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Almost everyone in PR thinks they are awesome storytellers, but are they? Really? It’s one thing to say you’re a good storyteller. It’s quite another to be a good storyteller. That’s where Lindsay Graham can help. He’s an expert at the craft of finding new approaches to old stories. He joins Robert this week to share his advice for pros who want to become better storytellers.Also, the crew talks about a pug’s first birthday, a harrowing go-kart ride on Halloween, and coloring a map of the United States on election night. Editor Tim is away this week. He was distracted admiring the softness of his IPR marathon t-shirt and missed the recording session.Links:Guest: Lindsay GrahamLindsay Graham’s History Podcasts on Airship.fmO’Dwyer’s PR Newsletter
Birthday musings, living, and dying … what is important in life? Really? It has to be Jesus and the Gospel!
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m excited to have Jen for joining us. Jennifer, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role within your industry to our audience. Jen Scandariato: Sure. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. And, so call me Jen. Jennifer, sometimes I feel like it’s my father yelling at me because I’m in trouble. I am a female in tech, or women in tech. I’ve been doing this for about 25 years. Out of school, I wanted to be an accountant. I went to go work for a CPA firm, and after about six months, I was like, yeah, this isn’t for me. So, I went back to school and studied and started in IT and I’ve been in IT for over 25 years. SS: Well, Jen, we’re really excited to have you. And as you mentioned in your intro, you’ve been a strong advocate for women in tech and women in business. So, could you give us some insights into your own journey navigating the industry and really being able to rise to leadership levels throughout your career? JS: Yeah, it’s been interesting. Nothing is like straight up or straight across, it’s definitely a wiggly line as you build your career, as most people know. When I was done with the CPA firm, I went to go work in computers. I was really excited about IT. And somebody had mentioned it’s a man’s world and I’m like, what are you talking about? I don’t think so. And my next trip, after that conversation, I was on the bus heading to go get my rental car after I flew into an airport and I looked around and it was all men. I’m like, “they’re so right. This is a man’s world”. I never recognized that. I think what the reason why I’m so passionate about females in tech is I’ve noticed in conversations with the other females, they would say, “Oh, this job description says, they’re looking for a rock star and I just won’t apply.” And I’d be like, “That’s crazy. Don’t you think you’re a rock star?” And they’re like, “It just describes a very competitive environment that I’m not interested in.” And if I wasn’t in it, I would definitely be in psychology because that piqued my interest. I was like, “Tell me more. I need to understand this. Why would you feel that way?” So, it’s definitely been a journey for me, but I think because of my ability to take risk and just dive right in and kind of lead into projects. I can never recognize the imbalance of men versus females until it was brought to my attention. SS: That’s absolutely fantastic. And I think you’re absolutely right. I think there is a psychological element to that sometimes with women. I remember the meme that was going around when Kanye West said that he was going to run for president. I couldn’t agree more, and I think the same thing exists with women that are in sales enablement, because there is a technical and a sales component to that, and both have historically been predominantly male-dominated roles. So, I’m really excited to have you here to talk to us about this. I’d love to learn from you some of the things that have worked well for you in particular. I know mentorship has been helpful in your professional development. So, can you tell us a little bit about how that’s helped you evolve? JS: Yeah, I would say that I didn’t really have formal mentors. I think I’m mature enough in my career that it was prior to people telling you, make sure you have a mentor and make sure you have a sponsor. I think what I did was I wanted to surround myself with people that were brilliant and then I could learn from. You never want to be the smartest person in the room because then you aren’t learning anymore and growing. They always say, if you’re in your comfort zone, and you’re not taking risks then you’re not learning. I think my aptitude to learn and grow was just an important part of my career development. I just had that affinity to take on the world. I do recommend now to have individuals be that sponsor or be that mentor. And it doesn’t have to be a formal conversation. I think it’s about finding people that you admire, and you want to emulate. I think you could have, you know, it’s difficult in the virtual world to have a cup of coffee with somebody these days but if you could saddle up with them and learn by their example and then emulate that in your real world, I think those are the best mentors when it’s unofficial, you know? But I do believe you need a sponsor, you need somebody advocating on your behalf when you’re not in that room and in order to do that I think it’s important to tell your supervisors and people that you work with that you’re looking for an adventure, you’re looking for a new opportunity. You want to raise your hand and take on something that maybe is out of your comfort zone, out of your wheelhouse. When you put it out there that you’re looking for more opportunity and you’re raising your hand people are much more willing to give you that opportunity and give you that room to grow. You have to have trust though. So, I think it’s important that you set yourself up for success, show your capability on what you can do, and then people will trust you. I’ll give you a great example. I worked with somebody and I was mentoring her. She was one of my managers when I was a director of one of the companies and she would sit at the back of the room on the side, she would never sit at the table. And she’s like, “I really want to take on some more responsibility.” And I said, “All right, your homework is to be at the table this next meeting.” And she’s like, “What does that have to do with anything?” I said, “It’s about being visible. It’s about being present. You’ve got a seat at the table, it’s my responsibility to make sure you’ve got a seat at the table.” These are our future leaders, right? So, she did her homework. The next meeting we had, she sat at the table and the person next to her happened to be male and said, “Hey, it’s so good to see you at these meetings. You should have been here months ago.” And she looked at me and acknowledged she wasn’t seen. It’s a very, very powerful thing, but very, very important. SS: Absolutely. Now, to tweak the verbiage a little bit. What advice do you have for how people can cultivate these kinds of meaningful, beneficial sponsorship relationships to basically help support their professional development goals? JS: That’s a tough one. I think you have to deliver. I think you have to deliver, so I’ll give you a great example. So, I just started a new role. It’s at a company called FINRA. We are big data. We’re dedicated to investor protection and market integrity. We regulate about 3,700 security firms, which is representative about 99% of US equities in the market transactions. We process 135 billion market events every day. This is like really, really big stuff. And when I started, so I think I’m on day 41 or 42. So starting a new job in a pandemic is a whole different podcast. But, the very first thing I wanted to do was to set up meet and greets. I wanted to be with my team to get to know them better and build a relationship. And you’re having to do this on zoom right now, which is fine. And then you also want to meet with your business stakeholders. These are your end-user customers. You want to establish a relationship with them, and you don’t want to just talk about the good stuff, you want to talk about the bad stuff. You want to talk about the elephants in the room that say, “Hey, if I had to do something better, what would it be? What do I need to focus on?” You’ve got to deliver. And I think when you deliver and go back to those business stakeholders and said, “I heard you. Here’s what I’m working on. Just so you know, this is important to me.” They tend to give you a sense of respect and loyalty, and that’s how you build trust. So, I would say that you have to rely on the relationships you have trust with. You can’t just ping your CIO and say, “Hey, can you mentor me for 30 minutes tomorrow?” That probably won’t be as meaningful. SS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Now I want to pivot just a little bit, because you recently wrote an article on LinkedIn where you discuss the concepts of a winning mindset. And that’s also a concept that is well understood in the sales enablement space, where basically it’s the ability to take that negative feedback and apply it constructively. So, for those in the audience that aren’t as familiar with that I’d love for you to explain to them how can people use criticism as an opportunity for personal development? JS: Oh boy, that article was very cathartic for me. I had a couple of weeks where I had received some negative feedback that I didn’t necessarily agree with. I hadn’t really taken a moment and recognize this individual was giving me information and actually doing me a favor by raising my awareness on a particular situation. And whether or not it’s reality or perceived, I had to use that information. I did a little bit of soul searching. Again, I didn’t really agree with it, but it made me recognize that even though that might not be true feedback, in my opinion, I needed to change my approach and either over articulate or really change something with the way that I was handling a particular situation. So it actually turned into a very positive outcome. I quoted somebody in the article that said, “Change your perspective and understand that knowing something could be your biggest opportunity for growth and success, embrace it.” It really is about perspective and having that information allowed me to be able to pivot and really change. But it wasn’t easy. The immediate reaction that you have when you get negative feedback is to be defensive about it. Right? When you really just take a moment, take a step back and say, this is actually doing me a favor. That’s that positive mindset and it provides your biggest opportunity to potential, right? You got to embrace it as a gift of growing and learning and it’s just one of those hurdles you’ve got to get through. So, I could have totally taken it badly. I’m a little bit of a type-A personality and a perfectionist, and it definitely did hurt. It hurt my confidence. It wasn’t really like an ego thing. I thought I was doing a great job in this particular area. It was the ability to pivot, change my perspective, tackle it head-on, and fix it. And it was a really positive outcome. And I was talking to somebody who had a similar situation and they were like you’ve got to write about this. And I’m like, “Really? It’s kind of personal.” But, I’m totally happy to write about it if it can help other people. And there’s been multiple people on LinkedIn since I wrote that article, I think it’s got so many thousands of views and people still to this day, I received something yesterday that said it was very inspirational. So, I’m glad it helped. SS: Oh, absolutely. Now to give our audience a little bit of additional guidance around this from the perspective of a manager or even someone sponsor how can they give feedback so that it’s more positively received on the other side but also to help ensure that their teams grow from that feedback. JS: Yeah, that’s a tough one. People don’t like confrontation in general, right? There’s hesitation to say anything negative or hurt anybody’s feelings. And my mantra is you always have to get feedback often in real-time, in the moment. I’m not a really big fan of giving performance reviews once or twice a year. I really think it’s important to give immediate feedback when a situation occurs and the language that I like to use when I work with individuals and I’m in a leadership role and I have to course-correct and give people feedback if something was different than what I had expected. I basically say, “here’s what I was expecting, and this is how you delivered. And please take this as not criticism, take it as an opportunity to kind of knock it out of the park next time.” If you can use this information, this only helps you. It has nothing to do with me, but the more successful your team is, the more successful you are. So, you really, you have to have trust to be able to have that open dialogue though. So, I do go back to that trust. It’s a very important thing. Try not to be critical, just be open and honest, and humble about it. I took a leadership class early on in my career. And it said every negative, critical feedback you give an individual, we’re all humans, you have to have seven positive things for them to be equal. Seven. You can’t be like, “That’s a beautiful shirt you’re wearing today.” Like, that’s not one of them. You have to make it meaningful. Like if they do something good, you’ve got to say, “That was awesome. I appreciate you going above and beyond. I recognized you stayed late for this.” That builds them up so that when you do have to give them some negative feedback, it doesn’t completely deplete them as a performer, as an individual. So constructive feedback is really important for everybody. At the end of my one-on-ones or skip-level one-on-ones I asked them like, “What could I do differently? Am I doing all the things you need from me?” So, make it two ways. Don’t make it just one way. SS: I love that advice and I think that’s spot on. Jen, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. To close out, based on your own experience, I’d love some advice on key ways individuals can really to take ownership of their own career trajectory and personal growth. JS: Yeah, personal growth is a really interesting one. Again, go back to get out of your comfort zone and learn, grow, take a new class. There’s so many offerings right now, especially in the zoom world we’re zoom, zoom, zooming. You know, join a network, whether it’s a woman in tech or an agile meetup or tech meetup. Find your passion and surround yourself with people that share that passion. I would say the second part of that I would recommend is really around your brand. You have to figure out, like, what is your brand? What are you telling people when they meet you? What is your passion? Who am when I’m meeting with people, do I say, “I’m a mother of two teenagers?” Do I say, “I’m a woman in tech?” Do I say, “I love big data.” Like you have to have kind of like that tagline. I think you surround yourself with those allies and those mentors and this is great advice. Somebody told me this, and I never thought about this before. You want to be that person that people want on their team, not the person that they run away from you. So, if you think about what are the behaviors and things that you have to be involved with and do, and you’ve got to build this confidence, you’ve got to show what you’re capable of so that people are like, “Hey, I need you on my team. I want you.” So, you really want to be sought after, and then that will help you grow. And I always look for the win-win, you know, how can you help somebody else and also, benefit some of your growth opportunity in the process. It’s always about a win-win. SS: This has been fantastic advice, Jen. Again, thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed this conversation. JS: Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
On this special edition of the Discog Breakdown, Alex and Jake interview singer/songwriter Mirah about the new reissue of her debut album ‘You Think It’s Like This but Really It’s Like This’, making art, discarded banana peels and collecting garbage! — Purchase the reissue here: http://www.dbldblwhmmy.com/products/671895-mirah-you-think-its-like-this-but-really-its-like-this-20-year-anniversary-reissue
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?Kris and Madge do. They also know a terrible movie when they see one and let us tell you, folks: this is a terrible movie. There's barely a single redeeming thing in it so listen to this but probably don't watch it.Plus!They were going to build a franchise off this? Really? It's a stretch, sure, but they really were looking to do it. I think they saw Baldwin's chest merkin in the editing room and decided that it was never going to fail but I have no proof of this.Also!The Shadow did not start out as a comic book character but you will never guess in a million years where he did make his debut! Unless you go look it up on the internet which is very clever of you (we're all impressed) but you could have just listened to Part 2 of this episode and found out the easy way.Thanks for the download. Please get in touch if you feel like it.email isitabirdpod@gmail.comtwitter @isitabirdpod https://twitter.com/isitabirdpod Instagram: search 'isitabirdpod' and look for the usual logoyoutube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeUXLIzqezSGihfXS6p7v5g
In this episode, St80fEmergency and Ravenoak dissect part of Captain America: Civil War. (Really? It’s basically Avengers 2.5: The Bromance Between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, but I digress…) This film has an amazing cast of characters, and we are introduced to a whole new wave of Avengers. YAY!Where to Find Us:www.gethelpmcupodcast.comtwitter.com/gethelpmcupodinstagram.com/gethelpmcupodcastgethelpmcupodcast@gmail.comArtwork by RavenaokMusic is “Controlled Distress” by Biz Baz Studio
I like you! How often do you say that to someone? Really? It feels odd sometimes but in reality, we LIKE all kinds of things but do we say we LIKE the people in our world. Do you say "I like you " to your friends, spouse, children, or co-workers? Why not? Well, for one thing, it is a more intimate way of expressing what we feel. Want to improve the quality of your relationships? Tell them what you liked about them. That you like the time with them or the experience you had with them. Have fun and express what you like more often today. Here is the expanded audio - https://tinyurl.com/s9khjwh - from: --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/daniel-c-clark/message
Things Thought on Circle Drive Come on in and listen to some things thought Tonight I am again just thinking out loud Why is Joe Biden the front runner? Really? It does not make sense to me. To resit the wills of others you have too know yourself. It is okay to have pride in freedom. Voice Message at Anchor : anchor.fm/bentley-craig/message facebook : www.facebook.com/AaThingsThoughtOnCircleDrive/ emails: bentleycraig@outlook.com ; bentleycraig@yahoo.com Fringe Radio Network: www.fringeradionetwork.com Suicide Hotline 800-273-8255 Poison Control 800-222-1222 Aa Things Thought on Circle Drive --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bentley-craig/message
Can I say happy Good Friday or will it end up being a trip to the Linkdin HR department? We're nearly five weeks into isolation so I don't care. Happy Good Friday! Yeah the day Jesus died. If any of us would've been there not one person would've believed on this Friday what was going to happen in the days ahead. Which is how I look at this entire Coronavirus situation. What's in front of us? Evidence of restlessness from the masses is starting to show up on social media. It's gonna get worse. On this podcast I jump into the mess and try to find light in the center of a horrid rain storm that came from out of nowhere. I talk about the days when we had electric typewriters in the radio station. No computers. I will never forget when the internet was hooked up in our studio. I didn't have to buy another USA Today or Charlotte Observer. Sorry guys. What about the fax machine? Radio stations loved tapping into businesses to give them free lunch and things. That's how I look at the Coronavirus stoppage. Something is going to come out of this. It may not be on this Good Friday but a different type of Easter is on the way. Something is going to rise and from it people will be led to a better place. Oh wait. HR just sent me an email. I'm walking to close to losing my job. Really? It was announced today that 17 million Americans currently don't have a job. 17 million! Chew on that chunk of fat for awhile. When you are allowed to go back what will you be walking into? Have you reached out to your old boss just to see how they're doing? You need to. Just because. The new normal changes everyday. I sit in this recording studio for nearly 14 hours everyday. I show up because on the other side of this Good Friday is Easter. We have to be ready. Put structure back in your life. Get dressed. Floss your teeth. Belong to something even though we're in isolation. When we go back the demand is going to be far worse then your final week. Be ready mentally and physically. Have I thanked you yet. Hi I'm Arroe. I show up here every day knowing you might. Thank you for taking the time to just say hi.
Can I say happy Good Friday or will it end up being a trip to the Linkdin HR department? We're nearly five weeks into isolation so I don't care. Happy Good Friday! Yeah the day Jesus died. If any of us would've been there not one person would've believed on this Friday what was going to happen in the days ahead. Which is how I look at this entire Coronavirus situation. What's in front of us? Evidence of restlessness from the masses is starting to show up on social media. It's gonna get worse. On this podcast I jump into the mess and try to find light in the center of a horrid rain storm that came from out of nowhere. I talk about the days when we had electric typewriters in the radio station. No computers. I will never forget when the internet was hooked up in our studio. I didn't have to buy another USA Today or Charlotte Observer. Sorry guys. What about the fax machine? Radio stations loved tapping into businesses to give them free lunch and things. That's how I look at the Coronavirus stoppage. Something is going to come out of this. It may not be on this Good Friday but a different type of Easter is on the way. Something is going to rise and from it people will be led to a better place. Oh wait. HR just sent me an email. I'm walking to close to losing my job. Really? It was announced today that 17 million Americans currently don't have a job. 17 million! Chew on that chunk of fat for awhile. When you are allowed to go back what will you be walking into? Have you reached out to your old boss just to see how they're doing? You need to. Just because. The new normal changes everyday. I sit in this recording studio for nearly 14 hours everyday. I show up because on the other side of this Good Friday is Easter. We have to be ready. Put structure back in your life. Get dressed. Floss your teeth. Belong to something even though we're in isolation. When we go back the demand is going to be far worse then your final week. Be ready mentally and physically. Have I thanked you yet. Hi I'm Arroe. I show up here every day knowing you might. Thank you for taking the time to just say hi.
Welcome! Today's show is a repeat of the Show aired on February 15, 2020. There is a ton of stuff going on in the world of Technology, and this show will hit several topics today. If you are on my email list, it has current articles that you need to read. If you are not on my email list, sign up at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. There are some scams that are getting more and more prevalent with Airbnb and VRBO that we will talk about. Also, phishing scams using the Coronavirus as a way to trick you into clicking. The ACLU is filing suit against DHS. China is stealing our Intellectual Property. Shadow IT becoming more and more of a problem and even more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on WGAN. It is a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Is it possible to secure our Elections using Technology The security mistakes made by the Iowa Democratic Party in creating their App Coronavirus bringing out opportunistic Hackers Extensive US Intellectual Property theft by Chinese being investigated by FBI Scammers have found a fertile field in Airbnb DHS wants to track illegal aliens using available cell-phone location data. ACLU says Whoa! Shadow-IT: Employees putting Business at Risk Ransomware rings adapt to business declarations by Revealing Stolen Data --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hey everybody, welcome, welcome. Craig Peterson here on, WGIR, you can also hear me every Monday morning at 737 with Jack Heath, where we discuss some of the latest topics in technology. Of course, nowadays, you can't talk about technology without security, which is what I've been doing in my business now for about 30 years. I was coerced into it. Maybe one of these days, I'll share that whole story with you. It can get to be kind of a long one. But today we are going through some of the problems that I've seen out there lately. I have on my podcast this week that you can get at Craig peterson.com slash Iheart, Craig peterson.com slash Iheart. I spent quite a bit of time talking about recent problems people have been finding with Airbnb with VRBO, and I go through some of the problems I recently have had with both of those services. And I think it's well worth listening to because I've gotten to the point right now where I will not use either Airbnb or VRBO, I don't think ever again. My experiences with them have just been so overwhelmingly negative, anyhow you'll find that online, and you can subscribe there as well at Craig peterson.com slash I heart. That like is going to take you to the I heart app. You might be listening to me right now, in fact, on Iheart streaming on these AM and FM stations. If you are, kudos to you, but you can also get all of my content by going and subscribing, Craig peterson.com slash I heart, and I'm also on every other major podcast streaming platform that's out there. But first, I just want to make mention of this other article that came out last month in January. It's talking about computer literate millennials and Generation Z. These are the people that grew up with the internet. They've had the internet pretty much their whole lives. They've found meaning the Federal Trade Commission found that people ages 39 and under are more likely to report fraud than the 40 plus crowd. Now, here's the thinking here. It isn't that the younger kids millennials and Generation Z, it isn't as though they are less afraid to report that money stolen from them. It appears that they are more likely to fall victim to fraud. 25% more likely. Now the millennials are less likely to fall for a scam over the phone and people over 40, but 77% More likely, Millennials are 77% more likely to get duped by email scams and 90% more likely to lose money on a fake check scam. Now, the thinking behind this is that those of us who are a little bit older, we hold the whole internet thing with a little bit more skepticism than our children and grandchildren do. Because we know that there are scammers out there and we've heard all the horror stories, whereas the younger kids are looking at it as well. It's the internet, and they just give their stuff away. We already know that there are studies that show that the millennials will give their email address or weigh in trade for a single donut. Okay. They don't value a lot of this stuff. And, you know, to me, well, it's a little bit concerning, and it should be to you. But let's get into the latest scam that's out there right now. It isn't the Airbnb scam, which has been out there for a few years now. As I said, hey, I've been burned, what, four or five times by this overall personally. I am jaded, and I just don't use it anymore period. It's a real shame because there are some good people out there. But this has to do with what's been happening with the Coronavirus. It is a huge deal. We had one day this week, where 15,000 new cases were reported. The Chinese changed how they tracked and diagnosed cases. So they're saying hey, listen, it's you know, it's Change. Don't expect this to indicate that more viruses are spreading out there. And frankly, I look at it and say, Well, maybe there are there aren't. But what we're seeing are some rather sophisticated phishing scams going on. Phishing, of course, this is the one spelled with a Ph. It is where an attacker tricks you into doing something. It might be clicking a link. It might be responding to an email. It might also be a phishing scam over the phone or, you know, SMS a text one which is called smishing. A whole new type of phishing this going on right now. Well, last week, IBM and Kaspersky now Kaspersky is an anti-virus company. They are also trying to stop the general spread of malware. They are a Russian firm, and the State Department and FBI have warned us about using their software, but they do have good information. When I see Kaspersky combined with IBM, a company I do respect, then that does kind of make my ears stand up, if you will. IBM and Kaspersky caught hackers in Japan, trying to spread malware through emails. And the emails had links about the coronavirus outbreak that started Of course and won China last month in January. And now adding cell phones to the list. Of course, Cisco, to the list, they have found phishing emails from cybercriminals, purporting to be from the Center for Disease Control, as well as the World Health Organization and what they're trying to do the bad guys his deal your email credentials and other information. The emails are coming from several domains, including CDC dash gov.org, which, of course, is not the real CDC website. So be very careful if you are trying to find out information about the CDC, or about the spread of Coronavirus about flu in general. For instance, in my home state of New Hampshire, we have I think it's seven deaths so far this year reported g attributed to the flu in general, not the Coronavirus. Every year about 12 to 16,000 people in the United States die from the flu. So far we've only got 14 cases reported of Coronavirus So, at this stage everybody, this is nothing to get all freaky worried about. Okay, so calm down. If you want more, go to CDC.gov. CDC Centers for Disease Control cdc.gov. And it tells you what to do now this Coronavirus has an official name now it's called Covin-19, co vi d dash 19 because there are multiple versions of Coronaviruses and viruses. And we have had a report in the past about Coronaviruses, and they have killed people previously. So you'll see right at the top of the CDC, gov website, information about the Coronavirus and it spread. It is a respiratory disease. It is potentially fatal. It doesn't seem to be any more fatal than some of the other viruses that we've had. So let's put all of this in context. And when you get an email from someone saying hey, Look at this, click on this link, it's going to get you information about the Coronavirus, it's going to let you track the spread of, etc. don't respond. And you, if you get a text message, don't respond. I got one because I'm a member of the Great and Powerful media, right. I got one last week that was sent out to members of the media saying, Hey, we got this new tracking site. You just can't be cautious enough when it comes to this. So if you go to CDC Gov at the top, you'll see the description here about the Covin-19. And you can click on that, and it'll show you a global map about where it has been reported what is happening. I'm looking at one. It's about one day behind it looks like right now for Covin-19. But you can see all of the countries that have been reporting it and then you can also So look at the hard statistics. People under investigation in the United States exactly how many 14 positives you'll see that there. Of course, it changes daily. How many negative how many pending? The people are under investigation. Remember, the airplane full of workers from the State Department that came back from China. They have now been under quarantine for more than 14 days. They released them all from quarantine because it turns out that nobody had that virus, so just because you have the flow doesn't mean it's Coronavirus. More cases over on the left coast and the Midwest, which is kind of surprising to me than there are on the East Coast or the Mid Atlantic, etc., etc. So have a look there. Do not respond to emails or texts or phone calls. Okay. Just be very, very careful. Hackers are imitating this sort of thing. Then the other side of this is they are sending out messages, seeking donations, and they're asking for Bitcoin donations to the World Health Organization. I can tell you right now, the World Health Organization, the CDC, they are not taking Bitcoin donations, okay? Don't go and donate, right. Again the CDC gov.org is the bad guys cdc.gov is the good guys. The scam page is elementary. it might have taken the scammers just a few minutes to put together. It's very effective. It looks legit. And the FBI and, of course, also Homeland Security are taking down these pages as soon as they can, but they can't always get rid of them right away. And companies we got to be proud. We've got a chain, train our employees not to follow up on these scams. So again, that's part of why I publish my newsletters. I report on the biggest scams that are going on. I try and keep it down to just a few a week. You can share them with your employees, share them with your family, but you have to get them to share them. Go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about this whole thing with the ACLU and their current fight. I spoke about something similar to this a couple of years ago, man, maybe actually the first time was probably about ten years ago. There are companies out there, and they gather information about us. They're called Data brokers. And I have visited some of these data brokers sites themselves. I mean physical site, where the company operates where they have their data collections, to help them with security problems that they have. And to help prevent problems from occurring, right. That's what I do for a living full time. And it was probably ten years ago, the radio show that I talked with some of these companies. But what they do is they take what's called open source information that's used a lot by government or investigations. And you can use open-source information yourself. All you do is go to Google, for instance, and do a search. That's the open-source information. It's anything that anyone can gain access to, without having to be a police officer without having to go and really kind of, you know, get a court order kind of be surreptitious and how you gather that's open source. So the data break brokers will take all of that, and that can include depending on States your living driver's license information. It can include information about the mortgage for your home. It can include you know the ownership of your home, and it can include just all kinds of stuff. And that becomes very, very difficult to control. Because all of your information is out there. It's available for free or for cheap on the internet. So these data brokers, they might buy it from the county, they might get it an open-source. Some of these documents are going to contain like your mortgage is going to contain your signature. The deed to your home is going to contain the signature, the automobiles that you own. There's going to be UCC filings with the Secretary of State's office, detailing what cars you own, who the lien holders are, and how much money is involved, all of this stuff. So it all gets pulled into these days. databases I mentioned on the show a few months ago, a couple of months ago that we were out in Las Vegas at a wedding. And of course, you know, doing work while I'm out there sitting on the couch, doing work for some of our Las Vegas clients when there was a knock at the door. Who's there? Well, it's an insurance investigator investigating an accident that had a fatality. And of course, the insurance company had been asked to payout. They came to this home because they had information that the person involved had contact with someone at this address, which indeed she did. It was her sister, and the driver had been responsible for this fake fatal death. The driver listed was one of my sisters in law, who had died six months before the accident. It was all fake. The insurance investigator showed my wife all of this information she had that they had purchased from one of these data brokers. It had listed my deceased sister in law's relatives, everybody every address she had ever had. It had names and contact information for some of my kids as well. Now, it was not all correct or organized. When I've looked at the data brokers' information about me, only about half of it is right, but the other half is entirely incorrect. That's still the case because they had a lot of utterly false information. People that they said were relatives that weren't. People we'd never heard of before, they identified as direct relatives of hers. The insurance company purchased all of this information from a Data Broker, in collections, this is called a skip trace. It's called a skip trace for people who jumped bail, etc. Man, we should talk about this whole bail thing, and the idiocy and New York state that is spreading countrywide dog, the bounty hunter and his wife Beth had been fighting this for a long time because it's making us much, much less safe. But anyhow, that's not a topic for today's show. It's not a political topic, because it's undeniable what's already happening with the increase in the crime rate, New York anyways. What the government is doing now and this is part of what I was warning about a decade ago, is the federal government, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, of the IRS, you name it. They are limited in how they can collect information, we kind of already knew that, right? They knew that they had to get a search warrant for certain things, right? They can follow you around if you do not expect privacy, etc., etc. So obviously, federal government agencies can use open-source information to see what you're doing online. But how about the closed source stuff? How about this information that the data brokers are collecting? Some of it comes from the people who lent you money. Some of it they're getting from places where you have to pay to get that information. What's happened here now is that the ACLU has filed a suit, according to The Wall Street Journal, against Homeland Security and Homeland Security through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. As well as Customs and Border Protection, is buying Gilo geolocation data from these data brokers. It's using it to investigate suspects who have allegedly committed immigration violations. So let me boil all that down into plain English. You might be using games on your smartphone, and you might be using all kinds of apps on your smartphone. If you have a smartphone, you probably are, frankly, not using 90-95% of those apps that you have downloaded. But many of those apps are tracking you. And that information is being sold to data brokers. So think about that for a minute. Remember that free app and how you've heard me and many others for so many years. Say, hey, you're not the customer. You are the product. But what's happening here now is that the ACLU is saying to the federal government, hey, you cannot, you cannot buy this information that you are not allowed to collect yourself. You cannot buy it from data brokers or these app developers who are selling it. Interesting question, interesting problem, isn't it? What should they do? What should you do? What can you do? It is going to play out in court. I suspect it's going to come down on the side of the Department of Homeland Security because this information is generally available to anyone willing to pay for it. So now the government stepped forward, saying we are will pay for it. By the way, it's down to local law enforcement as well, who, in many cases, are also buying information from the data brokers. Have you ever set up a company Amazon account? Have you ever set up an account for a company account for Uber? Maybe it's not a company account. Perhaps it's your account that you're using for Uber or something else? How about using something like Constant Contact to send out emails to your customers? How about salesforce.com, where we've seen a shift over the years from what used to be kind of the glass castle, where you had a central computer room in that computer room was a mainframe. And those mainframes were astounding. They still are. And that mainframe in that glass room was controlled by professional Information Technology people, people that knew what they were doing at least at the time, right? Then we started seeing some changes. You remember the apple two and VisiCalc Visicalc was kind of the killer application. And if you wanted to do numbers, then you bought an apple, you purchased a little apple two. And you then pulled data and people were asking that glass house, they were asking it, Hey, can you give us data because we want to put together some spreadsheet. People put together spreadsheets without really understanding the implications of the numbers they were using without understanding how to audit a spreadsheet to make sure that the figures included were correct. They didn't understand the double journaling. They didn't understand the cross-referencing of the information. They started a bit of a movement away from that glass house from that glass castle from it. They said hey, we could figure this out, why are we going to pay it all of this fake budget money to do something for us and we can do it for ourselves and do it cheaper. Frankly, that's a problem I still face with many organizations, if you can believe it, who think they can do security themselves, which is impossible for almost any organization. In this day and age, any small-medium business must have full-time external professionals who are helping your internal IT people. The internal IT should be doing what they do best, which is helping your business use information technology, to its best use, assisting people to be more efficient, finding new ways of doing things, etc. Instead of that, what most businesses do is they have these various silos, like sales and marketing and accounting. And each one of those silos, those lines company does things their way. So the sales guys, they're out, and they said, Hey, we're going to use Salesforce. And we're going to tie that into Constant Contact. And then you have your accounting people saying, well, we're going to use QuickBooks Online. Or maybe they're going to use one of Oracle's accounting systems. And then the manufacturing people say, Well, we are going to use this particular era p program, which is going to be great for manufacturing. And we've decided that we're going to use Survey Monkey to collect information from our customers from our vendors. You see where I'm going, each one of these lines of business is going out there and making what are in actuality, information technology decisions. They're making decisions about what type of technology to use, which is one level, but then the next Next Level is they're using it. And they're putting the business's information at risk. It is a huge, huge problem. It's something that I'm going to be addressing with some of this training that I have coming up with a couple of these tutorials correctly tackle these problems. And so if you're on my email list at Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, you're going to find out about these, and I'm going to give you some great cheat sheets and other things. But all of those again, Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. All of those different lines of business, all of those different functional responsibilities within an organization larger small, are adding up and adding up hugely. And there is a massive problem behind this. Now you know, that I use one password, and I recommend it, and we typically Use one password in conjunction with Duo to help secure login information. But because one password is used so frequently by companies to keep track of logins, they have kind of a unique view into the risks of all these different accounts. And what we're talking about where these lines of business are making Information Technology decisions that they're not qualified to make, and frankly, in most small-medium companies, there's probably no one in the organization that's fully qualified. Still, at least it has a better idea, but then a marketing person or an accounting person would have. So this is called shadow it and it's absolutely something that we have to be careful of and we have to watch for and if you are one of these people who is using one of these third-party services, and you have not informed your IT person. Do it right now. All right, thanks. Okay, hey, we have a lot more content that you can get online. Just go to Craig Peters on.com. You'll find it right there in my weekly newsletter that you can use to help educate other people inside your company. Maybe family, maybe friends, and indeed, educate yourself and the things that you need to know security-related or just the newest and latest greatest technology. Now I got an email here just while was Facebook a couple of weeks ago a message about a story that I had reported on about Tesla before, and I try and answer those I dig them up I get them for you. But I want to make sure you are subscribed at Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, so you get all of that. Thanks for being with me here, WGIR, and we'll be back Monday morning with Jack Heath at 737. Hey, welcome back Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online Of course, Craig peterson.com. If you want to, you can subscribe to my email list you'll find out about the free tutorials that pop up training, courses, everything that I do to help make you and your business more secure. So again, Craig Peterson, dot com slash subscribe. I got to read this to you right now. I decided to cancel through Airbnb and tell them about what had happened. He went off at me, berated me for not handling in it privately, and told me I was acting in my self-interest, and belittled me. I ended up having to pay the first full month even though I stayed one night. His listing is still up, and a review posted after my state also mentioned the silverfish. Isn't that something? Now, this is from a report that came out from vice. Now you might be familiar with vice.com. There's a lot of decent stuff up there. But I want to tell you a little bit about my own experience I've had with Airbnb and VR Bo now VR Bo is vacation rentals. It's it has been used more, I think, by businesses from what the stuff I've read than it is by individuals. But I have had bad experiences with both of them. Every time I have had an Airbnb, I have had a bad experience. So let me tell you what I mean by a bad experience. For instance, I was out of Vegas at a conference, and we thought, you know what, let's try Airbnb. I'm the tech guy, right? I need to understand this. Why wouldn't I go ahead and use Airbnb in make sense, right? So here the tech guy goes, and we poke around read reviews we read ratings. We found an apartment, not far at all, I mean like half a mile from the convention center. We thought, okay, this is going to be perfect. It says it's right by the strip we could walk over there, hop a cab or, or grab a ride and enjoy The Strip, and then the morning we can just walk over the convention center. We're not going to have any problems parking because it said it is an apartment. Let me start with parking. By the way, parking is another thing in the second Airbnb story. There was no parking. You had to park a half a mile away sometimes because people were just parking in the parking lot of the apartment building. There were no reserved parking slots for the apartment. So there's number one — number two. When we go into the apartment, and it's quite nice. We find out that it has two bedrooms. We had only booked one bedroom because that's all the listing talked about the one-bedroom. We get there, and we find, okay, so this is our bedroom over here. Well, the bedroom did not have an ensuite bathroom. The bathroom for the bedroom was across the hall. So there we go, we get in there and okay, fine. So our bathrooms across the hall, and we end up going to bed. We enjoyed it was a nice place relatively clean, quite old. It was probably a 40-50-year-old apartment. In the layout that you would expect there in the southwest where there's kind of a courtyard in the middle, and it's a little two-story thing and, you know, kind of reminded me when I lived in LA back in about 1980 late 70s early 80s. You know it's that part was quite nice. You know brand new shag rug in there, well you know not brand-new but quite new and clean. That part result was good. We go to bed and then we there we hear just tons of commotion because somebody else who didn't speak English very well had come to stay at the apartment as well. We hear them going into our bathroom, using our towels. They are very, very loud talking on the phone, and they get a hold of the owner right of this Airbnb. They got the same impression we did, which is there's one-bedroom in this place. So they had an ensuite bathroom. We did not, but they were using our bathroom the whole time and our towels, there's only one set of towels. It wasn't a great experience at all. They kept us up for quite a while because they were just so loud. Now you know me, I'm not an outgoing guy. You might not believe that, but I'm a little bit of an introvert. And as an introvert, I didn't want to go out and confront these people who were I'm guessing, or you know, from Asia, they were speaking Chinese or Korean or Japanese, I have no idea. I just didn't want to mess with it. So we get up in the morning, we and everything is okay-ish. We go to the conference and then that night, I guess these people only there for one night. That night, we had the whole place to ourselves, which is okay. Knowing that with Airbnb, I rate the place after I stay there, but the owner of the place rates me and so there have been a lot of issues of retaliation when it comes to Airbnb. If you stay at one of these places and you don't give them this glowing five-star review, then you're not going to get reviewed while and other people might not want you to stay at their place. So I gave it a reasonable rating. I can't remember what I gave it, you know, places clean and, and, you know, it was a nice place and there is another bedroom. You know, just kind of hint into anybody reading this. It isn't going to be dedicated to you and maybe your loved one you're staying with and left it at that. That's my first Airbnb story. And then my second Airbnb story, as I mentioned, had a lot to do with parking as well. And in this case, it was in the Toronto area, up in Brampton, and we rented a place on Airbnb, you know, I figured, well, we'll give another chance, see what happens. It was a three-bedroom place, and they said it sleeps like eight or something like that. What you did if you include the fold-out couch, and so we figured, okay, we need some parking. So I had sent them a message saying, hey, it's going to be myself and a couple of my kids and some grandkids. You know, I want to make sure that there's plenty of parking. Is it? Oh, yeah, plenty of parking, buddy parking, no problem. And so we get there, and there is one parking spot. And it's in one of these. I don't know if you know much about Canada and how they build their housing there. But one of the reasons I'm not that fond of it, right. I grew up there. It was these townhouses that are built right on top of each other, you know, the zero property line homes there. Three, four, or five of them attached. The only place you can park is in the little garage place. Well, the garage itself was full of stinking trash. Who knows how long it had been there. You couldn't use the garage. It had hared the driveway with the condo next door to you. It had one parking spot. I had my car, my daughter's car for her, her husband, and a couple of her kids. And then one of my other kids also drove up there. We had to find a place to park. Now the good news was that the whole neighborhood was under construction. They were able to park in the mud. in one area where construction wasn't happening right then, of course, the next morning, what shows up big dump trucks, excavators, everything else to work across the street from us. That wasn't fun. Let me tell you that it was not fun. We were quite worried about our cars, with all of this heavy equipment on this little narrow street designed for one car to go down the street when cars park on the street. We have to go right now when we come back, and I'm going to finish what happened with my air mean being being being a story, as well as my VR Bo story. And we got a whole lot more to cover. We're going to get into this Homeland Security thing with the ACLU and more but stick around, listening to Craig Peterson a course on WGAN online at Greg Peterson dot com is where you'll find me. Make sure you subscribe so that you get all of my free tutorials, training courses. Everything, Craig Peterson dot com, stick around. Hey, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and of course online, at Craig Peterson dot com. I was in the middle of telling you my stories about Airbnb. If you have ever thought about staying at Airbnb, or VRBO, or any of these types of places, right, obviously you're not staying at a website, but you're booking through a website, somebody's home, somebody's rental, whatever it might be then this is for you. I have done it for personal reasons. I have done it for business reasons as well. I told you the beginning of my story in Toronto, and I told you the last segment about my story in Las Vegas. We didn't have the parking, and the kids are all worried, and I was concerned about our cars getting destroyed by the heavy equipment. Were we going to have to move them because they were working on the lots across the street? It's incredible how fast the housing is going up there and how expensive it is to it's, it's just not how pricey it is. We get inside the place. Now, remember, I said that the garage was full of trash which was, and it stunk to high heaven, which it did. Okay, so some of that leaks into the house, which makes the house kind of smell too, which is just plain old, no fun. We get into the house, and I go and sit on this folding couch. And remember, the house is supposed to sleep eight, and it has a fold-out sofa. I sit on the couch. It reeks of BO, body odor. Right? I mean reeks. One of the first things I have to do is I want to make sure that they know that this is a problem so that maybe they can take care of it. I call, and I don't get any answer because it's the weekend, right? Nobody's around. We head out to the local grocery store, and we get some odor killer stuff, and we bring it back, and we drench the couch in it. And we're able to get rid of most of the BO you know, and its underarm smell is what it is. Someone with some nasty underarm odor was sitting on that couch. They put their arm up on the back of the sofa and left all of their BO behind them. Then they did the same thing on the couch itself and somebody supposed to sleep there, right? Oh, it was just incredible. Then we go upstairs and upstairs that we noticed that the fire alarms had tape all around the sides of them. Now, if you're not familiar with the way firearm alarms work, they have to be able to have air flowing through them to sense that There's smoke in the air or carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, whatever the type of detector is. And it had been it had tape all around it. Now it looked like it was painters tape right that blue tape that you use as you can pull off that isn't going to leave residue behind. So maybe it was the painters perhaps it was the owners, I don't know, perhaps it was a previous occupant, but I warned them about that as well as saying hey listen, your fire alarms are not going to work because it blocks the airflow on the fire alarms by this tape that's on them. I never got a response on anything there. So what do I do when it's time to leave a review? Well, I said the place was in perfect shape. It's brand new. I had to do a little bit of cleaning. The cleaning crew in because the carpets upstairs all had the markings of a, you know, a vacuum cleaner. You can see the wheel marks on the floor and everything else. So you see it's not as though a rip them a new one like I have seen done before. And you never get to see your ratings by the way from these Airbnb owners. Okay, so there's a second one not neither one of mine were nightmares per se, but they both had significant problems that I was afraid to report on because I know that turnabout is considered fair play and who knows what these owners are going to say. Then I tried a VRBO, but they are older. They've been around for something like 30 years, and it's vacation rental type stuff, right? So VRBO, okay, we'll try it out. So we try it. We booked a place, and I wrote to the owners. Hey, there's we're going to have three cars, or two cars can't remember what it was now. Is this going to work for us this okay, I want to make sure this parking is I've had issues before? I never got a response from them. But, you know, they ran my credit card through so I figured, okay, well at least that part is done. I show up with the family in tow. And we're going to have this great time together. I'm going to be working, and they can stay in and just enjoy the place you know, a new city, a new location is going to be great. Guess what? VRBO had canceled my reservation without telling me without informing me, without crediting me. Well, it turned out that they didn't end up crediting me after all the credit card, but here I am waiting for the place that I can't get in. I called up VRBO to say, Listen, I never got a code for the door or anything else. What should I do here? Oh, no. Well, I see that reservation was canceled. I never canceled the reservation. Oh, no, sir. It was canceled, like the day after you booked it. I said, wait a minute. I never canceled it. Well, okay. Well, then the owner must have canceled. Why didn't I get notified? Oh, you didn't get notified, sir? Really? It says they sent an email. I went through all my junk mailboxes and everything else and yep. Okay. I got a notice of cancellation. Oh, man, what a pain that one was. Well, we can find another place in the area you're in right now. We'll make sure you get a refund. I said, Listen, I'm here. I don't have A place to stay. What am I supposed to do now? And they just say I'm sorry, sir. You know, I'm sorry, We'll make sure you get credit. That's all they would do. For me, it was absolutely a nightmare. Three experiences personal experiences for me. One of them a nightmare. One of them on the edge of a nightmare. Another one that could well have been a nightmare but was a mere inconvenience. You can probably guess by now what my thinking is about Airbnb and VRBO. That's what got my interest in this article about this poor guy who was scammed, okay. He was trying to stay in Montreal, and the owner asked him to pay for their stay, outside of the Airbnb app. I've seen that happen many, many times. Because that way, the owner does not have to pay the Airbnb fees, okay? But if you do that now you have very little recourse against the owner, then you know, I've done some chargeback. Lately, now my company if someone buys a course from us, and they're not happy, and we will immediately refund their money because we just don't want them to be upset or disappointed. Because again, you know, our whole thing is to nourish you back to health when it comes to security stuff, right, get that transformation done. I have had some nightmares personally trying to do a chargeback for things that were never delivered, or that got charged inappropriately. Or where I canceled the service. In one case, it was like it was over $1,000 a month for the service, and I canceled it. They charged me the 1200 dollars anyways. I went to my credit card company, and they said, well, we'll have to verify it with the vendor first. So what? I canceled it. I had to fight with a credit card company, and then when they checked with the vendor, and the vendor said, Okay, well, it's fine. We'll take chargeback. You used to be able to do this at the drop of a hat, and I guess they've abused it, right? I think that's the bottom line on it. But man, oh man, so we'll get a little bit more into this vise story. I guess its turned into an Airbnb, VRBO, what to do if you want a vacation rental or if you want to rent a place while you're on a business trip. And then we'll get into some of the more of the articles here, in the next hour. You're listening to Craig Peterson, of course, on WGAN and online. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson back here. I don't know if you guys know what Airbnb's roots were. It started as an air Bed and Breakfast. It was intended for the very young generation to be able to go to concerts and things and just get an air bed in somebody's apartment or home. That's what Airbnb is all about air bed and breakfast. That was the whole idea. And I'm not so sure they've come a long way from those days. I spent the last few segments, in fact, in talking about my horror stories, we've been trying to use Airbnb. There's another one I did not mention in Florida, which was not a horror story quite the disappointment for this house. That I think while I'm quite confident in this house that we rented. It was for a family reunion. So we rented this house that slept like a dozen or something like that. All of the beds were just terrible. You know, the cheapest mattresses that are known to man. You shift your weight at all, and the squeaks loud enough to wake you up. The sheets are the cheapest ones you could imagine. It was an Airbnb as well. It was pretty obvious that the set up for this place was for porn videos. You go into the garage, and the whole garage is one massive shower with I can't remember for six showerheads in it. And then a little bit of workout equipment. I mean a tiny bit of workout equipment. It sounded awful. Okay. And so there you go there, there's all of the Airbnb and VRBO, experiences I can remember. My sister rented the one in Florida for the family, and she did not stay there. She stayed with my mom. It was quite revealing, frankly, so disappointing. I never shared these stories before, but it was because of a story that was in a vice.com, and you'll find this up on my website and Craig peterson.com. They put a little note out saying, Hey, does anybody have any stories about Airbnb, Airbnb scams, and they said, this is Anna Marian, who wrote this that nearly 1000 people sent them emails with their stories. They looked at all of the stories they put together some patterns. A former vice senior staff writer by the name of Alec Conti shared her story about a disastrous vacation to Chicago, and she ran into what she's saying are a bunch of grifters, and frankly a nationwide scam. I no longer use Airbnb at all or VRBO at all. I have been sticking with hotels. If you're interested, I typically use hotwire. I don't use the star ratings of the hotels. I rely on the ratings that are posted by the people who stayed there. I think that's the best feature of hotwire, frankly. I don't care what hotel it is. I just want to stay at a decent hotel. I even used hotwire throughout France and Belgium. It worked great. We found some just wonderful spots that we would never have found if we were just looking to stay at the Marriott or the Hilton or whatever it is, right? So Conti's investigation revealed some serious problems with Airbnb. Now you might have heard about this problem with Airbnb. After all, it hit the news late last year of these party rentals after a death happened. I think it was in San Diego at one of these party rentals. Somebody rented a nice house. Essentially a lot of these places get destroyed by the partiers, right there. There are drugs and heavy drinking, and in this one case, that hit the news. There were gun shootings. Okay, that's a very, very bad, bad thing. So Conti apparently, and again, you can find this article on vice.com traced her scam back to a company that used fake profiles and fake reviews to conceal a whole bunch of wrongdoings. Let's get into this okay because property switches are one of the biggest ones will tell you about what those are the units of sawdust on the floor with holes in the walls, this whole bait and switch game which goes into these properties, switches, and stuff. It's awful. When all else fails, there are these clumsy threatening demands for five-star reviews to hide the evidence of what they've done. Sometimes multiple scams are involved. You know it the hackers aren't just coming after directly our money by trying to hack our businesses by trying to fool us into clicking on links or doing things that we shouldn't be doing, right? These scammers are all over the place. After this story that came out, Airbnb promised to "verify All 7 million listings on this site by December of this year 2020". Frankly, there's no way that they could do this. There's no way you could send investigators to all 7 million listings. He said, Well, we're going to have to take more responsibility for stuff on our platform. Yes, you will. You have to provide a firewall. Not just a firewall of the reviewers, the people who stay there and review can see the reviews that come in from the owners of these properties. That's not going to solve the problem. You need to make it so that there can not be retribution by the bad guys that have given Airbnb a bad name. Now I got to mention that my sister the one that booked that Airbnb for us in Florida, my sister has a house that she rents out in Park City, Utah, on Airbnb, and one of her daughters keeps it clean. I know my sister is not engaged in scams. I know that my niece is somebody who takes responsibility for things. I'm sure she keeps it clean. I don't want to paint the whole Airbnb, a website and people who are renting with a black brush here, I don't want to paint the whole rental market, including the VRBO with a black brush, but I've got to say 100% of the time I have had what I think are scams on both platforms. Now, that's my personal opinion, based on a handful of stays, and I know a handful of stays does not represent every listing on the platforms, right. I understand that. However, its the verification process, we're talking about here. I don't know that he's ever going to do it. How are you going to review and verify all 7 million listings on the Airbnb site within 12 months by December 2020? I don't know how you're going to do it. So let's go through the biggest scams according to vice.com number one, which they say is exceedingly common. It's across hundreds of emails. It's the bait and switch where Airbnb users were promised one apartment and arrived to find something very different. deceptive photos a bore no resemblance to what they found when they got there. My kids found this too. They rented some places in Italy when they did a tour, and you know, black mold everywhere just terrible. Okay? Other times and they were persuaded by those to switch apartments or houses entirely. It is a widespread thing where they say, hey, due to unforeseen circumstances, as a pipe broke, I'm going to have to move you to another one of our properties. Now under the rules for Airbnb, the owner does not get penalized if they push you to a property due to quote, unforeseen circumstances unquote, like a pipe break. But it turns out some of these people are using that unforeseen circumstance again and again and again. And they're showing up to their rental defined the new locations filthy, unfurnished on a different part of town. And they're saying that in a surprising number of stories, the original house was full of a weird amount of bear beds laid out and bizarre configurations, kind of sounds like that porn place my sister rented for the family in Florida, doesn't it? So here's one of the quotes I rented a place near Glass beach and a few weeks part of my trip. When I reached out to confirm the booking, the Lister told me she had a septic problem in the unit, and she would see if she'd put me if she could put her up in a more prominent place nearby. It never materialized, but she refused to cancel my booking, saying the first time that her computer wasn't working and the next time weeks later that her father just passed away. I had to complain to Airbnb that she refused to cancel the booking, so they canceled it, but I was unable to write a negative review. According to Vice again, they're saying the plumbing scam seems to rest on the idea Airbnb won't penalize a host if the house is uninhabitable. Okay, that's what I was saying. I've seen this before. So this goes on and on this whole bait and switch thing. Okay, next one, getting the guests to agree to move houses and the plumbing scam is often kind of segway into getting you to agree to move houses. Okay? So they will say, supposed to be this, you know, here's this complaint supposed to be quaint, quiet property in downtown. They get delayed by the homeowner stating that we'd need to change properties the last minute since it was only a quick two-night visit we weren't opposed. The new quote larger location was this scummy little apartment complex on the other side of town. Another one - Booking the Airbnb to multiple people at the same time. That's what happened to us in Vegas. When my wife and I showed up at this apartment through Airbnb, perhaps the most socially awkward Bait and switch is this one renting an Airbnb where you believe you booked the whole residence only to arrive and find a whole bunch of strangers there. That happened to us in Vegas. Multiple people told us they came to see other Airbnb guests at the house, or in some cases, people who seem to live there. It just goes on and on. Next one - money scams, paying outside the app. I mentioned this one early. It says it's a straightforward scam. Be careful. There's no be careful here, as there is no reason to do that. Fake damages - Man, I've heard about this from multiple people before mine. How can Airbnb police this? Did the guests damage the place? Okay. Oh man scam scams, you'll find more about this online. My advice? Use a hotel you trust us out of the hotel booking site, you believe. And I already told you, I use hotwire because I don't care what the brand is. I just want a good hotel, and I use the ratings from the people who stayed. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online at Craig peterson.com. Hey, have you thought about how to follow along at home or on the road during the week? The easiest way to do that is to listen to my podcasts. Why not? I put it out there are multiple things, including this weekend show, but many other things that I include during the week, and you can subscribe to that as well on your favorite podcast platform. And it says Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes. If you are an iTunes type of person or Craig peterson.com, slash tune in or slash I heart. Okay, I am kind of all over the place today. I appreciate everybody who does Listen to me and comments on things during the Week. You'll also find me on LinkedIn and Facebook and YouTube, but it is kind of over the place as I talk about some of the biggest stories of the week. Now we were just talking about scams that seem to be coming from Airbnb and VRBO, of course, but there is a lot of scams going one. We are going to get into one right now tied into the coronavirus. But first I just want to make mention of this other article that came out last month in January. And it's talking about computer literate millennials and Generation Z. These are the people that grew up with the internet. They've had the internet pretty much their whole lives. They found meaning the Federal Trade Commission has found that people ages 39 and under are more likely to report fraud than the 40 plus Crowd now here's the thinking. It isn't that the younger kids and millennials and Generation Z, it isn't as though they are less afraid to report that money has been stolen from them, it appears that they are more likely to fall victim to fraud 25% more likely. Now the millennials are less likely to fall for scams over the phone than people over 40, but 77% More likely, Millennials are 77% more likely to get duped by email scams and 90% more likely to lose money on a fake check scam. Now the thinking behind this is that those of us who are a little bit older, we hold the whole internet thing with a little bit more skepticism than our children and grandchildren do. Because we know that there are scammers out there. And we've heard all of the horror stories, whereas the younger kids are looking at it as well. It's the internet, and they just give their stuff away. We already know that there are studies that show that the millennials will give their email address away in trade for a single donut. Okay, so they don't value a lot of this stuff. You know, to me, well, it's a little bit concerning, and it should be to you. But let's get into the latest scam that's out there right now. It isn't the Airbnb scam, which has been out there for a few years now. As I said, hey, I've been burned what, four or five times by this overall, personally. So I'm just to the point I just don't use it anymore period. It's a real shame because there are some good people out there. But this has to do with what's been happening. Now it is happening with the Coronavirus, and this is a huge deal. We had one day this week, where 15,000 new cases were reported. Supposedly, it was due to a change in the way China was tracking the Coronavirus and diagnosing people. So they're saying, Hey, listen, it's you know is just a change. Don't expect this to indicate that more viruses are spreading out there. And frankly, I look at it and say, Well, maybe there are there aren't. But what we're seeing are some rather sophisticated phishing scams going on. Phishing, of course, this is the one spelled with a Ph. It is where an attacker tricks you into doing something. It might be clicking on a link. It might be responding to an email. It might also be a phishing scam over the phone or, you know, SMS a text one which would be called smishing. A whole new type of phishing this going on right now. Well, last week, IBM and Kaspersky now Kaspersky is a Russian anti-virus company. They are also trying to stop the general spread of malware. The State Department, the FBI, Homeland Security, not to use Kaspersky software, but they do have good information. So when I see Kaspersky, combined with IBM, a company I do respect, then that does kind of make my years and help if you will. Still, IBM and Kaspersky caught hackers in Japan, trying to spread malware through emails, and the emails had links about the Coronavirus outbreak that started, of course, in Wuhan China last month in January. Now adding Sophos and now, of course, Cisco to the list. They have found phishing emails from cybercriminals, purporting to be from the Center for Disease Control, as well as the World Health Organization. And what these bad guys are trying to do is to steal your email credentials and other information. The emails are coming from several domains, including CDC dash gov.org, which, of course, is not the real CDC website. So be very careful if you are trying to find out information about the CDC or the spread of coronavirus about flu in general. For instance, in my home state of New Hampshire, we have I think it's seven deaths so far this year reported g attribute To the flu in general, not the Coronavirus. Every year about 12 to 16,000 people in the United States die from the flu. So far, we've only got 14 cases reported of Coronavirus. At this stage everybody, this is nothing to get all freaky worried about. Okay, so calm down. If you want more, go to cdc.gov. CDC Centers for Disease Control - cdc.gov, tells you what to do now. The current Coronavirus has an official name now. It's called covin-19 co vi n dash 19. There are multiple versions of Coronaviruses, which is why they identify each with a number. We have had a report in the past about Coronaviruses, and they have killed people previously. So you'll see Right at the top of the cdc.gov website, information about the Coronavirus and its spread. It is a respiratory disease and potentially fatal. It doesn't seem to be increasingly more fatal than some of the other viruses that we've had. Let's put all this in context. And when you get an email from someone saying, hey, look at this, you click on this link, to get information about the Coronavirus. It's going to let you track the spread of etc. don't respond. If you get a text message, don't respond. I got one because I'm a member of the Great and Powerful media, right. I got one last week that was sent out to members of the press saying, Hey, we got this new tracking site. You just can't be cautious enough when it comes to this. So if you go to CDC Gov at the top, You'll see the description here about the Covid-19. You can click on that, and it'll show you a global map about the location of reported cases and what is happening. So, I'm looking at one, and it's about one day behind. It looks like right now for Covid-19. But you can see all of the countries that have been reporting it. Then you can also look at the hard statistics. People under investigation in the United States, exactly how many 14 positives, you'll see that there. Of course, it changes daily. You can see how many tested negative and how many pending, the people are under investigation. Remember, the airplane full of workers from the State Department that came back from China. They have now been under quarantine for more than 14 days. They release them all from quarantine because it turns out, nobody had that virus. So just because you have the flow doesn't mean it's Coronavirus. More cases over on the left coast and the Midwest, which is kind of surprising to me than there are on the East Coast or the Mid Atlantic, etc., etc. So have a look there. Do not respond to emails or texts or phone calls. Okay? Just be very, very careful because the hackers are imitating this sort of thing. The other side of this is they are sending out messages seeking donations. They are asking for Bitcoin donations to the World Health Organization can tell you right now, the World Health Organization, the CDC, they are not taking Bitcoin donations, okay. So don't go and donate. Right And again, the CDC gov.org is the band guys CD see.gov is the good guys. The scam page is straightforward. It, you know, took the scammers, maybe just a few minutes to put together. It's handy, and it looks legit. And the FBI and, of course, also Homeland Security are taking down these pages as soon as they can, but they can't always get rid of them right away. And companies, we've got to be proactive. We've got to chain train our employees, not to follow up on these scams. So again, that's part of the reason for my newsletters. I report on the biggest scams that are going on. I try and keep it down to just a few a week. You can share them with your employees, share them with your family, but you have to get them to share them. Go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe, and you'll get those as well stick around. We'll be right back on WGAN. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN, and thanks for joining us today. Hopefully, you picked up a lot of good information. We're just talking about the CDC some of the scams that are out there right now from the Coronavirus, including one involving Bitcoin, which kind of surprised me. We talked a lot in the first hour about the major scams on Airbnb, where you can rent apartments or homes for a day or a week or a month, almost anywhere. It's really quite neat. But the major scams have been going on there and how I've seen them personally and why I will never use it ever again. If you want to listen to that, just go to Craig Peterson comm slash tune in, you can subscribe right there. Listen to me, live by the way on tune in when I'm on the radio. He And when I'm on with canon Matt, the morning drive every Wednesday at 737, every Wednesday morning, as well. And those are all on tune in. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about this whole thing with the ACLU and their current fight. I spoke about something similar to this a couple of years ago, man, maybe actually the first time was probably about ten years ago. There are companies out there, and they gather information about us. They're called Data brokers. I have visited some of these data brokers sites themselves, I mean, physical sites, where the company operates where they have their data collections, to help them with security problems that they have, and to help prevent problems from occurring, right. That's what I do for living full time. It was probably ten years ago, the radio show that I talked with some of these companies. What they do is they collect open-source information that's used a lot by the government for any number of things from financial transactions to investigations. And you can use open-source information yourself. All you do is go to Google, for instance, and do a search. That's the open-source information. It's anything that anyone can gain access to, without having to be a police officer without having to go and really kind of, you know, get a court order kind of be surreptitious and how you gather that's open source. So the data break, brokers will take all of that, and that can include depending on the state you're living, driver's license information, it can include information about the mortgage for your home. It can include you know the ownership of your home, and it can include just all kinds of stuff. That becomes very, very difficult to control. Because all of your information is out there. It's available for free or for cheap on the internet. So these data brokers, they might buy it from the county, they might get it an open-source. Some of this information will contain data from your mortgage, will contain your signature, the deed to your home is going to contain the signature, the automobiles that you own. There's going to be UCC filings with the Secretary of State's office, detailing what cars you own, who the lien holders are, and how much money is involved all of this stuff. So it all gets pulled into these databases. I mentioned on the show a few months ago, a couple of months ago that we were out in Las Vegas at a wedding and of course, you know, doing work while I'm out there and I'm sitting They're on the couch doing work for some of our Las Vegas clients. And there's a knock at the door. And who's there? Well, it's an insurance investigator investigating an accident that it was a fatal accident. And of course, the insurance company had been asked to payout. So they came to this home because they had information that it that the person involved I had a contact with someone at this address, which indeed she did. It was her sister, and apparently, the driver had been responsible for this fatal death. The driver listed one of my sisters in law. She had died about six months before the accident. So obviously, it was all fate. The insurance investigator showed my wife all of this information she had from one of these data brokers. It listed my deceased sister in law's relatives, everybody, every address she had ever had. There were names and contact information for some of my kids. However, it had a lot of incorrect information, including supposed current addresses and voting information for relatives deceased for over two decades. When I've looked at the data brokers' information about me, about half of it's correct, but the other half is completely incorrect. And that's still the case because they had a lot of completely incorrect information. People that they said were relatives that weren't people we'd never heard of before. They said these were direct relatives of hers. At any rate, they had purchased all of this information from a Data Broker. In collections, this is called a skip trace. It's called a skip trace for people who jumped bail, etc. Man, we should talk to about this whole bail thing, and the idiocy in New York state that is spreading country-wide dog, the bounty hunter and his wife, Beth had been fighting this for a long time because it's making us much, much less safe. But anyhow, that's not a topic for today's show. It's not a political topic, because it's undeniable what's already happening with the increase in the crime rate in New York anyways. What the government is doing now is what I was warning about a decade ago. That is that the federal government, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, of the IRS, you name it, they are limited in how they can collect information, we kind of already knew that right? You know that they had to get a search warrant for certain things right. They can follow you around, without any expectation of privacy, etc., etc. So So obviously, federal government agencies can use open-source information to see what you're doing online. But how about the closed source stuff? How about this stuff that the data brokers are collecting? Some of it they're getting from the people who lent you money, some of it they're getting from places where you have to pay to get that information. So, what's happened here is that the ACLU has filed a suit, according to The Wall Street Journal, against Homeland Security. Homeland Security, through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, as well as Customs and Border Protection, is buying geolocation data from these data brokers and choosing to investigate suspects who have allegedly committed immigration violations. So let me boil all that down into plain English. You might be using games on your smartphone, and you might be using all kinds of apps on your smartphone. If you have a smartphone, frankly, you're probably not using 90 95% of those apps that you have downloaded. But many of those apps are tracking you. And that information is being sold to data brokers. So think about that for a minute. Remember that free app and how you've heard me and many others for so many years say, hey, you're not the customer. You are the product. Well, what's happening here now is that the ACLU is saying to the federal government, hey, you cannot buy the information that by law your organization cannot collect. You cannot buy it from data brokers or these app developers who are selling it. Interesting question, interesting problem, isn't it? What should they do? What should you do? What can you do? It is going to play out in court, and I suspect it's going to come down on the side of the Department of Homeland Security because this information is generally available to anyone willing to pay for it. So now the government stepped forward, saying we are will pay for it. By the way, this goes down to local law enforcement as well. In many cases, they are also buying this information from the data brokers. So let's stick around when we come back. We're going to talk about shadow IT. If you don't know what it is, it's a problem if you're in business. Hey, welcome back, everybody Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Thanks for joining me and for spending part of your Saturday with me. If you're listening to this on a podcast at Craig Peterson dot com slash tune in, thanks for joining me, some listen to me while they're driving to and from work and find the various segments of my show, which are about ten-ish minutes long, really work well into their day. So if you're doing that, thank you if you're not, please do consider it. I try and keep everybody up to date with the information that you need to know. And that leads us to what we got right now. Which is shadow IT. Now I bet there is not a co
Welcome! Today there is a ton of stuff going on in the world of Technology and we are going to hit a number of topics today. There are some scams that are getting more and more prevalent with Airbnb and VRBO that we will talk about. Also, phishing scams using the Coronavirus as a way to trick you into clicking. The ACLU is filing suit against DHS. China is stealing our Intellectual Property. Shadow IT becoming more and more of a problem and even more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on WGAN. It is a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Is it possible to secure our Elections using Technology The security mistakes made by the Iowa Democratic Party in creating their App Coronavirus bringing out opportunistic Hackers Extensive US Intellectual Property theft by Chinese being investigated by FBI Scammers have found a fertile field in Airbnb DHS wants to track illegal aliens using available cell-phone location data. ACLU says Whoa! Shadow-IT: Employees putting Business at Risk Ransomware rings adapt to business declarations by Revealing Stolen Data --- Machine Automated Transcript: Hey everybody, welcome, welcome. Craig Peterson here on WGIR, you can also hear me every Monday morning at 737 with Jack Heath, where we discuss some of the latest topics in technology. Of course, nowadays, you can't talk about technology without security, which is what I've been doing in my business now for about 30 years. I was coerced into it. Maybe one of these days, I'll share that whole story with you. It can get to be kind of a long one. But today we are going through some of the problems that I've seen out there lately. I have on my podcast this week that you can get at Craig peterson.com slash Iheart, Craig peterson.com slash Iheart. I spent quite a bit of time talking about recent problems people have been finding with Airbnb with VRBO, and I go through some of the problems I recently have had with both of those services. And I think it's well worth listening to because I've gotten to the point right now where I will not use either Airbnb or VRBO, I don't think ever again. My experiences with them have just been so overwhelmingly negative, anyhow you'll find that online, and you can subscribe there as well at Craig peterson.com slash I heart. That like is going to take you to the I heart app. You might be listening to me right now, in fact, on Iheart streaming on these AM and FM stations. If you are, kudos to you, but you can also get all of my content by going and subscribing, Craig peterson.com slash I heart, and I'm also on every other major podcast streaming platform that's out there. But first, I just want to make mention of this other article that came out last month in January. It's talking about computer literate millennials and Generation Z. These are the people that grew up with the internet. They've had the internet pretty much their whole lives. They've found meaning the Federal Trade Commission found that people ages 39 and under are more likely to report fraud than the 40 plus crowd. Now, here's the thinking here. It isn't that the younger kids millennials and Generation Z, it isn't as though they are less afraid to report that money stolen from them. It appears that they are more likely to fall victim to fraud. 25% more likely. Now the millennials are less likely to fall for a scam over the phone and people over 40, but 77% More likely, Millennials are 77% more likely to get duped by email scams and 90% more likely to lose money on a fake check scam. Now, the thinking behind this is that those of us who are a little bit older, we hold the whole internet thing with a little bit more skepticism than our children and grandchildren do. Because we know that there are scammers out there and we've heard all the horror stories, whereas the younger kids are looking at it as well. It's the internet, and they just give their stuff away. We already know that there are studies that show that the millennials will give their email address or weigh in trade for a single donut. Okay. They don't value a lot of this stuff. And, you know, to me, well, it's a little bit concerning, and it should be to you. But let's get into the latest scam that's out there right now. It isn't the Airbnb scam, which has been out there for a few years now. As I said, hey, I've been burned, what, four or five times by this overall personally. I am jaded, and I just don't use it anymore period. It's a real shame because there are some good people out there. But this has to do with what's been happening with the Coronavirus. It is a huge deal. We had one day this week, where 15,000 new cases were reported. The Chinese changed how they tracked and diagnosed cases. So they're saying hey, listen, it's you know, it's Change. Don't expect this to indicate that more viruses are spreading out there. And frankly, I look at it and say, Well, maybe there are there aren't. But what we're seeing are some rather sophisticated phishing scams going on. Phishing, of course, this is the one spelled with a Ph. It is where an attacker tricks you into doing something. It might be clicking a link. It might be responding to an email. It might also be a phishing scam over the phone or, you know, SMS a text one which is called smishing. A whole new type of phishing this going on right now. Well, last week, IBM and Kaspersky now Kaspersky is an anti-virus company. They are also trying to stop the general spread of malware. They are a Russian firm, and the State Department and FBI have warned us about using their software, but they do have good information. When I see Kaspersky combined with IBM, a company I do respect, then that does kind of make my ears stand up, if you will. IBM and Kaspersky caught hackers in Japan, trying to spread malware through emails. And the emails had links about the coronavirus outbreak that started Of course and won China last month in January. And now adding cell phones to the list. Of course, Cisco, to the list, they have found phishing emails from cybercriminals, purporting to be from the Center for Disease Control, as well as the World Health Organization and what they're trying to do the bad guys his deal your email credentials and other information. The emails are coming from several domains, including CDC dash gov.org, which, of course, is not the real CDC website. So be very careful if you are trying to find out information about the CDC, or about the spread of Coronavirus about flu in general. For instance, in my home state of New Hampshire, we have I think it's seven deaths so far this year reported g attributed to the flu in general, not the Coronavirus. Every year about 12 to 16,000 people in the United States die from the flu. So far we've only got 14 cases reported of Coronavirus So, at this stage everybody, this is nothing to get all freaky worried about. Okay, so calm down. If you want more, go to CDC.gov. CDC Centers for Disease Control cdc.gov. And it tells you what to do now this Coronavirus has an official name now it's called Covin-19, co vi d dash 19 because there are multiple versions of Coronaviruses and viruses. And we have had a report in the past about Coronaviruses, and they have killed people previously. So you'll see right at the top of the CDC, gov website, information about the Coronavirus and it spread. It is a respiratory disease. It is potentially fatal. It doesn't seem to be any more fatal than some of the other viruses that we've had. So let's put all of this in context. And when you get an email from someone saying hey, Look at this, click on this link, it's going to get you information about the Coronavirus, it's going to let you track the spread of, etc. don't respond. And you, if you get a text message, don't respond. I got one because I'm a member of the Great and Powerful media, right. I got one last week that was sent out to members of the media saying, Hey, we got this new tracking site. You just can't be cautious enough when it comes to this. So if you go to CDC Gov at the top, you'll see the description here about the Covin-19. And you can click on that, and it'll show you a global map about where it has been reported what is happening. I'm looking at one. It's about one day behind it looks like right now for Covin-19. But you can see all of the countries that have been reporting it and then you can also So look at the hard statistics. People under investigation in the United States exactly how many 14 positives you'll see that there. Of course, it changes daily. How many negative how many pending? The people are under investigation. Remember, the airplane full of workers from the State Department that came back from China. They have now been under quarantine for more than 14 days. They released them all from quarantine because it turns out that nobody had that virus, so just because you have the flow doesn't mean it's Coronavirus. More cases over on the left coast and the Midwest, which is kind of surprising to me than there are on the East Coast or the Mid Atlantic, etc., etc. So have a look there. Do not respond to emails or texts or phone calls. Okay. Just be very, very careful. Hackers are imitating this sort of thing. Then the other side of this is they are sending out messages, seeking donations, and they're asking for Bitcoin donations to the World Health Organization. I can tell you right now, the World Health Organization, the CDC, they are not taking Bitcoin donations, okay? Don't go and donate, right. Again the CDC gov.org is the bad guys cdc.gov is the good guys. The scam page is elementary. it might have taken the scammers just a few minutes to put together. It's very effective. It looks legit. And the FBI and, of course, also Homeland Security are taking down these pages as soon as they can, but they can't always get rid of them right away. And companies we got to be proud. We've got a chain, train our employees not to follow up on these scams. So again, that's part of why I publish my newsletters. I report on the biggest scams that are going on. I try and keep it down to just a few a week. You can share them with your employees, share them with your family, but you have to get them to share them. Go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about this whole thing with the ACLU and their current fight. I spoke about something similar to this a couple of years ago, man, maybe actually the first time was probably about ten years ago. There are companies out there, and they gather information about us. They're called Data brokers. And I have visited some of these data brokers sites themselves. I mean physical site, where the company operates where they have their data collections, to help them with security problems that they have. And to help prevent problems from occurring, right. That's what I do for a living full time. And it was probably ten years ago, the radio show that I talked with some of these companies. But what they do is they take what's called open source information that's used a lot by government or investigations. And you can use open-source information yourself. All you do is go to Google, for instance, and do a search. That's the open-source information. It's anything that anyone can gain access to, without having to be a police officer without having to go and really kind of, you know, get a court order kind of be surreptitious and how you gather that's open source. So the data break brokers will take all of that, and that can include depending on States your living driver's license information. It can include information about the mortgage for your home. It can include you know the ownership of your home, and it can include just all kinds of stuff. And that becomes very, very difficult to control. Because all of your information is out there. It's available for free or for cheap on the internet. So these data brokers, they might buy it from the county, they might get it an open-source. Some of these documents are going to contain like your mortgage is going to contain your signature. The deed to your home is going to contain the signature, the automobiles that you own. There's going to be UCC filings with the Secretary of State's office, detailing what cars you own, who the lien holders are, and how much money is involved, all of this stuff. So it all gets pulled into these days. databases I mentioned on the show a few months ago, a couple of months ago that we were out in Las Vegas at a wedding. And of course, you know, doing work while I'm out there sitting on the couch, doing work for some of our Las Vegas clients when there was a knock at the door. Who's there? Well, it's an insurance investigator investigating an accident that had a fatality. And of course, the insurance company had been asked to payout. They came to this home because they had information that the person involved had contact with someone at this address, which indeed she did. It was her sister, and the driver had been responsible for this fake fatal death. The driver listed was one of my sisters in law, who had died six months before the accident. It was all fake. The insurance investigator showed my wife all of this information she had that they had purchased from one of these data brokers. It had listed my deceased sister in law's relatives, everybody every address she had ever had. It had names and contact information for some of my kids as well. Now, it was not all correct or organized. When I've looked at the data brokers' information about me, only about half of it is right, but the other half is entirely incorrect. That's still the case because they had a lot of utterly false information. People that they said were relatives that weren't. People we'd never heard of before, they identified as direct relatives of hers. The insurance company purchased all of this information from a Data Broker, in collections, this is called a skip trace. It's called a skip trace for people who jumped bail, etc. Man, we should talk about this whole bail thing, and the idiocy and New York state that is spreading countrywide dog, the bounty hunter and his wife Beth had been fighting this for a long time because it's making us much, much less safe. But anyhow, that's not a topic for today's show. It's not a political topic, because it's undeniable what's already happening with the increase in the crime rate, New York anyways. What the government is doing now and this is part of what I was warning about a decade ago, is the federal government, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, of the IRS, you name it. They are limited in how they can collect information, we kind of already knew that, right? They knew that they had to get a search warrant for certain things, right? They can follow you around if you do not expect privacy, etc., etc. So obviously, federal government agencies can use open-source information to see what you're doing online. But how about the closed source stuff? How about this information that the data brokers are collecting? Some of it comes from the people who lent you money. Some of it they're getting from places where you have to pay to get that information. What's happened here now is that the ACLU has filed a suit, according to The Wall Street Journal, against Homeland Security and Homeland Security through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. As well as Customs and Border Protection, is buying Gilo geolocation data from these data brokers. It's using it to investigate suspects who have allegedly committed immigration violations. So let me boil all that down into plain English. You might be using games on your smartphone, and you might be using all kinds of apps on your smartphone. If you have a smartphone, you probably are, frankly, not using 90-95% of those apps that you have downloaded. But many of those apps are tracking you. And that information is being sold to data brokers. So think about that for a minute. Remember that free app and how you've heard me and many others for so many years. Say, hey, you're not the customer. You are the product. But what's happening here now is that the ACLU is saying to the federal government, hey, you cannot, you cannot buy this information that you are not allowed to collect yourself. You cannot buy it from data brokers or these app developers who are selling it. Interesting question, interesting problem, isn't it? What should they do? What should you do? What can you do? It is going to play out in court. I suspect it's going to come down on the side of the Department of Homeland Security because this information is generally available to anyone willing to pay for it. So now the government stepped forward, saying we are will pay for it. By the way, it's down to local law enforcement as well, who, in many cases, are also buying information from the data brokers. Have you ever set up a company Amazon account? Have you ever set up an account for a company account for Uber? Maybe it's not a company account. Perhaps it's your account that you're using for Uber or something else? How about using something like Constant Contact to send out emails to your customers? How about salesforce.com, where we've seen a shift over the years from what used to be kind of the glass castle, where you had a central computer room in that computer room was a mainframe. And those mainframes were astounding. They still are. And that mainframe in that glass room was controlled by professional Information Technology people, people that knew what they were doing at least at the time, right? Then we started seeing some changes. You remember the apple two and VisiCalc Visicalc was kind of the killer application. And if you wanted to do numbers, then you bought an apple, you purchased a little apple two. And you then pulled data and people were asking that glass house, they were asking it, Hey, can you give us data because we want to put together some spreadsheet. People put together spreadsheets without really understanding the implications of the numbers they were using without understanding how to audit a spreadsheet to make sure that the figures included were correct. They didn't understand the double journaling. They didn't understand the cross-referencing of the information. They started a bit of a movement away from that glass house from that glass castle from it. They said hey, we could figure this out, why are we going to pay it all of this fake budget money to do something for us and we can do it for ourselves and do it cheaper. Frankly, that's a problem I still face with many organizations, if you can believe it, who think they can do security themselves, which is impossible for almost any organization. In this day and age, any small-medium business must have full-time external professionals who are helping your internal IT people. The internal IT should be doing what they do best, which is helping your business use information technology, to its best use, assisting people to be more efficient, finding new ways of doing things, etc. Instead of that, what most businesses do is they have these various silos, like sales and marketing and accounting. And each one of those silos, those lines company does things their way. So the sales guys, they're out, and they said, Hey, we're going to use Salesforce. And we're going to tie that into Constant Contact. And then you have your accounting people saying, well, we're going to use QuickBooks Online. Or maybe they're going to use one of Oracle's accounting systems. And then the manufacturing people say, Well, we are going to use this particular era p program, which is going to be great for manufacturing. And we've decided that we're going to use Survey Monkey to collect information from our customers from our vendors. You see where I'm going, each one of these lines of business is going out there and making what are in actuality, information technology decisions. They're making decisions about what type of technology to use, which is one level, but then the next Next Level is they're using it. And they're putting the business's information at risk. It is a huge, huge problem. It's something that I'm going to be addressing with some of this training that I have coming up with a couple of these tutorials correctly tackle these problems. And so if you're on my email list at Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, you're going to find out about these, and I'm going to give you some great cheat sheets and other things. But all of those again, Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. All of those different lines of business, all of those different functional responsibilities within an organization larger small, are adding up and adding up hugely. And there is a massive problem behind this. Now you know, that I use one password, and I recommend it, and we typically Use one password in conjunction with Duo to help secure login information. But because one password is used so frequently by companies to keep track of logins, they have kind of a unique view into the risks of all these different accounts. And what we're talking about where these lines of business are making Information Technology decisions that they're not qualified to make, and frankly, in most small-medium companies, there's probably no one in the organization that's fully qualified. Still, at least it has a better idea, but then a marketing person or an accounting person would have. So this is called shadow it and it's absolutely something that we have to be careful of and we have to watch for and if you are one of these people who is using one of these third-party services, and you have not informed your IT person. Do it right now. All right, thanks. Okay, hey, we have a lot more content that you can get online. Just go to Craig Peters on.com. You'll find it right there in my weekly newsletter that you can use to help educate other people inside your company. Maybe family, maybe friends, and indeed, educate yourself and the things that you need to know security-related or just the newest and latest greatest technology. Now I got an email here just while was Facebook a couple of weeks ago a message about a story that I had reported on about Tesla before, and I try and answer those I dig them up I get them for you. But I want to make sure you are subscribed at Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, so you get all of that. Thanks for being with me here, WGIR, and we'll be back Monday morning with Jack Heath at 737. Hey, welcome back Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online Of course, Craig peterson.com. If you want to, you can subscribe to my email list you'll find out about the free tutorials that pop up training, courses, everything that I do to help make you and your business more secure. So again, Craig Peterson, dot com slash subscribe. I got to read this to you right now. I decided to cancel through Airbnb and tell them about what had happened. He went off at me, berated me for not handling in it privately, and told me I was acting in my self-interest, and belittled me. I ended up having to pay the first full month even though I stayed one night. His listing is still up, and a review posted after my state also mentioned the silverfish. Isn't that something? Now, this is from a report that came out from vice. Now you might be familiar with vice.com. There's a lot of decent stuff up there. But I want to tell you a little bit about my own experience I've had with Airbnb and VR Bo now VR Bo is vacation rentals. It's it has been used more, I think, by businesses from what the stuff I've read than it is by individuals. But I have had bad experiences with both of them. Every time I have had an Airbnb, I have had a bad experience. So let me tell you what I mean by a bad experience. For instance, I was out of Vegas at a conference, and we thought, you know what, let's try Airbnb. I'm the tech guy, right? I need to understand this. Why wouldn't I go ahead and use Airbnb in make sense, right? So here the tech guy goes, and we poke around read reviews we read ratings. We found an apartment, not far at all, I mean like half a mile from the convention center. We thought, okay, this is going to be perfect. It says it's right by the strip we could walk over there, hop a cab or, or grab a ride and enjoy The Strip, and then the morning we can just walk over the convention center. We're not going to have any problems parking because it said it is an apartment. Let me start with parking. By the way, parking is another thing in the second Airbnb story. There was no parking. You had to park a half a mile away sometimes because people were just parking in the parking lot of the apartment building. There were no reserved parking slots for the apartment. So there's number one — number two. When we go into the apartment, and it's quite nice. We find out that it has two bedrooms. We had only booked one bedroom because that's all the listing talked about the one-bedroom. We get there, and we find, okay, so this is our bedroom over here. Well, the bedroom did not have an ensuite bathroom. The bathroom for the bedroom was across the hall. So there we go, we get in there and okay, fine. So our bathrooms across the hall, and we end up going to bed. We enjoyed it was a nice place relatively clean, quite old. It was probably a 40-50-year-old apartment. In the layout that you would expect there in the southwest where there's kind of a courtyard in the middle, and it's a little two-story thing and, you know, kind of reminded me when I lived in LA back in about 1980 late 70s early 80s. You know it's that part was quite nice. You know brand new shag rug in there, well you know not brand-new but quite new and clean. That part result was good. We go to bed and then we there we hear just tons of commotion because somebody else who didn't speak English very well had come to stay at the apartment as well. We hear them going into our bathroom, using our towels. They are very, very loud talking on the phone, and they get a hold of the owner right of this Airbnb. They got the same impression we did, which is there's one-bedroom in this place. So they had an ensuite bathroom. We did not, but they were using our bathroom the whole time and our towels, there's only one set of towels. It wasn't a great experience at all. They kept us up for quite a while because they were just so loud. Now you know me, I'm not an outgoing guy. You might not believe that, but I'm a little bit of an introvert. And as an introvert, I didn't want to go out and confront these people who were I'm guessing, or you know, from Asia, they were speaking Chinese or Korean or Japanese, I have no idea. I just didn't want to mess with it. So we get up in the morning, we and everything is okay-ish. We go to the conference and then that night, I guess these people only there for one night. That night, we had the whole place to ourselves, which is okay. Knowing that with Airbnb, I rate the place after I stay there, but the owner of the place rates me and so there have been a lot of issues of retaliation when it comes to Airbnb. If you stay at one of these places and you don't give them this glowing five-star review, then you're not going to get reviewed while and other people might not want you to stay at their place. So I gave it a reasonable rating. I can't remember what I gave it, you know, places clean and, and, you know, it was a nice place and there is another bedroom. You know, just kind of hint into anybody reading this. It isn't going to be dedicated to you and maybe your loved one you're staying with and left it at that. That's my first Airbnb story. And then my second Airbnb story, as I mentioned, had a lot to do with parking as well. And in this case, it was in the Toronto area, up in Brampton, and we rented a place on Airbnb, you know, I figured, well, we'll give another chance, see what happens. It was a three-bedroom place, and they said it sleeps like eight or something like that. What you did if you include the fold-out couch, and so we figured, okay, we need some parking. So I had sent them a message saying, hey, it's going to be myself and a couple of my kids and some grandkids. You know, I want to make sure that there's plenty of parking. Is it? Oh, yeah, plenty of parking, buddy parking, no problem. And so we get there, and there is one parking spot. And it's in one of these. I don't know if you know much about Canada and how they build their housing there. But one of the reasons I'm not that fond of it, right. I grew up there. It was these townhouses that are built right on top of each other, you know, the zero property line homes there. Three, four, or five of them attached. The only place you can park is in the little garage place. Well, the garage itself was full of stinking trash. Who knows how long it had been there. You couldn't use the garage. It had hared the driveway with the condo next door to you. It had one parking spot. I had my car, my daughter's car for her, her husband, and a couple of her kids. And then one of my other kids also drove up there. We had to find a place to park. Now the good news was that the whole neighborhood was under construction. They were able to park in the mud. in one area where construction wasn't happening right then, of course, the next morning, what shows up big dump trucks, excavators, everything else to work across the street from us. That wasn't fun. Let me tell you that it was not fun. We were quite worried about our cars, with all of this heavy equipment on this little narrow street designed for one car to go down the street when cars park on the street. We have to go right now when we come back, and I'm going to finish what happened with my air mean being being being a story, as well as my VR Bo story. And we got a whole lot more to cover. We're going to get into this Homeland Security thing with the ACLU and more but stick around, listening to Craig Peterson a course on WGAN online at Greg Peterson dot com is where you'll find me. Make sure you subscribe so that you get all of my free tutorials, training courses. Everything, Craig Peterson dot com, stick around. Hey, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and of course online, at Craig Peterson dot com. I was in the middle of telling you my stories about Airbnb. If you have ever thought about staying at Airbnb, or VRBO, or any of these types of places, right, obviously you're not staying at a website, but you're booking through a website, somebody's home, somebody's rental, whatever it might be then this is for you. I have done it for personal reasons. I have done it for business reasons as well. I told you the beginning of my story in Toronto, and I told you the last segment about my story in Las Vegas. We didn't have the parking, and the kids are all worried, and I was concerned about our cars getting destroyed by the heavy equipment. Were we going to have to move them because they were working on the lots across the street? It's incredible how fast the housing is going up there and how expensive it is to it's, it's just not how pricey it is. We get inside the place. Now, remember, I said that the garage was full of trash which was, and it stunk to high heaven, which it did. Okay, so some of that leaks into the house, which makes the house kind of smell too, which is just plain old, no fun. We get into the house, and I go and sit on this folding couch. And remember, the house is supposed to sleep eight, and it has a fold-out sofa. I sit on the couch. It reeks of BO, body odor. Right? I mean reeks. One of the first things I have to do is I want to make sure that they know that this is a problem so that maybe they can take care of it. I call, and I don't get any answer because it's the weekend, right? Nobody's around. We head out to the local grocery store, and we get some odor killer stuff, and we bring it back, and we drench the couch in it. And we're able to get rid of most of the BO you know, and its underarm smell is what it is. Someone with some nasty underarm odor was sitting on that couch. They put their arm up on the back of the sofa and left all of their BO behind them. Then they did the same thing on the couch itself and somebody supposed to sleep there, right? Oh, it was just incredible. Then we go upstairs and upstairs that we noticed that the fire alarms had tape all around the sides of them. Now, if you're not familiar with the way firearm alarms work, they have to be able to have air flowing through them to sense that There's smoke in the air or carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, whatever the type of detector is. And it had been it had tape all around it. Now it looked like it was painters tape right that blue tape that you use as you can pull off that isn't going to leave residue behind. So maybe it was the painters perhaps it was the owners, I don't know, perhaps it was a previous occupant, but I warned them about that as well as saying hey listen, your fire alarms are not going to work because it blocks the airflow on the fire alarms by this tape that's on them. I never got a response on anything there. So what do I do when it's time to leave a review? Well, I said the place was in perfect shape. It's brand new. I had to do a little bit of cleaning. The cleaning crew in because the carpets upstairs all had the markings of a, you know, a vacuum cleaner. You can see the wheel marks on the floor and everything else. So you see it's not as though a rip them a new one like I have seen done before. And you never get to see your ratings by the way from these Airbnb owners. Okay, so there's a second one not neither one of mine were nightmares per se, but they both had significant problems that I was afraid to report on because I know that turnabout is considered fair play and who knows what these owners are going to say. Then I tried a VRBO, but they are older. They've been around for something like 30 years, and it's vacation rental type stuff, right? So VRBO, okay, we'll try it out. So we try it. We booked a place, and I wrote to the owners. Hey, there's we're going to have three cars, or two cars can't remember what it was now. Is this going to work for us this okay, I want to make sure this parking is I've had issues before? I never got a response from them. But, you know, they ran my credit card through so I figured, okay, well at least that part is done. I show up with the family in tow. And we're going to have this great time together. I'm going to be working, and they can stay in and just enjoy the place you know, a new city, a new location is going to be great. Guess what? VRBO had canceled my reservation without telling me without informing me, without crediting me. Well, it turned out that they didn't end up crediting me after all the credit card, but here I am waiting for the place that I can't get in. I called up VRBO to say, Listen, I never got a code for the door or anything else. What should I do here? Oh, no. Well, I see that reservation was canceled. I never canceled the reservation. Oh, no, sir. It was canceled, like the day after you booked it. I said, wait a minute. I never canceled it. Well, okay. Well, then the owner must have canceled. Why didn't I get notified? Oh, you didn't get notified, sir? Really? It says they sent an email. I went through all my junk mailboxes and everything else and yep. Okay. I got a notice of cancellation. Oh, man, what a pain that one was. Well, we can find another place in the area you're in right now. We'll make sure you get a refund. I said, Listen, I'm here. I don't have A place to stay. What am I supposed to do now? And they just say I'm sorry, sir. You know, I'm sorry, We'll make sure you get credit. That's all they would do. For me, it was absolutely a nightmare. Three experiences personal experiences for me. One of them a nightmare. One of them on the edge of a nightmare. Another one that could well have been a nightmare but was a mere inconvenience. You can probably guess by now what my thinking is about Airbnb and VRBO. That's what got my interest in this article about this poor guy who was scammed, okay. He was trying to stay in Montreal, and the owner asked him to pay for their stay, outside of the Airbnb app. I've seen that happen many, many times. Because that way, the owner does not have to pay the Airbnb fees, okay? But if you do that now you have very little recourse against the owner, then you know, I've done some chargeback. Lately, now my company if someone buys a course from us, and they're not happy, and we will immediately refund their money because we just don't want them to be upset or disappointed. Because again, you know, our whole thing is to nourish you back to health when it comes to security stuff, right, get that transformation done. I have had some nightmares personally trying to do a chargeback for things that were never delivered, or that got charged inappropriately. Or where I canceled the service. In one case, it was like it was over $1,000 a month for the service, and I canceled it. They charged me the 1200 dollars anyways. I went to my credit card company, and they said, well, we'll have to verify it with the vendor first. So what? I canceled it. I had to fight with a credit card company, and then when they checked with the vendor, and the vendor said, Okay, well, it's fine. We'll take chargeback. You used to be able to do this at the drop of a hat, and I guess they've abused it, right? I think that's the bottom line on it. But man, oh man, so we'll get a little bit more into this vise story. I guess its turned into an Airbnb, VRBO, what to do if you want a vacation rental or if you want to rent a place while you're on a business trip. And then we'll get into some of the more of the articles here, in the next hour. You're listening to Craig Peterson, of course, on WGAN and online. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson back here. I don't know if you guys know what Airbnb's roots were. It started as an air Bed and Breakfast. It was intended for the very young generation to be able to go to concerts and things and just get an air bed in somebody's apartment or home. That's what Airbnb is all about air bed and breakfast. That was the whole idea. And I'm not so sure they've come a long way from those days. I spent the last few segments, in fact, in talking about my horror stories, we've been trying to use Airbnb. There's another one I did not mention in Florida, which was not a horror story quite the disappointment for this house. That I think while I'm quite confident in this house that we rented. It was for a family reunion. So we rented this house that slept like a dozen or something like that. All of the beds were just terrible. You know, the cheapest mattresses that are known to man. You shift your weight at all, and the squeaks loud enough to wake you up. The sheets are the cheapest ones you could imagine. It was an Airbnb as well. It was pretty obvious that the set up for this place was for porn videos. You go into the garage, and the whole garage is one massive shower with I can't remember for six showerheads in it. And then a little bit of workout equipment. I mean a tiny bit of workout equipment. It sounded awful. Okay. And so there you go there, there's all of the Airbnb and VRBO, experiences I can remember. My sister rented the one in Florida for the family, and she did not stay there. She stayed with my mom. It was quite revealing, frankly, so disappointing. I never shared these stories before, but it was because of a story that was in a vice.com, and you'll find this up on my website and Craig peterson.com. They put a little note out saying, Hey, does anybody have any stories about Airbnb, Airbnb scams, and they said, this is Anna Marian, who wrote this that nearly 1000 people sent them emails with their stories. They looked at all of the stories they put together some patterns. A former vice senior staff writer by the name of Alec Conti shared her story about a disastrous vacation to Chicago, and she ran into what she's saying are a bunch of grifters, and frankly a nationwide scam. I no longer use Airbnb at all or VRBO at all. I have been sticking with hotels. If you're interested, I typically use hotwire. I don't use the star ratings of the hotels. I rely on the ratings that are posted by the people who stayed there. I think that's the best feature of hotwire, frankly. I don't care what hotel it is. I just want to stay at a decent hotel. I even used hotwire throughout France and Belgium. It worked great. We found some just wonderful spots that we would never have found if we were just looking to stay at the Marriott or the Hilton or whatever it is, right? So Conti's investigation revealed some serious problems with Airbnb. Now you might have heard about this problem with Airbnb. After all, it hit the news late last year of these party rentals after a death happened. I think it was in San Diego at one of these party rentals. Somebody rented a nice house. Essentially a lot of these places get destroyed by the partiers, right there. There are drugs and heavy drinking, and in this one case, that hit the news. There were gun shootings. Okay, that's a very, very bad, bad thing. So Conti apparently, and again, you can find this article on vice.com traced her scam back to a company that used fake profiles and fake reviews to conceal a whole bunch of wrongdoings. Let's get into this okay because property switches are one of the biggest ones will tell you about what those are the units of sawdust on the floor with holes in the walls, this whole bait and switch game which goes into these properties, switches, and stuff. It's awful. When all else fails, there are these clumsy threatening demands for five-star reviews to hide the evidence of what they've done. Sometimes multiple scams are involved. You know it the hackers aren't just coming after directly our money by trying to hack our businesses by trying to fool us into clicking on links or doing things that we shouldn't be doing, right? These scammers are all over the place. After this story that came out, Airbnb promised to "verify All 7 million listings on this site by December of this year 2020". Frankly, there's no way that they could do this. There's no way you could send investigators to all 7 million listings. He said, Well, we're going to have to take more responsibility for stuff on our platform. Yes, you will. You have to provide a firewall. Not just a firewall of the reviewers, the people who stay there and review can see the reviews that come in from the owners of these properties. That's not going to solve the problem. You need to make it so that there can not be retribution by the bad guys that have given Airbnb a bad name. Now I got to mention that my sister the one that booked that Airbnb for us in Florida, my sister has a house that she rents out in Park City, Utah, on Airbnb, and one of her daughters keeps it clean. I know my sister is not engaged in scams. I know that my niece is somebody who takes responsibility for things. I'm sure she keeps it clean. I don't want to paint the whole Airbnb, a website and people who are renting with a black brush here, I don't want to paint the whole rental market, including the VRBO with a black brush, but I've got to say 100% of the time I have had what I think are scams on both platforms. Now, that's my personal opinion, based on a handful of stays, and I know a handful of stays does not represent every listing on the platforms, right. I understand that. However, its the verification process, we're talking about here. I don't know that he's ever going to do it. How are you going to review and verify all 7 million listings on the Airbnb site within 12 months by December 2020? I don't know how you're going to do it. So let's go through the biggest scams according to vice.com number one, which they say is exceedingly common. It's across hundreds of emails. It's the bait and switch where Airbnb users were promised one apartment and arrived to find something very different. deceptive photos a bore no resemblance to what they found when they got there. My kids found this too. They rented some places in Italy when they did a tour, and you know, black mold everywhere just terrible. Okay? Other times and they were persuaded by those to switch apartments or houses entirely. It is a widespread thing where they say, hey, due to unforeseen circumstances, as a pipe broke, I'm going to have to move you to another one of our properties. Now under the rules for Airbnb, the owner does not get penalized if they push you to a property due to quote, unforeseen circumstances unquote, like a pipe break. But it turns out some of these people are using that unforeseen circumstance again and again and again. And they're showing up to their rental defined the new locations filthy, unfurnished on a different part of town. And they're saying that in a surprising number of stories, the original house was full of a weird amount of bear beds laid out and bizarre configurations, kind of sounds like that porn place my sister rented for the family in Florida, doesn't it? So here's one of the quotes I rented a place near Glass beach and a few weeks part of my trip. When I reached out to confirm the booking, the Lister told me she had a septic problem in the unit, and she would see if she'd put me if she could put her up in a more prominent place nearby. It never materialized, but she refused to cancel my booking, saying the first time that her computer wasn't working and the next time weeks later that her father just passed away. I had to complain to Airbnb that she refused to cancel the booking, so they canceled it, but I was unable to write a negative review. According to Vice again, they're saying the plumbing scam seems to rest on the idea Airbnb won't penalize a host if the house is uninhabitable. Okay, that's what I was saying. I've seen this before. So this goes on and on this whole bait and switch thing. Okay, next one, getting the guests to agree to move houses and the plumbing scam is often kind of segway into getting you to agree to move houses. Okay? So they will say, supposed to be this, you know, here's this complaint supposed to be quaint, quiet property in downtown. They get delayed by the homeowner stating that we'd need to change properties the last minute since it was only a quick two-night visit we weren't opposed. The new quote larger location was this scummy little apartment complex on the other side of town. Another one - Booking the Airbnb to multiple people at the same time. That's what happened to us in Vegas. When my wife and I showed up at this apartment through Airbnb, perhaps the most socially awkward Bait and switch is this one renting an Airbnb where you believe you booked the whole residence only to arrive and find a whole bunch of strangers there. That happened to us in Vegas. Multiple people told us they came to see other Airbnb guests at the house, or in some cases, people who seem to live there. It just goes on and on. Next one - money scams, paying outside the app. I mentioned this one early. It says it's a straightforward scam. Be careful. There's no be careful here, as there is no reason to do that. Fake damages - Man, I've heard about this from multiple people before mine. How can Airbnb police this? Did the guests damage the place? Okay. Oh man scam scams, you'll find more about this online. My advice? Use a hotel you trust us out of the hotel booking site, you believe. And I already told you, I use hotwire because I don't care what the brand is. I just want a good hotel, and I use the ratings from the people who stayed. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online at Craig peterson.com. Hey, have you thought about how to follow along at home or on the road during the week? The easiest way to do that is to listen to my podcasts. Why not? I put it out there are multiple things, including this weekend show, but many other things that I include during the week, and you can subscribe to that as well on your favorite podcast platform. And it says Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes. If you are an iTunes type of person or Craig peterson.com, slash tune in or slash I heart. Okay, I am kind of all over the place today. I appreciate everybody who does Listen to me and comments on things during the Week. You'll also find me on LinkedIn and Facebook and YouTube, but it is kind of over the place as I talk about some of the biggest stories of the week. Now we were just talking about scams that seem to be coming from Airbnb and VRBO, of course, but there is a lot of scams going one. We are going to get into one right now tied into the coronavirus. But first I just want to make mention of this other article that came out last month in January. And it's talking about computer literate millennials and Generation Z. These are the people that grew up with the internet. They've had the internet pretty much their whole lives. They found meaning the Federal Trade Commission has found that people ages 39 and under are more likely to report fraud than the 40 plus Crowd now here's the thinking. It isn't that the younger kids and millennials and Generation Z, it isn't as though they are less afraid to report that money has been stolen from them, it appears that they are more likely to fall victim to fraud 25% more likely. Now the millennials are less likely to fall for scams over the phone than people over 40, but 77% More likely, Millennials are 77% more likely to get duped by email scams and 90% more likely to lose money on a fake check scam. Now the thinking behind this is that those of us who are a little bit older, we hold the whole internet thing with a little bit more skepticism than our children and grandchildren do. Because we know that there are scammers out there. And we've heard all of the horror stories, whereas the younger kids are looking at it as well. It's the internet, and they just give their stuff away. We already know that there are studies that show that the millennials will give their email address away in trade for a single donut. Okay, so they don't value a lot of this stuff. You know, to me, well, it's a little bit concerning, and it should be to you. But let's get into the latest scam that's out there right now. It isn't the Airbnb scam, which has been out there for a few years now. As I said, hey, I've been burned what, four or five times by this overall, personally. So I'm just to the point I just don't use it anymore period. It's a real shame because there are some good people out there. But this has to do with what's been happening. Now it is happening with the Coronavirus, and this is a huge deal. We had one day this week, where 15,000 new cases were reported. Supposedly, it was due to a change in the way China was tracking the Coronavirus and diagnosing people. So they're saying, Hey, listen, it's you know is just a change. Don't expect this to indicate that more viruses are spreading out there. And frankly, I look at it and say, Well, maybe there are there aren't. But what we're seeing are some rather sophisticated phishing scams going on. Phishing, of course, this is the one spelled with a Ph. It is where an attacker tricks you into doing something. It might be clicking on a link. It might be responding to an email. It might also be a phishing scam over the phone or, you know, SMS a text one which would be called smishing. A whole new type of phishing this going on right now. Well, last week, IBM and Kaspersky now Kaspersky is a Russian anti-virus company. They are also trying to stop the general spread of malware. The State Department, the FBI, Homeland Security, not to use Kaspersky software, but they do have good information. So when I see Kaspersky, combined with IBM, a company I do respect, then that does kind of make my years and help if you will. Still, IBM and Kaspersky caught hackers in Japan, trying to spread malware through emails, and the emails had links about the Coronavirus outbreak that started, of course, in Wuhan China last month in January. Now adding Sophos and now, of course, Cisco to the list. They have found phishing emails from cybercriminals, purporting to be from the Center for Disease Control, as well as the World Health Organization. And what these bad guys are trying to do is to steal your email credentials and other information. The emails are coming from several domains, including CDC dash gov.org, which, of course, is not the real CDC website. So be very careful if you are trying to find out information about the CDC or the spread of coronavirus about flu in general. For instance, in my home state of New Hampshire, we have I think it's seven deaths so far this year reported g attribute To the flu in general, not the Coronavirus. Every year about 12 to 16,000 people in the United States die from the flu. So far, we've only got 14 cases reported of Coronavirus. At this stage everybody, this is nothing to get all freaky worried about. Okay, so calm down. If you want more, go to cdc.gov. CDC Centers for Disease Control - cdc.gov, tells you what to do now. The current Coronavirus has an official name now. It's called covin-19 co vi n dash 19. There are multiple versions of Coronaviruses, which is why they identify each with a number. We have had a report in the past about Coronaviruses, and they have killed people previously. So you'll see Right at the top of the cdc.gov website, information about the Coronavirus and its spread. It is a respiratory disease and potentially fatal. It doesn't seem to be increasingly more fatal than some of the other viruses that we've had. Let's put all this in context. And when you get an email from someone saying, hey, look at this, you click on this link, to get information about the Coronavirus. It's going to let you track the spread of etc. don't respond. If you get a text message, don't respond. I got one because I'm a member of the Great and Powerful media, right. I got one last week that was sent out to members of the press saying, Hey, we got this new tracking site. You just can to be cautious enough when it comes to this. So if you go to CDC Gov at the top, You'll see the description here about the covin-19. You can click on that, and it'll show you a global map about the location of reported cases and what is happening. So, I'm looking at one, and it's about one day behind. It looks like right now for covan-19. But you can see all of the countries that have been reporting it. Then you can also look at the hard statistics. People under investigation in the United States, exactly how many 14 positives, you'll see that there. Of course, it changes daily. You can see how many tested negative and how many pending, the people are under investigation. Remember, the airplane full of workers from the State Department that came back from China. They have now been under quarantine for more than 14 days. They release them all from quarantine because it turns out, nobody had that virus. So just because you have the flow doesn't mean it's Coronavirus. More cases over on the left coast and the Midwest, which is kind of surprising to me than there are on the East Coast or the Mid Atlantic, etc., etc. So have a look there. Do not respond to emails or texts or phone calls. Okay? Just be very, very careful because the hackers are imitating this sort of thing. The other side of this is they are sending out messages seeking donations. They are asking for Bitcoin donations to the World Health Organization can tell you right now, the World Health Organization, the CDC, they are not taking Bitcoin donations, okay. So don't go and donate. Right And again, the CDC gov.org is the band guys CD see.gov is the good guys. The scam page is straightforward. It, you know, took the scammers, maybe just a few minutes to put together. It's handy, and it looks legit. And the FBI and, of course, also Homeland Security are taking down these pages as soon as they can, but they can't always get rid of them right away. And companies, we've got to be proactive. We've got to chain train our employees, not to follow up on these scams. So again, that's part of the reason for my newsletters. I report on the biggest scams that are going on. I try and keep it down to just a few a week. You can share them with your employees, share them with your family, but you have to get them to share them. Go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe, and you'll get those as well stick around. We'll be right back on WGAN. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN, and thanks for joining us today. Hopefully, you picked up a lot of good information. We're just talking about the CDC some of the scams that are out there right now from the Coronavirus, including one involving Bitcoin, which kind of surprised me. We talked a lot in the first hour about the major scams on Airbnb, where you can rent apartments or homes for a day or a week or a month, almost anywhere. It's really quite neat. But the major scams have been going on there and how I've seen them personally and why I will never use it ever again. If you want to listen to that, just go to Craig Peterson comm slash tune in, you can subscribe right there. Listen to me, live by the way on tune in when I'm on the radio. He And when I'm on with canon Matt, the morning drive every Wednesday at 737, every Wednesday morning, as well. And those are all on tune in. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about this whole thing with the ACLU and their current fight. I spoke about something similar to this a couple of years ago, man, maybe actually the first time was probably about ten years ago. There are companies out there, and they gather information about us. They're called Data brokers. I have visited some of these data brokers sites themselves, I mean, physical sites, where the company operates where they have their data collections, to help them with security problems that they have, and to help prevent problems from occurring, right. That's what I do for living full time. It was probably ten years ago, the radio show that I talked with some of these companies. What they do is they collect open-source information that's used a lot by the government for any number of things from financial transactions to investigations. And you can use open-source information yourself. All you do is go to Google, for instance, and do a search. That's the open-source information. It's anything that anyone can gain access to, without having to be a police officer without having to go and really kind of, you know, get a court order kind of be surreptitious and how you gather that's open source. So the data break, brokers will take all of that, and that can include depending on the state you're living, driver's license information, it can include information about the mortgage for your home. It can include you know the ownership of your home, and it can include just all kinds of stuff. That becomes very, very difficult to control. Because all of your information is out there. It's available for free or for cheap on the internet. So these data brokers, they might buy it from the county, they might get it an open-source. Some of this information will contain data from your mortgage, will contain your signature, the deed to your home is going to contain the signature, the automobiles that you own. There's going to be UCC filings with the Secretary of State's office, detailing what cars you own, who the lien holders are, and how much money is involved all of this stuff. So it all gets pulled into these databases. I mentioned on the show a few months ago, a couple of months ago that we were out in Las Vegas at a wedding and of course, you know, doing work while I'm out there and I'm sitting They're on the couch doing work for some of our Las Vegas clients. And there's a knock at the door. And who's there? Well, it's an insurance investigator investigating an accident that it was a fatal accident. And of course, the insurance company had been asked to payout. So they came to this home because they had information that it that the person involved I had a contact with someone at this address, which indeed she did. It was her sister, and apparently, the driver had been responsible for this fatal death. The driver listed one of my sisters in law. She had died about six months before the accident. So obviously, it was all fate. The insurance investigator showed my wife all of this information she had from one of these data brokers. It listed my deceased sister in law's relatives, everybody, every address she had ever had. There were names and contact information for some of my kids. However, it had a lot of incorrect information, including supposed current addresses and voting information for relatives deceased for over two decades. When I've looked at the data brokers' information about me, about half of it's correct, but the other half is completely incorrect. And that's still the case because they had a lot of completely incorrect information. People that they said were relatives that weren't people we'd never heard of before. They said these were direct relatives of hers. At any rate, they had purchased all of this information from a Data Broker. In collections, this is called a skip trace. It's called a skip trace for people who jumped bail, etc. Man, we should talk to about this whole bail thing, and the idiocy in New York state that is spreading country-wide dog, the bounty hunter and his wife, Beth had been fighting this for a long time because it's making us much, much less safe. But anyhow, that's not a topic for today's show. It's not a political topic, because it's undeniable what's already happening with the increase in the crime rate in New York anyways. What the government is doing now is what I was warning about a decade ago. That is that the federal government, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, of the IRS, you name it, they are limited in how they can collect information, we kind of already knew that right? You know that they had to get a search warrant for certain things right. They can follow you around, without any expectation of privacy, etc., etc. So So obviously, federal government agencies can use open-source information to see what you're doing online. But how about the closed source stuff? How about this stuff that the data brokers are collecting? Some of it they're getting from the people who lent you money, some of it they're getting from places where you have to pay to get that information. So, what's happened here is that the ACLU has filed a suit, according to The Wall Street Journal, against Homeland Security. Homeland Security, through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, as well as Customs and Border Protection, is buying geolocation data from these data brokers and choosing to investigate suspects who have allegedly committed immigration violations. So let me boil all that down into plain English. You might be using games on your smartphone, and you might be using all kinds of apps on your smartphone. If you have a smartphone, frankly, you're probably not using 90 95% of those apps that you have downloaded. But many of those apps are tracking you. And that information is being sold to data brokers. So think about that for a minute. Remember that free app and how you've heard me and many others for so many years say, hey, you're not the customer. You are the product. Well, what's happening here now is that the ACLU is saying to the federal government, hey, you cannot buy the information that by law your organization cannot collect. You cannot buy it from data brokers or these app developers who are selling it. Interesting question, interesting problem, isn't it? What should they do? What should you do? What can you do? It is going to play out in court, and I suspect it's going to come down on the side of the Department of Homeland Security because this information is generally available to anyone willing to pay for it. So now the government stepped forward, saying we are will pay for it. By the way, this goes down to local law enforcement as well. In many cases, they are also buying this information from the data brokers. So let's stick around when we come back. We're going to talk about shadow IT. If you don't know what it is, it's a problem if you're in business. Hey, welcome back, everybody Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Thanks for joining me and for spending part of your Saturday with me. If you're listening to this on a podcast at Craig Peterson dot com slash tune in, thanks for joining me, some listen to me while they're driving to and from work and find the various segments of my show, which are about ten-ish minutes long, really work well into their day. So if you're doing that, thank you if you're not, please do consider it. I try and keep everybody up to date with the information that you need to know. And that leads us to what we got right now. Which is shadow IT. Now I bet there is not a company out there. Well, maybe there's one right because you just can't put always say or you know everyone that I say almost every company out there has a shadow IT problem. So let's start by kind of defining what's going on. Ha
“I realized that people needed more than just fitness to reach their health and wellness goals.” --Chris Edwards How can we be healthy? Really? It’s a question humans have been asking for most of history - and yet, it always seems like there are new quick fixes or conflicting research. During his studies in professional training, Chris Edwards realized that fitness - while vital - isn’t enough to take people to their peak level of health. So what is? And how can we help our kids get there? Chris believes health and wellness is a family matter, and he gives three tips for success in family health. 1.Everyone has to be on board. 2.Gain an education (don’t worry - Chris will give legitimate resources) 3.Focus on nutrition first. Information is power, and Chris drops a lot of it in this episode. About Chris and TriCore Wellness Chris Edwards is a Fitness and Wellness Professional with over 14 years of experience specializing in personal fitness and wellness management. He holds multiple certifications and achievements in the fitness and wellness industry, is an accomplished competitive powerlifter, and is the owner and founder of TriCore Wellness. TriCore Wellness is a wellness management company that specializes in Personalized Health Coaching. TriCore captures and analyzes information about your Fitness, Nutrition, and Recovery to develop plans, coaching, and analysis for you to achieve any health and wellness goals. Keep the Conversation Going The episode is over, but the conversation doesn’t have to be. Send me your thoughts or questions about this episode at @sportpsychworks or https://www.kafcounselingandsportperformance.com/contact.
The Christmas messages are coming thick and fast. It's like the pep talk we never knew we needed, or should I say, the many pep talks. How to keep your relationship alive, how to draw boundaries with family and friends, how to find time for self care, what to eat and how to plan ... it's endless.The latest missive out of a university in Australia is to warn parents about pester power.Pester power is the niggly whiney constant asking by kids at this time of year, which they say starts with a small ask and then rises to a full blown tantrum. So according to the university research, parents are combatting this quite well - fewer than 20 percent of Australian parents were caving in to their children's demands.We often can't avoid having kids with us when we shop, they're on holiday, they're kicking around and they often want to come and "help" with the Christmas or food shopping. But apparently parents are getting better at dealing with pester power. So is the pestering losing its power then?If you think about the level of pestering - can you believe every 4 minutes a child will ask for something? That's 80 percent of children out shopping, asking every 4 minutes for something to be bought for them. That's an exhausting 4 minute cycle on repeat.But one expert says it's a necessary part of a child's development as they "learn to express themselves and practice communication and negotiation skills". Really? It just sounds annoying to me.Giving kids tasks to do at the supermarket or the free fruit on offer will hold off the pestering while you shop. Photo / 123rfBut here are the tips for diluting the pester power - give them a job, like pushing the trolley or ticking things off a list.Let them eat the free fruit at the supermarket - healthy snack plus buys you some time -win win.Take things to distract, like a book or toy they might like.Cut the trip short if need be.And my personal favourite, just say no. Wow. The experts remind us that we the parents, are in charge. What a revelation. Did we really need reminding of this? Are we that whipped by our own kids?I feel like the experts missed an obvious and very critical point here though. Leave them at home. If you know your kid is not up for it, or will pester you every 4 minutes to buy them something, why are you even taking them?Also, since when did threats not become a well-versed part of parenting? Before the trip begins, you tell your kid, if I hear one single moan from you whining about things you want, we're going home. Is that not kosher these days?I worry that we have universities wasting their time researching these topics and then handing out tips which are just common sense. Have we become that devoid of parenting abilities that we need to be told how to say no to our kids?If so, then I hope Santa's handing out backbones this Christmas.
Howie and Mark discuss dental insurance and what it really means to a dental practice. There are times when insurance participation makes sense. And there are times when it makes much more sense to transition away from insurance dependence. Over the course of a career it’s possible for a dentist to move back and forth between the two, depending on their overall business goals. Podcast Highlights: Dental Insurance. What is it Really? It’s a Highly Charged Subject It’s Just a Marketing Medium You Get to Capacity. Then What? Using Insurance to Fill Volume Boiling it Down
Rob Hirschfeld and Stephen Spector discuss a recent interaction Rob had with a senior IT executive who claimed a team of perfect employees and if anyone made a mistake they would be fired. Really? It's time for a Rob rant in response to this management approach.
Today's financial media was running a headline like this: Three-fourths of business economists expect a recession by 2021. Really? It's no wonder economist's are the butt of so many bad jokes: Three economists went out hunting and came across a large deer. The first economist fired but missed by three feet to the left. The second economist fired but missed by three feet to the right. The third economist didn’t fire but shouted in triumph, “We got it! We got it!” Plus a caller asks whether annuities are a good tool for asset protection.
Hey, Kevin, do you know of any good personal trainers? 嘿，Kevin，你认识好的私教吗？ I might. Why? Are you trying to lose some weight or are you just trying to get fit? 应该是认识几个，怎么啦？你要减肥吗还是只是想健身塑形？ A bit of both actually. I packed on a few pounds over the holidays and I’m starting to develop some love handles. 都想。假期里我胖了几磅，都开始有游泳圈了。 Do you want to sign up for the gym together? 你想一起去健身房报名吗？ Mmm…I don’t know… I think I’ll just try to go on a diet and see how it goes. 额我不知道...我就用节食减肥法好了，然后看看效果。 Really? It's impossible for me to stick to any diet. Besides, I think you still need to combine it with exercise. 真的吗？对我来说，坚持节食是不可能的。而且，我也认为需要饮食和运动相结合。 BackGround Music：Don't Rock The...
Really? It's just Facebook lol --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lance-burns/support
What's happening? I'm definitely, definitely going to have an amazing day. I was going to say something else. Where do you imagine that I put my AirPods? Did I leave them in the car? I'm definitely going to have an amazing day. That's been decided. It's done. It's how it has to be. Okay. I found one thing that I want. Oh, my AirPods are down my breasts. Where else would they be? Okay. Hi, Gayle. Lip gloss has been located. Now I've got to share this over. I'm going to talk. I'm going to talk about many good things. Just punctured two tyres in my car at once like a ninja. I don't do things half assed, you know. My laptop's not even turned on. Then I just threw my laptop on the ground while I was setting up this live show. Tell me something that's filled with love and excitement because I feel like I need to hear it. You know? Send me a love heart shower if you want to send me love for puncturing two tyres in my car at once. My car's down the back of the carpark down there. I'd walk over and show you, except I'd be embarrassed to do it in front of all the tradie men who were down there who already helped me out. Well, I wouldn't really be embarrassed. But then they're going to be like, "What is she doing walking around with a tripod? What's happening now? What is this crazy bitch up to?" Thank you for the love. So, I'm going to try and share this livestream. Let me see if it will let me hotspot. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. We'll be fixed soon. I know. It's so not a big deal. What do you do when you kind of get stranded? Obviously, you livestream. What else would you do? My friend Matt is a trainer here at the gym and I've messaged him. I'm like, "Hey. Where are you? Come out and hang out with me." But I think he's with a client. It's a normal thing to be doing as a personal trainer at 8:30 AM. So, I guess I'm just hanging here and livestreaming. Okay. Why does my hotspot on my phone just not work anymore? Marlene, Leslie, I love you. I love you. I can't wait to party with you in New York in a few weeks. Marlene, I just punctured two tyres in my car at once. I'm just like, if I'm going to do it, I'm all in. You know? I'm fricking all in. Where am I? I'm in, what is this area, Robina? Varsity Lakes? I'm at Robina Fitness First. There's my gym. There you go. There's the gym. You know, the good thing is I was already on my way to Mercedes. Never caught me live. All right. Well, clearly, I punctured both those tyres just for Liam because I'm super friendly and helpful like that. I like to be of service. I'm just here to be of service. I'm trying to see if, yeah, my hotspot's working, it's not working. We'll see if it's working. It doesn't know what the fuck it's doing. Retry now. Maybe Fitness First has wifi that I can hop onto. Sometimes they do. No, it doesn't look like they do today. I choose to believe that all things are perfect and as they are. Can somebody please share this into Daily Asskickery? Mim or Sam, if you're on here, because I did WhatsApp both of you before I jumped on live, can you comment and let me know that you're here and that you're sharing it? Because currently, I can't get onto WhatsApp on my laptop to check and I just don't know what's actually happening or going on. Sarafina, can you log into my Facebook? You can. If you can, can you log in and share this or can you tell Jessica to? Because neither Mim or Sam have heard my messages. Who is on live? Fina, can you maybe do that? I'm trying to see if I can do it. So, there's always a lesson in everything. I just punctured two tyres. Let's be honest. I was trying to screech out of the carpark at a million miles an hours because, of course, I was late. I'm always late for everything. I wanted to get here to the gym at 7:00 AM. Thanks for sharing, Liam. Oh, thank you as well, John. I love it when everybody shares for me. Wanted to get to the gym at 7:00 and I'm supposed to be at Mercedes at 8:00. Mercedes is only five or 10 minutes away from here. So, I get to the gym at 7:25, so behind my own schedule. I'm like, "Okay. All right." Thank you, Kiana. Jump in, do a quick workout, smash it out, had an awesome session. Everybody's sharing. You guys are all over it. Fina's driving. When you stop, can you share to my personal page? Don't worry. We'll figure it out eventually. Maybe this wifi will let itself work at some point or Mim or Sam should come online quite soon anyway. It's 20 before 9:00. So, yeah. So, I was super happy with myself leaving two minutes before 8:00. I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to be five minutes late to Mercedes." Then I just went, I clipped the corner of the car park right there. So embarrassing. There was guys around everywhere and I'm like, "Oh, my God. Stupid female in Mercedes." I felt embarrassed. But I just kept driving and then some tradies pulled me over and they're like, "Ah, you've punctured your tyre." Like, "Are you fricking kidding? It felt like only a small clip." Then I get out and then I've punctured two tyres, both on the left hand side. So, it's all fine. Everything's always fine and perfect. But I had to laugh because as I'd been rushing into the gym, I said to myself ... like I'm annoyed at myself that I was so late and so behind my on schedule. Then I reframed it and I was like, "No, Kat. Don't be annoyed at yourself because you've always been late." The amount of workouts where I thought I was going to do a full length workout and then it ended up being 20 minutes because I was always sitting there writing, which is what happened this morning. I was sitting blogging. So, I ended up late for my workout and that's happened for 20 years. But yet, I still have the shape I want, I have the business I want, I have everything that I want. Bronwyn, can you share this? Can you log into my Facebook and share this from my biz page in my profile to my personal page and to Daily Asskickery, even though everyone shared it there? Because I can't get my wifi on my laptop working. Then I need a call to action from Millionaire Mastermind as well. You might be driving or something. But if you're free, and can you comment and let me know if you're able to? Yeah. So, I'm like, "Everything's perfect. I haven't screwed up my life by being late all the time." Ella, no, I'm sorry to say. No. No. I know. But they were lovely. They are lovely. What am I up to? Everything's always perfect, right? It's always like, "Yeah, it's fine. I'll have a 20 minute workout and it'll be perfect." Thank you, Bronwyn. Then I come rushing out and then that happens and I'm just like, "It's kind of funny that I was just giving myself a little coaching session only 30 minutes ago about how it's fine that I'm always rushing and it's fine that I'm always late and then God's just like, 'We'll see about that. We're just going to send you a little message there to remind you that it's not always ideal to be rushing.'" Then I just thought, "Okay. Well, this is maybe a sign to be more present and be more in the now and give myself permission to be in each moment, even if I am late, that I didn't have to rush off and clip over the corner." So, the two truck will come within an our. I'll keep an eye out. They'll probably come while I'm on this livestream and then they'll take it to Mercedes where I was going anyway. So, I've been on the phone to Mercedes and they're like, "Don't worry. We'll have coffee ready for you," and you get the VIP service obviously when you got there. When I go there today, they're giving me a car service, which is why I was going. Now they're changing two tyres for me as well and they're going to try and sell me a new Mercedes. I shall let them attempt that, but as to what the outcome will be, I don't know. But they've been at me at it for ages. It's a great sales technique that you might want to employ into your business because they contacted me about six weeks ago. I was in America, though. They said, "Katrina, it's time to come in for your new Mercedes." I was like, "Is it? I didn't ask for a new Mercedes." Ella's like, she's finding the silver lining. "I'm hoping the two truck guy will be hot." I'm like, "How can it be time to come in for my new Mercedes? We've never had a discussion about that." You're so funny, Ella. Don't worry. I know where it all is. It's all there inside the gym and now it's all being seeing me sitting there with my car. Anyway, everything's fine. Yeah. So, they assumptively told me to come in and choose my new Mercedes. They're just upselling me. They gave me a date, even. Imagine you did this in your business. Why are we not all doing this in our businesses? They gave me a date and a time. They're like, "We've booked you in for such and such time. Come in and we'll take you in out in all the new cars or whatever. You can drive all the new cars." I was like, "Well, I can't because I'm America," right then when they gave me the date for. But I finally agreed to come in. Why not? The thing is, I'm such an easy sell. I'm the easiest sell in the world. I was that person at seminars. Somebody's going to need to back me up and let know if this was you as well so that I know that I'm not alone. But I was that person at seminars who was the first person to run to the back of the room and buy the thing. I was always running to the back of the room and buying the thing. I would even run to the back of the room before they did the sales pitch because I knew that there'd always be a special bonus if you're in the top three or eight or whatever for doing the sales pitch. I didn't even care what it was. I'm just such a buyer. I'm such an easy sell. Lakisha says, "So me." Please back me up, people. Give me a love heart shower. Give me a comment if you're an easy sell as well. I just love to be sold to. But I saw one of my friends once say that a good salesperson loves to be sold to and I fully agree with that. I was going to say I wouldn't buy anything I didn't need. That's completely bullshit. I've bought many things that I don't need and never used. Specifically, most courses that I ever bought in the history of time on the internet, by the way. So, if you buy courses and you don't do them all or finish them all, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Don't think that that makes you a bad person or that you're flaky or something like that because I think maybe we're just so fricking smart that we know where we should spend our energy and time. You might just get one thing from that course you buy, even if it's my content. Sometimes for sure, I bought a tonne of stuff that was definitely not the right course, not the right content. So, I just think that even back then before I knew anything about anything, and I still know nothing about anything, but I know everything about everything, even back then, I obviously subconsciously was so fucking intelligent that I knew where I should spend my energy or time. So, most courses that I bought, I never did, and look at me now. You don't need to feel bad about it if you don't complete content that you buy. All right. So, Bron, if you're still there, can you also just grab a call to action from the Millionaire Mastermind, even if you grabbed the PS from yesterday's blog and just drop it into the comments here while logged into the business profile and then pin the comment please. That would be amazing. Then let me know if you are there and if you can do it so I know what's up and what's happening. So, then what else should we talk about? Everything is always perfect. What if you believe that everything was always perfect? Okay, shared. You don't need to comment as you. Comment as the business page. You're commenting as perfectly however you're commenting now. But just pop in the call to action for the Millionaire Mastermind. Everybody watching, this is how you sell on a livestream. Well, you might not have a bunch of ninjas like I do who can post comments and share for you. I used to have to do it all myself and sometimes I still do. So, you can do it yourself or you can have ninjas. I have ninjas because I'm a ninja and that's why I've punctured two tyres, not one, because it's a ninja attitude. You don't go around puncturing one tyre. You obviously go all in and you do two. It's amazing that I didn't manage to do four at once. I'm still impressed at myself at how I even managed to do two at once because when he said one, I'm like, "Fuck. Really? It didn't feel like that big of a clip." I'm like, "Okay, fair enough. I believe it, obviously." Then I get out and he's like, "It's actually two. So, we can't help you. We can't change a tyre when there's only one spare tyre in the trunk." I'm like, "How is that even possible? How did I do two?" Rebecca says, "That is so me. I'm such an easy sell running, elbowing others to get to the back." Rebecca's just like, "Get out of my way, bitches." Puncturing one tire's totally for punks, [inaudible 00:12:16]. Exactly. Don't think I've finished a training series. Yeah. I have legitimately never once in my life finished a course that I did. Never, ever. Never once have I finished a course that I bought. Okay. I'm seeing everybody going to the gym, like people who I sort of know. You know when you know people at the gym, but you don't know them well? Everyone's looking at me and I don't know what they're thinking. They're like, "What is happening? Why is she livestreaming out at the front of the gym? I'm just that person at the gym that always rushes in and rushes out and barely says hello to anybody and now I'm just chilling. At least I'm not sitting next to my car, so it's not too embarrassing. Ella says, "Kat, I have a ninja star tattooed on me and I've also punctured two tyres at once." Soul sister. All right. So, from now on, if you puncture a tyre, don't even tell us about it unless you punctured two tyres, people, because we don't even want to know about your puncturing behaviour. It's just super low vibe puncturing if you're only doing one puncture at a time. They probably are looking at my boobs [inaudible 00:13:10]. I've noticed a lot of that his morning at the gym because I noticed this morning. Oh, my God. I'm going to tell you guys an amazing manifestation story when Bronwyn gets that link. Have you joined the Millionaire Mastermind? Because I want to tell you about that as well: www.thekatrinaruthshow.com, it's very windy, /millionairemastermind. Thekatrinaruthshow.com/millionairemastermind. There's just over 24 hours left to be amongst it. It's my High Vibe As Fuck Millionaire Mastermind, the mindset and the strategy of crushing it on life for driven creators and, no, driven entrepreneurs and crazy creators who just want more. You get my whole team supporting you and coaching you and mentoring. It's a monthly membership programme. You're not locked in. You get a over 80% discount for your first month when you join before we close the doors again tomorrow and so much more cool stuff. Bronwyn's getting a comment now, but that's a little overview of it. So, at thekatrinaruthshow.com/millionairemastermind. This is my super low cost membership programme that we've created for everybody where you're getting my whole team, all those ninjas that I just mentioned, supporting you as well. Tech support, Facebook advertising support, funnel support. One of my friends audioed me yesterday. She's like, "I have to join because I just find it so overwhelming even knowing which course to choose to learn Facebook ads or to learn funnels or to learn email automation or whatever it might be." She's so happy that I've created something where my team are teaching and supporting and answering questions, as well as me. It's fucking amazing. I'm very proud of it. So, you've got to get amongst that. But let me come back to this story about my boobs and what I've manifested there because I don't know if you noticed, but over the past week, I've talked a lot about feeling unsure of whether I made them too big. Okay, there they are. Hello. Who can screenshot this for me right now? Give me a comment if you're screenshotting. All right. I think I gave you long enough. Let me know if somebody screenshotted. We'll do it one more time. Okay, i feel like that's going to be important photo for something. There's still people looking at me over there. Who the hell are you? Bronwyn's just commented, logged into my profile. She says, "Who the hell are you?" Who the hell are you? I don't even know why it starts with that. I love when it just randomly starts with something aggressive and punchy. Okay. So, you can read that comment after. The pinned comment has the details about the Millionaire Mastermind. Thank you, Bronwyn. This is all divinely perfect. Divinely perfect that I punctured my tyres so I could do this livestream right now. Everything is just as it was meant to be. Okay. Thank you, Ella. Thank you for the screenshot. I'm so excited. I'm having the best day ever. I reframed straight away. Carissa, if you're going to puncture a tyre, make sure you do two. We've had a group discussion and we've decided that we don't want to know about it if you only puncture one tyre because it's super low vibe type puncturing. You got to go all in on your tyre puncturing. That's how it's done. Then you get stranded at the gym and then you do a live stream. Then when you go to Mercedes, they act like you've been in a hospital and bring you muffins and coffee and stuff. Okay, let's make sure we don't miss the tow truck arriving. Here's my manifestation story. All right? So, over the past week, it's been now eight days since I had my boobs done. Of course, I'm at the gym with my fricking sandman on grunting and groaning like a motherfucker. I did try a chest press. That didn't seem like a smart idea. So, I stopped. But everything else seems fine. I felt like they were too big. I really did. Now, all my male friends when I mention this to are like, "Please don't say that again. That's not a thing." Billy G. messaged me and said, "As a voice for all men, I want to let you know never again to say the words, 'They're too big.' It's not possible." Then I told Patrick. He was like, "No, that's not possible. That's not a thing." Every other male who's had the opportunity to comment on it has said the same thing. But I was honestly like, "No, I think I've gone too much." I think I'm now too much, too much. I'm already so much with the way I bling up and everything and now I'm too, too much. I've gone too much Gold Coast, too much. I was like, "All I need now is a Swarovski crystal covered Mercedes and then who the hell do I think I am?" Exactly like this comment says right here. Who the hell are you? Right? I was really legitimately concerned about it. Then on top of it, my whole body puffed up and bloated. I gained 10 pounds instantly in two hours. That's some magic fucking backward manifestation right there because I full abs and I was tiny on the morning of the surgery. Surgery takes an hour, not even two hours, and then later that day when I'm home, I'm like, "What in the actual fuck?" I literally gained 10 pounds in an hour, or in two hours. Imagine you could reverse that procedure. You'd be able to make millions. Well, you can reverse that procedure. It's just manifestation. But here's what I didn't notice, and I wonder if you noticed me doing this and you were like, "Oh, Kat. Oh, Kat. What are you doing?" If so, then why the fuck didn't you tell me? But you can tell me now. But I was totally wording it all through the week. All week long, I was saying, "I think I went too big." All week long, I was saying, "I feel so big." Do you know why I was saying that? The moment of vulnerability here right now. I feel embarrassed to say this, but I'm going to tell you. The reason I kept going on and on about it all week last week, and maybe you didn't notice, maybe you did, I felt I went on and on. I was going on and on like, "I feel so big, my whole body's puffed up, I feel all bloated and heavy." I was deliberately drawing attention to that because there's still that part of me who's the very insecure not good enough girl who feels like if I gain a teeny bit of weight, then people will think less of me and judge me or feel like, "What the fuck is up with her? What's happening there?" Even when I put the video up where I was pulling the drains out, my stomach looked so big to me and I know I'm not big and I wasn't big. I know that. But for how I feel, right? All my previous fucked up body identity stuff was coming up. What's funny is now I'm in such love and acceptance of myself. It's a true thing. Even though I was feeling that, I was still like, "And I do fully love myself and I know that it's fine and I know this will shift." But it did bring up some old stuff for me. So, I felt like I had to deliberately say it, right? So, even when I did that little video where I was pulling the drains out, I deliberately touched my stomach and said something about my stomach being bloated because I was like, "I don't want people to think that that's just how I now normally look or something." So, you might think I'm way too hard on myself. It's funny because I can have that thought process and say that and at the same time, love and accept myself fully. So, it's like I can see both sides of it and I have compassion for the younger me who legitimately lived in that reality and 100% would have felt like that. The younger me would have been devastated, no way would I have put the fucking video up, and would have not even gone out in public. I'm not even exaggerating or joking. Those are my fellow fitness junkies, cardio queen peoples from way back. I'm not really a cardio queen anymore, actually. Human women. Those are my fellow human women. Thank you, [inaudible 00:19:51]. I love that. Can probably relate, right? But then all week long, then I did filming with Matt. So, when you see episode 39 of Kat Unchained, which should come out maybe tomorrow, it was all about the reality of getting a boob job. I did some really good content there around how everybody should shut the fuck up about what women are allowed to do or not do with their bodies because even the backwards thing that people do when they're like, "Aw, but you're already beautiful as you are. Why would you need to get a boob job?" That's actually insulting as well, just in a kind of backwards way. So, I did a cool video about that. I got a video coming up about the reality of getting a boob job. Then we've got the Kat Unchained show coming out tomorrow, which shows the behind the scenes of that. What you'll see, even if you saw the trailer yesterday, you're going to see me going on and on about, "I feel so big, I feel bloated, my whole body's puffed up." Well, that's true, right? That did happen and it's protective because you get a whole bunch of stuff pumped into you during the surgery and your body is like, "What in the actual fuck just happened?" Then two big things got shoved into your chest as well and your body's like, "What the double actual fuck just happened?" So, as a result of that, your body's like, "Okay. Man all systems, sound all alarms, and bring all possible fluid from the entire of Australia and put it right here into this bitch." That's basically what happened. That's what it felt like happened. So, it's a pretty common reaction, though. So, I know all that. I wasn't worrying, like something's changed in my body or something like that. But it was like, "Okay, I just got to ride this shit out and I feel it's annoying. I hate being all puffed up. I want to be back to abs and back to tiny only." But I kept telling this story. I kept claiming it, right? I kept saying, "I think my breasts are too big." I kept saying, "My body's all puffed up." Then it wasn't until Sunday, I was going to yoga. Was it Sunday? Whenever it was, I did a livestream in the car outside yoga. I think it was Monday afternoon only. Right. It was only Monday afternoon two days ago. I did a livestream in the car and I must have caught myself or something and I was like, "Fuck. I'm manifesting this. Oh, my God." Now I'm going to laugh [inaudible 00:21:44] when the episode of Kat Unchained comes out because then I'm going to be like, "Listen to me going on and on creating this." So, only two night ago on Monday night, I went into yoga class and I just set an intention at the side of the class. I said, "What if I just decided that my breasts are perfect?" Because I did legitimately feel like I've made them too big. I went way bigger than I would've because all my friends and clients who already have boob jobs were like, "I wished I had have gone bigger." So, I listened to them, right? I'm like, "Okay." I went extra big. I went double D, 480. Most people when they get their first breasts will be getting 300 or 350 from what I've heard and established. So, I was really concerned that I'm not going to be happy. Then Saturday night, I was up all night long tossing and turning. I sympathy puffed up. Thank you. Potatoes keep my so lean. Why potatoes make me so lean, I'm going to talk about that in a second. So, Saturday night, I'm up all through the night, super restless, tossing and turning. You're going to laugh at me. I was like, "Maybe they're too big," and then I was like, "But they can't be because Kat, you always make the right decision and everything always works out perfectly for you." So, I was fully coaching myself through it with my underlying beliefs and things that I would say to clients. I'm like, "It's legitimately literally not possible that they're too big because you always make the right decision." Yeah, but the comment about how I look being irrelevant, I do appreciate that. But at the same time, it's not irrelevant because if something's important to me, then that's okay. I'm allowed to care about how I look. This is what I mean by those backwards compliments. I know that's not your intention, Claire, but when people say it shouldn't matter how you look and what's matters is what's on the inside, it's downplaying that we're allowed to care about how we look and that we're allowed to value that. It reminds me of how one time, it came out in my daughter's school newsletter, it said, "We got to make sure that the kids don't adorn themselves with anything or change their hair or anything like that because let's teach our kids how to express themselves with what's on the inside." I was like, "Yeah, and we can fucking express ourselves with our exterior as well. We have a body. We get to use it however we please." So, I just feel like we've got to be careful there because it's a kind of a backwards shaming. It actually is. That's what I was even talking about in my little video about getting a boob job. I know it's not usually intended at that, but it is because it implies that it's not something you should be concerned with or that it's a lower priority thing to be concerned with. What if everything that matters to an individual got to matter? Period, the end. What if we didn't grade things as this matters more, this matters more, or whatever, right? Anyway, so I stayed up all night coaching myself on the fact that, of course, I made the the right decision, even though it didn't feel that way at the time. Then I caught myself with the wording on Monday night. So, then I went into class and I was like, "Okay. I'm deciding that as of now, I made the perfect decision and my breasts are perfect and that my body is perfect and beautiful as well and that I'm fully in my body right now." That was only Monday night and I'm not kidding. Today's Wednesday morning here in Australia. Just now being in the gym and looking at my body in the mirror in my little shorts and gym outfit and everything. I was like, "Fuck. I'm not quite back to fully lean and ripped, but pretty fricking close in 36 hours after I decided that." But I've got to admit that the other thing I did is start to eat a fuck load of white potato. How we look does matter. Anything that matters to an individual matters. That's the whole point, right? There's no finite rules on what matters. So, the potato thing's just random. But I was thinking about why do I always feel like I find it a little bit harder when I'm on the Gold Coast to stay in shape. Then when I'm in Bali or when I'm America, I'm fucking ripped. I was like, "It's energy and it's my energy about being here and some sort of disconnectedness on the Gold Coast or something." There was some truth to that. Then I was like, "Oh." When I'm in the US and when I'm in Bali, I eat really big dinners quite a lot because I'm usually going out at night. I might not eat so much, or sometimes even at all, through the day. But I order a huge dinner and I always eat potato. White potato, not sweet potato. Sweet potato is not my friend. I could change that story, for sure. But sweet potato is not my friend. Currently, it feels that way. I just gain weight when I look at a sweet potato. So, potatoes absorb toxins. That's interesting. How did I not know that? I feel like I know everything, but I didn't know that. Thank you, Jodie. Got to read about that. Well, most people think potatoes are not a weight loss food. For me, they certainly are. So, I just remembered that. I'm like, "Oh." In Bali, even when I get my omelette in the morning, I get this particular omelette at the place I stay and it has chorizo sausage in it and it has potato in it and it has corn in it as well. Then for dinner, I pretty much always eat potato, especially in America because potatoes are like the official food of America. I think the whole food pyramid in America is made up of potato, right? Right. So. Yeah. So, then I just started to eat a fuck load of potato as of a day and a half ago. Not only do I love it and it tastes so good. Oh, my God. I've never put cinnamon brown sugar on a sweet pot- ... No. Don't have cinnamon brown sugar on a sweet potato. You know what? I don't even really love eating sweet potatoes. I don't mind them. I've had the sweet potatoes done that way. What is that? A Southern way or something? I've had that. I don't mind it, but it's always been something when I eat sweet potatoes where I'm like, "Eh." It just doesn't quite align with me. Sure enough, whenever I start eating them, even back in the fitness days when it would be an official part of how you're supposed to eat for fitness, modelling, or competing or whatever, it never felt quite right and I feel like I straight away hold onto fluid and stuff, like maybe I have a low level intolerance to them. The white potato thing at first, they didn't believe it because I started to eat a load of white potatoes. I just was following intuition. I just follow intuition with what I eat. I don't diet. So, I just noticed that I was starting to eat a lot of white potatoes from December last year in Bali, then in America, whenever I go there. I was just giving myself permission to eat what I want because that's what I do now. I just consciously choose to eat what I feel like eating. But I was like, "This is weird that I want so much potato and I was slightly concerned that I was going to gain weight from it. But I was still eating it because I eat what my intuition says. Then I was like, "Fuck. I think I'm getting super lean from all these potatoes." It just goes against what a lot of people teach. Ella's on her way here. She's going to come here and throw a sweet potato at me. Just bring me a regular potato. I'm not kidding. I've actually got potatoes in this bag right here. I just rescued my bag of food and stuff from the car so I don't forget to take it out when the tow truck comes and takes the car. Yeah. So, I don't know if it was the potatoes or the mindset or the manifestation. But it was a mixture of those things. Okay. So, now we can talk about everything is always perfect. I'm still thinking about potatoes. I'm like, "Bring me more potatoes." Even the other day, I went out for dinner. I'm like, "All right, I'm fully on the potato train," and I went out and I had steak and I had so much mashed potato with it, which everyone thinks is an indulgent comfort food that's not supposed to be good for you. The live training in the Millionaire Mastermind's at 9:00 PM tonight. Are you concerned that it's supposed to be at 9:00 AM? Because it's definitely at 9:00 PM. Maybe we should move that because now we've extended the countdown time until tomorrow. Or maybe we should just make it you guys better fricking sign up before tonight. Thank you for that reminder, by the way. The first live training is happening, no, I'm going to keep it tonight. So, sign up tonight. Don't wait until the doors close. The doors close tomorrow at midday at noon. So, that's going to be 27 hours from right now. It's going to be midday on Thursday, Brisbane time, which will certainly be 10:00 PM Wednesday night, New York time, just so you know. That's why you're here. Why are you here? Why are you here? Give me more explanation. Did you think it was at 9:00? Have I told people it's at 9:00 AM? It's definitely at 9:00 PM. I never do anything at 9:00 AM. It's very unusual for me to be on livestream at 9:00 AM. Like right now, normally, I'd be writing my blog or normally, I'd be training. Normally, I wouldn't be driving around puncturing my fucking tyre up. But it's obviously all this that was meant to be. Okay. I want to talk about the "what if everything was perfect" conversation. If you see tow truck in the background, make sure you tell me. Okay? I'm sure you guys would. I would see it in the background. If you believed that everything was always perfect and always just as it's meant to be, then wouldn't that just give you so much freedom? Right? Wouldn't it just give you so much freedom? Because even this morning, to be honest, I had to calm down the tradies a little bit. They were going on and on and on about it and it sucks or whatever. I was like, "Fuck." But I was like, "Okay. Well, it's fine. It is what it is." It's not like it was a big accident, obviously. Maybe I would have had a much bigger reaction, depending on the situation. Of course, I would have. But still, no matter what happens, if you bring it back to everything is always perfect and you always make the right decision, then what that does, and we'll talk about that belief system in a moment because it could be challenged quite easily, I mentioned, depending on the situation. That it means is that if you chose to believe that, that you give yourself complete freedom, right? You give yourself complete freedom to not get caught up in an energetic drain or an energy drain or anything like that and to be able to just take immediate aligned action on anything and everything that you need to take action on to be able to access high level creative flow. Let's talk about the belief for a moment of everything is perfect. It's literally something that you can choose to believe, right? You get to choose all of your beliefs. Maybe a load of people wouldn't want to choose that or wouldn't feel available to be able to choose that because they would be like, "But what about this and this and this and this?" Right? Particularly like legitimate situations that cause a problem or that are very upsetting or traumatic or worse, right? Here's where I'm going to be probably annoying as fuck. It's possible. I don't think that ever happened before at all. But it might happen right now. I reserve the right to have conflicting and contradictory beliefs. So, for example, if something really terrible or traumatic happens, the truth is that I wouldn't believe that it was perfect and I would have full blown human reaction to that. I don't know how I would process that. I've seen things happen in friends' lives and that's been very hard for me to process. Who here love 9:00 Kat livestream? Why are you so obsessed with ... Oh. Now you're talking about this one. I'm like, "Are you trying to encourage me to do a 9:00 livestreaming to the Millionaire Mastermind? Because I can't because I'm here." All right. Give a love heart shower in response to Bronwyn's comment if you love me livestreaming at 9:00 AM. Yeah. So, the truth is, I have found it really hard to process when full on things have happened in people's lives who I know, or even just in general sense when you hear about things. I can't say that I walk around feeling like everything is perfect and as it was meant to be and that was what was divined. So, that's where there's an element of mystery or an element of not-knowingness comes into the whole thing. I actually believe that as much as I love to know everything and feel that I do have access to the collective conscious, I do have psychic downloads, I do have the ability to channel or to travel and a lot of spiritual gifts and powers that people don't use or don't activate or maybe are scared of whatever and don't do all of that with an intention that it's coming from God, that I still, at the same time, accept and actually am happy to not know everything, to have things that remain mysterious, to have things where it hasn't been revealed to me yet and it maybe never will be. Right? You know the apple of the Garden of Eden, right? The fruit of the tree of, what's it called, the knowledge of good and evil. This being, I read a thing online. This is a little controversial. So, I don't know what your opinion is on this. But I read a thing that did resonate with me that spoke about a lot of, for example, [inaudible 00:33:37] and stuff, that it actually, it's kind of like an example of that. It's like the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It gives you access to more information that you're not necessarily supposed to have. I sound pretty crazy conspiracy theorist, don't I? But something in me resonated with that when I read that. I was like, "Yeah. No, I feel that. I feel that there's supposed to be mysteries that are not shown to us. I feel that there's a load of information that we can access that we don't and that I access an insane amount of stuff from the collective and from my higher consciousness and from God and that sort of thing through how deep my inner work practise is. Many of my friends who've done plant medicine, for example, which is a lot of my friends, by the way, and a lot of my clients, and I always say, "If you're called to do it, you do it." Right? I don't tell people, "You should do this or you shouldn't do that." I say what I feel for me and I encourage everyone to make their own decisions, as they only can, right? But many of my friends who've done it have said things to me like, "You seem to already have that level of knowledge and that level of soul connection," because they'll understand my writing in a deeper way or feel that they really connect with me in a deeper way or they're like, "Holy shit. I can see in you what I just accessed from this experience. How did you do that?" Because I've never taken anything, not a single drug, not even weed, nothing. Not even a cigarette. Right? But plenty of coffee and plenty of wine. So, I go, "Okay. I think that I've created that through my really deep inner work practise that I have and the deep spiritual practise that I have, which is an everyday thing. So, I do have the ability to access higher consciousness, to access power that are beyond my understanding and beyond the abilities, or I guess beyond what most people would choose. But I still feel like there's this level beyond that, which is a complete mystery on many levels, beyond that which are a complete mystery to me and which will probably always remain a complete mystery to me and that that's okay. I think that the search for knowing all things is a slippery slope to go down and I think that it can be dangerous. So, I don't know how I quite got onto that. But coming back to what I was saying about everything being perfect. I guess what I'm trying to say is when I don't understand something, when I don't understand something, when I can't reconcile it, when I walk around every day going, "Everything's perfect, I believe that everything is as it's meant to be." So, then I puncture my tyres. I'm like, "Easy reframe, right? So easy." But what if something really full ... Okay. Somebody tried to phone me. Don't the people know not to do that? What about when something really full on has happened in the lives of people I know or when something like that happens in a worldwide sense or whatever? Am I walking around saying, "Everything is perfect and as it's meant to be?" I'm not and I can't really justify or excuse that to you. I can't really explain that except for the way that I just did explain it, which is that I don't have the answers to everything. I don't know. But there are things where I feel like that's not as it was meant to be or that's not perfect. Then the other part of me goes, "But maybe it is and I just don't see the bigger picture yet and maybe it's okay that I feel confused about it or that I feel like I can't explain it and I'm not supposed to be fucking God here and trying to explain everything to the whole world." But I will say that in general day to day sense, who loves to go to church with Kat in the morning right outside the gym? Narnia. Narnia is the best thing ever. Narnia and Alice in Wonderland. I will say that in a day to day sense, and even for, I guess, day to day things that typically really throw people off their course and really upset them or something like that ... That's a good point. If it calls again, I'll answer the phone. It was no caller ID, though. Why would have have no caller ID? Yeah, that's a really good point. I should have answered the phone. Okay. If I freeze, it's because I'm answering the phone. They'll definitely call again if it was them. Manifest. I don't know why it would be no caller ID, though. That's all. So, yeah. In a day to day sense, a lot of the things that I guess throw people or really knock them around or slow them down or cause a huge energetic drain are things where, if you had the belief that everything is always perfect and as its meant to be and that you don't need to necessarily understand why, wouldn't it just make it so much easier to, I guess, manage and deal with your life and to be able to then flick straight back into flow or flick into gratitude or flick into positivity and make aligned choices from that place? So, even last week, my friend Linda, who I know a lot of you follow and who's coming back to stay with me today, she left from staying with me on Monday of last week. My son did in fact put poop in her handbag, in her bag, in her travel bag, like actual poop. That was just a side note there. He loves her so much. So, she found that right as she was leaving and that slowed it down and it was upsetting, of course. It's kind of funny now. But it wasn't really that funny at all. It was pretty fucking disgusting. So, that happened to her, I guess. For her, if we're going to reframe everything and say everything happens for us, not to us. That happened for her. I know that's just a normal big ass truck. That's not a tow truck. Then she leaves and she travels to Brisbane to get on the plane to fly to Bali. She was so excited to go to Bali and really looking forward to getting back there. That's not my truck. Then she gets to the airport, all the way to check-in, and finds that her passport was missing from her handbag. Right? So, I get this really upset message from her. The cover of the passport was there, but the passport itself was gone. Different bag from the one my son was in, by the way. We still, to this day, don't know what happened to that passport. She's now still here in Australia. She's coming back to stay with me today. She had to actually travel down to Canberra because she has a passport from Finland, not Australia. She's not necessarily a citizen yet. So, she had to fly and get on a plane and travel back down to Canberra in order to go to the embassy there and then organise a new passport and now wait for the new passport to be flown out from Finland. So, her trip to Bali's been delayed by roughly two weeks. She still doesn't have the new passport yet. So, that was so upsetting. But she is such a perfect example of what we're talking about because I got an upset message from her in the morning like, "I can't believe it," and all that sort of thing, obviously. Then I think it was only middle of the day where I was getting messages from her like, "Well, I don't understand why this is happening. I feel really upset still. But of course, everything's perfect and there'll be a greater reason for this that will be shown to me." She just released it just like that and went back into an abundance attitude, into a gratitude attitude, into a mindset of expansion and receiving. Now, I'm not going to tell all her whole story. She's telling them already on her own livestream. But now, over the past seven or eight, nine days since that happened, so much powerful, cool stuff is come into play for her. So many things have taken place, been shown, been revealed that couldn't have happened if she had have got on that plane to Bali. She'll tell you herself. Massive up-levels and perfect growth. It's just amazing, right? But none of us are surprised. I'm not surprised. She's not surprised because we're like, "Of course," because the second that passport went missing, it is that immediate reaction of, "I can't fucking believe it. My passport is missing." That's like that short term reaction and then for me straight away, as well as for her ... Hey, Liana. First time live. Awesome. For me straight away, as well as for her, it straight away goes into, "But everything is as it's meant to be." So, that's almost like anticipation, right? Almost anticipation and excitement like, "Ooh. I wonder what's coming. I wonder what's happening as a result of this." Now, I listened this morning, actually. As I was getting dressed, I listened to an 11 minute audio from her that she'd left me last night at 11:00 PM. Maybe [inaudible 00:41:07] 11:00, 11:00 PM. I don't know. I was just smiling because I'm like, "Of course. Of course, all this amazing fucking stuff is happening." So, I'm sure she and I will livestream together over the next day or two because she'll be back at my house from today. Then same with this when I punctured the tyres. I'm like, "Fuck. Now I'm going to need ..." I'm like, "Okay, it's only tyres. But now I'm sitting here for a while. It's all covered anyway. I've got all the coverage and everything. But now it pushes my whole day back because my car's getting serviced today and I wanted to get there at 8:00 AM when they're opened so that you're first in line. Now I don't know how long it will take for the car service. But that's fine. There's 87 awesome café where they treat you like a queen and I'll just sit there and work all day and then the shopping mall's two minutes walk from there anyway. So, it's all fine. So, I reframed all of that. But then as soon as I got off the phone from Mercedes about the car, I was like, "Oh. Well, of course, you're going to livestream right now, right?" Really, what else am I going to do? I guess I could go back into the gym and do another workout, but I already did that. Or I text Matt, my friend. He didn't answer me yet still. So, I guess he's with clients. It's a busy period of the morning. So, once again, I was like, "Oh. Well, I'm not going to sit here getting upset or feeling sad or feeling down," like most people. Most people really do let something like that totally impact their mood and their attitude for their whole day. It would be such a story like, "My day is ruined, now my week is ruined, now this happened," or they would get into a story of, "Why do bad things always happen to me? What's wrong with me?" Then isn't it hilarious how that ... Well, it's not hilarious, but kind of, how they would just keep creating a whole bunch of shit as a result of that, right? It's just kind of crazy. Where instead, if we have the mindset that everything's perfect, then we don't go down that negative spiral. We stay in this positive space of abundance and flow and receiving and just knowing and trusting. So, can you see how choosing, choosing to have that attitude that everything is always perfect and that every happened as it was meant to, you don't even have to understand it, it probably will be shown to you and you will understand it and you will look back and you'll be like, "Oh, my god. That happened because of this, this, and this. Oh, my god. I'm so glad that that happened. I thought it was a bad thing, and of course, it wasn't." So, often, that happens in life, right? But even if that didn't happen, even if you never were able to look back on that particular incident and go, "Oh, now I can see where that happened," even if that didn't happen, can't you see how choosing that everything's perfect and just releasing it in that moment gives you back your power? This is a conversation about power. It gives you back your power. It gives you access to creative flow and super flow because when you're in this energy of, "Something happened to me and life's hard or it's sad or now I feel shitty or now my day is ruined," even something like, "Just today is ruined," [inaudible 00:43:41] then you're immediately in a contraction energy, right? You're immediately tense, you contracted, you're in a downward energy. So, automatically, when you're in a contracted energy, and I was saying this to some of my members yesterday on our training livestream, when you're in a contracted energy, your body is like this and it's like you're like this. Right? You cannot receive when you're like this. How are you going to receive? You're clenched up so tight and you're going to impact not just ... This is not just to do with your energy, right? You're literally like this. You will see that your posture will change. Look at people who live in fear and from fear. They have a different posture. They don't walk around openhearted like this. I practise my posture a lot, actually. That was just like the wind saying, "Let's have a boobs flash." I consciously keep myself upright, keep myself open. I look at the physical aspect of my posture. But for sure, also being in an attitude of receiving and openness impacts your whole body. It impacts your posture. I believe it impacts my age. I talk about reverse ageing a lot. I know for sure that a part of why I stay looking young for my age, so young, so young right now. So young right now. So young right now. I know. You don't have to say it. I'm just going to own it. I know that a big part of it is, well, it fucking decided to. But it's alignment, right? But it's also being in an open abundant attitude. It's also I just don't get stressed or upset by things very much. I'm not saying I never would, obviously. But I don't get ... Even yesterday, I did a big survey for my new financial advisor and it talked a lot about, "Would you get really stressed or upset if you lost a lot of money?" There was a lot of questions to do with your moods. In all of them, I was like, "No. I wouldn't. I wouldn't." I would feel annoyed, maybe frustrated temporarily. I wouldn't be like, "Oh, my god. The sky is falling. The sky is falling." I would be like, "Okay. Well, that was a fun experiment. It is what it is," and regardless of the sum of money, right? How can you do that? You can't do that just because you make a lot of money in your business. If anything, it's probably the other way around. Let me see if I can balance this tripod. I'm getting all clogged up somehow siting there. Do you hear that? Must be the wind. Where's the tow truck? I really hope I didn't ignore the two truck driver's call and now I'm just hanging here now all day and he's given up on me. But I feel like they would have called back again if it was him. What was I saying? I don't even know. Something about the reverse ageing. It impacts your whole energy systems. It impacts your digestion, it impacts your physical posture, it impacts your moods, your happiness. So, I'm able to ... A very high percentage of the time when you choose to live this way, then you'll be in a good mood is the short and simple way of saying it. But you can expand on that, right? You're in abundance mood. You're in a mood of happiness. You're in a flow. You feel good about yourself. You feel uplifted. You feel light and lean and clear and clean or whatever it is that you want to feel. So, don't you think that you would naturally then just make better choices, make more aligned choices for you, have more creative downloads, have access to greater knowledge? A lot of the things that create success in my life come as a result of I have a lot of awesome fucking ideas all the time. I have creativity and badass inspirational, empowering, entertaining content just running through me like a tap running through me. It never stops. I always know what to do, I fully trust in my decisions, I make fast decisions, I feel energetically light the vast majority of the time. So, that allows me to move quickly through time and space. I trust and believe in people, I trust and believe that everything's working perfectly. There was another question on their survey. It was like, "Do you trust that most people are good?" I'm like, "Of course." Right? I just choose all these things that put me in expansion. Now, some people might think, "Oh, well, that's a naïve attitude or that's going to catch you out or somebody's going to screw you over," or something like that. I just don't choose to be available for that. I'm just not available for that. It's not the way that I choose to see the world. If something did happen, then I would be reframing it like a motherfucker. I would turn it into content. I would turn it into money. I would monetize the shit out of it and then we'd be sitting here on a livestream together again. So, for me, all of this has been a practise that's taken much time over the years, I suppose. But it doesn't have to take a lot of time. It would have been very quick for me to do this if somebody had have taught it to me earlier, if I had have been conscious of it. So, that's what I'm here for for you, right? Just because it took me years to really get into my abundance attitude and to really understand how this stuff works and how easy it is when you let it be easy doesn't mean it's got to take years for you. You get to listen to me and if you resonate with it, if something inside of your soul says yes, then you go, "Yeah. I'm just going to adopt that attitude right away. I would have just adopted that attitude right away if somebody would have told me. Maybe they did and maybe I just wasn't in a place to listen, right? Where's my tow truck? Where is it? How long have we been on here? I haven't been here for an hour, have I? It said the tow truck's coming in an hour. Man, I'm clogged up. It said within an hour. Okay. So, I just feel like this is such an important conversation. Actually, here's something I want to tell you about the Millionaire Mastermind as well. I haven't spoken a whole lot about what my role is in the Millionaire Mastermind. I was joking on yesterday's livestream. If you didn't watch yesterday's livestream, I was on fine form. I was hilarious as fuck. You definitely want to watch it. It was only 20 minutes. It didn't go into church like this. It was like I was being super random and crazy. I was funny. I watched the replay. I do watch my own replays. Then I laugh or then I'm like, "Damn it, that's good content. I should write that shit down," because it just comes through me, right? Oftentimes, I don't remember what I said at all on a livestream. So, I'll watch the replay. So, watch that. But one of the things that I said on yesterday's livestream was that I'm selling you nothing because I was laughing about the fact that I didn't promise anything. Basically, my role in the Millionaire Mastermind is that I'll do whatever the fuck I want when I want, how I want, and with who I want. I would just show up like a rockstar and bring my energy and bring my awesomeness. So, I was joking about how cool it is that you can create a whole programme and do a launch and sell a programme where you're literally selling nothing. I'm not promising and I would deliver plenty of it, though. Then people are signing up front and centre. Then I was like, "Okay. Technically, it's not nothing," because it's an insane amount of training, all the support, every single thing that we do here at The Katrina Ruth Show, talk to you month by month, monthly report and what we've been doing that very month, how we've been implementing it, and how you can implement it too. From the ninjas, right? Not me. My team are teaching the magic that they do. It's just going to be so fucking next level incredible. I'm so proud of it. I'm so excited. But as far as what I'm doing, okay, well, I do nothing because all I do is be me. But if I want to try and explain it to you, I guess, which I feel like doing right now, so I will, then what my role is in the Millionaire Mastermind is to be the light and to be the leader and to be that example for you of what's available and what's possible. So, the vast majority, if not all of what I'll be teaching on and creating trainings for you on and working with you on and having discussions with you around will be this sort of stuff, the inner work stuff, and how do you step into those beliefs? How do you step into what's inside of you? How do you say yes to your soul? How do you do that fast or as well and without hesitation? No, those are the tradies, Lisa, who helped me out before. No. How do you access it all? How do you access higher power? How do you access higher consciousness and all that good stuff? That's what my role is. So, it will be about me being in the energy space of the Millionaire Mastermind. The Facebook group's already open, by the way. When you sign up today, you're going to get into the Facebook group right away. You really want to sign up today because we're doing the first live training 12 hours from now. Approximately 12 hours from now. But then the doors are open for 26 and a bit more hours from now. Correct, Ella. Right? Thank you, Lisa. Yeah. So, you've still got a full day, just over a day to join. But sign up now. Right? We'll hit you hard with the reminder emails and social media before the doors close tomorrow. I just don't understand why you would not take fast action. If you want to see me being a total smart ass about not taking fast action, then go watch yesterday's livestream. I was being quite irreverent. Yeah. Then tonight, we'll do the first live training and the topic for that is on the sales page at thekatrinaruthshow.com/millionairemastermind. So, what my role is is to really lead the way with the energy of what's available, right? I've got my amazing team coming in and breaking shit down for you and teaching how it's done, exactly how to do it, exactly how to implement, exactly what it is that you need to do. My friend mentioned to me yesterday, I think I said at the start of this live, she mentioned something about being so grateful that I've created this where my team are there so that she doesn't have to try and figure out who to learn Facebook ads from or who to learn funnels from or who to learn selling from or who to learn the other things that are not really my area to teach, right? Everyone knows that I'm here to be the leader and to work with you on mindset and success and deep, solid cellular transformation. That's what I do. Cellular and soul shifts. So, I'm not going to teach funnel stuff. I will jump in and talk about these things from time to time. I have done it in previous programmes and I still will. But it's not my area to break it down and teach it. I'm simply not going to teach it in some kind of step by step fashion that you can then implement because it's not now my mind works. Right? I would try to do that and the next thing would be off on a deep soul shift conversation and everybody would be thrilled and it would be exactly what you need. But yet, at the same time, if you want to know the breakdown and the how to do it and the what you even need to do or give your attention to, then you probably are just not going to ever fucking get that from me because then you're going to be like, "Ah, let's just talk about soul stuff." Then you're going to be like, "That shit doesn't even matter." I simultaneously believe it doesn't even fucking matter because I know that my results come from inside and that's where yours come from as well. I fully believe that whilst at the same time understanding that you want to learn it and that it does matter and that it's really helpful to learn. So, I told you. Contradictions, right? So, that's what the team do and so much other cool stuff that you'll read about when you go to the sales page. Then my role, like I said is to be the light. It's to be the leader. It's to be magnetic as fuck. It's to be all that I am to empower you to be all that you are. So, I'll be coming in, I'll be the energy of the Millionaire Mastermind every day anyhow because it's obviously there on my Facebook. So, I'll be noticing and I'll be seeing and I'll be seeing where the limiting beliefs are and where the patterns and where the sabotages and where you're maybe asking questions that are pointing you in the wrong direction and I'll be able to guide you. Yes, the Millionaire Mastermind is the High Vibe Mastermind 2.0. So, High Vibe Mastermind didn't have my whole team coming in there. We had a few little individual trainings, but it wasn't a membership programme that was ever designed to teach all these different things with the whole team. So, it was time to move on. It was time to become better. It was time to improve. So, the Millionaire Mastermind is actually called Katrina Ruth's High Vibe As Fuck Millionaire Mastermind because it's 2.0. Yeah. So, I certainly have many ideas of things I want to cover in there. But it will be very flow based and it will be very guided month by month and week by week and day by day and very much guided by what I'm picking up in the energy of the group and what's going on. I'm really excited for it because this is the way that I work with my private clients where obviously, I don't say in advance what I'm going to do with them because it depends on what's going on at the time. So, that's exactly what will be happening with the Millionaire Mastermind. But even more in that broader format. Then incredible, incredible support from my amazing team. So, anyway, I'm going to jump off this livestream. I feel like we've done an awesome livestream conversation together. Thank you so much for being here. It is, it can't be 9:29 AM, surely. Is it already 9:29 AM? Does that mean ... Fuck. I've been livestreaming for an hour. I'm just looking at my times here. So, I might call back or see if I got a text from them. If it was them and I didn't answer the phone, they would have texted me and I turned my notifications on, so I would have seen that. So, that didn't happen. So, maybe I'll go inside and harass [inaudible 00:55:33] or I'll just chill out here. But I feel like the livestream's done. Thank you so much for being here. Go to thekatrinaruthshow.com/millionairemastermind, check it out, get in on the 26 hours until the doors close. Don't be the person that waits to sneak in over the final line. You'll still get everything. You'll still get the replay from tonight and all that. But one of the things I want to really teach you and support you around is learn to make rapid decisions from gut. If something's right for you, if your soul is speaking to you, say yes now. Don't hesitate. Ultimately, if you say yes to your soul, you get the benefit of that. But what I've learned is that when you say yes to your soul right away and you choose to do it without hesitation or with minimal hesitation, even when it feels scary, then you start to see your rewards exponentially increase because you're just not living in that constantly low state. You're making a statement to God, to the universe, to your higher self that you are ready to receive. So, if you're ready to receive and you're ready for your abundance and you know that the Millionaire Mastermind is for you, read the pinned comment. It starts with, "Who the hell are you?" I'm not even sure why, but it sounds aggressive. It sounds important. Read it and then go to thekatrinaruthshow.com/millionairemastermind, check out my High Vibe As Fuck Millionaire Mastermind. It is the mindset and the strategy of how to crush it on life for driven entrepreneurs and crazy creators who just want more. That's me. That's you. Don't forget. Life is now. Press play.
We have Stefan for one last episode, and it's about a major one. You heard of this one before? Really? It's so good. Theme song by French Goodbye @ramonespodcast
#186 Why paying taxes has very little to do with funding the federal government. We also explore the potential impact of the U.S. tax reform on households, businesses and the economy. More information, including show notes, can be found here.Episode Summary – Why Do We Pay Taxes?They say the only things certain in life are death and taxes. While that’s probably true it’s also likely that many people who have resigned themselves to paying taxes don’t truly understand why taxes are necessary. In this episode, David covers the issue extensively in light of the new Tax Cuts and Jobs Act the U.S. Congress has passed. If you take the time to listen you’ll not only understand the recent tax legislation better, you’ll also understand why you have to pay taxes in the first place, and what it does for the nation. Consider it a 30-minute lesson in economics and government spending that actually applies to your life.Comparing the U.S. tax system to other countries like Denmark makes you wonder why taxes have to be so complicatedOne of David’s friends lives in Denmark. In a recent conversation, this friend mentioned that it took him less than 10 minutes to prepare and file his taxes. Really? It’s true. But there are other things about the tax system in Denmark that might not be so attractive, like a 36% to 52% tax rate. When David started looking over his tax liability in light of the recently passed Tax Cuts and Job Act, the contrast between the two systems was obvious. After 45 minutes David couldn’t understand the implications of the legislation so he asked his tax accountant whether he’d get a tax cut or not. The answer? Maybe. It’s complicated. In this episode, David explains some of the basic principles behind how our economy and national budget work, including why taxes are necessary at all.One reason we pay taxes is to prevent inflation. Here’s how it works:When a government spends more than it takes in, it runs a deficit and then issues debt in order to balance its accounting books. If the federal government spends and spends and spends, the capacity of the private sector to produce goods and services is constrained and prices rise. That’s how inflation happens. Paying your taxes can help prevent inflation because it can keep federal government from overspending, particularly during a period when the economy is growing quickly. As the economy expands, households and business get more income, which means they have to pay more taxes, which keeps the federal budget deficit at a reasonable level.What will be the overall impact of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act?It’s expected that the new tax legislation for 2017 is going to stimulate the economy by encouraging more production and creating incentives for more workers to join the workforce. Lower taxes mean more money for households and businesses to spend and invest. But it also means the government receives less tax revenue – which will cause the national debt to increase. Nobody knows exactly how much either of those things will grow, but David has some insights to share about the legislation’s impact, on this episode.The new tax code is expected to impact businesses in a positive wayThere are many arguments for why the new tax code passed in 2017 should benefit business. First off, corporate taxes were cut from 35% to 21%. That will make the U.S. more attractive for business to operate in. The next positive aspect for businesses is that the new legislation establishes what is called a territorial system where businesses will no longer be taxed on their overseas earnings. Previously, U.S. businesses were taxed on any earnings they made overseas if they brought those earnings back into the U.S., and businesses want to keep their tax bill as low as possible, so they kept that money overseas to the tune of $2.6 trillion dollars worth. Now they can bring that money back into the U.S. economy through a one-time repatriation tax of 15% for cash, and for other things like property, it’s 10%. David covers a handful of other benefits businesses should experience into the new tax code on this episode.In This Episode You’ll Learn[0:51] Residents of Denmark are able to prepare and file their taxes in 10 minutes – Wow![1:40] Are you going to get a tax cut from the recent legislation that was passed?[4:01] Foundational principles about why we pay taxes in the first place[8:44] Assessing the new tax laws after the fact: They were trying to simplify. But does it?[17:32] What impact is the new tax legislation going to have on the economy?[21:10] Corporate income taxes have changed from 35% to 21%, and no more taxes on overseas earnings[27:39] Technicalities that still need to be worked out regarding the recent tax reform
Really? It's the LAST day of May already? Weren't we JUST dancing around the Maypole? We've got more chances for you to win your way in to 93Q Summer Jam, share some Fair concert news, a mid-week edition of GHOSTED, and we'll try and Name That Tune...Hear it all ON DEMAND, powered by Empower Federal Credit Union! 00:00 - Goodbye May 03:36 - Update 06:10 - Dónde está el baño? 10:16 - Guess the Year 12:52 - Update 16:10 - Hollywood Highlights 1 19:44 - Update 24:41 - Malarkey 29:33 - Amy is...quirky 32:37 - Update 37:17 - Dave Bullard/NYS Fair concert news 41:56 - Update 46:56 - GHOSTED! 53:28 - Update 59:38 - Name That Tune 1 62:47 - Sweet Deal of the Week! 65:14 - Name That Tune 2 69:03 - Hollywood Highlights 2 72:18 - Coming up Thursday/BYE!!!
Final Clickfunnels webinar? On this extra long episode Russell talks about doing a webinar for Clickfunnels today, and why it’s the last time. He talks about where he was a year ago, and how things have changed for Clickfunnels in that year. Here are some interesting things you will hear in today’s episode: Why Russell thinks doing a webinar a week for your business is still a must, but why his business is different. What revelation led to The Expert Secrets book and the possibility of doing an infomercial with Dean Graziosi. And what you can expect to see with Clickfunnels when things change in January. So listen below to hear what kind of changes are coming for Clickfunnels in 2017 and why. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson I want to welcome you guys back to Marketing In Your Car. Now, it’s funny I get people all the time that ask me what microphone I use due to its amazing audio quality, and it’s just my phone. I don’t do microphones, I just hold it and talk into it. I figured if I had to get a microphone set up I never would have done it. I just want to be able to do these whenever I want to. Whenever I want, so I need at least the most simple, easy setup possible and that’s how we did this, which is really cool. I actually just got a brand new iPhone, so this is my first time recording on this new iPhone, which I’m kind of excited about. With that said, it snowed last night, if you follow me on Snapchat….I may be killing Snapchat, I haven’t decided yet, but it’s kind of frustrating but it’s also kind of fun. I may be moving it over to Instagram Stories or something, I don’t know. But we went, half my kids are out in the snow playing in it. Norah and me were in the hot tub, it was really fun. Then the kids want the fireplace on, so I ran in my bare feet in the snow to turn the fireplace, it was some good times, but I survived it and lived to tell the story. Today is exciting day because today is webinar day. We’re doing a webinar, I was doing the stats, 4500 people registered. What? Which is going to be exciting. It’s funny, we’re getting towards the end of the year now and I want to share a message that’ll loop back to the beginning of this year. For those of you who have been listening to the Marketing In Your Car podcast, if you haven’t been, go and binge listen to all of them and catch up because there are some important things you’re missing. Just kidding, kind of. There was a podcast I did, I think in January. I was driving home and it was snowy as well. I think it was called the business model for the next twelve months. So if you go to marketinginyourcar.com and search on the page for business model, or twelve months, it should pull up and you listen to it. But I walk through a challenge I give to everyone, that basically do a live webinar every single week for the next twelve months and transform your life and business and it’ll be amazing. What’s interesting is that, as I’ve been saying that over and over and over again, very few people have. Surprise, surprise. But the people that have are doing some amazing things. Some are speaking at Funnel Hacking Live, some are doing different things. One of them, I’m going to brag, I hope they don’t mind. I’m sure that they’re probably listening to this, but Brandon and Kaelin Poulin are examples of people who just, every time I’m like, “Hey you should do this.” Just do it and it’s amazing. And last month, and they’re in the weight loss space, they sell $147 product and you might think, well how much can someone make doing a webinar a week every single week for a year? And I tell you it compounds. It’s a compounding interest game. I remember some famous guy said something about compounding interest, which was cool, but I don’t remember the quote or the actual concept behind compounding interest. I only know how to sell stuff. But it’s the same thing I think. It compounds. Just to put into perspective, when I met them at Funnel Hacking Live, they were doing about $100,000 a month that was in March or April, whenever Funnel Hacking Live was. Then they joined Inner Circle and kept doing it, and kept compounding and compounding. November, I actually sent an email out the other day, I was like they did almost half a million dollars in November. And Brandon messaged me back, “What? We passed 600 grand in November.” So I want to put it in perspective for you. $600,000 selling a $147 information product in the weight loss industry. That’s the power of what we’re talking about, this compounding interest, this compounding effect of consistently doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. And I’ve shared it with some of my friends, people who are successful, I had one friend I won’t mention his name. A great marketer and super cool guy, and his company has been stuck at about $3 million dollars a year for a couple of years. Which is funny, for some reason, I was stuck at 3 million a year for a long time, that was my sticking point. There’s different sticking points, for me to break a million dollars was really hard, took me four or five years in a row, I was trying to break a million dollars from January 1st to December 31st, and I missed it multiple years in a row by a couple tens of thousands of dollars, like 20 or 30 thousand dollars. There’s some mental block, and after I broke that I shot to 3 million and stuck there for a long time. Could never really break through that, in fact, I broke through it one time, when we built a big company up and had a huge staff, but our profits were horrible, then we shut that down and I was stuck at 3 million again for 3 or 4 years consistently, could not break that mental barrier. What changed it for me was that transition to selling a lot of different product, because that’s the mindset of marketers, I gotta create the next big thing, to make more money to how do I make something consistent that I just keep pushing people through. For me it was the webinar. We did the webinar and I committed to our team, because everyone….it’s funny, when we launched Clickfunnels, a lot of my friends, and I saw it in forums, in Facebook groups, people were like, “Clickfunnels looks cool, but it’s Russell’s flavor of the week. I don’t want to move my whole platform and then next week he’s on to a new thing.” I was like, “Crap, I have to show people that I’m serious about this. This is the future, this is my focus.” So a lot of my friends actually, didn’t sign up for a year and half to two years because of that. They were afraid I was going to move on, because that was my pattern. That’s all of our patterns. We do something initially to build a big audience of people. Then the way we start making money is create new things to sell to them. And that’s part of the strategy, there’s value in that, but what’s more valuable is creating a front end offer that’s evergreen, consistent, that you’re always driving people into. There’s a consistent message, consistent onboard, everyone comes through the same channel, buying the same thing, understanding the same concepts, then as you’re building your culture and all these other things, come off of that. So I started doing these one things consistently, that was kind of my promise to Dylan and Todd initially, “This is going to be my focus, don’t worry guys. I’m not chasing the next shiny object. We’re going to focus on this.” It took me three months before we figured out how to sell it right. We had multiple failed product launches initially. Then we figured out the webinar was how we were going to sell it, and it worked. We did the webinar over and over. And I did the webinar every week for almost a year, probably more than that. Some days I would do two to three webinars in a day, which is a lot. I don’t know if I could handle that nowadays. When we first got started, that’s what I was doing. I’d do a webinar and get off, then do another one and get off. If you do it, those of you who have done a webinar, a two hour webinar, it drains you. All your energy is going into it, and to do two or a couple times three in a day, it was tough. But I was learning my message, finding my voice, understanding where people were getting stuck, perfecting it and going over and over. And the nice thing about doing it live is it gets everyone on your staff and team focused on this thing. This last year, we had so much success and the webinars were kind of shifted over to automated webinar, and that’s been running for most of this year, so I haven’t been doing them live that much this year. But I paid my dues, so it’s okay for me. For you guys, you gotta pay your dues first then you can. After you’ve done it 50 or 60 times live, you’re allowed to automate it. So we automated it a lot this year, it’s been good, a consistent stream of money, but it hasn’t been this big focal point. So we wanted to do one big last hurrah, which is happening today in a couple of hours, to do the funnel hacks webinars. So we did a big push and got 4500 people on it. 4500 people means we’ll get a thousand on the webinar. We consistently close 20 percent, that means 200, so we’re looking at probably 150-200 thousand dollars live on the webinar. And then from replays we should double that. Gets us to 3 or 4, but then we’ll also have a big urgency and scarcity scare since this is the last time we’ll be doing this webinar, in fact we’re doubling the price of this offer and changing the webinar as a whole coming into the new year. So there’s a lot of built in urgency and scarcity. So my guess, we’ll probably end up with 5 or 6 hundred thousand from this in immediate sales, but the lift from that is huge as well, because even people that don’t buy, now they are indoctrinated into our process. They sign up for Clickfunnels, they start buying the books, all the other pieces start happening and there’s so many big benefits that come from the consistency of the webinar. So I just wanted to kind of circle back to when we talked about, almost a year ago, and get back to that. Like I said, my friend who’s stuck at $3 million I told him, “This is the model. You gotta do a webinar every single week.” He was like, “I can’t write a new webinar every single week.” I was like, “No, you do the same webinar every single week.” He was like, “I can’t do the same webinar every week, my audience will get tired of it.” I was like, “Exactly, that means you gotta bring in a new audience.” And he was like, “No, that won’t work. We make our money by creating new things, and it takes me a couple of months to create a new thing.” And I was like, “That’s why you’re stuck at 3 million dollars, because you can’t.” It’s a hard, hard road to grow past that until you find…… I know that, from a decade, ten years of me trying that and launching and re-launching. No, focus on creating a front end, it becomes so amazing, good, and powerful that you can consistently bring new blood in that brings new blood in. The second half is that you’ll find these businesses that are stuck at 2 or 3 million dollars a year. Usually after a year or two of that they start getting atrophy and it starts shrinking and there’s usually a couple of reasons. One is the entrepreneur is burned out of creating new offers. Number two the audience starts shrinking. I don’t know what it is, we all get good at bringing in an audience initially, and then we have it and we stop focusing on that. We’ve gotta be focusing consistently on new leads coming in. It’s a life blood of your business, even if you don’t want to grow, just want to maintain, it’s essential to have. It’s interesting, I have been listening to an old course, an old Kennedy, actually Bill Glazer course, it’s called Think and Grow Rich for Renegade Entrepreneurs, or something like that. I found it somewhere. So I’ve been listening to that and the firs thing he talked about is renegade entrepreneurs thinking to grow rich is that they all have a focus on consistent new lead generation. No matter how good their business is doing, they are always focusing on consistent new leads coming in. As I move into this new year, we are changing the webinar offer. We’re changing the pricing. We’re doing a lot of cool things inside of Clickfunnels and how we sell it, but I’m not going to be doing this webinar anymore. So for me it’s like, what’s the new horizon? What are we shifting to? I still recommend for 99.9% of all business, the focal point should be a front end webinar. In fact, we will still have webinars that are selling on the front end. But for me, I think I’ve talked about this with you guys before, my whole goal now, we just passed, it’s crazy. This week we passed 25 thousand active customers inside of Clickfunnels. That’s not people who signed up and left, that’s people who are actively being billed, happily. It’s…..we never thought we would get to that. We talked about that, “Oh yeah, when we have 100,000 customers…” but we never thought that was a real thing. But a little over two years in we’re at 25 thousand active customers, which is crazy. So for us, it’s like how do we expand that market? How do we get it bigger? We can keep doing it through webinars, and we will, but I think for me and my business, and again, I’m not saying this for all businesses, because I do not think this is across the board, but for Clickfunnels to grow….we’ll continue to grow in the channels we are, people that have existing businesses that need a funnel, but the big opportunity for me and our team is, and it’s funny because a year and a half ago when I started down this project, for new customer acquisition, how do we keep the fuel in the pump? It was funny, we were looking at, trying to figure out, what’s the offer I create so that all small businesses will start using Clickfunnels? I was stuck for 3 or 4 four months, trying to think through that, trying to figure things out. And it’s funny, I may have told this story before, if not it’s worth telling again. So you guys may hear it twice. A year and a half ago I had joined Joe Polish’s 25k group and the night before the first meeting, I got invited by some cool people to come to this little dinner party. It had about ten people in it, so I come to this dinner party and Dave Woodward came with me to the trip, but he wasn’t able to come to the dinner. And prior to that Dave and I were talking about it, “How do I create, a book I need to write, or is it a webinar? What do we need to do to penetrate and get all of small businesses to start using Clickfunnels? And we’re thinking through it and thinking through it. And it’s funny how when your brain is on something how things just open up. So I’m at this dinner and sitting across the table from me is Dean Graziosi and Dean is someone I’ve always looked up to and he’s been on TV for 15 years selling his books. I think he’s probably sold more books through direct response marketing than any other human on earth. The person who might be closest is Kevin Trudeau but he’s in jail right now so I’m not going to work with him. But Dean’s the best, and he does things in a really clean way that aren’t cheesy, that aren’t like the dirty stuff. And I’m sitting across, looking at Dean and we’re talking about, I don’t even know, something unrelated, and as we’re talking I had this epiphany, I don’t know, I look at it probably more like a revelation from Heaven, but who knows, whatever it is. That thing that is like, “Russell, you are going to be writing a book, you’re not going to be targeting small business owners, that’ll take care of itself. You have to expand the market and the book you’re going to write is going to be called Expert Secrets.” I own that domain, but that was never in my vision to write a book called that. “The book’s going to be called Expert Secrets and somehow Dean’s going to write an infomercial for you.” I’m sitting there listening to Dean talk about his kids or whatever, and I was like, “What? Did I just hear that right, because I don’t know if that makes any logical sense whatsoever. Then my brain comes back and its like, it doesn’t need to. I was like, alright cool. All I had was this little glimpse, “Okay, you are writing a book called Expert Secret, it’s going to help you expand the market and Dean’s going to write an infomercial.” I’m like, okay do I tell Dean that he’s writing an infomercial for me? No, don’t tell him, he’ll think you’re weird. It’s like on a first date, I think this is my wife, should I tell her? No, don’t tell her on the first date, hold that in. That’s how I kind of felt. So that was kind of the beginning of it. So I went back that night to the hotel room and I saw Dave and I was like, “Dave, I’m writing a book, it’s called Expert Secrets and the whole goal is to expand the market.” And he’s like “I got chills. Yes, we need to do that.” I’m like, “Alright.” So Julie, who is my writer, helps me with my writing projects, I voxed her that night. “Okay Julie, I’m writing another book.” She’s like, “You said you were never writing a book ever again.” I was like, “I know, we’re doing it anyway. I’m wiring you some money, give me the info again.” That night. I wire her and then I start writing this book and we start going down this process and I have no idea how all these pieces are going to take place, I just know that it’s supposed to. So I’m going to start running that direction. So we start running. Some of you might already know I wrote the whole book and then this summer I was editing it and trying to get it ready for the publisher and I realized that I hated the book. So on Snapchat I highlighted all 250 pages of it and deleted it. Messaged Julie and said, “We’re writing a new book.” And she’s like, “What? We just wrote a book.” And I’m like, “Yeah, we’re writing the same book again, but this one is going to be way better.” And started over, I’d been working on that project, in fact, today I finished Secret number 7, which is chapter number 7. For some reason I have to name everything secrets, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I just like secrets better than chapters, so whatever. And the book is legitimately, I’m so proud of it. I can’t even….so proud of it, so excited to share it with everybody. It’s gonna change a lot of lives. Change how people look and view how we sell and how we influence and how we can affect people’s lives. So it’s gonna be awesome. And then I’m in Genius Network, I go to that….Excuse me, now I’m going to rewind back. This is the next morning after hanging out with Dean, I’m in the genius network and I love Joe and Genius Network…..Just the way that…..I’m not a super huge fan of some of the way that…….I’ll leave it there. I’m out in the hallway talking to Jason Fladlien. Jason’s a big mentor of mine and I’v e learned some things about belief that….I was telling him the last time we were hanging out, “Do you realize those things you told me about belief have changed my whole life.” He was like, “ I don’t remember talking to you about that.” I was like, “Really? It was a really big deal to me.” He’s like, “I don’t remember that.” It was funny. I was talking to Jason and I told him we had launched a certification program, I was like, “We’re shutting it down.” He was like, “Why would you shut it down.” I was like, “It’s not working.” And we tried to talk through it and we were going to shut it down, and he was like, “Why don’t you find some rock star to run it for you?” and then I was thinking, if I can find the right person, then yes I would do it. But I don’t see that vision. Then a couple of days later, we’re sitting in a room talking about shutting down the certification program and all the sudden, I can’t remember who it was, but someone mentioned Norah and all of us in the room got chills, it was like, yes, she is the right person. She will take this to the next level. Norah is that person. We called her up, begged her and she came in and built the certification program. And what’s interesting, the certification program, we’re certifying all these amazing people now who were building funnels… I just pulled up and Steven is looking through the office window in a Santa hat, waving at me going crazy and saying Webinar Day. Anyway, this certification program is certifying all these amazing people who are now going and penetrating getting funnels into local businesses, which is cool because I was trying to figure out how to get that, how to go that direction and it didn’t make any sense. Now I know that those markets will be filled through the certification program, which is so cool to now see the vision later. So we’re working on the book, go to the next Genius Network, and I went to the last one and I was like I was not planning on re-upping, so I was like, it’s been good and I like it but it wasn’t what I needed right now in my business. The night before the last meeting, Dean’s like, “Hey come to my office.” So I swing over to his office and we talk for a bit. He shows me his infomercial studio, I’m sitting in this thing and I’m like, this is where he’s going to be filming an infomercial for me, but he doesn’t know that yet, how do I not awkwardly bring it up? “Hey man, just so you know you’re building an infomercial in this studio.” It was pretty cool. And then, I was talking about how cool it’d be to have him do an infomercial. I just dropped it as if it just came in my head, not that I’d been plotting it for a year and knew it was going to happen someday in the future. I was like, “Man, that’d be so cool to have you do an infomercial. What does it look like?” an d he’s like, “I don’t do infomercials for people, but I might be willing to do one for you.” I was like, “Really.” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And he gave me some cool compliments and I was like that’s cool. And then he kind of mentions in bypass, Joe Polish and I are thinking of doing a 100k group, would you be interested? And I said, “If you help me do an infomercial I’d definitely be interested.” And he was like, “Alright, I think we can make that happen.” And we kind of left it at that. I was like, oh my gosh. That night I was all giddy, this may actually happen. There’s now a path that this could actually, that this might possibly happen. So the next morning at the 25k meeting, the first thing Joe and Dean do is they launch, “Hey we’re launching a 100k program.” Dean’s like, “Brunson’s thinks he’s in.” and I was like, “I’m in.” and they handed me an order form, I filled it out and joined the 100k program. I’m like, I don’t know the answer but I know that this is the path. Somehow Dean’s making the infomercial and I just need to be closer to him. So that was kind of it, and now the 100k program, we had our first meeting a couple of weeks ago, I think I talked to you guys about that. And what’s cool, is at the meeting he asked me if I would train for a little bit. I was like, “What do you want me to train?” and he asked what I thought would be best for this audience. And I said, “I know what would be best.” So I shared some stuff in expert secrets book, it’s almost like a test to see how this audience would respond to it, and they went nuts. Insane. I was like, yes the message is right. The book is right. And I told Dean, my book’s about this concept. And Dean’s like, “I want to help you with the infomercial.” And I was like, “I want you to help me with the infomercial.” And he text the other day, “I think I have the perfect host for your show.” I’m freaking out that all this stuff is happening. For me the market expansion is the book, Expert Secret and using it through an infomercial. I mean we’ll be doing a normal book launch and pushing through channels that we’re good at. But I see a very clear vision of how we can use Expert Secrets to create the market to get people to…… Because the hard thing with a small business owner, let’s say it’s a chiropractor. If I go and I’m like, “I want to show you this thing called Clickfunnels.” And he’s like, “Alright.” And I show it to him, “Look you can drag and drop and move things on the page.” And he’s like, “Isn’t that how all website builders work?” because he doesn’t build his website. It’s the consultant that they hired or the webmaster that does that. To them it’s not a big deal, so the only way to get to them is to become a consultant, which is why the consultant program is working so well. I’m like, if we want to expand, we have to create people who are going to be using Clickfunnels. How do I create somebody? I show them the value they have within themselves. I show them that they’ve got talents and hobbies and skills and the thing that they goof off on the weekends because they love it, could actually become a career for them, if they learn how to structure it right. As soon as I can convince them of that, which is the goal of the book, then they need Clickfunnels the tool to be able to actually implement it. And that’s the magic. So that’s how we are going to be expanding our market. That’s going to become our new front end. Don’t forget, unless you’re worried I’m shutting down webinars, after they go through the book the next funnel is the webinar. The message will be a little bit different. In fact…..it’s already been 21 minutes. I’m sorry. I’ve been sitting in the parking lot freezing because I’m so excited to hang out with you guys. So I’ll just tell you some more. So what’s going to happen is they’re going to get the book, through radio, infomercials and online, all these different channels are gonna be pushing it. After they get the book, then there’ll be a survey they take. The survey will identify what type of business they are and then there’s a different webinar based on each of those types. And that’s the future, where we’re going. At least I think so. It could definitely change in the next few months. But that’s where we’re going. And Dean may decide next week that he hates me and not do an infomercial and I’d be totally cool with that. But so far I said, that’s the direction I’m going. But for most of you guys, the book is a much harder direction, longer and I think that for every one of you guys, if you join the inner circle, 99% of you guys, I’d say, you need a webinar and you need to do it every single week. And you’d say, “I want to automate it.” And I’d say, “Go back to this podcast episode.” And I’d make them go back and listen to it and say, “After you have perfected your message then you have my permission to automate it, but not before.” And that’s kind of the same thing I wanted to mention today. It’s been a year now. And those that heard that message a year ago, if you’ve been listening, you could be in the spot where Brandon and Kaelin are, where you did 600 thousand in sales on a webinar in November. Or maybe you haven’t done the webinar yet, and it could be both ways. There’s a kid, I’m learning his story, 4 or 5 people keep telling me, I haven’t met him yet. In the Clickfunnels group, he’s an 18 year old kid who was a pizza boy a little while ago and he learned the perfect webinar and he did like, I don’t know, 3 or 4 hundred grand selling something through a webinar. And he’s a young kid, first time he’s ever done it. But he did it and he’s doing it consistently and that’s what you guys gotta do. So I’m asking you right now to recommit. Because I don’t want to have this conversation next year with you. The conversation I want to have next year with you is, “Russell, I made so much money this last year. What should I do?” I’m going to say, “Come to Kenya with us and let’s build some schools together. But first we gotta get you to a spot where you can.” And the way we get you there is by having a consistent funnel. You’re bringing leads in every single day, new blood into your business every single day. And it’s happening through a front end webinar. And that’s the model. So go back, marketinginyourcar.com search for the next twelve months, or business model for the next twelve months, something like that. And listen to that, and follow that like it’s the gospel truth, because it is. There’s times for all these other funnels and all these cool things we’re doing, after you’ve acquired the customer. What’s cool is that you can focus on doing the live webinar once a week and the rest of the time you can focus on cool new products and services you can create for the existing audience, but all of your ad money, your time, your effort, your focus, should be on getting new people in through one consistent message. After you have that, then you can go back and create new things for those people. But that should be your focus. There you go. This may be the longest marketing in your car in the history of all time. We’re at 24 minutes and 15 seconds. I’m going to bounce. I got some work to do. We’ve got a webinar today. I have no idea what the numbers will be, but I’m excited to do it. And then retiring this message, which is kind of sad. Not completely retiring, I’m just definitely changing it for the new funnels to be very specific. The one…… for people wondering why, this webinar I talk about supplement funnels, which has been a double edged sword. It’s got a lot of people excited about supplements, but people who don’t have a supplement, there’s always just gap after bridges. So the new version webinars, webinars-plural, we identify who they are, and if they’re a retail store, we have a webinar showing them retail funnels. If they are an expert, we’ll show them expert funnels. There an ecommerce person will show them ecommerce funnels. We’ll be very specific to funnels we show in the webinar to the type of person who’s listening. So that is what we’re doing. Because the first two years of this has been brute force. We try to get everyone with the best message we can create. The second ten years will be more like a sniper war where we craft the message perfectly for each audience. It will hopefully increase conversions, stick rate, decrease churn, and build the culture even better. Thanks everyone for listening. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.
"I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me". Really? It requires a few things first.... discover the "Script in Scripture" of Philippians 4:12-13. #Instructed #Idonotcomplain
Some dispute global warming. Really? It's the latest in "What I Don't Get".
Someone has come up with an improved bra? Really? It's yet another version of "What I Don't Get".
For links to the resources mentioned in the show, head over to veronicagrant.com/episode9 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I’ve got another fun episode for you today. If you’re finding yourself stuck in a rut, this episode is for you. It’s only human to get into a cycle of wake up, work, work out, eat dinner, netflix bed. I’m all about routines; they can bring groundedness + familiarity to our lives, which lord knows is comforting. But sometimes, it begins to feel like a rut, like we’re just going through the motions. Enter Laura Yamin. Laura is a career coach for millennials + fellow podcaster. Her podcast Say Yes Podcast is all about those moments we say yes to life. Really? It’s about bringing in more fun + opportunity into your life, wherever you are. Here’s what we jam about: Many of us focus on career first, THEN relationships. Laura says this is backwards + explains why. You don’t have to have your life’s purpose in your job. {Even this is a hard pill for me to swallow, even though intellectually, it makes sense to me.} What does saying yes mean and what does it do How to start saying yes to the right things, and not burn yourself out. Laura’s experience speed dating. {Have you ever speed dated? Let me know how it was in the comments below!} Resources: How to Fascinate Strengthsfinder Say Yes Podcast Laura's website Follow her on Instagram For shownotes + to join the conversation, visit veronicagrant.com/episode9 xo, V ps - Big news! Date Yourself Radio made it onto the New + Noteworthy list in iTunes! Woohoo! This helps us to grow our community + create new friendships here in this group so that more women can start attracting the relationships we REALLY want into our lives. I'd love to move the show up even higher in the ranks, so here are 3 things you could do to help: Subscribe to the show on iTunes so you don't miss an episode. Share the podcast with girlfriends you know that need a dating intervention Review the show! Reviews are huge for iTunes' secret algorithm. Here's how to review: 1) Search Date Yourself Radio in the podcast app 2) Tap review 3) Write a review! Note, you'll want to use a unique username so iTunes can take your review. If the review box after you submit just disappears, you know you did it right, if it tells you the username is already taken, you'll have to write the review again. 4) Once you review, take a screen shot of the review {it takes a day or 2 to show up} + email it to hello@veronicagrant.com to be entered to win a free 60-minute coaching session with me!
Some interesting things that I discovered while on the road this last week in the UK. On this special early morning episode Russell recaps his trip to London and why he’s happy to be back home. He also talks about the differences with selling to audiences in different countries. Here are 4 cool things in today’s episode: How amazing it is that you can connect with people who are in the same industry as you all over the world. How weird it is that people in the UK made fun of Russell just because he’s American, and how that taught him how to transition his presentation to accommodate them. How people in Australia are different from people in the US or UK. And why Russell didn’t have any expectations for how well he would do in the UK, but how he is grateful either way. So listen below to hear how Russell’s trip to London went and why it was better than when he was in the UK 5 years ago. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, and welcome to an early morning fricken-freezing Marketing in your Car. Hey guys! So we just got back from London, woo-hoo! It was a long, long, long, long, oh so long trip to get back. We made it and we are excited and now it’s like 6 in the morning. My kids have not fallen asleep yet, because they’re still on London time. We kind of passed out for a little bit, but we’re awake now. Our cute little baby, who we haven’t seen in a week, we’ve been playing with her. Even though she’s tired, we’re not letting her sleep, because she’s too dang cute. A whole bunch of stuff and it’s not even 7:00 yet! I’m actually driving out to go grab some food because our house is out of food. That’s what’s happening over here. Other than that, I’m just excited to be home. I’m not traveling again for, hopefully for forever. You know how you feel after you eat Thanksgiving dinner, and you’re so full you just want to pop. You’re like, “I’ll never eat again, ever!” Then five minutes later, you’re hungry. That’s how I am right now. I will never travel again, ever. The last 30 days, it’s just been insane. We’re back! We’re excited, a lot of fun things. I’m excited to get my hands dirty again, and get into work and get into stuff. Speaking, and traveling, and selling, and stuff like that, it’s fun. I just miss sitting behind a computer and just funnel building, funnel hacking. I’m so excited! It’s all good. We had an awesome time in London, and it all turned out really, really good. It was fun. It was cool going there and seeing all these businesses. It’s interesting because you think about however many, 20 years ago even, people sold things in their communities, right? If you lived in Boise, you sold things to other people in Boise. That’s kind of how things were. The Internets made it so it’s everywhere. What’s cool, a couple things that I kind of got from it. 1, going over there, you see these entrepreneurs from that other side of the world. What’s interesting is their hopes, their dreams, their desires, their vision, their desire to change the world in their own little way is the same. It’s not different than it is here. I think entrepreneurs; we have something weird inside of us. It’s not an American thing, or it’s not whatever. It’s an entrepreneur thing and it’s everywhere. People there have the same bug that we have here. It’s awesome and I just love being around entrepreneurs. There’s nothing better for me. That was really, really cool. What was interesting though, this is kind of cool, people don’t see this a lot. You don’t notice it online either. I wonder, I don’t know if I’ll do anything because of this, but it makes me think. For example, in the last 30 days, I’ve spoken in Australia, United States 3 times, and then in London. The 1 thing that is different, culturally things are different. It’s just fascinating. I remember the first time I spoke in London and I tried to sell. I did my normal pitch that in the States was awesome and it bombed over there. I was like, what in the world? These people hate me. I found out later they did hate me. I remember, this is kind of sad, but after the event was over, I sold a couple, but not like what I normally would have. This is probably 4 or 5 years go. Then I went on this forum later, it was a free event we did, all this stuff. I’m on this forum reading people critiques of the event and all these people were making fun of me. They weren’t making fun of my presentation, or anything. They’re making fun of me because I was American. Wow! I never thought that that was a thing, it was so weird to me. After that I had friends that told me when they sold to the UK, they had to sell different, they had to speak different, they had to do things different for it to work. I hadn’t had the chance to speak in the UK for 5 years, so I never really tested that again. I’ve spoken twice in Australia since then. Australia was completely the opposite. Australia feels like, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think the people in the UK always like Americans. I think they think we’re stuck up. We kind of are. The more cultured I am becoming, the more places I go, the more I realize how annoying Americans can actually be. We are pretty, it’s kind of embarrassing looking at it now. That’s just how American’s are, right? I the UK, if people don’t necessarily like us as much, but in Australia it’s the opposite. Australians love us. It was really interesting, I was in Australia, anything I said it felt like I was walking on gold. It was a completely different cultural experience. That was kind of just weird to me. This time I spoke in the UK I was very aware of that. It thought if I’m going to be successful with this, I think the wrong approach … The approach in Australia was almost more like I’m this American authority, let me show you all this cool stuff I did. In the UK the way I transition my presentation this time, I had to kind of make fun of myself more. What do they call it, self-deprecating humor or whatever? I tried to make fun of myself more throughout the presentation. What’s funny is in America, even Australia, if you close people, they stand up and they start going to the back, when they get excited and they rush. The UK, none of that. Nobody moved. I’m doing my close and I’m telling them, “Get up right now, go to the back!” I’m doing all my stuff that normally get’s American’s jumping over each other and fighting to get to the back, and nobody budged. They just sat there. I’m so confused, did I not make fun of myself enough? What’s happening? Then after the presentation was done, people slowly stood up and walked over and signed up. The promoter told me afterwards, he’s like, “Your close rate was amazing for the UK, just so you know.” Really? It was way less, it wasn’t way less, it did well, but it was less than I thought it was going to be. He’s like, “You’re close rate was amazing for the UK audience.” It’s just interesting. When I think about a lot of times I think we craft ourselves messages for all people. As I’m getting more and more deeper into this business, what I’m learning more and more is that I think this is really the power of where Actionetics inside of Click Funnels is going. Changing based on people. This one is making more money, speak to them this way, less money, speak to them here. If they’re male speak to them like this, if they’re female speak to them like this. Whatever those demographics are. I almost think that if I really want to go deep in this, I don’t know if I will, but I might, especially offers that we really focus a lot of time and energy on. I would even change the sales message based on culture, based on geography. Somebody in the UK was watching video sales, I would speak much different than somebody in the United States. Just interesting I thought. One other thing, this I just want to share with you guys, and hopefully it will resonate. I hate this, I’ve got so many coaching clients who, and I get it, you want to forecast and set goals, and expectations, and things like that. I think it hurts. I always have these, our clients, our friends, or people that I hear are like, “Okay, webinars going to happen, I’m going to do this …” They have numbers built up in their head, “If I only get this percent, and this happens and dahdahdah.” All these things they figure out. They do it, and they don’t get it, and they’re destroyed mentally and physically that destroys them. I’m a big believer in not, not not setting goals. I’m a big goal setter. Not setting expectations of outcome. You can’t control those things at first. When I spoke at this event, Dan kept asking, he told me how many sales I did. Dan’s the promoter, was like, “Is that good for you? Bad? What were you expecting?” I was like I didn’t have any expectations coming in. I want, when it’s done, for me to be happy with whatever, and if I have expectations, then no matter what I’m not going to be happy. You know what I mean? I didn’t have any expectations. If I didn’t sell anything, I was coming to try to serve and try to help. When I speak, even I’ve been doing this forever, I get nervous. Before I speak, I pray and when I pray I pray that I can give value and help serve people to the best of my ability. That’s what I’m praying for and I like how many sales I can close, I’m legitimately here to serve people. That’s the way I go into it. The people buy, I’m so grateful afterwards that it’s awesome. But if I would have thought, think ahead of time, looked at Dan’s audience and said, “My typical audience converts this much.” Really though through it and really focused on that number, I probably would have been disappointed, because it made less money than it should have, based on if I would have thought through things. I try not to, I just kind of put it out of my head, and don’t think about that. Just focus on giving, and serving, and helping. I even told Dan that, I didn’t really have any outcomes, I wasn’t really hoping for anything. I just come in and serve and hopefully we can get a lot of people into Click Funnels because they need it. I honestly feel like you can’t be successful in life without it. I feel like they need it. I want to give that to them. From this, I’m sure people know who I am now. If they enjoyed it, they’re going to keep following me. They’re going to buy more stuff. A lot of them will ascend up and come in our inner circle, things like that. Good stuff will happen from it. I’m not tying an outcome to it. I can’t tell you how many people, over, and over, and over again, in my coaching programs, they have these numbers in their head. When they don’t hit it initially they’re just destroyed. It’s hard to recover. If you go into it with no outcome, with no projected outcomes of your own, you just go and you do it. You try to serve and you see what happens. Then you can take that data and you can look at it, and you can make decisions. If I was to keep speaking in the UK, I would look at the presentation and say what things didn’t work. There were a lot of things that didn’t work. I could tell, because there was this weird energy when you speak in a room. You can feel it, you can not feel it at times. There are things I would definitely change. Again, I’m not speaking in the UK all the time, so it’s not the same for me. My first webinar, not my first webinar, but my first Funnel Hats webinar, I had no idea if it was going to do well or not. I was speaking at Mike Filsaime’s event, and I did it. When people started running back, I was so shocked. Oh, wow! The next one was, oh! Every time I was so excited about what happened. Eventually, after we’ve done it so many times, we have projected outcomes, and we have things like that. Now we’ve got something to shoot for. I let the chips fall where they may at first. Then we can look at that, analyze the data, change things. Let that happen a bunch of times before we start making these projections, these models, and tying our happiness outcome to them. If you do, unless you hit it out of the park the first time, it’s hard. Most people do webinar the first time, they’re not getting 10% close rate. They’re not getting 5%, they might be getting 1-2%. That’s where we start at. That’s what we’ve got to do a billion times. That’s why I’ve done the Funnel Hacks webinar, in the last 12 months, I would say a conservatively, at least 50 times live. It gets better every single time. It just makes me feel for people who create it, have this vision in their head, launch it, and they don’t hit it. They are attaching so much personal emotion to it. I feel for that, so hopefully if nothing else you get from this, stop attaching all these things to you initial work. Just do it from a point that you want to serve, you want to give, you want to help. Let the chips fall where they may. Then take the data, change it tweak it, then keep doing that. Eventually, when you have a model that is working, now you can come back and you can be stressed out about the results. Don’t do that now. We have enough stress in our lives. You’re building a business, it’s fun and it should be an enjoyable process. It’s going to be hard at times. It’s going to be good at times. It’s going to be bad at times. You’re going to lose money at times. You’re going to make money at times. You’re going to be broke sometimes. Sometimes you’ll be rich. That’s just kind of the process in this game. If you don’t have the skin for that, it might not be the right game to play. I’m at the store, I’ve got to buy my family some food. Some eggs, some banana’s. Some stuff for us to eat. I better go. Thanks for listening to my ramblings today. Hope that there is some value in there for you. I appreciate you guys. For those of you who are my new friends in London, thanks for letting me come hang out. I had an awesome time. I appreciate you guys allowing me to serve you. Thank you so much, and I’ll talk to you soon.
TF Weekly Podcast bring you a special interview with Martin Hardy author of 'Touching Distance - Kevin Keegan, The Entertainers and Newcastle's Impossible Dream'. Martin is a journalist with the Sunday Times who has spent the last 18 months of his life writing about the meteoric rise of Newcastle United under Kevin Keegan to become the side that went so close to tasting Premier Ship Glory in the 1995/6 season. In this interview Martin tells us about his motivation behind writing the book, the people he met and the incredible journeys he went on. Touching distance is a must read for any NUFC fan whether you remember the Keegan years or not. Really It's a must read for any football fan and this podcast interview is a chance to hear about the book and the era from Martin as well as from True Faith editor Michael Martin. Buy the book here or across regional book stores: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1909245259 Follow us on twitter @tfweeklypod
My last podcast spoke about identifying what makes your unique. You have something that allows you to talk about a subject using a persepctive, attitude, or delivery different than anybody else. That perspective is shaped by experience. That attitude is shaped by life and learning. That delivery is shaped by your confidence. You may be thinking about starting a podcast. You may be thinking that there are, "So many podcasts out there already, why should you add to the pile?" Well let's see what we can learn from other industries. Because of My Podcast Crag from Mansion Ingles lives in spain and was recognized on the other side of the planet. He explained that he helps people learn english, and someone recognized his voice from his podcast. Craig is helping people learn english. When you get to meet someone, and they had a need, and you filled it, it's a great feeling. Podcasting Guru Scoptt Herzog - Inside the Studio of the Podcaster Last week we talked about embracing what you bring the the microphone. That you can bring an unique value and perspective. We talk about the many different ways you can look at a topic. Today we interview Scott Herzog about his new "Inside the Podcaster's Studio" show that will primarily focus on podcasting gear. Restaurants Still Open How many different ways can you kill and cook a cow? I mean really? Throw a burger on a bun, slap some ketchup on it, isn't it the same thing as McBurger down the street? No it's not. This one is flame broiled. This one is square. This one has butter on the bun. They are all variations of the same thing. Aren't french fries just deep fried potatoes? Don't get me started (to me there is only ONE type of French fry and it comes in a red box with Golden Arches on it - there is no room for discussion on this). Several years ago, researchers at Cornell University and Michigan State University conducted a study of restaurants in three local markets over a 10-year period. They concluded the following: After the first year 27% of restaurant startups failed; after three years, 50% of those restaurants were no longer in business; and after five years 60% had gone south. At the end of 10 years, 70% of the restaurants that had opened for business a decade before had failed. (source) Chef Rocco DiSpirito says that 90% restaurants close in their first year (this has been debunked) The reason people open restaurants is because more people are using them. a 2009 study showed the industry expanded by .5 percent, consumer spending on restaurant dining rose 1 percent in the past year (source). Yes these are small percentages, but its a $632 BILLION dollar industry. So while thousands of restaurants close every year (even though people are still eating, and in the US they are eating a LOT), people still open up new restaurants every year. Special thanks to Mike Howard of www.jpeg2raw.com to making this point on the Ask the Podcast Coach Show Chipotle - Take an Idea and Mix it with Integrity What happens if you take the assembly line of Subway (one of the fastest growing chains), mix in some spicy protein, add a dash of conscience (as their pigs and chickens are raised on farms), and a FOCUSED menu? You get a restaurant called Chipotle. The one by my day job as people lining out the door at lunch time. The funny thing is, that line moves faster than the one at the burger joint (even counting the time to get out of your car). What Podcasters Can Learn From Chipotle Niche down: Their menu has a few items. You don't have to stare long to see what's available. Ordering is easy. Consistent Content: They obviously have a well oiled machine behind the scenes. You see one person cooking, one person chopping, and three to four people up front scooping it up and giving it to you. No matter which location I go to, crispy chicken tacos taste the same. I can rely on them. I don't worry about wasting my lunch hour if I'm headed for a Chipotle restaurant. They Get to the Point: There is no idle chit chat in line. When you get close enough to order, the person behind the counter asks, "What can I get you.? Then they ask about the toppings. They don't ask about me, and I don't care. I'm hungry. They are giving me what I need: food. They Embrace Their Differences: Instead of looking at the competition and trying to be like them, they stood up for what they believed and pointed out that their pork and chicken is raised different. Now their brand means more than cheap, spicy, fast food, it is a statement. It ties in with a lifestyle. You wear a Chiptle shirt, weather you want to or not your clothes say "I care about treatment of animals." What Podcasters Can Learn From Ned Flanders Think about Christianity. Every single church and every single Christian has the EXACT SAME "product." (oh someone is going to get upset with this terminology, but bare with me). They are delivering the story of Jesus Christ. The majority of them say he was the son of God, born of a virgin, died on a cross, and rose from the dead three days later. Q: Why do more and more churches open every year? A: Because man does not live by bread alone (source) Q: Why Do So Many Churches Lose Their Members - Especially College Age? A: Because of their delivery.Ned Flanders is a fictional character on the Simpsons. He is the uber Christian that more than likely would turn down a piece of Devil's Food Cake just because of the name. Then there is the Church "Well isn't that special" Lady from Saturday Night Live. She lived to walk around and remind people that they are all fornicators and that they were going to Hell. In the same way that most people that you say "Man you're in a bad mood today," don't miraculously change into a good mood, telling people they're going to Hell doesn't seem to make them immediately repent. Now I'm not saying we need to alter our story. Think of the movie Gone with the Wind. This story has been seen on the big screen as well as on VHS, DVD, and now Blu-ray. It's the same message, but different packaging. The church I attend provides ear plugs for those who don't like their anthems to ROCK! We clap our hands. We have smoke machines (no joke) and cool lights. You know who loves our service? College Age Kids. Joel Osteen - The Happy Jesus Man Let's look at Joel Osteen (or as I call him "Happy Jesus Man"). He opens his sermons with a joke. A joke? Yes, he tells a joke. People laugh in church. Really? It's true. Then he has them hold up their bible and state how they believe it to be true (this sets the stage - people know what they are going to get). Joel Osteen Niches Down:There are all sort of stories in the bible where God's wrath is shown. There are all sorts of verses about Satan, and Hell. Joel got to know his community, and found them to be poor in spirit. They lack self esteem. They may lack skills on getting along with their family. Joel talks a lot about how God's Favor is waiting to be poured out on you. Is it working? His "Church" meets in an old Arena used by an NBA team. I think it's safe to say it is. I'm not hear to argue if Joel Osteen is a good pastor, or to pick apart his choice of scriptures or his statements on same sex marriage. I'm just pointing out that he has the same story as every other church. His delivery, and his ability to influence have allowed to connect with an audience and allow him to grow his church and further his story. More at www.schoolofpodcasting.com/404
What does Scrabble have to do with Islam? Well, nothing, really. Except that they are the topics of today’s podcast! First up: Lessons from a Thanksgiving Scrabble game gone awry. Followed by: All American Muslim…Really? It’s all on today’s CTC Podcast, with host Daniel Howell. Share This with Someone:
I thought it funny when everyone in the media kept saying after President Obama won the election that we now live in a "POST Racial America", REALLY? It wasn't long until the Racists showed themselves and asked as if the President were a newly minted Freed Slave, Where are your papers, boy? The birther movement was born! This week OUR President felt the need to surrender his "Papers" and sure enough the BIRTHER Channel, I mean FOX News wasn't happy and has begun to try and disprove yet again that HE and WE aren't true Americans. This week I am going H.A.M. on this and anyone that wants to believe that America isn't the most hatful and vile country. A country were white supremist now hide in plain site in the REPUBLICAN Party. This week I am going after FOX and Friends, Rush, and ALL REPUBLICANS. Join me as I show MY M**** F****** PAPERS! Oh, and this is still a BYOB kind of show.
Much more than your own well-being is at stake! Stay Out of the Swamp Tender Commandement #7: "You shall not commit adulatry." Ex 20:14 "Lust is nothing but a specie of madness, "somebody once ruefully observed. Really? It seems like such a natural thing, and so awfully prevalent today! But the Scriptures agree, and-goodness!-if true, then our generation is plunging toward madness! God has something much better for you!
Much more than your own well-being is at stake! Stay Out of the Swamp Tender Commandement #7: "You shall not commit adulatry." Ex 20:14 "Lust is nothing but a specie of madness, "somebody once ruefully observed. Really? It seems like such a natural thing, and so awfully prevalent today! But the Scriptures agree, and-goodness!-if true, then our generation is plunging toward madness! God has something much better for you!
Episode # 8.0 of THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID finds both Matt and Ian vying for the bouquet at the wedding of the century. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to witness the joining of this lovely couple in merged bliss... Scranton, do you take Stamford to join your branch, to love, torture and humiliate them, to make things not better but WORSE, as long as you both shall live? You do? Really? It's the moment we've been waiting for, folks-- Jim is back... bringing treble with him. Will things go as smoothly as Michael hopes, or will we suffer a quicky divorce? One thing I *DO* know? Ed Helms + Rainn Wilson = Crazy delicious! Incidental music provided by the Podshow Podsafe Music Network. Email us at TWSSpodcast @ gmail.com, or leave a comment on our blog page at thatswhatshesaid. libsyn. com. iTunes reviews are always appreciated! Help spread the word!
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