Podcasts about paul there

Today we have Kayleen. She is 27 years old, lives in Baltimore, MD and she took her last drink on April 6th, 2025.   Sponsors for this episode include: Better Help – 10% off of your first month Café RE – the social app for sober people   There are a few spots left for Peru in October 2025. On this 10-night, 11-day trip of a lifetime, we will be hiking the Inca Trail and participating in two service projects. Registration closes in about three weeks.   [02:35] Thoughts from Paul:   There is so much speak in the recovery world about letting go. In recovery meetings, many of the topics are centered around letting go.   Paul shares that he has spent years thinking he needed to figure out HOW to let go. Like there was a secret technique that was missing. In fact, all you can do is realize you're holding on and this awareness is the first real step towards letting the sunshine in. Once you realize you are holding on, or bring awareness to something weighing you town, it immediately begins to shift on its own, and you don't have to let it go.   Another thought is that it's not even about letting GO, it's more about letting IN. If something is nagging you, don't let it go, let it in. It will eventually leave on it's own, when the time is right, when it's resolved.   Paul encourages us to have the strength to see where you're holding on and then invite it in a little more.   [09:23] Paul introduces Kayleen:   Kayleen is 27, lives in Baltimore, and works as a server in a fine dining restaurant. She enjoys walking, being in nature, painting and going to Café RE meetings.   Kayleen says she never drank normally. She recalls being in ninth grade and taking swigs of liquor from her mom's cabinet before getting on the school bus in the morning. Looking back, she thinks that she was always looking to escape her feelings.   In college, Kayleen didn't go to parties and drink with others. She preferred to drink at home and didn't want anyone to know how much or how often she was drinking. She would frequently drink before going to class and eventually was suspended from the university.     Kayleen was sent to detox three times in college for her drinking and self-harm. She wasn't ready to quit drinking and would start back as soon as she got out. When she was 21, she was arrested twice for DUIs, and she wasn't willing to stop drinking.   A year later Kayleen was married and their relationship revolved around alcohol where they drank together daily. Over the next three years Kayleen gained over 100 pounds, and her mobility was suffering. A doctor told her that due to her poor health, she might not see age 30. For Kayleen, the idea of quitting drinking didn't feel like a possibility.   In April of 2023, Kayleen discovered the RE podcast. Within a month of listening frequently, Kayleen decided to quit drinking on May 25th – just for that one day. She woke up feeling so proud of herself she kept going. A few months later she joined Café RE and found community.   Kayleen began walking and ended up losing 60 pounds in the first year of sobriety. Her wife had quit drinking too, but that wasn't enough to save the marriage. Kayleen ended up divorcing her wife and moved from Indiana to Baltimore to stay with her accountability partner that she met through Café RE.   In April of this year, Kayleen's sister got married and it was at the wedding that she relapsed. She said within a day she was drinking just like she was before quitting and quickly turned to her community for help. Kayleen says she decided to quickly shred the shame and make sure she didn't get stuck in a “woe is me” place. The community lifted her up and helped her realize that she didn't lose her sobriety time and Kayleen shares that she learned a lot from the experience.   Kayleen's parting piece of guidance: Just keep trying. Never, never, never give up on yourself.   Recovery Elevator You took the elevator down, you gotta take the stairs back up. We can do this.   RE on Instagram RE merch Recovery Elevator YouTube Sobriety Tracker iTunes       

Welcome back to the Ready Set BBQ podcast, your go-to destination for the latest and most exciting happenings around the world! In this episode we talk about the Luka/AD trade, Grammys, RGV Dentist, Paul vs. Paul, Laredo Cookoff, GW BBQ, Fish tacos and Superbowl.                                                                                                                                            0-20 mins: Headlines Luka/Anthony Davis: We talk about the shocking trade this past weekend between Luka and AD.  Grammys: Hiram gives us a wrap up of the Grammys and we can't believe who won Country Album of the year.   RGV Dentist:  Local news as a Valley dentist gets robbed for $40K by his wife and her sancho mechanic. Paul vs Paul: There is news that the brothers Paul will be fighting each other in May.  Menu Anxiety: Gen Zers are getting menu anxiety from ordering at a restaurant.   25-40 mins: BBQ Time Laredo Red, White and Barbecue: We take our talents to Laredo to chase that SCA golden ticket and compete the next day in a CBA cookoff. GW BBQ: Most of the Joes make a trip to GW BBQ to have a weekend lunch. Fish Tacos on the Blackstone: I cook up some fish tacos on the Blackstone with some pineapple pico de gallo.  40-50 mins: 2024 Recap Superbowl: We give our predictions, talk about where we will be watching, eat and drinks and about the NFL fix being in. A bunch of joes that cook like pros!!!Melissa Bankard Farmer's InsuranceMelissa Bankard - Farmers Insurance Agent in Richardson, TXFacebook Pagehttps://www.facebook.com/readysetbbqWebsite/Shophttps://www.readysetbbq.com/Website/Shop https://www.readysetbbq.com/Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/readysetbbq

Episode 470 – Why Alcoholics Don't Get Hangovers…?   Today we have Lara. She is 40 years old and lives in Northwest Arkansas. She took her last drink on August 8th, 2019.   We are putting a call out for early sobriety interviews. We want to hear from you guys. Please email info@recoveryelevator.com.   Upcoming events: We start our six-week Ditching the Booze course, the what, the why and the how. This course is for Café RE members only and use the promo code “OPPORTUNITY” to waive the set-up fee if you are interested in joining us.   Registration for our 6th annual retreat in Bozeman, Montana opens Monday April 1st. We come together as a group and we laugh, we heal, we eat blueberry pancakes, play kickball, and have a great time.   Better Help:  www.betterhelp.com/elevator - 10% off your first month. #sponsored   [04:12] Thoughts from Paul:   There was a great question during our Dry January class that asked “Why don't alcoholics get hangovers?” Paul did a YouTube video about this but wanted to share more here.   Truth is, they do get hangovers, but they usually begin drinking before the full amount of alcohol can be metabolized in their system that they drank the day or night before. As tolerance develops with alcohol, the hangover gets pushed back later in the day the next day. A chronic drinker who drinks 10-15 drinks daily, won't begin the hangover cycle at 8am the next morning, but more likely, they will experience the worst of the withdrawal effects later that day or evening.   Chronic drinkers are almost always experiencing a low to mid-grade hangover. In other words, they feel like shit all the time. First alcohol takes you to a place where you are no longer drinking to feel good, but to simply feel normal. They you are drinking to simply not feel like death. And then the worst place is when you are simply drinking not to die.   *HUGE ASTERISK* Alcohol is the most dangerous substance to detox from. If you have been drinking 5-8 drinks daily, for months or years, then it's a very good idea to seek medical attention when detoxing.   Go Brewing. Use the code ELEVATOR for 15% off.   [09:26] Kris introduces Lara:   Lara is married and they have two dogs. After teaching preschool for 12-13 years she now teaches Pilates. She enjoys going to concerts and spending time outdoors. Lara had limited exposure to alcohol until she went to college. While there, she found friends, and they drank regularly. What started out as being fun soon became a way for Lara to ignore her mental health issues that were creating a dark depression. After graduating and the issues getting worse, she ended up going to a psych ward for a few weeks and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She moved back home to live with her parents while she figured out what life was going to look like with the new diagnosis. She continued to drink in spite of the medications.   Lara went to grad school in Colorado and was surrounded by friends and the drinking felt normal. She wasn't having major consequences until after getting married and she realized the drinking was happening all the time. Her husband ended up quitting drinking and while Lara supported him by quitting too, she didn't feel that she had a problem.   Lara found herself reaching out to others to help support her as the spouse of someone quitting drinking. Over time she started realizing that recovery was her path as well. Lara says that she has learned that she knows how to ask for help if she needs it now. She and her husband share a sobriety date and their life has done a 180. Alcohol is no longer an issue, and they just enjoy living life.   Lara's favorite resource in recovery: Holly Whitaker's book Quit Like a Woman.   Lara's parting piece of guidance: Just find one person who you can talk to.   Instagram   Recovery Elevator YouTube Sobriety Tracker iTunes      Recovery Elevator You're the only one that can do this, but you don't have to do it alone. I love you guys.

Patrick - Met someone on FB, she is Catholic. He is married in the Catholic Church, but divorced since 2007. Am I doing anything wrong by having this relationship on FB? We did tell each other I love you. Mark - Heard Russel Bran's livestream on vaccines. It seems like Pfizer is gearing up for turbo cancers now, as they bought this company that is looking into those turbo cancers. (17:02) Paul - There was a Pope who refused to add Filioque...then about 200 years later, Rome added it. Why did they add it to the creed? (25:03) Break 1 (26:12) Patrick discusses the Filioque. Not sure what that is? Check this segment out Joe - my son is getting married in the Greek Orthodox Church. Is it OK if I go? (39:55) Break 2 Jake - My cousin asked me to officiate his wedding. My cousin was Baptized protestant, and his fiancé was baptized Catholic? (47:22) Nicholas - Was my last confession valid? The priest did not 'i absolve you...'

Today's Guest is Paul Thompson.   Paul has been featured in numerous real estate podcasts and hosts his own podcast called Ready Investor One where he teaches the mindset and mechanics of real estate investing. Join Sam and Paul in today's show. -------------------------------------------------------------- [00:00:00] Intro [00:01:34] The challenges of ground-up development [00:05:18] Dealing with entitlements and negotiating with the city [00:10:02] The entitlement process and financing [00:11:48] The decision to pursue larger projects [00:13:38] Underwriting multifamily properties [00:20:45] Paul's journey from single-family investing to multifamily development [00:20:29] Challenges faced in ground-up development [00:21:14] Closing -------------------------------------------------------------- Connect with Paul: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pauldavidthompson180  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pauldavidthompson/  Twitter:https://twitter.com/WinCoreInvest  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulthompson-wincoreinvest/ Web: https://pauldavidthompson.com/free-resources/   Connect with Sam: I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/ Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com   SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-scale-commercial-real-estate/id1539979234 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f -------------------------------------------------------------- Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: Paul Thompson (00:00:00) - The way it works in the development business is the longer you hold the land, the more money you make. So the sooner you sell, you can still make money, but you make less money. So like, well, we don't need to sell this this property right now. Let's go to the next level and do the horizontal development. Well, once you do that, you're like, Well, can't we keep some of it and do the multifamily side of it as well? And that's where we stand. Welcome to the How.   Sam Wilson (00:00:23) - To scale commercial real estate show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big. Paul Thompson has been featured in numerous real estate podcasts and hosts his own podcast called Ready Investor One, where he teaches the mindset of real estate investing. Paul, welcome to the show.   Paul Thompson (00:00:45) - Thanks for having me, Sam.   Sam Wilson (00:00:46) - Absolutely. The pleasure is mine. Paul There are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show in 90s or less.   Sam Wilson (00:00:51) - Can you tell me where did you start? Where are you now and how did you get there?   Paul Thompson (00:00:55) - Where did I start? Cut my teeth in multifamily. I'm sorry. Come on. Teeth with single family and have since gone to multifamily. I did that as a way to escape my day job. I was a corporate guy. Recovered. I'm still recovering, I think, from being a corporate drone. And so now I have a portfolio of single family in Little Rock, Arkansas, where I live, but now I'm doing multifamily development in syndications in the Dallas-Fort Worth market.   Sam Wilson (00:01:24) - Wow. Wow. That's a big jump. What what was the thing that really compelled you to say? All right, we're going to go do something bigger.   Paul Thompson (00:01:34) - Well, I bought I bought and sold a lot of single family. Like I've gotten really good at doing that. If it can be done in single family, I've probably done nearly all of it and it became kind of pedestrian to me and I was playing it a bit safe.   Paul Thompson (00:01:49) - And if you really want to scale, which I did, then I wasn't sure that buying 100 single family properties was the best play and I wanted to jump off in the deep end. So instead of just buying an apartment complex, I decided to do a ground up development. So I just I really went for it.   Sam Wilson (00:02:07) - Wow. Okay. So you took on the ground up development project on your own. You said, All right, we're going to do a ground up development. It's a multifamily property. Uh huh. Whoa, whoa. Walk us through walk us through that. I mean, that's ambitious. Like that's I mean, just to get lending, to get investors, to get all those things lined up, you had to do a lot of things, right? What were they?   Paul Thompson (00:02:27) - Yeah, I'm still in the middle of it. So we'll we'll give you a full report in a couple of years when it's all said and done. But the learning and the process so far was that I was a member of a mastermind where we were working on mindset and trying to figure out kind of what our bottlenecks are and kind of designing our life.   Paul Thompson (00:02:49) - And I have a good life. I've nothing to complain about, but I felt like I had the potential to do a lot more. And I met a really good friend and he and I are still business partners at this mastermind. And he said, You know, I live in Dallas and I feel like we're in a good market. I really want to get into this land business. Interested in since you've done a lot of wholesaling and flipping and stuff, you kind of know the marketing side better than I do and our values aligned and we're still, you know, considered one of my best friends in the world and talked to him on a daily basis. And I really enjoy that business. So that's how it started. And then it evolved from there to, well, we've got the land entitled now. I mean, like let's we could just sell it. But the way it works and the development business is the longer you hold the land, the more money you make. So the sooner you sell, you can still make money, but you make less money.   Paul Thompson (00:03:41) - So like, well, we don't need to sell this this property right now. Let's go to the next level and do the horizontal development. Well, once you do that, you're like, Well, can't we keep some of it and do the multifamily side of it as well? And that's where we stand.   Sam Wilson (00:03:55) - Wow. What was the timeline from? Hey, here's an idea to when you identified a parcel that you said, Hey, this is a place where it will work.   Paul Thompson (00:04:04) - You probably took 3 or 4 months and made lots of offers not knowing we were doing. We did the I come from a kind of a wholesaling marketing background so I can do that. I don't necessarily say I enjoy it, but I know how to do it. And we sent lots of letters to landowners and we ended up finding a friend of ours that had a property and he's in the business and he had a property and said, This is a small one for me, probably smaller than I care to fool with. Would you guys be interested? I'll you'll pay me an assignment fee, but I'll show you the ropes and here's a good project for it.   Paul Thompson (00:04:36) - And that's that's been all we needed because that has then kind of dovetailed into a couple of deals.   Sam Wilson (00:04:43) - Right? So were you guys were you guys marketing for off market land then?   Paul Thompson (00:04:47) - We were.   Sam Wilson (00:04:48) - Gotcha. Okay. So yeah, I was wondering, I'm like, if you're going to, you know, again, if you're the DFW market, there's a property on the market. I mean, getting just the credibility with the brokers and with the sellers that says, Hey, we're going to take it's hard.   Paul Thompson (00:05:00) - Yeah, yeah.   Sam Wilson (00:05:01) - It would be hard. So finding it off markets probably a little bit. A smarter way to go about that. So you had the idea. Four months later, you acquire the land and then you're like, okay, we're going to go through entitlements. What are some things that you learned that maybe you wish you had known early on about entitlements?   Paul Thompson (00:05:18) - Lesson number one you don't buy land unless it's entitled. You can get it under contract subject to getting it entitled. And that's the way we do it now.   Paul Thompson (00:05:27) - But the first property we bought a little too quickly and it ends up we're going to be okay with it. But we had a surprise development in the middle of our process that the city didn't really want to do what we want to do with it. So we had to I mean, it's it's what they call it's in the county or in the Texas. They call it the edge. And it was kind of out in the county there. And that gives you options. You can annex into the city or you can stay in the county and it gives you some options. And basically we're running into some hassles with the city. And they're not. They say they want to do all the things you want to do, but then when it comes time to negotiate what they call the developer's agreement, they're like, well, we don't want to commit to anything. It's like, well, I'm not going to annex into the city unless you commit to something. And, you know, just that's that's the process of entitlement is dealing with the cities and going through the legalities and negotiating with lawyers who everybody typically means pretty well, but no one person has the say.   Paul Thompson (00:06:26) - So you're having to kind of like piece all this things together and even the people you're interfacing with, with the city, they're the city planner or the city attorney. They're not the city. They're just like employees of the city. And so this is really weird dynamic where you're trying to get the council to agree to something, but the council has no idea what you're doing. Because they're not involved in the conversations.   Sam Wilson (00:06:50) - So how do you how do you work around that?   Paul Thompson (00:06:53) - Well, you fight with the city planner. I say fight, but you have very pointed conversations with the city planner and especially the city attorneys. And you're like, no, the city does want to do this because they're going to get tax revenue. Does the city want tax revenue? Well, of course they do. Okay. Well, then this is how they get it. And you just have to play that game a lot and negotiate back and forth, have lots of meetings. Like, sometimes it feels like I'm back in corporate because I'm like, trying to, like, herd the cats a lot.   Paul Thompson (00:07:18) - And. And when it goes well, it's awesome. And when it doesn't, it's really frustrating.   Sam Wilson (00:07:23) - Yeah, man, I can only. I can only imagine what? How would you, other than waiting, you know, to close on the land, subject to whatever your plans are, getting entitlements done. What what else would you do to maybe expedite that process and or just kind of grease the wheels?   Paul Thompson (00:07:41) - I have learned that you don't expedite the process. No matter what you think you can do to make it go faster. The process is the process. And it's it's just government, right? So, like, you just can't make it go faster. So you basically have to negotiate with the seller to allow the and educate them that this is what it takes in any developer who's going who's worth their salt is going to do this, this, this same thing. They're not going to just buy it hoping and wishing that that that we're going to get the the terms we need from the city.   Sam Wilson (00:08:13) - Um, could you have gone to the city in advance and said, Hey, what do you guys want?   Paul Thompson (00:08:20) - Yes, we did.   Paul Thompson (00:08:21) - We can. And we did. And they said, we want this. This would be great. Let's annex. And then, you know, 18 months into the process, like, okay, well, we want you to help us get the financing. That'd be the only reason we actually annexed into the city is to help get a what they call a district created to do the financing. And they said, Yeah, yeah, we'll do that, but we're not going to promise we will. It's like, Well, then we're not going to annex to the city. Right, right.   Sam Wilson (00:08:44) - And you guys wanted to be annexed into the city for valuation purposes. Being attached to for.   Paul Thompson (00:08:52) - The financing, the city can help you qualify for financing. Public improvement. Financing.   Sam Wilson (00:08:57) - Right. Right. Which I'm sure is much more favorable terms than maybe what the street rates are.   Paul Thompson (00:09:02) - Yeah, right. Very much. It's a bond, right? So you raise a bond and the people who go and get the benefit of it, pay it back over time.   Sam Wilson (00:09:09) - Right. Very interesting. Okay, man, that's a lot. So you got through entitlement, you said. And so now you're, what, two years in at least? Yep, yep. Two years in, you get the land entitled. And then you came to a fork in the road. You said, Hey, look, I can sell this or we can go vertical with it. And it sounds like it sounds like you love hard things just from.   Paul Thompson (00:09:31) - No, like, actually I'm lazy. Like, why did I sign up for this? But then you look at the the potential profits know like, oh yeah that that adds like a whole nother zero to your profit. And I was like, okay, maybe it's worth it.   Sam Wilson (00:09:44) - Right? Right. Zero zeros are important. So you decided to go vertical. Like what? What was the next I mean, because at this point you're a lot of money in you're a lot of money and you're a lot of time. Yeah. Any any idea how many acres is this project?   Paul Thompson (00:10:00) - The whole thing is 36.   Paul Thompson (00:10:02) - 13 of it will be developed into multifamily and the other 23 will sell as townhomes. And basically we'll sell it, put what they call paper lots, we'll sell it 20, we'll sell the 23 acres to a builder to do the townhomes and the duplexes and whatnot. A build to rent model.   Sam Wilson (00:10:19) - Got it. Got it. Okay, cool. But still, so you got see and even so, you've already gotten all your, like you said, paper lots. I mean, the place is basically drawn up at that point. Right, right, right, right. Forget what I was going to ask you. It was about a oh amount of money that you're in on a project like this. Like what? What would you budget if you were to turn around, do this again? Maybe you already are doing this again. But we.   Paul Thompson (00:10:40) - Are. Um, I mean, you need access to, you know, probably tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for and pay for entitlements.   Paul Thompson (00:10:54) - And the studies and like, it's not uncommon for our earnest money deposit to be like 70 grand. Yeah. So it's not trivial amount of money. This is probably not something that you stumble into as a newbie having no experience, right? Um, yeah. And which is what we were, we were newbies and had no experience, so we made some mistakes along the way. But we were, you know, I'm in my 40s, my business partner is in his late 30s and we have established businesses otherwise. So this is not like the only thing that we're relying on. This is I think of business development and kind of like when you come in investing, single family and existing multifamily are more stable and defined, but then you can have these bigger projects that you kind of go go for gold. And this is what this is. This is a much bigger play, a longer term, and I'm not looking for immediate near-term cash flow. This is like like life changing wealth potential.   Sam Wilson (00:11:47) - Right, Right.   Sam Wilson (00:11:48) - No, absolutely. Clearly, you have the long game, the long game in mind. And I kind of suspected the answer to your, you know, or yeah, I suspected your answer to the question, which was, hey, you know, you could be hundreds of thousands of dollars in on this project by the time you get to entitlements. So we kind of learned plan B of it where you're going to sell that, you know, the other 23 acres off to developer, you guys are going to build the multifamily property on the 13 acres. But you liked it so much that now you're going back and you're doing it all over again.   Paul Thompson (00:12:18) - Yes, we are under contract on other projects and we're negotiating on with the cities to see if they're willing to play ball. And we make a decision right before our earnest money goes hard if the city is willing to to play or not. And we've gone on our contract on multiple occasions where we've had the property under contract, earnest money approaching, going hard, but we can't get up, can't get it back and we have to back out and tell the seller that this is like we explain this on the front end, that this is a risk of this.   Paul Thompson (00:12:52) - And most sellers that own that kind of land are sophisticated enough to kind of get the game enough that they understand. And they and I was still out money because I paid for all kinds of studies. And, you know, sometimes you can be out 30, 50 grand and realize this is not a viable deal.   Sam Wilson (00:13:09) - Wow. Wow. Man, that's tough. That's tough. What is what you talked about the financing side of things. But what is it like underwriting multifamily mean in today's environment? It's an ever changing environment, especially buying land developing. I mean, that's a long a long time time frame. There it is. What's a what's a strategy or how are you kind of offsetting or compensating for some of that unknown that we seem to have right now.   Paul Thompson (00:13:38) - So we take the we pay for market studies, which again, it can be 5 or $6000 and they and they provide like like a 60 page report on what's happening in the marketplace given where you are. And you take they give you a range of what things will rent for, you know, say a three, two or rent for, you know, 1600 to 1800.   Paul Thompson (00:13:57) - So we will run the numbers at 1500. So we kind of round down and we do our valuations based on that. And you determine what your NOI is based on, the number of units you think you're going to get, which again is, you know, this in a given like you think you're going to get 200 units, but you only get 188. So you you do like the 80% number of that and then you do these engineering estimates, which they call an opinion of probable cost. And you and you really got to understand the assumptions that they're making because most of the engineers are trying to do right by you and they make really, really, really conservative numbers and they make it super expensive. So they're so you have to kind of dial that into reality. Which is a whole process to learn. But once you kind of get your costs of what you think it takes. I went to an actual builder and said, What does it cost to build something? And they said, In today's market, it's $135,075 per square foot, so budget for 185.   Paul Thompson (00:14:54) - Okay. So we budget for 185 and then we determine, okay, like what's the going rate, determine the value? Well, we we run the conservative side of the cap rate. So in Dallas, it can be as low as four and a half. Five. We run it a five and a half, five, 5.8.   Sam Wilson (00:15:11) - That's a lot. That's a lot. A lot, A lot of things to consider there. Love. I love the the ambition and the just hey, we're going to go for it and figure it out. But it sounds like it sounds like you've done this, though, strategically. I think that's that's it. Maybe I'm wrong. Does that sound right? I'm going to say.   Paul Thompson (00:15:29) - I did because I can't defend myself in the event that I didn't.   Sam Wilson (00:15:35) - Love it. I love it, man. That's that's really, really cool. One of the other things, though, that it looks like you've done just from going through our show notes and then talking here before we kick this off, was that you've also just focused the side of your business on the capital raising side into other opportunities.   Sam Wilson (00:15:51) - Is that still something you do and if so, why? When you are apparently so busy already on your own deals?   Paul Thompson (00:15:57) - Well, my role in my own deals is that I'm the capital raise and the capital stack guy. So that's that's my angle. So my business partner is more of the finding the deals and analyzing and dealing with it with the the engineers and whatnot. I'm more of the the CFO role, right? So that's, that's where I sit. And whether it's for my own deal that I'm developing or for somebody else's RV park or somebody else's multifamily, I like getting to know investors. I like the marketing side of that because you're dealing with typically very consummate professionals and they're super curious about the business and they're not experiencing it yet. And they asked typically very shrewd questions based on their level of sophistication. They just don't know this business yet. And I enjoy that process of hosting webinars and meeting. I do a lot of Zoom calls with with investors to understand, you know, what they're after and what their goals are.   Paul Thompson (00:16:52) - And like, you know, this may not be a good fit for you, but, you know, down the road there might be something else that is.   Sam Wilson (00:16:56) - Sure. No, that's really, really cool. Anything that you have previously been investing in that you're now just like. Not interested in anymore.   Paul Thompson (00:17:06) - Yeah. So I ran an experiment for a while, though, where I was running with what I call mid term rentals, where I take basically you're focusing on traveling nurses, traveling professionals, and you're using Airbnb to market it. And I still have three units that do this with because I've already put the investment in the process in place, but I don't enjoy that business. That to me is personally exhausting. Like I have just three of those and I spend more time thinking about those than I do the other 40 long term rental units I have in Little Rock.   Sam Wilson (00:17:36) - Wow.   Paul Thompson (00:17:37) - Right. So even though they're only turning over once every 6 to 12 weeks, we have to turn it over every time because someone has lived there oftentimes for months at a time and it needs a major cleaning.   Paul Thompson (00:17:49) - And so after the cleaning, we have to go there and look at it and say, is this good enough? And nine times out of ten, it's not like it needs a little bit more. And so we have to get the cleaner back over there or me and my wife will do the last few minute items. I don't enjoy that part of it. That's not the kind of business I want to be in long term. But it's good to know I ran an experiment and it's a great model if you're that kind of operator. I am not that kind of operator. And so you need to know your pros and cons like, like what are you good at? And that is not what I'm good.   Sam Wilson (00:18:14) - At, right? No, that's really cool. I love I love that. And it's funny how different, different investing styles fit different personalities where it's like, you know what? There's people got a I got a buddy of mine that he loves the mid term rental thing. I mean that's all Yeah.   Sam Wilson (00:18:29) - Is mid term. It's a good business. A good business. Great makes great money. It it at scale and that's his thing. Yeah. You know doing capital raising like what you and I do and then you know getting involved in ground up development would not be his thing. So I think that's what's fun about this business. We all all get to choose. What has it been like for you? What are some systems that you either have implemented that you really liked and or systems you're still working on inside of your business that you're refining?   Paul Thompson (00:18:57) - I have found that I am a high startup, low follow through personality. This is like a real thing. This is like somebody came up with those words before I did, right? Like, this is a thing that people have and I am that person. I love dealmaking. I love deal structuring. I love putting things together, but I don't want to operate the deal. That's not my strength. I'm a visionary, not an operator. Right? So I need an operator.   Paul Thompson (00:19:20) - And for an example of the mid term rentals, I have completely outsourced the management of that to a good friend of mine and she does an amazing job. She gets 15% of all revenues, so she gets paid very well to do that and she does a great job and we still get pulled in occasionally to take care of things. So we're having to train our our cleaner, our local cleaner to look at things the way we would look at things. And so we have created her a checklist. And she's so good that we're afraid to run that by her too much and be too critical because we don't want to run away. Right? So that's something that me and my wife are working on. My wife likes to like fiddle with these things. And to me it is a money in money out box. But she likes to make a nice place to live. I care nothing about that. My wife does. So we have to like marry those two approaches and my wife can think about what the what kind of flowers that we're planting and I can think about, you know, what what the process is, the checklist for the cleaner to make sure that they're cleaning underneath the furniture because people have been there for a long time.   Sam Wilson (00:20:23) - Right, right, right. Yeah. If you have hardwood floors or whatever, you don't you don't want to get on your hands and knees and see nothing but dust.   Paul Thompson (00:20:29) - Right. Which is what happens if we let just the cleaner do what she would normally do because she turns over Airbnbs that are like 2 or 3 day stays. They don't get that dirty. When someone lives there for six months, it gets dirty. It needs a full overhaul. So what her checklist for a midterm is completely different than for a short term?   Sam Wilson (00:20:45) - Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Very, very interesting. Paul, I love what you're doing. This is I mean, you got your hands in a lot of different things, everything from long term rentals, mid term rentals, land acquisitions, entitlements, now doing massive development projects, it sounds like. Yeah, it sounds like you stay a fairly busy. This is this has been certainly enlightening to have you here come on the show and just share with us today. I appreciate your time.   Sam Wilson (00:21:10) - If our listeners want to get in touch with you and learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?   Paul Thompson (00:21:14) - The best way to get a hold of me is that my website. Paul David Thompson. Com. I think you'll drop that in the show notes. But it is spelled the way you might expect. I say this a lot, but I have a curse of a common name, so I had to use all three of them to make sure I got my own domain. All David thompson.com.   Sam Wilson (00:21:32) - That's awesome. Paul We share the same middle name. I like it. This is great. Thank you again for coming on the show today. I do appreciate it. Appreciate it. Sam Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast. If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show.   Sam Wilson (00:21:56) - It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.  

Jesus, this woman, this man, was caught. The law demands condemnation. What do you say? The God who wrote the law with his divine finger, now writes with a human finger. And Jesus writes through his servant Paul “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus!” (Rom. 8: 1). I have made your condemnation my own. For you there is no condemnation! From you there is to be no condemnation. Sin no more. Go in peace.

Jesus, this woman, this man, was caught. The law demands condemnation. What do you say? The God who wrote the law with his divine finger, now writes with a human finger. And Jesus writes through his servant Paul “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus!” (Rom. 8: 1). I have made your condemnation my own. For you there is no condemnation! From you there is to be no condemnation. Sin no more. Go in peace.

Allen: All right, passive traders, we have a treat in store for you today. Many of you know about the option continuum, which is basically, you know, our levels of breakdown of where you are as an options trader, you start with level one, you don't know anything. And then you get to level 10, maybe if you want to, which is option professional. And basically a professional means that you are so good at trading options, that you are now trading and managing other people's money and you're getting paid for it. Many of you have reached out to us in the past and said, Hey, I want more information on that. And we haven't really put it out there because I am not doing it myself. Right now, as a professional, I don't I'm not measuring anybody else's money. And so, you know, I'm not the best person to talk to about that. But we keep getting people and be like, hey, you know, I want to learn, I want to learn. So one of our members, Paul Ashcraft, has volunteered to join us today. And I want to thank you, Paul, for coming and helping out. A few a couple of months ago, I think in one of our groups, I think it was a passive group, where I had put in there like, Hey, I'm thinking about starting a hedge fund. So I'm thinking about going professional, right? And he reached out and said, hey, you know, I'm already doing it if you want to, if you want to talk and I can answer your question. So we had an amazing conversation, I learned a lot. And I was like, You know what, this would be really helpful for everybody else. So I asked Paul, hey, could you do it again? And we can record it this time? It was like, Yeah, sure, no foul. And so he's here, Paul, thank you. Thank you for being on thank you for taking the time to do this. Paul: Thank you very much. Pleasure. Allen: And you're Paul is a member of our of a lot of our programs. So passive trading formula, the blank check, and now the credit spread mastery as well. So you know, it's good to see that, hey, if you're a money manager, then you're continuously getting learning and learning new things to help out your students, or your clients, I guess. So. Well, tell me, why did you get into management? What was it that drawed you through that? Paul: Well, I sort of got tricked into it. I had a, I'm a CPA by trade, and I had a client who was becoming an NFL player agent. And he trusted me and wanted me to help him manage his people's NFL players money. So I started the licensing process at that time. And so that sort of tricked me into it. So that sort of fell apart. And then he wasn't getting more leads for what he was doing. So I basically continued since then, so Allen: Okay, so were you already trading on your own? Or before that? Or did you learn as you want to? Paul: Yeah, I've been trading, you know, for quite a while. Off and on. So yeah, I've had some experience of trading. Allen: Okay. So you are comfortable, you could do it? Paul: I knew I needed to learn, I do need to learn some more. But yeah, I feel like I could I knew enough about the world to do that. Allen: Okay. And so you are known as what is a RIA, a registered independent advisor? Paul: Right. That's correct. Allen: So that's one of the ways of managing money. What exactly is an RIA? Paul: It's basically a firm that is licensed by the FINRA basically, and you are licensed to where you can manage other people's money. Allen: And all RIAs, are fiduciaries, right? Paul: That's correct. Yeah.  Allen: Right. Because a lot of people don't know the difference between a fiduciary and a non fiduciary. And so a fiduciary, if you don't know you are legally bound to do what's in the best interest of the client. A lot of these other companies that people think about when they're talking about money management, or Wealth Advisors, retirement advisors, all these words that they use, they have no license, or maybe they do have a license, but they're not a fiduciary. So they're not required to do what's best for the client. And so they can sell you a product that they get the highest commission on, even if it's not really a good thing, a good fit for you. So that's why..  Paul: Yeah one of the ways I deal with that fiduciary criteria is basically whatever I do for other people, I do for myself. Allen: Okay. Okay, interesting. So, what does it take to open an RIA? Paul: Well, if you want to legal structure and need, like, I have an LLC got a creative for that. And I have had to pass a serious 65 test, which you'd like an SEC test, and get to come up some kind of agreement you have with your clients that's approved by FINRA to sign them on as clients. Those are the basics you have to do. Allen: Okay, and like how long did it take you to go through all that? Remember? Paul: I'm gonna say, basically of six to nine months. Allen: Okay, and how long have you been? How long have you been an RIA? Paul: Since 2014, so roughly eight years. Allen: Awesome. Yep. Cool. And for those of you, you know, I'm going to repeat it later on, but Paul's business website is Businessadvisors.Pro. So if you ever or if you need a good adviser, you know, please reach out to Paul. And I'll repeat at the end, and we'll put it in the show notes. I just wanted to get that out there. Paul: And that's mainly my CPA website, just so you know. Allen: Very cool. BusinessAdvisors.Pro, there you go.  Paul: And then sort has been done about creating my Wealth Advisors website, because you're so under scrutiny when you were you advertise things, so I just sort of steered away from that a little bit. Allen: Interesting. Okay. So I guess there's certain things you can say and certain things you cannot say. Paul: Basically, anything you put out there to the public, you have to like, monitor it for five years, and they can question you about it anytime. So I just figured one way to get around that is just not to do it. Allen: Okay. So then that leads me to my next question, like, how do you find clients if you're not advertising? Paul: Well, you know, I have CPA clients, probably like half the clients, I have my Wealth Advisors from CPA side. Other thing is like, from friends, and referrals from other people who use me. Allen: Okay. So it takes time to build all that up?  Paul: Yes, yes. And I'm currently working on more. More advertising. Allen: Okay. All right. So the advertising is possible. It's not it's not like it's restricted. But you have to be careful of what you do and how you do it. Paul: Yes, yes, yeah. Allen: Now, what are your clients looking for? Because, you know, if somebody comes to you and says, Hey, you know, I'm looking to make more money, obviously, but they have so many, so many choices. They can do it themselves, it could go to like, like Fidelity and have them do it. They could go to they're really rich, they can have their own private like, you know, Bank of America, has their own private wealth, people. So when they come to you, what do they tell you? Like? What are they looking for in terms of an advisor? Paul: Well, I mean, I had someone recently come to me, and, you know, we're signing them up, or things that I'd say we, if we look, if we're here a year later, what do you want to what your criteria are saying, I did a good job. And he wanted a 10% return, which has been difficult in this market. But that's, that's one thing. Another thing? I you know, most advisors out there, these basically are, they're buying hold people, I mean, and they bid six things in a bucket, and don't look at it too often. So I, I basically say that I'm actively working in their account, and I'm not sure I'm going to just put it there and not be looking at it. Allen: So obviously, you probably tell them about your options experience and the different types of strategies you use. Paul: Yeah, a lot of times just the casual person warnings on the manager money that, that if I tried to tell them all that it would go way over their head. Because, you know, it took me like two years talking about options to actually start doing it myself, you know, so I'm trying to be a little bit of conscientious about what they can and cannot handle information wise. I'll be glad to talk about it, they want to, but I'm not gonna write too much about it. Allen: And I bet that would that would set you apart, right? You know, it's like, hey, you know, we can do plain vanilla stuff. Or we can do if you're a little bit more aggressive than we can do this, and this and this. And then if it goes over there, that's fine. But as long as they're like, whoa, this guy knows. Paul: Yeah, definitely. That's certainly part because like, my CPA, well, I deal with investment advisors. And like, no one, no one that I know of is actually managing costs. I mean, like, you know, every week or things like that, Allen: yeah, yeah, they just don't I mean, part of it is they have, depending on where they are some of these guys that I know, they have broker dealers, and the broker basically tells them what they can do and what they can't do. And trading is like, No, you're not doing it. They just they can't, they're not allowed. And so, you know, we get we get clients that are financial advisors, they come in, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm a financial advisor, like, oh, they shouldn't, you know, all this stuff. And they're like, oh, I don't do any of this for my son. I don't know, they don't even teach us this stuff. In financial advisors. Cool. So it's like, once I call again, I'm like, Oh, my God. Paul: Yeah, most of them are just like, call themselves people. And it is this, they don't necessarily know that much about investing. It's more about they have relationships with people, and they train their people to be accustomed to five to 7% returns. So so don't want you to do that as that's, you know, not a hallmark. Allen: Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, when I go to if I go to a dinner party, or whatever, and, you know, always comes up. So what do you do? It's like, well, I teach people how to do this. And the first they're like, really, is that, you know, what do you what do you mean? And then we tell them a little bit about it, and they go, Yeah, you know, we try to aim, you know, for 5% a month, and they're like, what a month. Really? Oh, wow, I gotta learn about that. And then, you know, you explain a little bit and then they're, like, bored and then they go talk to somebody else. Because, you know, it's cool. They want, they want it. They just want to do the work. So that's cool. Now as an advisor, how do you How do you charge? Like, what do you charge? How do you do it? Paul: So I have what's called a serious 65 license. So I'm able to charge a percentage of what assets are under management. Okay, so the basic generic, charged with as generally 1% of assets under management. Okay, that if I'm doing more as a some different strategies, things like that, I'm probably going to up the field more because it's, it is active trading. Allen: It takes more time. Yeah, yeah. Because I remember way back when I had a guy at America ice, and he was my advisor. And yeah, he would charge a minimum of 1% on assets every year. Every time you put money, you gave him money, they would take 5% off the top. And then every every mutual fund and every index fund or whatever that they put you in. And most of them were, you know, Ameriprise products. Each of those things would have a separate fee every year. So I mean, I got dealing left and right. I didn't know what I was doing. At the time, I was thinking I am going to you know, I'm smart. I got an advisor. But yeah, he was the one getting rich. And so.. Paul: They made that money, whether they go down or go up it. Allen: Yeah, I mean, they take the money right up front, 5% off the top. As soon as you make a deposit, it's like, man, you haven't done anything. Even if I turn around and ask for the money back, I just love fibers. Do you have like a lot of Is There a lot of overhead for being a advisor? You need a large staff? Paul: Right now, it's just me. And so I'm already have all my setup for my CPA business. So there's not really that much more to do.  Allen: And you can run it from the same location. Yes, yes. Okay. So then who does the like the backend stuff, you know, statements, and compliance audits, all that stuff. Paul: So we use Interactive Brokers as the broker dealer. So they basically, so all my clients have their own account set up with them, and it sort of goes underneath my master account. So so they take care about the then get a statement from there anytime they want to find out what their balances. And if they need to take up money, they can contact them and get the money taken out. So they saw him. So we're doing a lot of the back office stuff. Allen: Awesome. So you really don't have to do anything. And they they opened the account themselves, the client opens the account themselves, they deposit the money themselves, they can take it out whenever they want, they can go and log in, see all the trades, see whatever is there. So you really don't have a lot of customer service issues. And so you don't have to send send out statements, because Interactive Brokers will do that. Right. Paul: And one of my strategies is if someone is, I call it high maintenance, then I probably can't handle that, you know, they probably need to find someone else because, you know, I got enough things to do is it is. Allen: Awesome, cool. And then. So you don't handle any of the money either. Because they just go straight to interactive. So you're like a hands off, okay, I'll do the trades, but I'm not touching your money. So you don't have to worry about me taking your money and running away and flying to Bermuda or something.  Paul: Yeah, just like the Bernie Madoff deal where he was. He they call it having custody of the funds, and he had custody. And so they, they talked about that when you're going through your testing and things like that, about having custody and not having custody and things like that. So yeah, it's a big red flag. Allen: Yeah. Because I mean, like, I've been looking into starting my own hedge fund, you know, using the the passive trading strategies and such. And I looked at RIA first and then I looked at, you know, hedge fund as another way, and I think from what I've been able to find so far is that if you start a hedge fund, and you don't charge any management fees, you don't need the license, you can set it up in a way where you know, you get you only take a percentage of the profit. So if there's a gain, you can get a percent, but you don't get that yearly management fee. If you want the yearly management fee, then you do have to separate a separate Ria, to do the management of the fund. Okay, I didn't know that. Yeah, so I thought that was pretty cool. So we've been looking at that as well, different things. So now, what percentage of your management is active? versus, you know, index funds, mutual funds, etc? Paul: I'd say about half. Allen: Okay, and all of the clients are okay with that, or do you do client by client? Paul: I pretty much put everybody under the same model. Yeah. So Allen: And so with interactive, how does that work, you have to go into each account to put a trade on or you just put one trade on and it just trickles.. Paul: There's a master account and I can set up different  classification. So I could I could buy 1000 shares of IBM and have it spread it putting all the accounts did that.  So they have to watch out for is some of the accounts can trade certain things, some can't, like RIAs cannot do you know, futures and naked options and things like that as far as, at least on the credit side. Allen: Okay. All right. So can does that get confusing? If you want if you want like, Okay, I want like a say IBM, I want my IBM stock to be 5% of all of my everybody's portfolio. Paul: Yeah, that would be a different the different equation. So basically, like I did a trade today where I figured, you know, want to take a $10,000 risk. So divided by what that option was going for. And I bought that many contracts to take on that kind of risk. So not necessarily rebalancing everyone is usually trade by trade. So putting on a certain set of circumstances, set a step stop loss and things like that. Allen: Okay, cool. So you can do it as easy or as simple as you want. Or you can make it as complicated as you want. Yeah, up to you. Yeah. Nice. So what types of what types of trades do you do? Paul: Well, some of what you teach. So I do some swing trading. And of course, you know, credit spreads and things like that. And some, you know, some some of the dividend paying stocks and covered calls and things like that. Allen: And do you do any any oil futures options? Paul: Well, I'm not. I'm just at the point to get licensed for that. Allen: It's a separate license? Paul: That's as a separate license. Yes. So you have to you have to get licensed through the, Chicago Board of Trade, the NFA and National Futures Association. Allen: Okay. Okay. And then will you be able to do it the same as everything else through Interactive Brokers? Paul: Yes, I think so. Sometimes you don't know to actually do it. So I think it's pretty similar. Allen: Sweet. Okay. Now, as a as an RIA, do you also advise your clients on other alternative investments, you know, real estate, crypto anything else? Or is it just stocks, bonds, options? Paul: I'm always getting to ask questions, you know, because I'm in, you know, really, I'm gonna CPA world or the IRA world, I'm getting asked questions. So I will advise on that if I think I have a good opinion. You know, I'm not roll up on that rolled up on crypto Allen: Right, right. Are you still bound by the same fiduciary type rules on that or?  Paul: You could come under some scrutiny. You know, you'd like an offsetting handed comment, and then someone does something crazy. And so you got to be a little careful. Allen: Yeah. All right. And okay, so him now with the interactive account, or the broker dealer, is the software any different? Like, versus if you open a regular account by yourself? Is there anything you have to learn a new platform? Or is it basically the same thing?  Paul: It's pretty much the same platform, you just have to understand how to do the trading, like I was telling you about, like, allocating between all the accounts, but the platform itself is basically the same. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Allen: What do you see as the future of money management, because like, you know, they got these robo advisors now, and they got like Robin Hood, trying to get everybody to trade on their own. And so what do you see down the pike? You know, do you see like, your clients are like, yeah, rather just have you do it? Or are robots or whatever? Paul: Yeah, I can see, you know, some of the robot picking up. But on average, most people out there don't know, hardly anything about the investing world. My average client, so I think it's going to be still a good field you know, way up currently doing it. Allen: Okay, and who is like your average client? Paul: They're probably like 50 years old, that did 60. And probably, you know, got assets anywhere from, you know, 50 to 50,000 to over a million dollars, you know? Allen: And do you have any limits on who can invest with you? And how much? Paul: No, I mean, like, I'm not, I'm just gonna take on any account right now. It would need to be over a certain dollar amount for me to I just always have to keep that in mind about, you know, do I want to take on a five or $10,000 account? Because it's gonna be extra work. Taking that versus the capital issue at-- You don't have to be you don't have to comply with the day trading rules. You know, because because if you if you accidentally in and out three, three trades in a week, then your account gets shut down. You know, so you have to deal with that. So yeah, so I'm trying to gradually move up from like a minimum of 25,000 to 50,000, 200,000. Allen: Okay. And then you also have a certain criteria like a certain person that you want right? Certain somebody they can handle the options and that Intertek can handle that because I mean, it does swing a little bit. So if they have a 5,000 to $10,000 account, they freak out if they lose $1,000, obviously, that's not the right person for you anyway. Paul: Right. But on that same note, I had a client the other day that, you know, they have, you know, an excess a half million dollars with me. And they want to know how they could put in more money since this market was down so they could capture, capture that now mark? I love that kind of client. expecting them to call you and tell you, why is my account down? Actually, that question is dead. They're saying, How can we put more money in?  Allen: Yeah, that's a smart, that's a Smart Client. So that's, that's got to be your email, you know, going out, like, Hey, he's trying to give me more now. double down on your investments. Okay. Now, How has being a money manager improved your own trading? Or hasn't? Paul: Well, I mean, it's made me to seek out new avenues of investing. You know, because I'm looking out for my clients. By the same token, when I do that, I find things that I can use to, you know, like, I don't know, if I would have found the old future options without that, you know, seeking out new new investment strategies, you know, so I could do a better job for my clients. Allen: Okay. Now, we've had a lot of volatility lately. And you've, you've alluded to it already. When stocks down about 20% or so right now, how do you deal with the investor concerns or expectations? Paul: I'm continually learning that. The more, the more proactive you can be with that, I find that it's better. Like, if you have a bad day or a bad trade that, you know, that affects it so much, and then maybe call and talk to them about it versus waiting for them to call you later, and they get their quarterly statements. And they call you know? Allen: Right. So do you find that a large portion of your job is just talking to people and just calming them down? Or explaining certain things to them? Or educating them? Paul: In the beginning? Yes. If someone's with you for a while, and they haven't gotten, understood your ways, and why you do what you do. And it would be generally in the first year of a client relationship, you indeed do that more, but there is sort of they get to know you, you you get to know them and sort of like a training curve there. Allen: And now, most of your clients, are they either they know you or they were referred to you. Right. So there's always there's already that trust built in from the beginning. Most of them yes, yeah. So if you, you know, advertising, somebody comes in cold, they're like, oh, yeah, I like what you're doing here. You know, here's $100,000, there's gonna be a lot more back. Paul: Yeah. Allen: Okay. So how are you handling? How are you handling the volatility? Like when somebody calls up and says, Oh, my count is down. How do you? What do you do there? Paul: Well, number one, what I did when I saw when I saw the market starting to tank, I basically, was going more into cash. So like, I the client won't know why we aren't investing. I said, Well, I'm waiting for the market to give me indication has, it's found the bottom or, you know, it is headed back up. So I don't want to, I'm not a bottom picker. But I don't want to like, write it further down. You know. So that's one way of dealing with it. And they seem to appreciate that quite a bit and understand that. So I don't think that's something you get out of a typical advisor. Allen: So yeah, but what if somebody calls you and says, Oh, my God, you know, I'm down 10%? What am I going to do? I can't handle this. How do you handle that? Have you ever had that happen? Paul: Yeah. I tried to change up their strategies a little bit to get them a little more solid, or maybe not trade as much in their account. Just being a little more cautious. Allen: Okay, so Okay, so you can actually choose, like, let's say, we talked about that IBM thing. So if you're like, Hey, I'm buying IBM, you could choose and say, okay, don't put it in this account in this account, just because in all these other ones,. Yeah. All right. So you can actually tailor it because like, if somebody goes, Yeah, I just want to be long stocks, or I just want tech stocks. And I just want you know, credit spreads. So they you can, you can do that. Yeah, okay. Yep. So, do you have any shortcuts that you can share? You know, for somebody that's thinking, hey, you know, this sounds like cool, I'm gonna I'm gonna get into this. RIA business, anything that you probably didn't know, ahead of time that you would have liked to have known? Paul: This is sort of like a unknown territory. Because, I mean, when I was doing it, I couldn't get anybody to actually figure it out what like a serious 65 license would do. And I was sort of going into blindly a little bit. So I mean, I think the number one thing is maybe you know, then contact me. Shortcuts is, you know, I don't know like I had to find a place to take the take the course for that. And then I hired a guy to tutor me some. And, you know, there's, there's these firms out there wanting you to sign up with them for them to do oh, you know, like your paperwork and so forth. And I just sort of like fumbled my way through it and plagiarized another agreement online affected us. And so another thing is to know if you're in this world, you will get audited. Personally. Well, the your investment firm, right, yeah. Yeah. Like I'm in the CPA world, and I probably will never get out a different CPA world. But the investment side, I will get audited probably time and time again. So far, it's only been once one step Florida, but yeah, Allen: okay. Yeah. I mean, that's a good thing. I guess, you know, that, that the advisors and like you said, you know, the Bernie Madoff, he keeps him at bay as much as he can a little bit. So some of that, I guess, from a consumer standpoint, and that's a good thing to hear. Paul: Yeah, but a lot of a lot of us, they don't necessarily understand the world as much as you do. And it's more like them checking a box somewhere in a city. They ask this question, or I did that, but they don't really find that don't really necessarily know exactly what they're doing, you know, Allen: Yeah. So but do you mean tax audited or audited by like the audit by Paul: the state by the financial regulatory people for the state you're in Allen: The state regulatory? Okay, so every state has their own regulatory stuff that you have so far. Paul: Yeah. So just just sort of background here. Usually, as you're managing under $100 million, you're managed by the state. But then once you hit $100 million in the SEC is basically is going to your watchdog, it's gonna look over your shoulder. Allen: Okay. All right. Cool. And you're in Florida, right? Correct. But you can take clients from anywhere? Paul: I can. But different states have different rules, most of them allow you to take five to 15 clients, and not really be registered with them. But then once you hit over that threshold, they want you to fully registered with them. But there are a few states that require you if you get one client, they want you to be registered. And Louisiana was one of those states. Allen: So I guess, depending on how much capital the guy is gonna give you whether it's worth it to register there.. Paul: Exactly, exactly, yeah. Okay. All right. Allen: So would you knowing what you know, now, are you happy that you went this route? Paul: Ask me again, in a few years. Allen: Well, you've been doing already for like, eight years. So kind of got some kind of track record here. Paul: Yeah, it's been, you know, it's been definitely a learning curve, you know, from the regulatory side. And then from the investment side, too, so? Yes, I'm glad I did it. But it' had its rough moments. Allen: Well, give me an example. Paul: Well if you if you lose on a trade, you know, it can affect your account and other people's account. So that's probably the biggest things that has happened to me, you know? And then you got to figure out how am I gonna tell this person this?  Allen: Yeah. So how did you how did you deal with that? Paul: I prayed a lot. Basically, if I knew the fact that someone so much, I would, I call them and talk to him about it. But in a certain situation, like, because it was spread over so many accounts, it didn't really affect anyone that much. It wasn't that big of a deal. Like, you know, if I'm managing $5 million of money, and I lose 20,000, you know, the most Someone's probably gonna lose is maybe 2 or 3000. So the overall number is a big number. But you know, we spread between all the counts, it's not that big of a number. Allen: Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I mean, that's that thing, right? There is like, the biggest thing that's kept me out of it for all these years, you know, people have been asking me from the beginning, okay, can you take my money? I'm like, nope, nope, because I don't know how I'm gonna handle the stress. I don't know if, um, we will sleep, I can lose my own money, you know, market down 20% Okay, whatever, it'll go back up, I got time, you know, but somebody else if I lose your money, and I don't know, I don't know how I'm gonna handle it. And so that's the one thing that that's really caused me to be hesitant up till now. And I agree what you said about not having that much information out there. You know, I mean, there are companies out there that will like if you want to be in RIA you type in how to be an RIA and there's a company that hey, you if you give us like 30 grand, you know, we'll do all the paperwork and we'll file everything for you. So you Okay, but what do I actually get? You know, they're like well you do the paperwork. Well what about after that? How do I get clients how do I do this how to do that they will help you at all and these two guys they had approached, they had talked that a because I'm you know Option Genius is in what's called the financial publishing space that world, so we have our own little conventions and all the Guru's come and hang out and talk marketing and stuff. And so there was there was these two guys who were speakers, and they were telling all of the financial publishers that hey, you guys need to get into the into the management business, because you guys already have all these clients? They already trust you? You know, and they probably have a lot of money because people coming to me, you know, they say, Hey, I want to learn how to trade options. Okay, cool, you know, and how large is your account? They're like, Oh, 50,000. Okay, cool. And they trading options with 50,000. But they also have like, maybe a million dollar IRA, that they're not touching, or their wife has $500,000 that is with some other financial advisor that she doesn't want her husband to touch with options. So it's like, yeah, everybody that comes in has a lot more money. So if you started an IRA or an advisor, then you know, they'll give you that money as well. And you can make all this money. And I was like, Okay, that's interesting. But, you know, what are the legalities and all that and they wanted, I don't know, obtain $1,000 plus a percentage of the company to actually teach me all this stuff. And I'm finding a there's a lot of secrecy, as you can say, you know, and Wall Street, I think puts it like that on purpose. Because they don't want everybody to know what they're doing and what they that they don't know what they're doing. Pretty much. So cool. Paul: I don't know, that's intentional, but it just got I think there's so few people who are looking to do it. And like, it's not a widespread throughout the population thing. So you don't find as much about it, you know. Allen: Maybe okay, yeah, I'll take that. Yeah. Because like, you know, even like, what is the difference between an RIA and a hedge fund? You know, I've been beating my head, like, which one? Which way? Do we go? Which way? Do we go? If we go this way? Or this? Or what are the pros? What are the cons, and there's like, no one person that can that can tell me, if you want to go to a hedge fund, they got a little hedge fund world, and, you know, you got to you got to pay the dues to get in. If you want the RA world, then it's more common, but it's, it's for the guys, you know, for people who are like, Yeah, you know, I just want to put everybody's money in an index fund, you know, so it's like, what you're doing is totally different, like, I have not met any advisors that are actually, you know, trading that actively for people. So I mean, compared to the other guy, Joe Schmo that charges 1% a year, or 2% a year, just to put their money in an index fund compared to what you're doing, you know, your value is just so much more. But it does seem like it's very similar to a hedge fund where, you know, a hedge fund is a little bit different, where all the money is pooled into one spot. And then, you know, the, the trader controls it, you're doing kind of similar, where you can look at it and be like, Okay, I got, you know, $10 million under management, how am I going to split that up into different trades? And it just happens to be in different people's accounts? So have you ever thought about increasing your rates because like a hedge fund, they can charge a percentage of the gains? An RIA can't? Can they do that? Paul: They can do that on their certains particulars criteria? I think like you have to have an investor who's has at least $2 million in investable assets. They have at least $1 million invested with you. And then you can have certain arrangements where you say, Well, if I make whatever percentage I'll make about what the s&p does, you'll split it with me, or something like that, you know? Okay, so again, it's very, it's has a lot of criteria to it can't be done, though. Okay. Yeah. Because I wouldn't say the hedge fund world is based on what you're telling me is, cuz you're basically commingling all the funds. Right? So you got to do like a statement for each person or something. Yeah. And so I think the advantage is, you can just commingle it all and then do whatever you need to do. And then at the end of the day, you somehow allocated? Allen: Right, so the thing with the hedge fund is that all the investors have to be accredited. Okay, so accredited, as you know, probably, you know, you basically you have a million dollar net worth not putting your house, or you're making upwards of 300,000 a year. So, you know, basically, so at least Paul: They have to tell you, they're accredited. Right? Allen: I think we would actually want them to be proof, you know, give me proof otherwise, we're not letting you in. Paul: That was actually in so my testing I just did is like, yeah, you want this criteria? But are you actually gonna go go check it? No. So Allen: Interesting. Okay. Because I mean, you know, the government says that the hedge funds, you know, if you're an accredited investor, you should be smarter than the average bear. And so, if you lose money, it's not that big a deal. Like you are smart enough to get into it. You know, somebody with $5,000 or $10,000. That's my life savings. No, sorry, you can't invest in this. Even though the hedge fund might be like doing 1,000,000% a year, you can't invest because you're not accredited. Ras can take basically everybody, so that was one of the things okay, somebody comes in with 50,000 as an RIA, you might just take it because it's not that much paperwork. It's not extra for you. But for a hedge fund. Yeah, no, I can't do it. Because I gotta, I gotta pay the auditing company. I gotta pay the statement company. I got to pay the customer. You know, whoever's doing customer service and answering the phone and doing all that, and salespeople and all that. So 50,000 is not going to cut it, you know, the limit is a lot higher. For sure. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, that, in that sense, totally different world. But very similar from what I'm seeing is that, you know, you're doing probably what we're gonna be doing, you know, similar. Paul: So you probably can't take qualified money like IRAs and things like that. Allen: I think they can. Yeah, yeah, I think they can, as long as a person is accredited. And so there's different regulations, 5063 C, or six, C, five, or six D, they'll those tell you, you know, if you can take accredited and non accredited, and then can you advertise or not, I'm still learning all this, it's all different, because like, if you start a Real Estate Fund, different from if you're doing a hedge fund, versus a private equity fund, so some of the rules apply to everything. Some of the rules are just separate. So I'm still learning all that. But I know that the Interactive Brokers, people, they've done webinars in the past with attorneys. So if anybody wants to start a hedge fund, you can still use the Interactive Brokers platform. And they have they actually have a separate portal, I think, for hedge funds. Yeah, I've seen that. You've seen that too? Where you can actually see what other people are doing. And what are the trades that they're making? Paul: I didn't know about that. I just knew that they had some kind of hedge fund portion of what they're doing. I didn't know exactly what it meant. Allen: Yeah. So So what they said was that, you know, the attorney was like, you know, it'll take several, you know, maybe $30,000, to set up your hedge fund, you can probably do it with a smaller amount, if you want to start an incubator fund, which is like, you know, if you have your own money, and you put in and say $300,000, and you trade it as if it's a fund, and you don't maybe that that paperwork might be like 7000, and you set that up, you treat it as a fun, you build up your track record, and be like, Oh, hey, look, you know, I was trading for six months, I got this, that or not, and then you can start advertising it, and you convert it to a full fund. And then you can say, well, look at my track record, this is what I did. And then people can come in for the full fund. So that was one of the things that they were they were talking about. But so yeah, we were we were looking at an interactive, but the one thing that interacted with their software is a little bit more clunky or less user friendly than some of the most user friendly software. Yeah, it was my personal accounts. Now. So when, do you still trade on on your own on the side? Or is all of your money in the big? Paul: I have some money still in the in the huge fund? And then, you know, I have some I have an account on the side, right? Allen: So that separate account, did that change it all after you got licensed? Because they always, you know, when you open an account, they always ask you, are you licensed? And then they're I don't know why they do that. Is there to change anything on? You're not gonna recall? Paul: Yeah. So, there's, there's occasions where you can link up an account with the master fund, and you can D link the account. So I think at one time I had, it's actually my 401k account for my accounting firm attached to the IRA account, but then I detached it. One of the main reasons was for futures. Okay, because I knew I wasn't qualified to do futures for the whole fun. But I could on a mountain account. Allen: Ah, okay. So you have to keep it separate to do the futures options. Yeah. Until you get licensed by them. And is that like a lengthy process as well? The futures options? License? Yeah. Paul: I took a series three exam back a month or so ago. So I'd studied for two or three months, and again, got a tutor. Yeah. Okay. Allen: All right. How many clients do you have right now? Paul: I'd say about 20-25. Allen: Okay. All right. Cool. And so, from a financial standpoint, has it been worth it? Paul: Yeah, it's been really good. I might, my intention when I know that, you know, once I got into it, my intention was over the years, you know, retirement age, is at my incomes shift for my CPA business or to my investment business. So I could do that, say two hours a day and retirement versus, you know, doing tax seasons and all that. CPA visits. Allen: Okay. Is that still the plan? Yes. Still plan. Awesome. Cool. So yeah, I mean, handling managing millions of dollars of assets in two hours a day. That sounds pretty good to me. Paul: That might be a pipe dream. But that's what I had in mind.  Allen: I think you could do it your own way. You're on your way. Cool. Awesome. So is there anything that I haven't asked you that you think like, oh, yeah, people need to know this. Paul: I could probably sit here and think about a few things. Not on every call. No, no, no, no. I mean, one thing you have to like for instance, a you have to have a like an email account that you Gotta add to retain all your emails for at least like five years. That's one thing to keep in mind. And like I have to send a like a balance sheet and income statement to the state of Florida every year and get someone to notarize it. You have to upload information to the FINRA site at least once a year. And that's where you pay your like on license Louisiana along Florida and things like that. So I pay my fees for those licensing booth vendors website. Allen: And that you had told me that the fee that you charge for management that comes out Interactive Brokers basically pays you every quarter, your fixed asset if I had to build it, right, yeah. Paul: Okay. So, so they do it automatically. But when I got audited, the state wanted me to actually create invoices. So the answer your question is, I'm not sure what the real requirement is. So far, I guess I met that criteria then. So I'm not actually grading him. What's the reporter right now? Okay. Allen: Yeah, I mean, because like, I mentioned, those two consultants that I had talked to, they had told me that I would have to bill everybody invoice, everybody, every quarter. And those people would have to pay me directly. So it wouldn't be taken out of their account, it would be sent directly to me that they would have to write a check every quarter. And I'm like, that's a pain in the butt. You know, that's pretty cumbersome. Yeah, if a customer has to pay, you know, a big check every quarter for management fees. And then especially if you have a down year, he's like, What am I paying for it? I don't pay for this anymore. And you don't get paid. So I was like, Okay, that's a big red flag. But I'm glad that that's not true. Cool. Okay. Paul: One thing I have figured out there is, like, there's an account I was going to take from someone from one advisors to me, and they had all their fees, like totally hidden with all these mutual funds and things like that. And so like, you know, that account, I was gonna charge 3.3%. But we weren't able to ever get to the bottom of what the other advisor was charging. So, even though they have a lot of disclosures and things like that, I think we could have pressed the issue if we really wanted to. But, um, but you know, I ended up losing that account. Allen: So did that customer realize that, that he's being charged all these things? Paul: No, no, no clue. No, I mean, whenever I sort of parted ways, and I said, you guys at least need to figure out what they're charging you. You'd be surprised at the amount of inept that's out there and people who are actually hiring advisors, like, yeah, most people do not keep like their annual statements. They couldn't tell me how much they made last year. You know, because really, when I'm taking on an account, I want to know, what their track record has been sort of what I would need to beat to make them happy. You know, a lot of them are not that attuned to that. Allen: That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, people, they work their entire lives to save up money and invest it so they can retire. But then they don't pay any attention to the money. Oh, boy.. Paul: I think it's because they don't know that much about it. So they wouldn't know what to do if it was not what they wanted, you know? Allen: Yeah. I mean, you gotta you gotta take a little bit of time to at least read the statements and figure out where's the money going? And it could be better disclosed, you know, the statements could be easier to read that that's definitely sure. That's, yeah. But it is what it is for now. Paul: Like, I have this account right now, I'm probably going pick up another six to nine or 1000. And I asked them to get their annual statements ready. Because I wanted to see what they have been. have been doing, you know, so, you know, so they didn't know if there'll be they'll find those. So let me guess. It's like, it's weird. Allen: Okay, they just like asked her her advisor. Paul: Oh, that might be red flag fight flight to them. And they are looking so yeah. Wow. Okay. All right. seem bizarre. Allen: So if somebody was thinking about starting their own advisory firm, what would you say? They would need in terms of like, what are the minimums, okay, you should have been in the market for, you know, five years, you know, or you got to know XYZ, is there anything that you would say that, you know, if you don't, if you can't even do this, and this is not for you? Paul: Well, they're planning on doing what I'm doing, they probably need at least three to five years, you know, their own market experience. But, you know, that being said, like, I just met with someone the other day, and I could put all my funds through their strategies, and just sit and coast. You know, really, they charge an extra 1% or whatever, so I'll back off of my fee a little bit. You know, so you can you can play the game different ways. Wow. So you could do like I can see a new person and starting that and just have these other you know, because they have what's called sub managers or something like that. I don't know the exact term. Basically, you're hiring other money managers to manage the money you have for your clients. Right, like sub advisors, maybe is what it's called. Okay. So I'm not saying it will totally preclude them that they didn't have three to five years. But, you know, hopefully they're drawing on someone's experience to help hold their handle that Allen: Right. And do you know how much it costs to get it up and running? Paul: I would say three to five grand. Wow, that's not much. I mean, the hardware, these firms are brought in to charge you five times that? Allen: Yeah. Okay. So well, the sub accounts. Yeah, actually, I do remember those consultants talking to me about that. Paul: They they call it sub advisors? Allen: Yeah, I think that's what it is. And it's like, yeah, you know, if you don't want to do it yourself, you can put your money, you can put your your clients money into different buckets, and then they just do it for you, and they charge and then you split the fees or whatever, or something like that. So, and then each broker, each broker dealer has different ones. So like Fidelity or Schwab will have different sub accounts versus what you could put your stuff in. But interesting, I just Just curious the ones that you had talked to what what strategies were they were using, Paul: They're using free cash flow to is their criteria for who they're investing in. So they have like international, they call a cash cow c-o-w. So they've international domestic, and things like that. So they have a different definition of free cash flow. So they're they're fearing that's the best value, their way of determining value out there, like sort of like a value fund, but their own definition of what value is. Allen: Okay, so they're investing in stocks. Paul: Yes, international and domestic.   Allen: And they handle the ins and outs. And so you could put a portion of your client's money in there, you put it all in there. So it's like, it's like an ETF. So basically, you can say I want 20% of my money to go on this domestic one 20% International. And I might, I'm in talks with them. So I might end up doing some more money that way. But so they're coming up with different sample portfolios that I can use their funds for. Allen: Okay, interesting. And so that must be a much larger company. Paul: Yeah, I'm not sure how big they are. But they're, you know, big enough to where they had like a representative here in central Florida and some of their back office helping them out. Awesome. I'm not sure their size yet. Allen: Yeah. So I mean, this rabbit hole is pretty big. You can dive in there and spend a lot of time figuring all this stuff out. Paul: Yeah, yeah. So I can see a way I could sit and close more. But you're only doing it two hours a day anyway. Allen: Cool. All right. Paul: Well, maybe we're gonna get into my retirement years, a certain amount of years. I'll just put it there and just coast. The zero hours a day. Yep. Allen: Yeah, my, my neighbor in the office next door, he's a financial adviser. He's been doing it for, I think, 25 years now. So he's built up, you know, a sizable clientele. And so now he's at the point where he wants to retire. But he doesn't know what to do with the firm. He's like, you know, he makes probably a good 500,000 a year income from it. And he's like, I want one of my kids to take over. But the kids are not really willing, and not interested. He's like, I don't know what to do. So he's still there.  So there's been periods of times or, you know, like, I sit on the CPA world deal with other investment advisors, where it's been a quite a lucrative market to get bought your practice bought out by bigger, let's say Merrill Lynch or something like that, you know, they pay some pretty big bucks to buy those books of business. Yeah, yeah. Because I mean, one of the things that the consultants told me is that once you get you get a client, that turnover, meaning the fact that they're going to leave you is not very high, they're gonna stay with you for years and years. So you can count on that money coming in, you know, that fee money coming in for a long period of time, unless you unless you totally screw it up, and then they're gonna leave. Paul: If you play the play smart. You know, if you're dealing with someone 50 years old, right now, you know, another 10 or 20 years, you're gonna pick up their kids and things like that when they need investment advice and stuff. It's, it'd be a self perpetuating thing. Allen: Yeah, yeah. And I do like the fact that there's always going to be somebody there willing to buy you, your company. You know, because a lot of times in smaller companies if you're the only person or if you got one or two employees, nobody really wants to buy the company even if it's successful. Nobody wants to buy it because they would without you there they're basically buying a job for themselves, right? It's not running on its own you're the one doing all the work in this case. Yeah, you're the one doing all the work but they don't need you. They can just, you know, have their own advisors take over. So you still get a pretty decent multiple when you sell so that's really cool too. Right? Paul: Also, I met a.. in my travels on this world. I've met the company and actually finance you if you want to buy on someone else's practice in the financial visor word world. Allen: Hmm.. So have you looked into that? Paul: I had a conversation or two with them, but I haven't really pursued it further. Yeah. Because I didn't know if I wanted to buy a larger practice. Right? Yeah. Because generally, that is a seven year payout to do that. So, you know, seven years, you'd be free and clear. Allen: That'll be interesting. Yeah. So a lot of ways to skin this cat. So you would I mean, I'm assuming that if anybody asked you, Hey, should I do this? Probably the answer is yes. Paul: Yeah, I mean, just mean, talk to people who have done it, and sort of figure out if it's a good fit for you, you know? Yeah. It's definitely can be pretty lucrative. Allen: Right? And I like the fact that it's like, for you at least it's more localized, you know, so you're not competing with somebody in California or Canada, or whatever. It's like, yeah, you guys get your clients over there. I'll have my clients over here. You know, they love me, they trust me. We hang out maybe. And sometimes. So it's not like a competitive situation. So, right. Awesome. Are you in any? Are there any, like, associations or memberships for advisors?  Paul: No, I'm not. Allen: No, but obviously, they probably have them? Paul: Yeah, I'm just not familiar. Very familiar with that. I have another advisor to hang out with suddenly sort of share some ideas. That's, that's all I have right now. Allen: And they're also private. Like on their own? Paul: Now, one of the reasons I didn't cover this in the beginning, like when I started looking into this whole thing, I didn't want to get clients and then share my fees with other people. That's why I didn't latch on to a bigger firm and start building my clients from there. So that's why I started my own Ra. So they will be my clients. And I get all the fees for them. And no one else had had rights to him. So that's, that's one of the reasons I did the way I did it. Allen: Okay. Okay. So what would be the benefits of going with a larger firm just to name recognition? Paul: Well, they have, one of the biggest things is called compliance. So like, right now, I'm my own compliance officer for my firm, okay, and larger firm like that they have whole departments that take care of compliance, for you to make sure you don't get in trouble, the regulators and so forth. So, like this other advisor, I had, he joined another firm, just so you could have that compliance piece to it. But in his firm, he can't trade options. Right? Allen: Because they're very limited. Yeah, exactly.  Paul: It's taught me to join his is up, like can't trade options. Allen: Because compliance says no. Paul: It was on the client's officer. Allen: Right. So that's why when you said you were thinking about advertising, it's the risk is on you because you're the compliance officer. So you got to know exactly what can be done and what can't be done. Right. Right. Interesting, cool. Is there anything else because  I'm out of questions. Paul: One of the things, one of the things I tell you, I looked into going with other companies, other inactive brokers when I started, okay, and like Charles Schwab wanted you to have $7 million you're managing before you could go with them. Allen: Whoa, okay. And they're the biggest right right now, I think. Paul: I think so. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one reasons with Interactive Brokers, because they didn't have the minimums like that. I didn't really check too much rather than other people. Allen: So and how's your customer service at Interactive Brokers, because they for personal accounts, they don't have a good reputation. Paul: Yeah, they have a separate line, you can call as a professional advisor. So it's, I get pretty quick attention. Usually, you know, it's not it's not perfect, but you know, it's decent. Yeah, but you're happy. Yeah, I'm not saying that. I'm sure other companies have better customer service but you know, for right now, they, you know, I might need to call him a few times, but I get what I needed if I need need to.. Allen: And how are their margins and Commissions? Paul: Commission's are pretty low. I don't have the exact numbers I just know less than like $1 per 100 shares. Allen: And who comes out of the customers account? Obviously. Paul: Each person like when you do a trade display something all the counselee they pick up their own fees. Allen: Cool. All right. Well, thank you Paul. You know, Paul's website is again BusinessAdvisors.Pro. Paul said that he could reach out you know, you guys can reach out to him if you have any questions. And Paul is also in our other memberships are other programs as well past trading formula blank check and credit spread. So if you guys are members of those, you can reach out to him there. You'll find him in the group. And he's been very gracious with his time. So I do want to thank you and And he's very active in the group and you know you've been helping a lot of newer people as well they're so appreciate you there. Interesting place, interesting world and as I dive in I'm probably going to reach out to you more. Paul: Sounds great, I appreciate it.  Allen: Thank you thank you so much and we'll talk to you soon JOIN OUR FREE PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. Thank you!

In this episode of the Love Selling Hate Sales podcast, Joshua talks to Reed Clarke and Paul Chadwick, both Enterprise Account Executives at Shift Paradigm. They talk about the importance of partnership and the general challenges one may face when building a partnership program.Reed and Paul discuss the many different aspects of a partnership in terms of helping both the sales and corporate sides of the business. They also share some of the best and worst situations they experienced during partner deals and the lessons gained from these experiences.HIGHLIGHTSChallenges of working with software partnersWhy partnership mattersTrust and relationships make a successful partner program Applying the concept of third-party validationThe best and worst moments Reed and Paul had in a partner dealQUOTESReed: "Getting that upfront trust and making sure you have a cohesive plan helps a lot with that. But also just making sure that the goal is set and everybody knows what they're going to get. Everyone's worried in the software services relationship like 'who's going to pay what?', 'where's the budget going to go?', and you really just have to be clear about that."Reed: "Unfortunately, this is the reason for the bad rap and the young software salesperson is starting to catch that which is just 'we're going to tell you everything does everything.' And the problem is that their competitors are doing the same and there is a lot of crossover between all of this technology."Paul: "Enablement is a big one. Is there a partner program set up? And as partner folks begin newer roles in those situations, how do we quickly enable the sales folks to understand where we play in the market? How do we not take a revenue share from them? How do we incentivize?"Paul: "There is an element of breaking bread with somebody and having a conversation, telling stories, and developing that trust and relationship because it starts to open those doors."Connect with the guests through the links below:Reed (LinkedIn) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedlclarke/Paul (LinkedIn) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pkchadwick/About Josh Wagner: Josh is a growth advisor and the host of the Love Selling Hate Sales podcast. He specializes in helping executives understand modern marketing and sales to drive growth in a scalable way. To learn more about Josh and his work, follow the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshwagneraz/Company website: https://www.shiftparadigm.com/Personal Website: https://joshuadwagner.com/Podcast: https://www.lovesellinghatesales.com

James and I talked to Matt Ericson, founder of Trekka Logistics. Matt holds court with great wisdom and energy for his industry and business. He talks about growth, complexity, transparency, and evolving systems to keep things smooth. This is absolutely one of those episodes where — if we didn't try to keep things down to a sane length — we could have talked for hours. I had a blast, so please give it a listen! Matt gave me a bit to chew on here. He responded to one of my questions in a different way than other guests have — what excites him about the future? WE'RE LIVING IT. I tend to think about “the future” in sci-fi terms. But I'm realizing that can put me into a perpetual state of “the really cool things are going to happen in the next 10 years” future fever-dreaming. I want to pursue more strongly the mentality that it's my job to create the future.Highlightshelp people transition from a small platform to one that scales with themit's not so automated that common sense is removedlogistics is an “orchestra” to MattAbout Trekka: – Their strategy is to let the business evolve, install systems that can scale roughly to $200M 3PL– 2021: 100% quarter-over-quarter growth– No sales team. Growth is through referralsCOVID has absolutely impacted — a generational shift, sped up the e-commerce industry by 10–15 yearsWhat don't people understand about logistics? The complexity behind the orchestra.What has you excited about the future? WE'RE LIVING IT! COVID is the great accelerator. More buildings, more geography for Trekka — but the industry is in such wild speed of change that the future is happening NOW.Money QuotesMatt“We're built on transparency and process”“When we expand to a new building, we don't have to rebuild anything [software-wise]”James“Projects that wouldn't have seen the light of day before, they're coming to the forefront” [COVID as accelerator of e-comm and tech]Paul“There's a kinship between software engineering and physical logistics”

Entrevista a Paul- There´s a Place

“Just remember it's not about you,” shares Jason Teteak, Founder of Rule The Room Public Speaking. In this week's episode of The Catalyst, Jason Teteak and public speaking coach Paul Westfield discuss tips for physicians to improve their communication styles.    Common mistakes made by physicians when public speaking are using filler words, struggling to translate technical knowledge in a way that the everyday person can understand, and focusing too much on their performance. Learning your preferred presentation style can help you to tailor a pre-speech ritual that will help shake the nerves. By focusing on engaging the audience instead of worrying about yourself, you can deliver a more impactful speech.   Tune into this week's episode of The Catalyst for a conversation with host Dr. Lara Salyer and special guests Jason Teteak and Paul Westfield about how to improve your public speaking. Learn to overcome nervous behaviors and get through to your audience more effectively.    Quotes • “Health practitioners whether you're a nurse, doctor, independent, or even employed, we can all benefit from learning simple tips to elevate our communication.” (00:57-1:08 | Host) • “I am Jason Teteak. I am the author of Rule the Room and Founder of Rule the Room and Rule the Room Public Speaking dot com. I love helping others succeed. That's what brought me into the field…I love to help people be great and succeed in whatever they're doing.” (2:37-2:58 | Jason) • “Paul Westfield is a member of the Rule the Room public speaking team. His focus is on physicians and on coaching physicians to help them be successful with their communication, with the public speaking, with getting their message across.” (3:05-3:17 | Jason) • “Just remember it's not about you. The reason I say this is imagine this is your opportunity to love these people, to show how much you care about these people, to meet their needs, to build rapport, to build credibility.” (7:00-7:14 | Jason) • “I notice common mistakes that physicians make that are very similar to most executives…They'll use a lot of filler words like so or um or uh or and or because or but. All of those words are helpful for the physicians. They're helpful for the person speaking…but they end up causing the audience to stumble. That's an example of focusing on themselves instead of on the audience.” (7:34-8:17 | Jason)  • “The biggest thing is most physicians are very technically oriented in their persuasion…So communication is very much right-brain oriented. So if you take someone who is mostly left-brain functional and you put them in a right-brain environment, it doesn't cross over always as well. There is a translation that has to occur. When they're in a room one on one with a patient they can rely on that technical expertise, but when they're in a room full of people that's not available so it's a little more challenging.” (9:34-10:20 | Paul) • “The biggest mistake I see physicians making is the curse of knowledge. They have all this knowledge and this amazing experience and expertise and they have a hard time translating to somebody that doesn't know what they know.” (11:14-11:25 | Jason) • “The first things I'd say about nerves is when you make it about you and worry about how you're going to look and you're going to perform that ends up causing a lot of nerves. When you put the focus back on the audience and focus on them, that's one of the ways to relieve some of those nerves. One of the best ways to do this is to actually talk to a couple of audience members before you go up on stage. Right before you go up.” (11:30-11:55 | Jason) • “We cannot deny that our body is going to respond on its own. It's going to do its own thing. We have to accept that That's the part of mindfulness is acknowledging that yes I'm nervous but this is good…Take all of that nervousness and make it a positive force that gives you the confidence to use that to your advantage.” (14:44-15:15 | Paul) • “There's four kinds of presenters. There are performers like Lara. There's inspirers like me…There's energizers…And so fascinators are all about wisdom. Performers are about charisma. Energizers are about courage. Inspirers like me are about spirit, heart, caring kinds of things.” (18:23-19:12 | Jason) • “The value in meeting some of the people ahead of time is so important because it gives you a sense of where the audience is…It allows you to tune yourself for that initial engagement. So you can match where they are and take them where you want to take them.” (22:12-22:38 | Paul)   Links   For private coaching and Online classes and tutorials (PS Lab): https://ruletheroompublicspeaking.com/   Connect with Lara:  Website: https://drlarasalyer.com Instagram: @drlarasalyer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drlarasalyer Linked-In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drlarasalyer/ YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/c/DrLaraSalyer TikTok: @Creativity.Doctor   Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Paul Nation is one of the world's leading researchers on and writers on vocabulary, reading and fluency, has written dozens of books and been publishing research on these topics since 1970. Paul is Emeritus Professor in Applied Linguistics at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (LALS) at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and has taught in Indonesia, Thailand, the United States, Finland and Japan.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channelTracy: Hey everybody. Welcome to our podcast.Ross Thorburn: Hey everyone. On our podcasts, I think we spent a lot of time talking about speaking, but we haven't ever really directly tackled the idea of fluency.Tracy: That's true.Ross: Today we've got, once again, Paul Nation, emeritus professor at the School of Applied Linguistics and Applied Language at Victoria University, New Zealand, to talk to us about fluency and vocabulary and how those two things link together.Tracy: Paul is one of the world's leading researchers and writers on vocabulary and fluency. We are incredibly lucky to be able to have him on our podcast.Ross: As usual, we've got three areas that we'll cover in the podcast. Firstly, we will ask Paul why fluency is important. Then secondly...Tracy: ...how can teachers help students develop fluency, and the third one...Ross: ...what are some common mistakes that teachers make in teaching vocabulary and helping students become fluent?Why is fluency important?Tracy: Hello Paul.Paul Nation: Hello.Tracy: How are you doing?Paul: Good.Tracy: Before we go onto fluency, let's start off by talking about vocabulary.Paul: No problem.Tracy: Why have you dedicated so much of your career to vocabulary and vocabulary research?Paul: There's a couple of reasons why I focus on it. I guess being important is one of the reasons. The vocabulary knowledge underlies every language use skill, and without vocabulary, you can't do much in the way of listening, speaking, reading or writing.The other reason I'd probably focus on is that it's been a very poorly researched area in the past. In fact, some of the worst researched areas that I know of in applied linguistics are actually in vocabularies.Ross: Can you tell us a bit about fluency then? To start off, why is fluency so important?Paul: One of my favorite stories about that is when I was in Japan. We went on a train. We weren't quite sure whether we were going to the right place or not. I looked around the carriage, and there was a very studious looking young woman there wearing glasses, looking like a student.I asked her, "Is this the train to Osaka?" She looked at me, and a look of dismay came over her face. She buried her hands in the face. "Oh my goodness, what have I done?" If I caused her to lose face, what's going to happen as a result?Anyway, someone further down the carriage, a man said, "Yes, Osaka." As the train went along, this woman pulled out a book and started reading it. Being nosy, I dropped my pen on the floor and had a quick look at what the book was.She was reading a book called "The Macro Economics of Agriculture" in English. I couldn't read a book called The Macro Economics of Agriculture in English, even being a native speaker. When we got off the train, she came up to us and said, "Where are you going?" I bet that she'd been practicing that sentence for the last 20 or 30 minutes before we got to the station.I said the name. She said, "Follow me." We had a conversation. Here was someone with enormous knowledge of the language and yet not fluent in some of the basic things that she could have quite easily become fluent. It meant that these avenues of use of it were closed off to her.I think it's important that about a quarter of the time on a course to spend getting fluent in reading, getting fluent in writing, using just the little bit that you know even, but making sure that you can use it.Ross: Paul, with fluency, I think there's this concept that, for students, they only really become fluent or develop fluency at maybe intermediate or advanced levels. You wouldn't think of a beginner as being fluent. When do you think it's useful for students to start to develop fluency?Paul: I can't talk about anything nowadays it seems without having to get onto what I call the four strands. The four strands are simply learning through input, learning through output, deliberate learning, and developing fluency.Each one of those that I call a strand, which in the basic principle is that in a well‑balanced language course there should be roughly equal amount of time spent on each of these four strands at every single level of proficiency.If you're learning a language for survival, David Crab and I did some research to set up a survival vocabulary for foreign travel, which is about 120 words and phrases, that if you know those, you can do quite a lot in the language.You can travel around. You can get food. You can find accommodation. You can be polite to people and so on like that. The thing is, you could learn those, but the other thing is you've got to learn them fluently.That means that you can say them in a way that people will understand. When people reply, you need to be able to interpret what they say at a speed which will make it useful for you. Even then learning, a survival vocabulary, you've got to get fluent and that kind of fluency is quite easy to develop.You keep getting people to repeat it over and over again to you and get faster and faster and faster. You keep practicing and practicing and doing that. It's very important because a lot of students have quite a lot of knowledge of English, but they don't have the fluency to put it into practice.How can teachers help students develop fluency?Tracy: Paul, can you please share some practical activities which teachers can use in the classroom to help their students and develop those skills to be more fluent?Paul: I've written lots of books, but the one that I liked the most, one that gave me the greatest satisfaction having written it is called, "What Should Every EFL Teacher Know," because of near I sort of wanted after training teachers and teaching English and that for well over 50 years.I thought if I can sit down, reading all the research, and say in a simple, clear and direct way what do I think EFL teachers should be doing, then there's something wrong with...I haven't spent my life well.I wrote that book and then as, part of doing it, I sat, and I thought, "Well, what if I had to choose 20 teaching techniques and activities, what would they be? The top ones that people should know."I came up with a list of those which are in the book. The ones for speaking fluency, one is a very interesting technique called Four, Three, Two, where the students choose an easy topic, and then they sit down with a partner and teacher says, "Go."For four minutes, they have to talk about that familiar, easy topic. After exactly four minutes, the teacher says, "Stop. Change partners." Then everybody moves onto a new partner.Then for three minutes, the same people, half of the class have to talk again to their partner saying exactly what they said before to the new partner, but doing it in three minutes. After three minutes, they move onto another partner. Then they have to do it in two minutes. That's a very simple, easy but very effective technique for developing spoken fluency.Another one would be repeated delivery of a talk, which is a bit like Four, Three, Two because repetition is one of the ways of developing fluency. It's what I call the will beat a path to fluency, that is you keep doing the same thing over and over again until you get good at it.Another way of developing fluency is a rich and varied map where you do similar things but not exactly the same thing. You change it in some way so that you keep coming at the same stuff, but you're doing it in different ways.A very useful technique for that is called Linked Schools where people might read about something. Then they might write about the same topic, and they would have to get up and speak about that topic.Having now read about it, written about it, when they come to speak about it, they can do this speaking with a lot of knowledge and use that speaking as an opportunity to develop fluency in speaking, drawing on that knowledge.Common mistakes teachers make in teaching vocabulary and helping students become fluentRoss: I remember, Paul, a few years ago, in fact, I think we did a podcast about this, I remember reading a paper that you wrote that was warning teachers of the danger of teaching vocabulary in lexical or semantic sets.Can you tell us about some other examples maybe of where you think there's a gap between what research says works with teaching vocabulary and what teachers tend to do for teaching vocabulary?Paul: The lexical sets was interesting because once again, the research is starting to show that there are sort of niceties to that lexical set idea comparing immediate learning compared with a long‑term retention from it.There's interesting research which shows that the interference is greater with say, if you learn fruit together. It becomes harder with fruit, which in some ways resemble each other like apples or more like oranges. Then they are like bananas.You're more likely to get interference between apples and oranges than you are between apples and bananas in terms of the word form and its meaning. That's funny.I would say that the greatest mistake is one I've mentioned already, which was the idea of vocabulary needs to be taught. I would say another belief that's encouraged by people who haven't read the research is that vocabulary needs to be learned in context.They often express this negatively in the sense that it's not good to learn vocabulary out of context and the research is quite the opposite. Learning vocabulary out of context is highly effective and highly efficient.The idea, for example, of using bilingual word cards or bilingual flashcard programs is a very good idea. You'd have this often criticized because it says all the vocab isn't learned in context.If it's part of a well‑balanced program where there's opportunities for learning from input‑output in fluency development, which are all in context. Then some deliberate learning, using the first language translation, learning the word without any illustrative context around it is very effective and efficient.Tracy: That one is interesting. I think that's very different to what most teachers believe and what gets taught on most of the teacher training courses.Paul: Steve Crashing criticized this saying that this learning will not be learning which will be of use when you come to use the language normally. I tackled him on this at a conference one time, and I said, "Does this apply to vocabulary? The idea that deliberate learning doesn't result in the kind of knowledge you need for a normal language used."He said, "Yes, it applies to vocabulary." I said, "Good." We went away, and we got one of our PhD students working on it. She showed the deliberate decontextualized learning of vocabulary resulted in both implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge.Implicit knowledge is a kind of knowledge that you need for normal language use, this kind of flash card learning. You can learn enormous amounts in a very short time, but they out very important principles to follow when you do this learning.These are principles, which have been well‑established by psychological research or research in psychology over the last almost 100 years, or so, involving repetition, spacing of the repetitions, retrieval that means not looking at the word and the meaning together all the time, but having to try and retrieve or recall the meaning that went with the word.If you can't recall it, you have a look. The idea of spaced retrieval is very important. The idea of varying the order of the words being learned, so you're not learning them in the same serial order or anything like it.There are simple guidelines for that learning, but they're very important guidelines. If learners are trained in how to do that, training is not a big deal for that, they could learn large amounts in a very short time.This allows them to make good progress through extensive reading and extensive listening and things like that, because they bring all this background knowledge of decontextualized learning, which now becomes contextualized through their reading and listening.More from Paul NationRoss: Paul, I'll put a link to your University of Victoria web page. Is that a place for people to go if they want to find out more about your work?Paul: Yeah. The latest thing on the website is the updated vocabulary levels test, which is the most useful test for teachers of English as a foreign language to do, to measure the learners' vocabulary size. Then I wrote a book for learners called "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?" That's free for download.Ross: Thanks so much again for taking the time to come and talk to us.Paul: No problem. Good luck with your work.Ross: Thanks, Paul.Paul: Bye everyone.Tracy: Bye.

We deal with a lot of stress every day. From balancing our responsibilities to merely reading the news, stress is an inevitable part of life. But contrary to popular belief, stress isn’t always the enemy. A healthy amount of stress allows us to grow more resilient to tougher conditions. Too much stress, however, can lead to the downfall of our well-being. Especially during these exceedingly stressful times, we need to manage our stress levels and build resilience.  In this episode, Paul Taylor joins us to share how we can better respond to stress and build resilience. He explains how too much stress can damage the body and the role of genetic predispositions in our health. Paul also gives us tips on training yourself to handle stress better. Finally, we talk about reframing negative self-talk and forming good habits. If you want to learn more about how to build resilience and handle stress better, then tune in to this episode.     Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/. CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year’s time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, your goals and your lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa’s Anti-ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, a NAD+ precursor   Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time.   What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that is capable of boosting the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements that are of highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today.   Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 Capsules   Quality You Can Trust — NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting edge science) combat the effects of aging, while designed to boost NAD+ levels. Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility   Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce’ Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Train yourself to build resilience and handle stressful situations better.  Discover ways to deal with negative thoughts. Learn Paul’s tips on creating good habits.   Resources Pushing the Limits Episode 183 - Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Dr Elena Seranov‪a‬ You can also watch Episode 183 on YouTube Watch my interview with Dr Seranova on The Interplay Between Autophagy and NAD Biology.  Learn more about NMN supplements on NMN Bio.  Stopping Automatic Negative Thoughts   Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl   Connect with Paul: Website | LinkedIn The MindBodyBrain Project with Paul Taylor The Better You Program by Paul Taylor   Episode Highlights [05:13] About Paul’s PhD in Resilience Paul is studying psychophysiological resilience.  Gratitude, empathy and mindfulness are necessary. But they are not sufficient factors in  studying resilience.  Paul is looking at the interaction between resilience, mental well-being and burnout in military guys.  Paul is developing a new measure of resilience. It uses self-reports, cognitive batteries and biological measures. [07:57] What Stress Does to Your Brain Consistent exposure to stress changes the brain, both structurally and functionally.  These changes make people less able to control their emotional responses.  People suffering from anxiety, depression, PTSD or burnout were found to have significant maladaptive changes in their brains. [17:38] Daily Stressors That Damage Us Aside from life traumas, the smaller daily stressors can also be damaging for us.  Paul believes that modern life is characterised by input overload that puts us in a constant state of stress. Our resilience and responsiveness to stress depend on factors such as genetics, social support and nutrition. Listen to the full episode to learn more about how nature and nurture inform how stress is processed in the brain. [22:40] Training Yourself to Build Resilience The Goldilocks Effect proposes that for optimal performance, stress levels must be just right. Specific training and repetition can help people arrive at an automated response regardless of their genetic predispositions. Learning arousal control strategies can make you act effectively under pressure. These strategies are also used routinely in training military, police or firefighters.  Breathing is one easy arousal control strategy. Specifically, techniques like box breathing and resonant frequency breathing help manage stress.  Listen to the full episode to learn more about breathing techniques and the autonomic nervous system. [29:49] Using Attention in Stress Response Our attention tends to be internally focused if we’re anxious, depressed or stressed.  If you’re not in danger or no external threat, shifting your attention outward can help minimise your stress. You can shift your attention to your breathing or the things you can sense. Paul says that we all have an ‘inner gremlin’. It’s a character that is responsible for negative self-talk, anger, anxiety and depression. Instead of listening to it, you can shift your attention to the “inner sage” or the best version of yourself. This process of “self-distancing” has been found to reduce people’s emotional intensity. Listen to the full episode to find out how to create a character based on these figures. [35:58] Discharge, Recharge and Reframe When you’re feeling overwhelmingly anxious, first find a way to discharge your stress hormones.  Paul finds that even 30 seconds of intense activity helps in discharging.  Then you recharge by focusing on your breathing. Lastly, reframe your perception by thinking about what your best character would do. [40:44] Dealing with Automatic Negative Thoughts You are not your negative thoughts. You can choose not to listen to them. In Japanese psychology, our automatic negative thoughts are stories we tell ourselves. What matters is what story we pay attention to.   The concept of Hebbian learning suggests that every time you’re repeating a thought, you’re strengthening it.  Interrupt your maladaptive and unhelpful thought patterns and create new healthier ones.  Watch your thoughts with curiosity and remember that you have a choice over the ones you can focus on. [48:10] The Importance of Getting Outside Your Comfort Zone The small circle-big-circle analogy is used to describe comfort zones. The small circle is your comfort zone and the big circle is where growth and adaptation happens.  Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have stopped adapting to their environment. Paul thinks that learning how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable is key to growing stronger and building resilience.  However, you can’t go outside your comfort zone and push yourself too hard all the time. You also have to allow yourself to recover physically and mentally. [53:05] On Recovery Seeking comfort is done during recovery. Recovery isn’t the same as relaxation.  Recovery is doing stuff that energizes you. If you don’t take the time to recover, you’ll run the risk of burnout. Balancing recovery, proper nutrition, good sleep hygiene and high-intensity training drives stress adaptation. [1:01:52] How to Make Good Habits and Stick to Them As humans, we are more driven by immediate rewards. Temporal discounting is what happens when our brains ignore rewards that are far off in the future.  Temporal discounting gets in the way of making good habits and achieving our goals.  In making good habits, it is important to understand your values and connect your behaviours to those.  Breaking big goals into smaller and more manageable goals makes it easier to follow through them. Engaging in enabling behaviour also helps in priming your brain to make your habits.    7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode ‘And so this is what happens when people get burnout or anxiety, depression, PTSD, is that there are adaptive changes that turn maladaptive. And it's basically because the brain is being overwhelmed with stress, either way too much stress in the case of trauma, or just complaints, daily bombardment with stress, and not enough recovery’. ‘So that resonant frequency breathing or box breathing can be really really useful and to deal with stuff in and of the moment. Just, it's basically autonomic nervous system control through breathing’. ‘So if we take a step back, people who have anxiety or depression or just have a busy mind, you know, they've got a lot of negative self talk going on, they want to get rid of it, right? But these three approaches, and I say, look, getting rid of it, it's not really the objective. It's really about where you focus your attention’. ‘I like to talk about shifting your attention to the concept of your inner sage, which is what the Stoic philosophers talked about, you know, that's the optimal version of you. And that's either my best self, me at my best or some sort of other character that I'm consulted’. ‘If you're sitting listening to this, think of your biggest achievement in your life, something that you are most proud of. And I guarantee you, for almost every listener, it will involve stress and being out of your comfort zone. But we need to hang with the tension long enough for adaptation to happen’. ‘You only get bigger, faster, stronger, because you hang with the tension long enough for adaptation to happen right’? ‘And I find that there are a lot of high achievers who are at risk of burnout because they're just on, on, on. And not enough serotonin focused stuff, just contentment, relaxation, connection with others time in nature, all of that sort of stuff’.   About Paul Paul Taylor is a former British Royal Navy Aircrew Officer. Paul is also a Neuroscientist, Exercise Physiologist and Nutritionist. He is currently completing a PhD in Applied Psychology. He is developing and testing resilience strategies with the Australian Defence Science Technology Group & The University of Tasmania. In 2010 Paul created and co-hosted the Channel ONE HD TV series Body and Brain Overhaul. And in 2010 and 2015, he was voted Australian Fitness Industry presenter of the year. Paul also has an extensive background in health and fitness. Additionally, he has experience in leadership, management and dealing in high-pressure situations. His former roles include Airborne Anti-submarine Warfare Officer and a Helicopter Search-And-Rescue Crew Member with the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm. He has also undergone rigorous Combat Survival and Resistance-to-Interrogation Training. In 2012, he practised what he preaches about resilience training and became a professional boxer. Want to know more about Paul’s work? Visit his website or follow him on Linkedin.   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends, so they can learn to build resilience. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript of Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Well, hi, everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. I’m your host, Lisa Tamati. Today I have the legend Paul Taylor. Now Paul is a former British Royal Navy air crew officer. He's also a neuroscientist and exercise physiologist and a nutritionist. And he's currently completing a PhD in Applied Psychology, where he's developing and testing resilience strategies with the Australian Defence Science Technology Group and the University of Tasmania. This guy is an overachiever. He's done a whole lot of stuff in his life. In 2010, Paul created and co-hosted the Channel One TV series Body & Brain Overhaul. And in 2015, he was voted Australian Fitness Industry presenter of the year. This guy has been there, done that, and you're going to really enjoy the conversation today—all around resilience. He has so much knowledge, and he is with us all today. So I hope you really enjoy this episode with Paul Taylor.  Now before we head over and talk to Paul, I just want to remind you, if you're wanting to check out our epigenetics, what we do with our gene testing program that we have, where you look at your genes, understand your genes and how to optimise your genes, and how they are being influenced by the environment and how to optimise your environment, then please head over to my website, lisatamati.com. Hit the Work with Us button. Then you'll see peak epigenetics, peak epigenetics and click that button and find out all about it. Every second week, we have a live webinar where we actually take you through what it's all about, what's involved and how it all works. So if you want to find out about that, just reach out to me. You can reach me at any time and the support@lisatamati.com. If you've got questions around in the episodes, if you want to know a little bit more about any other guests, or you want to find out about anything that we do, please reach out to us there.  I also want to let you know about the new anti-ageing and longevity supplement NMN that I'm importing. I had a couple of episodes with Dr. Elena Seranova, who's a molecular biologist who shares all the information about this incredible supplement and how it upregulates the sirtuin genes in the body and helps create more NAD. Lots of big words but very incredible. The information in those episodes is really incredible. And if you want to try out this longevity and anti-ageing supplement, have more energy, it helps with cardiovascular health, there's even some evidence now starting to looking into fertility. It works on a very deep level in the body and helps upregulate the sirtuin genes which are longevity genes, helps with DNA repair mitochondrial biogenesis, lots of really good stuff. You probably didn't catch all those words, but go and listen to those episodes.  The product is called Nicotinamide Mononucleotide. It’s fully natural, there’s no downside to this. Very safe to take and will slow the ageing process. If you want to find out a little bit more head on over to nmnbio.nz, that's nmnbio.nz. Right, enough for today. I'm going to send you right now over to Paul Taylor who's sitting in south of Melbourne. Lisa: Well, hi everybody, Lisa Tamati here at Pushing The Limits. Super excited to have you. I'm just jumping out of my skin for excitement because today I have the legendary, Paul Taylor with me. Paul, how are you doing? Paul Taylor: Hi, I'm bloody awesome. How the devil are you? Lisa: Very excited to meet you. Paul is sitting in south of Melbourne, he tells me, in Wine Country. Is that right? Paul: That's correct. Like any self-respecting Irishman, I moved to where they make the wine. Lisa: An Irishman who lives in Australia, who is ex-British Royal Navy e-crew, neuroscientist, nutritionist, exercise physiologist—a bit of an overachiever, Paul. Crikey, could you do a little bit more, please? You're not doing enough. Paul: Well, I’m currently doing a PhD in Applied Psychology, just to sort of finish it—round it all out. And I need to keep myself out of mischief. Lisa: Crikey. I feel very intimidated right now. But I am very excited to have you on the show. Because I have come across you from our mutual friend Craig Harper, he is awesome. And I've been listening to your lectures and your work and your learnings, and just going, ‘Wow, this guy puts everything into such a lovely way - with stories and good analogies’. And so, I wanted to share you with my world, over here with my audience. So today, I wanted to do a bit of a deep dive. But before we get into it, so you are doing a PhD in resilience. So, can you elaborate a little bit on the PhD you’re doing? Paul: Yeah, so what I'm looking at is psychophysiological resilience, because I'm just bloody sick to the back teeth, hearing that resilience is all about gratitude, empathy, and mindfulness. And that stuff, it's important. But as I say, it's necessary, but it's not sufficient. And there is a large component of resilience that has to be earned. And that's the sort of stuff that I realized from my time in the armed forces.So, the positive side stuck is important. But there is a lot more to it. And I actually wanted to explore it and do the research on it.  And I'm very lucky that one of my supervisors, Eugene, is the principal scientist at Defence Science Technology Group. So, they work a lot with the military. And I'm actually doing—I'm just finishing off my first study with the military. So, it's pretty cool for me, having left the British military 16 years ago. Now, I’m doing resilience interventions with the Australian military. Lisa: Wow, I mean, it just sounds absolutely amazing. What sort of things are you—because I agree, like, the gratitude and all that very, very important—but it is, you can't just decide. Like, positive thinking, ‘I'm going to be positive thinking’. It's like a little bit more complicated than that. We need to look at things at a deeper level. What is it that your PhD is actually researching? So, what is the study that you've just done, for example? Paul: Yeah, so the one that we're doing, we basically—it's a pilot study. So, what we call a proof of concept. So, taking a bunch of military guys, and they've gone through training, so I did a full day's workshop, 34 hours with the guys. And then they went on to my app, to be able to sort of track behaviours and log habits and interact with each other and put the tools to the test. And so they did—they've done a survey on mental well-being, another survey on resilience, and another survey on burnout. So I'm actually looking at the interaction between your resilience levels, your mental well-being and your burnout, or risk of burnout in the workplace.  And what I'm hoping to do in further research is to develop further the model or the measurement criteria of resilience. Because at the minute, in the literature, it's just measured through a questionnaire, and it's pretty poor, really. Lisa: Wow, yeah. Very subjective. Paul: Yes, it just gets very subjective. And it's also influenced by—if you're doing a resilient survey, it's influenced by who is actually going to see that right. So, if you're doing it for your employer, a lot of people will actually think, ‘Oh, I better not answer this in a certain way, because there may be ramifications’. So there are limitations with any self-reported questionnaire.  But more lately, there's been some biological measures of resilience that have come out of University of Newcastle, which I'm actually going to be working with that group. So, they've actually lived in something called an acoustic startle response, which is basically you'd be sitting with your headphones on, doing some sort of task. And every now and then there'd be this light noise going off in your headphones, and you'd be all wired up. And they'd look at your heart rate, your blood pressure, your galvanic skin response. And you see there's a spike from your autonomic nervous system, right?  And what they have actually shown is that people who have higher levels of resilience on these self-reported questionnaires, they actually—they acclimatized or they adapt quite quickly to that noise, whereas those who have got lower resilience or who maybe have PTSD or anxiety or depression, they don't habituate to it. So, they're still getting that response, right. So, and this is about what is actually going on in the brain, and particularly an area called the amygdala, that I'm sure we'll get into.  So, I'm looking at a sit back and develop a triangulated measure of resilience. We're taking that maybe acoustic startle and some of the self-reports stuff, and then performance on a cognitive battery when you're under pressure, right? So, trying to then get a triangulated measure or a new measure of resilience. That’s a very long winded—yeah, so we can measure it a bit more objectively. Lisa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, because you're working with, like, in Special Forces, I think, in the military. So these are guys that are under immense pressure situations. And looking at our military and vets and stuff, and a lot of them come back with PTSD, and all sorts of mental health issues. And these guys that are coming into this are tough characters, these are not—and then they're coming out with problems. And even not in military, but just in things like my husband's a firefighter. The stuff that they get to see every day. Like he's a really strong, resilient, resourceful human being, but I'm seeing the load, the PTSD sort of load that's coming up over years and years and years are starting to have some bigger ramifications.  Do you see that people that are like super hardcore tough, amazing, but when they are going into these repeated situations and being because usually like exposure therapy is one of the things we do to lower our stress response. If you don't like spiders, and you have to hold a spider every five minutes, you're going to get used to holding a spider, and it no longer will cause a response. By the same token, are you seeing this going flip the other way? Where you're actually getting worse from exposure? Paul: Yeah, so there's a lot of academic research in this area, looking at not just PTSD, but also burnout. So, for me, there's that, there's a continuum of workplace burnout is linked in a way to post traumatic stress disorder, right? It's just that the exposure isn't as extreme. There's not that trauma, but it's the insidious, consistent exposure to stress that actually changes the brain. It changes the brain both structurally and functionally. So what I mean by that is what we're seeing in both PTSD and anxiety and depression, by the way, and workplace burnout, with the advent of brain scanners, they're able to take a bunch of people and follow them for a long period of time—six months, a year, two years. Ask them about their stress levels, and then look and see, does the brain change over time? And what they're actually seeing in that people who are suffering from burnout or anxiety or depression or PTSD, there are significant, as I said, structural and functional changes in the brain. So what I mean by that from a structural perspective, the amygdala, the part of the brain, one of its job is to sense and respond to stress, and it actually becomes bigger. And so there's  increased cells, increased connections and hypertrophy, it's just like your muscles with hypertrophy. And I'll come back to that in a second why this is, right. But in concert with that, areas of their prefrontal cortex, that rational planning judgment part of the brain, and also, another area called the anterior cingulate cortex—they're actually shrinking. There’s damage to those neurons and there's less activity in those areas. And what this means functionally, is it means it's a less-connected brain. And it means it's a brain that is less able to control emotional responses. So basically, the amygdala is starting to hijack the brain. The neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, he's the first to show in his lab that with that repeated— if your amygdala becomes sufficiently activated, it can actually secrete chemicals to block your frontal lobes. Basically, it says, ‘Talk to the hand. I’m in control of this brain’. Right now we all know that as losing our shit, right? Things are hijacked. But when this is happening repeatedly, what's happening is that there are neuroplastic changes in the brain. Right? And we know that this even happens in unborn children, in fetuses, that if they're exposed to chronic stress in the third trimester, the amygdala will grow bigger and more sensitive. And if we think about it, it's an amazing adaptive response. Because it's basically, they're getting inputs through the placenta and stress hormones. If we're adults, we're getting input saying, ‘This is a dangerous word’. Right? Lisa: Got to be vigilant. Paul: Yeah, the brain is all about survival first, right? It's all about survival. So, and sometimes that adaptive response is maladaptive. Right? In that there are changes that no longer serve us, right? And so this is what happens with people get burnout, or anxiety, depression, PTSD, is that there are adaptive changes that turn maladaptive. And it's basically because the brain is being overwhelmed with stress, either way too much stress, in the case of trauma, or just bombardment. Daily bombardment with stress, and not enough recovery. And I know as a lead athlete, you know about the balance between stress and recovery and just dealing with what you’ve got. Lisa: Never got it right. Paul: And then you don’t, right? Lisa: Burnout was my best friend. Yeah, there's a huge—because I studied genetics, there’s a huge genetic component to this as well. Paul: There is, yeah. Lisa: When you're looking at how long your adrenal, your stress hormones, for example, stay in the body, your COMT gene, your—the RD2 gene, the RD2B gene. Once they actually get the adrenaline, is it going to stay here in the body very long? Or is it going to be out? And they call it like the warrior gene and the worrier. Paul: Worrier and warrior. When I say it, people go, ‘What’s the difference’? I go... Lisa: Warrior as in a Maori warrior, and the other one as in worrying, worrying yourself to death. And there’s a genetic predisposition. And then you couple that with environmental, being overwhelmed with either an event or a series of events, or like you say, the constant bombardment. Because there's a question in my head, like, you and I, there’s history, we've both been in some pretty freakin’ scary situations in life. And those are certain traumas that you've been through and you've carried. But then there is a daily shit that goes on.  Like something that I'm dealing with currently is like, I don't know, but the level of anxiety sometimes is like as high just because I feel like a computer with a million windows open. And it's got inputs coming up. And there's so many—you're trying not to drop the ball, and you're wearing so many hats on so many levels. So that's a different type of anxiety. And it's—and that one that like the big, major ones that you've been through, they sort of self-explanatory that you've got problems with those. But these little ones can be quite damaging too, daily on the mind. Paul: Absolutely. And I like your analogy about having a million windows open. And that's really modern life, is it's just input overload for a lot of people. And it's, even we know that reading the news a lot, and the negativity particularly around COVID is just bad juju, right? Particularly if you are predisposed, or you have underlying anxiety. Then we've got kids, we got that juggle, we got kids and parents, right? And we got work stresses, we got money worries, we got relationship issues. These are all things that our ancestors didn't really have to deal with. Right?  And our stress response system has evolved over the last 2 million years in our ancestors in response to certain challenges. Right, so three minutes of screaming terror on the African savanna when you're being chased by a lion—that's your fight or flight mechanism. And then longer term or really traumatic stress, but mostly longer term stress, like famine. And that's the HPA axis and cortisol. And as you rightly said, different people are different. There's genetic predispositions to which one is dominant, how quick the clearing is. But there's also that, as you rightly say, and a lot of people don't understand this, is that the interaction between nature and nurture. That just because you have a certain variant of a gene, it predisposes you—it doesn't mean you're going to develop that, there needs to be that event. And then we know that those events, when they happen early in life, tend to have a bigger impact. Right? Lisa: So children exposed to trauma are in much deeper in the shit than others Paul: Can be. Unless they have the presence of a caring, supportive adult, often, they can get through it and end up being more resilient. Or they've got a certain variant of a gene, that when they're exposed to stress as a kid, they end up more resilient as an adult. So, it's a really complicated thing. And the thing that I also talk about a lot of people don't, is it also depends on other environmental factors going on. Like what's your nutrition like? Like, what's your sleep like? What's your exercise like? All of those things are hugely, hugely important. It’s a really complicated story, as to whether someone and develop some psychopathology because of exposure to either trauma, or just that insidious day to day stress—what we call de-stress versus used stress, which I'm sure we'll get into. Lisa: Yeah, now that's absolutely exciting because I mean, I preach a lot about doing the fundamentals right. Getting a sleep—at the basis of everything is good quality sleep. And that's not easy. It's not always an easy simple thing. Paul: But check if you're under stress, right? Lisa: Yeah, yeah, because your brain won't bloody turn off. And studying the gamma and dopamine and adrenaline and norepinephrine and all these chemicals that are running out and they're actually controlling us to a large degree, or at least when we're unaware of their influence on the body. But there are things that we can actually do to actually help regulate our own physiology. So I mean, guys and girls in the armies, in the military, have to do this. Or even like I watch my husband and my brother—they’re firefighters—when they're under an emergency situation, three o'clock in the morning, called to a bloody accident, someone's trapped in a burning car type of situation. Like, my husband's just so cool and calm and collected in that moment, like he's completely present. And in daily life, he's quite a shy, introverted dude, right. But when the shit hits the fan, I've seen his like, he doesn't put on a cabbage head. When I looked at his genetics, he doesn't have that predisposition to having adrenaline much. He doesn't have much of an adrenal response. So he'll come up for a minute, and then he'll be back down very quickly, and he’ll be able to control it. And he also understands, I've taught him more about breathing and all that sort of jazz to help regulate your cortisol and all of that sort of stuff. But it is a predisposition.  My predisposition, I have a hell of a lot of adrenaline, testosterone up the wazoo, dopamine. I tend to start really responding and taking action. But I have to actually turn on the prefrontal cortex. I have to really focus on that and not just fly around like a blue ass fly going just running into the burning building without thinking about what the hell I'm doing. So, two different responses—and both are very good responses in a way, if you can learn to manage them and control them and bring them on at the right time. Paul: Yeah, and look, that's where the training element comes into, right? And so, irrespective of what your underlying genetics are, through military training or police or firefighters, they are trained in these situations routinely. And the brain sort of habituates to it and you learn strategies to be effective under that pressure, what we call arousal control strategies, right. So, whether that is—an arousal control can be both ways can be—for people who are generally low, can be getting them up to the right level of arousal. And for people who are a bit too overactive, bringing their arousal down, so they're in that peak performance zone. Let's say the neuroscientist Amy Ornstein talked about Goldilocks and the Goldilocks effect of stress in the brain. That it can't be too little, because when you're bored or you're under arousal, your performance is just not going to be optimal. But also it can’t be too much. And everybody's got a level of arousal that is too much. Lisa: Wow. That's a cool analogy. I like that, Goldilocks. Paul: It's a wonderful analogy. And she's shown, looks at the neurotransmitters that are involved in that—and particularly looking at dopamine and noradrenaline, or norepinephrine, as some people call it, how they're really important in that regulation. But as I say, training, specific training and repetition, can really help people just to get into an automated response. And no matter what their genetic predisposition. Lisa: So if someone is prone to a lot of anxiety, and maybe depression, what are some of the practical—like, if we start talking a few practical strategies now for people dealing with different issues — and let's start with anxiety and maybe depression—what are some of the things that they can do when their amygdala hijacks you? How do you get a grip on yourself and actually change the physiology? Because you feel some big noise happens, or an earthquake happens, or something and you've got that adrenaline just poured out and you’ve got all this stress cortisol and all that, how do you bring yourself down quickly, get yourself under control? So you don't end up in a panic attack, for example? Paul: Yeah, so there's both short-term strategies and there's long term adaptive strategies, right? So, and I'll go into both of those things. First of all, it's important to understand what's going on, right? So this is about the autonomic nervous system. And there are—some of your listeners will be aware of this, but there's two branches of the autonomic nervous system. There's the sympathetic nervous system, and the parasympathetic. And the sympathetic is probably badly labelled because it's not very sympathetic, right? It's the one that increases stress, right? So, and if we think about the response that's going on—so in the brain, the amygdala senses a threat, it sets off a general alarm. And then, the hypothalamus is involved in this, the sympathetic branches is fired up. And for some people, it fires up more than others. But for everybody, when that's fired up, and the vagus nerve is really quite important in this, that's the nerve that connects the brain to the heart, the lungs and all the visceral organs, right? So and the blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up in order to pump blood to the muscles to give you the fight and runaway, right. And additionally, breathing gets faster and shallower. And then, we know your digestive system is affected and all the blood that is in your digestive system, digesting your food... Lisa: Your peristalsis. Paul: It’s shunted away. It’s shunted away to the working muscles, right, we know the immune system is temporarily switched off, the reproductive system’s temporarily switched off because there's no point in ovulating or creating sperm when you're being chased by a lion. It’s a waste of energy, right? If we think for a second about the long-term consequences when people are in a chronic state of overarousal, even if that's just low baseline overarousal. So, I have a suppressed reproductive system. This is why people who are chronically stressed, and they become infertile. Right? Boom. And this is why they develop digestive system issues like irritable bowel syndrome and stuff like that, which we know can change your microbiome. And then there's a two-way interaction, which we'll talk about later. And the immune system becomes suppressed. That's why people develop—they get sick, and they take longer to recover, whether it's from a wound, whether it's from training load, or whether it's from any type of illness or injury. And then heart damage can happen, right, and with that chronic stress. So that's over activation of the sympathetic branch, and particularly the vagus nerve, right? What we now know is it's only taken our scientists about 3,000 years to catch up with the knowledge of Yogi's, right? Yeah, exactly. Certain breathing patterns can affect your heart and your brain. And I used to think, all that breathing, I used to think it was fluffy bullshit. Until I get into the science—and Jesus, how wrong was I? Lisa: Me, too. I must admit, and now I'm doing it 100 times a day. Paul: Yeah, exactly. So, techniques like box breathing. I'm sure your listeners have probably heard you talk about it. Lisa: Repeatedly. Paul: Yeah, breathe in like the sides of a box. Breathe in for four or five seconds, hold for four or five, out for four or five, hold for four or five. And you can also do a modified box breathe, which is in for four, hold for four, out for six, hold for two. And I'll talk about that in a second. There's also something called resonant frequency breathing, which is also really, really beneficial and can actually enhance your what's called heart rate variability, which is a kind of a window into overall stress on the body.  So, reso-frequency being—you need some equipment to measure it effectively. But generally, everybody listening is probably between four and a half, five breaths and seven breaths a minute. And it's been shown that if you get within one of that, then you could. So I teach people, just generally six breaths a minute, right? So that's 10-second breath cycle, but breathe in for four and out for six. Because the longer breath out—when you breathe in, you are up regulating your sympathetic nervous branch, right? When you breathe out, you're activating the parasympathetic nervous branch. So, the long breath out is really, really key, which is why I talk about the modified box breathing as well. So that resonant frequency breathing, or box breathing can be really, really useful to deal with stuff in and of the moment. Just—it's basically autonomic nervous system controlled through breathing, that’s it. Lisa: Control your physiology in seconds. Paul: And the other thing that goes in concert with that, and my wife uses a lot of this, she's qualified in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in Japanese psychology. And we're both fans of stoic philosophy. And it is about attention, and all three of these great agree that attention is key. So if we take a step back, people who have anxiety or depression, or just have a beasty mind, they've got a lot of negative self-talk going on, they want to get rid of it, right? But these three approaches, and as they say, look, getting rid of it, it's not really the objective. It's really about where you focus your attention.  So, if you think of your attention, like a light, and when you're in that stress response, your attention, and it is very internal focused, if you're anxious or depressed, or you're stressed about something that's on that particular thing. But it's an internal experience that you're having. So just shifting your attention outward. If you're not in danger, this is—you just have an anxiety, depression, whatever, just look for the colour blue. That's one thing. Just shine the light of your attention somewhere else. Lisa: Like a naughty kid who’s having a tantrum. Just distract them. Paul: Yeah, absolutely. And I call that part of the brain your inner gremlin, that’s responsible for anxiety, depression. And but also just negative self-talk and self-criticism, and anger — all of these things. And the key thing to understand is your gremlin’s like a chameleon, right? It can take many guises. But it's like, if you remember the movie Gremlins, when you feed Mogwai after midnight, it becomes energised and turns into the Gremlin. So, when you shine the light of your attention on the gremlin, it becomes energised. So this is where you just shift your attention either to where's the colour blue or what can I smell? Lisa: Or breathing. Paul: Or we like to—or your breathing—yeah, that's another great combination. And I like to talk about shifting your attention to the concept of your inner siege, which is what the Stoic philosophers talked about. That's the optimal version of you. And that's either my best self, me at my best, or some sort of other character that I'm consulting. Lisa: Ah, yes, I heard you talk about this on Craig’s show. And I was like, that analogy that you use, like there was one with your son, Oscar. And him talk, having Derek, I think it was... Paul: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, Derek. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lisa: So creating a character around these two polarizing figures. I’m always talking about the lion and the snake in my head. Or Wonder Woman in this chicken shit, who’s me. And we all have this positive, amazing self. And we have the self that's full of self-doubt and imposter syndrome, and I can't do this, and angry, and negative, and cynical. And so it's creating a character. So tell that story a little bit. Paul: Yeah. So the character thing is really, really powerful. And so I get people to—you've got to bring this character to life, right? So there's a little exercise, which I'll share with you. And you can share with your listeners where, so I call them your inner Gremlin and your inner siege, right? Or you can say whatever you want. So, what do they say first thing in the morning, right? You write that down. Generally your inner Gremlin is the one that says, ‘Press snooze’ or ‘Not another bloody day’, right? But then you go, what do they say when they're faced with a challenge? And then you write down their character strengths and particularly, you focus on your inner siege, what are the character strengths that you have when you're at your best? And then I like to do a thing called plus ones. Like what are ones that you'd like to develop or have more of? And you write down. So, if it's calm under pressure or being more empathetic, I'm going to write down that my inner siege is calm under pressure, is more empathetic, right?  And then drawing the characters is a brilliant thing because it brings it to life. And Oscar when he drew the characters, he drew Derek and he drew Flash, who has now actually being replaced with Richie. A little side story. I actually bought a book called The Real McCaw from Richie McCaw because I am a big fan of the All Blacks, and particularly Richie McCaw. And I bought his book, and I was wanting to read it, and it friggin’, it disappeared, and I couldn't find where it was. And one night, I went down to Oscar’s room. He was supposed to be asleep, and he's there reading. And he's reading that book. He'd nicked it from me, and he had a highlighter. He's 10 years old, and he's highlighting stuff what Richie McCaw said, right. So now, his inner siege is called Richie, right? But when he drew these original ones, he actually did a speech bubble for Derek and it said, ‘I will crush the good ones and I will be the king of Oscar’s head’. How cool is that? Lisa: And he’s 5 or something. Paul:  No, he was seven at a time. Lisa: 7. Oh my god. But I mean, the hard cold, maybe 6, actually. But sometimes kids are so insightful. Because that's what happens, right, is that when that negative character takes a hold of the negative self-talk, it does crush the good self-talk, kind of becomes the king of your head. If you choose to let it, right? Paul: So my inner siege is called, Jeff. So when I'm struggling, or I need to get myself up, I just go ‘What would Jeff do right now’? Right? And so this is a process in psychology called self-distancing, where you're taking yourself out of the emotional state, and you consult a character or my best friend or whatever, and it actually shows it reduces the emotional intensity. And research shows that people make better choices. They're more courageous, and they make better choices, right. And so that's one, I think, really useful way to shine the light of your attention. So, the process that I use, depending on who's around, right, if someone's having a bit of an anxiety or just a bit of negative stuff, I like discharge, recharge, reframe. So think about it, it’s stress hormones, right? If somebody’s having an anxiety, get it out. You got to discharge those stress hormones. When you run away... Lisa: Go for a run. Paul: ...you come back to homeostasis, right. And I find, even 30 seconds of intense activity is enough. So, you discharge the stress hormones, then you recharge by your breathing, right. So you're doing that breathing and you're focusing on your breathing. And then, so your amygdala hijack is gone now. Use you're focusing on the breathing, and then you reframe and you go, ‘Okay, what would Jeff do right now’? Or ‘What would my character do right now’? Or, if I've written down all my character strengths, what action do I need to take right now to display those characteristics? Right? So the Japanese psychology, Morita Therapy, there's this beautiful term called, arugamama, right? It is what it is. And then they say, ‘What needs to be done’? And the stoics are very much like that — what do we need to do right now? So it's very action focused. Right? And so that is something that I think works for me well. Lisa: Yeah. Because it sort of removes yourself so that you're looking—it's like looking down on yourself. Because this brain of ours is like a thought factory, it just keeps going and talking and chattering and go, go, go, go. And yeah, emotions take over, amygdala often is in control of our prefrontal cortex. And if we can separate ourselves and sort of hover over ourselves—and I've been looking into stuff like what happens after death because I just recently lost my dad and all those questions. ‘How do I connect to my dad on the other side’? All of that sort of jazz that nobody can bloody answer, really.  Paul: Yeah, if you get the answer, let me know. Lisa: Yeah, I’m working on it. I'm really trying to get it out. But a lot of talking about the connection to the other side and opening up those channels, and to me, it's like, okay. So just from a brain point of view, if I just separate myself out from my brain, like, if you believe that we are a spiritual being and so our brain, our body, we're just walking around in this earthly body, but we have a higher self, if you like. So, it’s this higher self looking at that brain going, ‘Oh she's running that stupid program again that she learned when she was seven. It's no longer relevant here, I need to change the recording, and I need to change up’.  So it's just giving yourself a way of separating yourself from the actual emotions that your body is feeling, your physiology is feeling like now. And for me, a lot of it is, when I get anxious and stuff, I will just go and sprint for 50 metres. Like you say, it doesn't have to be long, it might be 2 minutes. It just comes back, reset myself. Sometimes if it's a really bad situation or whatever, I'll have a little cry that discharges more energy. And then I pick myself up and we'll get on with it, and we'll do a breathing, and we'll get back into gear. And just having those little tools in your toolbox can really help you manage the day-to-day crap that comes at us. And even in the big situations, the really traumatic ones, I've used those situations regularly—just remove myself for a minute from the situation, go and get my shit together. And then come back into the situation. And that can really help if you have the luxury of doing that. So, I think these are really, really important because people often think, well, they look at someone like you and all your achievements and all stuff that you've done—or even in all the races that I've done. ‘No, never. I could never do that’. And that's your automatic negative thoughts coming in, your angst, as Dr. Daniel Amen talks about, they just pop up. And you need to realize that that isn't you, that's just your brain doing its thing. And you can choose not to believe that brain when it tells you you're not good enough, or you're not sexy enough, or you're not pretty enough, you're not strong enough, whatever the case may be. You can go, ‘No, I'm not listening to that’. And I'm diverting, and what you're saying, is divert your attention. Paul: Yeah, absolutely. And those answers are automatic negative thoughts. In Morita Therapy, Japanese psychology, it's basically, it’s a story. It's a story that we tell ourselves, and there are a number of different stories. And it depends what story we pay attention to. And because when you pay attention to a particular story, when we think about what's happening in the brain, that self-concept, or that idea that ‘I'm not good enough’, is basically what we call a neural net in the brain, right? It's a bunch of neurons that are firing together for a concept or a thought or a particular line of thinking.  And the Scottish neuroscientist Donald Hebb showed in the 1950s, it's called Hebbian Learning. And it's a well-accepted way of the brain works, nerve cells that fire together, wire together. Right? So every time you're repeating that thought, or paying attention to it, you're strengthening it. And he showed that eventually, after a certain amount of repetitions—and we don't know the magic number—but that circuit becomes what's called long-term potentiation. This means that this circuit is primed for firing. And it means that then even neutral information is more likely to fire off that circuit, right? And every time you're paying attention to it, you're strengthening it.  So, the other approach is to go, ‘Thanks, Gremlin’, or ‘Thanks, brain. Thanks for that story that you're telling me. But it's not helpful right now’. Right. And that's where you focus on another story, or a particular affirmation that people might have. A different story, I've got this, whatever, it's another neural net. And every time you're focusing on it, and paying attention to it, you're strengthening it, right? So it's about interrupting the old and maladaptive, unhelpful thought patterns... Lisa: That we all have. Paul: ...and actually creating new ones. And every time you catch yourself—this is why the first part of all of this is about being the watcher. It's about being the watcher in your own brain. And for lots of people, this is a frigging revelation, that they can actually watch their thoughts, and do it with curiosity. And go, ‘Wow, there's an interesting negative thought. And that's an interesting negative’...  Lisa: Great example! Paul: Yeah. And then be curious and go, ‘Well, what would a more positive thought actually be’? Right? So you can trick yourself into having these positive thoughts and every time you're doing it, you're laying down and strengthening those networks in the brain, right? So like anything, like you didn't become awesome at what you did by doing it once and then boom, that's it. It's about repetition, repetition, repetition. So, really the first step is being the watcher, and then just repeatedly intervening, and going, ‘Actually, I have a choice’, right? And what's called in Acceptance Commitment Therapy, the choice point. And Viktor Frankl talked about it, the Jewish psychiatrist who was imprisoned in Auschwitz. And I read his book as a 17-year-old, had a pretty profound effect on me. He said, in between stimulus and response, is the space where we have the ability to choose. And he talked about the last of human freedoms, is your ability to choose how you react to your circumstances, whether they be external circumstances or circumstances in your head, we all have that ability to choose how we're reacting, right. And choosing what we actually focus on. And it's this light of attention, that I think is really, really powerful. So when we wrap it all up in those characters, and then we're repeatedly doing it, and then people are waking up in the morning, and actually spending a few minutes saying, ‘Okay, who am I going to be today? What version of me is going to interact with the world’? And every time they observe negativity going, ‘Well, I say I've got a choice right now. What would Jeff do right now’? Right? Before they walk into their office, and just before you walk in the door, just think, ‘What do I need to do to express those characteristics of my best self’? And especially when you come home, particularly if you've had a shitty day, you just spend 10 or 15 seconds going, ‘Okay, there's a choice here and what version of me, do my partner, my little kids want to see walk into the room’? Right?  And it's just that little mental rehearsal, as you'll have done hundreds of thousands of times as an athlete and every world class athlete does this mental rehearsal because that shit works. Get your game face on. Lisa: Get your game face. I have this analogy and I've told this story before on the podcast but when I was doing this race in the Himalayas and absolutely terrified, 222 K's of extreme altitude... Paul: Jesus Christ! Lisa: And I’m an asthmatic with a small set of lungs, who did mostly deserts for a particular reason. And I was absolutely packing myself, and I got my crew together like two days before and I said, ‘You have to protect me, my brain. You have to like tell me how amazing I am. Every time a negative thought comes up, I want you to sort of shout it down for me and protect me from everyone else’.  And on the day of the actual event, they did that and they really helped me get my shit under control because I was really losing it. Like I was just terrified I'd had a concussion in the build-up, I'd had to rip some ligaments, so I hadn't had a good build up. And it was the scariest thing I've done at the time. And I've done some other scary crazier shit but that was pretty up there.  And on race day, you wake up and you have that moment for a second where you go, ‘Oh shit. It’s that day’. That day you've been  preparing for, for a year and a half, but it's that day and you've got to get up and face down 222Ks in the mountains in extreme temperature, extreme altitude, and no air and things. And I'm putting on my gear, and then that person changes. When I put on my running gear... Paul: That’s your thing. Right. Lisa: It’s my thing. That's my ritual. Paul: That’s your siege. Lisa: When I put on a number, there's a different person in front of you. And that person is a freaking warrior. Paul: Machine, yeah. Lisa: Yeah, in my head. I’m not, but I am in my head, in that moment, I am Wonder Woman. I'm Gal Gadot. I can do any freaking thing and I’m telling myself the story, I'm telling myself the story in order to create the chemicals in my body that I need just to get to the freaking start line and not run the other way because I'm terrified.  And then, once you start and you're in the battle, you're in the battle. You're in it. There's no way out but through. And then you have to bring in all the guns. Over the period of the next 53 hours, I had to bring out all of the stock, sort of things, to get through every crisis that came. And these voices in your head are pretty freaking loud after 50 something hours out there. Paul: That they bloody well are, yeah. Lisa: Yeah, but when you go—because one of the other analogies that I wanted to bring up that you talked so well about in one of the interviews was the small circle and the big circle. And the small circle is your comfort zone. That's you, that's the life that you're living when you're in your comfy world and you're not pushing outside the zone. And you’re staying safe because you're too frightened to jump out into the big circle is what you can be, and your potential.  But out there, in that big circle, it's freaking scary, it's hard work, it's terrifying, there’s risk of failure, there's all sorts of things. And everybody wants to be that big person that does these, lives this full life, that reaches their—none of us will reach our full potential, but we're reaching a heck of a lot of potential. And not living in the safe, little comfortable, ‘I'm scared’ world. And pushing yourself every single today to do shit that hurts, that’s hard, scares the crap out of you. And then coming back and recovering. Paul: It’s critical, right? And I called that big circle, our scientists will refer to that as the zone of productive disequilibrium, right? Lisa: Those are scientists’ words? Paul: Yeah, exactly. So you're out of balance, you're out of whack. But it is where adaptation happens. And this is the problem. So we are by our very nature, we are comfort seekers, right. And just because all of our history has been of discomfort, and so it's pretty natural that we're comfort seekers. The problem is that we have an ancient genome in a modern world. Our genome hasn't changed in 45,000 years, right. And for the vast majority of our human history, we had lots of discomfort, life was uncomfortable, and we became the dominant species on Earth, largely because we adapted better to environmental stressors and pressures than other species right. Now, what's happened in the last 100 years since the Industrial Revolution, particularly in the last 30 years, is that we have stopped adapting to our environment, and we've started changing it. And recently, we've changed our environment to such a level that we're no longer optimally matched to it genetically, right. So when we seek comfort, we get soft, we develop a soft underbelly. And this is what a lot of the positive psychology people do not talk about, is that getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.  And you can just do this, quite simply, if you're sitting listening to this, think of your biggest achievement in your life, something that you are most proud of. And I guarantee you, for almost every listener, it will involve stress and being out of your comfort zone. But we need to hang with the tension long enough for adaptation to happen. And lots of people spend most of their life in that little small circle, the comfort zone, and they dip their toe into the uncomfortable zone of productive disequilibrium. They go, ‘This is uncomfortable. I'm getting right out of here’. No good shit ever happened in your comfort zone. Right? Lisa: It’s a quote from Paul Taylor, ‘No good shit ever happens in your comfort zone’. You gotta put that one on the wall. Paul: It’s like past 2am. Right?  That's the thing, no good shit happens there. So, it is about seeking discomfort. And one of my things, which you actually exemplify much better than me, but it’s that get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Right? Yeah, that's really key. And I think we have, as a generation, particularly in the West, we have got comfortable with being comfortable. And we are comfort seekers. Lisa: Getting cosy all the time. Paul: It's all, it's served up to us everywhere. And we're prompted to buy things and do things that make us comfortable. And it's natural to want to go there. But it's not self-serving. Lisa: But our biology isn't, our epi genome isn't suited. Paul: Absolutely not. Lisa: Getting out of that thermoneutral zone, for example, like cold showers, cold water, hot. All of these things that are outside the neutral zone are where the change happens, from a physiological point of view. If I hop into a sauna, I'm going to create heat-shock proteins, I’m gonna sweat. That's going to cause all this cascade of events in my body that will make me stronger. The next time when I go to the gym and I work out with weights, then I'm going to be sore and I'm going to be breaking down the tissues. What happens is a cascade of events that makes me stronger for next week. Paul: And here's the thing, right, that if somebody wants, if somebody goes one, if someone hasn’t been trained for ages and particularly, they’re bloke. And they go riding got to get back and then they go to a CrossFit class or F 45 hard core. And they go, ‘Jesus. That was ridiculous. I'm never doing that again’. But then you're not going to adapt, right? You only get bigger, faster, stronger, because you hang with the tension long enough for adaptation to happen right. Now, seeking comfort, we should do that when we're in recovery, right? But a lot of people, and we should really define the difference between recovery and relaxation. Right? Recovery isn't sitting with your feet up with a bottle of wine watching Netflix, right? Recovery is stuff that is actually energising you, right? It’s doing the breathing stuff, it’s doing the meditation, doing the tai chi, the qi gong, those sorts of things, yoga. Or for some people, it's drawing, it's reading a book, it's connecting with others, it's gardening, it's spending time in nature. These are all things that really help us with that balance between stress and recovery. And when, if we get that right, the stress becomes used stress. And if we are just exposed to that too much or don't get the recovery, right, it's de stress. And then we can go into burnout/overtraining syndrome, which then when you look at the physiology between overtrained athletes and burnt out executives and depressed people, it’s almost identical. Lisa: Yeah. And like, I've had to try to get my head around this because when you're an athlete—and I grew up in a household where being tough was cool. And physical toughness and mental toughness were what was valued and what was rewarded in my family. So therefore, I have this complete construct in my head that if you're not tough, and you're not hard ass all the time, then you're useless. And I had to deconstruct that a little bit because that lead me to burnout, that broke me, that lead to hell of a lot of pain in sickness and all sorts of things. Now, as I'm hopefully older and wiser, I know that my body also has a full on and it has to have a full off. And that recovery is really important. And that recovery can be cuddling the cat, it can be going to the beach with my husband and just staring at the waves for half an hour to recover. It doesn't have to be something epic, and it can be something like the sauna

When you’re entering a new company or a new market, there are lessons to be learned from the past and opportunities to grab hold of to propel yourself and your company forward. Paul Lanham entered a new company and industry all at once when he became the Chief Information and E-Commerce Officer at Charlotte's Web, a CBD company.   On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Paul details how he used his experience at companies such as Crocs, HCL and Brookstone to help guide him as he helped grow the Ecommerce business at Charlotte’s Web to the point where it now represents 65% of the business. Paul explains the methods he has used to generate qualified traffic, conversions and a high retention rate, and he discusses the technology he thinks is going to make a huge impact on Ecommerce in the future. Main Takeaways: Respect The Work That Came Before You: As a leader coming into a new company, there can be a tendency to try to change too much too fast. Instead, acknowledge and respect the work that was happening prior to your arrival, and then try to evolve that work into something more.  Let the Tools Handle the Work: Humans are excellent at many things, but we all have inherent biases and miss certain correlations or connections. Rather than trying to analyze all the data you have on your own, employ technology like A.I. that will ignore most (unprogrammed) bias and can do the deep work a human brain is incapable of. Tech is Catching Up To Personalization: For so long, there has been a promise of technology that could interact in a human way with customers in real-time. That technology is finally starting to become a reality and those that can implement it properly can take personalization of their Ecommerce experiences to the next level. 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 back to Up Next In Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org and your host. Today we have Paul Lanham on the show, the Chief Information and Ecommerce Officer at Charlotte's Web. Paul, welcome. Paul: Hi, nice to be here. Stephanie: I'm glad to have you. Yeah, I'm really excited. I've used Charlotte's Web products before. So, when I saw that you were in our queue for interviews, I was like, "Oh, this is going to be a good interview." Paul: That's good to hear you have some perspective then. Stephanie: To start, I was looking through your background and was really impressed by some of the companies that you've worked at. I'd love for you to first before talking about Charlotte's Web, kind of go through a little bit about your history and then what brought you to Charlotte's Web. Paul: Sure. As you just noted, I have a pretty diverse background mostly in the retial and CBG and technology industries. What's really colored my career is that I've been given a lot of opportunities, some of which I hadn't had a lot of experience in including Ecommerce when I started in its infancy in the mid '90s when you had to build everything. You couldn't really go to the corner shop and buy an Ecommerce server. Paul: But I basically have touched on virtually every aspect of Ecommerce over the past 20 somewhat years. I've been a C level executive for about 25 years and worked for a diverse group of companies, a variety of sizes. Some startups. Paul: I started my own tech company and now it's Charlotte's Web, which I have to say is very much different in terms of its make up versus the companies I've worked for in the past. Stephanie: Yes. And just for people to know the difference, it would be great if you could name drop a bit. I know people hate name dropping, but I'd love to hear what were some of the companies, the largest ones you've worked at? I think you can compare it to Charlotte's Web. Paul: Sure. I worked for what was a startup, Crocs. I think people will recognize the infamous shoe company that is just located down the street from where I work. Paul: I've worked for Jones Apparel Group, which is a mega apparel conglomerate that own companies like Barneys New York, Jones New York, Apollo Jeans, et cetera, in the apparel industry. Paul: I started a tech company that eventually became a subsidiary of HCL Technologies, which is a global tech firm based in India. Paul: And Brookstone, which is the gadget shop, competing with Sharper Image. Again, near its infancy as well. So, a diverse group of experiences. Stephanie: Yeah, that's amazing. With some of these companies you've worked at previously, are there a lot of lessons that you were able to bring to Charlotte's Web or is it just such a different beast that you kind of had to just start over and had a completely new hat on? Paul: Well, basically if you've been a C level executive for a number of years you have some successes and you have some failures and hopefully you learn from the failures, and I've had them too. Paul: Implemented virtually every kind of system you can imagine. Been on the business side from an Ecommerce perspective and learned a lot of different things that I've been able to bring to Charlotte's Web. Paul: Back to the diversity of my career, one thing I can note, I probably have been in just about every function that you can imagine from finance, to marketing, to sales, to Ecommerce, et cetera, et cetera. Paul: So, I think that brings somewhat of a unique perspective to a company like Charlotte's Web, where I frankly I have a lot of empathy for my peers in other departments because I've done a lot of their jobs. Stephanie: Yeah, that is so important. I've worked at previous companies where someone doesn't understand I worked in finance back in the day and people do not understand the complexity or why there are certain procedures set up and you can definitely see tension between certain groups if they've never worked in that team before. So, that's key I think. Paul: Absolutely, and financial people can be fun. Most people don't know that. Stephanie: They can be. Just like me, I'm fun. You're fun Paul. I'd love to hear or I'd love for you to explain what is Charlotte's Web and maybe even starting with the story behind it, behind the name. Paul: Sure. Charlotte's Web is CBD company that was founded by the seven Stanley Brothers and that's a wonderful story in it of itself in that they grew up in the Cannabis industry. Paul: But the company's namesake, Charlotte Figi, who many people may remember from the Sanjay Gupta CNN Specials from years back and most recently illustrating how there was this trajectory of various peoples and things to help a little child basically survive. Paul: So, our namesake Charlotte really is like our guiding star or north star in the context of our mission, which is to help people through natural products that Charlotte's Web produces. Paul: So, it's a young industry, it's a young company where we are a market leader. Obviously we are commercial, but we're always grounded by our original mission and we still do help quite a few people to where our product is very essential like the Charlottes olive oil. Stephanie: Yeah. I was looking at the I am Charlotte video on your website and it definitely gave me goosebumps. When did you guys create that campaign? Paul: Well, it's basically been the past year. The point is with her passing it really shook us all to our core because frankly it was probably one of the core reasons that most of us joined the company. I was fortunate to be able to meet Charlotte and her mother Paige a couple of times. Paul: But many people in my company, and obviously the Stanley Brothers basically grew up in this company attached to Charlotte's story. The I am Charlotte campaign is currently just obviously a testimony and our take on how beloved she is and still is. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. The CBD industry as you mentioned, it is kind of a new-ish industry. When you're in California it seems like it's been around forever, but when you go to other states or back to my hometown, people still kind of have they either don't know what it is or yeah, are just very unclear about what it is. You have different preconceived notions, you can say. Stephanie: So, how do you all think about kind of educating the public or new buyers who come to your site for the first time? Paul: Certainly. Two points, actually about 15% of households have had some experience with CBD in the United States. And still because it's such an emerging industry, word of mouth is still very important. Typically, people first get exposed to CBD by a relative or a friend or somebody mentioning it that it helped them. Paul: When they go to search for it, we basically are actually a leader at Charlotte's Web because we rank very high on the first page, in the first third with what is CBD. To that point, we spend a good deal of time on our site through blog entries and various educational videos that we put out to educate our customer on the difference, for example, between hemp and cannabis or what is the efficacy of CBD and various in-depth, I guess, videos to illustrate the depth of what they could know about CBD. Paul: So, it very much is still an educational process as you've mentioned to evangelize the use of CBD. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. How did you all become a market leader? I know you were not first, but you definitely were some of the early leaders or even starting up in this industry. But how did you go about making sure people had your name as the household name when it came to CBD? Paul: Sure. They were among the first and the brand story between the Stanley Brothers and Charlotte really resonated. It was made for this industry and the mission that the Stanley Brothers inoculated into the company and we still have in terms of evangelizing the product and natural products to the world to help people, I think resonate with people. Paul: When you talk about, for example, our end-to-end integration from seed to shelf, our quality, et cetera, all those things kind of are confluence in terms of being perceived as a quality brand and a premium brand to a consumer. Paul: There are a lot of smart business decisions along the way, frankly, in terms of becoming that market leader. Stephanie: What kind of smart business decisions? Now you've piqued my interest. Paul: Okay. For example, going really strong in Ecommerce initially in that the nature of the industry is that there's been a slower adoption in the major retailers because hemp frankly, from a federal perspective, wasn't quite legal until a couple of years ago based on the format. Paul: There are some reticence in terms of conservative retailers to carry the product. So, they were very smart in not necessarily going the mom-and-pop route even though we have a big natural store population on the retail side. Paul: But going very strong with Ecommerce and hiring the right people right off the bat a couple few years ago to basically push the commercial side of this. Ecommerce right now represents about 65% of our business as was in the first quarter. That's somewhat of a higher percentage than many of our competitors. Stephanie: What do you think is attributed to that higher percentage? Paul: Being first out of the gate. Being very professional about it. But the primary drivers, they're a couple, back to the brand story that really resonated, was beautifully presented on the site and for media. Paul: Secondarily, the quality that we bring to the table that we try to communicate to other consumers. From that seed to shelf continuum, we test the product 20 times, we track each individual bottle or tincture or the like back to a specific lot and seeds. We could document virtually anything anyone needs to know about that particular product. Paul: So, particularly in this industry where you have an influx of competitors, some of which frankly are not quite as sophisticated in the context of testing and the branding. You can really stand out by basically taking care of those issues. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. That is how I found you guys in the early days was because quality to me is the biggest factor when it comes to CBD. Paul: Absolutely. Stephanie: And it's also something that a lot of people worried about early on because you do hear horror stories and it felt good going to a company knowing yeah, they've already got everything figured out. They've got the dosing down to its seed. They've got it's non-GMO and yeah, I think that's so important with an industry like this. Paul: Absolutely. Stephanie: The one thing I was thinking about was consumer journeys. Everyone is coming to your website maybe at a different place like we were mentioning before. Some people are brand new or they've maybe never even heard of it, where education is key. Stephanie: Some people have heard about it. You've got the people who maybe are hiding their browsers when they're looking for it or the people like me it's like, "Yeah, this is an obvious thing that can help you." Paul: Sure, sure. Stephanie: How do you personalize either your Ecommerce experience or your marketing efforts to kind of go after all those people and meet them where they are? Paul: Well that's a good question because when I mentioned sophisticated we invested in tools that enable us to personalize that journey. So, for example, back to my comment on what is CBD. Paul: If somebody enters that as a search term and they have to click on our link, we will take them initially to the education materials and will kind of guide them through the process from the Ecommerce perspective of walking them through that journey and hopefully they purchase. Paul: We do that in the context of segmenting our email channel. We have a variety of channels and we handle each one differently. Our affiliate channel, for example, is very strong in terms of the partners we deal with like a Healthline.com, which yet again is another educational component in that we're very strong with them. Paul: So, depending on the channel, depending on the entry point of our consumer, we will treat them differently in the context of where we land them on the website, what we offer to them in the context of their journey through the website, and what promotional activity we engage with them. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah that make sense. When it comes to affiliate programs, how did you all think about setting that up and is that still a big part of your strategy or did you kind of pull back on that once you started becoming more of a household name? Paul: It's still and will be a very big part of our strategy in that penetration of CBD from a search to perspective is still relatively low compared to what I've experienced in the past so that we're still in an emerging phase where we need to use and leverage every channel we can. Paul: So, as strong as our Ecommerce business is, which happens to be frankly Ecommerce alone at Charlotte's Web is a market leader in revenue compared to every other CBD company, just alone. It kind of tells you the scale of our business. Paul: But what I'm getting at, the Healthline.com affiliate is very important to us in that it is the number one rated medical advice site, I believe, if I look at the statistics recently. Paul: Every entry point is different for every consumer and we need to leverage all those different entry points. We can't, for example, rely solely on organic search as an example, not that we would. But we basically go through every venue. Stephanie: Got it. What does it look like setting up a partnership like that? Because, I think that is really important kind of finding someone who has a good reputation that a lot of people trust. But what did that look like setting that partnership up and making it so both sides feel like it's a win-win? Paul: Well to your point, it's important to vet the partner because obviously you don't want to be presented on a site that doesn't quite meet your value set or your brand image. So, we're fairly choosy in terms of the affiliate partners that we work with. Paul: Obviously, in some cases it's a longer negotiation in that obviously we want to do it on advantageous terms in terms of the share basically. So, we don't cast a wide swath in the context of the affiliate partners we deal with. We're very selective. Stephanie: Got it. So, the one thing that I was wondering earlier when you were mentioning failures and you of course have a huge backlog of experience at other companies, what did your first 90 days look like coming in to Charlotte's Web and what big things did you change from the start based on maybe past failures or successes that you've had at prior companies? Paul: Well, like entries in the most companies it's a rush. My story, this is pre-COVID times obviously, I talked on the phone with a board member and my boss, the CEO, on a Friday. I flew over the weekend, got there on Monday. I took the job sight unseen after a phone call. Stephanie: Wow. Paul: I was so enamored of it. I've never done that before. And Danny has never hired anybody like that before, it just went so well. I showed up on Monday and I didn't leave for 90 days, much to the consonation of my significant other in Boston. So, we worked it out. Paul: But it was just a rush of understanding the industry in-depth, doing triage in the context it was still a start mentality, triage in the context of building a business intelligence stack, revamping the Ecommerce organization, planning the next iterations and improvements, setting up for the holiday season for example. Paul: When I joined, literally the week after I joined we kicked off a new platform upgrade that we only had a couple of months to do prior to holidays. So, it was a lot of long days. Stephanie: Was that something that you feel like you could step into because I'm sure you've done many re-platforming experiences before? Paul: Yeah. There is some muscle memory and back to my point, you always want to learn from your failures and not do them again or at least understand the context and admit them. Basically one of those issues is that one has to listen very carefully. Paul: I parachuted into a company that was going 1,000 miles an hour and one of the lessons I've learned in the past is honor the past because there was a great deal of work and a lot of great work done that I took the attitude of evolving and adding to as opposed to turning the part which many C level executives take that as their mandate. Paul: I've never really done that. It's one of the failures I've learned from in my past that basically sometimes evolution is better than tearing things apart. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I love that and I think the quote too. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: So, I'm sure another thing that you kind of the change of thinking on would be how you track the success of a business or the Ecommerce site. What kind of metrics, did you maybe look at prior companies where you were like this is our set of metrics that always made sense versus what do you look at now at Charlotte's Web? Paul: Well, there are quite a few. You know the Ecommerce business, there are probably 20 things that you look on a daily basis. That's my routine in the morning, I get up and I look at basically all the metrics. Paul: But what's important here, more so than perhaps, it's always in the top three conversion for example, on unbalanced traffic. It's significant here because you're engagement with a new customer and maybe fleeting because of the nature of the industry, the curiosity about CBD, people not knowing about it. Paul: I actually had to look at that statistic or those statistics several times because they didn't believe them, they were so high. That's a testament to the people and the staff that were here in that whether it's educating the consumer, or the customer experience on the site, or customer care on the backend, we have a high percentage of sales that convert. Paul: So, that probably is a much more important stat that I've paid attention to in the past. It's always been in the top three or four. Paul: Retention of consumers. Again, in this sort of industry because of the fleeting interaction with your customers, we have a very strong subscription program that is very important to us, which are typically customers who deem the product to be essential to their wellbeing. Paul: So, we've put a good deal of emphasis on that as well as retaining customers, and again, without divulging the statistics, it's much higher than I've experienced in my past 20 plus years of experience in Ecommerce. Stephanie: What do you think is making it so high? How are you all retaining customers so well or encouraging people to subscribe? Paul: Well, it's high because I guess in a way our traffic is more qualified, then again I've experience in the past. When they come through the site and they've been educated, there's a slightly high degree of propensity to buy. So, that's a factor. Paul: Plus some of our tools really facilitate the conversion in that. Not that we're pushy but we don't let go in the context of okay, this isn't right for you, maybe this or how about this promotion or have you rethought this through the customer journey in the site? Stephanie: Yeah. Paul: Basically, there's a pre-decisive to buy basically once they get to our site. Stephanie: Is there any initiatives that you've implemented when it comes to, like you said, it's nice you don't let go and you make sure to make to keep reminding them or showing them new products or new ideas. Stephanie: Is there anything that you've implemented recently around those kind of initiatives that have increased conversions or increased subscription rates or anything, or anything that you've done where you're like that was a big flop, don't try that? Paul: Well yeah. Again, getting much more sophisticated, I don't think anybody else has implemented the suite of what I call campaign tools and analytical tools. Typically, people use the standard GA or Google tools and we've gone past that and utilizing tools that I've used in much bigger companies without naming the company. Paul: So, we can have a high degree of personalization in terms of how we treat our customers as they kind of navigate through our site. A much higher capability in terms of test and react and basically inoculating those scenarios and situations into our campaigns eventually down to the individual level. Paul: So, we're still learning some of those. We've implemented those over the past three or four months. The company is still, my staff is still learning some of the aspects of those tools. Paul: On top of that from an analytic standpoint, which is a little unusual in the industry, we dived in with both feet from an artificial intelligence perspective because I joke with my staff and they read too rapidly that my experience doesn't always mean anything. I think I know everything about my customer and I'm confounded constantly in terms of why I was wrong on that. Paul: It comes down to the data and what artificial intelligence does for example, is that it makes those deep correlations that none of us would have thought of, I would have never thought of with my 20 plus years of experience of how our customers actually interact with our site or what are they thinking in the context of their purchase strength. Paul: So, when you put all those things together from a capability perspective, I love it in terms of being data driven, in terms of understanding our consumer at a deeper and deeper level and being able to provide the best experience and the best service that we can on an ongoing basis. Stephanie: Got it. That makes sense. When you're implementing AI, first can I ask what platform are you using for that and what kind of surprises have you found when you implemented AI? What were the consumers doing that you would never have guessed before? Paul: Well it's a third party app. It's a bunch of data scientists who basically provide the service for us. They're conduit for the massive amount of data that we have. To your question of surprises or those correlations or what people have affinities for in terms of say, an add-on purchase that we would never think of, what prompts them to basically make that leap to make the purchase in the context of their journey through the site. Some of which are counterintuitive to some of our experience particularly for certain segment of our consumer base. Paul: It's just some of those interesting nuggets of information. The hard part of it is, there's so many correlations that we have to rank them and we basically test each correlation over a period of time to vet out the action. Paul: Our challenge at this point is basically getting into a much more test and react cycle on these correlations. Stephanie: That's really interesting. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: So, if you were to implement AI all over again or you had someone who does not have that on their site right now, what would you do maybe differently or if you were like we could go back and maybe I would change the way we did this or think about it differently when implementing it, what are some advice around that? Paul: Well what slowed us down was the notion of producing what I call hypothesis based on our prior knowledge. That tends to put you into silos of information and doesn't quite give you the breadth of correlations that AI can do for you. Paul: So again, it was all of my advice that hey, I think I really know this aspect of consumer behavior. I'm really interested in terms of their conversion activity when they do X, when they do Y. Paul: I wouldn't be so structured in those hypothesis going into it and probably a little more open minded in the context of looking at the correlations in a much different broader way. Stephanie: I love that. That's such a good reminder about the kind of biases you bring when looking at data or your consumers and why all that should be scraped from the beginning and just let the technology work for you? Paul: Absolutely, absolutely. Stephanie: In your industry I'm sure you probably get a lot of questions around this. But I'm thinking about all the regulations you have to deal with especially on a state level and when it comes to having Ecommerce be such a large part of your business, what does that look like behind the scenes when it comes to shipping or selling in certain states? Paul: Well, it's mostly an impediment from a retailer, particularly a major retailer perspective because to your point, there's a hodgepodge of regulation in the state. Even though hemp was 0.3%, THC less than 3% as federally allowed, depending on the nuisances of what is in California or Florida, et cetera, retailers may be averse to getting into ingestibles as opposed to topicals. Paul: So, back to our point, one of the reasons why we're industry leaders we've invested heavily in internal, external lobbyists that can guide different parties and factions, whether it be congress at the federal level or legislations at the state level or associations to evangelize the notion of CBD. Paul: One thing that people miss the point on, we welcome more defined regulation from the FDA because we feel that we're heads and shoulders above most of our competitors in the context of how we test, how safe our product is, how we document it and the like. Paul: So, it's an ongoing journey that hopefully more clarity will emerge at both the state and federal level whether it's with the FDA or with various state legislatures to make the retail sales of CBD more palatable. We do ship to all states in the Ecommerce perspective. Stephanie: Okay. Yeah, I like that idea around encouraging the FDA to look into it and implement regulations because you're like my product is so good, we should have the other products regulated and be held to a high standard as well because that is what can maybe hurt the industry as a whole, is having people making subpar products that aren't as high quality as Charlotte's Web. Paul: Yes. It's kind of adding to that, major business publications have basically stated and make the articles that CBD is here to stay. It's a multi-billion dollar business growing at a rapid rate and it's frankly grown so fast and it's a new industry that regulations haven't quite caught up with it. Stephanie: Yeah. I was reading a bit about demand surges especially during the pandemic right now. I think maybe it was your CEO who was mentioning like, oh we had a surge in demand for two weeks and then people kind of pulled back for a little bit. Stephanie: I was wondering how you guys are keeping up your inventory levels, how you manage that and then if you're changing anything going forward after seeing these surges of hopefully consumers that are going to stick around going forward? Paul: We've been really gratified and continuing to serve our customer because the majority of the customers consider our product to be essential for their wellbeing whether it's the type of tincture they use or the ointment or the like. So, it's been relatively stable for us. Stephanie: Okay. Paul: Now from an notary perspective, as a growing company our processes have become more sophisticated and over the past year we've implemented an NSLOP process or production planning process that I'm more familiar with in my CBG background to really dial into marrying strategic plans to budgets, to demand forecast and skew level and doing a relatively sophisticated job of planning product demand. Paul: Now the flip side of that, this industry is volatile in the context of demand in general because retailers, some are still adverse to taking the product, so it's hard to predict demand in that context. Paul: So, we place a little more emphasis on safety stock and agility in the context of the co-manufacturers we deal with and the like. Stephanie: Got it. What are some of the best practices you set up when it comes to setting up that forecasting process because I know you've had a lot, like you mentioned, a lot experience with that. What did you bring to Charlotte's Web that maybe they weren't doing before? Paul: Well, they had started it but I amplified from an Ecommerce perspective, a rigorous skew demand process that is three dimensional and that it adds up from top to bottom and extremely rigorous analytical process of continually revising those forecasts taking into account promotional cadence, taking into account day-to-day iterations of different campaigns. Paul: So, it's a fairly in-depth forecasting process in Ecommerce so that our accuracy is much higher. It's in the 90 percentile by skew in terms of our monthly demand, for example. Paul: One of the things I've learned in my past is that sometimes you have to take a leap of faith on a particular product because you don't know how high you can go. On the other hand, that's what safety stock is for. Stephanie: Got it. What does that look like when it comes to thinking of new products? How do you influence your decision behind that, like you were mentioning, behind the sales channels and the marketing channels that help you influence your ideas or thoughts behind it. What does that look like when it comes to new products? Paul: We do have outside data and with a caveat that it's such a rapidly growing industry that tends to change overtime. But I feel is obviously one of the standard firms we use in the context of a longer term view, in terms of product categories and growth and certain segments and the like and we use that as a baseline. Paul: Obviously we use our trend and my counterpart on the retail side and myself where basically experience marketers and sales people and that we have our own opinions in terms of how we correlate our thoughts on category growth versus what we're seeing in external data, for example, like Brightview. Paul: So, we listen very closely to our consumer in terms of what categories we're pushing. Stephanie: I was just going to say I'm sure you guys get a lot of customer feedback of what people want or what they're looking for. Paul: Yes we do. Stephanie: How do you grab all that and put it in a meaningful way because you probably know best. So, a lot of times consumers might ask for something and then not actually buy it or not really want it. Paul: This is true. They certainly vote with their dollars. But on the other hand, we have a pretty good customer care department that is in my peer bid where I've managed those sorts of departments in the past but this is in an interesting one, the group of individuals that the empathy, because of the nature of the product and the stories they hear and the people they try to help, the empathy they exhibit in terms of comments from customer is just outstanding. Paul: So, it's not only commercial, but to the extent that it's practical based on the information they have, they are advisors to the customers that call in and we have a high volume of calls that come in not necessarily about order standard things, but really what should I do? What about this product? Paul: The other aspect is we have a fairly rich library of customer reviews and the technology we use enables us to slice and dice some of the categories of the customer reviews and try to get to a gist of what's working versus not, whether it's from a product efficacy perspective or perhaps a defect of some sort. Paul: The dropper may not work exactly the way we wanted to and the like. So, we have multiple sources of information of customer contact. Stephanie: I think that's so key to be able to call in and actually talk to someone. That's the perfect way to develop trust is by having someone that you can actually get on a phone with and be like, "Okay, I don't know what to do now. Tell me exactly what I should be doing." Or same with reviews, being able to see someone who sounds like me reviewing the product just seems like a great way to develop trust all around. Paul: Absolutely. From a hiring perspective, I have lunch, a virtual lunch nowadays with every associate in my group at some point. Today I just, prior to this meeting, I had lunch with three of our associates just to kind of get a feeling of that. Paul: When it comes to our customer care associates, I've never met such a group of people that are truly empathetic to where they hear a story and they're crying on the phone with the consumer. They're doing everything. They have a wide latitude of actions they can take to help our customers more so than I'd had in the past in much larger companies. Paul: But they really have the right mindset, I think, as opposed to working in a call center. Stephanie: Yeah. That's so key and so important. Paul: Absolutely. Absolutely. Stephanie: So to shift a little bit into more of a marketing mindset, I wanted to hear a bit about how you guys are investing in different digital channels. What's working and what's not? Paul: Sure. Just the overview is that you may have seen our Trust The Earth campaign, which I loved, we started last fall that kind of instills what our brand messaging is. Basically, a lot of our marketing efforts go to that because again we're an emerging industry, we're maintaining our market lead, we want to convey a certain image, just a random stat based on our efforts here today. Paul: We have over 400 billion impressions from the various things we've done versus, I think our closest competitor from the stats that I've seen were about two billion and it dropped rapidly. So, marketing our digital efforts from a broad perspective are very effective and that shows in the context of where we are in organic search or educating the consumer, long ways to go. Paul: From a digital perspective obviously we're active in every social media component and we're very assertive in terms of educating our consumer through that channel, conveying our brand message. Paul: The industry is in a place right now, there are some restrictions in terms of how aggressive that you can market CBD on social media like on Facebook, for example, or Twitter. But that's not a real problem for me right now because for me we want to activate understanding and education and our brand story at this stage of our growth in the social media channels. Paul: So, a lot of our digital, aside from our paid media, which we're very good at I believe, a lot of our digital is focused on building our brand. Stephanie: How are you thinking about expanding into other markets? I think I saw that you were looking at going into a few other countries. How are you guys exploring that right now? Paul: Well, we're basically putting our markers out there. We have a staff of people who are very experienced internationally. I have a good deal of international experience as well from an Ecommerce perspective in retial. Paul: But one of the constraints still is the regulatory environment in that we won't sell in any country that obviously it's not allowed. There aren't too many countries that actually allow it. So, we're basically putting the building blocks in place if in case that would be our strategy to understand what the international market would mean to us. Paul: But it's still evolving because it's basically not allowed from a regulatory standpoint in quite a few countries. Stephanie: Got it. So now that we're kind of predicting our future a little bit, I'm wondering what kind of Ecommerce trends are you excited about or preparing for right now? Paul: Well, in general, like I have for a number of years it's the technology keeping up with my visions of personalization. In the perfect world I'm interacting real time with the individual consumer in the context of whether we're educating them or guiding their journey and the like and the technology is starting to catch up with that capability even at a company of our scale. Paul: So, that's the trend that has been there for a little while but the promise has been there, but the reality is starting to catch up. The other one I mentioned is using deep technology to a point within certain boundaries to understand our customers behavior and needs and wants and applying, point number one, the personalization with that. Stephanie: Yeah. That makes sense. Is there any new tech that you're experimenting with right now that you guys are loving? Paul: Well, I've experimented with in the past in terms of client side speed of devices. Every Ecommerce and you know all the tropes about how conversion is impacted by site speed and page loading and all those different things. Paul: But what I've been enamored of in the past couple of years is utilizing technology to tailor the experience on whatever the device our consumer has. You know there's somebody out there who's still on dial-up, if that still exists. Stephanie: You caught me Paul. Paul: With a new browser, right. It doesn't matter how efficient your site is or your servers are like, you have to tailor the experience, strip down the page load, the content, rejigger the Java script on the fly depending on that individual's device because as far as they're concerned, they may have a iPhone 5 that hasn't been updated in five years but they still like that experience. Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree. That's really important because I think a lot of people assume that users are always on a newest and the latest and greatest. The one thing, yeah, I had, let's see, we're doing a study on I think Google maps users in India and the majority of them were on such outdated versions that they were never seeing updated streets or an update at all in maybe a year or two. Stephanie: I think it's just a good reminder that a lot of people are on older versions of things, not just in other countries but here too. Like you said, some people still use dial-up. Sowe have a quick lightning round coming up. But before that, I wanted to ask you one last question because I love your excitement towards the company and your energy behind it and I wanted to hear what is the best day in the office look like for you? Paul: The best day in the office, let me think about that for a moment. Stephanie: Yeah. Paul: As I mentioned before I'm usually willing to go every day. It's when I'm in the thick of it, I'm a great delegator I believe, and I think the people who work with and for me would say so. Paul: But I'm most happy when I'm in the thick of it, not being Mr. Executive and my people interacting with, like a peer to some degree, in terms of coming up with ideas, debating certain concepts, making things happens. Paul: It's still small enough company where many people I'll be a jack of all trades and that's where I've shined in my past of, okay, rolling the sleeves up and figuring it out and having to learn things. Paul: Many of my jobs have reflected that. So, that's when I'm happiest, when I'm learning something new. I think I've been told I'm really, really curious to a fault. I ask too many questions sometimes. Stephanie: I think that's a good thing. Paul: Yeah, I guess so. But that's what jazzes me, being in the thick of things, making things happen. Now having said that, as a C level executive you have certain programs and responsibilities to create a conducive environment for your people to work in to make them feel trusted, to stretch them to the extent of their capabilities giving them a vision. Paul: On the other hand, I've always been a believer of an executive being able to walk the talk having done something. Being able to do it, without actually doing it. That lends a certain amount of credibility in your interaction with your staff. So, I think that's very important. Back to your point, that's what makes me happy is just being in the thick of it. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. I like that idea and I heard a ratio or it was a metric that an executive used called the say do ratio, and it was how much do you do what you're going to say you do, and that's how he gained the trust with a new company he was joining, was he actually tracked it. Paul: Well in a small company I think my first interaction with an associate at CW is riding up the elevator that Monday, they had heard of me, and they asked my name and they heard that I was a tech guy. I was really the Ecommerce business guy and tech guy and they asked me about an email problem they were having. Stephanie: A personal or a company one? Paul: A company one, yeah. Stephanie: Okay. Paul: "I can't quite get this to do this." It was a sales executive or a sales manager that we had. She asked me a question not knowing exactly what I did so I spent a half hour tracking it down and getting back to her. Paul: Later when she learned, you're in charge of Ecommerce and tech and all that stuff. To me, in a small company like ours, you have to be personal, you have to be willing to help anybody with anything and follow up on it and get it done as opposed to always delegating and there's a balance obviously in terms of the work balance. Paul: But you have to show that direct interest in everybody's issue in what they're doing. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. That is such a good mindset to be in, like you said. Especially coming from a larger company where employees might be like, "Oh this guy is going to just delegate everything," like showing them you're willing to get your hands dirty and help them with their needs and stuff. It's also crucial. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: All right. Next we have the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Paul: Okay, lightning round it is. Stephanie: Are you ready? Paul: I'm ready. Stephanie: Roll up your sleeves, get ready. All right. Paul: They're already rolled up. Stephanie: First, I'll start with an easy one. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: What's up next on your Netflix or Hulu queue? What are you watching these days? Paul: On my Netflix queue let's see, geez I don't watch a lot of TV so you're going to stop me. I have 30 seconds left. Mostly about historical dramas. I've always wanted to watch The Crown, which everybody has watched. So, that's probably next on my queue. Stephanie: Cool. I haven't watched that yet. You'll have to let me know how it is. Paul: There you go. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your travel destinations when you can travel again? Paul: Wow. When I can travel again? I'd like to go back to Tokyo. I've traveled so much in my career personally. One point I spent about 50% of my time overseas. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Paul: But Tokyo because I was born in Tokyo. Stephanie: Cool. Paul: And an American descent. But when I traveled I was always able to get there and see my cousins three or four times a year. But it's been a while. That would be my first place to basically get back to my roots. Stephanie: That is a good one. I love Japan. Paul: Yeah. Stephanie: What app or piece of tech are you most enjoying right now? Paul: I'm most enjoying, this is an odd app, is a password saver. I won't say the name of it, but I've been searching for the perfect one because I'm all about convenience and security and all those things at the same time. So, it's an odd choice but I found the perfect passwords saver. Stephanie: Yeah. That is actually a very good piece of tech. We recently implemented that at the company not too long ago and I was like, "Wow, this saves a lot of time. Who knew?" Paul: Absolutely. Get rid of the sticky notes. Stephanie: Yeah. All right. If you were to create a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be? Paul: My first guest I'm thinking big. Stephanie: Go for it. Paul: Because I'm thinking really, really big because I'm enamored of her career. I was actually at her first rally, Elizabeth Warren. It tells you a little bit about politics and no offense. Stephanie: That's okay. Paul: But I was still in Boston, I went to her first rally and I was just enamored, I've always been enamored of her and not withstanding what happens in the near future. I would just be fascinated to talk to her about her career and how she made that mid career shift and the [inaudible] plan. Stephanie: That's cool. So, it would be politics focused or more human centric on what's important when it comes to you? Paul: More human centric with a tinge of politics because I am interested in politics. Elizabeth Warren would be it. Stephanie: We could get her on the show. I would make that happen for you. Paul: You could make that happen? Stephanie: Yeah. Paul: That would be so cool. Stephanie: I could do it. Elizabeth call us. We're ready for you. Paul: Absolutely. I remember I've actually seen her a few times, in the crowd obviously. The last time was at a protest at the Boston Common and she was quite compelling in her speech. Stephanie: Well that's great. I will have to see if I can find that online. Paul: Yeah. Stephanie: The last hard one which you've kind of already answered this, but I'll throw it anyways at your way. What one thing will have the biggest impact on Ecommerce in the next year? Paul: I think the biggest impact is the turmoil going around the big guys whether it's Facebook, Google, to some degree Amazon. What is the regulatory landscape, what is the antitrust landscape, how will they evolve, how monolithic will it be? Paul: I think I actually think about that quite often in terms of how do we enact with them, do businesses, make the leap into Amazon as a third party do, how do the algorithms evolve from a group perspective. How does privacy work? Paul: That really weighs on me in the context of thinking through how do those outside forces that are so monolithic in the tech industry impact Ecommerce. Stephanie: Well that's a big juicy one. We'll have to have a whole nother episode just to talk about your thoughts on that. Paul: Right, right. Stephanie: Well Paul it's been such a pleasure having you on this show. Like I said, I use Charlotte's Web. I've been around it for a while and I really appreciate you coming on and taking the time. Where can people find out more about you and Charlotte's Web? Paul: Well obviously our website, Charlotte'sWeb.com and I have a pretty fulsome linked in profile that shows you how haphazard my career has been but it's been a fun ride. Stephanie: Yeah. That's where I found out all about you. Well thanks so much for coming on. We'll have to have you back for round two in the future. It's been great. Paul: Absolutely enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform. Max: Good morning, everybody and welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast with max  from Talkpush. Today I'm excited to be welcoming Paul Noone, who is CEO for HireIQ and someone who is in technology. And I've, we both focus a lot of our energy on the call center and the BPO market and service this industry, which is always hungry for automation and innovation. So we both love this industry and we can exchange our thoughts on this topic.Paul, thank you so much for joining me on my new podcast. Paul: Hey, thanks Max, I'm thrilled to be here actually. Max: So our audience, some of them will recognize HireIQ. And some of them will probably recognize you, but they probably don't know the history of how you ended up starting this business, or how you ended up with HireIQ.Perhaps you could walk us through that journey. Paul: Yeah, I'd love to. HireIQ is an interesting technology and we're very focused on the call center. And because the call center has this outsourcing process that's associated with business process outsourcers.Most of the organizations don't realize that, while Fortune 500 organizations, anybody with a product or service has a requirement to support through call centers or through service locations, they also do a lot of outsourcing. So they're organizations like BPOs, the large ones in call centers are Teleperformance and Alorica and Atento and Sutherland and 24[7].And those are the organizations that we help with  in the talent acquisition, part of this, you know, max, you and I probably talked about this before, but recruitment is the term that we use. But we're in sort of a special place in recruitment. We're in the engagement with the candidates, the acquisition of all the data that we aggregate as much data as we can in a shorter period of time.And then we provide it to the recruiters in such a way that they can quickly make a decision, because we're talking about maybe 10 interviews for every hire, we're really known for our efficiency. And then we're also known for the AI associated with how we do that. How do we tell whether a candidate it's going to be particularly good at this particular role in collections or in sales? Or in support?We do a whole lot with that. I actually got here about six years ago through the investors. So I had just, I was working with another technology company on disaster relief, and just sort of an interesting aside, Max, we had built a product around disaster resource management and that's where these large scales or, when you guys experienced the typhoons and we have the hurricane season from June through November and, being able, you know, the shift in technology, the shift to phones, being able to locate all of the things that you need when a disaster strikes is a really interesting use case.So we had gone pretty deep into that and acquired some large customers, the U.S Red Cross, but we were looking to move from the Red Cross division of emergency management and we were looking for additional investment. So I was on sort of a roadshow talking to investors and ultimately a lot of people made the decision that it, and it's a function of that market. But, without disasters, if you have a good year, meaning no disasters, you're getting no money into that particular part, the Red Cross every now and then they literally go almost to zero. So they actually need engineering, Max: Pure disasters once in a while. Paul: And oddly, when you're in that business, you start to hope for bad things to happen. So there was something wrong, but the investors didn't buy. Max: I think it's not just the disaster people. I have a feeling that a certain class of politicians also relying on a good disaster once in a while. Paul: Well, so there's politics in there, the weird thing about funding ,and how funding shifts, and things like that.I think that actually is what scared investors away, Max, and it's a shame in some ways. That what we were doing was, you know, enabling, with the Red Cross, for example, we found a billion dollars worth of resources that had been sort of lost, and it hadn't literally been lost. It was in firehouses and it was in other locations.And that sounds like an inventory management issue, but it's not when something bad happens in one part of the state. And then you realize that through a quick app, you can find it. Where everything is: shovels clubs, protective eyewear, and N95 masks, for example. Imagine that you put in an application, you find a billion dollars worth of resources, really through crowdsourcing your own people.Anyway, that app is lovely but the investors didn't think it was an investable market at the time. And so I just finished this and I had met with the investors here and I called them back and said, you know, so we'll probably shut this down. And they said, great, because we have something we'd love to share with you.And they brought me into HireIQ. I have a background in call centers. I was with Genesis as they were starting out on sort of the part of the first team. I want to say pre-revenue, but I want to say Genesis is a $2 billion organization right now, 20 years ago when I was with them we had less than $10 million in revenue. So building that to a public company and then moving on, but coming here was lovely in that the technology was solid. But it was  a function of focus. We were trying to do too much. By focusing on call centers and BPOs in particular, we ended up, turning into, from being a typical technology company where we might be losing money quarter after quarter to being one that was profitable, really understood what we were doing and then have been very zeroed in on that use case around language proficiency, around understanding our customer's needs and really, more than anything else, making sure that they're succeeding.So closing that loop and making sure that they succeed. Max: Your star product is the product called Audiolytics? Paul: Well, so Audiolytics is really the technology that underlies the audio processing that we do. So at the heart of what we're doing is, the origin story really comes around. While I submit my resume in a recruiting, in an interview process, what that does is it strips out my personality and my voice.It strips out the narrative. I moved from the disaster resource management effort into HireIQ, why did that happen? All of those things that you get to tell people in an interview process. So the origin story is really about how do we add a narrative to what's a two dimensional piece of paper that's supposed to represent me.And so with that, we started to create a platform that would say not only here's the resume and here's some qualifiers about me, but here's my voice. Max: It used to upset me so much when I started on my career and I would go and socialize, go to a bar anywhere and someone would ask me, so what do you do?And, you know, I didn't want to tell them my job title and the company I worked for, because I didn't feel like it represented anything about me. And it would always come up with some weird answer I would say, oh, what do I do? You know, I roller skate or, you know, or something, just so that I could come out and shine and that wasn't a social environment in a work and job search context.Also, what do you do? Should be the first question or rather who are you? rather than a resume. Paul: Tell me about your expense in this particular business is an open ended question that a lot of our customers ask, but asking open ended questions, which is an old interviewing technique and a valuable one really allows people to tell them more. To talk to the narrative. Tell me about your experience in this particular world. Tell me about your understanding of customer support. Tell me your understanding. Tell me about an experience that you had with your boss that may be positive or negative, but being able to do that and being able to do it asynchronously when, you know, we could collect lots and lots of those became really the most important thing.But Audiolytics is actually the parsing of that. The audio data in order to get a really good and different understanding. So Max, what it doesn't do, is it doesn't convert voice to text and then parse it that way. But, it literally is looking for tone. So it's in these frames of voice, it's saying that's a positive, that's a negative, that's a happy emotion, that's a sad emotion. We're looking for things that we know are important for a good employee, but are particularly important when you're dealing with call center agents. That they're engaged, they're alert. They're more active than passive. They're not expressing boredom. Which is really interesting when you can pick up boredom because when a recruiter gets this information, they're going to see an Audiolytics score that says, you know, this person is probably not someone you want to spend a lot of time with.And I would say more than anything else we're not dispositioning customers. What we're doing our best to do is to give them an idea of priority. Talk to Max. He's got a great score. He's good with language. He's got good scores with data entry and even chat. Max: I didn't know that your technology was able to detect boredom. That's remarkable. Would it be influenced by geography and how do you factor that in? Because you live in Atlanta, people are supposed to speak a little bit more slowly, perhaps have a drawl. You don't, but nonetheless, you know, would the software, not pick up on the intonation and think maybe somebody from the South is bored?Paul: So it's really interesting. What you're doing is, so engagement doesn't necessarily have anything to do with dialect. And in fact, the tool itself is just sort of mentioned there's no conversion. It's listening for something that would be appropriate for the cohort of folks who are taking it ,interestingly enough.It's actually self adapting, because the same tool is used for engineers and salespeople and support people — all should have a different dynamic in their voice. And so it actually has to adjust based on the people who are taking the interview. The people who are successful in expressing themselves in that interview, as well as the questions.The questions and the people are really the dynamic that you're looking for, but boredom might be expressed differently by an engineer, or by somebody from, a Latin expression. But, the cohort itself helps to define that. And so ultimately you have not only our recommendation, but you also have the answer.So what's interesting about it is how closely we track to what a good recruiter would do. In the initial testing, after we did the machine learning on it. So can we in fact pick these up at a high rate? So can we, in fact, identify that Max is more happy than sad? Can we identify that when he's taking this test he's more bored? When we do that, we match Max almost 97% against a recruiter who would be listening to those particular things. So imagine that the technology itself is so wildly accurate in a lot of ways. But you know, to that end, that's what Audiolytics does. We're really sort of the platform is HireIQ, and it's a whole series of ways to basically create a recipe of assessments to understand more about you more about whoever you're interviewing — at speed. So we're trying to get the recruiting experience to be three, three and a half minutes. So you don't spend a lot of time with these individuals unless you're really digging in on them. And then with the candidate experience should be less than 20 minutes.Max: So the questions are not picked from a standard list. Since you're working with open answers, you don't have to use the same questions with every customer. Paul: No, in fact, they're different in virtually every customer.  There are some that seem to be universal people do want, need, to understand what your experience has been with customer support.So, if you're going to be in that customer support role, you're going to have to have some experience in sales, right? That has come up. Max: Yes. For me, it's like a yes or no answer. Have you worked in this industry before? That's usually how they ask that question in a chatbot environment. Paul: So that would be a bad question for us.What we're always going to do is ask a question that asks you to elaborate on something because we do in fact, need enough content to understand the profile. We need to have enough of Max telling us about Max to understand where Max's orientation is in terms of sharing, communicating. For the question, is he too verbose? Meaning he may be struggling with answering a particular question and trying to overanswer a question, or is it too short, meaning maybe he doesn't have the skills to think through and is that enough for this particular customer? So there are all kinds of metrics, there are cohort determined, sort of thresholds. It's really fascinating. And now we've done about, you know, close to 5 million interviews with it. So we have a really good base of understanding of how effective it is when matched with outcome data.So it's really fun stuff. Max: Does it replace, let's say the first phone call? I mean, if you're going to look at the standard recruitment process to hire it replaces the first phone call. Paul: So really what it's designed to do is give you a complete understanding. So we have customers who might do it for the engaged at the front end.We have customers for who it represents the entire interview process. So  once they've engaged, they've completed it. They have the scores, they meet thresholds. Then it's appropriate literally for the recruiter when they engage with them to close them.  You've probably experienced this, particularly with BPOs is that there's a real machine, there's a supply chain and with the attrition rates that exist, what you're working your best to do is fill training classes. And what we're doing, of course, is trying to identify people who are going not only achieve the right goals, the metrics that they're looking for, but we're also looking for folks who have an orientation, which would suggest they're going to stay longer.So that's one thing that we're doing, but because there's such a speed element, to this we are really careful about, trying to do as much as we can in a shorter period of time, giving you a complete understanding so that that particular recruiter can sell when appropriate and be restrained also when appropriate.So somebody does, you know, in the U S we have to answer, we have to give everybody the same interview experience. So that means that if you answer the first question horribly, Max, I still have to give you an opportunity with the next 7 questions I'm supposed to ask in an interview. It's a fair interviewing process, even if you disqualief yourself right out of the gate.And so one of the things about being able to acquire this information, offline and, online, as opposed to in front of somebody, it gives that particular person, the ability to advance quickly through that particular candidate and prioritize who to sell and who to, again, disengage with.Max: I understand the benefit for the candidates to do a short interview and a short assessment and get through those things faster, but it sounds like it's more than just, you know, I mean are you doing it because you get dropouts when ,people are held up more than five minutes? Or is it at the request of your customers? What's the driving force behind keeping it just two or three minutes long?Paul: Oh, I'm sorry. So the interview itself for the candidate will be as much as 20 minutes, but we're trying to keep it under 20 minutes, really because there's a falloff Max. 20 is about the cutoff. If you've seen some of the older, you know, The 1950 based assessments that had a lot of triangulation, right.You're asked one question one way and then seven questions later, you're getting the same question phrased differently in order to validate that the first question was like the second question and your answer was consistent throughout. And if you know that that's going to be an hour and a half, you really start to wonder, is there an easier way to get a job? For this wage.. Max: But time is speeding up, right? People have a lot shorter attention spans. They have multiple conversations going on asynchronously with five friends at the time. And so I expect that the 20 minutes would already be beyond the comfort zone for some people who are remote.Paul: It's very, very close. And you see what we're trying to do. It answers that question: is it enough? What we're trying to do is the open ended questions seem very much like what a typical interview would be. So tell me about yourself. Tell me about an experience that you had. What would your last employer say about you?Those kinds of open ended questions are the things that seem conversational. And allow you to expand upon yourself, but in fact are dense with data for us to help make a decision. And so the tone, the tempo, and in fact, the content is even important, but only when you know that that petitioner has an alertness and an engagement that pleasantness that you're looking for now go back and listen to those questions.Is there even more data that we can mine there? And that's why on average, it's about three and a half minutes. Because some you're just going through they didn't meet any of my language proficiency thresholds or whatever. And now we can spend a little bit more time with the particular person that I want to hire.And that would extend, you know, that's when you advance candidates and things like that, but it really is. I agree with you. I think what you're asking in that question is how do you give the candidate an opportunity to advance themselves, to tell their story? And not be too efficient in the process, that would eliminate me being able to tell enough about me. And so I think this is sort of the best of both worlds. Max: Yeah. I get the sense that 20 minutes would be annoying if I'm sitting at home and I'm applying to 10 different jobs, but yeah. If I had a sense that this company could be a fit, they are interested in me, then, yeah. 20 minutes is no problem, easy. And certainly easier than traveling physically to sites. So, have you seen the same thing as we have at Talkpush over the last few months? We've seen an increase in the volume of job seekers, an increase in volume of candidates. And how has that played out for the rest of the recruitment funnel?Is it,  becoming a problem where it just means we have too many candidates and not enough jobs to offer? What kind of dynamics does that create for your business? Paul: Well, I think for both of us, what I would say is: volume is important because volume breaks process. The more, you know, we got to a point in the U.S, our unemployment rate was down to 3%, you know, at times probably lower than that in certain places.So it was in fact hard to get enough people to interview, you know, recruiters spent most of their time trying to pull people out of other companies. And then in a matter of weeks, as we all know, it went from, you know, less than 3% too, you know, a lot. And then we're talking about 52 million people at its height, out of work needing to quarantine and work from home. So all of a sudden the opportunity to interview was greater, but the importance of identifying somebody who was really looking for that job and really engaged and would do a good job with both the hard skills and the engagement that we're looking for.What everybody's looking for, to be committed to that particular role, over the long term that became even more important. So a 100%, I agree with you that the volumes changed. And I would say, you know, in the first, because of the way we're set up and because of the way people leverage boards, that we might've seen a doubling in the first month, which probably created some concern on our part. There was actually a cost every time somebody does an interview with HireIQ, rather than it being a, you know, we do a lot of processing…Max: and because we're doing processing servers, AWS, bills go off, Google bills, come up. I had all of that happen as well. Paul: Yeah. So, that sort of evened out a little bit. And while I would say we're up. We're also going into that season, which is a ramp, right? So we're looking for a lot of holiday seasonal workers right now. So I would say we're probably, closer to where we were maybe a little bit higher, but not as dramatically higher as we saw in the first quarter after the quarantining.And we're seeing some alleviation of that. I think we're seeing some go back to physical work, but, the other part, Max's you may have an opinion on this as well, is that I don't know that a lot of people were willing to let go of their jobs. So are people artificially staying where they were highly mobile in the first quarter? All of a sudden now they're thinking, you know, it may not be as easy to get a job in the next place. So, there may be a false sense of  retention taking place at the same time. Max: Well, yeah, I guess when things heat up again, we'll see whether all those new hires in the BPO sector from the last six months, are meant to stay in those industries.I guess it really depends whether they like working from home. If they like putting on a headset and getting in front of a camera, and working on Slack, maybe it'll work out and maybe they won't to go back into the field. Like, I do not have a crystal ball for that, but, I think that some companies are making a shift towards hire anywhere and opening the talent pool so much that they're going to be able to build a very unique group of people which have defining traits, which if you remove the geographical constraints and you say, now I can have such a broader group to choose from. Then you can create new constraints.You can say, I only want people that think that way, or that have this hobby or that are very meticulous or, you know, you can be very specific and that could create, you know, some very bizarre groups of people and  that could give the economy some lift perhaps.Paul: So Max, this is an interesting thing. I absolutely loved the whole train of thought. So I have  a couple of data points on this. I had a company at one point in which I did a lot. The company had lots and lots of training, and we started to do a model, which we were trained from anywhere this go to meeting in a WebEx type zoom.It was technology, but we were sharing screens. Let's configure it this way. Now this is how you do this. This is how you do that. And one of my employees came to me and said, do you mind if I do some work? So his passion, interestingly enough, was kimonos. So he did he sold, these beautiful kimonos. He invested in them. And what he wanted to do was be able to go to these shows in Asia where all of the best would be there, he'd be able to sell his kimonos. They'd also be commercial. I said, Sam, Do you think I care where you go to a meeting or a virtual training takes place, go do what you want to do.And by the way, then being skewed 13 hours is in your best interest. Now go spend a day there and carve out the two hours you need for that particular training. Just make sure that it doesn't affect your ability to do that particular piece of work, but I just so loved this and that whole concept of displacement.If we can, and  it's happening more and more in some of our customers. Assurion one of the groups that I heard speak recently, they're doing gig work now, Max, meaning you can opt in to when you're available, you know, you've got to schedule, but sometimes it's via social media, they'll say we've got surge paying.You've got a surge wage based on how much people, how much traffic we're going to have, you know, based on, on questions, we need to answer about the Assurion products. That to me, being able to opt in, to be able to do what you're passionate about and have that feed your work day is something that I think is really important.And I think that's where you get energy, you get energy by, you know, middle of the day being able to take, you know, take a swim in a pool. I get energy. I did something recently where I went out and I hit golf balls. First time since March, I used to play golf all the time. I'd say 10 years ago.I went out and, Max, doing something physical, like that, changed, I swear it changed my brain chemistry. So I think this whole concept of displacement is one of those things that's also going to enable people to do and maintain their passions. And because of that, we may be in, you know what we're doing with call centers and delivering work to location. I literally think that's the future. I don't think  the future  like I thought the future was cell phones. As soon as you don't physically have to go pick up those yellow slips, you don't have to answer a physical phone. You don't have an extension that's tied to a location. God, the world changes and in such a great way.Max: Yeah, you were telling me how you got to enjoy more time with your family in recent weeks. Somebody was telling me recently, an article about this reverse migration, which is happening, where people are leaving the cities, and going back to where they came from, to their hometown because of this pandemic and supported through the technologies of remote work. We are seeing basically these shifts happening everywhere and people spending more time with our family. So, on a bizarre way, family values, family traditions  we'll see a resurgence as a response to this crisis.Paul: Well, I don't want to be overly optimistic. Look, I think everybody's been through a trauma. And so, one of the things that I'm doing as a CEO, I'm sure you're doing it is giving people some room. Right? I want people to make sure that they... look, I have an employee who has three kids at home, all under the age of 10, who she's starting zoom meetings with, in three different rooms for children.There's a kindergarten class going on. There's a second grade craft class. There's a third grade class, all her room, she and her husband are working at the same time. It is insane what we're piling on people at the same time.Max: And the bandwidth. Paul: That's exactly right. So that's the other thing right? We didn't talk about this, but it's interesting. I read an article last night about why this is different. And this particular article was why New York city would never be the same. Because just as you said, there's an exit, maybe a million people have left New York city. The rates, the rental rates, the buildings that are empty relative to where they were.But, we saw something like this in 2001, with 911, we saw something, you know, we've had these, national crises in the U.S. 2008. And the contention was why this is different than those other times is because bandwidth exists right now. Bandwidth exists like it's never existed before.So now you have private equity guys that don't physically have to be in New York City, because it doesn't matter that you're physically there to run into somebody because that person may in fact not be there. So when people were telling me, and in fact, during this period, they said, they'd be traveling. I said, well, that's good that you're traveling. Are people willing to meet with you? Which is the other side of the equation, right? It's one thing for you to be willing. It's a second part altogether once you land in a city, are people willing  to meet with you? That will change. There's no question, but, I think some of the positive of that and believe me, I'm sure if you're a real estate magnet in New York city, you're super concerned about this. But, I think the freedoms that it provides for individuals is particularly engaging. It's an interesting thought. Let's put it that way. Max: Oh, if you're, if you're a real estate magnet in the suburbs, well, you're doing well. Anyway, we're going to a more realistic conversation because that will alienate my audience 100%. Paul: But the other part to that, but I would say, listen,  the thing that I get excited about is the options it provides. The reality is I think so you can follow those kinds of things in any direction.The reality is we need human interaction. You and I like to do what we do. I want to meet you. I want to run into you, I want to see you compete at a technology showcase. Those kinds of things stimulate me. So I don't think there's any chance that we don't go back to some more normalcy and sooner than later, more 2021.But I think taking a moment and understanding the lack of distraction. Which really is the way I described it early in this was, there was no sports. There were no, you know, the activities themselves that would typically take me off center or off of focus were gone. And so now I had family to focus on.Now I had what's next for the business. Now I had what's best. So I think the lack of distraction helps us to focus. Max: Yes. I see. I think that you were talking before we started the interview about the fact that, you're going to look for a different type of worker the call center worker working from home needs to be self motivated, autonomous and so on.If someone is now at home unemployed and is able to find, well, by force needs to find employment of that sort and then by force needs to build certain life habits around that. And then actually it gets through it and realizes, oh, this works. I can put in 5- 10 hours of uninterrupted work in a day if need be.And now you've unlocked something in him or her that they can carry for the rest of their lives, potentially that sense of autonomy and that ability to manage your day. That becomes something you can keep Paul: It's a freedom and it's magnificent. So rather than your work being dependent on your relationship with your employer or your boss in front of you, you're focused on becoming valuable, is your ticket to the next role that you have or greater responsibility or in frankly being as engaged in your passions and things outside of work could in fact, energize that in a way that we might not be able to today. I promise you, nobody's complaining about the lack of traffic.Max: Well, one thing, one thing I do complain... I still hear some people ask me, Max, you've got so much experience working with remote teams, distributed teams. How do you check on them? And like you just totally missed it. You don't. You're rethinking about what your job is as manager. But that question still comes up so often.Paul: Here's how I keep in touch with them. I engage with them on how do we make what you're working on better? How can I help? And then they'll tell me. Max: Yeah,  there are certainly a few ways.I'm sure some, some of my employees will listen in and think that's too engaging. But, it's great to see how your business has evolved over the years. I hope that we can be part of this bright future. And have more of these partnerships as we've had with some of our customers where they integrate your assessment platform with our, conversational chatbots and engagements to take care of the whole workflow.So if anybody's listening you want to match our two technologies. They work very well together and thank you very much, Paul, for joining me today. Paul: Maxm I love it. And I appreciate  your engaging in conversation with this. I love Talkpush, I always have, and I love in particular the fact that you're doing what many other people would be required to do.So being able to get out in front. Engage those people to make sure that they stay in touch and then keep that information about them. Just, you know, in a way that really becomes a system of record for employment. So, we're thrilled to be working with you. Thank you very much for your time today. And, we're partners, so anything that we can do to help you we're available.Max: Thanks. Paul, we'll both continue burning resumes and replacing them with conversation. Paul: There's a whole discussion about bias and all of the other things that we really should talk about it some time. But, I think the answer is engagement and we're both doing everything we can to enlighten people about who they're talking to and why they'd be a good fit.Okay. We've got the topic for our next interview, it will be about bias. Maybe we'll wait a few months for that one. Paul: And so we'll give people some time.Max: And the topic may be a little bit less dangerous in a few months time. Paul: Yeah. I think there'll be more light at that point.Max:  Great. Thanks Paul. TPaul: Thank you, max. That was Paul Noone from HireIQ, a company, which has figured out how to measure the empathy, warmth, and care of a voice and allows employers in the call center industry to evaluate those voices in a scalable way. If you liked the interview and you'd like to hear more about some of the movers and shakers from the high volume recruitment industry, please subscribe to our podcast and share with your friends.

Finance Alternatives with Paul Boyd-Skinner Josh: Everyone out there in podcast land, we've got a great guest for you today. We've got Paul here from NoBNK, and he is a bit of a wizard when it comes to looking at a different way that you can do finance. This is especially critical in today's financial climate. So Paul, tell me a bit about what it is that you do with NoBNK. Learn more about finance alternatives at dorksdelivered.com.au Paul: So NoBNK is predominantly a non-bank business and commercial finance solutionist. I've been involved in nonbank lending for around about 16 years. So I've done all sorts of finance. I've done everything from home loans to commercial development, construction equipment, finance, factoring, all that sort of thing. And I'm proud to say that I've never ever put anybody in a loan with the bank.  Josh: High five! Paul: Look, you know, my adversity towards banks. Back in the 80s, back in the day when I got my first home, which was in late 1988, 89. You know we will be excited about getting our first home and interest rates at that time were around about 12% when we went and got our loan. The way it sort of worked back then was you go to the bank. And you're begged for a loan and they'd say, ‘Yes, yes, we'll give you a loan.’ And it was usually, you know, like about 70% or something that they give you, but they will do on a bit of a special, at the time for first home buyers where they give you 100% at interest only. We were living in a caravan when we first got married, so that was a pretty good option to get our own homes.  Josh: Absolutely! And upgrading it’s pretty low friction option, I guess. Paul: The only thing was the in-laws had to go as guarantors. So I now know that today is like a parental guarantor. Really wasn't heard of back then. So it was a little bit of a product for first home buyers. So we did that. We jumped in and we got the house and everything was going along nicely. And then we had to have the recession that we had to have. And our interest rates went from 12% to a 7%, 8.5% in the space of about six months. And just to give you an idea, the loan was $105,000. My repayment was $1,560 a month. Yep. And I was on $33,000 a year. So when you take tax out, 80% of my income was going towards paying my mortgage.  Josh: Yeah. Far out.  Paul: And it wasn't knocking 1 cent off it. Josh: Yeah. Just sitting there as interest only. And that is a scary spot to be in, because you're not sure if it's going to go up or down or left or right, or what it's going to do. Somersaults.  Paul: That happened with a lot of first home buyers over the years. Eventually, you know, it just got too heavy. I had to do up to 30 hours a week overtime to make ends meet, I was a fitter-machiner at the time,and you know, we ended up losing it. It's just the way it was. There were a lot of people losing their properties.  Josh: You weren't the anomaly. I don't think so. Paul: I sort of didn't understand what happened to me. I didn't like the banks at all when I worked it out. I've done a lot of study on the banks since then, or the banking system, and, you know, my thoughts on the global financial system is, I believe it's a world's biggest Ponzi scam. I've been open and honest about this for quite a long time, about how I feel about the banking system and I'm a bit like the disruptor.. I'm all about wanting to make the change so that it's a benefit for us, not so much just for them.  Josh: Yeah, well, I guess like I've done a bit of research into things such as the fractional reserve system and how that works. Paul: Does it work?  Josh: Well, how it works doesn't mean it works. No, you're exactly right. It's not a very good system, which is based on, now, nothing really. It's just based on numbers in a computer. It's not weighted against any real thing of intrinsic value. Paul: Well, have a think about that. So what a lot of people don't understand is that when you deposit money into a bank, you're actually lending them that money. It's a loan. You become an unsecured creditor, yet there is no security for that loan to that bank.  Josh: Yep.  Paul: It's a promise that they give you. We'll promise that we'll give you your money back.  Josh: After changing you bank fees or having it in there. Paul: Well, what a great deal for them, isn't it? They say, ‘Joshua, can you lend me your $100,000?’ Josh: Yeah, no problem at all.  Paul: Now would you want to say, ‘Oh, I need a contract with that?’  Josh: Well, normally you would. Yeah. You hope so. Paul: No. So what's going to happen, Joshua, on the bank is you're going to lend me $100,000. You're the bank, though. Not as a contract, but I do promise that I'll give you your money back and I'll dictate the terms. Right? So you might want 10% interest, but I'm happy to give you 1 ½. And you'll say, ‘Yep, I'm happy to do that.’  That's really what you've done when you put money in the bank, and just remember that one critical part. You're an unsecured creditor. Meaning that secure creditors, in the event of the bank collapse or whatever, secured credit is paid first and then unsecured credits. Josh: Yup. So in the situation where shit hits the fan hypothetically, we can all feel the recession, we can all hear it being spoken about, we can also feel some pressures around the place. If shit hits the fan and everyone starts frantically pulling money out of the bank, they've already planned for that, and that's what's been going through at the moment. Am I right?  Paul: Yeah, correct.  Josh: Tell me a bit about that for our listeners. Paul: Well, long story short is that there's three generations of savers, so you've got you've got your builders, you've got your boomers, and then you've got generation X, which is me. We've all been bought up as a generation of ‘get yourself a good job, save for retirement.’ It was all about saving money. Okay. The other thing too is that we had our children quite young, so you know, I've been married 31 years and I've got married to my wife she was 19, and I was 23. And, we had our children when she was 21. So we had our kids young, and if you think about my father, he was one of 17 children, so they had big families. So they were called boomers, you know. Josh: Huge families, but small houses.  Paul: Can you imagine having 17 children? And the house, there were three bedrooms, one bathroom, right?  Josh: One bathroom, 17 people. 17 children! 19 people. Paul: It's 28 years from youngest to oldest. You know what I mean? Like it's just a constant flow of, you know, at least seven, eight, nine people in a 3-bedroom house.  Josh: Should have bought a TV, so that there's something else to do.  Paul: Didn’t have TV back in the day, so what they did was they went out into the world and started the businesses and all that sort of thing and created quite a lot of wealth. And they stored that wealth in the bank because that's what they were told to do, you know? And they'll get great returns. So when I had those interest rates of 18% of my home, you would get 16% return on money that you had sitting in the bank and you know that's a fantastic return. But look what's happened over the years. You know, that was 30 years ago. Now we're down to zero negative rates in other countries. Japan has been at negative rates for 20 years.  Josh: How much money have they reprinted over there? Paul: Does anyone know why? Does anyone really know why? Or is it just like it's a bad economy and all this sort of stuff? So what makes the bad economy? When people stopped spending! If you're not buying things at the shop, then retail starts to drop off. I want to spend the money. So they're trying to force you to get your money out to spend. Banks don't make money out of people saving and make money out of people borrowing. So they don't want you having money sitting in the bank anymore. Their fractional reserve system, that doesn't matter anymore because they're reprinting money off loans. They make more money out of loans than they do early use saving. So the idea is to try to get that money out of the system and into risky investments or to just get you out there spending.  But when you have the majority of the world's population over 45 years old, that's when our spending curve drops right off. We're not out there buying. We're not down to supermarkets every week, three times a week, or whatever at the big shops. I'd be lucky to go to near Robina. I'd be lucky to go there once a month.  Josh: Yup. For those listeners that didn't hear you. You were saying the GFC is a light rain comparative to what could be happening. And I always say if it's been 30 years since a major recession and it doesn't hit right now, all that means is we're going to be getting a slightly bigger downfall before we're getting absolutely torrential rain in 7 or 11 years time from now. Would that be fair to say?  Paul: It could be any time. When you think about in Australia, we've had 28, 29 years without a recession. What has stopped that recession from happening? So back in the 90s when it happened, like 1990, 91, we had the recession we had to have, but they didn't do anything to try to stop it. You know, and as I said, the interest rates are at 18% so what they've done to stave it off every year, you know, because the next government that comes in needs to be leaving it in a good place. They don't want to be the government that caused the recession. Right.  Josh: The inevitable recession. Paul: The inevitable recession. And when you look at what the US in particular, they've had about seven or eight in that amount of time. Australia have had none. So every time that you look at the interest rate table and you look at different things that's happened, like the 9/11, the GFC, they've dropped rates 3% to 6% in order to stave off that recession. Probably the other recession that we had to have. And now we're getting down to zero. We will be at zero. We're 100% going to zero. Where do they go? Where do they go if we had some major problem, like a GFC or whatever again or a reset? How do they fix that? Josh: I don't know. How do they reset that? They can’t.  Paul: They can't! There was a paper written 18 months ago by the IMF, and in that paper, they said that they are working on models to make -4% to -5% feasible. Josh: All right. Paul: So try to get your head around that.  Josh: I get paid to have a house. Is that right?  Paul: That's already happening overseas.  Josh: I have read up about that. So that would mean that the more debt you've got. Go and buy a house now, ladies and gentlemen.  Paul: Why would they want to do that? Why would they want to get down to -4% to -5%? Josh: Well, I always say if they're getting down to those numbers, it's going to mean that people are going to be more wanting to get loans and get things like that.  Paul: I think it's about getting rid of cash because if they could get rid of cash and move it into a digital world, get rid of the physical cash, then they've got complete control. Josh: Well, see, the problem that I, and this is something that's come about over the last 10, 12 years. When cryptocurrency started coming around, if you're comparing apples with apples, and I'm not going to say that they're both exactly the same, obviously. But when you have a digital currency being compared to a digital currency, which is, if they're getting rid of all paper and all money becomes more frictionless to be able to move from the AUD to a Bitcoin or any of the other cryptocurrencies that are out there without it being is in the power of the banks or anyone else. How do you think they are going to overcome?  Paul: Well, I believe cryptocurrency is a red herring. I believe that it's just been set up for you to play with while they build their real money system. And there's a little bit of a showing of that last week. So in this IMF paper, what they actually said is that they would introduce e-money. They call it e-money. And basically what that means is that that item there is $100. They say, ‘Joshua, you know, that's $100 if you pay cash or $95 if you use e-money.’ And you go, ‘Well, I'll use e-money.’ So that's how they destroy cash. So they make it worth less than what it is. That's how they get rid of it.  There's a bank in Sweden, and the currency in Sweden is krona. The central bank in Sweden has announced the e-krona and they're in the second phase of testing e-krona. Josh: The timing of it's great.  Paul: And of course, it runs on blockchain because blockchain is a great technology. But yeah, it's a decentralized system? I don't believe so. I think it'll be a very centralised system, but it'll definitely be electronic or digital.  Josh: Yeah. Okay. So I guess the recession at this stage, you're saying, is inevitable. It's going to happen. Got a beautiful way to at least have people that are struggling a little bit in their business, whether that be because they need to have more finances bought into it. Or maybe you've got people on the other side of the coin that have liquid assets or liquid cash where they want to be able to use that and invest into something that's going to be giving them a bit of a better return without having to put it into the big nasty banks. How do you go about? How does NoBNK work?  Paul: So the way that NoBNK came around is that many years ago, I looked at many of the managed funds and different places like that where they would collapse. There were quite a few here on the Gold Coast where a lot of those managed funds collapsed and the person who lost that was the investor every single time.  And it's only because the managed funds, number one, they think like a bank. And number two, they take their fees and everything out first. I'm not saying that all managed funds are like this. I'm just saying that when you get that real control freak at the helm, that's when there's a problem. So I designed a system where there is no control freak. So it's all about putting the control, the choices, the security back in the hands of the investor. And the number one thing is the trust. You know, because I think that we put a lot of trust in these organisations, in the corporate side, the banks and a lot of these managed funds. That's what we were told. You know, this is what you do. And I think they’ve broken our trust. I think they've broken our trust big time. You know?  The way that NoBNK is set up is that we make our number one product service. You know, everybody wants service. Well, the banking model can't give you service. It's impossible because of the way that their pecking order is designed. So their pecking order is profits first, shareholders second, then clients, then employees, that's the pecking order. They can't give you service. They don't make money out of service.  We're not about that. We're about, if we create that service for you, where you're having a great experience and you feel that you've got the trust and you will have to trust because what I say to people is, who's the one person that you trust more than anybody else in the world? To make the right finance decision for you. It's yourself, right? You trust yourself more than anybody else. So why are we giving that away? Why are we giving that trust away to the banks? So what we've done with this platform is that we're going to make you the bank.  Josh: Okay.  Paul: If I want to borrow money from you, why do I have to go to a bank to do that? You put your money in the bank and then I go and borrow the money from the bank. That's your money that's in the bank. That's not theirs. So why not just borrow directly from you? So the platform is set up where we facilitate accurate information between somebody who wants to borrow money and someone who wants to lend it. So the terms are all worked out, and if the borrower is happy to go, and the lender is happy to go, we just put those two together. That's all we do. And they've paid monthly returns in events on their investment. I don't know how many other investments you get paid monthly in advance, and it's direct in the security goes into the investor's name. Josh: Okay. So let's say I'm new to the idea and I'm going, ‘Okay. Yeah. Stuff the banks. They've stuffed me over too many times.’ Without saying the bank that I'm with, I can see the interest rates that I could be getting just changing to another bank, I could be saving $11,000 a year in mortgage repayments, and I had to look and I thought, ‘Ah, it's too hard.’ How hard is it? Or how would I go about moving a lot like a house?  Paul: The area that we're not going after at the moment is the consumer market. It's very regulated. There are a lot of rules around that market. We'll get to that. We'll get to that market. But the area that we want to look after, first of all, is the business and commercial arena. I think that if you look after the business side of things first and the business owner, they're gonna have to worry about their day-to-day things rather than worrying about when the next dollars, you know, how they're gonna pay their bills, if the bank's going to foreclose on them and the house is tied to that loan and all that sort of stuff.  So we look at things a lot more commercially and it won't always need to be property initially. There’s a lot of lending that happens out there that a lot of people don't know about, where you might have some text it or you need to, you want to jump on an opportunity pretty quickly and all this sort of stuff. So they use private, short-term lending and that short-term lending could be a loan that's anything from 3 months to 3 years. It’s not a 30-year loan and all that sort of stuff, and it's just about jumping onto an opportunity or it could be getting out of trouble. You know, ‘We're in a bit of trouble over here. We need to pay back the bank and get some cash flow into our business as well so that we can stay afloat.’ So really, we're more targeting that area there at first, which is perfect. Yeah. Well, I think it's an area that's very under-serviced.  And the other area that we're targeting, and this, as I said before, is those people all around the world, those high net worth investors all around the world that's got money sitting in the bank and it's getting them no return or very low returns. We want you to be able to negotiate the term between what sort of return you want. So really you get to choose the return you want. And the client gets to choose whether to accept it or not.  The way this platform is designed is that as an investor, we don't touch your money. So we never touch your money. We're not a managed fund. It's not a pooled investment. It's not a, you know, sort of property trust. It's not a contributory fund, none of that sort of stuff.  It's just one loan, one investor, one loan, one investor, one loan, one investor. So someone wants to borrow $1 million, the investor's gonna put up the whole $1 million, and we're just going to put those two directly. Josh: So it sounds like obviously it's a lot of advantages for both parties in regards to the returns that they're going to be getting, as well as the rates that they're going to be paying because you're cutting out the bank in the middle. What would be some of the, I guess, risks? Or does it take the same amount of time to process through if you wanted to get an equipment finance loan for $50,000 for a new digital printer or something like that. Paul: The process is quick, it all happens within 24 to 48 hours. You'll know how many people So as a borrower, you'll know how many people are interested in doing your loan and you'll get offered the lowest interest rate that they offer.  Josh: Is this a global thing or is this just Australia?  Paul: This will be a global thing. Initially, it's Australia, but we do want to take it globally because the problems that started in the world, the reason why I've talked a lot about Japan is because the reason why they've already experienced all this, what we're going through, is they’re the oldest population in the world, you know? So it all adds up to me. Their ages crossed over and over that 45-year mark, they're average age crossed over 15 or 20 years ago. So it comes in a lot sooner than what it has to us.  Josh: And their workforce is diminishing because of that. Paul: That's exactly right. And the wages aren't going up. All the problems that we're starting to have here in Australia, you know, property prices are going through the roof, but wages aren't going up. So the next step is how does somebody that's on 60 grand a year buy a million dollar property in Sydney? Well, I'll have to have a 70-year mortgage just like they have in Japan. You can see it. You're watching the pattern globally. It's happening all through Europe. You know, there are 30 countries in the Eurozone now that are on zero and negative rates and the lowest is -0.75.  Josh: All right. That's nuts. It's nuts when you think about it, and as you were saying, like it was only 30 years ago, we had the last recession, and so for Japan to be at the position...  Paul: 20% 30 years ago. Now the -0.5.  Josh: And that all comes down to the workforce and the economy, and that's where we're, as you said, we're heading towards the potential issue here.  If someone wants to jump in and jump onto NoBNK or hear any more information, how do they go about sort of doing that? Paul: The good thing about us is we can look after you no matter where you are in Australia and then as I said, that eventually, New Zealand will be pretty quick, but then we'll be going into places like the UK and America and things like that as well. This is something that can go global and that's the whole idea is that we're about like, you know, if you're going to disrupt your models and make it worthwhile.  Josh: Absolutely. If you’re going to kick the big in the head you may as well do it globally.  Paul: They had their place and as I said, we're not going to manage, we're not going to take your money and just go and do a hope and pray thing like many do. Your money stays in the bank under your control, so nothing changes, right? The only thing that changes is you get the opportunity to be able to have a crack at one of these deals and become the bank.  And your worst case scenario is you're sitting there with a security in your name and you're getting a return. Whereas what's your security in the bank? There isn't any, but if you don't win the deal, because it's going to be like an auction type system where you make a bid on what sort of return you want, then nothing's changed in your life. You still get your money sitting in the bank, you know? No one's touching it. No one's taking any fees off you or any of that sort of thing.  We're all about mitigating risks. We've got to mitigate the risk for the borrower, the lender, and for ourselves. So it's about everybody having this happy equilibrium, you know? That's how we're going to structure this thing.  We've got a whole website there. It’s NoBNK.com.au. And the reason why we got B N K is because ASIC won't let us use the word ‘bank’. It's a swear word. So we call ourselves NoBNK and we advertise as NoBNK does that, which has a double meaning. NoBNK does that. Josh: Perfect. As an investor and a borrower, what's the starting and ending amounts you can go for.  Paul: Because we're starting with the property component of it first of all, the minimum line would probably be around the $50,000 mark. This is why we're up to sophisticated investors. So this is some for your institutional versus, or you know, like your mum and dad's and things like that. You must be a high net worth. You know, I know people out there, they have tens of millions just sitting in the bank.  Josh: Yep.  Paul: Globally. So you might have somebody, you might have a deal here in Australia. There might be somebody in Japan that makes a bid on the deal and all of a sudden they're getting a return of 4%, 5%, 6%, 7%, whatever it is, whatever that agreed return is, where they're getting nothing over there, but they've actually got to pay to put their money in the bank over there. So it's a really good outcome because, you know, we just let the market set itself dynamically. There is no ‘ring Paul up and say, “Mate, what interest rate can I get?”’ There's none of that anymore. It's just like, well, it's whatever anyone's prepared to bid and whatever you're prepared to pay. Josh: Yep. So it's win-win. Paul: And look, there's rules for the investors. I've got a pretty good record. We're doing this sort of thing.  Josh: You've been doing it for more than 10 years?  Paul: Yeah, about 10, about 12 years now. I've been doing these sorts of loans for some high net worth. And in that amount of time, we've had no foreclosures and the investors haven’t lost money in the capital. And it's just about managing it.  Josh: That's a good run.  Paul: Yeah. It's just about managing. You don't smash people when they're down. You help them. You don't have to be all hard about it. You know, you're a day late or two days late with your payment. It's about managing it. Nobody gets hurt. You know what I mean?  Josh: So how do you guys come into it? Do they just clip the ticket on the way through?  Paul: You have a gross line amount. You have a net loan amount. You got to add that first month's interest. There's lawyers involved, there's all sorts of things, which for the investors, it's great for them. It's their lawyer. So it's a lawyer of their choice. And you know, usually there's brokers involved in all the research, so there's nothing under the table. So there's no hidden fees and charges and all that sort of stuff. In our letter of offer, it's like, say for example, you want half a million dollars and it might cost $520,000 you know, like when you add everything up. So you say, okay, so your gross loan amount is 520, that's what it is. You'll see all the costs that are involved, all the rest of it, and you get the choice to say, ‘Yeah. I'm happy with that.’ ‘Well, no, thank you.’  Josh: Fair enough. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. I think there's going to be a big help for a lot of people that are feeling a bit of pressure, whether that'd be as an investor or they're looking potentially down the barrel of a gun for a business. They might not be going as well as it was. Is there anything else you'd like to add? Paul: There's lots of businesses out there that need lots of help in different ways. It's not just about, you know, finance and properties and all that sort of stuff. It's just about knowing that there are people out there that, you know, we'll have a chat about it first. I mean, whether you've been rejected by a bank, don't want to go to their bank or can't go to a bank, that's why we're here. So pretty well covers everybody. When you do those things, we tell them, you don't go to the bank, come to NoBNK.  Josh: I guess back in the day, there was like no-doc loans and things like this. This is from a business owner's perspective. Paul: It's a very, very simple process. So you know, the information that we asked from you is not onerous. It's really quite simple. It's a very quick application process. This platform that we've built that we'll be releasing in the next couple of weeks, it'll be automated. It's just a quick, you know, fill in the application process type of thing and you'll get SMS and emails and all that sort of stuff, and then so will the investors and they'll be able to start bidding on your deals straight away.  Josh: Sweet.  Paul: It's a little bit of a game changer, come to the market.  Josh: Absolutely. Yeah.  Paul: That's what it's about, isn't it? It's about changing things up and seeing if we can do it better and make a change, you know, a different change for the better for once rather than just doing the same as everybody else.  Josh: Really enjoyed talking to you and is there anything else you'd like to add before we jump off? Paul: No, mate, I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I'd like to wish everybody out there that, you know, there is hope. It costs you nothing to apply with us or to have a chat with us or anything like that. So, you know, your people wanting to, you know, they're welcome to have a chat anytime they like. Josh: Cool. Only advantages and as I said, a very welcome time for me to be talking to you about this sort of stuff for a lot of people out there.  Paul: Appreciate it, mate. Thank you very much.  Josh: If you have any questions and bits and pieces, we'll put a link down to NoBNK as well as Paul's details. If you've enjoyed this episode, jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love and stay good. 

Before today, you might have not realized the importance of storytelling. How can storytelling relate to building wealth and leadership skills? Today, WTR discusses the importance of storytelling with Paul Smith, an author and speaker who has an expertise in storytelling. This podcast will uncover the steps that are necessary to help engage your audience while you are communicating your story, along with the most important stories that any leader needs to be able to tell. Ingenious tactics to accumulate wealth, for people who see things differently. Paul SmithWebsite: http://www.leadwithastory.com (http://www.leadwithastory.com) Website 2: http://www.kennytedford.com (http://www.kennytedford.com/) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smithpa9/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/smithpa9/) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LeadWithAStory/ (https://www.facebook.com/LeadWithAStory/) Twitter: https://twitter.com/LeadWithAStory (https://twitter.com/LeadWithAStory) YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/LeadwithaStory (https://www.youtube.com/user/LeadwithaStory) NOTES: [00:25] Kevin: Today, we're joined by guest Paul Smith, whose expertise is storytelling. Specifically, storytelling that has to do with you in your life and your profession and relationships. Stories are great ways to convey ideas and get messages across clearly to people in ways that people can relate to you and understand you [01:38] If you wouldn't mind, could you tell our listeners a little bit about where you came from and what inspired you to do what you do today? [01:57] Paul: I studied economics in undergrad, got an MBA, and spend a couple of years as a consultant. But along the way, I just got fascinated with this concept of storytelling and I just recognized that the leaders that I admired the most were really good at it[2:36] I set out to learn about it myself by interviewing a bunch of leaders (about 300) and this has allowed me to reverse engineer my way into what works and what doesn't with storytelling (this lead to books I've written) [02:57] I research and write about storytelling at home and at work and I spend my time teaching people how to do that [03:20] Kevin: Let's go into the storytelling part of this and why storytelling? What's really in it? What is it do for our listeners and why should they care about this? [03:30] Paul: There are a lot of reasons, but the most important to me are:[03:34] Human being don't make the rational, logical decisions that we'd like to think that we do[03:43] Human beings often times make subconscious, emotional decisions in one place in their brain, and they rationalize those decisions a few nanoseconds later in a more conscious, rational thinking part of the brain [04:18] Storytelling allows you to talk to both parts of the brain and you need both. So if you want to influence what people think, feel, and do (leadership), you need to speak to both parts of the brain [04:38] Stories are a lot more memorable and people tend to remember what you say more [05:13] Kevin: I remember some expert said that the brain thinks in pictures, and when you tell a story, a person gets a picture of what's happening in their mind and maybe that's one of the reasons why it sticks with people [05:39] Paul: When you're just telling people what to do or what to think or just bossing them around, there's no movie to watch in their mind's eye [05:52] Kevin: How do you use storytelling? (at home vs. at work?) [06:05] Paul: Storytelling is useful at home and at work. The main difference is simply what type of stories you're telling and what your objective is[06:30] At work, you're trying to get people to see and understand your vision or you're trying to lead change or you're trying to get people to collaborate more (accomplishing some leadership objective) [06:44] At home, you might be trying to parent your kids and teach them what kind of...

Learn more about being a better person through the positive impact of giving, difference of being the receiver from being a giver & the real definition of success from a person who experienced an extreme financial struggle while things were falling apart. And be inspired on how he and his family managed to still give, even on their toughest time. Show Highlights 00:02:04 - (Ari) You called your podcast How to Lose Money. And while we were setting up this interview, you mentioned that I should ask why. Yeah. So you definitely have a story about this. And I am incredibly curious. What is it? 00:02:04 - (Paul) One of my great goals in life is to be a great husband and father.. 00:05:25 - (Paul) I decided years later when we started a podcast, I said, hey, everybody's got all these successes and I love hearing about them, but I would love to hear about people's struggles, failures, problems, setbacks 00:06:01 - (Ari) The focal point of this podcast is, of course, success and greatness 00:06:54 - (Ari) What you felt like while you were watching your empire crumble from having one and a half million in the bank to being two and a half million in debt, a $4 million swing? 00:07:24 - (Paul) I actually started a nonprofit, but I didn't get the people involved 00:07:55 - (Paul) Investing is when your principal is generally secure and you have a chance to make a profit. Speculating is when your principal is not at all secure and you have a chance to make a profit. 00:08:47 - (Paul) One of my heroes in life is a guy named George Mueller. George Mueller was a hellion in Germany in the early eighteen hundreds. And he turned into a pastor. And he actually started orphanages 00:09:20 - (Ari) Wow. You're saying just by being him. People just get donations? 00:13:19 - (Ari) So I did a little math over here on the side and I'm seeing that giving around 10 percent based on making what you said a half a million dollars. 00:13:52 - (Paul) There's some formula that would that it always would work out. I think it just worked then 00:14:36 - (Ari) Can you remember when you were in the crux of it? Two and a half billion dollars in debt. Remember how you felt? 00:14:47 - (Paul) I think since all of it was backed by real estate and since I didn't have any idea how bad real estate was going to be out again, a thousand eight, nine, I actually wasn't that worried about it 00:15:49 - (Ari) Do you have a notable story about your time in financial struggle? 00:17:08 - (Paul) We were pretty tight. I mean, we were making enormous interest payments. 00:17:53 - (Ari) How did it feel to end up being the recipient when you needed it? 00:18:00 - (Paul) I wasn't ashamed, but it was weird getting a hundred dollar gift card 00:18:28 - (Ari) Are you still debt free? 00:20:47 - (Ari) How do you define success? 00:20:56 - (Paul) Inner quality, that inner satisfaction and joy from knowing you did something really, really excellent 00:22:15 - (Ari) You told me that you work very hard to fight human trafficking. You're generating funding and you rescued victims. So how does this work? And what's the backstory? 00:24:14 - (Paul) My goal is to give a significant portion of our company's profits toward fighting human trafficking and rescuing its victims 00:24:35 - (Ari) How did this end up on your radar? How'd you get involved? 00:26:44 - (Ari) Do you have any crazy stories about human trafficking that you like to share? 00:28:08 - (Ari) Felony is a much, much, much griever crime that has a much further impact on somebody's life overall as opposed to a misdemeanor Originally recorded 12/14/2018 Special Guest: Paul Moore.

In this episode, we discuss: The importance of a Wealth Coordination Account Understanding long-term planning for your long-term future Resources and tips related to understanding your knowledge gap   Rhonda: All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us for another episode. And I am so excited to be able to introduce to you my friend, Paul Adams. And he and I met via LinkedIn. All good things start there. And there was something about your profile that just captured my attention and I actually didn't even really know what you did when I said, "Hey, let's connect." And so, you are the Founder and CEO of an organization called Sound Financial Group. And you're also a fellow podcaster and entrepreneur. Paul: Indeed. Rhonda: And so, I just want to thank you for taking time to join us today. Paul: I got to tell you, I'm so happy to be here. Just our phone conversations we've had leading up to this, and you mentioned about creating a friendship. And I even was talking to my wife this morning and saying, "Yeah, I'm going to be on a friend's podcast this morning." And it was just like, "Oh, yeah, that's kind of nice." Versus somebody has a show somewhere that asked me to be on it. It just felt wonderful and warm and just getting a chance to reconnect this morning. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I have certainly been in the financial industry and you are with an organization that happens to be in their headquarters in Milwaukee. Paul: Yeah, at the very beginning of my career. Rhonda: Right. Right, at the very beginning of your career. So, I just want to take some time and share, what are some of the trends that you're seeing? Obviously, our focus is women. Paul: And I think that if, for any of us, it's where is my knowledge gap? And when I say knowledge, I mean the capacity to act, not just understand it. If we were thinking of it like parachuting, understanding would be like, "I know the plane goes up to 13,000 feet, somebody jumps, they count to 10, they pull this thing here, and then they steer themselves with two cables they hold in their right and left hand, and it pulled them both down near the ground and they land." That's understanding. Paul: Knowledge is hurling yourself into the abyss and landing and not dying. That is the difference. And I think people tend to collapse the understanding and knowledge. And especially when we're divorced, prior to that, it may have been, at least we see this often, I don't know about you, but we'll see oftentimes that the wife will handle a ton of the bills, and then the husband tends to handle a lot of the long-term strategy and investments. And they both have an understanding of the other one. Paul: Now, it's a lot easier for the divorced husband to get a handle on the bills because it's a fast iteration cycle. They got to deal with the bills every 30 days. So, I don't know, after doing it for four or five months, you're back on plane and you know what you're doing. But when there is this... And it really is one of the longest feedback loops we deal with in our entire life. It's a 40-year feedback loop from 22 to 65. You have one time that you get feedback, and filling a glass of water, we're all used to it. We've all gotten our hands wet as kids when we overfill the glass, that we're listening and feeling the weight of the glass, and we turn off the spigot at the right time. Paul: If you perform really badly at work, somebody's going to let you know in a few weeks. You eat too much, over 7 to 10 days, you'll actually start gaining weight, and the feedback is in the scale. Bad behavior in all those areas equals bad short-term outcome. Paul: Here's the problem. With money, the feedback loop is like a negative feedback loop in that you can make bad decisions with money. And know how they feel in the short run? Awesome. It feels so good. You can get the brightness on your kids' eyes because you got them a cool new toy. Or all the Instagram likes because of the killer vacation you went on. All those things feel wonderful. The new car smell. Nice, so wonderful. And those are all things that, in the long run, the one-time feedback loop is you spend the rest of your life in some version of poverty below what you would have chosen. Paul: And so, one of the things we have to do is get those shorter iterations occurring through these coaching conversations around money so that everyone, and I think divorced women are particularly susceptible to having somebody that looks trustworthy, somebody who's super friendly, who's a friend of a friend, who may just be selling product. And one of the things we encourage people to think about is, is the advisor's revenue model only you acquiring product from them? Paul: And if that is their primary revenue model and they're not charging you a fee upfront so that they can support their business and themselves without needing to sell you a product, then that should give you at least a moment of pause, to stop and reflect and say, "Is there a chance that products could be recommended to me because of the advisor's revenue model, not because of what's right for me?" And not that the advisors are unethical or making bad decisions, any of that. It's just that, clearly, they can't work with 100 clients and not have any of them acquire product. Paul: But we and some other advisors out there, will do something similar to that, where we charge a fee upfront. It retains us for that first year, which is that timeline of a divorce. It never occurred to me how those line up that way. And then we coach them throughout the year, and we may meet them as many as 15 times over the first year, but that primary coaching to get spooled up and get all the things corrected in their financial life, et cetera, not counting ushering them through the divorce is about 6 to 10 meetings over about 10 to 14 weeks. Rhonda: Yeah. And I think that's spot on. Prudential did a longitudinal study. And what they found was that it was the knowledge plus experience that really helps the women build the confidence. Because if you have the knowledge without the experience, that's theory. If you have the experience without the knowledge, then you're just going through things hoping that you're not making too many mistakes. Paul: I was going that was a terrible idea, I shouldn't do that again. Rhonda: But it's those two things when they can work in tandem that really helps women build the confidence. And when I think that is one thing that, as we look at some of these studies, women have a great opportunity to step into power as it relates to their financial lives. It's just that they may not have had the experience because, statistically speaking, and you alluded to this, women are doing the day to day stuff, but they aren't necessarily as involved in the big picture things. And so, when they're thrust into that environment, it's uncomfortable and overwhelming and intimidating and all of those kinds of things all at once. Right? Paul: And I think there's probably a lot of domains that are that way. The trouble about the long-term planning for your long-term future is that's the one thing out of all the things that are coming at women going through divorce, it's the one thing that they really can, in the short run, put their head in the sand and avoid all the negative consequences. They are coming, but they're not here yet. And so, they can deal with all the things that are urgent and forget the things that are necessary. Rhonda: Yeah. Well, and I think too, it's history. Like you said, the feedback loop is so long, and even from the time that they got married until potentially the time that they're getting divorced, there's all of those habits and behaviors that they're now dealing with. Plus, let's face it, everything's always goes back to our childhood. There's always some connection between, "Hey, this is my attitude and belief about money as a kid. Here was how it was modeled. I brought that into the marriage. Now somebody always has to take the lead, and now I'm thrust into having to take the lead myself." You know? Paul: Yes. Yeah. And, you're right, it's so tough for them to make that gear shift. And we recommend people do something that's super subtle, easy, anybody can start it. Anyone of your listeners can do this right after the call. And we talk about the importance of somebody really understanding their own freedom and agency and choice. And we need to take that back immediately in people's lives around their money. Rhonda: Yep. Paul: Financial institutions ideally would like you to take your regular household checking and start choosing a financial product that you can automatically deposit via bank draft to. And we teach our clients to set up a separate checking account whose only purpose is to purchase assets. That's it. It shouldn't be buying anything else. It only buys assets. And we define an asset. An asset is anything that puts money in your pocket now or has the ability to put money in your pocket later. Paul: And it doesn't matter if it's just $25 a month. To shorten that feedback loop, we're simply saying we're going to put in $25 here and that is for my long-term wealth building. And then I'm going to put in $25 next month here. Now, for some people in some amounts of wealth, it might be 1000, it might be 2000, we have clients it's $30,000 a month they're doing. The key, and for the women that we've helped journey through getting their financial knowledge up to where they are financially during the divorce, is simply having a wealth coordination account means that when those payments start coming in, they realize, "Well, my bills are only 10,000 but I just got a $20,000 support payment during the trial period." Great. Let's just put that 10,000 aside. Paul: If the divorce attorneys are not saying that you need to keep your monthly spending up for a period of time while we finish the divorce. And then when they're complete and the divorce element goes in, where do most people put that first check? It's like there is a million dollars of liquidation. I guess I just go put it in my checking account if they haven't been working with a coach. Rhonda: Right. Paul: And whenever money goes in the household checking account, whether it's for a couple or a single individual, some of it is bound to get lost in the sauce of life. And by just putting it in the wealth coordination account, now you're sitting there and you're like, "Well heck, I don't know what assets I'm going to buy." But if you're resolved it's going to buy assets. At least it's not buying liabilities. Little steps here. We're not talking about big complicated things. Let's just make sure we don't buy stuff that costs us more in the future. Rhonda: And I love that. And you have a podcast episode that you focus specifically on that concept. As I was listening to some of your podcasts, that was one that really resonated with me because it's simple and it's not requiring women to make a big decision right now. Paul: Yes, that's right. Yes. The cognitive load of somebody saying, "Let's budget for this financial tool, and this is the financial tool you should use," being collapsed. The cognitive load is so high in making that decision versus simply being able to say, "Oh, all I need to do is set the money aside. I'll figure out what it purchases later." You make a good point. I was going to see if I could quickly find the name of that episode. So give me just a second, because I'm sure your audience right now is thinking to themselves, "Don't say that's a great episode of Paul's, not tell us." Rhonda: That's right. Yes. Paul: So, my podcast is Your Business Your Wealth. That's episode 131, Wealth Coordination Account. Rhonda: Perfect. And that reminded me too, this was a woman that I had met with a couple of years ago, and I was actually still in the financial industry at that point. And I remember, she had lost her husband. It was actually she was a widow, not a divorcee. But the concept is still similar. And I was so frustrated because there were two companies, two advisors from two separate companies, that were literally swarming her like vultures. And there was the one guy who called her probably every single day, literally called her every day. And I was like, "Okay, timeout. I'm going to encourage you to do nothing." And anybody who knows our personalities, would we ever tell somebody to do nothing? Paul: Nope. Rhonda: But in this case it made sense, just hang tight. Okay? You do not have to make a decision today, and you don't even have to make a decision tomorrow. Give yourself some space and permission, space and permission to just be. Paul: We are raised as kids with that, don't just stand there, do something. But sometimes we need to be, don't just do something, stand there. And that one's a lot harder. It's always easy to make a move. It's real tough to just sit with it and go, "Okay, I'm going to think about it for a while. I'm going to plan." And I think that example of those two advisors, I'm going to go out on a crazy limb here and say probably neither of those advisers had gotten an upfront annual engagement, some kind of retainer, to then be able to coach her throughout the year. They were calling, they had pitched a product, and they were calling to say, "Are you ready to execute on the product yet? Are you ready to execute on the product yet? How are things going? Do you want to meet for lunch? Because at some point during lunch I'll just bring up the product again." Paul: That is how that normally goes. And I know because that's how I was trained originally. That's exactly the process I went through as an advisor. And it took a lot to escape the gravitational pull of all those practices to have a different way to be able to serve and engage clients. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. And so that's why I think, yeah, that wealth coordination account, it's simple, it's easy. Again, they can go to whatever bank or credit union they're currently using and say, "Hey, I just need to set up." And finding, to that point, finding a bank that gives you the opportunity to go into one dashboard, see what you have going on, and set up those really simple automatic contributions to their wealth accumulation account. Paul: And the one thing that we do say a little different, if people want to put some amount that's regular and automatic going into the wealth coordination account, we're a fan of that. We also say, by the way, this is going to sound a little bit heretical to people who are more steeped in finance. We say it ought to be a checking account, we don't care what the interest is, because when you buy an asset you've got to write a check, so you better have a checking account you're writing it from, otherwise it has a chance to flow through another account that could be a consumption account. Once it's in there, you want it to be sacrosanct, it's an asset purchasing tool. And then, ultimately, we'll have enough assets to have enough passive income to not reach retirement. Paul: We don't talk with our clients about retirement, in fact our first conversation with clients that we currently call our philosophy conversation. We're thinking about changing it to the unretirement talk, and why we should not be pursuing a retirement, because most people who have done something with their lives and added value to the marketplace don't plan on doing that for 40 years so they can just stop doing any of it. In fact, you wanted just maybe change the mode of doing it. You might want to do it for a charitable cause, you might want to just do it differently. But people want to continue to add value to their world and their overall community. So why would we say retire? Because that word means something's put up on the shelf and is no longer of use. I don't want to feel that way one day. And nor do most of our clients. And when they relate to it that way, no wonder they don't want to plan for it. Paul: So, we just talk about planning for what we call DFI or definite financial independence. When we can get passive income to exceed existing bills, then if you choose to work, you just keep working. We're just going to save 100% of your income. You don't have to be dependent on it anymore because you're living off your passive income. Total paradigm shift. And the financial institutions would rather you just build up a huge pool of money and be really insecure that it's not enough so that they can get all the asset management fees on it, all that. And they're not like black helicopter conspiracy about it, they're just being normal players in the free market. And we just need to equip our clients with knowledge and hopefully some of your listeners with this knowledge to say just set up a wealth coordination account, add money every month, and the last thing I was going to mention, do some of it every month that is you moving it intentionally. Because if you move it intentionally, then every month you have to pause and at least consider your long-term financial wellbeing. And if you do that once a month, you are now doing that, I forget what the stats are, but it's something like for many people, they're only really looking at their planning sometimes once every two years to once every five years. Paul: There's the old saying, "People spend more time planning a family vacation than their long-term financial wellbeing." Well now you're having to at least consider, or have it hit your radar once a month, which right there we find changes people's financial lives if they do nothing else, just saying, "This is going to go into my assets." And then when somebody comes up and says, "Hey, we got some financial products you should buy," you just look to your wealth coordination account, it's like, "Well this is how much I have to put in that thing." You don't have that second part of cognitive load of how do I afford it, and should I do it or not? Now you can actually think much more clearly because your money's already set aside to do assets or not. And now you're just turning to say, "Is this right for me?" Rhonda: Right. And I remember back, this was in the early 2000s, that was when the book Cashflow Quadrant came out, by Robert Kiyosaki. Super classic book that I recommend to everybody because I think it's an easy read. And I think it's something that really helps people get their mind around, okay, well there are two different types of income. There's going to be the active income, job, self-employed, and there's going to be passive income as a business that's generating passive income, and investments. Rhonda: And so, if the listeners have not checked that out, we'll include that in the show notes as well. But it's just a great book to reprogram our mind about passive income. Paul: Yes. I remember reading it, it's kind of funny, I was actually temporarily disabled when I first got exposed to Robert Kiyosaki's stuff. I'd fallen off a horse and shattered an internal organ, and a lot of internal bleeding. So, you're in a massive amount of pain while organs heal, and bleeding is absorbed. So, I guess graphic warning for this podcast, I don't know. But I was on a pretty significant amount of painkillers for about a month after this accident. And I remember reading Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Cashflow Quadrant during that window. And I would read, and I'd go, "I don't remember anything I just read the last five pages." And I have to read them again. And I think I read the books first time through, three times each. Paul: But instilled me this idea that there are things we buy that are assets and there are things that we buy that are liabilities. And by simply understanding the difference between the two, we end up, here's one, we teach our clients that their primary residence is not an asset, never is. Now, it can be if it goes up a lot in value and you decide to move. But we said something that puts money in your pocket now or in the future without changing your lifestyle. Paul: So, you can move from Seattle, say, to Gilbert, Arizona. If you have any listeners in Gilbert, Arizona, I mean no offense. But in Gilbert, Arizona you can buy the same size house for a lot less money than Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, but it's definitely a different lifestyle. So, your primary residence, if you think it's an asset, even if it's paid off, just stop paying your property taxes and the real owner of that asset will eventually knock on your door and politely demand you pay your taxes. That is an example of why we don't consider it an asset. Paul: Now, it probably is a good idea to have a paid off house at some point in the future, lowest possible cost of just providing shelter for yourself and your family. But I've watched women during a divorce hurt themselves financially significantly because they had this, they got a spouse, they've got this concern, that concern, and then what will sometimes happen is they really have a demand of, "I need to stay in this house." And it's like, between the two of you, you were making $800,000 a year, you're going to have some kind of settlement, but you're making 200 of the 800. You should not stay in a home that you afforded at $800,000 a year. You stay in the same neighborhood, we could do all kinds of stuff, but let's not trick ourselves into thinking it's an asset. That's something that, no offense to the realtors that are listeners, but the real estate overall complex has made us want to think it's our biggest investment, when in fact, for most people, their home is actually their biggest liability. Maybe one you should have. I'm not saying you shouldn't own a home ever, that would be crazy. But people just automatically slip into these habits that have been part of society. Paul: Have you heard the story of the little girl who asked her mom about the Christmas ham? Have I told you that before? Rhonda: No. Paul: I hope this is fun and interesting for your audience. Sometimes we have financial practices, things you grew up with. You talked earlier, Rhonda, about children and the way we picked up habits and how our parents talked about money, et cetera. Well, there's this little girl and her mom is baking the Christmas ham. And she's prepping it and putting all the rubs on it and all that, and then right before she puts it in the pan, she cuts off the ends, both ends of the ham. And then plops it in the pan and puts it in the oven. She says, "Mom, I understand why you did all the rest of the stuff. Why did you cut off the ends of the ham?" She says, "You know, I don't know. You should ask Grandma." Paul: So, Grandma comes over for dinner that night, and she says, "Grandma, why is it mom cuts off the ends of the ham right before she puts it? I understood everything else. Why does she cut off the ends of the ham?" She says, "You know, I don't remember why. I just know my mom always did it." So, a little bit later, Great-Grandma comes from the nursing home, comes over for dinner that night. And she goes, "Great-Grandma, I watched mom and she cut off the ends of the ham. Then I talked to Grandma and why she cuts off the end of the ham, and neither one of them remembered why they do it. Why did you do it?" She says, "Oh, honey, we were poor. I didn't have a pan big enough to hold a ham, so I had to cut off the ends to make it fit." Paul: And yet, how many people are still making financial relationship decisions or decisions about their own personal confidence about navigating the world by themselves because of an inherited mindset that is just as unimportant as cutting off the ends of that ham? And these mindsets go unexamined for people all the time. And that's what I love about what you do, frankly, is helping women engage and think through that mindset. That is something and the thing that attracted me to you is that idea of nobody else is teaching this that I could find. And I looked. Rhonda: Yeah, it's awesome. And just to wrap up the ham thing, I love the ends, don't cut off the ends. Paul: I'm the same way. I love the burnt ends of a brownie in a pan, the ends of a ham for sure. Rhonda: I mean, don't cut those off. Right? And yet, though, I think there's... Gosh, that story even goes deeper. Right? It's like, yeah, you know what? We do things because of perhaps the way that we have been taught to do them and we don't know why we do them. And, yeah, what are those things in our life where we are shortchanging ourselves or we're cutting off the best parts? Because we're not taking the time to really evaluate what it is that we bring to the table and why we do it. So, I love that analogy because I think it makes a really great point related to the financial aspect. Paul: Yeah. I think your point is good. That it almost wears on you a little more. What could have been in the ends, mindset-wise, for that entire family. Rhonda: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Paul: That does remind me of something that we put together for your audience, is we have a white paper that we give folks sometimes called The Three Money Mistakes No One Talks About and Six Things You Can Do About Them. And we actually have that set up on our website. Rhonda: Awesome. Paul: It'd be super easy for your audience to get to. You can get it at SFGWA, that's Sound Financial Group, WA, like Whiskey Alpha, dot com/rhonda. And right there, there's just going to be a page where you can drop in your email address and it will just shoot you this white paper. And, for anybody that just thinks they would also get benefit from it, you get a copy of my last book via PDF if they just check that box also, then we'll email them a copy of my last book, Sound Financial Advice. Rhonda: Awesome. Thank you so much. I'm part of an organization called eWomenNetwork and one of their principles, so their focus is helping one million women achieve one million dollars in annual reoccurring revenue. But one of their main principles is give first. And I have to be honest, when we first met, you embraced that principle. And I'm used to being the one who gives first. It was actually like, okay, I love that. Right? I don't think there are enough people who say, "I'm going to give first," not asking for anything in return. Paul: Yes. Rhonda: And I really appreciate that. Paul: Yeah, you're welcome. And maybe for folks in the audience, if any of you are thinking about making that shift in life about the give first piece, I'd never really thought about this before, Rhonda, but something you said there just hit me like a ton of bricks, is that for us to be able to give first we had to have created probably a lot of value for others beforehand because then we're just... For instance, great example is if I hadn't been writing books for years, I wouldn't have a book I could give away now. We sell it, people can find it on Amazon, it's called Sound Financial Advice. But we have another one releasing later this year. So, if I wasn't writing books or if I only wrote one book ever, we would never have the ability to do the giveaway. Paul: And so, we have to create value in the marketplace and in the world first before we can help people first. Because we've all had those people say, "I think I'd really like to help you here," but they have no skill set in that domain. And then you find yourself being offered help and then you're like, "Gosh, I got to look at this knucklehead and figure out what they're good at and what I could do with them. And now you've just created more costs for me in trying to help you." As opposed to somebody being able to listen well enough and say, "I think you might need help in one or two of these areas and I can specifically make a difference for you there." It's a totally different way to help people. And thank you for the acknowledgement around that. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been super fun. I always like to wrap up our time together with two things. One is favorite client success story, and then finally your favorite quote. Paul: Ooh, okay. Rhonda: I know, you only can pick one. Paul: I know. Is it okay if I use one for myself? Rhonda: Sure. Absolutely. Paul: I got to do one fun one and then I'll answer your question seriously. So, my fun one is actually a quote that our social media team put out, which is, "I really don't like complimenting myself, but I don't not like it so much that I won't do it in this space." And they put that out on Twitter and Instagram. I was like, "I believe I said it, but gosh, it looked weird in print." Paul: So favorite client success story is actually a woman that was introduced to me who was getting divorced, married to someone who is a very domineering relationship, from what I could take away. And I don't envy anybody on either side of a divorce at all. It's just hard. No way about it. This is somebody you thought you were going to spend the rest of your life with and now you're not going to. And all the hurt and shame or doubting yourself, "Did I make a terrible decision?" All this stuff that comes in. It's just terrible. Paul: And I watched her over the course of a year, as we engaged, go through one conversation after the next and coaching her, letting her know she's doing great. She's handling herself well. She let the husband say all the crazy things he wanted to say, which included things to the children that were not. And what people may not know who are listeners, is we work with clients all over the country. So, this woman is on the other side of the country from me. We're connecting via Zoom meeting, and we're just walking her through step by step this entire process. Paul: Okay, when's the next trigger date where something's going to happen? Great. Do you want to talk to me right before that or right after that? Emails coming through, et cetera. And I had a chance to see her the other day. She has now chosen to set up her own business. She was an employee before. Stepping into the world of entrepreneurship. Next introduction is actually to get engaged with the Women's Center for Financial Wellness, just to get some of that additional coaching and confidence around her business. And she has done such an amazing job to actually fully understand what she's doing, where the money is, from being so timid and scared, to now being confident and growing more confident every time I speak to her. And now the things she complains about are the busyness of life with family visiting in town. And no longer the, "Am I going to be okay or what's going to happen?" And that's my favorite story right now. Paul: And then my favorite quote actually is a quote from John Maxwell, if you're familiar with him, kind of general leadership guru. And my favorite quote from him is, "If you're curious what your future is going to look like, look at your habits and practices today. If you're going to change your future, change your habits." Rhonda: I love that. I love that, because that's exactly it. Right? Their future's going to look different and so, yeah, how can we be positioning our thoughts and attitudes and beliefs right now that are going to impact the future? And of course, anything by John Maxwell is always awesome. Paul: Yeah, that guy. And I know it to be right. I've had a chance to see him speak several times in person, and, gosh, he just such a great way about him. One of my favorite things about the way he speaks is he just looks like he's sort of making it up at the time. But when you've seen him multiple times, you realize he has laid everything out from dropping the note cards, to all of it. He has taken it on as a real performance he's doing. Not for his own sake to look good, but rather everything is crafted around impacting the people he gets a chance to interface with. I also think it's a lot of what you do, Rhonda, in that in our time together you've always taken super seriously, and you know it's kind of like life or death with the women that you work with that you have a chance to help them set themselves in a new direction and make a difference for them forever based upon just being coached by you and your organization for a year, and their whole lives could be different. Rhonda: Yeah, for sure. Paul: That doesn't exist out there the same way for these women that you deliver. And I love it. So, I'm so glad I could be here with you today. Rhonda: Yeah, thank you so much. Hey, this has been awesome. Certainly, if folks want to connect with you, they can reach out, grab that white paper. We'll include all your contact info in the show notes. But I just want to thank you for taking time out of your also busy, crazy schedule to chat with us today. Paul: You're so welcome, and it's a pleasure to be here.   QUOTE: "I really don't like complimenting myself, but I don't not like it so much that I won't do it in this space." – Paul Adams "If you're curious what your future is going to look like, look at your habits and practices today. If you're going to change your future, change your habits." – John Maxwell   RESOURCES: The Three Money Mistakes No One Talks About and Six Things You Can Do About Them Cashflow Quadrant by Robert T. Kiyosaki Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki Sound Financial Advice by Paul Adams Podcast: Your Business Your Wealth Episode 131: Wealth Coordination Account: Big Wealth, Small Business with Paul Adams and Cory Sheperd   CONTACT INFORMATION: Paul Adams CEO & Founder Sound Financial Group info@sfgwa.com  (855) 578-8724 LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram   Visit the Women’s Financial Wellness Center for a full directory listing of experts. Be sure to reach out if you would like to connect personally with the Women’s Financial Wellness Center. You can visit our website or grab a complimentary 30-minute consult. Leaving a positive podcast review is hugely important: they help the podcast get discovered by new people. Please spend 5 minutes of your time to leave a review on your preferred listening platform, we’d love to hear from you!

James: Hey audience, welcome to Achieve Wealth Podcast, where we focus on value add, real estate investing across all commercial real estate. Today we have Paul More from Valence Capital. Paul also has a podcast called How to Lose Money and also a frequent contributor to BiggerPockets. He produces live video blog content on a weekly basis, he's also the author of The Perfect Investment book, 'Perfect Investment creates entering wealth from historic shift to multi-family housing'. And has a forthcoming book on self-storage investing. Hey, Paul, welcome to the show.  Paul: Hey, it's great to be here, James. Thanks for having me on.   James: Well, really really happy to have you here. So you have been an inspiration to me because I've read a lot of your articles on Bigger Pockets. So I want to go into some of the articles in BiggerPockets which is like, for example, recently you wrote about real estate tsunami, right? And the other article such as, 'Why do some people will continue to overpay for multifamily?' Can you explain what's your thought process behind these articles?   Paul: Yeah, you know a lot of what I'm trying to do is warn people that there is a market cycle, you know, and a lot of people who are successfully investing the last decade since the crash, don't realize that it's going to come down, it's going to change. It may not drop drastically like the last bubble that burst in 2008. But here's the thing, I just read a book called Mastering the Market Cycles by Howard Marks and I think you and I might have talked about that book before and you know, there's always people saying it's different this time.   And the truth is I want to tell people, especially newer people on BiggerPockets, no, it's not different this time. There are things that change every cycle and yes, we may be hovering around a different mean of the cap rate, you know might not return to an average of eight and a half like it did historically, maybe it'll return to an average of seven or six and a half, I don't know but I do know that it's not different. It's always--there's a book out there that I think it's called 'It's Different This Time: eight centuries of financial Folly.' And it explains going all the way back to I believe the 1200s, how everybody always thinks it's different this time, but it's not. And we need to be very, very careful to not overpay for multifamily or any asset class.   James: Got it. So don't you think with the tenants, the renter's base of millennial who just moved more into becoming renters, don't you think we're going to have a continuation of multifamily boom in general?  Paul: Yeah, I absolutely do and I actually believe that if I was going to invest a million dollars and it had to stay locked up for a hundred years if I had to pick one asset to put it in, it would be multifamily. Because I truly believe that the multifamily, you know, the nicer ones at least they're being built around Austin or around me here in Virginia, I believe they're still going to be lived in as apartments, a hundred years from now. I'm not sure that Self Storage will still be popular in a hundred years and I don't know where mobile home parks will be, I think they'll be around but multifamily is certainly on the way up.   The problem is, there's a thing called supply and demand and there could be a situation where people are overpaying for assets in the wrong location. I mean, there's some overbuilding going on, like there is, in any cycle in any asset class. I'm just trying to warn people don't be taken in, be really, really careful. I was at a conference in December, James and a very famous multifamily syndicator got on stage. He wasn't scheduled to be there, I guess they invited him up when they saw him there and he said, hey, go ahead and overpay for multifamily. It's okay to overpay. Just get in the game you need to get in. And I thought he was kidding and I thought that there was going to be a punch line to the joke, but there was none, he was not joking. And his quote actually turned out, I wasn't sure I heard him right, I was shaking my head kind of bewildered and his quote actually went out all over the Internet later. So I was correct, I heard him right and I just don't agree with that.   And I tell you, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Howard Marks, a lot of great investors, you know would not agree with this. And so, I'm trying to side with the more conservative great investors on this one.   James: Got it. Got it. And what triggered you to write that book? I mean, there must be something that triggered you to write 'The Historic Shift to Multi-family Housing' and you also mentioned, "The Perfect Investment', what are the components of multifamily do you think that has that perfect perfectness?  Paul:  There's a lot of books out there about how to get into single-family and the BRRRR Strategy on BiggerPockets and wholesaling, flipping, building a portfolio. There are lots of books on apartments, but I didn't see one that was specifically geared to people to help them to realize how they could make the jump up from a few duplexes to being part of a large scale commercial multifamily project. And so, I wanted to write that for those people and it really struck a chord. I have a storytelling fashion manner and in the book, I tell a lot of stories and it really struck a chord with a lot of people. I mean people are telling me that it's the most pivotal multifamily book that they've read and I still believe everything I wrote in it, even though I wrote it three years ago.   Some of the statistics, you ask what makes multifamily so great. A couple of the things are; number one, the government. Now, the government tinkered in the housing world in 1995 or so. They said everybody that can fog a mirror should be able to buy a home and they pass laws that motivated, let's say, to put it lightly, motivated Mortgage Companies to give mortgages to anybody even if they couldn't prove they had good credit or even if they didn't even bother to prove their income. I had a guy I know who was making about 40,000 a year, James and he bought a $600,000 mansion as his second home and I think it was to impress his family back in his hometown. Well, he didn't impress them much when the notice went out in the newspaper about four months later that he was in default and it was foreclosed on but anyway, that's what happened. Well, in 2005 that bubble began to burst and from 2005 to 2015 well, first of all, from '95 to '05, homeownership rose to from 64% up to 69.2%. From 2005 to 15, it dropped back to a historical level of about 63%. Every one point drop means 1 million new renters into the renter pool and of course during the recession and then the aftermath of the recession, there was a lot of building going on so there became a supply and demand imbalance. That's number one.   Now number two. There are four demographic factors. Number one and that is Baby Boomers. They're the smallest group of renter's but they're the fastest-growing group. And the statistics say that when a baby boomer 50 60 70-year-old rents, they never buy again and that's happening more and more. And part of the reason, James, is we learned during the recession that our home, our single-family home wasn't what our grandparents told us, it wasn't our greatest investment. A lot of people, you know, were leveraged to the hilt and they lost their homes.   And so, another group that saw this were the Millennials, that's the second demographic group. And they realized single-family homes is not my greatest investment and why should I be tied down to a, seemingly, overpriced home with a 30-year contract in this part of town when I might have new friends or new adventures or a new job opportunity on that other side of town or that side of the country next year? And so, Millennials also have record amounts of student' in credit card debt, and they don't want to get tied down and they don't have a huge propensity to save. So Millennials rent far more than buy. Now, that's changed some, a few years since the book but, you know, Millennial still have a propensity to rent more than buy.   A third group is immigrants. Immigrants, on average, rent more often and for longer than folks who had their descendant, you know that was born in America. The fourth group that I didn't cover in the book is Gen Z and I was really surprised. As far as I know, the Gen Z group is the only group that came right on the tail of another large demographic group and they're actually about the same size, about 78 to 82 million strong. And so, this group we can only guess will be renting more than buying. So those are some of the factors. I will tell you that because of all this, multifamily, large-scale multifamily has almost a zero default rate Nationwide. In fact, from what I understand, well, I mean I can tell you during the Great Recession, multifamily was only at, I think, point eight percent default rate, I think it was point four percent default rate, in fact, with Freddie Mac specifically. And Freddie Mac, on the average for single-family homes, was a four percent default rate. So it was only 10% of the default of single-family and now it's virtually zero. It's about 98 or 99% less than single-family homes. So the default rate is very low. Again, the risk compared to the return is very favorable for multifamily.   James: That's a very long but it's a very detailed explanation for why multifamily will continue to be in high demand for a lot of people who need housing. The other thing I want to add is a lot of things are moving to the cloud. A lot of work is no more like I have to drive to somewhere to work, right? So everything is in the cloud right now. So it's easy for people to move and change jobs and go live somewhere else and everything is in the cloud, right? So with the technology changing, you know, you just make more sense to rent. Do you think we are becoming a renters Nation?   Paul: You know, Germany has about 60--let's see, we have 63 or so, maybe 64 percent home ownership right now. Germany has about 42 and Dallas, Texas near you is below 50. I imagine Austin might be below 50. We're older cities, you know, more mature cities that don't have a huge amount of migration coming in right now. Like Detroit is over 70% homeownership. And so I think if you look at the trends, I think we're becoming more and more a renter nation and it remains to be seen how it will shake out in the coming decades though.   James: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to be posting a chart which shows all the cities in the US and it shows the homeownership difference from 2010 to 2018 and you will see some of the Cities there, it has like almost thousand over basis point change in the home prices well, and how are people going to afford it in the cities. So, you know some cities are going to be more renters city, faster than everybody else. So that's very interesting. I mean, what are the things that all multi-family investors need to be careful of at this stage of the Market cycle?  Paul:  I think just you know, the Euphoria of potentially overpaying or potentially buying a C-Class property and treating it like it must be a like a B class. Yesterday on our podcast, we had Monique Calm and Monique is really large, really big in the female commercial real estate space. And she said her biggest mistake was buying a D-class property in the euphoria of 2016 and treating it as if it was a B-class property. And, of course, those are very different things and she got out by the skin of her teeth after losing a lot of sleep and through a lot of pain and I think that's a really big risk. I think the risk, anytime you're at this hype part of a market cycle the risk is, you know, believing that it'll never change. As I said, things are different this time. Well, no, things are probably not different this time. It's going to burst.   Now, it may not drop like a rock as it did in the fall of 2008, I don't think it will but that's a risk and we got to be really careful not to overpay.   James: Okay got it. Got it. But do you think the information about multifamily is also very widely known right now? It's no more hidden investment asset class ready. So do you think that can cause the whole Market to shift as well? Maybe our circle is whoever we know in multifamily. I may be wrong by saying everybody knows about multifamily because I still find a lot of investors who don't know about multifamily yet. Do you think because of the knowledge that has been disseminated by social media and lot of clubs and lot of groups and just there's so much of information out there about multi-family, do you think that would impact what's the next recession or the crash that's coming?  Paul:  So let me ask you, James, do you mean because there's so much information out there that there are so many more investors coming in at might keep the market, keep the price up a little bit?   James: Yeah. So many less sophisticated investors are coming in so, for example, mobile home parks, like five years ago, nobody wanted to touch it. But now there are so many people who want to do mobile home parks. Self-storage was not known, the same thing with multifamily 2010; nobody wanted to touch it because it's considered expensive. It has always been considered expensive for me. But do you think just because of the information and the knowledge that people have right now about how to run asset management of multifamily, you know that could change the landscape?  Paul: It's possible. I'm not sure. I think that amateur, I shouldn't say amateur, most investors tend to buy high and sell low and even experienced investors do that. We discussed this on my 'How to lose money podcast often and so you know whenever there's a motion involved, it's very, very hard to predict the timing and the future. I can tell you the higher things go the lower they will go later because the same people who were the most euphoric to buy at the top are the same people who think they've never ever buy again at the bottom. And, of course, Warren Buffett and others us, you know, you need to buy when things are the opposite of what they seem and we know that.  James: Correct.So what do you think we should be doing as multi-family investors who know how to run, how to do asset management, how to buy deals? I mean, we already have the knowledge, right? So a lot of people who already have the knowledge but what should they be doing like at thisMarket cycle?  Paul:  I think being very, very careful. I keep beating the same drum actually, James and that is just really really being wise. Having a default of know; why not have a default to say, hey, I'm looking at this multifamily deal. I'm going to start out by saying, I'm not going to do it. Then letting the numbers, letting the demographics, letting everything else convince you that you should do. You know, it's as entrepreneurs and investors we're naturally an optimistic bunch, we naturally want to do things, we want to say yes. And then, once we are way down the road with it, you know, then everything looks good. And even the things that look negative, we somehow in our minds twist into something positive.   Well, what if we started out with a no and let that be our default and then we let the numbers and everything talked us into it? I think that would be a good way to go for any kind of investment.   James: Yeah, that's absolutely, really good advice. So let's move on to your recent adventures, right?So you have been looking more into self-storage. I mean, investing with self-storage, even though you said you're investing with another operator, right? So is that right, self-storage only? Are you do also mobile home parks as well?  Paul:  Yeah. About a year and a half ago, we were beating our head against the wall, trying to find multifamily that made sense and we finally decided, hey, let's expand outside of multifamily. So we started researching self-storage and mobile home parks and we found out the formula to do it. We found out how to do it, what made sense, what were the best steps and we were pretty much on paper or in a book, we were able to understand what to do; what the steps were to do a very, very profitable deal. Well, that didn't mean we had done it and I had to look at my team and say, guys, you know, we know how to do this, but we're late and the market cycle prices are high in all these asset classes. Maybe we should invest with some experts who already have a team, who've already been doing this for decades.  And so we decided, as a company, to pool our resources and our investors' resources together and invest with operators. And so we spent a long time, last year vetting great operators, and we're still doing that now. Trying to find great operators to invest with and then, investing with them in their best projects. And by doing that, we're getting the benefit of all their years of experience, their acquisition pipeline. A lot of them have great off-market deals that I don't have access to and the expertise to drive the highest income and the highest value and the highest return on equity for the investor.   And so that's what we're doing. In fact, Wellings Capital has put together two funds recently to allow people to invest in these other experts, these best-in-class operators deals.   James: So do you get similar loan terms like in self-storage as well? Like is it a non-recourse type of loan or do you get like government loans like Fannie and Freddie? So my government loan I would say.   Paul: Yeah, Fannie, and Freddie love self-storage and mobile home parks. In fact, the interest rates for mobile home parks, surprisingly, are lower than multifamily, quite a bit lower and Freddie and Fannie allow at least Freddie Mac allows syndicators to refinance and to take basically additional equity out of the property twice in the first five years. And those two refinances are at the same interest rate as they went in at, guaranteed upfront and there's no penalty. So it's a great opportunity to you know, get in below to sometimes below 4 percent interest and then pull out safe Equity to hand back to the investors which we love to do. Because if we can hand them all their money back in the first five years, well, they can go out and reinvest that and then the money left in our deal is really essentially zero, so they're effectively getting what is called an infinite return on their investment at that point.  James: Yeah, I remember Fannie Mae entered mobile home parks like two years ago. I mean, that's where I was looking at mobile home parks. And that's the time like Fannie Mae came in and I was surprised even when they started itself they already told everybody about, hey, you can do a multiple refis on the same project, which was very interesting because it's hard to do on a multi-family. There is prepayment penalty, you have the fees and you know, it's just so hard to increase the value so much and you know, we had to do double refire within a short time. And so that's interesting. Is that the same thing in Self Storage as well? Does Fannie and Freddie loan non-recourse loans in self-storage?  Paul: I'm not as familiar with Fannie and Freddie's take on self-storage specifically because a lot of the operators we worked with either use, one bank, in particular, is called Live Oak Bank, and they're very aggressive in Self Storage, especially the smaller deals. And then there are some REITs. In fact, the REIT that owns U-Haul and I'm struggling to remember the name of the REIT, actually does a whole lot of the debt in Self Storage. There's other Regional Banks like BB&T and others that provide loans as well for self storage. Those seem to be the most popular with the operators, we've been working with at least.  James: So what about challenges in self-storage? Because self-storage is pretty easy to be built, right?  Anybody can build something because it's cheap and if you find land. So aren't you worried about that kind of coming into self-storage?   Paul: I am worried about it. In fact, I thought about doing a self-storage project myself, 20 years ago this year, in 1999. And my concern was, well, I built it on the edge of town here and there are all kinds of farmland just outside of City Limits. Well, as the town keeps expanding what if another nicer self-storage facility comes in and a year later, I'm in trouble? And you know, there's truth in that so there are very important things you have to look at when you invest in a self-storage deal.   For example, we just invested in a Minnesota deal, it's near Minneapolis and it's in a town. It's in a suburb that has already changed the zoning and said no self-storage is allowed in the city limits unless they're in an industrial part. Well, that bodes really well for this self-storage project because it's right in the middle of a bunch of Townhomes, single-family developments, multifamily some retail. It's right there on the main Boulevard in town and it's a perfect location. And now that the competition is relegated to industrial parks, it made it a really good opportunity. There are other factors we look for in evaluating self-storage.   And for example, we want to see less than an average amount of square feet of Self Storage in a say a three or four-mile radius around this one. So here's how you look at it. You look at the total square feet of Self Storage in it, let's say a 4-mile radius, and then the total people in that radius and you're looking for the national average might be around seven square feet per person. Well, if you're in a market like our Minneapolis one, where the average square feet per person was only two and a half square feet, then you can basically say that that market is undersupplied. And so, it's undersupplied because you know, it's much less than the national average. And then places like Florida, Texas, California, the average square feet per person is likely much higher because they don't have basements typically and they're rarely using their attic because it's so hot. And so those have even higher demand than the national average. But those are the kind of things we look for as we evaluate these things.   Another one that my friend invested in was in a basically a sleepy town called Marietta, Georgia. It was sleepy years ago. Now, it's a booming suburb outside of Atlanta and this, you know, 1978 facility was looking pretty tired. Well, he bought it and he is making into a gleaming beautiful facility right on the main boulevard in town.   James: Awesome. That's very interesting on how Self Storage has changed throughout the years. But I think if you look at like the last 15 years, I mean, I did a lot of analysis on asset class and Self Storage is one thing that has never dropped in demand since past 15 years.   Pauk: Yeah. It really hasn't.  James: Yeah, there's no data that shows that it has dropped a lot. So that's a really good asset class. So right now, you are like investing with some operators, right? So, how did you choose your operator? What was your criteria? What did you look for in them that you feel comfortable about them and you know placing you and your funds money?  Paul:  Yeah, so we're looking for you know things like high character, high ethics, high integrity, you know, can we really believe what they say? We're looking for competence a second see, you know, we're looking for people who have a phenomenal track record, happy investors, professional, you know bookkeeping and operations. We're looking for people who have weathered the storm and we'd like to know how they weathered the storm, what they did during the recession, what they learned from it and what they're doing now to protect themselves against the next downturn? We're looking for conservative, people who are not taking on way too high of Leverage. We're looking for operators who might be better operators than they are many razors and they might need some money to you know, fund some equity, to fund their deals. We're looking for operators who are willing to give us a better deal than a retail investor.  And what that means to me, is that as a fund we might get a better ROI than an investor coming off the street to them. Which means that we can offer when our fees are factored in, for running the fund, keeping the lights on. We're giving our investors still a better or about equal deal to what they would get if they went directly to them. We're not vetting operators. A lot of people ask me this one; are you vetting them based on geography? And I would say if I was an operator myself, I would absolutely be looking for the right geography, but we're actually trying to merge; we're trying to bet on the jockey and let them pick the horse. Let them pick the geography.   So for example, I'm talking to a guy in the Pacific Northwest, which I know very, very little about. I'm heading out there June. We don't know that area really well, but he does and we trust him to make the right decisions to invest in those areas like, Washington, Idaho and, Oregon.  James: Got it. So is this like 506C offerings? Is that what they do?   Paul: Yeah, so we are a 506C which gives us the maximum flexibility to invest in a 506C or a 506B syndication.   James: Got it. Got it. So I want to take one of the points that you mentioned in terms of, you know, selecting the operator, right? So how do you know they have a good track record?   Paul: Well, I mean, if they're making this offering if they're reporting their track record and they're going back and showing line-by-line the different deals they bought you know, they're going to have to tell the truth on there or they can get in trouble. But another thing we do is we talked to some of their references, we talk to investors that invested with them. Sometimes we'll try to find an investor or two that they didn't know that we asked you know that we happen to run into. We really look to people who have gone before us in this business.   A lot of people know and maybe you know, Jeremy Role for example. He's in LA and Jeremy has a phenomenal track record of investing and he's very very conservative our first conversation, years ago I was trying to pitch him to invest with me. He said, well, I'm probably not going to invest in your deals. I'm probably a lot more conservative than you are. So he started that's what I said a while ago. He started with the default of no and by saying no first, I had to try to convince him that it would be a yes. But anyway, Jeremy is super conservative and when he really likes an operator that gives me a reason to believe that we're going to like them too.   James: Yeah. I know Jeremy and his investment criteria, which is really conservative and I interviewed him on the fourth or fifth podcast. Once I launch people can listen to that podcast as well. And let me see. Is there anything that you want to share in this podcast that you have never shared in any other podcasts or your own podcast?  Paul: Oh that's gonna be really hard to think of. I talk a lot so I can't think of anything that would be completely unique. I will Circle back and tell you briefly that one of the reasons Self Storage demand has never gone down at least, you know to this point--now, by the way, that doesn't mean there couldn't be a market that's oversupplied. I heard of a self-storage facility last year that was foreclosed on because it was in an oversupplied Market you got to be smart.   But think about it, James, in a good Market, people are filling up their Amazon carts or their Walmart cards and they're buying more stuff and they need a place to put it. In a bad Market, people are often downsizing from a let's say 4,000 square foot home to 2,000 or 2,000 to an apartment. They need a place to put their stuff and for a relatively small cost, they can put their stuff in self-storage. And think about this if I was charging $1000 a month for your apartment in Austin and I raised, may be low and I raise the rent by 6%, you might move rather than pay me $720 in the next year.  But if I was charging you a $100 for a storage unit and I raised it 6%, you're probably not going to move, spend a Saturday, get a U-Haul, get your friends to pack up your junk, I mean, your treasures and move them down the street to save $6 a month.   Tenants are very very sticky in self-storage. It's very similar to mobile home parks. If you raise the rent 10% you know, are they really going to move down the street, spend $5,000 to move their trailer down the street to save $30 a month on lot rent? Probably not.   James: Yeah, and also the leases are monthly right? So that makes changes in rent much more quicker and rapid right?  Paul: Right. Yeah, a lot of self storage operators raise the rent twice a year.   James: Got it. Got it. That's very, very good to know. So throughout your real estate life, is there any proud moment that you think make yourself proud even until now that you think you really had a huge contribution to someone or can you describe that moment?  Paul: Yeah, I mean there's probably a few I think I can tell you about my worst deal and my best deal. I'll try to do it quickly. My worst deal was a 5-acre subdivision that I bought, excuse me; a five-acre piece of land that was Waterfront. I bought it in 2006. I was flipping Waterfront lots at this Lake and I really believe very speculatively, by the way. I really believe that the road in front of this five-acre lot was going to be made from a private into a public road and that would allow me to subdivide the land. Well, that wasn't the case. There wasn't going to be a public Road. And we were wrong and we went into the Great Recession with $860,000 in debt on that five-acre piece of land and we were paying that debt along with, we had two and a half million dollars in total debt, my family did and that was part of our business. And my partner left and that left me with all the interest in January 2008. Well, I told my friends and I told my family, we're going to start giving our way out of debt, which was kind of crazy. But I really believe my back was against the wall and I had to try something and so I really believed in, you know, the law of sowing and reaping another people call it karma that I would give and it would come back to me.   So we started giving a very significant check, a very significant amount of money for us, at the time, every single week we gave it to nonprofits and to our church and we really believe that it would pay off. Well four weeks later, I had a light bulb moment, a light bulb idea to take the law that would not allow me to subdivide and sell off this land and turn it on its head and actually subdivide and sell these four, now actually 5 1 acre parcels. So we did that; we sold the land, we sold four of the five lots in the fall of 2008 and I was completely debt-free 13 months later.   James: Wow. I'm a strong believer in the law of karma, right? So that's really good. Very inspiring story. Thank you for sharing that.  Paul: You bet.   James: Yeah. I know. Why do you do what you do? I mean, you have a lot of things that you have done for the past, you know throughout your life, right? But why do you continue doing what you're doing this?   Paul: Well, you know you wrote a book on the power of commercial real estate didn't you?  James: The Passive Investing in Commercial Real Estate.  Paul: Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean I can show and you can show, a real estate investor how to take $100,000 in over 20 to 30 years turn that into you know, three to five million dollars. The power of commercial real estate investing is really amazing and it's more amazing when you think that the tax laws favor us so much that you know, it's possible to do what I just said. It's not guaranteed by any means, but it's possible to do that and pay very little taxes along the way.   Once I discovered that you can drive, you can force appreciation in Commercial Real Estate, I was completely hooked. For example, let's say you're Chip and Joanna Gaines Jr. And you can beautifully renovate a house from, let's say, half million dollar house, what's that? Dan?   James: They're in Reco, right?   Paul: So yeah, right. There are a few hours away from you right now. So let's say you can renovate that house from a half-million-dollar house up to a million dollar house. But if you're in a neighborhood of $400,000 houses, you're probably not going to get your million out of it because values are derived by comparable properties. Not so with commercial as you know, the commercial value formula is the value, is the net operating income divided by the cap rate. And so if you can find a way to increase the operating income and if you can possibly find a way to compress the cap rate and there are ways to do that, then you can dramatically increase the value of that asset. And if you take leverage into account, then you can even more dramatically increase the value of the equity. And so $1 increase in income per month at a commercial property, take that $1 that's $12 a year divided by a normal cap rate of 6% or 0.06 and that $1 of $12 excuse me .06 is 200 dollar increase in value.   So if you can go around and find ways to save or add a dollar to your income, every month, then you can dramatically increase the value of the property and even more so, increase the value of the equity in the investors pocket.   James: Yeah, it's just so amazing the commercial real estate. The defaults appreciation play is just so powerful. Especially if you can do value add on top of it. I mean, that is the value add; cash flowing plus the force appreciation value add that's the power of it.   Paul: Yeah, right, really is.   James: Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for that explanation. So Paul why not you tell our listeners, I don't see any questions coming in. So we're just going to go ahead and listen. If you guys want to type in any questions in our Facebook group. Go ahead and do that.  Paul, why don't you tell the listeners how to get hold of you and reach you?   Paul: Okay, great. My website is wellingsCapital.com and they can reach out and fill out our contact form and reach me there.  James: Awesome, Paul. Thanks for joining us today Paul, and thanks to the audience for joining us today. Hope we gave a lot of value to everybody and that's it. Thank you, and bye.   Paul: Thanks, James.    

Paul Mattal is the Director of Network Systems at Akamai, one of the largest content delivery networks in the U.S. Akamai is a major part of the backbone of the internet and on today’s episode, Paul is going to talk about the massive amount of telemetry that comes into Akamai and the various decision support tools his group is in charge of providing to internal customers. On top of the analytics aspect of our chat, we also discussed how Paul is approaching his team’s work being relatively new at Akamai. Additionally, we covered: How does Paul access and use internal customer knowledge to improve the quality of applications they make? When to build a custom decision support tool vs. using a BI tool like Tableau? How does Akamai measure if their analytics are creating customer value? The process Paul uses with the customer to design a new data product MVP How Paul decides which of the many analytics applications and services “get love” when resources are constrained Paul’s closing advice about taking the time to design and plan before you code Resources and Links: Akamai Twitter @pjmattal Paul Mattal on LinkedIn Paul Mattal on Facebook Quotes from Today’s Episode “I would say we have a lot of engagement with [customers] here. People jump to answering questions with data and they’re quick. They know how to do that and they have very good ideas about how to make sure that the approaches they take are backed by data and backed by evidence.” — Paul Mattal “There’s actually a very mature culture here at Akamai of helping each other. Not necessarily taking on an enormous project if you don’t have the time for it, but opening your door and helping somebody solve a problem, if you have expertise that can help them.” — Paul Mattal “I’m always curious about feedback cycles because there’s a lot of places that they start with telemetry and data, then they put technology on top of it, they build a bunch of software, and look at releases and outputs as the final part. It’s actually not. It’s the outcomes that come from the stuff we built that matter. If you don’t know what outcomes those look like, then you don’t know if you actually created anything meaningful.” — Brian O’Neill “We’ve talked a little bit about the MVP approach, which is about doing that minimal amount of work, which may or may not be working code, but you did a minimum amount of stuff to figure out whether or not it’s meeting a need that your customer has. You’re going through some type of observation process to fuel the first thing, asset or output that you create. It’s fueled by some kind of observation or research upfront so that when you go up to bat and take a swing with something real, there’s a better chance of at least a base hit.” — Brian O’Neill “Pretend to be the new guy for as long as you can. Go ask [about their needs/challenges] again and get to really understand what that person [customer] is experiencing, because I know you’re going to able to meet the need much better.” — Paul Mattal Episode Transcript Brian: Hi. We’re back with Experiencing Data here and I have Paul Mattal on the line who is currently the Director of Network Systems at Akamai. How’s going, Paul? Paul: It’s going great. Thanks, Brian. Brian: I’m glad to have you on the show and you’re working at one of these companies that I think of as kind of like oxygen in the internet. It’s everywhere but you don’t really see it because it’s all invisible and that’s actually this big thing behind the scenes. You’re swimming around the internet as all these data and Akamai’s in the middle of all of a lot of that, largely responsible for making sure it’s moving quickly and is available at the right time and in the right places. As I understand it, you’re in a new position, you’ve changed domains, previously you were working in the space of legal patent work, digital forensics, and you built some tools that your previous company makes. You can tell us a little bit about those. Now, you’re moving more into the bits and bytes of the internet and you’re responsible for creating data products like decision support tools for people that keep the Akamai network going and running smoothly and anticipating demand? Did I get all that right? Paul: That’s exactly right. At Akamai, we like to think of it as we’re the ones that make the internet work. There’s a notion that the way things work on the internet is you just simply put your content up on a server and the rest is history. But these days, there’s a lot of complexity. There are many, many users who want access to the same content at the same time. Akamai makes that content all available to everyone when they need it and how they need it. In my past job, as you mentioned, was quite a bit different, although it had some similar qualities. I was helping to develop systems and tools for lawyers and for consultants for lawyers, in some cases to analyze patents, to help them better understand their subject matter of patents, so we’ve created some applications there. Here at Akamai, I’m also creating applications and tools to be used by the members of the network’s team who are responsible for deploying and maintaining the whole Akamai network. That breaks down roughly into tools that help us manage our work, tools that helps us with analytics and planning, and also tools that help us visualize data. It is somewhat of a shift. A lot of the domain knowledge is different, but it’s interesting that so many of the problems end up being similar. Brian: Tell us a bit about who the end-customer is. How many internal customers do you have? Do they break up into personas or segments? Like you have network administrators and you have whatever people. Tell us a bit about who those people are that you’re designing these tools for or you’re helping deploy these tools for. Paul: There are a couple of groups. The infrastructure group which is responsible for really deploying all of the servers and maintaining all of the servers. That’s a set of one class of user who is mostly using our tools in a logistical fashion to coordinate and organize their work. There’s a planning team who is thinking about the capacity of our network: Do we have enough for what’s coming down the pike? Do we have the right capacity in the right places? We also have users who are thinking about the architecture of the network and thinking about how we build and optimize our hardware and our network, to continue to be cutting edge and to continue to meet the needs of our customers. So, different people looking at different tools and different data for different purposes. Brian: Cool. Just a little fun question here. This is probably because I don’t know the domain very well. When there’s a big event coming on the internet, let’s take something like the Super Bowl, or the World Cup, or the new Game of Thrones, or whatever, are there literally changes that you guys go and make to facilitate a major event? Or are those actually more like a blip in terms of internet traffic and all of that? Paul: It depends. Certainly, some of those events have been some of the largest data traffic we’ve seen move across our network. Often, there are considerations especially depending on where exactly we expect the viewers to be for those events. We may deploy additional capacity in one geographic area or another. Brian: Going back to the people that are the end of these tools—again, these are decision support tools—how do you know if your team is doing a good job? How do you measure that the end-customers are getting the right information and they believe it, that they’re willing to take action on it? Do you a regular feedback cycle or interaction with these different personas that you talked about? Paul: Yes, That’s one of the most important aspects of what we do is trying to figure out how to measure, how exactly to measure how we’re doing, especially in the analytics space, right in the productivity tool space is a little simpler. We can tell pretty much where the pain points are. People come to us and say, “This interface isn’t working for me or these five things are in five different places,” and they’re going to use them as one. Those are a little bit more straightforward kinds of feedback. With analytics, we find it goes a lot to how successful were we predicting, how much excess capacity did we end up within a place we didn’t need it, for example, and all those kinds of questions. We meet with our customers pretty regularly and we also have some metrics that we compute to give us an idea of how we’re doing. Brian: Are those quantitative then? Those are all quantitative metrics or do you have any type of qualitative conversations that go deeper than like, “I wish there was a filter for the date on this chart,” or stuff like that. Those things do matter and it’s the sum of all those little, tiny details that add up into good experiences typically, but I’m curious if you have any deeper qualitative type of interaction with these end-users. Paul: A lot of what we’re discussing these days, for example, is there’s a tremendous amount of telemetry available that comes off the platform. Numbers about what’s going on in the network that could measure and we could capture. In many cases, a lot of the conversations are about, “Hey, can we capture more of this data? Is there’s somewhere we can get sample more frequently?” or, “Can we get access to this kind of data that we don’t have right now, so that we could be able to optimize more effectively on the things that actually matter, where the actual bottlenecks are in the network,” versus more simplified models based on less data. We’re finding that’s one of the very common kinds of feedback we’re getting is for more data and differently sampled data. Brian: We talked about this a little bit when we did our pre-call on whatever about topics and you mentioned that you have different classes of users in terms of who’s capable of designing an effective tool for themselves. I think you said you’ve got a mix of tools that are custom-built which might have two-way interaction, where data’s being put back in through forms or whatever in the tool. Then you have Tableau and some kind of rear-view mirror type historical reporting interfaces which, as I understand it, those start with the user a blank slate? Is that correct? Then they put together the views that they want and the reporting that they want? Kind of curious just for you to talk about how many people are using custom tools that you built versus the ones that they designed for themselves. Are people doing a good job creating the tools they need for themselves? Do you have a sense of that feedback that they’re looking at the right data, that they know how to interpret it, they know how to visualize it? Can you talk a little bit about that? Paul: Sure. Our organization has hundreds of people in it and I would say at least probably 50%–75% of those users are highly technical, which is very helpful, actually. They often come to us with a better idea of what they need. In some cases, we can give them good interfaces to go build their own tools. The historic approach to that here has been to give them pretty decent access to the data in our databases and even the engines themselves. Many of them are comfortable writing their own queries. But we also have a very mature ecosystem of query exchange. We have this tool that allows people to write their own queries and share them with others, and then others can manipulate those queries further and customize them to their own needs. They’re very familiar with that. The piece we’re bringing in next is this idea of really making visualization also of a self-serve kind of area where, with a tool like Tableau, you can point Tableau at the same data that might be the out part of these queries but then have powerful visualizations on top of that. The other piece of this is how much of it do we do and how much of it do customers create from old cloth. It’s kind of a balance. Some people come to us and say, “Here’s what I need but I don’t know how to do it,” and then they ask us to do it. Sometimes a customer actually originate it and will say, “Here’s the report or this query that I think is interesting,” and we’ll say, “Oh yeah, that’s interesting. Why don’t we bake that into something more sophisticated?” It’s kind of a mixed bag but I would say most people come in to us, there’s usually something that we already have that they can use as a basis and then they can usually modify that further. That’s been a pretty successful model for us because it really lets people get what they want, get the very detailed, precise view that meets their needs, but benefit from all of the other work that we’ve put into to making those views and those approaches effective and mature over many years. Brian: It sounds like you don’t struggle as much with engagement with the analytics. You actually have plenty of that? Or would you say that’s not necessarily entirely true? Paul: Yes. I would say we have a lot of engagement with that here. People jump to answering questions with data and they’re quick. They know how to do that and they have very good ideas about how to make sure that the approaches they take are backed by data and backed by evidence. Very mature in that sense people. Brian: Since you have this mix of these custom tools that you guys are building and how slick, how do you decide which wheel is going to get the most oil? You’ve got these custom tools, you’ve got some Tableau stuff, you’ve got people coming in, maybe they are using Tableau, but they don’t know how to build the reporting they need. Is it based on a business driver? If we get problem X wrong, this cost a lot of money, so we’re going to put our team on this problem and sorry, Jane, you’re going to have to take that Tableau tutorial and figure it out yourself. How do you resource like that? Paul: As with any place, there’s certainly scarcity. Everybody wishes they had choice in people they had and twice them. Maybe even the computing resources and everything else that they wished they had. At a high level, a lot of it is driven by a strategic plan, by an idea for what we as an organization are trying to accomplish. That determines which things get the most people and the most priority. There’s actually a very mature culture here at Akamai of helping each other. Not necessarily taking on an enormous project if you don’t have the time for it, but opening your door and helping somebody solve a problem if you have expertise that can help them. We find that it’s a balance of those things. We work on major roadmaps, large projects or tools for strategic and efficiency. Particularly efficiency reasons that we’re wishing to achieve as an organization. We spend a lot of us of the time helping the folks who need it, to get where they need to get. Brian: That makes sense to me. Is the feedback loop in place such that there’s some point in the future which you look backwards on these projects, or products, or tools that you’ve built and say, “Did we make a dent? What were the success criteria for those? What’s that three month or six month rear-view look like?” Do you guys talk about what that is, so you know whether or not you hit your objectives? “And since project X got four times the resourcing, did we get four times the value or whatever the value was that was determined?” I’m always curious about these feedback cycles because there’s a lot of places that they start with this telemetry and data, then they put technology on top of it, they build a bunch of software, and a lot of times the releases and the platforms are looked at as the outputs and the final part of this and it’s actually not. It’s the outcomes that come from the stuff we built that matter. If you don’t know what outcomes those look like, then you don’t know if you actually created anything meaningful. So, I’m curious, that feedback cycle, does your business know? Like, “We have to see. We can’t get predictions wrong or we don’t want to have a little more than 12% server waste from the wrong prediction, whatever.” I don’t know what those metrics are. Can you talk about that feedback loop from a business and a value perspective? Paul: Sure. Some of the things we’re doing are very tied to specific business goals for certain kinds of […]. These are targets for dollars saved in terms of operating the network at a lower cost. In those areas, we are very acutely being measured pretty much on a yearly basis along those lines. We’re working towards getting better at what happens in between and the rest of the year. You can often go off-track a little bit somewhere in one month and that can cost you down the road. We’ve been focused on trying to get to more of a monthly evaluation where we can break things down, try to deliver a value on a monthly basis, then get feedback from customers, and also to see how they’re affecting the numbers in real world application of this data to actually optimize. They never to learn. Are we consistently on track? Or are we moving in the right direction? I say that it’s definitely an element of what we do. Right now, we’re doing it more like every six months or a year. At a granular level, we’d like to move that to be a much shorter term and focus on constantly delivering smaller chunks of value. Brian: That’s good to hear. My understanding from when we talked to that you be almost what I would call a product manager, even though you’re not developing commercial products but you’re overseeing the creation of these different tools. I’m curious. Do you have the equivalent of a product manager role where one person’s job is to make sure that whatever analytics and/or custom tools you guys build for the network operations team or the team that deploys the servers, they live and breathe that world and they’re totally responsible to service those staff that work on those technical problems? Is that how it’s shaped or is everyone’s touching all of the different parts of Akamai? I’m just wondering how you get into that world. What’s it like to be the server administrator and predicting where to deploy servers? How is that structured? Maybe you don’t have enough staff to break it down that way and I’m asking a leading question, but I’m curious if you could talk about that a little bit. Paul: We actually do have four teams within our group and they are divided up with focus on the different stakeholder groups within the network’s organization. There is definitely some division. There’s also some who sort of cross responsibility but there are definitely folks who know specific subject matter areas very well and who are critical in those areas to anything more than the simple bug fix in an area is going to involve somebody managing that area. Now, for our largest projects of all, we do have product managers as well as project managers involved in the creation of the larger ones. I’d say about two or three are major systems and the other several hundred tools or various pieces that we manage, care and feeding over the years. That stuff is either being taken cared of by one of these SME areas or it’s sort of rolling out to me especially if it’s something new. A large part of my role is helping to at the outset to say, “Let’s define what this tool looks like. What it’s doing? Who is going to use it? What those people need? What are the processes at play here at Akamai that this is a part of? Do we understand those processes? Have we optimized those processes?” That’s a lot of what I end up doing with the rest of my team, to define those new products so that they’ll be the most successful as we build them and get off in the right direction. Brian: That sounds awfully like design to me. Paul: It is. Brian: Is that traditionally how things have been done in this group or is this something that’s new? How’s that being received? Are you getting like, “Just give us the data and we’ll put it together,” and you’re like, “No. Help me understand what are you going to do with it at the end.” It’s just like, “Well, I’ll know when I see it.” Is it that kind of thing or are they like, “Great, let’s get it right.” What’s that process like? Paul: The history of our group is that we have probably not put enough focus on planning and design, but I think it’s an area where people realize that we need to spend more. They really are now focused on that as a goal and understanding that it’s important in many context. That’s not to say that there aren’t sometimes when people will say, “Here’s what I need and I need it tomorrow,” and you know that comes up. It’s a balancing act that is always a challenge, but I think there is an increasing sense and increasing support across the network’s organization and maybe beyond that using some sort of platform organization, other parts of engineering at Akamai. It’s really a much better result if you make a plan upfront, you understand the context into which you’re creating this new thing, and you understand how it’s going to impact processes and flow that occur once you’ve built it. Brian: Maybe you haven’t been there because I know you’re somewhat new in this position but if you’ve been there long enough to go through a full cycle with that where you’ve taken someone through like, “Let’s hold on. Let’s figure out what’s actually needed. What the real problem’s face is like,” and then you’ve gone all the way through maybe building a product or a prototype or something. Have you gone through a full cycle yet? Or are you still in the design phase on some of these? Paul: For a couple of smaller projects, we’ve definitely done that. It’s been posted where people have come and said, “Hey, could you do X?” and we’ve said, “Well, we could do X but that actually requires more code and more effort. We have this other thing over here that actually can accomplish that and then it puts you more in the driver’s seat because you can help maintain it later. How’s that?” Often, the results are very positive. If we can actually get things implemented faster, people are happier in the end, it’s less maintenance for us overall in the long-haul. So, yes on the small things. On the bigger things, those are in progress and we’re excited about those design phases that’s going on now. They’re larger and more productive than they’ve been in the past. We’re excited to see probably by the middle of this year or later in the year that there is also an output of that. Brian: Can you tell us about what some of those activities are? I think some of the people listening to this are not coming from digital-native companies. The whole product design process is maybe foreign to them. Can you tell us about like, “What are you doing during this time? Why aren’t you writing code? You have the data. Put Tableau there and build some reports.” What are you doing that’s not that during this phase? Paul: Usually, the first thing we’re doing is trying to find out who are all the people that interact with this data, or these kinds of systems, or these particular business objects, or aspects of Akamai’s network. Often at the start, we find there’s common problems. There’s people and other parts of the organizations who may already have a tool that allows them to do this. Now we also want to go and observe those users. We want to go find out are they satisfied with the tool and is the tool meeting their needs, which are actually two different questions. Really seeing whether what they’re doing is a process that’s optimal and seeing whether we can create a solution to this new problem or borrow a solution to this new problem and change it in some way that helps everybody. That’s one of the interesting aspects of design here is that there are many groups that interact with the same data in so many different ways. I think a lot of that design phase is about, “Hey, one of the tools out there, how do we integrate them so that they’re the least work for us? How do we make sure that we’re choosing a good solution and we’re actually meeting the user’s needs?” Probably the last part of that, especially in our group is, and not getting stuck on not meeting 100% of any single tool, because in some cases, you’ll get 80% of the use cases for five groups and you have to say, “Okay, that’s fine. For this other case, they’ll do it this way.” That’s a lot what goes into the design process. Really just understanding what the users are looking for, how does that match up with stuff we already have, and then how do we integrate that use case into what we maintain, in a way that is streamlined and effective for them and also streamlined and effective for us. Brian: When you talk about getting to know what they’re going to do with this information and how they want to use it, is that through them self-reporting through, like talking to you in a meeting? Is it through you observing them doing what they’re doing now without the tool? Is this largely like, “Right now I can’t do any of this. I need this tool so I can enable this new thing that I currently don’t do,” or is it more like, “I have this long, convoluted process I have to do in order to achieve X. Can you help me build the tools so I can do it in less time?” One of those there is like a recipe for something already and you’re trying to optimize it and the other one is more like, “This is a new thing I’ve never been able to do but maybe I could with your help.” Do you put it into those buckets and then if it’s the former, how do you figure it out? Is it observation or just them talking to you about how they’re going to use it? How do you figure that out? Paul: There definitely are both of those scenarios come up. We often get requests about processes that already exist. At some point, there’s some tool in there already, sometimes it’s a highly manual process. In that scenario, one of the great assets of this particular group is that we have whole standards, documentation, and work co-optimization group here within network, which is a true treader to have. Usually, when that kind of problem comes up, the first thing we do is say, “Okay, let’s work with the [worker?]group and let’s get a really good map of what this process looks like end-to-end and let’s look at what the steps are, what tools are now, where the pain points are, and then once we have drawn this out so that we understand the context, let’s actually first look and see whether there’s any way we can optimize the process, because the last thing we want to do is to spend a lot of time implementing automation steps for a process that shouldn’t be that way in the first place.” We look at that process and we say, “Okay, how do we simplify it? How can we bring automation to bear, to make the process more straightforward, take less time, take less human effort.” Then, we usually at that point, sit down and actually design the automation solution around that. That’s one kind of problem and that process of workflow [analysis…] does involve what we call business process performers in each step. These are not the people who manage those areas. These are the people who are actually doing the work. We want to know what are they actually doing, we talk to them whenever we can, and we actually go [observe.] them because we can learn at least this much and probably more by watching what they’re doing and what they’re struggling with. That’s one side of it. The less well-described problems, those are the ones where nobody knows yet. This is something brand new. There, I think we tend to sit down and try to understand what these users are trying to accomplish, what problems they had in the past that this addresses, because so often, something that’s new is really some way connected to something old. We did this before. It didn’t really work or we have a gap here, there’s something that we’re not doing as well as we should or we’re not doing at all, and how do we get that better? A lot of it is about understanding what they’re looking for and I think the big element of that that’s key is breaking it down into manageable phases so we can deliver quickly and iterate quickly. The last thing you want to do is sit down and say, “Okay, we think we understand exactly what you need. Now, we’re going to go off for a year-and-a-half and build it.” That’s always a recipe for disaster. So, what we want to do is sit down and say, “Let’s take the most important crux of what you’re trying to get at here. Let’s implement something in a few weeks or a month. Then, let’s sit down and get it in your hands, get your feet back on it, and then figure out the next piece.” This doesn’t mean we can’t have a plan for like, “Here’s really roughly what we think the phases are going to be and how they’re going to be laid out. But let’s have these checkpoints along the way and let’s iterate based on what we actually are able to learn, what we actually to benefit from.” That’s what we found is the key to those kinds of new projects is the fast iteration cycle. Brian: We’ve talked a little bit about the MVP approach, which is about doing that minimal amount of work, which may or may not be working code, but you did a minimum amount of stuff to figure out whether or not it’s meeting a need that your customer has. You’re going through some type of observation process to fuel the first thing, the first asset or output that you create. It’s fueled by some kind of observation or research upfront so that when you go up to bat and take the swing, there’s a better chance of at least to base hit and not a strikeout or something. I fully support that type of effort instead of me going off, “We all have the data. We’ll send you back a kit and then you can put it together yourself. It will take a year, you’re going to dump everything into the data warehouse, and then you fall into the Gartner 85% of ‘Big Data Projects That Failed’ category, which nobody wants to be in that whole thing. I think that that’s really great you’re doing some of that. Earlier, you said you have a lot of different products and you said two to three of them are large. I’m just curious. Large by number of users? What justifies putting a dedicated product manager on it and what’s the extra love that is received because you’re one of those two or three? Is it they have a dedicated designer and dedicated engineers? It is more research time? Tell us about your big ones. Paul: I would say that the largest projects usually have someone who’s effectively an architect for the project, who may also be part of the development team. They usually have a development team. It’s usually several people. At least in an ideal world, three or four is probably typical for larger projects. Then there’s a project manager who is managing the project and also how that reports up into our overall program of initiatives for that organization. Usually, those projects, to get substantial research, are going to be priorities for the organization at some higher level. The last [piece] probably the most important piece is that there’s a product owner, who may or may not be the architect, in some cases the architect plus feedback from the stakeholders is enough to make it work, but most of the time, it’s usually somebody who is also the project owner or the product manager who’s really responsible for shaping the design of that product. For example, one of the big tools we’re working on has to do with increased virtualization that we’re rolling out within the Akamai network. This is a big project because it’s a company-wide initiative. We have somebody working on designing the interface and working to figure out how the interface to provisioning works within the context of all the processes we have here at Akamai. Another example, one of our key analysis or databases for analytics and for planning. There, the ownership is essentially a data team who is responsible for this database, the universe of this data, and roughly how it’s visualized. That team has responsibility for that database for its schema, how we got that data, where it comes from, its cleanliness, but also for the visualization aspect of it, and then it’s now also inheriting this ‘how do we use Tableau as part of that ecosystem?’ Just to give you some idea how these projects are organized and then what the roles are. Brian: Got it. Your large projects fall both into maybe a database that’s sitting behind Tableau as the interface and then you have another one, the server provisioning one, which sounds like a custom web-based application or something? Paul: That’s right. Brian: So then, for that one, to me that’s the decision support. The provisioning action would be the decision the human takes theoretically, upon some analytics or insight, that made them decide, “I need to push the button to deploy X servers in Y region or whatever it may be.” Is that decision support part of that custom product as well? Or is this a balance between two or three different Tableau instances that are behind different databases, and then you co-authored the provisioning tool and just do the action, you make the decision in that tool, but the insight about when and how and where to make the decision is not part of the tool? Or is that actually in that tool as well, where it’s like, “Hey we predict that you should do this,” or “Here are the stats. You come and make the decision on provisioning based on what’s in this tool.” How much is that wrapped together versus a series of different URLs you’re going to bounce through and piece together yourself with eyeball analysis? Paul: There’s some separation of systems and we’re actually moving into a more integrated direction. For example, a lot of us begin with a customer demand. Either we determine or the customer gives this information that helps us determine that they need capacity in a certain area. That drives the process but that also factors in to a lot of decision-making that goes on, right about exactly what gets deployed, where, and when. There’s elements of this that are integrated in a sense that the deployments that we’re planning to make to expand a network or to choose a network in some way, are inputs into this great big optimization model where you say, “Here’s what we know we think is coming, here’s what we know we think is going to happen, here’s the moves we’re planning to make when and where we will run out of capacity. I think we’re moving towards a more integrated feedback model for that where less of the work has to be sort of connect the dots by a human being and more to saying, “Okay, all the systems have this data and if they can exchange it with each other, then we have all the data in the places we need it.” Brian: You’re talking about this feedback cycle annually, then you might look back and say, “How well did we arrange for these optimizations? We planned for these predictive resource allocation or whatever it may be,” you look back and see how accurate that was by looking at the utilization rates or something? Paul: Exactly. Is there a customer demand we failed to meet? On the flip side, were there servers sitting around underutilized? Brian: Got it. When we talk about Akamai going out and deploying servers, are you talking about deploying physical hardware in a datacenter or are you just talking about provisioning up virtual servers on the cloud somewhere? I’m just curious because you guys are a network that sits on top of the internet. Does this involve lots of humans and you’re rolling out hardware and all that or are we really talking about virtual deployments? Paul: Some of each, but one of Akamai’s hallmarks, actually, is the breadth of the network. We have some servers in pretty remote locations. These are physical servers. These are places in some cases where there isn’t a lot of good cloud providers or anything like that. Brian: Johnny’s going to the Arctic to install some Dell servers. Paul: That’s right. I’ll tell you there’s a datacenter in Antarctica and it’s possible we have a server there. Brian: Someone’s got to go rewire it once in a while. Oh, we’re out of a storage. There’s still disk drives in that cloud up there. They might be flash, but they’re still a piece of hardware. Paul: One of the things that really differentiates Akamai is that we have this extensive edge network which really is pretty unparalleled to the industry. Brian: When there’s a report back then, do they look at the travel cost for Johnny going to the Arctic on an ice clipper or whatever it’s called, and then was it worth going there to deploy these servers? Paul: Sure. Increasingly, that is the kind of analysis that we’re doing. [and] we manage the network according to some of that. When there’s servers that are sitting somewhere and just not getting used or they’re there but they were extremely expensive to put there, then maybe that’s not a place to cover in the future. But in some cases, it makes sense to keep our coverage really good even if in one area where we’re sacrificing a little bit of cost to keep the coverage up over all and that might be worth it. Brian: Right. I’m curious. Now that you’ve been here awhile and through all these, do you have any stories or anecdotes about a particular user experience, a customer/internal user that found an approach that’s useful, or you’ve got some feedback or maybe it was negative, but you learned something not to do it again, or any type of anecdotes that you can think about that were insightful for you? Paul: Yes. We had a number of tools that we use for manipulating all the business data around what’s deployed in our network. I would say that I guess the best [anchor??] I had about them is that we’ve found there are tools that are very commonly used because of their flexibility. But if you actually look at the tool itself and you look at the complexity of the tool, it’s not that complex. It’s the default way of using things and people have used it continually because it has always been the way of using it, when in fact, there’s nothing particularly special about it. We’ve seen in certain circumstances where you give somebody a new tool that just works faster, it provides very similar interface, or you found some tweak to that workflow that really can save them tons and tons of time, and you just watch their eye pop out. They realized that you just probably saved them two hours a day. It’s interesting that that can happen in pockets and corners. There are many tools that have been built already to help with that but there are still plenty of opportunity for it. Brian: That’s great. That’s one of the things I think I love about being a designer. A lot of times, the big picture rewards like, “Was this product valuable or profitable?” There’s these lagging indicators which take a while and they don’t have the same hit as those small wins which were like, “I just saved this guy two hours a day doing a task that has nothing to do with his skill set. It’s just labor. He’s not using his brain. He just has to download these logs, put them in Excel, run a lookup, and then blah-blah-blah. And now it’s just bam.” I love that and that’s part of it for me, at least the joy of doing design work and stuff. I totally relate to the way you’re saying about helping someone. It is so much about helping people and you also feel like, “Man, I’m also helping the company because I’m helping this person use his brain to do much more important things than maybe he was doing with tool time, like downloading crap and uploading into a tool, sorting it, changing this, and blah-blah-blah.” Most of that is tool time. That’s not the, “Should we put more servers in Antarctica?” It’s not the thinking time and the valuable business time. Paul: It’s one of the very fulfilling aspects of the job like this where you’re building tools for internal stakeholders. In many software industries, you build product but your users might not be accessible for you or hardly at all. “I see that they’re right down the hall.” It’s a great fulfillment I think in building something that meets a person’s need and having that feedback and knowing that [did.] and having the satisfaction of that. Brian: Yeah, that’s awesome. This has been great. I’m curious. Do you have any closing advice for other product owners or data product leaders, analytics practitioners in your space, maybe about changing domain, you’re in a new domain? Any kind of insights looking back in this six months or however long that’s been that you’ve been there? Paul: I would say above all, my advice would be take the time to plan. Nobody ever thinks they have the time to design or to plan. To some extent, you just have to say, “If we don’t do this, [you know] the thing we build is not going to be worth nearly a much as the thing we could build.” You’re much better off figuring out the right design for something before you build it. Even when you think you don’t have the time, ask your managers and then your management chain for that space you need to get that pipeline started the right way because once you actually design things, you’re going to find that the number of people you’re helping and the degree at which you’re helping them is much greater. Brian: I can totally get behind that. That closing statement, I agree. First of all, you’re putting that anchor in place to do good things down the road. You’re probably reducing you’re technical debt and you’re maximizing your ability to change, especially when you’re doing small deployments. You’re probably going to need to change stuff, so a little bit of designing and planning upfront can do a lot for both the engineering part of it but also most importantly the customer experience getting that right. So, amen to that. Paul: Maybe the last part of that, just to add, is sometimes we take for granted the job we’ve been at for a long time. We actually take for granted that we think we know what everybody needs already. Sometimes, actually, it’s a blessing when you come to something brand new, because you’re not to assume you already know what that person across the hall really needs. You say, “I’m going to ask that person because I have no idea.” I would say these problems are the same everywhere. Whether you’re in a place, in a domain you’ve been for a while, there’s still going to be some aspect to that problem and you don’t understand what that person is living with. Pretend being the new guy for as long as you can. Go ask again and get to really understand what that person is experiencing because I know you’re going to able to meet the need much better. Brian: Yeah, I think that’s great advice. You don’t have that bias from your own knowledge about the domain or your assumptions there and that’s just a good design technique in general is being able to compartmentalize. We all come to the table with bias but if you can try to put that aside. For me, a lot of times it’s like leaving with new stuff with clients. It’s explain it to me like a five year old and I tell my clients sometimes this like, “What does it mean to deploy a server? What is he literally going to do and how does he know when to push the button to go do that,” and sometimes they look at you like, “What do you mean? You don’t know what a server is?” It’s like, “Well, I know what a server is, but literally I want to see every step it takes to know to go put one there. Is the guy going to walk out there with a box and rack it up? Or is this a virtual thing? Literally tell me what that’s like, that whole process.” Even though I know something about how that works, you’re going with that clean slate because you want to be open to those things you don’t know to ask about, and that the more you can come in with removing as much of that bias is possible, you might find those nuggets and stuff that just pop out to you that the customer doesn’t know to tell you about, but that they’re just going through their process. They’ll often ping you. You have these moments where you’ll learned something you didn’t go in there to ask about and sometimes it can be a really big thing like, “Wow. That’s really what the gap here is. It’s not this. It’s this another thing.” Having that really childlike innocence about the way you inquire can help enable that. Paul: Absolutely. Brian: Where can people find out about you? LinkedIn? Twitter? Are you out there in the internet? Paul: I’m on LinkedIn, for sure. I’m on Twitter. I’m on Facebook. Brian: Where are you on LinkedIn? What’s your Twitter handle? I’ll put the links in the notes, too. Paul: I think I’m @pjmattal everywhere. Brian: @pjmattal on Twitter. Okay, great. I’ll put your information up there. Thanks for coming on the show. It’s been great to hear about what you’re doing in Akamai and good luck as you guys charge forward. Paul: All right. Thanks.

Biz Jazz Shownotes. Topic 1
 Would you swap your voice?
 “I wouldn’t swap my voice because …” insisted Paul. Topic 2
 How to Introduce yourself attractively [This episode is not sponsored by Joe Rogan] Paul says he’s a mature man who’s done business with 4398 companies - and availed of their services & noticed their style of delivering their offering. Roger likes to wear one thing, and ends up wearing the opposite. He is capable of forming a vision and sticks to certain practices. Lesson:
 Having a coherent vision & executing, it may help you grow a business that attracts people. __________________ Topic 3 How how to introduce yourself well - an example The DigisoftTV story Paul met a man at the Nespresso coffee station in Republic of Work, just before recording this episode of the podcast. A stranger he became interested in. A mutual attraction developed from which there was plenty to talk about. - He said nothing, he was “just there” - He paid attention, watched Paul take a photo of the “Get Shit Done” mug - He spoke about what Paul was interested in - He showed he was curious - Paul is attracted to people with curiosity - He knew nothing about Paul, except his maturity: he saw Paul photograph the mug with Steve Jobs as background & GaryVee language on the side - He connected to Paul’s current interest, spoke about the mug - He allowed Paul speak - “I had no idea he produces the RedFM podcast, and that he was from DigisoftTV.” 
[His boss Fearghal Kelly starred with Donal Cahalane on Republic of Work podcast]. Topic 4
 How to make a strong impression - an example 
Roger told the story about how someone stood out from the crowd in a way that appealed to him. A shirt that made someone look the most attractive person in the room during a storytelling workshop. Lesson :
 Pay attention to your customer’s story: it makes it easier to have a conversation In effect, “tell me your story” Think about how skilled “used-car salesmen” are successful at selling cars Topic 5 How to succeed at a job interview “Sell me this pen” story from Roger (picked up on LinkedIn). The impressive approach one candidate took which. Must be “Best Practice”. The known unknown: Did they get the job? Lesson: A good story empowers you. On Business Jazz podcast, we don’t plan what we’re going to talk about It’s raw & spontaneous. But we have the same agenda every week: how to attract others to your business (whatever that is) agreed P&R. “I think everyone can pick up our messages from the stories we’ve told on this episode” added Paul … [There much more in this episode. We better leave you to discover it yourself.] The episode ends on a cliff-hanger. Roger asks Paul “what’s the most attractive business you’ve ever dealt with?” __________________________ Please tell one other person about this podcast. Thank you very much for listening to this episode. Until next week. ___________________________ Recorded in Republic of Work, Cork, Ireland on 10th May 2019.

  We sit down with the host of Zig Zag to talk about decentralization, feminism, and how the blockchain might fix journalism The creators of Zig Zag: Manoush Zomorodi and Jen Poyant Capitalism, Journalism, and Women: This week Paul Ford and xarissa sit down with Manoush Zomorodi to talk about her new podcast, Zig Zag, and why she left a steady job at NYPR to create a media company on the blockchain. We chat about what it means to create a podcast on a technology no one really understands yet, the importance of owning your work, and how decentralized platforms are benefiting women. We also get to hear Paul’s manatee impression! 6:34 — Manoush: “It wasn’t necessarily about an incident or a guy, it was about the whole system.” 7:29 — Manoush: “If [Trump] can be President, I can have my own company.” 14:17 — Manoush: “ I don’t understand the blockchain, no one understands the blockchain, so what if we actually made something that explained the blockchain… it’s the perfect narrative vehicle to explore all the other problems that we have with the internet.” 13:30 — Manoush: “You’re going to put this thing on the blockchain… and you can’t take that away from us.” 19:07 — Paul: “It’s tricky. You’re in this priestly cast when you’r ein the media, and you’re not supposed to get your hands dirty. Then there comes a point where you’re like, ‘do I believe more in the ethos of this culture or is it worth it for me to participate even though I might get cast out of heaven’.” 22:08— Paul: “There’s a point where you go, ‘I can’t be broke and smart’.” 24:56— Xarissa: “[Women] historically have been really bad at creating things that we own.” LINKS Manoush Zomorodi Civil Zig Zag Podcast Jen Poyant Note to Self Stable Genius Productions Popula Maria Bustillos Julia Angwin Joe Lubin Sir Tim Berners-Lee   Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Production, show notes and transcripts by EDITAUDIO. Podcast logo and design by Will Denton of Postlight.

How does the endless scroll of Netflix impact our desire for sneakers? How does the manufactured scarcity of shoes influence a billion-dollar secondary market? What is a sneaker bot? The difference between iPhones and Sneakers: This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade sit down with product designer Matthew Famularo to talk about sneaker appreciation, manufactured scarcity, and the second-hand marketplace built around sneakers. We get acquainted with sneaker bots and discuss the ways that teens unknowingly carry out digital strategy for their favourite brands. We also listen to Rich’s admiration of Paul Newman’s good looks. [podcast player] ►iTunes/►SoundCloud/►Overcast/►Stitcher/►MP3 /►RSS 5:25 — Matthew: “Part of this multi-billion-dollar industry of sneakers winds up being sold because the supply is so incredibly limited and the demand is so high.” 7:25 — Matthew: “People will camp out for sneakers… It’s like Apple products, it’s like when the iPhone comes out.” 9:40 — Paul: “There was kind of a larger trend of athletes going from cool hometown celebrities to global mega superstars where everything is affiliated with them, like when Steph Curry came out with his sneaker and everybody made fun of it — I don’t follow basketball or sneakers, but that was big news.” 10:00 — Rich: “It’s fully baked at that point. You’re not wearing a sneaker to go play basketball in the schoolyard. You can, but it became fashion.” 16:18 — Matthew: “It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry, sneakers. It’s a marketplace. Because of this multi-billion-dollar industry and supply that doesn’t meet with demand, there’s now a billion-dollar secondary market that StockX is participating in, that eBay is participating in, that people are using platforms to sell sneakers.” 16:30 — Paul: “There’s a low cost of entry, it’s connected to street culture, there’s an element of hustle to it, and there’s a key thing you’ve just described which is that you’ve got this marketplace over here, you’ve got this waiting room here, you can automate this — or you could, theoretically.” 16:55 — Matthew: “There are a lot of different kinds of sneaker bots that you can get and it depends on the shoes that you’re looking for… Some bots do all of them. Some bots only do websites that use Shopify. Some bots only work on jailbroken iPhones because they work on the Nike SNKRS app. You have to understand what you’re looking for, and dependant on that, there are a number of options available.” 17:35 — Paul: “Everything you can do with the web has ended up in sneaker bot development territory.” 19:25 — Matthew: “We are now exposed to digital objects more than types of physical objects.” 20:05 — Matthew: “What you have today is between the digital objects [of music, TV, and film] is the notion of scarcity has exploded. Netflix will just pour content over your head until you drown in it so the perceived value is gone. I think that this is almost in a way a reaction to it, because you actually have this thing you can cherish in a weird way because not everyone has it. You know for a fact that because of the marketplace that there are just not a lot of them.” 20:50 — Paul: “That aspect, that sort of raw capitalist consumption part of street culture got really into the brains of cool rich young kids who are like, ‘Oh yeah, $1500 for a cool pair of sneakers, that’s no big deal. I’m a DJ and my parents are funding the next 30 years of my college education.’” 22:00 — Paul: “It’s not such a big market that serious, giant players are really deeply invested in it so it stays kind of ground level. Even the fact that there’s this whole sneaker culture and the bots and so on becomes part of the mystique. The marketplace is now connected to the big public branding event… They’re seeing this growing marketplace as feeding into their overall big brand efforts. Matthew at some level is pulling off the digital strategy around perceived value in the adidas and Yeezy brand for them.” 22:50 — Matthew: “One of the key points is that demographically you’ve got teenagers who fully understand that everything’s disposable. Everything. My Instagram, my Snapchat.” 27:35 — Paul: “Watches are very specific. Watches are rich people catnip.” 28:25 — Rich: “I just it’s cool that there’s this appreciation for this thing that there aren’t just endless amounts of.” 28:35 — Matthew: “There’s a separation between how widespread it can be. On social media, you can see photos of the shoe everywhere. But you go to… Ohio, and you’re not going to see that.” 29:30 — Paul: “When we’re having our kids play Pokemon Go, we’re training them to be sneaker drop consumers.” 31:10 — Paul: “As a species we find scarcity. I think it’s really exciting and I think it’s because we like having access to everything and then we get really excited about rich people having access to things we don’t and we’re like, ‘well why don’t I have it?’” LINKS Matthew Famularo, product designer StockX Virgil Abloh x MoMA x Nike The Story Behind The Air Menthol 10s YEEZY 500 | adidas + KANYE WEST Supreme Paul Newman’s Rolex

How many cake decorating videos does it take to disrupt the platform economy? Would forcing constraint on platforms generate better content? How do we reconcile unlimited access to an infinite library when we’re being pummeled by bad content? Endless scrolling is the opium of the people: This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade discuss how platforms like Spotify, Netflix, and Youtube have turned into an inescapable hellscape of unfocused content. We talk about being disappointed with the infinite media libraries of our dreams, and the potential for platforms to redeem themselves by constraining content, while looking at how smaller creators are already doing that. Paul also reveals his utopian dream of a centralized platform of curated cake-making content.   4:45 — Rich: “I go to the track, and I go View Album, because I’m wondering if I’ve stumbled on an artist that I want to really dive into… then I go to the album, and I want to like it so I’ll give the album a full listen. There’s so much shit. I get through the first [few] tracks of the album and then the waves break the glass in my house and flood, taking the table and me and the chair, and I go to the next thing.” 5:45 — Paul: “You know what I’ve noticed is the truly talented young artists just produce EP after EP, for years, and then they’re like ‘oh, I’m gonna do this album now.’ They don’t jump to the album. It’s a high risk game. 80% of it is gonna be trash unless you know what you’re doing.” 8:30 — Paul: “With the pure algorithmically defined entertainment that Netflix specializes in, there’s this thing called Dinotrux. It’s dinosaurs that are trucks because they know that little boys like trucks and dinosaurs — little girls too! Have you seen Dinotrux? It’s so bad.” 10:00 — Paul: “It must have been very exciting though at first where it’s like, ‘I’m doing a new thing, a Netflix standup special,’ and then a month goes by and it’s just not as cool for the comedians. Now you’re like, ‘I’m doing a Netflix special!’ and your housekeeper says, ‘so am I!” 12:30 — Paul: “We have a developer/designer here named Darrell and he made a playlist expiration tool. It’s called Dubolt. It’s quite good, you seed it with a few tracks and parameters and you get a very good playlist back.” 13:30 — Paul: “So we’re hitting a point in the glut where we’re realizing that emotionally and intellectually it’s not that satisfying to keep waiting and searching. You saw this when cable TV suddenly had five thousand stations and nobody could figure out what to watch.” 14:00 — Paul: “There’s always the great simplifying agent, which in our industry is often Apple, [saying], ‘you don’t want all those choices.’ Now the problem that Apple has — which is the problem everybody who creates a successful minimalist approach has — is that everybody starts adding stuff to it.” 15:00 — Paul: “We’re in the glut. There’s very little quality in a glut. There’s no sense of quality. Literally, it’s just this tsunami of content coming in and we’re all just like, ‘wow, that’s a lot of content!’ You thought it was what you wanted.” 15:25 — Paul: “We measure creativity by how people respond to constraints.” 16:50 — Rich: “When I see a Netflix Original Series, I just assume — and I could be surprised — I assume it’s bad.” 16:55 — Paul: “Compare Netflix and Youtube for a minute. What do both of them solve? They solve distribution. Suddenly they were like, ‘oh my god, we can put moving pictures in a rectangle on a screen and we can get it out to millions and millions of people.” 17:20 — Rich: “There’s a phenomenal quote by the Chief Content Officer of Netflix. They said, ‘what’s your strategy?’ and he said, ‘we have to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.’” 19:10 — Paul: “Here’s a thing I think a lot about: Cakes. Cake making is a whole scene on Youtube. There’s probably 30 million people… who watch and subscribe to cake content where people smear things with fondant. Very charming people. They sell spatulas. That’s how they monetize. I sort of look at Netflix as being very well set up to capitalize on these nascent expanding scenes in a way that Youtube can’t. You’ve got thirty, forty, fifty cake-making personalities but Youtube doesn’t really bring them together.” 20:50 — Paul: “It’s a promise that everyone is roughly equal on the platform, which is weird because you walk down the street and there’s a giant picture of a Youtube celebrity painted on the side of a wall in Manhattan.” 22:00 — Paul: “Netflix is weird because it’s all about subjects and I almost think it should be more focused around verticals. Like channels, or something on Netflix where you can go over and participate as opposed to these ‘movies for people who like cats and have no hair!’ I think Netflix is totally primed to do that.” 24:10 — Paul: “The whole system is set up where the platforms make it challenging to create real utility. The ways that you focus by making products that allow them to access the media and give them new powers and understanding — the platforms are not set up for that. They’re set up for continual delivery of a single experience which is usually a rectangle of video. They’re focused around the media, not the actual usage of the media to do things.” 24:50 — Paul: “Youtube is just a big open hole that anybody can throw their trash into, and sometimes people are like, ‘that’s not trash! That’s good!’” 26:00 — Rich: “For the consumer, I’m worried about them. The motivation on the creator side is to just pour more and more on my head. For the consumer, that’s led to a terrible state. Everything’s garbage. Most things are lousy.” 26:25 — Paul: “Even when you have a lot of money and you do everything right, the odds are that it’s gonna be pretty bad.” 28:35 — Rich: “You know what the most popular piece of advice is now? [Companies are] telling the person: Leave your phone outside the bedroom. Take a book with you. Pause and think! Think deeper!” 29:10 — Paul: “It’s always been crappy bestsellers and big stupid movies with car chases. That’s been the baseline for a long time. It’s not surprising that in an era of digital glut we just end up with more. Not better, but more… Do you try to build the new platforms where there are more constraints and more creative work? That’s a way to address this but you are climbing a very high mountain.” 32:20 — Paul: “Constraints matter, but platform economics take over. You have to choose how to live in this world, because it’s being done to you.” A full transcript of this episode is available. LINKS Dubolt by Darrell Hanley Is Netflix the Next HBO? Platform Economy Longform Rheo.tv Longreads And for His Next Act, Ev Williams Will Fix the Internet Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Production, show notes and transcripts by EDITAUDIO. Podcast logo and design by Will Denton of Postlight.

  What conversations can we have in email? When do we need to transition them into meetings? How can we make meetings more productive, and less of a waste of time?  Like Startups, Most Meetings Fail: This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade chat about the inefficiency of frequent meetings. We discuss what makes a meeting fail within the first few minutes, and provide strategies that can be deployed to make them successful (like defining a leader). We also complain about the neverending email thread, and the disconnect between our daily lives and the design of Google Calendar. Rich shares his best excuses (Ed note: lies) to get out of a meeting!  3:45 — Paul: “There’s the Two Pizza Rule for Amazon where no team should be bigger than what you can feed with two pizzas.” 4:00 — Paul: “I think there are three good meetings. There is, ‘hi, let’s all get in the room as higher primates and get a sense of each other.’ You need to see and understand the people who are going to be working with you on something. There’s the kickoff. Then there’s the ‘we went away and did some work and we wanted to show you that work and get your discussion within about a half hour.’ Then there’s the standing process focus meeting in which you know what you’re going to do, it’s about a half hour long, and it’s just more efficient to […] find out what the tasks are and walk away.” 6:10 — Rich: “This is free for all our listeners. It’s the opposite of saying ‘this is a waste of time.’ Ready? Here’s the sentence: ‘You don’t really need me for this.’” 6:30 — Paul: “The calendar is this territory that belongs to you.” 10:35 — Paul: “Let’s be honest. Calendering software is terrible. The way that we’ve arranged the weeks so that they’re verticle stacks from top to bottom, that’s now how humans think about things.” 11:00 — Paul: “Time really works like a slithering snake. It goes from left to right.” 11:50 — Paul: “95% of meetings fail within the first six minutes.” 13:37 — Rich: You know what the worst invite is? The preface is this: ‘We all gotta get into a room.’ You get in a room and you realize the email thread was way more productive than us getting in a room.” 15:00 — Paul: “I’ll tell you what I like. Email or meetings? Neither. They’re both terrible.” 18:30 — Paul: “My brain works that way. Business brains don’t work that way. They talk and talk… My brain works in 8.5 by 11 inch paper, top to bottom. I can’t get that in business, and I accept that. I always feel a little bit like a space alien.” 20:40 — Rich: “If there isn’t a clear path to failure, then that meeting is useless.” 20:50 — Paul: “What favour are you doing anyone by hiding the fact that you’re secretly a compulsive lunatic who needs them to do things?” 21:00 — Rich: “The three legs of a stool are ‘what is the thing?’, ‘who’s responsible for the thing?’, and ‘when are you gonna get the thing?’” A full transcript of this episode is available. LINKS Jeff Bezos Meeting scheduling tool The ‘two pizza rule’ is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ secret to productive meetings Jeff Bezos explains his famous one-character emails Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Production, show notes and transcripts by EDITAUDIO. Podcast logo and design by Will Denton of Postlight.  

Paul discusses the webinar, which took place in Café Re, and focused on why taking action is so hard.  It’s much better to focus on the action and not the results.  We are definitely in a results oriented society.  Focus on the journey and not the destination.  Success can follow a flawed effort, and failure can follow a flawless effort.  If your happiness is predicated on your success, and if your success is predicated on a specific outcome, then you are setting yourself up for a high likelihood of frustration and disappointment.  If you instead let go the need for any particular outcome, you increase your chances for success and contentment.  View each attempt as practice for the next attempt.  Dawn with a sobriety date of November 27th 2016, shares her story.   SHOW NOTES   [8:09] Paul Introduces Dawn.  I’m single, 42, and I’m from Poole in the U.K.   In the daytime I work in accounts, in the evening I’m generally working on my blog. I love going out to dinner with friends, and walking to work.  Set myself a challenge to do 10,000 steps a day.   [10:10] Paul- Tell us more about this experiment to live you life without alcohol.   Dawn- The plan was to give up alcohol for a year.  I was struck down with flu, and I gave up alcohol then, instead of waiting until the New Year.  I decided to write down my journey, and document it on my blog.  It’s been filled with positivity.    [13:35] Paul- The way I’ve made it this far in sobriety, and been successful, is that I looking at it as an opportunity instead of a sacrifice.  Is that something that you are experiencing as well?  You’re looking at this as an opportunity instead of a sacrifice?   Dawn- Yeah, definitely.  I don’t think I realized how unhappy I was drinking.  I was more of a binge drinker than a drink everyday, drink in the morning type person.  My weekend would be properly drinking from Friday through Sunday.  Drinking copious amounts of alcohol to the point that I was sick the next day.  I don’t see that as a sacrifice, giving that up that kind of mentality, since it was so much binging and purging.   [14:53] Paul- When did you first realize that perhaps that you wanted to quit drinking?  Was it something that happened?   Dawn- I was conscience that I was drinking too much in one sitting, not remembering how I got home, kind of dangerous drinking really.  If I drove somewhere I would have nothing, instead of a single glass of wine.  Because if I had one, it wouldn’t stay at one.  Once I started, it was difficult to stop.   [18:06] Paul- Can you tell me about a time when you started drinking and you found the “off switch” a little difficult to find?  Was that progressive for you?  Did it become harder and harder to stop?   Dawn- Yeah, I was born without an “off switch”.  The first time I really remember getting drunk I was probably about 15 or 16.  Early twenties living with friends, drinking was a massive part of our lives together.  The men that I met were a massive part of that as well.  It didn’t spiral rapidly.    [22:16] Paul- How are you staying sober now?      Dawn- It’s a matter of changing everything.  I thought life would carry on the same.  Everything has changed.  I write a post for my blog at least once a week.  Trying to keep other people encouraged to carry on.  I used to always have a special drink as a reward for hard work.  I no longer do that.  I have a drink when I am thirsty.   [26:31] Paul- There’s a quote in recovery- You don’t have to change much, you just gotta change everything.  Is that how it went down for you?   Dawn- I still struggle with the social side of things.  I was the party animal.  It’s difficult to go from that to- it’s dark and I’ve got to get home.  I find it hard to socialize without alcohol.  I’m not good with big crowds.  I’ve come to terms that I won’t be that person again.   [28:40] Paul- What have you learned most about yourself in these past 6 months of sobriety?    Dawn- I’ve never really believed in loving yourself.  Now I keep saying to people you have to love yourself.  I haven’t loved myself for 40 years.  I realized I’m not the person I thought I was.  In my previous job I wasn’t really helping people and I didn’t think I could. It’s being confident in myself, rather than what other people think.   [31:31] Paul-  How do you feel about alcohol being an addictive substance, and perhaps there is no void?   Dawn- For me, the feeling is what was addictive.  I was the crier.  Alcohol gave me an emotional release.  For me it gave me an emotional release, woe is me!  For a window of 15 minutes I would feel amazing, then I would go over the top.  Then you’re miserable.  I think really it was the way it made me feel for 15 minutes before the crying would start.   [33:27] Paul- What are your goals in sobriety?   Dawn- I’ve always wanted to go to Thailand.  Stop waiting around for something to happen.  I was too tired, and lazy, and in bed.  Now I’m full of energy, and I’m going to make it happen on my own in January.   [35:18] Rapid Fire Round What was your worst memory from drinking? Getting home, and waking up the next day at 4:00, and not remembering getting home in a taxi. Did you ever have an “oh-shit” moment? I was a drunk texter.  Sometimes I couldn’t even touch my phone.  They were my worst moments really working out who I had contacted the night before. What’s your plan moving forward? Keep the blog going beyond being sober.  Maybe the hope rehab center in January.  Listening to podcasts more than music, listening to other people’s journeys. What’s your favorite resource in recovery? I love the online forums.  Club soda, team sober UK, and listening to Podcasts.  It is amazing listening to other peoples journeys What’s the best advice you’ve ever received (on sobriety)? The best thing to do is go for each day at a time.  Breaking it into chunks can work.  Un-break the habit. What parting piece of guidance can you give listeners who are in recovery or thinking about quitting drinking?  Never give up.  I admire those who never give up.  I recommend writing down how you’re feeling.  I literally flooded my mind with sobriety. You might be an alcoholic if you find yourself questioning that you might be an alcoholic, then you probably are.   Resources mentioned in this episode:   dawn@soberfish.co.uk   http://www.soberfish.co.uk http://www.hope-rehab-center-thailand.com/ http://www.belvoirfruitfarms.com/ Recovery Elevator Retreat Connect with Cafe RE- Use the promo code Elevator for your first month free Sobriety Tracker iTunes Sobriety Tracker Android Sober Selfies! - Send your Sober Selfie and your Success Story to info@recoveryelevator.com     “We took the elevator down, we gotta take the stairs back up, we can do this!”