewhere in the house. They’re still in the same place I grew up in, so they’ll be somewhere in that house. So I’ve been a natural storyteller my whole life. The vehicle for that telling a story was just verbal stories and emails and love letters to Lisa my wife … I’ve always found a way to put things on paper. But certainly through the barren accounting years, then really trying to work out where my lane was that had been lying dormant, and then the birth of Noah – my first son, Noah – came a flood of stories and the desire to get these things down on paper. The rest is history. Elizabeth: What was it particularly about that event - the birth of Noah – that opened the floodgates, so to speak? Patrick: Well the birth itself…even before the birth I was starting to work on a book. But it’s, I think it’s just this natural, just as we have a desire to breathe, have food and water, a desire to be heard and understood, and then as a parent, it’s just this innate desire to share stories and to bond through stories. Elizabeth: Legacy. Patrick: Legacy. What my dad did was the same with me. My grandfather – I vividly remember my grandfather declaring over me that “You’re going to be an author one day.” Elizabeth: Oh wow. Did he write? Patrick: My grandfather, no. It was more my grandmother – she was a gifted storyteller. She kissed the Blarney Stone a few times, Ma, and... So it’s flowed through, that Blarney Stone – the kissing of the Blarney Stone gift has been passed through, through Grandmother to my dad. Elizabeth: We have a similar heritage then. Patrick There you go. And I can see it in my kids as well. Noah and Reuben, they love telling stories and they love hearing stories. So it’s been passed on for sure. Elizabeth: That’s fantastic. Can you advise all the aspiring writers out there how to get started, and more importantly, how to keep going? Patrick: How to get started… I can only speak, maybe quote Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.” So I can only speak from the authority of my own experience. I don’t have a technique or a tactic or a ritual that I go through. I pray. I pray, and one thing that I’ll say to people when asked this question – again I don’t want to get too preachy here – but if you want to get creative, it helps to get in touch with your Creator. That’s all I can say. That might be a bit controversial but for some ears, but that’s what works for me. I don’t get on my knees and say “God, give me another book!” Elizabeth: “Give me a bestseller or a …” Patrick: “Give me a bestseller!” What I actually do is I surrender my agenda. Elizabeth: So ego is left aside. Patrick: Ego is left aside, and any preconceived ideas are left aside. So I’m not sitting there going “Give me inspiration”. I’m giving myself out, and saying “Take away”. Elizabeth: Use me, as a conduit. Patrick: “Use me”, and if that’s to be the best barista in Mornington, or go back to my cobbling beginnings, or elephant-washing beginnings, so be it. So most of – no, really all of – my flashes of inspiration you could say… There’s that great poem by Rumi, Listening, where he says, “When that voice speaks, may I sell my tongue and buy a thousand ears.” So when I’m hearing that voice, that is always followed by a period of prayerfulness or meditation which just opens up that creativity. Sounds easy. I know when I hear that voice, and I sell my tongue, I know that there’s a double emotion. Joy, and dread. Because I know that I’m in for some hard work. Elizabeth: ‘Cause writing can be hard work, can’t it. And the discipline that’s required – and you know you may not particularly feel like writing that day – but you have to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Patrick: Yes, so back to the question, which was “How do we keep going?” How do we start? For me, I don’t really start until I’ve heard the voice, I’ve heard that voice, I’ve heard that spark of inspiration. How do I keep going? I know that I won’t have peace until it’s done. So I’m listening to that voice but I also know that it’s a collaboration after that. So I’m seeking opportunities to get it on paper or get it onto the computer. And they are taken in the busyness of my life with 3 young kids and a fulltime job as a physio. I have to be creative just to find that time. So often it’s my wonderful patients – patient patients – lying on the physio plinth – and I’ll just seek an opportunity to say, “Now that you’ve got all those needles all over you, there’s no way to run out of here. Would you mind listening to my latest? What do you think of it?” Elizabeth: Do they come back for another appointment after that, Patrick? Patrick: Normally they do. I don’t think I’ve managed to scare anyone off yet. Elizabeth: I might need to book for a session. Do I have to have a needle? Patrick: Not always, but it does – has that influence on my clinical judgment. Might be, if I’m honest. But I call it ‘bibliotherapy’. That works well, so I’m looking for opportunity. Sometimes I’ll pull the car over and send myself a text message for a sentence. Or middle of the night, off to the computer, or scribbling in bed on a bit of paper. I don’t have a routine about how to get these things down. Elizabeth: 2 a.m. is a common time for me to receive a sentence too. Patrick: In the shower can be a good place – you can scratch it into the wall, into the mist, write it down, whatever it is. But I’m in the posture of seeking the opportunity to find that time to write that down once I’ve heard that voice. Elizabeth: Can we talk about your work – who you work with, the wonderful men and women that you care for? Can we talk about that? Patrick: Yes, so 2 days a week, I work at the medical centre at Victoria Barracks, which is a service based in Melbourne. They are wonderful, so when I first started working for the military, I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about war and the work of the military. Elizabeth: In what way? Patrick: I’d been a bit of a hippie, a bit of a peace lover, a bit biased against the war machine, or whether it’s a valuable service that the Army and Navy and Air Force offer. And then you get to meet these people and hear their stories. Elizabeth: Amazing. Patrick: Amazing, the sacrifice made. I see the plague of PTSD is becoming more public or known as an extension of the epidemic of general mental health problems in the world. As a physio you get a front row seat really, and you get the rare – it’s a real privilege to offer probably two of the greatest needs of the human being: to be heard and understood, and to be touched. Elizabeth: Yes. Beautiful. Patrick: To be touched. There aren’t many mainstream medical professionals that offer both. So as a physio you’re in a really good place and space to offer that service and in that way to gather stories. So in that way it does feed into the other half of my career, which is becoming more than half really, the writing side of things, and the gathering of stories from the confessional plinth is part of that, and the sharing of stories is part of that. Elizabeth: They’re exceptionally lucky to have you. Patrick: Goes both ways. Elizabeth: You’ve had wonderful success with your book sales. What does success mean to you? Patrick: About three bucks fifty? (Laughter) So I remember when my amazing editor and publisher Margrete Lamond sat me down – we met face to face for the first time – she’s based in New South Wales – one of her first pieces of advice was “Don’t give up your day job!” Elizabeth: I’ve had the same advice before. Patrick: So in terms of success it’s been humbling and mind-blowing to think that That’s What Wings Are For – my first book – has cracked the magical 10,000 books sold in Australia within 6 months. Elizabeth: Wow. Congratulations. That’s wonderful. Patrick: So now we’re into our second year of sales. I’m not sure where we’re up to now, but has been picked up internationally and translated internationally to Chinese and Korean and several other languages. What does it mean to me? It means that – it gives me a voice, a chance to talk to your lovely self, and to visit schools. I love that side of being a writer. Most writers are more comfortable in a darkened room tapping away. To my surprise, I was a very reluctant public speaker but I absolutely love going out to the schools. On Wednesday, I had a full school assembly, hundreds of kids there, and the audience and ability to speak and share… Elizabeth: ‘Cause you make that fun, don’t you. We’re just going back to The Ricker Racker Club for a moment, and can we know how you make that fun for the kids? ‘Cause the parents listening there would be really interested – we know we’re there to do hard work but school can be fun as well. So how do you make it fun for them, Patrick? Patrick: Well, The Ricker Racker Club – I invite everyone to join this very exclusive club, The Ricker Racker Club, IF they pass the test. So I read the story, but along the way we pause and issue challenges to the members of the audience to come up on behalf of the whole school, see if they can pass this test. So we follow the story. And one of the characters is Max, and in the first week he sticks his head into the fox’s hole. So I make up a little fox’s hole, and find a willing kid to stick his head into this fox’s hole. The whole school are counting 20 seconds and I bring out this little stuffed fox. So the poor kid doesn’t know I’m tiptoeing up behind him and “Raaaahhh!” Elizabeth: (Laughter) Do you get a lot of screams? Patrick: We get a few of those, and then the villain of the book is this wolf next door, which is based on a great German Shepherd that lived next door to me, and I have the scar to prove, the moment the basketball flew over the fence. I rescued the basketball – and Chance (the dog’s name was Chance) – got me. And so the wolf next door – it would normally have a wolf suit – and it’s normally the PE teacher who dresses up as a wolf. Elizabeth: Would you go to our school? They’d love you. Patrick: I’d love to. Elizabeth: Ours is a service school, so you’ll like it. Ours is a service school, so we have a lot of service families that go to... Nice connection for you. Patrick: I’d love to come out. Absolutely. So the kids build up and up and at the end, “Who wants to join this club?” “Yeah!” “Who wants to learn the secret password?” “Yeah!” So I force it down a little and say, “Unfortunately you haven’t done quite enough yet.” Elizabeth: (Laughter) Oh my, the kids will go “Oh what?” Patrick: So it’s a case of “Do not put up your hand, do not raise your hand, unless you are extremely brave.” All the hands go up. “I mean it, I’m warning you now – extremely brave.” Elizabeth: What age group are we looking at, with the hands going up? Patrick: Prep, all the way to 6. Elizabeth: The whole school, wow. Patrick: At this point, some of the Grade 6s I can tell – folded their arms; it’s a bit babyish for them. So picture it: I do target them a bit at this point. So I’ll normally look for the guy who’s lost interest – the kid can be too cool for school here. And I’ll grab this fellow and bring him up. “So on behalf of the school, let’s talk about Courage. Courage comes in many forms. You’ve already demonstrated Courage by standing up in front of the whole school. But Courage comes in many forms. The courage to make a mistake when you know it’s going to get you in trouble. You’re scared of something. And then there’s taste buds. So we go back to Week 3, if you were listening, what did Zack do in Week 3?” And he’ll say “I’m sorry, I can’t remember.” Again in a loud voice, “What did Zack do in Week 3?” And you get the book out again: Zack drank a tomato sauce milkshake. At this point I’m standing behind him with milk, and then I bring out the tomato sauce. And what’s he do now? At this point he’s shaking his head ‘no’. And the school have already started the chant without encouragement: “Drink! Drink! Drink! Drink!” So I make this milkshake, this foaming tomato sauce milkshake… Elizabeth: Oh no. Patrick: And I pause again and say “Unfortunately my friend, Zack did that for one person. You’re doing it for 700 people right now. That’s not enough. So I look around – I shop for the largest Brussel sprout I can find. And I bring out this Brussel sprout, drop it into the tomato sauce milkshake, and present it to this fellow. Elizabeth: Poor kid. Patrick: The poor kid. Originally, I used this – it occurred to me that this is peer group pressure of the highest order. So I now use this as an opportunity for this poor unfortunate kid to – they’re saying no at this point – I really esteem that courage. I say “Look, you have done something extraordinarily brave. Everyone here at some point is going to face a baying crowd of people saying ‘Drink! Drink!’ or whatever. Elizabeth: That’s so clever, Patrick. Patrick: And to say no in the face of that, is true Courage. So I give him a round of applause and he sits down. “Now who wants to be a legend?” (Laughter) So someone else comes up. Or I’ll turn it into the “What would the kind person do now?” Or even better. “Maybe there’s a teacher in the audience…” Elizabeth: So what I’ll do is I’ll leave it there, because if the school listens to that one they won’t book you. I will leave them in suspense. When I first read That’s What Wings Are For, I was sitting in a coffee shop, with tears rolling down my cheeks. The other patrons respectfully averted their eyes. And you know you’ve found a great book when so much emotion is ... Can you please tell us about your inspiration for That’s What Wings Are For? Patrick: So That’s What Wings Are For … Maybe I can mention one of my favourite poems of all time, which is The Hound of Heaven. The Hound of Heaven, for those who don’t know, written more than a hundred years ago by a homeless opium addict in London, Francis Thompson. So he was asking the big question: how could a loving God allow such suffering in the world, and particularly in his own life? And the penny starts to drop about halfway through. He says maybe, just maybe, You allow us in Your love to burn and burn until we become charcoal, and You pick us up and You create Your masterpiece. So That’s What Wings Are For – I’m not calling it a masterpiece – it certainly came from a burning charcoal in process. And that process was the great sadness in my life. My son Noah has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which is a devastating condition that involves the wasting of muscles. And the heart’s a muscle, and it’s a devastating disease. So in light of that I was asked to write a book about a certain blue dragon Bluey, who is the mascot for all the families affected by this devastating disease. So I was working on another book at the time, and I was asked to write this book. And I jumped at the chance, but I also knew there was a heavy responsibility writing that. So really you can look globally at that and look at the whole community impacted by that, but really it was a love letter from a father to a son. Elizabeth: Beautiful. Patrick: And that’s how it was written, and that is something I do say when I go out to the schools. You’ve heard Ricker Racker – it’s quite a boisterous, joyous occasion. When I go out to talk about That’s What Wings Are For, I basically start off in a fun way, and then I bring it back sharply and I say, I bring out Bluey, the actual mascot, a blue plush teddy, and I say “I actually met Bluey on the worst day of my life.” And to have a school go from being quite boisterous, and the teachers go “Shh! Shh! Shh!” to your pin drop in one sentence… Elizabeth: Wow, that’s powerful. Patrick: They get it. They get it. From the preppies all the way up to the Grade 6s, they get it, and there’s a real reverence suddenly about the book and why it was written. And then I explain what’s happened from there and we go from there. I still struggle to read it without crying, but they are tears of – what will I say - I heard this line yesterday – “what we sow with tears, we reap with shouts of joy”. And there’s something joyous – it’s bigger than me, this thing. It’s bigger than me. Elizabeth: What you’ve created is magnificent. Patrick: Thank you. Elizabeth: You’re welcome. You mentioned in an interview that 80% of That’s What Wings Are For was written over breakfast with your family, and then one sentence that brought tears to your eyes took you 3 months to write. Can you please share that sentence with my listeners and what it was that finally led you to discover the sentence that made you cry? Patrick: What it was was my incredible ego. I just – it went to my head. The idea of being a published author and all this went absolutely to my head. Elizabeth: Well you are only human after all. (Laughter) Patrick: Well, I’m sitting back there, I’m imagining red carpets, imagining walking up the stairs. It was shocking! And here I am, I’ve written a book for my sick kid, and my ego’s having a field day. At this point I hadn’t even had the manuscript finished… Elizabeth: You were strutting around… Patrick: It was appalling. I’m embarrassed about it, at the way I was carrying on in my head anyway. So we needed – Bluey needed a reason to be doing what he did ultimately, which is find a reason for his wings. And I was trying all these sentences about sending him off to Margrete, and very gently and respectfully she would be saying “That is rubbish.” (Laughter) Elizabeth: Thanks Margrete. She just knew there was more to you – she knows how deep you are. Patrick: She knew how to push the buttons and what’s right. And equally my wife Lisa as well. And more so my wife Lisa, she has a great ability to tell me when I’m writing something that’s rubbish - and good as well. Elizabeth: Good. Patrick: So the to-ing and fro-ing went on for months. And then I had this moment of “You complete goose! What are you doing?” And certainly at that moment I decided that every cent from this book would be given to charity, which it always should have been anyway, and I made that decision, and entered some prayer and reflection, and within really minutes of making that decision – within minutes – I was given this sentence. And I have to set the context of that time. And at the time we had a crudely termed … we called it a ‘year of adventure’ – you could call it a bucket list, and we were doing all sorts of things around the world. So the sentence – Bluey was coming back from the Royal Children’s Hospital. It was broadened to be a magical building filled with magical creatures with all sorts of ailments. So at that moment when Bluey looks out, and when I’m reading the story to the school, I’ll have people close their eyes and put their hands on their hearts, and feel. Elizabeth: Which I’m going to do now. Patrick: And if you keep feeling, you’ll feel something. You may not feel it straightaway, but if you keep trying, you’ll get there. You’ll feel something warm and fuzzy. And that feeling has a name; it has lots of names. Kindness, and hope, and love, and what happens – and at this moment, Bluey looks across, and I share this sentence: “Bluey saw the boy’s soft, floppy legs, and at that moment, something happened in Bluey’s heart. He stopped for that moment thinking so much about his own situation, and he looked inward. He looked out, and saw this boy sharing a similar path. That word ‘empathy’. That changed everything for Bluey; it helped him work out what his wings were for.” So we go on from there. Elizabeth: Beautiful. That compassion for another person. The author-illustrator relationship is such a pivotal one. Can you describe what is important to you in such a relationship? Patrick: Respect, and trust, and space. So ‘let there be space in your togetherness’. Certainly for the first two books – the first one, Daniella Germain, extraordinary talent. And then the same with Nathanial Eckstrom, rising superstar of the illustration world. So first book, I had no contact at all with Daniella until after all the illustrations were done. Had no input into the illustrations at all. So in terms of relationship, it’s one of trust. Slightly different with the second book – some feedback. Poor Nathanial, I saw his amazing illustrations, but – and it was amazing that he managed to draw my 3 kids without having seen a photo of them, quite accurately – except for Gracie wears glasses. And I just politely asked whether he might pop glasses on Poppy (Gracie is named Poppy in the book). So he went back and put glasses on. Then I had a look at that and thought, “No. Makes her look too old now. Can you take the glasses off?” So that was a bit of a diva moment for me, I suppose. But other than that it really is letting go and not being too precious and trusting in the selection of the illustrator – that’s up to the publisher – and I trust Margrete to make that decision, and she hasn’t failed me yet. I know how she is with me with the words, and she’s that way again with the illustrator. Elizabeth: What a wonderful person to find! Patrick: She is great, she’s fantastic. Elizabeth: What are you working on at the moment? Patrick: Well, the undercurrent to all the picture books that have been picked up in the last couple of years has been a novel for children called The Last Secret of Ernie Pigwinkle, and I’ve been working on the story for more than 10 years. And it comes and goes, and then another idea overrides that. But I keep coming back to The Last Secret of Ernie Pigwinkle. That is lying dormant again, but I know I will go back to that, so there’s always that in the background. That story is the story of an old man who loves to tell stories. And he has this great secret. Great secret, that he's burning with this secret, to share it with his grandson Arthur. Long story short, he gets invited to the World Storytelling Competition in Marrakesh, Morocco, up against the greats of storytelling. Professor Chinwag from China, Lord Blabbermouth from England. I won’t give too much away, but he makes it to the final and he tells this great secret, but the secret is revealed slowly as the story goes along. Elizabeth: Suspense right through… Patrick: Right through. It has been a lot of hard work, also joy, and I have a sense that one day it will happen. I’ve also recently finished another picture book manuscript that is very, very dear to my heart, called Tiny Dancer. Elizabeth: The Elton John song. Patrick: The Elton John song, so hopefully Sir Elton will approve, and that’s really dear to my heart, and I’m in an acquisitions meeting on that one. And we’re in the process of illustrating and that process does involve some word changes. My next release which will be next year, I thought that was going to be a book called The Second Sky. It sounds like – based on this week’s emails – it sounds like it will be called Rabby the Brave. Elizabeth: You’re just prolific – you’re pounding on aren’t you, one after the other. Patrick: Look, it’s been a blessed couple of years. There’s been a very rich vein of inspiration and creativity that’s happening at the moment. Really grateful. Elizabeth: We’re very, very pleased too, I must say. Can’t wait to read them. What do you like to do in your spare time to unwind from all this work you’re doing – the physio work with the military, your family, and all this wonderful writing you’re doing? What do you do to unwind? Patrick: I’m clinging to my childhood in terms of chasing a bouncy ball around. I still play basketball. There’s a competition going on in Victoria Barracks actually, so at the ripe old age of 45, I’m taking on the burly soldiers, I’m taking on the burly soldiers in this basketball competition. Elizabeth: Well you have to keep up on being brave. (Laughter) Patrick: I love it. I must say I’m shamelessly, every goal I score – there aren’t many of them – I’m celebrating them like they could be my last. So there’s the fist pump and the whooping after every goal I score. And would you believe I’m still sort of – don’t let Lisa know but I’m still playing football. Full contact. There’s a wonderful competition – Reclink, midweek, battlers’ competition. You may have heard of the Choir of Hard Knocks – Reclink was spawned from it and there’s a football league for battlers, whether it be homeless refugees or people battling addiction. So we’ve set up a team in Frankston, and I’ve been the … Elizabeth: You are brave. (Laughter) Patrick: Madness, absolute madness. And so I’ve been the physio, the chaplain, the halfback flank and the water boy, whatever goes on, whatever’s needed for that team. And there’s just something primal about playing Australian Rules football that I just can’t let go of. And if I ever get the chance, I’ll go out surfing as well. Elizabeth: Isn’t it great to tap into that raw energy and just let yourself go? Patrick: It is. With surfing, it’s one of the few pastimes or sports where you spend 95% of the time staring at the horizon. So you get a chance to unwind – then it goes from the serenity to scrambling for your life. It’s great. Elizabeth: It’s a bit of a metaphor, isn’t it? Patrick: It’s great. Yes, so those are the 3 main things. Elizabeth: Do you want to remain in the children’s book genre? Patrick: Absolutely. Maybe one day a book for grownups, but certainly at the moment I’m loving – when you write a picture book, you are writing for grownups – you’re writing for two generations. Elizabeth: It’s that connection, I think, with parent-child. It’s so special. And you both learn so much when you’re reading together. Patrick: Absolutely. And I’ve been trying to make the transition from picture books into early readers, and I’ve found that quite hard. I might have to leapfrog that and go into older early readers. Because to go from a picture book to an early reader is – you got to dumb it down. You really have to dumb it down. That’s a crude way of saying it, but you do. There are certain concepts you have to avoid, and using poetry or metaphors is a bit more tricky. So maybe that’s not for me, that niche. So certainly The Last Secret of Ernie Pigwinkle is for an older reader, an older young reader. And then the picture books as well. I might stick to those, to genres within the broader children’s book genre for now. We’ll see what happens after. Elizabeth: You’re so insightful. Because you haven’t actually studied Creative Writing or completed a formal uni degree in writing, and yet your knowledge is so vast. Is you’re your intuition at play again, do you think? Patrick: Not sure. I think it’s a blessing. Don’t want to use the word ‘gift’, but I think it’s nothing to be proud of if it’s a gift. Elizabeth: I really have to disagree, because so many people are given, receive gifts, it’s then what you do with that gift. And so many people do not do anything with what they’ve been blessed with. I do think you can claim that proudly and whoop, like on a footy field. (Laughter) Patrick: Maybe. I do love whooping when there’s a sense of victory, a sense of accomplishment – once you finish that manuscript, submit to send, and you know it’s off, and have such a beautiful relationship with Margrete. I should mention Alyson O’Brien, who is also with Little Hare – I’m increasingly involved with her. I know that they will read it and give it the full attention and get back to me quite quickly, so that agonizing wait has been reduced to, in some cases, a few hours now, which is great. Elizabeth: It’s cause you’re so clever, and they know it. Do you have a website or blog, Patrick, that my listeners can go to find out more about your wonderful work? Patrick: Yes, there’s a shiny new website, “Patrick Guest dot com dot au”. I know nothing about the technical side of websites, and a great friend of mine, Jeffrey County, has helped set that up, and it’s sparkling. Elizabeth: Aren’t tech people great? I’m not one of those. Patrick: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. There’s no way I could do that. So that’s up and running now, so there’s opportunity to email me and contact me through that. Happy to do that. Elizabeth: Patrick, this is a signature question that I ask all my guests. What do you wish for, for the world, and most importantly, for yourself? Patrick: That’s a big one. Look, the first thing that springs to mind is a cure for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Elizabeth: I’m with you. Patrick: That would be the first thing. But if I thought more about it, more broadly… Maybe I could go back to Ernie Pigwinkle, The Last Secret of Ernie Pigwinkle. So I’ll give away a little bit, so we get to the end of the story. We’re at the World Storytelling Championships, so Ernie, this old man from Ballarat, has made the final and won, thanks to his grandson. So the secret starts off as “Do you know why dogs wag their tails?” We move on from there to “Why dogs and cats fight – the origins of war”. Then he finishes with a little song, a little poem he says to the world: It’s a war that’s continued to this very day. It’s a shame that Dog and Cat couldn’t think of a way To listen and learn and be understood, And love one another as all of us could. You don’t have to carry on like a dog or a cat. You’re not a baboon or as blind as a bat. There’s a heart in your chest and a brain in your head. So before you lose faith, hold on instead. Hold on to your faith in the goodness of others. Never give up on your sisters and brothers. You’ll see for yourself, as sure as the sun, That there’s something worth loving in everyone. He says that. Elizabeth: I need a box of tissues. [Laughter] Oh Patrick, my goodness, that’s so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Patrick: That’s the world premiere of The Last Secret of Ernie Pigwinkle and… Elizabeth: What a coup on Writers’ Tête-à-tête with Elizabeth Harris. Wow, Patrick! Superb. Patrick Guest, thank you so much for joining me on “Writers Tete-a-Tete with Elizabeth Harris”. We look forward to more of your stunning work. I totally agree with you: hugging is what wings are for. Thanks for tuning in everyone, and may your wishes come true. [END OF TRANSCRIPT]