Podcasts about rebecca so

ROUNDING UP: SEASON 3 | EPISODE 8 As a field, mathematics education has come a long way over the past few years in describing the ways students come to understand number, quantity, place value, and even fractions. But when it comes to geometry, particularly concepts involving shape, it's often less clear how student thinking develops. Today, we're talking with Dr. Rebecca Ambrose about ways we can help our students build a meaningful understanding of geometry. BIOGRAPHIES Rebecca Ambrose researches how children solve mathematics problems and works with teachers to apply what she has learned about the informal strategies children employ to differentiate and improve instruction in math. She is currently a professor at the University of California, Davis in the School of Education. RESOURCES Geometry Resources Curated by Dr. Ambrose Seeing What Others Cannot See Opening the Mind's Eye  TRANSCRIPT Mike Wallus: As a field, mathematics education has come a long way over the past few years in describing the ways that students come to understand number, place value, and even fractions. But when it comes to geometry, especially concepts involving shape, it's often less clear how student thinking develops. Today, we're talking with Dr. Rebecca Ambrose about ways we can help our students build a meaningful understanding of geometry.  Well, welcome to the podcast, Rebecca. Thank you so much for joining us today. Rebecca Ambrose: It's nice to be here. I appreciate the invitation. Mike: So, I'd like to start by asking: What led you to focus your work on the ways that students build a meaningful understanding of geometry, particularly shape? Rebecca: So, I taught middle school math for 10 years. And the first seven years were in coed classrooms. And I was always struck by especially the girls who were actually very successful in math, but they would tell me, “I like you, Ms. Ambrose, but I don't like math. I'm not going to continue to pursue it.” And I found that troubling, and I also found it troubling that they were not as involved in class discussion. And I went for three years and taught at an all-girls school so I could see what difference it made. And we did have more student voice in those classrooms, but I still had some very successful students who told me the same thing. So, I was really concerned that we were doing something wrong and that led me to graduate school with a focus on gender issues in math education. And I had the blessing of studying with Elizabeth Fennema, who was really the pioneer in studying gender issues in math education. And as I started studying with her, I learned that the one area that females tended to underperform males on aptitude tests—not achievement tests, but aptitude tests—was in the area of spatial reasoning. And you'll remember those are the tests, or items that you may have had where you have one view of a shape and then you have a choice of four other views, and you have to choose the one that is the same shape from a different view. And those particular tasks we see consistent gender differences on. I became convinced it was because we didn't give kids enough opportunity to engage in that kind of activity at school. You either had some strengths there or not, and because of the play activity of boys, that may be why some of them are more successful at that than others.  And then the other thing that informed that was when I was teaching middle school, and I did do a few spatial activities, kids would emerge with talents that I was unaware of. So, I remember in particular this [student,] Stacy, who was an eighth-grader who was kind of a good worker and was able to learn along with the rest of the class, but she didn't stand out as particularly interested or gifted in mathematics. And yet, when we started doing these spatial tasks, and I pulled out my spatial puzzles, she was all over it. And she was doing things much more quickly than I could. And I said, “Stacy, wow.” She said, “Oh, I love this stuff, and I do it at home.” And she wasn't the kind of kid to ever draw attention to herself, but when I saw, “Oh, this is a side of Stacy that I didn't know about, and it is very pertinent to mathematics. And she needs to know what doorways could be open to her that would employ these skills that she has and also to help her shine in front of her classmates.” So, that made me really curious about what we could do to provide kids with more opportunities like that little piece that I gave her and her classmates back in the day. So, that's what led me to look at geometry thinking. And the more that I have had my opportunities to dabble with teachers and kids, people have a real appetite for it. There are always a couple of people who go, “Ooh.” But many more who are just so eager to do something in addition to number that we can call mathematics. Mike: You know, I'm thinking about our conversation before we set up and started to record the formal podcast today. And during that conversation you asked me a question that involved kites, and I'm wondering if you might ask that question again for our listeners. Rebecca: I'm going to invite you to do a mental challenge. And the way you think about it might be quite revealing to how you engage in both geometric and spatial reasoning. So, I invite you to picture in your mind's eye a kite and then to describe to me what you're seeing. Mike: So, I see two equilateral triangles that are joined at their bases—although as I say the word “bases,” I realize that could also lead to some follow-up questions. And then I see one wooden line that bisects those two triangles from top to bottom and another wooden line that bisects them along what I would call their bases. Rebecca: OK, I'm trying to imagine with you. So, you have two equilateral triangles that—a different way of saying it might be they share a side? Mike: They do share a side. Yes. Rebecca: OK. And then tell me again about these wooden parts. Mike: So, when I think about the kite, I imagine that there is a point at the top of the kite and a point at the bottom of the kite. And there's a wooden piece that runs from the point at the top down to the point at the bottom. And it cuts right through the middle. So, essentially, if you were thinking about the two triangles forming something that looked like a diamond, there would be a line that cut right from the top to the bottom point. Rebecca: OK. Mike: And then, likewise, there would be another wooden piece running from the point on one side to the point on the other side. So essentially, the triangles would be cut in half, but then there would also be a piece of wood that would essentially separate each triangle from the other along the two sides that they shared. Rebecca: OK. One thing that I noticed was you used a lot of mathematical ideas, and we don't always see that in children. And I hope that the listeners engaged in that activity themselves and maybe even stopped for a moment to sort of picture it before they started trying to process what you said so that they would just kind of play with this challenge of taking what you're seeing in your mind's eye and trying to articulate in words what that looks like. And that's a whole mathematical task in and of itself. And the way that you engaged in it was from a fairly high level of mathematics.  And so, one of the things that I hope that task sort of illustrates is how a.) geometry involves these images that we have. And that we are often having to develop that concept image, this way of imagining it in our visual domain, in our brain. And almost everybody has it. And some people call it “the mind's eye.” Three percent of the population apparently don't have it—but the fact that 97 percent do suggests for teachers that they can depend on almost every child being able to at least close their eyes and picture that kite. I was strategic in choosing the kite rather than asking you to picture a rectangle or a hexagon or something like that because the kite is a mathematical idea that some mathematicians talk about, but it's also this real-world thing that we have some experiences with.  And so, one of the things that that particular exercise does is highlight how we have these prototypes, these single images that we associate with particular words. And that's our starting point for instruction with children, for helping them to build up their mathematical ideas about these shapes. Having a mental image and then describing the mental image is where we put language to these math ideas. And the prototypes can be very helpful, but sometimes, especially for young children, when they believe that a triangle is an equilateral triangle that's sitting on, you know, the horizontal—one side is basically its base, the word that you used—they've got that mental picture. But that is not associated with any other triangles. So, if something looks more or less like that prototype, they'll say, “Yeah, that's a triangle.” But when we start showing them some things that are very different from that, but that mathematicians would call triangles, they're not always successful at recognizing those as triangles. And then if we also show them something that has curved sides or a jagged side but has that nice 60-degree angle on the top, they'll say, “Oh yeah, that's close enough to my prototype that we'll call that a triangle.”  So, part of what we are doing when we are engaging kids in these conversations is helping them to attend to the precision that mathematicians always use. And that's one of our standards. And as I've done more work with talking to kids about these geometric shapes, I realize it's about helping them to be very clear about when they are referring to something, what it is they're referring to. So, I listen very carefully to, “Are they saying ‘this' and ‘that' and pointing to something?” That communicates their idea, but it would be more precise as like, I have to ask you to repeat what you were telling me so that I knew exactly what you were talking about. And in this domain, where we don't have access to a picture to point to, we have to be more precise. And that's part of this geometric learning that we're trying to advance. Mike: So, this is bringing a lot of questions for me. The first one that I want to unpack is, you talked about the idea that when we're accessing the mind's eye, there's potentially a prototype of a shape that we see in our mind's eye. Tell me more about what you mean when you say “a prototype.” Rebecca: The way that that word is used more generally, as often when people are designing something, they build a prototype. So, it's sort of the iconic image that goes with a particular idea. Mike: You're making me think about when I was teaching kindergarten and first grade, we had colored pattern blocks that we use quite often. And often when we talked about triangles, what the students would describe or what I believed was the prototype in their mind's eye really matched up with that. So, they saw the green equilateral triangle. And when we said trapezoid, it looked like the red trapezoid, right? And so, what you're making me think about is the extent to which having a prototype is useful, but if you only have one prototype, it might also be limiting. Rebecca: Exactly. And when we're talking to a 3- or a 4-year-old, and we're pointing to something and saying, “That's a triangle,” they don't know what aspect of it makes it a triangle. So, does it have to be green? Does it have to be that particular size? So, we'll both understand each other when we're talking about that pattern block. But when we're looking at something that's much different, they may not know what aspect of it is making me call it a triangle” And they may experience a lot of dissonance if I'm telling them that—I'm trying to think of a non-equilateral triangle that we might all, “Oh, well, let's”—and I'm thinking of 3-D shapes, like an ice cream cone. Well, that's got a triangular-ish shape, but it's not a triangle. But if we can imagine that sort of is isosceles triangle with two long sides and a shorter side, if I start calling that a triangle or if I show a child that kind of isosceles triangle and I say, “Oh, what's that?” And they say, “I don't know.” So, we have to help them come to terms with that dissonance that's going to come from me calling something a triangle that they're not familiar with calling a triangle. And sadly, that moment of dissonance from which Piaget tells us learning occurs, doesn't happen enough in the elementary school classroom. Kids are often given equilateral triangles or maybe a right triangle. But they're not often seeing that unusual triangle that I described. So, they're not bumping into that dissonance that'll help them to work through, “Well, what makes something a triangle? What counts and what doesn't count?” And that's where the geometry part comes in that goes beyond just spatial visualization and using your mind's eye, but actually applying these properties and figuring out when do they apply and when do they not apply. Mike: I think this is probably a good place to shift and ask you: What do we know as a field about how students' ideas about shape initially emerge and how they mature over time? Rebecca: Well, that's an interesting question because we have our theory about how they would develop under the excellent teaching conditions, and we haven't had very many opportunities to confirm that theory because geometry is so overlooked in the elementary school classroom. So, I'm going to theorize about how they develop based on my own experience and my reading of the literature on very specific examples of trying to teach kids about squares and rectangles. Or, in my case, trying to see how they describe three-dimensional shapes that they may have built from polydrons. So, their thinking tends to start at a very visual level. And like in the kite example, they might say, “It looks like a diamond”—and you actually said that at one point—but not go farther from there.  So, you decomposed your kite, and you decomposed it a lot. You said it has two equilateral triangles and then it has those—mathematicians would call [them] diagonals. So, you were skipping several levels in doing that. So, I'll give you the intermediate levels using that kite example. So, one thing a child might say is that “I'm seeing two short sides and two long sides.” So, in that case, they're starting to decompose the kite into component parts. And as we help them to learn about those component parts, they might say, “Oh, it's got a couple of different angles.” And again, that's a different thing to pay attention to. That's a component part that would be the beginning of them doing what Battista called spatial structuring. Michael Battista built on the van Hiele levels to try to capture this theory about how kids' thinking might develop. So, attention to component parts is the first place that we see them making some advances.  And then the next is if they're able to talk about relationships between those component parts. So, in the case of the kite, they might say, “Oh, the two short sides are equal to each other”—so, there's a relationship there—“and they're connected to each other at the top.” And I think you said something about that. “And then the long sides are also connected to each other.” And that's looking at how the sides are related to the other sides is where the component parts start getting to become a new part. So, it's like decomposing and recomposing, which is part of all of mathematics.  And then the last stage is when they're able to put the shapes themselves into the hierarchy that we have. So, for example, in the kite case, they might say, “It's got four sides, so it's a quadrilateral. But it's not a parallelogram because none of the four sides are parallel to each other.” So now I'm not just looking at component parts and their relations, but I'm using those relations to think about the definition of that shape. So, I would never expect a kid to be able to tell me, “Oh yeah, a kite is a quadrilateral that is not a parallelogram,” and then tell me about the angles and tell me about the sides without a lot of experience describing shapes. Mike: There are a few things that are popping out for me when I'm listening to you talk about this. One of them is the real importance of language and attempting to use language to build a meaningful description or to make sense of shape. The other piece that it really makes me think about is the prototypes, as you described them, are a useful starting place. They're something to build on.  But there's real importance in showing a wide variety of shapes or even “almost-shapes.” I can imagine a triangle that is a triangle in every respect except for the fact that it's not a closed shape. Maybe there's an opening or a triangle that has wavy sides that are connected at three points. Or an obtuse triangle. Being able to see multiple examples and nonexamples feels like a really important part of helping kids actually find the language but also get to the essence of, “What is a triangle?” Tell me if I'm on point or off base when I'm thinking about that, Rebecca. Rebecca: You are right on target. And in fact, Clements and Sarama wrote a piece in the NCTM Teaching Children Mathematics in about 2000 where they describe their study that found exactly what you said. And they make a recommendation that kids do have opportunities to see all kinds of examples. And one way that that can happen is if they're using dynamic geometry software. So, for example, Polypad, I was just playing with it, and you can create a three-sided figure and then drag around one of the points and see all these different triangles. And the class could have a discussion about, “Are all of these triangles? Well, that looks like a weird triangle. I've never seen that before.” And today I was just playing around with the idea of having kids create a favorite triangle in Polypad and then make copies of it and compose new shapes out of their favorite triangle. What I like about that task, and I think can be a design principle for a teacher who wants to play around with these ideas and get creative with them, is to give kids opportunities to use their creativity in making new kinds of shapes and having a sense of ownership over those creations. And then using those creations as a topic of conversation for other kids. So, they have to treat their classmates as contributors to their mathematics learning, and they're all getting an opportunity to have kind of an aesthetic experience. I think that's the beauty of geometry. It's using a different part of our brain. Thomas West talks about Seeing What Others Cannot See, and he describes people like Einstein and others who really solved problems visually. They didn't use numbers. They used pictures. And Ian Robertson talks about Opening the Mind's Eye. So, his work is more focused on how we all could benefit from being able to visualize things. And actually, our fallback might be to engage our mind's eye instead of always wanting to talk [chuckles] about things.  That brings us back to this language idea. And I think language is very important. But maybe we need to stretch it to communication. I want to engage kids in sharing with me what they notice and what they see, but it may be embodied as much as it is verbal. So, we might use our arms and our elbow to discuss angle. And well, we'll put words to it. We're also then experiencing it in our body and showing it to each other in a different way than [...] just the words and the pictures on the paper. So, people are just beginning to explore this idea of gesture. But I have seen, I worked with a teacher who was working with first graders and they were—you say, “Show us a right angle,” and they would show it to us on their body. Mike: Wow. I mean, this is so far from the way that I initially understood my job when I was teaching geometry, which was: I was going to teach the definition, and kids were going to remember that definition and look at the prototypical shape and say, “That's a triangle” or “That's a square.” Even this last bit that you were talking about really flips that whole idea on its head, right? It makes me think that teaching the definitions before kids engage with shapes is actually having it backwards. How would you think about the way that kids come to make meaning about what defines any given shape? If you were to imagine a process for a teacher helping to build a sense of triangle-ness, talk about that if you wouldn't mind. Rebecca: Well, so I'm going to draw on a 3-D example for this, and it's actually something that I worked with a teacher in a third grade classroom, and we had a lot of English language learners in this classroom. And we had been building polyhedra, which are just three-dimensional shapes using a tool called the polydrons. And our first activities, the kids had just made their own polyhedra and described them. So, we didn't tell them what a prism was. We didn't tell them what a pyramid was or a cube. Another shape they tend to build with those tools is something called an anti-prism, but we didn't introduce any of those terms to them. They were familiar with the terms triangle and square, and those are within the collection of tools they have to work with. But it was interesting to me that their experience with those words was so limited that they often confused those two. And I attributed it to all they'd had was maybe a few lessons every year where they were asked to identify, “Which of these are triangles?” They had never even spoken that word themselves. So, that's to have this classroom where you are hearing from the kids and getting them to communicate with each other and the teacher as much as possible. I think that's part of our mantra for everything. But we took what they built. So, they had all built something, and it was a polyhedra. That was the thing we described. We said it has to be closed. So, we did provide them with that definition. You have to build a closed figure with these shapes, and it needs to be three-dimensional. It can't be flat. So, then we had this collection of shapes, and in this case, I was the arbiter. And I started with, “Oh wow, this is really cool. It's a pyramid.” And I just picked an example of a pyramid, and it was the triangular pyramid, made out of four equilateral triangles. And then I pulled another shape that they had built that was obviously not any—I think it was a cube. And I said, “Well, what do you think? Is this a pyramid?” And they'd said, “No, that's not a pyramid.” “OK, why isn't it?” And by the way, they did know something about pyramids. They'd heard the word before. And every time I do this with a class where I say, “OK, tell me, ‘What's a pyramid?'” They'll tell me that it's from Egypt. It's really big. So, they're drawing on the Egyptian pyramids that they're familiar with. Some of them might say a little something mathematical, but usually it's more about the pyramids they've seen maybe in movies or in school.  So, they're drawing on that concept image, right? But they don't have any kind of mathematical definition. They don't know the component parts of a pyramid. So, after we say that the cube is not a pyramid, and I say, “Well, why isn't it?,” they'll say, “because it doesn't have a pointy top.” So, we can see there that they're still drawing on the concept image that they have, which is valid and helpful in this case, but it's not real defined. So, we have attention to a component part. That's the first step we hope that they'll make. And we're still going to talk about which of these shapes are pyramids. So, we continued to bring in shapes, and they ended up with, it needed to have triangular sides. Because we had some things that had pointy tops, but it wasn't where triangles met. It would be an edge where there were two sloped sides that were meeting there. Let's see. If you can imagine, while I engage your mind's eye again, a prism, basically a triangular prism with two equilateral triangles on each end, and then rectangles that attach those two triangles. Mike: I can see that. Rebecca: OK. So, usually you see that sitting on a triangle, and we call the triangles the base. But if you tilt it so it's sitting on a rectangle, now you've got something that looks like a tent. And the kids will say that. “That looks like a tent.” “OK, yeah, that looks like a tent.” And so, that's giving us that Level 1 thinking: “What does it look like?” “What's the word that comes to mind?” And—but we've got those sloped sides, and so when they see that, some of them will call that the pointy top because we haven't defined pointy top. Mike: Yes. Rebecca: But when I give them the feedback, “Oh, you know what, that's not a pyramid.” Then the class started talking about, “Hmm, OK. What's different about that top versus this other top?” And so, then they came to, “Well, it has to be where triangles meet.” I could have introduced the word vertex at that time. I could have said, “Well, we call any place where sides meet a vertex.” That might be [a] helpful word for us today. But that's where the word comes from what they're doing, rather than me just arbitrarily saying, “Today I'm going to teach you about vertices. You need to know about vertices.” But we need a word for this place where the sides meet. So, I can introduce that word, and we can be more precise now in what we're talking about. So, the tent thing didn't have a vertex on top. It had an edge on top. So now we could be precise about that. Mike: I want to go back, and I'm going to restate the thing that you said for people who are listening, because to me, it was huge. This whole idea of “the word comes from the things that they are doing or that they are saying.” Did I get that right? Rebecca: Yeah, that the precise terminology grows out of the conversation you're having and helps people to be clear about what they're referring to. Because even if they're just pointing at it, that's helpful. And especially for students whose first language might not be English, then they at least have a reference. That's why it's so hard for me to be doing geometry with you just verbally. I don't even have a picture or a thing to refer to. But then when I say “vertex” and we're pointing to this thing, I have to try as much as I can to help them distinguish between, “This one is a vertex. This one is not a vertex.” Mike: You brought up earlier supporting multilingual learners, particularly given the way that you just modeled what was a really rich back-and-forth conversation where children were making comparisons. They were using language that was very informal, and then the things that they were saying and doing led to introducing some of those more precise pieces of language. How does that look when you have a group of students who might have a diverse set of languages that they're speaking in the same classroom? Rebecca: Well, when we do this in that environment, which is most of the time when I'm doing this, we do a lot of pair-share. And I like to let kids talk to the people that they communicate best with so that if you have two Spanish speakers, for example, they could speak in Spanish to each other. And ideally the classroom norms have been established so that that's OK. But that opportunity to hear it again from a peer helps them to process. And it slows things down. Like, often we're just going so fast that people get lost. And it may be a language thing; it may be a concept thing. So, whatever we can do to slow things down and let kids hear it repeatedly—because we know that that repeated input is very helpful—and from various different people. So, what I'll often do, if I want everybody to have an opportunity to hear about the vertex, I'm going to invite the kids to retell what they understood from what I said. And then that gives me an opportunity to assess those individuals who are doing the retell and also gives the other students a chance to hear it again. It's OK for them to see or hear the kind of textbook explanation for vertex in their preferred language. But again, only when the class has been kind of grappling with the idea, it's not the starting point. It emerges as needed in that heat of instruction. And you don't expect them to necessarily get it the first time around. That's why these building tasks or construction tasks can be done at different levels. So, we were talking about the different levels the learner might be at. Everybody can imagine a kite, and everybody could draw a kite. So, I'm sort of differentiating my instruction by giving this very open-ended task, and then I'm trying to tune into what am I seeing and hearing from the different individuals that can give me some insight into their geometrical reasoning at this point in time. But we're going to keep drawing things, and we're going to keep building things, and everybody's going to have their opportunity to advance. But it's not in unison. Mike: A few things jumped out. One, as you were describing the experiences that you can give to students, particularly students who might have a diversity of languages in the same classroom, it strikes me that this is where nonverbal communication like gesturing or using a visual or using a physical model really comes in handy.  I think the other piece that I was reminded of as I was listening to you is, we have made some progress in suggesting that it's really important to listen to kids' mathematical thinking. And I often think that that's taken root, particularly as kids are doing things like adding or subtracting. And I think what you're reminding [me] is, that holds true when it comes to thinking about geometry or shape; that it's in listening to what kids are saying, that they're helping us understand, “What's next?” “Where do we introduce language?” “How can we have kids speaking to one another in a way that builds a set of ideas?”  I think the big takeaway for me is that sometimes geometry has kind of been treated like this separate entity in the world of elementary mathematics. And yet some of the principles that we find really important in things like number or operation, they still hold true. Rebecca: Definitely, definitely. And again, as I said, when you are interested in getting to know your children, seeing who's got some gifts in this domain will allow you to uplift kids who might otherwise not have those opportunities to shine. Mike: I think that's a great place to stop. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Rebecca: This has really been fun. And I do want to mention one thing: that I have developed a list of various articles and resources. Most of them come from NCTM, and I can make that available to you so that people who are interested in learning more can get some more resources. Mike: That's fantastic. We'll link those to our show notes. Thank you again very much for helping us make sense of this really important set of concepts. Rebecca: You're welcome. Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling all individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability. © 2024 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org

We love hearing stories of how our Women of Strength navigate birth in an empowered way, no matter the outcome. Rebecca's story shows how she carefully selected the most supportive homebirth midwife, created a safe birth space in her home, labored hard and beautifully with her husband, took time to process information, assessed her situation, and consented to her second Cesarean when the time felt right to her. Meagan also talks about the different types of positioning and some signs that your baby might be in a less-than-ideal position. Rebecca and Meagan discuss tips and tricks to help prevent a swollen cervix and what options you have if that happens to you!Additional LinksNeeded WebsiteHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode Details Timestamp Topics01:54 Review of the Week04:31 Rebecca's first pregnancy07:25 Consenting to an unexpected C-section for breech presentation8:53 Fertility Fridays11:02 Sparked interest in VBAC and getting pregnant again13:53 Planning for a HBAC18:00 Tachycardia and GBS positive21:27 Early labor24:18 Calling the team30:10 Laboring through the night39:02 Making the decision to transfer44:53 Consenting to a C-section46:43 Tips for when things don't go as planned50:43 Signs of wonky positioning53:31 What to do57:00 Why you shouldn't skip the repeat Cesarean storiesMeagan: Hello, hello. It is Meagan with another amazing story on The VBAC Link podcast. Thank you so much for listening to us, you guys. I love this community. I know I talk about it. I know it's weird that I don't even know you, but I love you. I love you so much and I'm so glad that you are here with us today. We have our guest today from, let's see, Virginia. I think it's Virginia. That's what my mind is saying. Rebecca: Yep. Meagan: This is Rebecca, so welcome, Rebecca. Rebecca: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited. Meagan: Absolutely. Me too. Her story, you guys, today is a repeat Cesarean story so if you didn't know on The VBAC Link, we do share repeat Cesarean stories because they are important to share as well. I'm excited for you to share more about your story and we're going to talk a little bit about swelling of the cervix at the end of this episode because this is something that we see and is a little bit of a part of your story. 01:54 Review of the WeekBefore we dive into the story and all of the things, we of course want to share a Review of the Week. This review is from shotsie3 and it says, “Amazing is not a strong enough word.” That is really awesome. I love that. It says, “I cannot say enough good things about The VBAC Link. Listening to this podcast not only saved my mental health but gave me the knowledge and confidence to take control of my second pregnancy. After my home birth turned into a hospital transfer and Cesarean with my first child, I felt broken. When I unexpectedly found out I was pregnant just 7 months postpartum, I felt scared and lost. I was afraid of failing again and doubted my body's ability to birth naturally, but I knew I absolutely could not have another Cesarean so I started obsessively researching VBAC. That's when I found The VBAC Link. I've been binging episodes ever since. Listening to these stories has been incredible. Each episode is like giving a shot of confidence into the arm.” Oh, I love that. A shot of confidence into the arm. We're giving you guys a little vaccine of confidence. It says, “Both my midwives and doulas have commented on how far my mental prep has come and I know it's all thanks to The VBAC Link. Julie and Meagan have given me lots of tools and resources to control my birth.” I love that. Control your birth. “I am now looking forward to welcoming my second child via HBAC in just five short weeks. I want to shout it from the rooftop, ‘EVERYONE SHOULD LISTEN TO THE VBAC LINK!'”This review was a little while ago, so shotsie3, if you are still listening with us, which we hope you are, email us. Let us know how your birth went. 04:31 Rebecca's first pregnancyMeagan: Okay, cute Rebecca, thank you so much for being here with us today. Rebecca: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to share. Meagan: Absolutely. Well, I'd love to turn the time over to you. Rebecca: All right, well I guess I'll start with just a little recap of my daughter's birth who is my first C-section. My daughter was born in January of 2021. We got pregnant with her during kind of the height of COVID. That pregnancy went really smoothly other than it was COVID times so of course, my husband couldn't come to any of the appointments or anything like that. I didn't really do much prep with her because I wasn't going to go to a birth class. There weren't a lot of resources available. All I really did was watch some YouTube videos. I kind of knew I wanted to try to have a natural birth, but I didn't prepare that much for it really. I read Ina May Gaskin's Guide to Childbirth and stuff, but I didn't do too much preparation. She went to 41 weeks with no complications. I didn't want to be induced, so my OB was like, “We'll go to 41 weeks and then we'll bring you in for an NST and an ultrasound.” So we went in on January 10th for her NST. She passed that with flying colors and I had asked them if they would give me a membrane sweep before they would induce me. They said they could try that, so they were going to come in and give me the membrane sweep, but luckily, one of the doctors there was like, “Well, let's do her ultrasound first just to make sure that everything's fine because that just makes sense before going down there and doing the membrane sweeps.” They did the ultrasound and she was like, “Did you know your baby's breech?” I was like, “No, I did not.” Meagan: News to me. Rebecca: Yeah. Every time the OBs would very quickly, I will say, very quickly palpate me, they'd be like, “Yep. Feels like she's head down. Everything's good.” She was like, “Yeah. She's breech so we're going to go ahead and schedule a C-section for today at 4:00.” It was around 11:00 or something when this happened, so I just immediately started crying because I did not want a C-section. That wasn't what I was planning for at all. She was like, “Well, we don't do the (ECV)s here.” Is that what it's called? (ECV)? Am I saying it right?Meagan: Mhmm, yeah. Rebecca: Yeah. She was like, “We don't do that here. Your amniotic fluid is kind of low, so yeah. This is your option.” Meagan: I wonder why they don't do it there. Rebecca: I don't know. She just said that they don't offer that service. I guess I didn't really know to ask for a second opinion or to see what other– I was just like, “Well, she's telling me that this is my only option,” so we consented to the C-section which was really disappointing. 07:25 Consenting to an unexpected C-section for breech presentationRebecca: My husband had to go home and get a hospital bag ready because we didn't bring it with us or anything. We were like, “Oh, we will have time to go back if they are going to induce me.” I don't know. We just weren't prepared. Anyways, around 4:00, she was born via C-section and it was uncomplicated. It was uncomplicated. She did well. She did have some hip dysplasia because she was frank breech and they think she was probably frank breech for a long time, so her hips and the bones weren't in the socket at all. But other than that, she was completely healthy. But yeah, I remember that night kind of laying in bed with her nursing, and my husband was asleep. I just was quietly sobbing because I felt like everything that I was looking forward to kind of got ripped away from me and I didn't really have a choice in the matter. So I never got to experience one single contraction or any of that with her. I didn't even really have Braxton Hicks with her. It almost felt like there was no closure to the pregnancy. It felt like I should still be pregnant. I definitely, yeah. That was a struggle. That was a struggle for a while afterward kind of trying to find closure of that whole experience because it was just like, “Okay, you're pregnant and now you're not pregnant.” There was no transition. That was her story. 8:53 Fertility FridaysActually, to be honest with you, shortly after her birth, I was kind of like, “Well, if we get pregnant again, I think I'm just going to do a C-section again because I know what to expect. My body's already been through it. You know, I think I'm just going to do a C-section again.” That was kind of what I was thinking. But as I went on throughout my postpartum time, when I got my period back, I noticed throughout the year that I had some weird issues. I was spotting a lot all throughout the month and just different things were happening that I was like, “This doesn't seem quite right.” When I went to the OB about it, they were like, “Oh, it's fine. Your body is probably just getting back into the swing of things.”But it would be like, “Okay, well I've been postpartum for a while now.” This was two years down the line. I think that there's probably something going on that needs investigating. They were kind of like, “No, it's fine. It's fine.” I ended up finding a podcast actually called “Fertility Fridays”. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's really awesome. Meagan: I haven't. Rebecca: It just teaches women about their bodies. How to track your cycle and what your cycle means, and how to know if you're actually fertile at that time because that's another thing. It took us a year to get pregnant with Emma Jean. I was also afraid, “Well, it took us a long time last time. Maybe something was wrong.” I just got really into body awareness and women owning their bodies and the different choices that we make and that our bodies have all of these natural processes that we don't even really know about all of the time because we are not educated about those things. Meagan: Yeah. Rebecca; So as I educated myself on how my body worked and all of its amazing processes, I also became really interested in physiological birth again. It re-sparked my interest in that and my passion for that. I kind of was like, “Well, my body is set up to do all of these amazing things. Why don't I let it do that? If I do get pregnant again, I do think I want to try to have a VBAC and let my body do what it's supposed to do.” 11:02 Sparked interest in VBAC and getting pregnant againRebecca: That kind of sparked my interest back into the VBAC and the physiological birth. I got pregnant again in, I guess it was September of 2023. It's 2023 now, right? Meagan: Mhmm, yeah. Rebecca: It was 2022 that I got pregnant again with the first time trying because I had used these methods that I had learned to actually know, “Hey, I'm fertile on these days.” Unfortunately, that pregnancy did end in a miscarriage so we miscarried that baby in November around this time of year. That was also crushing, but luckily, we started again in January, and again, right away, the first time we tried, we got pregnant again with my son, Arthur who luckily is here with us today. We got pregnant with him in January of 2023 and that was a pretty scary first trimester because I was definitely worried about miscarriage and things of that nature. But as soon as we got pregnant with him, I started listening to The VBAC Link. I also just started to think about, because you guys talk about it all of the time, finding a provider that was friendly to VBAC, truly friendly. Meagan: Yes. Rebecca: Based on my experience with my OB that I was with, I felt like they were tolerant of VBAC but not necessarily supportive. I figured with her, I went to 41 weeks and I hadn't experienced a single contraction. I think they would have been like, “Well, if you don't go into labor by 39 weeks, it's going to be a repeat Cesarean.” I wanted to look for other options and one of my friends had a wonderful home birth for her second child and she recommended Kelly Jenkins who is Blue Ridge Birth. Meagan: What city are you in? Rebecca: I'm in Winchester, Virginia and she works all throughout the surrounding area so the Northern Virginia area. I called her around 7 weeks. I was like, “I know it's kind of early.” She was like, “No. This is perfect timing because I'm already almost full for October,” which was when I was due. She was just really great about going through all of the fears and concerns we have as VBAC parents going into a home birth. She just made me feel so comfortable. She was just really thoughtful with all of our questions, had a lot of stats and evidence, and just really practical which was what I was looking for. Somebody who really was practical and knew their stuff, but also wasn't necessarily a traditional OB. 13:53 Planning for an HBACRebecca: We ended up signing on with her for our care. She would come to our house at the normal time and an OB would come and spend a whole hour with us and just answer all of our questions which was awesome. Meagan: Wow. Rebecca: I never felt like, “Oh, well you're a VBAC so you are a huge risk.” Everything was just supportive and always gave us all of the evidence for all of the choices we had to make all along the way. I also did yoga throughout this pregnancy. I immediately downloaded the Spinning Babies yoga thing. We watched the Spinning Babies parent class because I was trying to do everything not to have a breech baby. Meagan: Yes. Rebecca: I went to the chiropractor a lot and yeah. I just tried to do everything with my posture and all of these things to make sure this baby was not going to be breech. That was my biggest fear. He never was breech, so that wasn't the problem. We also took a Bradley class. I have mixed feelings about Bradley, especially as a repeat Cesarean parent. Meagan: Yep. Rebecca: I think Bradley is really great, but I will stand on a soapbox just for a minute and say I also think Bradley is pretty dated and somewhat unfair to parents because it really does villainize any kind of drug or anything. Sometimes you have to do things for the safety of your child and I feel like it really villianizes using a lot of medical tools that sometimes you truly need. Meagan: That are necessary. Interesting, yeah. Rebecca: Luckily, we had a great doula who taught our Bradley class. It was Bethany Bagnell. She definitely gave it her own spin and kind of, I feel like, was more open-minded whereas if you read the Bradley book, I feel like he's very stringent and I just feel like some of the things he promotes are a little bit outdated in my opinion. But I really liked her so it was a very informative class. We felt really prepared going into the birth. 18:00 Tachycardia and GBS positiveWe really didn't have any complications until week– I guess it was 34 or 35. Kelly came to our house to do our normal check-up and the baby's heartbeat was really fast. She called it tachy. She was really concerned about that and so we actually did go to the hospital to get an NST. They were pretty rude to us at the hospital. They were kind of like, “Why are you guys here? I don't understand why you are here.” We were like, “Our midwife–”Meagan: Just checking up. Rebecca: You know, the heartbeat was really high. I don't know. They just weren't very kind to us while we were there. But anyway, they ended up not giving us the test that she asked them for. She wanted them to do an ultrasound and an NST and they refused to do the ultrasound. We ended up having to drive up to Laden to get the ultrasound. Everything was fine. His heart rate had settled back down and he looked fine. He was head down so we were happy about that. But that was the only little scare that we had. The other thing that was a little bit of a complication but not a complication, just something that happened is we did test positive for GBS. That was not a big deal. We could get the antibiotics at home so it did not preclude us from having a home birth or anything. We did research a lot about that because we kind of wanted to avoid antibiotics so we did a lot of research to decide what the best decision was for us whether we wanted to do those antibiotics. We decided we were just going to play it by ear based on how soon my water broke and different things. Meagan: Signs. Yeah, all of those things are really good things to take into consideration. Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. My urine was clear for GBS. It was just the swab so that was another good indicator that it might be okay. Then yeah, we were just going to kind of wait and see. I also went on a really stringent diet. I cut out white foods and a lot of the things that are shown to feed GBS then I added a lot of fermented foods and probiotics and stuff like that. Meagan: Awesome.Rebecca: So those were really the only two little bumps in the road. The whole pregnancy, every time, she would palpate which would be a full belly map by the way. When the OB would touch my belly, it would be for 10 seconds. Kelly would actually go in and she would completely map out my belly and be like, “I can feel his neck here and his butt.” Every time she did that, she would be like, “He's in a great position. He's in a perfect position.” We were really hopeful going into things. Of course, he did go over the due date but I kind of expected that because Emma Jean did the same thing. The difference with him was I had a lot of Braxton Hicks and I did actually have a few days where I had some prodromal labor or some episodes that I was like, “Maybe this is labor,” and then it kind of just fizzled out. 21:27 Early laborHe went to 41 weeks and I was starting to get a little nervous that we might have to induce. I really didn't want to do that, so the day that he was 41 weeks, I started feeling contractions every 10 minutes throughout the day. I was at work and I was just kind of breathing through them. They weren't painful, but I was definitely like, “Okay. These are kind of timable, every 10 minutes or so.” Right after work, I got together with some of my work friends and we went for a really nice, hilly, 3-mile walk and sure enough, by the time I got home from that, I was feeling contractions become stronger and closer together. They weren't painful yet, but around the time that I was cooking dinner, I went upstairs and I went to the bathroom and I had blood all over my toilet paper. I was like, “Okay. That's a good sign. Maybe I am in labor. Maybe this is finally it,” because we had a few episodes and we had been trying all of the things to get things going. I told my husband, “Maybe things are really happening.” I texted my midwife and she just told me, “Go to bed early tonight. After you put your daughter down, go to bed and see if you can get some rest because it sounds like this might be it so try to get some rest.” I got my daughter down and tried to lay down probably around– she went to be around 8:00 and I tried to lay down around 8:30. As I was laying in bed, I just couldn't get comfortable. What it felt like to me was gas pains. I had always heard period cramps, but I was feeling very strong gas pains. I told my husband, “Maybe I just have gas.” He was like, “Your gas doesn't come in waves like that. I think you're having contractions.” I was like, “I don't know.” Meagan: It doesn't come in waves. Rebecca: He was like, “You're having contractions. I think you're really having contractions.” So he started to time those and they were coming every 5-7 minutes and it was too uncomfortable for me to stay in bed, so I was like, “Well, let's go ahead and go into the basement.” We have a nice finished basement and we were going to birth down there. That's where we were going to set up the pool. I was like, “You can get the tub set up and I can kind of pace around and we will make sure we won't wake up Emma Jean,” who is my daughter. We came into the basement probably around 10:00 and pretty much as soon as we got into the basement, my contractions became strong enough that I wasn't really feeling like I could talk through them anymore. I was leaning over the ball and breathing. My dog, Maggie, was right beside me. Her face is right next to mine the whole time. She was kind of starting to distract me so I was like, “Let's call my dad to come get the dog.” I was like, “I think this is really happening.” 24:18 Calling the teamRebecca: We called everyone. We called Kelly and we called my mom and my sister who were going to help and attend the birth. Everybody just started rolling in. My dad came and got the dog. My mom and sister came and then Kelly was coming around midnight. By the time Kelly got there, I was definitely like, Rick was already helping me out with counterpressure because my contractions were so strong in my back. Everything was in my back, not in my abdomen at all. I remember in the back of my head, I was like, “Man, I remember that means position.” Meagan: Usually. Rebecca: It's probably not what it should be. Kelly, on the phone, had told me to try to do some of the Miles circuit. I had been working through that a little bit when she showed up. When she showed up, I was on the bed in the head down position with the butt up which is part of the Miles circuit and my water broke. My water broke right around midnight when she arrived and that was really cool for me because I had not gotten to experience that with Emma Jean so that feeling is still something that I think of fondly because I never got any of that with my first daughter. Kelly was like, “Just so you know, your contractions might pick up now because your water is broken.” I was like, “Okay,” and they definitely, definitely did pick up. I feel like I almost didn't even go through that early labor stage. I feel like I kind of went straight into that active, you've got to focus. You've got to breathe. My husband had to be right there with me with the counterpressure. Things were pretty strong. They were tolerable and I was excited, so I wasn't like, “Oh, this is really painful.” I was like, “Oh my gosh. It's happening. This is all happening.” That really, I think, helped with the pain tolerance. I was excited for it. But for most of that part of labor, I was leaning over the bed or the couch, and my sister, I would hold her hands and look at her. My husband would be behind me with the counterpressure. They were getting the tub all going and everything. Then Kelly was like, “Do you want me to check you?” I let her check me, but I told her not to tell me how dilated I was. She checked me and she was like, “Well, he's really, really, really low. I can already feel his head. You're almost completely effaced so that's good.” She didn't tell me how dilated I was, but I was like, “Okay. He's low. I'm effaced. Things are sounding good.” Then the nurse got there and we had to decide if we wanted to start the antibiotics for the GBS. My water had broken so I was kind of like, “Um, I don't know. Let's see.” Then I asked Kelly, “Can you just tell me how dilated I was so I can kind of get a sense of how much time we have?” She said I was only at a 1. I was kind of disappointed by that, but I was like, “I haven't been laboring that long. I know that dilation can come really quickly. It's not the only thing. I'm effaced and he's low,” so I didn't let it get me down, but we did decide to go ahead and run the antibiotics. She hooked me up with those and I was able to still be in the tub and everything. She just covered it with a dressing and a plastic so I could be in the tub. I did get in the tub at that point. I got in the tub probably a little after midnight. I don't know the exact timeframe. The tub was nice, but my husband hates baths so at first, he was like, “I'm not going to get in the tub with you.” I was like, “Okay, well I need your counterpressure so buddy, you're going to have to.” Meagan: Get in.Rebecca: Yeah. I went through a few contractions in the tub without him in there with me and to do the counterpressure, I would press my butt as hard as I could against the bottom of the tub. I was like, “This is not cutting it. You're going to swim with me now. Get in.” He did. He got in. He's kind of a germaphobe which is part of him not liking tubs thing. Meagan: Okay, fair. Rebecca: He got in with me and he did what he needed to do. He was awesome. Basically, I would just press against– I was lined up against his pelvis and I would press my butt into him as hard as I could because every contraction felt like my butt would fly apart if I didn't have somebody holding it together. Meagan: I  can totally relate. I was in labor. I was like, “He's going to come out my butt.” Everyone was like, “No, he's not.” I'm like, “Yes, he is.” Those posterior babies. Rebecca: Yep. It just felt like my butt would fly apart if no one held it together. That was how I was getting through each contraction. I labored in the tub for a while then I had to use the bathroom so they were like, “You should labor on the toilet for a while. People love laboring on the toilet.” So I was like, “All right.” I did not like laboring on the toilet. Meagan: Dilation station. Rebecca: I think I just really needed my husband's body. I don't know why. I needed to be pressed against him in some form or another. He was definitely my rock through that whole thing. He was really good. He read The Birth Partner book and everything. He really was with me 100% of the way which is another reason I'm so thankful that I got to labor this time because the bonding between the two of us going through that together was just something that I could never replace. It was just amazing. 30:10 Laboring through the nightRebecca: We kind of went back and forth between the tub and the bed and doing different things. Everything was going well. I remember asking people what time it was a few times and I was like, “Man, the night's really going by quickly. I feel like I'm laboring really hard, but I'm managing and everything was going well.” We labored all through the night until my daughter woke up at 7:00 in the morning. I wanted to say goodbye to her before she went off to school to daycare. I waited for a contraction to end because I was like, “I don't want her to come down here while I'm acting crazy.” When the contraction ended, I called up to my mom. I was like, “Bring down Emma Jean.” She was so cute. She was like, “You're swimming? You're in the pool? What's happening?” I was like, “Yeah. Your brother is coming. Kelly is here,” and she was really excited that Kelly was here because she got to know her throughout the pregnancy. She was really excited. She gave us a kiss and we told her, “Probably when we pick you up from daycare, your brother will be here,” so it was really cute. Then my mom took her. She took her to breakfast and was going to take her to daycare. Basically, as soon as she left, that was my permission to make as much noise as possible. Meagan: Let it go, yep. Rebecca: Yeah. My contractions were starting to be really, really strong. I was starting to feel pushy and I was having to basically roar through them. I was really fighting it. I was sounding angry. I was kind of roaring through them with sort of gritted teeth which I know is the opposite. You're not supposed to grit your teeth. You're supposed to let your jaw be loose and all of that. I was definitely roaring through those contractions. At that point, Kelly was like, “Look, it seems like you might be getting kind of close. Let's check you again and see what's going on.” The intensity of where I was and what I was doing to get through the contractions, I was really expecting and hoping that she was going to say I was maybe a 9 or a 10. She told me later she was fully expecting to tell me, “You're a 9 or a 10.” But when she checked me, I was only a 4.That was kind of crushing to me, but I was like, “Okay.” Actually, I told her not to tell me at first. I was like, “Don't tell me. Again, don't tell me unless it's time to push.” Meagan: Do not tell me, yeah. Rebecca: She said, “Okay, it's not time to push.” The way she said it, I was like, “Something's weird. Something's wrong.” She was like, “I really need you to relax. We're not going to get back in the tub. I want you to lay in the bed. I want you to be in a side-lying position.” She put me in very specific positions and she was like, “I really need you to rest and relax.” 33:09 First signs of swellingI was kind of like, “Okay, something is weird,” so I just asked her. I was like, “Well, what am I at?” She was like, “You're only at a 4.” I was like, “What? I've been laboring all night intensely.” She was like, “And the baby's head is already trying to come through and his head at the top is starting to swell a little bit,” which they called a caput. She was like, “So you know, he's good. His heart rate's good. Your heart rate's good. I'm not worried, but we do have to keep an eye on that.” So she was like, “I'm going to have you go through some different phases of the Miles circuit to see if we can change his position a little bit, get him off your cervix a little bit,” and things like that. I was not able to get those really strong counterpressure that I needed from Rick in that side-lying position, so I was like, “Let's get some music going. I need some kind of distraction.” I'm a singer. I love to sing and I play music and stuff so we put on our wedding playlist. We were just both lying on the bed. I had him get my comb for me so I could squeeze it and I was just singing through our wedding songs. That was actually a really beautiful part of the labor for me. I was sitting there and singing through our songs. It was kind of a chance to just be quiet and think about things. I just kept saying in my head, “Okay. Dilate. Dilate. You're going to dilate,” and thinking that over and over again. She had me do 30 minutes in each of these different positions. The one with the head down and the butt up was super uncomfortable I think because my neck was hurting. I was so ready for that to be over. After we went through those, she was like, “Okay, let's get you up and get you moving again.” This was probably at least an hour later that she was like, “Let's get you up off the bed and we'll just move around.” Rick and I danced around. Every time a contraction hit, I would just squat down really low and he would squat down and hold me in a chair almost and just hold onto me, then we would sway and dance. Meagan: How cute. Rebecca: Yeah. It was really special. We did that for probably another half hour, then it was time for me to get another round of the IV which I guess I had been getting every 4 hours is what that generally is. Kelly was like, “How about we do another round of the antibiotics and then I'll check you again because it will have been about two hours more or so. We will see if you have progressed and what is going on.” At this point, I was starting to feel a little discouraged. I remember I was sitting on the birth ball and Bethany, the nurse, was giving me the antibiotics. I just remember looking at Rick and I was like, “I'm trying so hard.” I was tearful. I was like, “I am trying so hard. I know that I'm a good mom.” He was like, “You're the best mom.” He was crying and I was crying. He was like, “We're going to get through this and we're going to do what we need to do.” Throughout my whole pregnancy, I had told him, “If I don't get a VBAC, it's going to be so hard for me. It's going to be really crushing for me.” His perspective on it the whole time was always like, “Look. We're going to make the best decisions possible with the information we have.” He was like, “Hopefully, that is you getting your VBAC, but if it's not, it's because we had to move to the next plan because it was the best decision.” He was kind of like, “Look. That's the same thing. We're going to make the best decisions with the information we have. You're a great mom and you're doing a great job. I'm so proud of you.” That was just really special. We were just going through the emotions. After we got the antibiotics, she checked me again. I want to say this was around 10:00 in the morning and she was like, “Becca, you're still a 4.” And she said, “Now, your cervix is swelling.” She said, “Look. You know, you're not in danger at this point. The baby's not in danger. This is not an emergency. But, I can't tell you that if you keep going for a few more hours, you're going to have your baby here. I don't know.” She was like, “Chances are your cervix will continue to swell. You've also been in labor for a long time. You're getting tired.” She just kind of started to talk to us about hospital transfer. She was like, “Maybe if we go to the hospital and you get an epidural and you can relax and maybe we can try some different positions with the epidural and get the baby to come off the cervix some.” We started talking about it and I remember I was going through a contraction on the edge of the bed. I had my arms up on the bed and I was just sobbing. I was like, “I tried so hard. I'm trying so hard.” But I remember as soon as I found out I was still just at a 4 and that my cervix was swelling, it is very mental because my tolerance of the contractions, my pain tolerance, just went down. Meagan: Yeah. Rebecca: All of a sudden, they just felt so much more painful because I was going from being like, “Well, maybe I'll meet my baby any second,” to “Who knows? Who knows what's going to happen?” Meagan: Starting to feel the defeat and doubt. Rebecca: Exactly. We talked about it and we were like, “Well, we could labor here for who knows how long and still need to transfer, or we could go ahead and transfer and try something new.”39:02 Making the decision to transferWe made the decision to transfer. Luckily, I only live 5 minutes away from the hospital, so it wasn't a super long process to do that. We already had our hospital bag packed this time. I was ready with that. I had my hospital bag packed. I had my C-section plan just in case. I had my hospital plan just in case. I at least felt ready to go. Nobody said, “You have to transfer.” It was our decision. We felt like we had the information and we made the decision together. That part of going to the hospital, I remember just wishing I could turn these contractions off now because now, getting in the car, not having the counterpressure, all that, and the funny thing was we walked out onto our patio. I had a contraction on the side of my patio and of course, my neighbors drive by and roll down their windows and are like, “How's it going?” Meagan: “Are you okay? How's it going?” Rebecca: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” I love these neighbors. They are amazing, but I was like, “This is not what I want to be doing.” But we made it to the hospital. We got to triage. They strapped me all up. I was lying flat on my back in the most uncomfortable position, but basically, we got through triage and everything. From the time I got to the hospital to the time I got the epidural was probably still another hour and a half of labor at least. That was really tough. We made it there. We got there. We finally got the epidural placed. I would say it was around noon when I finally got the epidural placed. I will tell you. I am all about natural labor and if somebody had told me, “You'll have to labor 10 more hours, but you're going to push your baby out and everything is going to be fine,” I would have found it in myself to do that.Meagan: Yeah? Yeah? Rebecca: I will still say that epidural felt so freaking good. Meagan: I bet. Rebecca: It was just a warm wave of a warm tingling hug. As soon as I got the epidural, all of the pain just kind of melted away. I was like, “This is where we are so I might as well enjoy this for what it is and take this relief.” Yeah. The other thing was that the doctor was, I would say, VBAC tolerant for sure, the doctor on call. He kind of came in and gave us a big spiel about TOLAC and did we know the risks. He was like, “Look, you can try for a VBAC, but if anything goes wrong, we're not going to try to fix it. It's just going to be a C-section because we're going to play it safe.” I was like, “Okay.” I didn't have any problems with him. He was a nice guy and everything, but as soon as he said that, I was like, “I have a feeling this is going to be a C-section. I think it's just going to be a C-section.” The nurse was very great. She put me on the peanut ball. She moved me around some different positions to try to get him to back off my cervix. When they checked me again, I was still a 4 even after that time. I labored with the epidural for about two more hours to the point where I was like, “I'm getting kind of bored and antsy. I sort of want to know what's going to happen. What's the plan at this point?” At about two hours in, the doctor came back in and he checked me again. He said, “I could push you to a 5, but you're still basically a 4.” He said, “Your cervix is very swollen.” He said, “I could give you Benadryl or something like that for the cervix to come down.” He was like, “But I really don't like to do that because at this point, whatever is happening to your cervix is a position thing. It's a mechanical, positional thing.” Also, the epidural slowed my contractions way down. They went from being 3 minutes apart to being 10-12 minutes apart. He was like, “I'd probably have to give you Pitocin to get this going again.” He was like, “I'm not comfortable doing that.” He basically said, “I recommend a C-section and that's basically your option.”Meagan: I was like, “Okay. Can you give us a few minutes to talk it over?” He did. He left the room. My midwife, Kelly, was still there. She stayed on the whole time as my doula. She basically was like, “You know, I do understand what he is saying.” She was like, “I kind of wish he would have told you that earlier and not made you wait for two hours.” She was like, “I agree. It probably is positional and there's probably not a ton we can do.” Oh, another thing he had said was that the baby was having some decels after my contractions. He was like, “You know, that can show us the baby is in a little bit of distress.” She was kind of like, “You know, I understand what he is saying and I'm not sure that I would give you any other advice. I'm not sure I would tell you anything different.” My husband and I talked it over and we were like, “Let's just meet our baby. Let's just meet our baby now.” We had them go over our C-section plan and of course, they weren't willing to do most of the things that we had on that plan. They didn't have the clear drapes. There were just a lot of things that they weren't willing to do, but they did agree that the nurse could take pictures of the surgery for us which was something I didn't have with my daughter.Meagan: Which is nice. Rebecca: Yeah. She took pictures for me and that's pretty much the only thing, I think, that was really different. She took pictures of everything that happened. 44:53 Consenting to a C-sectionRebecca: Around 4:00, we consented to the C-section, and then yeah. They just prepped me. My sister took a picture of me giving a thumbs up getting ready to go. She took a picture of my husband and his whole suit and everything. I was like, “Okay. Let's just do this thing and get our baby now.” I did shed some tears while they were rolling me into the OR and I remember the anesthesiologist well-meaning was kind of like, “What? Are you afraid of a C-section? You've already done this!” I know she was trying to be like, “There's nothing to be scared of,” but I was kind of like, I even said to her, “I'm not scared. That's not why I'm crying.” She was like, “Well, what's wrong?” I was like, “I'm disappointed.”Meagan: This is not what I wanted, yeah. This is not what I planned for. Rebecca: That was a little bit like, “Okay. Come on. Empathize a little bit here. There are lots of reasons why someone could be crying going into this.” Long story short, the C-section all went to plan, but as soon as they did pull him out, they did say he was OP. He was sunny-side up and then they also said, “And he's 9 pounds.” So he was pretty big. I mean, I could have pushed him out for sure but he–Meagan: Yeah, on the bigger side. Rebecca: But he was in sort of a poor position which could be why I had the swelling and everything of the cervix. He came out and he was really, really healthy. Once we got to the recovery room, he nursed right away. He was definitely a hungry little boy right from the beginning so that was awesome. He latched right on and nursed and everything. Yeah, that's pretty much the story. 46:43 Tips for when things don't go as plannedMeagan: You know, it's so interesting how we have these things. We go through all of these things and we end sometimes in the way we didn't want, right? Rebecca: Yeah. Meagan: I've been there too, not nearly as intense as you. You went through a lot. I just had an unsupportive provider from the get-go. I ended up walking down to the OR in general, but we have these experiences, but we still grow from them. Rebecca: Absolutely. Meagan: I mean, I heard little nuggets within your story like bonding with your husband, having faith in your body, working through it, experiencing labor, having support, but are there any other things that you would tell our Women of Strength, our listeners, especially if something doesn't happen exactly as planned? Rebecca: Yeah. There are a couple of different things. The first one was all throughout when I was prepping for labor in particular, especially for dealing with pain, the word that kept coming up and coming up was surrender. I kept thinking, “Surrender to the contraction. Surrender to the sensation.” I always applied that very specifically to labor and labor pains, but I want people to take it a step further and just be like, surrender to your birth however it's going to happen because even if you do everything right and you do all of the steps, there are no guarantees in birth that you are going to have the outcome that you wanted. Even if you have a good outcome, most likely, there's going to be something about it that was unexpected or wasn't perfect so just try to surrender to the whole experience. Yeah, of course, surrender to the contractions. Surrender to the labor, but surrender to the whole experience and the fact that you can't control it. That doesn't mean you are doing anything wrong. Meagan: Yeah. Rebecca: That's the other thing. I hear it a lot in VBAC and I understand why people use this word, but I feel a little bit, I guess I would say use some caution in using it. A lot of people label their VBAC as a redemption or redemptive. You own whatever experience you have. I'm sure it is redemptive, but I guess what I would say is that we don't need to redeem ourselves. There is nothing we did wrong that we have to have redemption for. Can the experience feel redemptive? Absolutely, but I don't want women to then apply that to themselves like, “I need redemption because I failed at something.” You are making the best decision for yourself and your child with the information that you have at that moment. That is what parenting is all about. You can't control anything when you become a parent either. There are always going to be these little decisions you have to make that are unexpected or huge decisions. I think that was the difference between this C-section for me and the last one was the last one, I didn't feel like I had a choice. With this one, every step of the way, I was given choices by my midwife with my husband. We had time to talk through things. We had time to think through things. We made the choices that we felt were the best choices at the moment. So those are the two things I would really say. Surrender to your whole experience because you have no idea what it's going to bring and you don't need redemption because you are already being the best mom that you can possibly be or the best birthing parent that you can possibly be just by being in the moment and making those good decisions with the information that you have. Meagan: I love that so much. I love that so much. Thank you for sharing that. Rebeca: Yeah, absolutely. 50:43 Signs of wonky positioningMeagan: I want to dial into that. The swelling of the cervix, the “stalling” of this labor and I'm putting it in quotes, but it does happen and sometimes despite all of our efforts, it doesn't change and sometimes it does change, but I wanted to talk about the swelling of the cervix and what that really means and what kind of signs we can look out for to know that we've maybe got a baby in a wonky position that could cause a swollen cervix and then what we can do. I mean, just like you were talking about, we were talking about how you just needed your husband to hold your butt together. That is a sign. If we are having all back or butt labor, that could mean a sign that a baby is in an OP or occiput posterior position. That doesn't always cause a swollen cervix or a delay or a stall in labor or anything like that, but it can.Another position is called asynclitic and that's where the head is kind of tipped to the side a little bit and we're not coming down with a nice chin-tucked position into the pelvis. Another one is where the chin is extended or we're in that military position. I've also seen it sometimes in a transverse. It's like a transverse asynclitic. I don't know exactly what that one is where the head is back, the chin is up, and we're in an asynclitic position. We're not looking straight up. Those are positions that may mean our babies are in a less-ideal position. Some of the things are prodromal labor beforehand. You had mentioned that. That means sometimes there is a baby that needs help getting in a different position or a back labor or a butt labor. A coupling pattern where there are two contractions and then there is a big break and then there's a big strong one. Our body is trying to get that baby to rotate. Rebecca: Yep. I did have really long contractions and I did have some double peaks so that makes sense to me.Meagan: Yes. Yes. I call them coupling contractions where that's what they can do. Our body is brilliant. It's trying to rotate these babies and work with us, but sometimes, it's more difficult and sometimes we have to help our body by rotating and moving and working with the pelvis in things like this. 53:31 What to doSome of the things we can do, it sounds really weird and I saw this from a nurse years ago and I was like, “What is she doing?” Then I was like, “Oh my gosh, it worked.” We had an anterior lip where it was swelling on the one side. She said, “I want you to get in the biggest fetal position that you can, the tightest fetal position.” We're holding her even around and imagine a 9-month belly. So it was a little difficult to wrap ourselves around it, but we brought knees all the way to her chest, had her wrap around her knees like this and she laid there. We had to do a lot of counterpressure. Rebecca: Yeah, I can imagine. Meagan: Because that was not a comfortable position. We did five contractions like that and it was hard, but she said, “I want to do it. I want to do it.” We got into it with lots of counterpressure then we did, I don't know what you call it, but we did the throne where you sit up feet to feet, knees out, but after that contraction, she got a check and the lip was gone. That was something that was kind of cool that I had never heard of. I had been a doula for years then I saw this and I was like, “Huh, okay.” I haven't seen anyone do that. Rebecca: Yeah. I read a lot of the books and I didn't see that anywhere. Meagan: Never saw it anywhere, but yeah. This nurse here in Utah was like, “I know just the trick.” She did it and I was like, “Whoa, okay.” Yeah. Some people will say that sometimes ice, there is a circulation issue and sometimes ice can actually stop circulation. Sometimes ice isn't the best and then Arnica or Benadryl. You mentioned Benadryl that they wouldn't give you but they mentioned it. I don't even know how to say the word. It's actually something that I just was talking to a labor and delivery nurse in our community who wants a VBAC. It's Cemicifuga. I don't even know actually, you guys. I don't know how to pronounce it, but those, I've seen arnica, out-of-hospital midwives will use or getting into a tub. Sometimes that can or sometimes an epidural because it can offer relaxation. But then that always and then yeah, just moving, moving, and working with position. But then sometimes, despite all of our efforts, just like cute Rebecca, for whatever reason it doesn't change. That's when we have to surrender on our whole experience and make the choice that is best for us at that point. If that's a repeat Cesarean, that's a repeat Cesarean. Repeat Cesareans can also be healing. Rebecca: Yeah. I would say this was because I definitely felt totally different about the experience afterward. I still mourned it of course and you will, but I felt much more empowered and I got so much out of just going through the labor process that I wouldn't give it up for the world. It still was healing for me for sure. 57:00 Why you shouldn't skip the repeat Cesarean storiesMeagan: I love that. Well, thank you so much for sharing your stories with us, being here with us today, and talking about swollen cervixes. Rebecca: Yeah. I hope people actually click on this. I know when I was preparing for VBAC, I was kind of guilty of, “Oh, a repeat Cesarean, I don't want to listen to this one.” So again, hopefully, people will be open because you never know what your story is, or maybe you'll come back and find it after you've had a repeat Cesarean and feel proud of yourself for everything that you did because I think hearing these stories after you've had a repeat Cesarean could be really helpful. Meagan: Absolutely. Just like they are helpful after having a Cesarean and preparing for a VBAC, after having a repeat Cesarean, these stories can be very healing and validating as well. These stories, I know that there are so many people out there who won't click or will avoid them because they don't want to even think or go there, but a lot of these stories with repeat Cesareans actually offer tools that can help heal if that does happen and ways that you can prepare for if that does happen because it's any birth. I mean obviously, look at all of us. There are hundreds of us and thousands of us who have had an unexpected Cesarean. We weren't planning on that Rebecca: No. Meagan: So preparing before for all outcomes is so powerful. Rebecca: Definitely. Definitely. Have that backup plan because I didn't even have one at all for my first and I was really glad I had it for my second. Meagan: Yes. Oh, well thank you again so much for being here with us today, and congratulations on your baby. Rebecca: Thank you. Thanks for hearing my story. I love what you do and I think it's really, really important, so thank you. Meagan: Thank you. ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan's bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

What does it take to run for office as a person with a disability? Rebecca LaMorte We talk to Rebecca Lamorte, who ran for city council in New York on a platform on disability rights.  Listen as she talks about her experiences running for a major office in the Big Apple. We also talk to Ventura City Council Member Liz Campos about working at a city hall that is inaccessible, her challenges finding accessible housing, and how she ran a successful campaign on only $3,000. Liz Campos Lastly, we talk to Denver City Councilman Chris Hinds about the unique challenges of being Colorado's first elected official with a physical disability. Chris Hinds This episode of Pushing Limits is hosted and edited by Denny Daughters, and produced and written by  Jacob Lesner-Buxton. Check out this database of elected officials with disabilities.    Add your favorite politician with a disability to the list. Rebecca Lamorte Website Campaign website for Liz Campos Website for Council Member Chris-Hinds Transcript Denny Daughters:  Welcome to Pushing Limits, KPFA's program by and about people with disabilities. We air every Friday afternoon at 2.30 p.m.  I'm Denny Daughters and I'll be voicing a script written by Jacob Lester Buxton. According to a 2019 estimate by Rutgers University, 10.3% of elected officials serving in federal, state, or local government have a disability.  People with disabilities are twice as likely to serve as local officials rather than as state or federal representatives. Today we will be talking to people with disabilities who have run for public office at the local level. Our first guest is Rebecca Lamorte.  She's a lobbyist for a labor union and she lives in Manhattan. In 2021, she ran for a seat on the New York City Council.  There were a total of seven candidates.  Unfortunately, she lost the election, coming in at third place. We asked Rebecca.  What motivated her to run? Rebecca Lamorte:   Anger, honestly. When I was pushed on the subway, I was 22 years old.  And I had just finished college.  I had just moved in to my first apartment alone in New York City. You know, I had my student loans, I had my bills, I had my friends. And in an instant, everything changed for me where I went from taking my body for granted and not looking at a flight of stairs, for example, and thinking twice about them to not being able to really leave my own apartment building for a long time because it had stairs and dealing with rude and invasive questions and comments and being faced with discrimination on the job and in public places. The most egregious thing for me that really made me and pushed me to take that step to decide I am gonna run for office is one day I was at New York City Hall for work.  I'm a lobbyist, I work for a labor union, and I have for 12 years now.  And at City Hall that day with union members, I was there with my cane and security told me if I couldn't walk up the stairs, maybe I didn't belong there.  And I got so angry.  I almost couldn't speak.  I was so angry because I felt if this is happening to me, what's happening to other people? Who cares about us?  Who's fighting for us?  Who else is experiencing this?  And so angry and so upset right now when they're just living life and going about their day like everybody else.  And I wanted to take my anger and do something positive from it.  And for me, working in the government space and being interested in politics, that was running for office to give disabled people like myself and others a seat at the table where decisions are made.   Where I was now witnessing and now very aware that those decisions were being made in ways that harmed us and harmed our community and ignored our needs, ignored accessibility, ignored disability rights and the inclusive society and city we could have.  And that's what made me throw my hat in the race for 2021.   Denny:   Lamorte put disability front and center of her campaign.  It raised some eyebrows among political people in the city. Rebecca:  Yes and no.  So, there have been some people in public office with disabilities.  Not everyone has been comfortable speaking about their disabilities, which I very much so understand.  You know, not many people go out every day in the world and get asked about their bodies and have people expect that we'll respond and share everything that's happening with us. But that's unfortunately reality for people with disabilities.  And there have been people in elected office in New York that haven't been comfortable speaking about their life, speaking about their accessibility needs, speaking about their lived experience as a person with a disability because of that stigma and discrimination, which is really unfortunate and keeps other disabled people from speaking out, feeling that commonality, knowing they have an ally in government. But outside of that, we've had some really great people in office right now. We have our first disabled New York City council member, a woman named Shahana Hanif from Brooklyn.  We used to have another amazing woman, Yuh-Line Niou in the New York State Assembly.  She unfortunately isn't there anymore, but we have some other great people out there fighting for us and making sure we have a seat at the table. But we need some more people.  Just having, you know, between five and 10 people with disabilities in office isn't going to change the conversation.  We need more voices in the chorus for us.   Denny:  To create the campaign she wanted to run, Rebecca first had to look inward.  There's the nitty gritty stuff, filing your paperwork to run for office.  Like you said, I made my decision and then I was like, well, what do I do now?  Like how do I make it a reality?  I'm, I'm, I'm here. I'm going to run, but what do I do? And so I did the like the nitty gritty stuff, file paperwork, tell the government I'm running, told local elected officials in the neighborhood that I was running, reached out to people in politics, consultants, other people I knew saying I'm going to run, what's your advice? And unfortunately, in doing that, I started getting back comments that wanting to run on a platform of disability issues, disability justice, as I refer to it for my campaign platform, that that was a niche issue.  And I should first run, then win, and work on it and tell people I care about it. And that was really hurtful for me as a disabled person, because it's like, well, do you see me every day when I'm out like this?  Like my life isn't a niche issue.  There are so many New Yorkers that have this experience too. So my first real campaign thing was getting comfortable, being uncomfortable as a disabled person, getting comfortable sharing things about my life, about my opinions, my experiences, my feelings, about my physical body — about certain social and emotional impacts that I deal with from being a person with a disability out in society that can be really difficult at times for us. And so that was the first thing.  Getting comfortable as a disabled woman, what I was comfortable talking about, how I was comfortable talking about it and really rooting myself that this was a campaign for disability justice, and everything would always pivot back to that center.   Denny:  We asked Rebecca how she handled being perceived as the woman who only talked about disability issues during her campaign. Rebecca:  That was the lady with a cane, the one trick pony with a cane. I would call myself at a point in time.  Um, what you're saying is true.  There were some people that would be able to see the far through the trees with me of affordable housing is a disability issue.  We need affordable, accessible housing and it's not just accessible with an elevator in the building.  That's my disability experience, but there are other people with disabilities that, okay, you need to have your handles lower.  You need to have your counter heights changed.   Denny:  Surely a candidate like Rebecca, who is so passionate about disability would be fully embraced by everyone in the community. Rebecca:  So unfortunately, there wasn't much support from formal disability groups for me during my campaign in New York City.  We have what is called the 504 Democrats, which is a citywide disability center Democratic club. And they endorsed a person without a disability in my race. And it really upset me. And that unfortunately kind of colored my experience and opinion with them and some other formal groups going forward. Coming from the political space, I understand wanting to go to the power and wanting to have a seat at the table.  And sometimes you have to choose the person that's going to win, even if there's someone else you like better.  But with something as personal as running for office with a disability, how few people do it and to have a candidate running so vocally, opening and powerfully as a woman with a disability on a campaign rooted in disability justice — that was really, really hurtful. I'm not going to lie to you. But outside of that, I was very blessed to have individual disability advocates from throughout the country come together to help me learn about disability issues that are not personal to me in my experience as a disabled woman, to help me meet other people that could offer advice that had run for office or were working within the government space and had experience with this.  And so it was those individuals that really surrounded me and gave me the cocoon of love from our community that I do wish had been there from other larger organizations, but just unfortunately was not, because politics makes for strange bedfellows as the saying goes, right?   Denny:  As a result of her campaign, Rebecca became more active in disability rights movements, including mentoring others who want to run for office. Rebecca:  I'm a board member of an organization called Disability Victory, which is aimed specifically at helping disabled people run for office and or work on campaigns that are accessible and engender real disability justice and disability inclusion in them. And through that, we do campaign trainings where it's everything from how do you talk about being a person with a disability on a campaign, getting comfortable with that, what you want to share, what you don't want to share.  Kind of like I spoke about with my own journey and experience on that — things like how do you develop a campaign platform?  And how do you then pivot those issues back to disability justice and disability rights? We actually just did a great hour-long talk about that specifically where I led the conversation.  I had everyone choose a policy.  And by the end of the hour, we took that policy from not being about disability rights to making it about disability rights to show that it is possible and these aren't niche issues.   And, if people are interested, they can follow Disability Victory on Facebook, X and Instagram. And we also have a website, DisabilityVictory.org. And we're doing more trainings coming up in 2024. Our next one will be about canvassing with a disability because, not surprising for anyone here that's listening, it's not so easy.   And campaigns are not made for disabled people.  And that's people like myself with mobility aids and mobility issues.  That's for people that are blind, that's for people that are deaf, that's for so many different disabled people because campaigns are made for one kind of person and it's a cis white rich man — typically. And that's not politics. That's not my politics. That's not what I want our country, our society, my city to be.  And so Disability Victory is working on that specifically.  And so in January, we'll be talking about canvassing with a disability.  We're going to be having some fireside chats to also just offer more emotional support for candidates in this space because running for office is so difficult and isolating.  But when you're running with a disability, it's even more so because traditional spaces in politics aren't made for us and they don't include us. And when we do go to them, we'll be made to feel that way, at least in my experience at times here in New York.  So, making sure that we have a space that is specifically for us.  And I'm really proud that that's Disability Victory now.   Denny:  In the world of politics, we were interested how Rebecca developed a thick skin. Rebecca:  I was born with a bit of a thick skin.  It definitely got thicker, though, after my subway accident. You know, when you go out every day and people see you and they're gonna pry and they're gonna ask questions, they're gonna look at you differently, and I am out here with an invisible disability with my cane — and I still get those stares and those questions and those uncomfortable moments.  So, it's made me develop a much thicker skin.  It's also made me get really quippy.  Like for example, when I walk down the sidewalk in my neighborhood and people are staring at me, I like to stop and look at them and go, “Show's here all day everybody” and then watch them laugh and get uncomfortable.  I also like to call people out if they're staring.  I'll be like “Let me do a trick!”  And then, they like look away anxiously and uncomfortably.  It's made me develop a thick skin but also, it's given me a confidence in myself that [pause]. I was always a confident person before, but it's a different and it's difficult to put into words the kind of confidence that comes from knowing who you are when you may be at your lowest.  And even if you're not there physically, but emotionally at your lowest from what someone has said or done or how you're feeling that day or (for me), what my mobility is that day.  And just knowing that still doesn't define who you are.   And if people see you as just that, that's a reflection on them. And it's such a confidence that I feel very lucky to have. And it's something that it took a while for me to develop, but I'm here now and I'm really thankful to be.  And to feel this good about myself 10 years in the game.  Lately, Rebecca offers motivation to those with disabilities who are interested in running for political office.  If you're a person with a disability, thinking about running for office, it's probably the scariest thing you've ever thought about for big and small reasons but it could also be the best thing you've ever thought about. I didn't win, but I am so thankful that I ran for office.  I am thankful for what it taught me about myself, what it taught me about disability rights, disability issues.  I'm thankful for the community it helped me create around myself.  And I'm also thankful for the platform it's given me as a person with a disability to now call out things that I see, share my experiences, shine a light on things that so many people have said, ‘I never thought about that, Rebecca'. Just today, a friend texted me, ‘a woman with a walker can't get down the subway stairs right now, and I wouldn't have thought about that if it wasn't for you', — talking about subway accessibility.  And that's a small thing, but that's someone that would have never thought about that if I hadn't been out there running as I was and talking about things like I did and getting comfortable being uncomfortable at times.  And so it's the scariest thing you may be thinking about, but it could be the best thing you've ever done, not just for yourself, for your community, for our larger disability community, for our country.   Because if we don't have a seat at the table, we're on the menu and policies never have us in mind.  And so we have to put ourselves in people's mind. So take that step!  Be bold!  Don't be afraid!  And feel free to reach out to me on social media, because I'm always going to be here to tell you that, you know, you're either a Smart A [Beep] with a mobility aid like me or, you know, something else that will build you up and get you back out there in the streets fighting for us.  Because we need more voices in our disability chorus.   Denny:  You're listening to Pushing Limits on 94.1 KPFA. I'm Denny Daughters.  We just heard from Rebecca Lamorte who ran for a New York City Council position in 2021.  Today, we are talking to people with disabilities who run for public office.  Our next guest is Liz Campos who sets on the Ventura City Council.  Campos decided to run for office because she was frustrated that city hall wasn't responding to the needs of the people in her community.  94.1 KPFA. Liz Campos:   Well, I've been active in my community for 20 years and particularly the last 10 years I spent on the board of the Westside Community Council, my neighborhood community council.  And after becoming chair of that board, I realized that City Council wasn't listening to the people, the diverse voices in the community properly.  I also, for almost seven years, attended every city council meeting, listened to what they were doing, spoke to them many times often with no result.  And I decided that it's important for people to be on an elected body who will listen to the entire community. So I didn't come just to be a voice for people with disabilities, but to be a voice for everyone who feels disenfranchised.   Denny:  While many people in the Compos community were excited by her candidacy, those in City Hall sang a different tune. Liz:  Because I had been active in my community.   Ventura has districts. My district is about 8,000 registered voters. But I had spent two and a half years in my community holding public rallies to fight against the expansion of a Southern California gas compressor that is across the street from an elementary school.  And that alone is disabling many children not just with asthma, but with central nervous system problems and cancers. So the community knew me already from that battle and had gotten accustomed to seeing me in the wheelchair, but knowing that I was there for them.  So, my community didn't show a lot of disdain or problem for me as a person with a disability. Where the pushback came was from a couple of the other candidates but also from some of the higher-level city staff who looked at me as an imbecile or had the attitude that I would never be able to serve on city council.  And so, I shouldn't be encouraged.  And that was a difficult battle, both before and after getting elected.   Denny:   Ventura City Hall wasn't ready for Campos to assume office, or any person with a physical disability for that matter.   Liz:  Ah Ventura City Hall is not the most accessible location, in part because it's up on the top of a pretty steep hill, California Street.  It has a beautiful view of the ocean, but for a person in a wheelchair — a manual wheelchair cannot make it up the hill by its own steam. I'm in an electric wheelchair and I can roll up to City Hall, but when I leave City Hall, I have to roll backwards because the hill is too steep.  And that's just to get to City Hall. There is a ramp on the street level that goes up into the building. And that is there because about 11 years ago, I sued the city for access. So they made the public area more accessible with bathrooms and a ramp and electronic doors. When I got elected to City Council, anyone would have expected that the council dais and council area would be made accessible. December 12th will be my one-year anniversary and I still cannot use the bathroom where all the other Council members use the bathroom. I have to leave the dais, exit the Council area out into the hallway, and go to the other end of the building for an accessible bathroom during meetings. For the first several months, the way I got up on the dais was they threw a piece of plywood over a steep staircase. And so I would roll up, but again, I had to roll backwards off of that.  And this was all during the tenure of that acting city manager who was here, who wasn't happy about me being here.  My wheelchair ultimately got broken rolling down because it started to slide sideways, and the brakes broke.  So, the city's paying for the repair of that wheelchair. That acting city manager resigned, and our new city manager is incredibly kind and generous and working very hard to ensure not just my access, but everybody's. He's had the city hold trainings for every staff member to learn about disability access.  And so, I appreciate that none of that would have happened had I not been here. And it's not just about me. It's about every person in the community that is challenged with barriers to access.   Denny:   One of their priorities for Liz is creating more accessible and affordable housing in the city, an issue she is currently experiencing. Liz:   So, I still have not found housing in my district that is wheelchair accessible and affordable.  And the cost of housing in Ventura just keeps getting higher and higher.  So, I'm currently living in a [pause]. It's, it's a van, but it's not a little tiny van.  It formerly was an access bus and a paratransit bus.   So, it has a ramp.  It's pretty big.  It's about 16 feet of living space. I have solar panels on top.  I can cook.  I have a camping toilet.  So, it suffices while I'm still looking for housing. But really — Affordable housing for people with disabilities and seniors on limited income does not currently exist in the city of Ventura except through Section Eight.  And the Section Eight waiting list currently is 15 years long.   Denny:  Upon hearing what Liz spent on her campaign, our interviewer Jacob was speechless. Liz:  I didn't raise a lot of money. I probably spent the least money of anyone who's ever run for Ventura City Council.  And people who are rich will spend a lot of money, but it really isn't about the money as much as about how you connect with people.  I put a website up that cost me $100, and I used it for fundraising.  And I had all the videos from the rallies I did and from public meetings and… I think I posted a video from one of the events I did with the ILRC [Independent Living Resource Center], and then I just made a couple short videos talking about the cost of running, but how important it is for me to be there to represent the people. I put a PayPal link to the campaign bank account, and I raised just about $3,000. Of that money, I had two events in a park and gave away free tacos that cost about $1,200.  And I spent $800 on t-shirts saying Vote for Liz Campos in two languages.  And I gave away the t-shirts free.  I had 2,000 t-shirts of all sizes.  So, people in my district were walking billboards for me. The other thing that's important to do is to meet with unions or organizations.  iIf you get their support and get an endorsement who will knock on doors for you. Because both Santa Barbara and Ventura, for example, are a little bit hilly and they're old.  There's narrow sidewalks.  There's front gates that a wheelchair can't get through.  People don't answer their doors to strangers. Because I couldn't knock on doors myself, I held events at the park. But I had CAUSE who endorsed me, and Stonewall Democrats and the county Democrats endorsed me, and they knocked on all the doors in my neighborhoods for me.  And they also paid for mailers.  Because they endorsed me, they paid for the mailers.  So, when I finished my campaign, I had $800 left that I donated to a local nonprofit organization.   Denny:   Like Rebecca, Liz also offers words of encouragement to people with disabilities who are interested in running for public office. Liz:  Don't hesitate to do it.  Get to know other people as much as possible.  Speak at rallies and events.  And make sure you get video of those things so that you can put it online when you're running.  That way other people who don't know you get to know you. But I think that there are people still who have animosity to us as people with disabilities, but more and more people are recognizing we're not so different from them. So, I would encourage everybody who wants to run for public office to run.  Even if you lose the first time, keep at it because it helps everybody in the disability community — win or lose — if people see us in public and hear us speak and recognize that we're good people.   Denny:   Our last guest is Chris Hinds on the Denver City Council. Chris Hinds:  I'm the first elected official in Denver's history, local, state or federal, who uses a wheelchair to get around.  My decision to seek elected office is because we've never had disability representation in Denver.  I have an acquired disability.  I grew up as an able-bodied individual.  I was in a crash in 2008. The Democratic National Convention was here in Denver in 2008. I was on a bike and got hit by a car.  So, um, I went from being on three soccer teams to, uh, learning how to sit up in bed and, uh, I have a spinal cord injury.  It is a T-3, do, um, third thoracic vertebra and, uh, I now use a wheelchair to get around. I started looking around and I didn't see people with disabilities in areas of power or influence, or I couldn't find a lot of role models that I really wanted to aspire to be.  You know, as the Gandhi quote is, “Be the change you want to see in the world”.  I realized that it was important for me, if I felt like I could represent people with disabilities, then I had an obligation to do so.   Denny:   Chris talks about a few challenges he faced while trying to run for office. Chris:   You know, much of campaigning is knocking on doors and telling people, you know, sharing with people, one-on-one, your story. I can't do that because most of the homes have at least one step right before the front entrance.  In some ways that was great for me because I can't knock on any doors at all because of my wheelchair and those steps to get to the front door, but no one else could either.  Because 80% of the people I represent in central Denver live in apartments or condominium buildings, you know, secure access buildings. Campaigning is grueling for anyone.  It, it takes a lot of time.  It takes a lot of energy.  It takes, it takes a lot of focus.  And so, someone with a, you know, with a disability has to spend more time doing things and can't do things that other people can.  And so being a candidate and campaigning and making phone calls and worrying about pressure sores, some pressure ulcers. I don't have control over my bowel or bladder function like I used to, because just it's all paralyzed.  I would be at a venue, turns out that the restroom wasn't wheelchair accessible.  I mean, there were times when I would pee on myself.  In addition to having to learn how to say something compelling to someone and really get them to want to vote for me instead of anyone else, I also had the more basic thing of I'm being myself, how do I minimize that? How do I keep someone from realizing that I am embarrassing myself in a public space?   Denny:  There are people with a wide variety of disabilities serving in various positions all across the USA. The National Council of Independent Living maintains an online database of elected officials that Jacob used to find guests for today's show. A link to the database can be found on the KPFA archives page for this show. We'd like to thank today's guests, Rebecca, Liz and Chris. And thanks also to the whole Pushing Limits collective for another great year of Disability Radio. Today's interviews and script were done by Jacob Lesner Buxton, announcing and audio production by Denny Daughters. Contact us by email (all one word) PushingLimits at KPFA.org, catch us on Facebook at Pushing Limits Radio, or you can visit our website at Pushing Limits Radio.org.   Stay tuned for Talk It Out.  This is 94.1 KPFA.   Keep on Pushing Theme Song. [Keep on Pushing sung by Curtis Mayfield] The post Politicians with Disabilities – Pushing Limits – December 29, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

Listen to a powerful message of hope from Ps Erin Manners (LIFE Central Campus Pastor) along with Ps Melissa de Jong (Senior Pastor) and Rebecca So'e, as we explore the characteristics worth celebrating in the people around us. _ To find out more about LIFE, visit us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lifenz.org⁠⁠

The Connected Yoga Teacher Podcast 312: We Stand with Survivors with Rebecca Sebastian & Colin Hall   Description: We must not be afraid to speak up when we see harm taking place in the yoga world - that is part of yoga. Recently, there was recent news that Bikram Choudhury was scheduled to teach in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. If you are unaware of this, there are some resources you can use to learn more about why this is problematic and why it is upsetting many people in the yoga world.   In this episode, Shannon Crow is joined by Rebecca Sebastian and Colin Hall to discuss this recent event. They share what actions they and others in the yoga community took to put pressure on the organizers and hotel to stop the event from happening and what additional actions we can take to bring Bikram to justice.   Bikram will no longer present at the event as he was originally scheduled to but there is still more to be done to hold him accountable for his actions and the abuse he inflicted on women in his yoga classes and trainings. Tune in to find out more about what you can do and how we can collectively disrupt the sexual assault and harm that occurs in yoga spaces.   Key Takeaways: [0:00] Shannon reads a note to the survivors. [3:39] This podcast interview was recorded live with Rebecca Sebastian and Colin Hall to discuss the recent news of Bikram Choudhury teaching in Vancouver, BC, Canada. [5:14] Shannon shares some resources where you can read more about the current situation. [7:10] Shannon gives thanks to the sponsors, OfferingTree and Pelvic Health Professionals. [8:43] There has been a recent wave of effort to keep Bikram out of Canada, and it has worked but there are many more questions arising from this situation. [13:36] Colin Hall, Rebecca Sebastian, and Shannon Crow introduce themselves. [16:09] Rebecca and Colin share some resources where you can get the backstory of what happened with Bikram. [18:59] Colin started investigating who was behind bringing Bikram to Canada. [22:27] Rebecca shares some of her tips on how to make movement happen, especially when dealing with non-profits. [24:31] Shannon shares that there are survivors of abuse from Bikram who are being threatened by organizers of this event. [27:11] Is this water under the bridge? Is this something that happened and we should all move on? Colin explains why not. [29:20] Josh Cooper joins the call to share his experience in speaking directly with the GM of the hotel where the event was set to take place. [32:04] Shannon gives a shout out of thanks to sponsor, OfferingTree. [33:11 - 33:12] Rebecca has some action steps that you can take if you are in the US. [35:10] Colin explains some of the actions that he and other Canadian yoga teachers took to stop Bikram from teaching yoga in Canada and what actions you can take now. [39:45] How can we decrease sexual assault and harm caused by the power imbalance in yoga? [43:19] Shannon and Rebecca share their thoughts on why people might still be signing up for Bikram's trainings and what we can do about it. [49:18] Not everyone, even in the yoga world, is aware of Bikram and what he did. [52:05] How do we separate the yoga that we do from the people and the harm they caused? [57:42] When people get together and organize, you can get results. [60:16] Rebecca shares some resources for people who have experienced sexual assault. [61:03] Shannon shares some takeaways and upcoming events you can join.   Links: Hotline for Women Against Violence Against Women in Canada - (877) 392 7583  National Sexual Assault Hotline (USA) - 800 656 4673 Rainn.org Rebecca Sebastian on Instagram Colin Hall on Instagram Josh Cooper on Instagram Online Protestors Express Outrage in Response to Bikram Choudhury's Scheduled Classes in Canada, Article by Sarah Herrington and Renee Marie Schettler for Yoga Journal Controversial Bikram yoga founder's planned Vancouver workshops raising flags, Article by Sarah Grochowski for Vancouver Sun  Organizers say controversial Bikram Yoga event will be "rescheduled", Article by Megan Devlin for Daily Hive Navigating Narcissism with Dr. Ramani Podcast Episode: ‎Bikram Yoga and the Abuse of Power w/ Mandeep Kaur Sandhu  Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga  Benjamin Lorr Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, Netflix Documentary LA County Courthouse Department of Justice Reports Change.org petition Vancouver Board of Tourism Vancouver CBC OfferingTree User Group on Facebook Canada Yoga Sports Federation Alison Henry of Bikram Yoga Gardom Lake Shannon Crow on Instagram The Connected Yoga Teacher Facebook Group   Gratitude to our Sponsors, OfferingTree and Pelvic Health Professionals.   Quotes from this episode: "How do we stop the abuse of power that is so prevalent in the yoga world?" - Shannon   "The truth is that we will get more impact by following the money." - Rebecca   "So many people are coming into our practices with that vulnerability piece." - Rebecca   "When people get together and organize, you get results." - Colin Hall  

Looking for recipes from Gilmore Girls that you can make? I get you, and I have a solution! You're watching Rory and Lorelai eat stacks of pancakes and drink copious amounts of coffee, and suddenly, you are ravenous. Been there, done that. So what's the solution? Head over to EatingGilmore.com to whip up a recipe that will satisfy your food cravings! Larisa, the creator of EatingGilmore.com is in the process of creating a recipe for every single episode of the popular series Gilmore Girls. And why not? You know they're always eating and it makes us so hungry! In this episode, we explore our mutual love of food, cooking, cookbooks, and of course, the popular hit show Gilmore Girls. Meet the Author behind EatingGilmore Larisa is a home cook obsessed with Gilmore Girls and is cooking her way through the series one episode at a time. Each episode she chooses a dish, drink, or meal to prepare inspired by that episode then develops a recipe to share on her website. Cooking has always been something Larisa enjoyed and it truly shows in the food she creates to pair with each episode. eatinggilmore.com Making Recipes from Gilmore Girls - Rebecca's Favorites Apple Cider Ice Cream - see photo belowMac and Cheese Chocolate Milk Shakes - see photo belowCoconut Shrimp Tacos with Mango Avocado SalsaDr. Pepper BBQ Chicken Nachos (I substituted Kombucha Brew Dr., and it was still absolutely amazing!) My daughter and me toasting our perfect milk shake and episode pairing thanks to Larisa! Lorelai: We should be eating, I'm hungry! Don't they want us eating? Isn't that what the point of the Hungry Diner is, to feed the hungry diner? Or is the point of the Hungry Diner to keep the diner hungry, in which case they should call it the Eternally Hungry Diner cuz you're not gonna get any food here, loser!Rory: That would be quite a sign.Gilmore Girls While eating dinner in front of the tv isn't something experts recommend doing every night, an occasional dinner at the coffee table while watching your favorite show is a great way to bond with your family or friends. When you pair Gilmore Girls with one of Larisa's recipes, you can turn screen time into family bonding time. Apple Cider Ice Cream Recipe by Larisa and then I used my caramel sauce recipe for a delicious topping! Rory: You know, there will be food there.Lorelai: Finger food, aka snooty little balls of attitude!Rory: Oh boy.Lorelai: I need real food, peasant food, hearty bread, meat, cheese, little pickle chips, sauce, a special sauce. This is the food that sustains me, this is the food of my...Rory: Oh my God, just eat the burger already!Lorelai: How crabby!Rory: I'm not crabby.Lorelai: I didn't even get through my special sauce speech. That's crabby.Gilmore Girls Transcripts EatingGilmore [00:00:00] Rebecca: So tell me a little bit about yourself so that you know, people can get an idea of who you are from you.  [00:00:06] Larisa: Yeah. so I'm Larissa. I am the person behind the Instagram and blog called Eating Gilmore, and essentially the project is where I recreate a dish or drink of some sort that is inspired by every single episode of my favorite TV show, which is Gilmore Girls. [00:00:28] Larisa: That is so cool that you had the idea to do that, because I. It's interesting  [00:00:33] Rebecca: when you watch a TV show or sometimes even a movie, but I feel like it's more with TV shows and they're eating something. It always makes you want to eat too.  [00:00:43] Larisa: Yes, . I'm always hungry when I'm watching the show  [00:00:47] Rebecca: because they eat all the time and I got my coffee because I'm like, okay, we're gonna be talking about Rory and Lo Loli, so I know there's gonna be coffee involved , so I have to have my coffee. [00:00:58] Larisa: Perfect.  [00:00:59] Rebecca: Yeah. So obviously you loved Gilmore Girls, it's your favorite show, you said.

“Every baby, every delivery, and every birth is so different.” Rebecca's first birth was a smooth, textbook experience. Less than 12 months later, Rebecca arrived at the hospital ready to deliver her second baby girl. However, after four hours of pushing, unmedicated manual rotation, and scary heart rate readings, Rebecca knew she needed to consent to a C-section. In surgery, Rebecca was told her pelvis was too small to ever birth a baby vaginally even though she already had a prior vaginal birth! She also experienced a cervical laceration. Rebecca was left traumatized after such a drastically different birth experience. With her next baby, Rebecca fought for healing and for her TOLAC. Her third delivery was quite unlike either of the two previous deliveries. We can't wait for you to hear about her wild ride and to learn from her particularly unique experiences!Additional linksIntrapartum Cervical Lacerations PubMed ArticleThe VBAC Link Blog: Special ScarsSpecial Scars, Special Hope Facebook GroupHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull transcriptNote: All transcripts are edited to correct grammar, false starts, and filler words. Meagan: Good morning, everybody. You are listening to The VBAC Link. Today is the first episode without Julie and let me tell you, I am already missing her so much. It's going to be a little different not having this podcast with her. I was just telling our guest today how weird– I don't even know what episode number we are on right now because Julie was such the backbone. She did all of the technical, little-detail things and I am going to have to get used to that.So bear with me as I am weaning into doing all of the podcast stuff by myself. Today, we have our friend, Rebecca, and she is going to share her story. You guys, she has a special scar, or a cervical extension I should say, that ended up turning into special scar. We don't have a ton of these episodes on the podcast. They are not as common and one of the reasons why I am personally excited for her to share her story is because they are not as common but they are still possible. We really want to get the word out there to do your research and do what's comfortable for you, but know that it is possible.Something that's also a little different about her story is that it was from the cervical extension. I can't wait for her to share a little bit about this. We are going to talk about what a cervical extension even means, what that looks like, and what it could mean for future vaginal births. But of course, we have a Review of the Week. Normally I would turn the time over to Julie, but we don't have Julie, so I am going to read you a Review of the Week. Review of the WeekMeagan: Today's review is by Sarah and she said, “One month ago, I had a successful VBAC induction just 18 months after my Cesarean section. I almost called to schedule a repeat on my due date because I was so scared. I found your podcast and listened to it for two days straight. It gave me the courage to go through with induction and I am so glad I did. I'm hoping more people find this as a resource.”Oh, that's awesome. It looks like she emailed us that. We love reviews. As you know, we have Apple Podcasts. We have Spotify. We have Google play. We have just Google. You can leave us a review on Google. But just like Sarah did, you can email us a review. So if you've had a good experience or something that you would like to share with the world, please email us. Feel free and we will slot this into the review and maybe read it on the next podcast. Rebecca's StoryMeagan: Okay, Ms. Rebecca. We are so excited to have you. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to share the stories of your three kiddos, right? Do you have three?Rebecca: Yep, three girls. Meagan: Three girls! You're a girl mama. That is so awesome. And remind me, they are all pretty close like 4, 3, and 1?Rebecca: Yep. Yep, that's right. Meagan: Yes. 4, 3, and 1. That is so awesome. So you are really busy in your life.Rebecca: Yeah, just a little bit. Meagan: Yes. Oh my goodness. Are you guys planning on having more? Do you have any idea if you are wanting any more?Rebecca: I've always liked even numbers, so I'll probably have one more but we joke that each one gets spaced out further and further apart. So not anytime soon at least. Meagan: Yes. But hey, you know what? Julie had this too where all of her kids are really, really close. It might be chaotic right now when they are little, but then they are the best of friends and they are all in the same time. My sister and I are three years apart. It's still not that very far, but I love that when they are really close, you are always going to school together, you are in the same friend zones and in the same types of things. It might be chaotic when they are little but it will be so fun I bet.Rebecca: It will be worth it hopefully.Meagan: It will be so awesome. So awesome. Well, cool. Well, thank you for joining us today and I would love to turn the time over to you to tell us about these beautiful girls' births. Rebecca: Okay. Well, my first birth was very uncomplicated. Pretty much the only strange thing that happened was that my water broke at 37 weeks in the middle of the night. I was totally unprepared because everyone says that first-time moms go until 42 weeks, and so I just wasn't even in my mind thinking that was possible. But it was a great birth. It lasted about 10 hours, labor did. It was unmedicated. I didn't have any tearing and it was just kind of textbook, I guess, in that way. Then, when my daughter was about 4 months old, I started coming down with what I thought was the flu, and then I also started having some food aversions which was weird. And so I asked my doula. I was like, “Is this normal postpartum? Are my hormones regulating or what's going on?” And she was like, “Rebecca, you need to go take a pregnancy test.”Meagan: You're like, “Uhhh.”Rebecca: It was positive. I was in denial. She said she knew for a week before I did what was happening. Meagan: Oh my gosh. Rebecca: Yeah. I was just in denial. So that put their due dates within 12 months of one another. So both October and it was just a very difficult pregnancy emotionally and physically. I had to give up nursing because I'm one of those who dry up when I'm pregnant. I just felt a lot of guilt. My husband seemed to be completely unaware of how hard it was going to be where I was like, “Do you understand having two kids 12 months apart? This is going to be very hard.” Anyway, so with her, I was expecting to go into labor early. 37 weeks came, rolled around, and no baby. 38 weeks came. 39 and finally, after my due date, I went into labor which already felt like I was three weeks overdue just because my first daughter came three weeks early. It was just so mental at that point. We got to the hospital and I was already 9 centimeters so we thought this baby was coming. I pushed for four hours and she would not come out. They called in the senior midwife and she was like, “The baby is OP.” And so they were having me do all of the things. What's it called? The Walchers?Meagan: Oh yeah. That's intense. Rebecca: Oh, it was terrible. It was really painful, but they could just not get her to turn into a favorable position. They tried manually turning her and I still didn't have the epidural at that point. Finally, the midwife was wanting to call it and I said, “What are my options?” She was like, “A C-section.” I was like, “Well, how about we do an epidural and see if that relaxes me, and then see if you can try turning the baby?”At that point, I was just willing to try whatever so they agreed. They let me sleep for a few hours and then came back in. It was the middle of the night and they started manually turning. She was responding to it, but then all of a sudden, she just started having heart decels down to the thirties and they freaked out. They were like, “Okay, we are not doing that. We will let you try to push her out sunny-side up essentially.”And so I pushed and she started descending, but then her heart did the same thing down to the thirties.Meagan: Wow, that is scary. That is scary.Rebecca: Yes. It still, I mean, I've worked through it in therapy now, but yeah. Just the room, you could just tell the mood changed. They were just staring at the monitor with her heart rate. It was at that point where I was like, “Okay. We've done it. We've given it our all. This is the right call.” So they prepped me for a C-section. Overall, it wasn't terrible. They didn't strap my arms down or anything. She had descended so far down, so they had to come back through and push her back up. During that, my cervix tore.She came out screaming. My husband told me it was a girl because we don't like to find out beforehand. Then, they were taking out my placenta and I heard the midwife and the OB. They were both like, “That's weird. I've never seen anything like that.” They were just talking back and forth about something going on.Meagan: And you're listening to them. Rebecca: Yes. I know my baby's okay because I can hear her and I think I asked, “What's going on?” The midwife was like, “Oh, I'll come and show you once you're in recovery. I'll show you your placenta.” So they started stitching me back up and I'll get back to the placenta, but they started stitching me back up and the OB said– he was one of those where he's a great surgeon but he doesn't have bedside manner. He made some comment like, “Yeah, you shouldn't waste your time trying to VBAC. Your pelvis is way too small.” I got so angry. I'm on the operating table and I said, “I've already had a vaginal birth.” You could tell he was caught off guard. Obviously, you didn't read anything about me before you gave me the surgery. Meagan: And this diagnosis of, “You will never have a vaginal birth.” That happens so often! Rebecca: I know. It makes me so angry when I see that because yeah, obviously, my body has pushed out a baby. Meagan: Well, yeah. Even mine hadn't and he was like, “Your pelvis is too small.” The thing is that I easily could have believed him, right? Rebecca: Yeah.Meagan: When you're laying there, cut open, vulnerable, and you're told, “Don't ever do this. Your pelvis is too small,” you want to naturally just believe these providers. I'm not saying that these providers are ever totally wrong or anything, but they give these diagnoses and we just believe it. Rebecca: Yeah. Meagan: So it's hard.Rebecca: I mean, yeah. I don't know what he was using to make that judgment, but it was obviously wrong as we are going to see. My body had already done it, too. Meagan: Yeah. Rebecca: I think that when I said that, he tried to recover it by saying, “Well, how much did your last baby weigh?” I told him and he said, “Well, I guess your magic number is somewhere between your first baby's weight and your second baby's weight.” I was just thinking, “I don't think that's how it works.” Meagan: Uh-uh. No. Sorry, dude. Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. So yeah. He got reprimanded, I think, for that one by the midwives. It made me so angry. But anyway, in recovery, the midwives brought my placenta to show me. It was wild. She said that she had never seen anything like it. It was a bivalve placenta and there was a velamentous cord insertion in between the connecting tissue. So it was just very exposed and apparently, I had vasa previa too. Their assumption was that when my baby was turning, it was compressing the cord and causing the heart decels essentially.And so they said it could have ruptured during surgery, or sorry, if I had actually pushed her out, it could have been pretty bad. So it was really crazy. She took pictures of it and texted it to all the people. She thought it was two placentas. The OB disagreed so the jury, I guess, is still out on what it was, but I had had a lot of bleeding during the pregnancy and they had assumed a vanishing twin or something along those lines early on. They couldn't quite figure it out. It just kind of stopped. So they don't know what exactly was going on with the placenta if it was just, yep. It was crazy. But that was my second birth and it just was very traumatic. After having such a smooth, textbook first birth and feeling so empowered to have this 12 months later was just devastating. Thankfully, my doula recommended therapy. I got into a therapist and really was just able to work through that birth trauma which is one of my big recommendations to people who have unexpected C-sections is to work through your birth story. There is so much healing in that. I am now able to look back at the birth and it's not necessarily the happiest day to look back on, but I'm able to see it and not cry whenever I talk about it. Meagan: Yeah, yeah. Rebecca: Yeah. So that was my second birth, and then now leading into my third, I was determined to have a VBAC. One, to prove it to that OB who told me my pelvis was too small, but just for myself. I knew how much I loved my first birth and I just really wanted that again. After we got pregnant, in one of my first appointments, I was just chatting with the midwife and I said, “Oh yeah. The OB mentioned something about a cervical tear during the C-section. Does that affect anything?”Her face changed and she goes, “I'm going to get your OP report and read it. I'll be back in a few minutes.” She came back in and said that I had a low-lying, transverse scar, but I had a midline cervical extension. So essentially, my cervix had torn and it had torn up to where my C-section scar was, so it was in the shape of a T.Meagan: So did that cervical scar tear up into your uterus?Rebecca: Yes. Meagan: Okay.Rebecca: But not into the contracting part. Meagan: Gotcha. Rebecca: So it was still low. But it was, yeah. It was very hard for me to figure out what exactly it was because I was trying to Google all of these words like, “What does this mean?” And then they were finally able to explain it to me. It was shaped like a T essentially. And she said that she seemed very confident that I was going to risk out of having a trial of labor and I was devastated. I was really upset, but she ultimately left it up to one of the OBs in the practice to sign off on. I knew I was going to see him at my next appointment, so I just spent a ton of time researching. I was texting all of my friends that are doctors. Nobody knew what it meant. I was searching for research articles. I joined the Special Scars Facebook group trying to find some more stories. I eventually found a PubMed study that was on cervical lacerations and how they affected subsequent pregnancies. It wasn't really an apples-to-apples comparison. I was like, “You know what? These women had cervical tears and went on to have vaginal births afterward. I'm going to take this to the OB.” I was armed and ready. And then I went to the appointment and he was like, “Yeah. There's not really any data or studies on how this impacts your risk of rupture.” I told him about the study and it was weird. He was just like, “Okay, yeah. You can have a trial of labor.” And I was shocked because I was just expecting to have all this pushback. I don't know if he was more comfortable because it was lower and not in the contracting part of my uterus or if he could tell I was very determined and had done my research and was willing to take that risk, but he essentially gave the green light and then I never heard anything about it the rest of the pregnancy. So that was really exciting and I just continued. During the pregnancy, I went to the chiropractor. I ate dates. I drank red raspberry leaf tea. I was doing Spinning Babies, HypnoBirthing, and meditations. I was just trying to get in the right head space and get my body ready. And then near the end, I started psyching myself out. In one of my last appointments, I was obsessing about the baby's position because the baby wasn't– what is the ideal? It's like, LOT?Meagan: LOA. LOA, but OA. We want the baby looking down towards the mom's back so as the baby comes down on your pelvis, the neck can flex underneath the pubic bone, then they rotate and make room for the shoulders. But LOA is kind of like a great spot to start because the uterus will naturally rotate the baby away. Rebecca: Yeah. So I think the baby was ROT, where the baby typically turns posterior during labor.Meagan: Yeah. They start on that side because they rotate back, to the left, then to the front. And so if you've got a baby that's on the right but looking sideways, which is ROT, it means the baby's back is on the right side but sideways in the middle if that makes sense. I'm using my hand, but people can't see me. And then the baby rotates. But then you know, most labors have a high chance at some point of a baby going in a posterior position. Whether they stay there or not, yeah. ROT for sure. Usually, you are going to have a baby there. Rebecca: Yeah. I was paranoid, I think, from my previous birth. I said something to the midwife when she confirmed that the baby– I think it was ROT. I was just like, “I can't birth an OP baby.” She just looked at me in the eyes and was just like, “No. You couldn't vaginally birth the last one, but this is a different baby and this is a different birth. The majority of these babies turn and are going to get in the right position.” So that set me at ease. I started having prodromal labor starting around 38 weeks and then the day after my due date, I started having lower back cramping and aches. It felt like period cramps, super mild. I said to my husband, “You know, lower back pain can be an early sign of labor.” At this point, he just looked at me and was like, “What isn't an early sign of labor?” And I think if looks could kill, I was so annoyed at that point. Which, in all fairness, I had been telling him every single day for two weeks that I thought I was in early labor and it was all just prodromal labor. Meagan: Hey, you were still having laboring signs and prodromal labor is still labor. It's just not progressive labor. Rebecca: Right, exactly. So I didn't appreciate his smart-alec remark. But I did try timing them. There was no peak. They just fizzled out. That evening, I lost my mucus plug again. I told my husband and my mother-in-law, “I think tonight might be the night.” But I didn't want to jinx it, so I didn't send my older kids home with her because I had done that the last time and I had to do the walk of shame where she had to bring our kid back to us because I didn't go into labor. So I was like, “Okay. We are just going to go to bed.”I went to bed at 10:30 that night downstairs in our guest bedroom because the struggle was real with the pillows, getting comfortable, and that whole third-trimester routine. One hour later, after I had gone to sleep, I woke up to a contraction. I stood up and immediately heard a pop and my water broke. I went to the bathroom to check the color and make sure it was clear, and the contractions were coming. This was real. And so I just knew that we needed to leave for the hospital as soon as possible. The problem was that my husband was upstairs asleep and I literally could not walk past our kitchen. In our kitchen, I fell down to my hands and knees. I thought I was screaming his name, but he told me later that I was just actually whisper-screaming and he doesn't even know how he woke up. He heard a weird noise and apparently I was whispering, but it was weird. He came downstairs and in my mind, I'm on my kitchen floor and I'm like, “I'm totally getting the epidural. I have nothing left to prove. I'm getting that epidural as soon as we get there,” which, hindsight is 20/20. I was obviously in transition at this point, but he called his sister. Thankfully, she only lived two streets away so she was at our house in five minutes. I told him, “You need to call the on-call midwife and let them know we're coming.” He hadn't packed a bag yet. He did not have a hospital bag packed. He's like, “I can't call.” So he put it on speaker phone, dialed it, and set it down on the floor while I'm on my hands and knees working through contractions and he was running around packing a bag. So the midwife, she's like, “How far apart are your contractions?” And I'm just like, “They're back to back. They're double peaking. I can't get off the floor.” And she's like, “Okay. You need to come in soon.” “That's the plan. We're heading in soon.” So somehow, they get me to the car and before we get to the car, I told my husband, I'm like, “Hey, grab one of those puppy pads that we never used in the closet,” because we had just gotten a new car two months before and obviously, my water was leaking. So I was in the back seat riding on my knees holding the back of the headrest and we get in the car. We start driving and all of a sudden, my contractions started spacing out again. I was like, “Oh, this is so nice. I'm getting a break finally,” which, once again, hindsight is 20/20. Contractions start typically spacing out right when you're supposed to start pushing. We're halfway to the hospital and my body just starts bearing down. We're in the car and I'm like, “Oh my gosh. I'm pushing and we're in a car.” My husband was like, “Do I need to pull over?” But at this point, we're on a bridge. We drove from Louisville over to Indiana to give birth. We're on the bridge over the Ohio River in between the two states and I was like, “No. You cannot pull over right now.” I said, “You need to call the hospital and tell them to be waiting for us. This is an emergency situation.” Meagan: I might have a baby on the side of the road.Rebecca: Yeah. At that point, I'm like, “There's no way by the time an ambulance gets there.” Meagan: Oh yeah. No, it was probably best to just keep going. Rebecca: It was just like, “Keep going.”Meagan: Yeah. Rebecca: He calls the hospital and it's this lady. She's like, “Sure. Just come in and you can go up to labor and delivery.” He's like, “No. You don't understand. My wife is having a baby,” and she's just giving him the runaround. I was like, “Tell her that I'm a third-time mom and I'm pushing.” He told her that and she was like, “One moment,” and immediately transferred him to the emergency room department. They said they would be waiting for us and we were like, “Okay good. That's what we like to hear.” We were almost there. My body's bearing down. I pulled down my pants and stick my hand down to make sure I don't feel a head because I am pushing hard. Actually, I pooped in the car and it landed on the puppy pad thankfully. Meagan: Hey!Rebecca: I was mortified. Well, I think I was more– it's so silly. I was like, “It's a new car and I just pooped in our new car!” But you know. Meagan: But we all know that pooping is a sure sign that a baby is coming, so it's not like it was a bad thing. Rebecca: No. I just, you know. It would have been nice to–Meagan: What did your husband say about that?Rebecca: Later, he actually left the hospital to go clean out the car a couple of hours after. Meagan: “I'm going to go clean that up.”Rebecca: Yeah. You would not want that sitting in the car. But he said it wasn't bad because it all was on the puppy pad. Meagan: So you just fold it up and put it in the garbage. Rebecca: Yeah, it wasn't bad. So that's my tip for all you listeners. Have a puppy pad in your car just in case. Meagan: Yes. Puppy pad and a bag or something for vomit. No matter how far along you are in labor, something to do that because you never know. Sorry, my dog's toy is squeaking in the background. You never know when you are going to poop or puke. Rebecca: Yep, very fair. I definitely puked in my first labor. So anyway, we get to the hospital and they're waiting. I can see the team outside. They come up to the door on the side that I'm on. She checks to make sure that there's not a head and she's like, “You defecated, but that is normal.” She's trying to reassure me. I'm like, “I know it's normal to poop. It's okay.”They're trying to convince me to get on the gurney and I'm like, “I'm not laying down on that. I will crawl onto my hands and knees.” This entire time, I pretty much have not been off of my hands and knees. So they get a sheet and cover me because my pants were off at this point and they wheel me up to labor and delivery on this gurney with me on my hands and knees. They get up. I have my eyes closed the whole time. They get up to labor and delivery and somebody whispers in my ear and says, “Hey Rebecca, this is Sarah. You're going to be okay.” It was my favorite nurse who was there with my traumatic birth and stayed the entire time. She was actually a student midwife too, so I was just immediately put at ease. They get me up. They know they're not going to be able to COVID test me so they put me in the COVID positive room because they're obviously not going to stick a Q-tip up my nose at this point. The ER people just had no idea what to do. They were like, “Do we need to run a line? Should we run an IV?” Sarah, the nurse, was just like, “There's no time for that. You're not running an IV on her right now.” They're trying to convince me to get over into the labor and delivery bed, but I don't want to move. They're like, “We promise you that it's much more comfortable than the gurney. Please.” So they finally scoot them side by side and I crawl over. I stay on my hands and knees and they get the monitors on me. She checks me and she's like, “Oh yeah. You're complete.” I was like, “What station is the baby?” She just laughs because, in my head, I was complete with my last pregnancy and still pushed for four hours, but she goes, “The baby's right there. You're +3. This baby's coming.” In the background, I can just hear that they're on the phone. There are no midwives on the premises and there's no OB. They're kind of panicking because the first call midwife is over across the street with a birth center patient and so she can't leave, so then they had one driving from 20 minutes away, and then the OB that I do not like from my C-section, they called him and he was on his way. He was not the person that I wanted to see either. But everybody's like 20 minutes away. I said, “I have to push.” And she's like, “Okay, you're fine. You can push.” I literally pushed. Baby came out in that first push fully. No head molding or anything and I just lay down. I was so exhausted. Then I turned around. They handed her to me and told me it was a girl, which, I was shocked because I thought it was going to be a boy. It was such a different pregnancy. So yeah. The nurse ended up catching her. I think it was 15 minutes after we got to the hospital. She was born at 12:26 a.m. and I had woken up to that first contraction at 11:30 p.m. Meagan: Oh!Rebecca: So it was pretty much exactly an hour and it was just wild. Meagan: Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Rebecca: I could not believe it. So yeah. That's the story. It was just a whirlwind. Meagan: Yeah, yeah!Rebecca: Yeah. I'm kind of scared to have another kid honestly because I'm like, “What happens if you don't get to the hospital?”Meagan: I know. Well, I mean, it happens and people usually call EMTs and things like that, but yeah. You might have to plan first sign of anything maybe going. I don't know. It's totally what you want more.Rebecca: Yeah.Meagan: Another thing, too, is sometimes with a history of pretty solid prodromal labor, as a doula, if I have a client that has had a week of prodromal labor, in my mind, I kind of anticipate potentially a precipitous birth. It doesn't always happen. It doesn't always happen, but especially for a mom that has had a baby before and her cervix has dilated and effaced and everything, prodromal labor can sometimes be a sign that labor could, not always, but could go quickly.Rebecca: Well, I think I remember reading that, or what I at least told myself was that every contraction I had then in the moment was, “This is one less that I'll have later.”Meagan: Yeah. Rebecca: I don't know how accurate that is but it seemed true at least in my case that I had very few, yeah. I mean, it was just so fast but it was interesting. My body, looking back, did not get off of my hands and knees. I delivered on my hands and knees. I think the baby was turning. That's what my body knew because it felt crazy in my body. I don't know. I felt like she was banging around. I don't know if that's right. She was obviously rotating or something but my body knew that this was the position I needed to be in and I did not get out of it for anyone. That was it. Hands and knees, the whole time.Meagan: Intuitive. Your body was intuitively going into that position which I think is amazing. I think it's amazing that our bodies can communicate to us that way where you get into a position and you're like, “Nope. This is not working,” and then you get in a position and you're like, “I'm not leaving. This is where I'm staying.”Yeah. That is so awesome though. I love that your provider– I love that one, you did research and you spoke with your provider and were able to have that conversation of, “Okay, yeah.” And then I also love, this is not in regards to the laceration, but I also love when your baby was in a less ideal– as what the world says is less than ideal– not LOA but ROT, she's like, “Yeah. You're baby's going to rotate. It's going to be fine.”Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah.Meagan: You kind of needed that. Rebecca: Oh yeah. I think mentally, I had hit a wall even though the whole time I had been listening to affirmations and getting in the right headspace, but then right there at the end, it was suddenly just this mental game of, “Can I do this? I don't know if I can do this.” I was so thankful because I feel like it really put me over that hump for sure. Meagan: Yeah, for sure. Well, awesome. Well, if you guys do end up having more children, hopefully, you make it to the hospital or wherever you decide to birth. Hopefully, it goes well. Rebecca: Well, yeah. Somebody suggested a home birth and I'm like, “A home birth midwife would not have gotten there in time and my husband would have been catching that baby.”Meagan: Yeah. That happened to a friend of mine who had the same thing. It was very precipitous. The midwife was not even that far, but she also said, “I probably waited too long to tell her to come.” She was in denial. She was like, “I just don't. I don't really know. I'm okay. I'm doing okay.” And then it shifted so fast and I'm like, “Yeah. You probably should have called her.” She even said that. She was like, “Yeah, I probably should have called her sooner.” Her husband caught the baby.Rebecca: Oh wow. Meagan: The midwife was there to catch the placenta. Rebecca: See? Yeah. That's essentially, I think, what happened. The midwife got there in time for me to deliver the placenta at the hospital at least. But yeah. Yep. Nobody was there for the actual baby. Meagan: Nobody was there, yep. And that happens. That happens. Sometimes these babies– and like you said, there was no shaping of the head. Baby dropped, rotated, and came out. Rebecca: Yep.Meagan: Yep. Your body did some awesome work. I love that. So with your cervical laceration, obviously, it didn't necessarily stop you from dilating. Rebecca: No, not at all. Meagan: There wasn't any scar tissue or anything like that. Have you, in your research, found that sometimes where there are lacerations to the cervix, it can delay dilation or cause issues with dilating? Rebecca: Well, yeah. There was an article also on cervical scar tissue. I was concerned about that. I remember bringing it up to my midwives and they're like, “We won't really know until you're in labor if you have a lot of scar tissue and if you do, we might try to just break it up or your body will eventually.” They said, “A lot of times, there's a big jump in dilation.” So you're showing all of the signs that you're not very dilated and then all of a sudden, you jump from a 3 to an 8 and that scar tissue breaks up essentially.So I mean, I guess presumably there could have been scar tissue and it was just–Meagan: It just broke on its own.Rebecca: It broke open an hour before the baby was born. I don't really know but there wasn't any by the time I got to the hospital that was causing issues.Meagan: Which is great, yeah. Have you had any problems monthly with pain or anything like that?Rebecca: No. I need to probably go back to a physical pelvic floor therapist. I did go with my third pregnancy because halfway through, I started feeling some pressure and whatnot. It was really helpful, so I'm all about that soapbox too about pelvic floor therapy. Meagan: Oh, I know. Rebecca: I have not prioritized it but I was telling a friend the other day, I'm like, “I don't think things are back to normal after that really fast labor and pushing.” Thankfully, I only had a first-degree superficial tear that they didn't stitch, but it's still after three pregnancies. Things are feeling not painful, it's just that I feel like some therapy could be helpful for me maybe. Meagan: Yeah, for sure. We're going to be recording another episode with a pelvic floor specialist here in the next couple of weeks. Rebecca: Awesome. Meagan: Yeah, stay tuned everybody for that because it's going to be really great. She has a lot of really, really, really great info on that. She has, oh my gosh, so many amazing things just on her Instagram. So that will be good. But you know, I think that vaginal or non-vaginal, pelvic floor stuff is really good to do to just tune in, learn how to strengthen and release, and all of that jazz down there. So yeah. I mean, I've only had one vaginal birth with two C-sections and I feel like I probably need some more pelvic floor love. I've gone, but I probably need more too. Well, that's awesome. So I was trying to find the PubMed article that you were referencing. Do you know the title of it? Is it the Intrapartum cervical lacerations? Rebecca: Yes. It's that one. Meagan: Okay. That's the one I found. Perfect. Yeah. They did quite a significant study. There were just over 81,000 deliveries in this study and it said that 131 or .16% were complicated by cervical lacerations. It doesn't happen a lot, but it happens. It says that a lot of the time they get cervical cerclages, so I was wondering if anyone ever talked to you about cervical cerclage.Rebecca: Nope, they never mentioned it. Meagan: That's awesome. Yeah. I have a friend that has a cervical cerclage. When she gets pregnant, she starts dilating really, really, really early. Like, really early. Like, 18 weeks. So they had to do a cerclage. But anyway, it says, “Regression and cervical cerclage precipitous labor.”Rebecca: Really? I totally didn't even know that. Meagan: Oh, so I saw precipitous labor and I thought, “Oh, that's really interesting.” But I think that's probably because it happens so fast and baby just comes out really, really fast, but you had precipitous labor the second time and didn't have any further complications so that's really awesome.Rebecca: Yeah, yeah. Meagan: So anyway, I'm going to link this article to the show notes and you can check it out if you guys want to learn more about cervical lacerations and how they could impact future vaginal deliveries. But yeah, I mean, it still looks like many people go on and have uncomplicated vaginal deliveries. Rebecca: Right. The way it was explained to me is that it could happen a lot more than they realize where they knew because of the C-section, but you could tear your cervix during birth and if you're not hemorrhaging or bleeding a lot, then they might not even catch it. It might just heal on its own. That could lead to scar tissue so I am curious if it is more common and we just have no idea. Meagan: Right. And that's another thing, even talking about uterine rupture, right? There are different types of uterine rupture. There's dehiscence and stuff and yeah, obviously, with uterine rupture we usually know, but there are probably many times that people have dehiscences where it's really thin or windows. We see windows but we see them because you are cut open and you see the uterus. But if you don't have a C-section, we could still have windows, but we don't see them so we might have more uterine windows than we know but we are just not seeing them. So yeah. It's interesting that if things aren't coming forth in concern or bleeding and things like that, then we may not ever know. Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. Meagan: But yeah. In this conclusion, it says, “Intrapartum cervical lacerations do not appear to affect the outcome of subsequent pregnancies.” So that's pretty awesome. And obviously, it went up a little bit. We are going to link the Special Scars Group. We'll do our Special Scars Blog, and then I'm also going to link this PubMed article in the show notes. So if you guys want to go check that out, click on the show notes below and have fun reading. Well, it was wonderful to have you and hear your beautiful stories. I mean, they are all so different in so many ways. It's really crazy to think about how you're the same person, but you've had three very different deliveries. I think that is birth and that's how it can always be. I think especially when we are going into a VBAC, it's important for us to remember that just because one birth was one way doesn't mean it's going to be the next birth. That's not going to be our story for every birth because I know it's easy to do. We know what we know. We know what we've lived through and even you said, yeah. It's easy to reflect back or maybe be triggered and things, but just know that every delivery is different even though you are the same person. Every baby, every delivery, and every birth is so different. Try to remember that as you are going through things. There may be similarities, but it doesn't mean it's the same. Rebecca: Right, absolutely. Meagan: Yes. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I can't wait for the world to hear you. Rebecca: Well, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Julie and Meagan's bios, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

About Ben KehoeBen Kehoe is a Cloud Robotics Research Scientist at iRobot and an AWS Serverless Hero. As a serverless practitioner, Ben focuses on enabling rapid, secure-by-design development of business value by using managed services and ephemeral compute (like FaaS). Ben also seeks to amplify voices from dev, ops, and security to help the community shape the evolution of serverless and event-driven designs.Twitter: @ben11kehoeMedium: ben11kehoeGitHub: benkehoeLinkedIn: ben11kehoeiRobot: www.irobot.comWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/B0QChfAGvB0 This episode is sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo.TranscriptJeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly.Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Marshburn.Jeremy: And this is Serverless Chats. And this is a momentous occasion on Serverless Chats because we are welcoming in Rebecca Marshburn as an official co-host of Serverless Chats.Rebecca: I'm pretty excited to be here. Thanks so much, Jeremy.Jeremy: So for those of you that have been listening for hopefully a long time, and we've done over 100 episodes. And I don't know, Rebecca, do I look tired? I feel tired.Rebecca: I've never seen you look tired.Jeremy: Okay. Well, I feel tired because we've done a lot of these episodes and we've published a new episode every single week for the last 107 weeks, I think at this point. And so what we're going to do is with you coming on as a new co-host, we're going to take a break over the summer. We're going to revamp. We're going to do some work. We're going to put together some great content. And then we're going to come back on, I think it's August 30th with a new episode and a whole new show. Again, it's going to be about serverless, but what we're thinking is ... And, Rebecca, I would love to hear your thoughts on this as I come at things from a very technical angle, because I'm an overly technical person, but there's so much more to serverless. There's so many other sides to it that I think that bringing in more perspectives and really being able to interview these guests and have a different perspective I think is going to be really helpful. I don't know what your thoughts are on that.Rebecca: Yeah. I love the tech side of things. I am not as deep in the technicalities of tech and I come at it I think from a way of loving the stories behind how people got there and perhaps who they worked with to get there, the ideas of collaboration and community because nothing happens in a vacuum and there's so much stuff happening and sharing knowledge and education and uplifting each other. And so I'm super excited to be here and super excited that one of the first episodes I get to work on with you is with Ben Kehoe because he's all about both the technicalities of tech, and also it's actually on his Twitter, a new compassionate tech values around humility, and inclusion, and cooperation, and learning, and being a mentor. So couldn't have a better guest to join you in the Serverless Chats community and being here for this.Jeremy: I totally agree. And I am looking forward to this. I'm excited. I do want the listeners to know we are testing in production, right? So we haven't run any unit tests, no integration tests. I mean, this is straight test in production.Rebecca: That's the best practice, right? Total best practice to test in production.Jeremy: Best practice. Right. Exactly.Rebecca: Straight to production, always test in production.Jeremy: Push code to the cloud. Here we go.Rebecca: Right away.Jeremy: Right. So if it's a little bit choppy, we'd love your feedback though. The listeners can be our observability tool and give us some feedback and we can ... And hopefully continue to make the show better. So speaking of Ben Kehoe, for those of you who don't know Ben Kehoe, I'm going to let him introduce himself, but I have always been a big fan of his. He was very, very early in the serverless space. I read all his blogs very early on. He was an early AWS Serverless Hero. So joining us today is Ben Kehoe. He is a cloud robotics research scientist at iRobot, as I said, an AWS Serverless Hero. Ben, welcome to the show.Ben: Thanks for having me. And I'm excited to be a guinea pig for this new exciting format.Rebecca: So many observability tools watching you be a guinea pig too. There's lots of layers to this.Jeremy: Amazing. All right. So Ben, why don't you tell the listeners for those that don't know you a little bit about yourself and what you do with serverless?Ben: Yeah. So I mean, as with all software, software is people, right? It's like Soylent Green. And so I'm really excited for this format being about the greater things that technology really involves in how we create it and set it up. And serverless is about removing the things that don't matter so that you can focus on the things that do matter.Jeremy: Right.Ben: So I've been interested in that since I learned about it. And at the time saw that I could build things without running servers, without needing to deal with the scaling of stuff. I've been working on that at iRobot for over five years now. As you said early on in serverless at the first serverless con organized by A Cloud Guru, now plural sites.Jeremy: Right.Ben: And yeah. And it's been really exciting to see it grow into the large-scale community that it is today and all of the ways in which community are built like this podcast.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. I love everything that you've done. I love the analogies you've used. I mean, you've always gone down this road of how do you explain serverless in a way to show really the adoption of it and how people can take that on. Serverless is a ladder. Some of these other things that you would ... I guess the analogies you use were always great and always helped me. And of course, I don't think we've ever really come to a good definition of serverless, but we're not talking about that today. But ...Ben: There isn't one.Jeremy: There isn't one, which is also a really good point. So yeah. So welcome to the show. And again, like I said, testing in production here. So, Rebecca, jump in when you have questions and we'll beat up Ben from both sides on this, but, really ...Rebecca: We're going to have Ben from both sides.Jeremy: There you go. We'll embrace him from both sides. There you go.Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah.Jeremy: So one of the things though that, Ben, you have also been very outspoken on which I absolutely love, because I'm in very much closely aligned on this topic here. But is about infrastructure as code. And so let's start just quickly. I mean, I think a lot of people know or I think people working in the cloud know what infrastructure as code is, but I also think there's a lot of people who don't. So let's just take a quick second, explain what infrastructure as code is and what we mean by that.Ben: Sure. To my mind, infrastructure as code is about having a definition of the state of your infrastructure that you want to see in the cloud. So rather than using operations directly to modify that state, you have a unified definition of some kind. I actually think infrastructure is now the wrong word with serverless. It used to be with servers, you could manage your fleet of servers separate from the software that you were deploying onto the servers. And so infrastructure being the structure below made sense. But now as your code is intimately entwined in the rest of your resources, I tend to think of resource graph definitions rather than infrastructure as code. It's a less convenient term, but I think it's worth understanding the distinction or the difference in perspective.Jeremy: Yeah. No, and I totally get that. I mean, I remember even early days of cloud when we were using the Chefs and the Puppets and things like that, that we were just deploying the actual infrastructure itself. And sometimes you deploy software as part of that, but it was supporting software. It was the stuff that ran in the runtime and some of those and some configurations, but yeah, but the application code that was a whole separate process, and now with serverless, it seems like you're deploying all those things at the same time.Ben: Yeah. There's no way to pick it apart.Jeremy: Right. Right.Rebecca: Ben, there's something that I've always really admired about you and that is how strongly you hold your opinions. You're fervent about them, but it's also because they're based on this thorough nature of investigation and debate and challenging different people and yourself to think about things in different ways. And I know that the rest of this episode is going to be full with a lot of opinions. And so before we even get there, I'm curious if you can share a little bit about how you end up arriving at these, right? And holding them so steady.Ben: It's a good question. Well, I hope that I'm not inflexible in these strong opinions that I hold. I mean, it's one of those strong opinions loosely held kind of things that new information can change how you think about things. But I do try and do as much thinking as possible so that there's less new information that I have to encounter to change an opinion.Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah.Ben: Yeah. I think I tend to try and think about how people ... But again, because it's always people. How people interact with the technology, how people behave, how organizations behave, and then how technology fits into that. Because sometimes we talk about technology in a vacuum and it's really not. Technology that works for one context doesn't work for another. I mean, a lot of my strong opinions are that there is no one right answer kind of a thing, or here's a framework for understanding how to think about this stuff. And then how that fits into a given person is just finding where they are in that more general space. Does that make sense? So it's less about finding out here's the one way to do things and more about finding what are the different options, how do you think about the different options that are out there.Rebecca: Yeah, totally makes sense. And I do want to compliment you. I do feel like you are very good at inviting new information in if people have it and then you're like, "Aha, I've already thought of that."Ben: I hope so. Yeah. I was going to say, there's always a balance between trying to think ahead so that when you discover something you're like, "Oh, that fits into what I thought." And the danger of that being that you're twisting the information to fit into your preexisting structures. I hope that I find a good balance there, but I don't have a principle way of determining that balance or knowing where you are in that it's good versus it's dangerous kind of spectrum.Jeremy: Right. So one of the opinions that you hold that I tend to agree with, I have some thoughts about some of the benefits, but I also really agree with the other piece of it. And this really has to do with the CDK and this idea of using CloudFormation or any sort of DSL, maybe Terraform, things like that, something that is more domain-specific, right? Or I guess declarative, right? As opposed to something that is imperative like the CDK. So just to get everybody on the same page here, what is the top reasons why you believe, or you think that DSL approach is better than that iterative approach or interpretive approach, I guess?Ben: Yeah. So I think we get caught up in the imperative versus declarative part of it. I do think that declarative has benefits that can be there, but the way that I think about it is with the CDK and infrastructure as code in general, I'm like mildly against imperative definitions of resources. And we can get into that part, but that's not my smallest objection to the CDK. I'm moderately against not being able to enforce deterministic builds. And the CDK program can do anything. Can use a random number generator and go out to the internet to go ask a question, right? It can do anything in that program and that means that you have no guarantees that what's coming out of it you're going to be able to repeat.So even if you check the source code in, you may not be able to go back to the same infrastructure that you had before. And you can if you're disciplined about it, but I like tools that help give you guardrails so that you don't have to be as disciplined. So that's my moderately against. My strongly against piece is I'm strongly against developer intent remaining client side. And this is not an inherent flaw in the CDK, is a choice that the CDK team has made to turn organizational dysfunction in AWS into ownership for their customers. And I don't think that's a good approach to take, but that's also fixable.So I think if we want to start with the imperative versus declarative thing, right? When I think about the developers expressing an intent, and I want that intent to flow entirely into the cloud so that developers can understand what's deployed in the cloud in terms of the things that they've written. The CDK takes this approach of flattening it down, flattening the richness of the program the developer has written into ... They think of it as assembly language. I think that is a misinterpretation of what's happening. The assembly language in the process is the imperative plan generated inside the CloudFormation engine that says, "Here's how I'm going to take this definition and turn it into an actual change in the cloud.Jeremy: Right.Ben: They're just translating between two definition formats in CDK scene. But it's a flattening process, it's a lossy process. So then when the developer goes to the Console or the API has to go say, "What's deployed here? What's going wrong? What do I need to fix?" None of it is framed in terms of the things that they wrote in their original language.Jeremy: Right.Ben: And I think that's the biggest problem, right? So drift detection is an important thing, right? What happened when someone went in through the Console? Went and tweaked some stuff to fix something, and now it's different from the definition that's in your source repository. And in CloudFormation, it can tell you that. But what I would want if I was running CDK is that it should produce another CDK program that represents the current state of the cloud with a meaningful file-level diff with my original program.Jeremy: Right. I'm just thinking this through, if I deploy something to CDK and I've got all these loops and they're generating functions and they're using some naming and all this kind of stuff, whatever, now it produces this output. And again, my naming of my functions might be some function that gets called to generate the names of the function. And so now I've got all of these functions named and I have to go in. There's no one-to-one map like you said, and I can imagine somebody who's not familiar with CloudFormation which is ultimately what CDK synthesizes and produces, if you're not familiar with what that output is and how that maps back to the constructs that you created, I can see that as being really difficult, especially for younger developers or developers who are just getting started in that.Ben: And the CDK really takes the attitude that it's going to hide those things from those developers rather than help them learn it. And so when they do have to dive into that, the CDK refers to it as an escape hatch.Jeremy: Yeah.Ben: And I think of escape hatches on submarines, where you go from being warm and dry and having air to breathe to being hundreds of feet below the sea, right? It's not the sort of thing you want to go through. Whereas some tools like Amplify talk about graduation. In Amplify they aim to help you understand the things that Amplify is doing for you, such that when you grow beyond what Amplify can provide you, you have the tools to do that, to take the thing that you built and then say, "Okay, I know enough now that I understand this and can add onto it in ways that Amplify can't help with."Jeremy: Right.Ben: Now, how successful they are in doing that is a separate question I think, but the attitude is there to say, "We're looking to help developers understand these things." Now the CDK could also if the CDK was a managed service, right? Would not need developers to understand those things. If you could take your program directly to the cloud and say, "Here's my program, go make this real." And when it made it real, you could interact with the cloud in an understanding where you could list your deployed constructs, right? That you can understand the program that you wrote when you're looking at the resources that are deployed all together in the cloud everywhere. That would be a thing where you don't need to learn CloudFormation.Jeremy: Right.Ben: Right? That's where you then end up in the imperative versus declarative part where, okay, there's some reasons that I think declarative is better. But the major thing is that disconnect that's currently built into the way that CDK works. And the reason that they're doing that is because CloudFormation is not moving fast enough, which is not always on the CloudFormation team. It's often on the service teams that aren't building the resources fast enough. And that's AWS's problem, AWS as an entire company, as an organization. And this one team is saying, "Well, we can fix that by doing all this client side."What that means is that the customers are then responsible for all the things that are happening on the client side. The reason that they can go fast is because the CDK team doesn't have ownership of it, which just means the ownership is being pushed on customers, right? The CDK deploys Lambda functions into your account that they don't tell you about that you're now responsible for. Right? Both the security and operations of. If there are security updates that the CDK team has to push out, you have to take action to update those things, right? That's ownership that's being pushed onto the customer to fix a lack of ACM certificate management, right?Jeremy: Right. Right.Ben: That is ACM not building the thing that's needed. And so AWS says, "Okay, great. We'll just make that the customer's problem."Jeremy: Right.Ben: And I don't agree with that approach.Rebecca: So I'm sure as an AWS Hero you certainly have pretty good, strong, open communication channels with a lot of different team members across teams. And I certainly know that they're listening to you and are at least hearing you, I should say, and watching you and they know how you feel about this. And so I'm curious how some of those conversations have gone. And some teams as compared to others at AWS are really, really good about opening their roadmap or at least saying, "Hey, we hear this, and here's our path to a solution or a success." And I'm curious if there's any light you can shed on whether or not those conversations have been fruitful in terms of actually being able to get somewhere in terms of customer and AWS terms, right? Customer obsession first.Ben: Yeah. Well, customer obsession can mean two things, right? Customer obsession can mean giving the customer what they want or it can mean giving the customer what they need and different AWS teams' approach fall differently on that scale. The reason that many of those things are not available in CloudFormation is that those teams are ... It could be under-resourced. They could have a larger majority of customer that want new features rather than infrastructure as code support. Because as much as we all like infrastructure as code, there are many, many organizations out there that are not there yet. And with the CDK in particular, I'm a relatively lone voice out there saying, "I don't think this ownership that's being pushed onto the customer is a good thing." And there are lots of developers who are eating up CDK saying, "I don't care."That's not something that's in their worry. And because the CDK has been enormously successful, right? It's fixing these problems that exists. And I don't begrudge them trying to fix those problems. I think it's a question of do those developers who are grabbing onto those things and taking them understand the full total cost of ownership that the CDK is bringing with it. And if they don't understand it, I think AWS has a responsibility to understand it and work with it to help those customers either understand it and deal with it, right? Which is where the CDK takes this approach, "Well, if you do get Ops, it's all fine." And that's somewhat true, but also many developers who can use the CDK do not control their CI/CD process. So there's all sorts of ways in which ... Yeah, so I think every team is trying to do the best that they can, right?They're all working hard and they all have ... Are pulled in many different directions by customers. And most of them are making, I think, the right choices given their incentives, right? Given what their customers are asking for. I think not all of them balance where customers ... meeting customers where they are versus leading them where they should, like where they need to go as well as I would like. But I think ... I had a conclusion to that. Oh, but I think that's always a debate as to where that balance is. And then the other thing when I talk about the CDK, that my ideal audience there is less AWS itself and more AWS customers ...Rebecca: Sure.Ben: ... to understand what they're getting into and therefore to demand better of AWS. Which is in general, I think, the approach that I take with AWS, is complaining about AWS in public, because I do have the ability to go to teams and say, "Hey, I want this thing," right? There are plenty of teams where I could just email them and say, "Hey, this feature could be nice", but I put it on Twitter because other people can see that and say, "Oh, that's something that I want or I don't think that's helpful," right? "I don't care about that," or, "I think it's the wrong thing to ask for," right? All of those things are better when it's not just me saying I think this is a good thing for AWS, but it being a conversation among the community differently.Rebecca: Yeah. I think in the spirit too of trying to publicize types of what might be best next for customers, you said total cost of ownership. Even though it might seem silly to ask this, I think oftentimes we say the words total cost of ownership, but there's actually many dimensions to total cost of ownership or TCO, right? And so I think it would be great if you could enumerate what you think of as total cost of ownership, because there might be dimensions along that matrices, matrix, that people haven't considered when they're actually thinking about total cost of ownership. They're like, "Yeah, yeah, I got it. Some Ops and some security stuff I have to do and some patches," but they might only be thinking of five dimensions when you're like, "Actually the framework is probably 10 to 12 to 14." And so if you could outline that a bit, what you mean when you think of a holistic total cost of ownership, I think that could be super helpful.Ben: I'm bad at enumeration. So I would miss out on dimensions that are obvious if I was attempting to do that. But I think a way that I can, I think effectively answer that question is to talk about some of the ways in which we misunderstand TCO. So I think it's important when working in an organization to think about the organization as a whole, not just your perspective and that your team's perspective in it. And so when you're working for the lowest TCO it's not what's the lowest cost of ownership for my team if that's pushing a larger burden onto another team. Now if it's reducing the burden on your team and only increasing the burden on another team a little bit, that can be a lower total cost of ownership overall. But it's also something that then feeds into things like political capital, right?Is that increased ownership that you're handing to that team something that they're going to be happy with, something that's not going to cause other problems down the line, right? Those are the sorts of things that fit into that calculus because it's not just about what ... Moving away from that topic for a second. I think about when we talk about how does this increase our velocity, right? There's the piece of, "Okay, well, if I can deploy to production faster, right? My feedback loop is faster and I can move faster." Right? But the other part of that equation is how many different threads can you be operating on and how long are those threads in time? So when you're trying to ship a feature, if you can ship it and then never look at it again, that means you have increased bandwidth in the future to take on other features to develop other new features.And so even if you think about, "It's going to take me longer to finish this particular feature," but then there's no maintenance for that feature, that can be a lower cost of ownership in time than, "I can ship it 50% faster, but then I'm going to periodically have to revisit it and that's going to disrupt my ability to ship other things," right? So this is where I had conversations recently about increasing use of Step Functions, right? And being able to replace Lambda functions with Step Functions express workflows because you never have to go back to those Lambdas and update dependencies in them because dependent bot has told you that you need to or a version of Python is getting deprecated, right? All of those things, just if you have your Amazon States Language however it's been defined, right?Once it's in there, you never have to touch it again if nothing else changes and that means, okay, great, that piece is now out of your work stream forever unless it needs to change. And that means that you have more bandwidth for future things, which serverless is about in general, right? Of say, "Okay, I don't have to deal with this scaling problems here. So those scaling things. Once I have an auto-scaling group, I don't have to go back and tweak it later." And so the same thing happens at the feature level if you build it in ways that allow you to do that. And so I think that's one of the places where when we focus on, okay, how fast is this getting me into production, it's okay, but how often do you have to revisit it ...Jeremy: Right. And so ... So you mentioned a couple of things in there, and not only in that question, but in the previous questions as you were talking about the CDK in general, and I am 100% behind you on this idea of deterministic builds because I want to know exactly what's being deployed. I want to be able to audit that and map that back. And you can audit, I mean, you could run CDK synth and then audit the CloudFormation and test against certain things. But if you are changing stuff, right? Then you have to understand not only the CDK but also the CloudFormation that it actually generates. But in terms of solving problems, some of the things that the CDK does really, really well, and this is something where I've always had this issue with just trying to use raw CloudFormation or Serverless Framework or SAM or any of these things is the fact that there's a lot of boilerplate that you often have to do.There's ways that companies want to do something specifically. I basically probably always need 1,400 lines of CloudFormation. And for every project I do, it's probably close to the same, and then add a little bit more to actually make it adaptive for my product. And so one thing that I love about the CDK is constructs. And I love this idea of being able to package these best practices for your company or these compliance requirements, excuse me, compliance requirements for your company, whatever it is, be able to package these and just hand them to developers. And so I'm just curious on your thoughts on that because that seems like a really good move in the right direction, but without the deterministic builds, without some of these other problems that you talked about, is there another solution to that that would be more declarative?Ben: Yeah. In theory, if the CDK was able to produce an artifact that represented all of the non-deterministic dependencies that it had, right? That allowed you to then store that artifacts as you'd come back and put that into the program and say, "I'm going to get out the same thing," but because the CDK doesn't control upstream of it, the code that the developers are writing, there isn't a way to do that. Right? So on the abstraction front, the constructs are super useful, right? CloudFormation now has modules which allow you to say, "Here's a template and I'm going to represent this as a CloudFormation type itself," right? So instead of saying that I need X different things, I'm going to say, "I packaged that all up here. It is as a type."Now, currently, modules can only be playing CloudFormation templates and there's a lot of constraints in what you can express inside a CloudFormation template. And I think the answer for me is ... What I want to see is more richness in the CloudFormation language, right? One of the things that people do in the CDK that's really helpful is say, "I need a copy of this in every AZ."Jeremy: Right.Ben: Right? There's so much boilerplate in server-based things. And CloudFormation can't do that, right? But if you imagine that it had a map function that allowed you to say, "For every AZ, stamp me out a copy of this little bit." And then that the CDK constructs allowed to translate. Instead of it doing all this generation only down to the L one piece, instead being able to say, "I'm going to translate this into more rich CloudFormation templates so that the CloudFormation template was as advanced as possible."Right? Then it could do things like say, "Oh, I know we need to do this in every AZ, I'm going to use this map function in the CloudFormation template rather than just stamping it out." Right? And so I think that's possible. Now, modules should also be able to be defined as CDK programs. Right? You should be able to register a construct as a CloudFormation tag.Jeremy: It would be pretty cool.Ben: There's no reason you shouldn't be able to. Yeah. Because I think the declarative versus imperative thing is, again, not the most important piece, it's how do we move ... It's shifting right in this case, right? That how do you shift what's happening with the developer further into the process of deployment so that more of their context is present? And so one of the things that the CDK does that's hard to replicate is have non-local effects. And this is both convenient and I think of code smell often.So you can pass a bucket resource from another stack into a piece of code in your CDK program that's creating a different stack and you say, "Oh great, I've got this Lambda function, it needs permissions to that bucket. So add permissions." And it's possible for the CDK programs to either be adding the permissions onto the IAM role of that function, or non-locally adding to that bucket's resource policy, which is weird, right? That you can be creating a stack and the thing that you do to that stack or resource or whatever is not happening there, it's happening elsewhere. I don't think that's a great approach, but it's certainly convenient to be able to do it in a lot of situations.Now, that's not representable within a module. A module is a contained piece of functionality that can't touch anything else. So things like SAM where you can add events onto a function that can go and create ... You create the API events on different functions and then SAM aggregates them and creates an API gateway for you. Right? If AWS serverless function was a module, it couldn't do that because you'd have these in different places and you couldn't aggregate something between all of them and put them in the top-level thing, right?This is what CloudFormation macros enable, but they don't have a... There's no proper interface to them, right? They don't define, "This is what I'm doing. This is the kind of resources I can create." There's none of that that would help you understand them. So they're infinitely flexible, but then also maybe less principled for that reason. So I think there are ways to evolve, but it's investment in the CloudFormation language that allows us to shift that burden from being a flattening inside client-side code from the developer and shifting it to be able to be represented in the cloud.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. And I think from that standpoint too if we go back to the solving people's problems standpoint, that everything you explained there, they're loaded with nuances, it's loaded with gotchas, right? Like, "Oh, you can't do this, you can't do that." So that's just why I think the CDK is so popular because it's like you can do so much with it so quickly and it's very, very fast. And I think that trade-off, people are just willing to make it.Ben: Yes. And that's where they're willing to make it, do they fully understand the consequences of it? Then does AWS communicate those consequences well? Before I get into that question of, okay, you're a developer that's brand new to AWS and you've been tasked with standing up some Kubernetes cluster and you're like, "Great. I can use a CDK to do this." Something is malfunctioning. You're also tasked with the operations and something is malfunctioning. You go in through the Console and maybe figure out all the things that are out there are new to you because they're hidden inside L3 constructs, right?You're two levels down from where you were defining what you want, and then you find out what's wrong and you have no idea how to turn that into a change in your CDK program. So instead of going back and doing the thing that infrastructure as code is for, which is tweaking your program to go fix the problem, you go and you tweak it in the Console ...Jeremy: Right. Which you should never do.Ben: ... and you fix it that way. Right. Well, and that's the thing that I struggle with, with the CDK is how does the CDK help the developer who's in that situation? And I don't think they have a good story around that. Now, I don't know. I haven't talked with enough junior developers who are using the CDK about how often they get into that situation. Right? But I always say client-side code is not a replacement for a managed service because when it's client-side code, you still own the result.Jeremy: Right.Ben: If a particular CDK construct was a managed service in AWS, then all of the resources that would be created underneath AWS's problem to make work. And the interface that the developer has is the only level of ownership that they have. Fargate is this. Because you could do all the things that Fargate does with a CDK construct, right? Set up EC2, do all the things, and represent it as something that looks like Fargate in your CDK program. But every time your EC2 fleet is unhealthy that's your problem. With Fargate, that's AWS's problem. If we didn't have Fargate, that's essentially what CDK would be trying to do for ECS.And I think we all recognize that Fargate is very necessary and helpful in that case, right? And I just want that for all the things, right? Whenever I have an abstraction, if it's an abstraction that I understand, then I should have a way of zooming into it while not having to switch languages, right? So that's where you shouldn't dump me out the CloudFormation to understand what you're doing. You should help me understand the low-level things in the same language. And if it's not something that I need to understand, it should be a managed service. It shouldn't be a bunch of stuff that I still own that I haven't looked at.Jeremy: Makes sense. Got a question, Rebecca? Because I was waiting for you to jump in.Rebecca: No, but I was going to make a joke, but then the joke passed, and then I was like, "But should I still make it?" I was going to be like, "Yeah, but does the CDK let you test in production?" But that was a 32nd ago joke and then I was really wrestling with whether or not I should tell it, but I told it anyway, hopefully, someone gets a laugh.Ben: Yeah. I mean, there's the thing that Charity Majors says, right? Which is that everybody tests in production. Some people are lucky enough to have a development environment in production. No, sorry. I said that the wrong way. It's everybody has a test environment. Some people are lucky enough that it's not in production.Rebecca: Yeah. Swap that. Reverse it. Yeah.Ben: Yeah.Jeremy: All right. So speaking of talking to developers and getting feedback from them, so I actually put a question out on Twitter a couple of weeks ago and got a lot of really interesting reactions. And essentially I asked, "What do you love or hate about infrastructure as code?" And there were a lot of really interesting things here. I don't know, maybe it might be fun to go through a couple of these and get your thoughts on them. So this is probably not a great one to start with, but I thought it was interesting because this I think represents the frustration that a lot of us feel. And it was basically that they love that automation minimizes future work, right? But they hate that it makes life harder over time. And that pretty much every approach to infrastructure in, sorry, yeah, infrastructure in code at the present is flawed, right? So really there are no good solutions right now.Ben: Yeah. CloudFormation is still a pain to learn and deal with. If you're operating in certain IDEs, you can get tab completion.Jeremy: Right.Ben: If you go to CDK you get tab completion, which is, I think probably most of the value that developers want out of it and then the abstraction, and then all the other fancy things it does like pipelines, which again, should be a managed service. I do think that person is absolutely right to complain about how difficult it is. That there are many ways that it could be better. One of the things that I think about when I'm using tools is it's not inherently bad for a tool to have some friction to use it.Jeremy: Right.Ben: And this goes to another infrastructure as code tool that goes even further than the CDK and says, "You can define your Lambda code in line with your infrastructure definition." So this is fine with me. And there's some other ... I think Punchcard also lets you do some of this. Basically extracts out the bits of your code that you say, "This is a custom thing that glues together two things I'm defining in here and I'll make that a Lambda function for you." And for me, that is too little friction to defining a Lambda function.Because when I define a Lambda function, just going back to that bringing in ownership, every time I add a Lambda function, that's something that I own, that's something that I have to maintain, that I'm responsible for, that can go wrong. So if I'm thinking about, "Well, I could have API Gateway direct into DynamoDB, but it'd be nice if I could change some of these fields. And so I'm just going to drop in a little sprinkle of code, three lines of code in between here to do some transformation that I want." That is all of sudden an entire Lambda function you've brought into your infrastructure.Jeremy: Right. That's a good point.Ben: And so I want a little bit of friction to do that, to make me think about it, to make me say, "Oh, yeah, downstream of this decision that I am making, there are consequences that I would not otherwise think about if I'm just trying to accomplish the problem," right? Because I think developers, humans, in general, tend to be a bit shortsighted when you have a goal especially, and you're being pressured to complete that goal and you're like, "Okay, well I can complete it." The consequences for later are always a secondary concern.And so you can change your incentives in that moment to say, "Okay, well, this is going to guide me to say, "Ah, I don't really need this Lambda function in here. Then I'm better off in the long term while accomplishing that goal in the short term." So I do think that there is a place for tools making things difficult. That's not to say that the amount of difficult that infrastructure as code is today is at all reasonable, but I do think it's worth thinking about, right?I'd rather take on the pain of creating an ASL definition by hand for express workflow than the easier thing of writing Lambda code. Because I know the long-term consequences of that. Now, if that could be flipped where it was harder to write something that took more ownership, it'd be just easy to do, right? You'd always do the right thing. But I think it's always worth saying, "Can I do the harder thing now to pay off to pay off later?"Jeremy: And I always call those shortcuts "tomorrow-Jeremy's" problem. That's how I like to look at those.Ben: Yeah. Yes.Jeremy: And the funny thing about that too is I remember right when EventBridge came out and there was no CloudFormation support for a long time, which was super frustrating. But Serverless Framework, for example, implemented a custom resource in order to do that. And I remember looking at a clean stack and being like, "Why are there two Lambda functions there that I have no idea?" I'm like, "I didn't publish ..." I honestly thought my account was compromised that somebody had published a Lambda function in there because I'm like, "I didn't do that." And then it took me a while to realize, I'm like, "Oh, this is what this is." But if it is that easy to just create little transform functions here and there, I can imagine there being thousands of those in your account without anybody knowing that they even exist.Ben: Now, don't get me wrong. I would love to have the ability to drop in little transforms that did not involve Lambda functions. So in other words, I mean, the thing that VTL does for API Gateway, REST APIs but without it being VTL and being ... Because that's hard and then also restricted in what you can do, right? It's not, "Oh, I can drop in arbitrary code in here." But enough to say, "Oh, I want to flip ... These fields should go from a key-value mapping to a list of key-value, right? In the way that it addresses inconsistent with how tags are defined across services, those kinds of things. Right? And you could drop that in any service, but once you've defined it, there's no maintenance for you, right?You're writing JavaScript. It's not actually a JavaScript engine underneath or something. It's just getting translated into some big multi-tenant fancy thing. And I have a hypothesis that that should be possible. You should be able to do it where you could even do it in the parsing of JSON, being able to do transforms without ever having to have the whole object in memory. And if we could get that then, "Oh, sure. Now I have sprinkled all over the place all of these little transforms." Now there's a little bit of overhead if the transform is defined correctly or not, right? But once it is, then it just works. And having all those little transforms everywhere is then fine, right? And that incentive to make it harder it doesn't need to be there because it's not bringing ownership with it.Rebecca: Yeah. It's almost like taking the idea of tomorrow-Jeremy's problem and actually switching it to say tomorrow-Jeremy's celebration where tomorrow-Jeremy gets to look back at past-Jeremy and be like, "Nice. Thank you for making that decision past-Jeremy." Because I think we often do look at it in terms of tomorrow-Jeremy will think of this, we'll solve this problem rather than how do we approach it by saying, how do I make tomorrow-Jeremy thankful for it today-Jeremy? And that's a simple language, linguistic switch, but a hard switch to actually make decisions based on.Ben: Yeah. I don't think tomorrow-Ben is ever thankful for today-Ben. I think it's tomorrow-Ben is thankful for yesterday-Ben setting up the incentives correctly so that today-Ben will do the right thing for tomorrow-Ben. Right? When I think about people, I think it's easier to convince people to accept a change in their incentives than to convince them to fight against their incentives sustainably.Jeremy: Right. And I think developers and I'm guilty of this too, I mean, we make decisions based off of expediency. We want to get things done fast. And when you get stuck on that problem you're like, "You know what? I'm not going to figure it out. I'm just going to write a loop or I'm going to do whatever I can do just to make it work." Another if statement here, "Isn't going to hurt anybody." All right. So let's move to ... Sorry, go ahead.Ben: We shouldn't feel bad about that.Jeremy: You're right.Ben: I was going to say, we shouldn't feel bad about that. That's where I don't want tomorrow-Ben to have to be thankful for today-Ben, because that's the implication there is that today-Ben is fighting against his incentives to do good things for tomorrow-Ben. And if I don't need to have to get to that point where just the right path is the easiest path, right? Which means putting friction in the right places than today-Ben ... It's never a question of whether today-Ben is doing something that's worth being thankful for. It's just doing the job, right?Jeremy: Right. No, that makes sense. All right. I got another question here, I think falls under the category of service discovery, which I know is another topic that you love. So this person said, "I love IaC, but hate the fuzzy boundaries where certain software awkwardly fall. So like Istio and Prometheus and cert-manager. That they can be considered part of the infrastructure, but then it's awkward to deploy them when something like Terraform due to circular dependencies relating to K8s and things like that."So, I mean, I know that we don't have to get into the actual details of that, but I think that is an important aspect of infrastructure as code where best practices sometimes are deploy a stack that has your permanent resources and then deploy a stack that maybe has your more femoral or the ones that are going to be changing, the more mutable ones, maybe your Lambda functions and some of those sort of things. If you're using Terraform or you're using some of these other services as well, you do have that really awkward mix where you're trying to use outputs from one stack into another stack and trying to do all that. And really, I mean, there are some good tools that help with it, but I mean just overall thoughts on that.Ben: Well, we certainly need to demand better of AWS services when they design new things that they need to be designed so that infrastructure as code will work. So this is the S3 bucket notification problem. A very long time ago, S3 decided that they were going to put bucket notifications as part of the S3 bucket. Well, CloudFormation at that point decided that they were going to put bucket notifications as part of the bucket resource. And S3 decided that they were going to check permissions when the notification configuration is defined so that you have to have the permissions before you create the configuration.This creates a circular dependency when you're hooking it up to anything in CloudFormation because the dependency depends on the resource policy on an SNS topic, and SQS queue or a Lambda function depends on the bucket name if you're letting CloudFormation name the bucket, which is the best practice. Then bucket name has to exist, which means the resource has to have been created. But the notification depends on the thing that's notifying, which doesn't have the names and the resource policy doesn't exist so it all fails. And this is solved in a couple of different ways. One of which is name your bucket explicitly, again, not a good practice. Another is what SAM does, which says, "The Lambda function will say I will allow all S3 buckets to invoke me."So it has a star permission in it's resource policy. So then the notification will work. None of which is good or there's custom resources that get created, right? Now, if those resources have been designed with infrastructure as code as part of the process, then it would have been obvious, "Oh, you end up with a circular pendency. We need to split out bucket notifications as a separate resource." And not enough teams are doing this. Often they're constrained by the API that they develop first ...Jeremy: That's a good point.Ben: ... they come up with the API, which often makes sense for a Console experience that they desire. So this is where API Gateway has this whole thing where you create all the routes and the resources and the methods and everything, right? And then you say, "Great, deploy." And in the Console you only need one mutable working copy of that at a time, but it means that you can't create two deployments or update two stages in parallel through infrastructure as code and API Gateway because they both talk to this mutable working copy state and would overwrite each other.And if infrastructure as code had been on their list would have been, "Oh, if you have a definition of your API, you should be able to go straight to the deployment," right? And so trying to push that upstream, which to me is more important than infrastructure as code support at launch, but people are often like, "Oh, I want CloudFormation support at launch." But that often means that they get no feedback from customers on the design and therefore make it bad. KMS asymmetric keys should have been a different resource type so that you can easily tell which key types are in your template.Jeremy: Good point. Yeah.Ben: Right? So that you can use things like CloudFormation Guard more easily on those. Sure, you can control the properties or whatever, but you should be able to think in terms of, "I have a symmetric key or an asymmetric key in here." And they're treated completely separately because you use them completely differently, right? They don't get used to the same place.Jeremy: Yeah. And it's funny that you mentioned the lacking support at launch because that was another complaint. That was quite prevalent in this thread here, was people complaining that they don't get that CloudFormation support right away. But I think you made a very good point where they do build the APIs first. And that's another thing. I don't know which question asked me or which one of these mentioned it, but there was a lot of anger over the fact that you go to the API docs or you go to the docs for AWS and it focuses on the Console and it focuses on the CLI and then it gives you the API stuff and very little mention of CloudFormation at all. And usually, you have to go to a whole separate set of docs to find the CloudFormation. And it really doesn't tie all the concepts together, right? So you get just a block of JSON or of YAML and you're like, "Am I supposed to know what everything does here?"Ben: Yeah. I assume that's data-driven. Right? And we exist in this bubble where everybody loves infrastructure as code.Jeremy: True.Ben: And that AWS has many more customers who set things up using Console, people who learn by doing it first through the Console. I assume that's true, if it's not, then the AWS has somehow gotten on the extremely wrong track. But I imagine that's how they find that they get the right engagement. Now maybe the CDK will change some of this, right? Maybe the amount of interest that is generating, we'll get it to the point where blogs get written with CDK programs being written there. I think that presents different problems about what that CDK program might hide from when you're learning about a service. But yeah, it's definitely not ... I wrote a blog for AWS and my first draft had it as CloudFormation and then we changed it to the Console. Right? And ...Jeremy: That must have hurt. Did you die a little inside when that happened?Ben: I mean, no, because they're definitely our users, right? That's the way in which they interact with data, with us and they should be able to learn from that, their company, right? Because again, developers are often not fully in control of this process.Jeremy: Right. That's a good point.Ben: And so they may not be able to say, "I want to update this through CloudFormation," right? Either because their organization says it or just because their team doesn't work that way. And I think AWS gets requests to prevent people from using the Console, but also to force people to use the Console. I know that at least one of them is possible in IAM. I don't remember which, because I've never encountered it, but I think it's possible to make people use the Console. I'm not sure, but I know that there are companies who want both, right? There are companies who say, "We don't want to let people use the API. We want to force them to use the Console." There are companies who say, "We don't want people using the Console at all. We want to force them to use the APIs."Jeremy: Interesting.Ben: Yeah. There's a lot of AWS customers, right? And there's every possible variety of organization and AWS should be serving all of them, right? They're all customers. And certainly, I want AWS to be leading the ones that are earlier in their cloud journey and on the serverless ladder to getting further but you can't leave them behind, I think it's important.Jeremy: So that people argument and those different levels and coming in at a different, I guess, level or comfortability with APIs versus infrastructure as code and so forth. There was another question or another comment on this that said, "I love the idea of committing everything that makes my solution to text and resurrect an entire solution out of nothing other than an account key. Loved the ability to compare versions and unit tests, every bit of my solution, and not having to remember that one weird setting if you're using the Console. But hate that it makes some people believe that any coder is now an infrastructure wizard."And I think this is a good point, right? And I don't 100% agree with it, but I think it's a good point that it basically ... Back to your point about creating these little transformations in Pulumi, you could do a lot of damage, I mean, good or bad, right? When you are using these tools. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, is this something where ... And again, the CDK makes it so easy for people to write these constructs pretty quickly and spin up tons of infrastructure without a lot of guard rails to protect them.Ben: So I think if we tweak the statement slightly, I think there's truth there, which isn't about the self-perception but about what they need to be. Right? That I think this is more about serverless than about infrastructure as code. Infrastructure as code is just saying that you can define it. Right? I think it's more about the resources that are in a particular definition that require that. My former colleague, Aaron Camera says, "Serverless means every developer is an architect" because you're not in that situation where the code you write goes onto something, you write the whole thing. Right?And so you do need to have those ... You do need to be an infrastructure wizard whether you're given the tools to do that and the education to do that, right? Not always, like if you're lucky. And the self-perception is again an even different thing, right? Especially if coders think that there's nothing to be learned ... If programmers, software developers, think that there's nothing to be learned from the folks who traditionally define the infrastructure, which is Ops, right? They think, "Those people have nothing to teach me because now I can do all the things that they did." Well, you can create the things that they created and it does not mean that you're as good at it ...Jeremy: Or responsible for monitoring it too. Right.Ben: ... and have the ... Right. The monitoring, the experience of saying these are the things that will come back to bite you that are obvious, right? This is how much ownership you're getting into. There's very much a long-standing problem there of devaluing Ops as a function and as a career. And for my money when I look at serverless, I think serverless is also making the software development easier because there's so much less software you need to write. You need to write less software that deals with the hard parts of these architectures, the scaling, the distributed computing problems.You still have this, your big computing problems, but you're considering them functionally rather than coding things that address them, right? And so I see a lot of operations folks who come into serverless learn or learn a new programming language or just upscale, right? They're writing Python scripts to control stuff and then they learn more about Python to be able to do software development in it. And then they bring all of that Ops experience and expertise into it and look at something and say, "Oh, I'd much rather have step functions here than something where I'm running code for it because I know how much my script break and those kinds of things when an API changes or ... I have to update it or whatever it is."And I think that's something that Tom McLaughlin talks about having come from an outside ground into serverless. And so I think there's definitely a challenge there in both directions, right? That Ops needs to learn more about software development to be more engaged in that process. Software development does need to learn much more about infrastructure and is also at this risk of approaching it from, "I know the syntax, but not the semantics, sort of thing." Right? We can create ...Jeremy: Just because I can doesn't mean I should.Ben: ... an infrastructure. Yeah.Rebecca: So Ben, as we're looping around this conversation and coming back to this idea that software is people and that really software should enable you to focus on the things that do matter. I'm wondering if you can perhaps think of, as pristine as possible, an example of when you saw this working, maybe it was while you've been at iRobot or a project that you worked on your own outside of that, but this moment where you saw software really working as it should, and that how it enabled you or your team to focus on the things that matter. If there's a concrete example that you can give when you see it working really well and what that looks like.Ben: Yeah. I mean, iRobot is a great example of this having been the company without need for software that scaled to consumer electronics volumes, right? Roomba volumes. And needing to build a IOT cloud application to run connected Roombas and being able to do that without having to gain that expertise. So without having to build a team that could deal with auto-scaling fleets of servers, all of those things was able to build up completely serverlessly. And so skip an entire level of organizational expertise, because that's just not necessary to accomplish those tasks anymore.Rebecca: It sounds quite nice.Ben: It's really great.Jeremy: Well, I have one more question here that I think could probably end up ... We could talk about for another hour. So I will only throw it out there and maybe you can give me a quick answer on this, but I actually had another Twitter thread on this not too long ago that addressed this very, very problem. And this is the idea of the feedback cycle on these infrastructure as code tools where oftentimes to deploy infrastructure changes, I mean, it just takes time. In many cases things can run in parallel, but as you said, there's race conditions and things like that, that sometimes things have to be ... They just have to be synchronous. So is this something where there are ways where you see in the future these mutations to your infrastructure or things like that potentially happening faster to get a better feedback cycle, or do you think that's just something that we're going to have to deal with for a while?Ben: Yeah, I think it's definitely a very extensive topic. I think there's a few things. One is that the deployment cycle needs to get shortened. And part of that I think is splitting dev deployments from prod deployments. In prod it's okay for it to take 30 seconds, right? Or a minute or however long because that's at the end of a CI/CD pipeline, right? There's other things that are happening as part of that. Now, you don't want that to be hours or whatever it is. Right? But it's okay for that to be proper and to fully manage exactly what's going on in a principled manner.When you're doing for development, it would be okay to, for example, change the Lambda code without going through CloudFormation to change the Lambda code, right? And this is what an architect does, is there's a notion of a dirty deploy which just packages up. Now, if your resource graph has changed, you do need to deploy again. Right? But if the only thing that's changing is your code, sure, you can go and say, "Update function code," on that Lambda directly and that's faster.But calling it a dirty deploy is I think important because that is not something that you want to do in prod, right? You don't want there to be drift between what the infrastructure as code service understands, but then you go further than that and imagine there's no reason that you actually have to do this whole zip file process. You could be R sinking the code directly, or you could be operating over SSH on the code remotely, right? There's many different ways in which the loop from I have a change in my Lambda code to that Lambda having that change could be even shorter than that, right?And for me, that's what it's really about. I don't think that local mocking is the answer. You and Brian Rue were talking about this recently. I mean, I agree with both of you. So I think about it as I want unit tests of my business logic, but my business logic doesn't deal with AWS services. So I want to unit test something that says, "Okay, I'm performing this change in something and that's entirely within my custom code." Right? It's not touching other services. It doesn't mean that I actually need adapters, right? I could be dealing with the native formats that I'm getting back from a given service, but I'm not actually making calls out of the code. I'm mocking out, "Well, here's what the response would look like."And so I think that's definitely necessary in the unit testing sense of saying, "Is my business logic correct? I can do that locally. But then is the wiring all correct?" Is something that should only happen in the cloud. There's no reason to mock API gateway into Lambda locally in my mind. You should just be dealing with the Lambda side of it in your local unit tests rather than trying to set up this multiple thing. Another part of the story is, okay, so these deploys have to happen faster, right? And then how do we help set up those end-to-end test and give you observability into it? Right? X-Ray helps, but until X-Ray can sort through all the services that you might use in the serverless architecture, can deal with how does it work in my Lambda function when it's batching from Kinesis or SQS into my function?So multiple traces are now being handled by one invocation, right? These are problems that aren't solved yet. Until we get that kind of inspection, it's going to be hard for us to feel as good about cloud development. And again, this is where I feel sometimes there's more friction there, but there's bigger payoff. Is one of those things where again, fighting against your incentives which is not the place that you want to be.Jeremy: I'm going to stop you before you disagree with me anymore. No, just kidding! So, Rebecca, you have any final thoughts or questions for Ben?Rebecca: No. I just want to say to both of you and to everyone listening that I hope your today self is celebrating your yesterday-self right now.Jeremy: Perfect. Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining us and being a guinea pig as we said on this new format that we are trying. Excellent guinea pig. Excellent.Rebecca: An excellent human too but also great guinea pig.Jeremy: Right. Right. Pretty much so. So if people want to find out more about you, read some of the stuff you're doing and working on, how do they do that?Ben: I'm on Twitter. That's the primary place. I'm on LinkedIn, I don't post much there. And then I write articles that show up on Medium.Rebecca: And just so everyone knows your Twitter handle I'll say it out loud too. It's @ben11kehoe, K-E-H-O-E, ben11kehoe.Jeremy: Right. Perfect. All right. Well, we will put all that in the show notes and hopefully people will like this new format. And again, we'd love your feedback on this, things that you'd like us to do in the future, any ideas you have. And of course, make sure you reach out to Ben. He's an amazing resource for serverless. So again, thank you for everything you do, and thank you for being on the show.Ben: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This was great.Rebecca: Good to see you. Thank you.

Welcome to the Cracking Content Podcast, helping entrepreneurs to amplify their expertise through storytelling, content, and PR so they can get more sales and make a bigger impact. Every business has a story to tell. Don't be afraid to tell it. In this episode, I'm going to be talking to Becca Heaps, the founder of Tentshare, and also the curator of Tentival 2021. It is really exciting to have Becca on the podcast for lots of reasons; we've worked together, she's been a client of mine, she's done some of my courses, and also does coaching with me. But I'm more excited about her new project, Tentival 2021. {1:09} Rebecca: I'm Rebecca, founder of Tentshare, which is a people to people, tent lending platform. So, the idea is that if you've got a tent, it's an asset. So, you can pop it on the Tentshare website and rent it out to someone local to you, and make a bit of extra money at the weekend. But also if you'd like to go camping and you don't want to invest in a big old tent, or invest in a tent that you may only use once or twice, you can go onto the Tentshare website and rent the tent that would be appropriate for your camping trip. {2:00} Rebecca: From that has grown Tentival. I hosted and curated Tentival last year, 10 days after lock down. Because I was absolutely gutted that there was going to be no more festivals, plus I'd launched Tentshare, and I wanted people to pitch up their tents and have a lovely day looking at each other's tents, and having a glorious day outside. So, that's how Tentival started. And this year, I'm bring Tentival 2021, which is coming back bigger, and better, and brighter, and more sparkly than before. {3:09} Rebecca: There are a lot of virtual festivals and events being streamed online. But the thing that's very different about Tentival is it is interactive. {5:01} Rebecca: So, the idea is that you pitch up a tent in your garden, or you go to a park, maybe take a picnic, bring a device. As long as you've got a device and the internet, you can access this festival from anywhere. {10:04} Claire: Can you tell us a bit about your content marketing journey with this business? Rebecca: I launched it February 2020, and then a really lovely friend gifted me a four-week course, Pitch the Press course, which happened to be yours Claire.  And it landed in my lap at just the right time. And I went on that four-week course, and my goodness, what a lot of information I learned. And by the end of it, I had pitched. I'd been in The Mirror. I'd had an interview on BBC Radio Kent and I've been in a camping magazine. {12:04} Claire: It's just been phenomenal watching you grow your business and grow awareness about what you're doing. And obviously, you're really active on Clubhouse as well, and you've made some great connections there, which has enabled you to take Tentival to the next level. {12:25} Rebecca: You invited me into Clubhouse. And whoa, it's just been incredible. The contacts that I've made, and the people. And once you're in there and you find your people, and you're all like-minded and in alignment with all your ethos, it's just incredible. It's been great finding people who, at last, I feel like I have a voice, where I haven't felt I've had a voice before. So, it's been wonderful. So, I've got you to thank for that as well, Claire. {12:59} Claire: I think that is probably my mission. I've been redefining it, and it is, it's like helping women amplify their reach, and find their true, authentic voice and share it with the world. I think it's needed more than ever. {16:17} Rebecca: For every ticket sold, we're going to plant a tree. We've teamed up with Tree Sisters, and they do an amazing initiative planting trees where they're most needed and where they're most effective. And tickets are pay as you can. So, we don't want wealth or lack of wealth, especially coming out of COVID, when people haven't been able to work and such, to be a barrier to coming to the festival. Connect with Claire:  You can download my free PR guide here https://clairewinter.info/freebies/be-your-own-pr/  To find out about 1:1 content coaching go www.clairewinter.info. Free Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/crackingcontent/ Website: https://clairewinter.info/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clairewinteruk  To get your content sorted join the Cracking Content Club Membership for just £35 a month: https://clairewinter.info/cracking-content-club/ About Rebecca: Rebecca's passion project is Tentshare (www.tentshare.co.uk), a pioneering peer-to peer tent-lending platform. Tentshare offers a more sustainable and cost-effective solution for campers. Tentshare is committed to building a community of campers and novice campers sharing tents, equipment, and knowledge. During the Covoid-19 crisis, Rebecca curated and hosted the first lockdown, virtual festival, Tentival 2020. Rebecca also has a wide range of skills and experiences garnered over a career that has taken in more than 10 years as a primary school teacher in the borough of Hackney and a Stage, Lighting and Sound manager for several theatre and entertainment project. She is currently director of a successful family property development business, Hippo Holdings Ltd. Tentival 2021 June 12th - Find out more and purchase a ‘pay-as-you-can' ticket here: https://www.tentshare.co.uk/tentival-2021/ For further information, images, or interviews, please contact Rebecca Heaps, Tentshare Founder: 07940469284; hello@tentshare.co.uk; https://www.tentshare.co.uk/ Connect with Rebecca: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tent_share/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tentshare.co.uk Twitter:  https://twitter.com/Tentshare1

About Rebecca MarshburnRebecca's interested in the things that interest people—What's important to them? Why? And when did they first discover it to be so? She's also interested in sharing stories, elevating others' experiences, exploring the intersection of physical environments and human behavior, and crafting the perfect pun for every situation. Today, Rebecca is the Head of Content & Community at Common Room. Prior to Common Room, she led the AWS Serverless Heroes program, where she met the singular Jeremy Daly, and guided content and product experiences for fashion magazines, online blogs, AR/VR companies, education companies, and a little travel outfit called Airbnb.Twitter: @beccaodelayLinkedIn: Rebecca MarshburnCompany: www.commonroom.ioPersonal work (all proceeds go to the charity of the buyer's choice): www.letterstomyexlovers.comWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VVEtxgh6GKI This episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo.Transcript:Rebecca: What a day today is! It's not every day you turn 100 times old, and on this day we celebrate Serverless Chats 100th episode with the most special of guests. The gentleman whose voice you usually hear on this end of the microphone, doing the asking, but today he's going to be doing the telling, the one and only, Jeremy Daly, and me. I'm Rebecca Marshburn, and your guest host for Serverless Chats 100th episode, because it's quite difficult to interview yourself. Hey Jeremy!Jeremy: Hey Rebecca, thank you very much for doing this.Rebecca: Oh my gosh. I am super excited to be here, couldn't be more honored. I'll give your listeners, our listeners, today, the special day, a little bit of background about us. Jeremy and I met through the AWS Serverless Heroes program, where I used to be a coordinator for quite some time. We support each other in content, conferences, product requests, road mapping, community-building, and most importantly, I think we've supported each other in spirit, and now I'm the head of content and community at Common Room, and Jeremy's leading Serverless Cloud at Serverless, Inc., so it's even sweeter that we're back together to celebrate this Serverless Chats milestone with you all, the most important, important, important, important part of the podcast equation, the serverless community. So without further ado, let's begin.Jeremy: All right, hit me up with whatever questions you have. I'm here to answer anything.Rebecca: Jeremy, I'm going to ask you a few heavy hitters, so I hope you're ready.Jeremy: I'm ready to go.Rebecca: And the first one's going to ask you to step way, way, way, way, way back into your time machine, so if you've got the proper attire on, let's do it. If we're going to step into that time machine, let's peel the layers, before serverless, before containers, before cloud even, what is the origin story of Jeremy Daly, the man who usually asks the questions.Jeremy: That's tough. I don't think time machines go back that far, but it's funny, when I was in high school, I was involved with music, and plays, and all kinds of things like that. I was a very creative person. I loved creating things, that was one of the biggest sort of things, and whether it was music or whatever and I did a lot of work with video actually, back in the day. I was always volunteering at the local public access station. And when I graduated from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had used computers at the computer lab at the high school. I mean, this is going back a ways, so it wasn't everyone had their own computer in their house, but I went to college and then, my first, my freshman year in college, I ended up, there's a suite-mate that I had who showed me a website that he built on the university servers.And I saw that and I was immediately like, "Whoa, how do you do that"? Right, just this idea of creating something new and being able to build that out was super exciting to me, so I spent the next couple of weeks figuring out how to do HTML, and this was before, this was like when JavaScript was super, super early and we're talking like 1997, and everything was super early. I was using this, I eventually moved away from using FrontPage and started using this thing called HotDog. It was a software for HTML coding, but I started doing that, and I started building websites, and then after a while, I started figuring out what things like CGI-bins were, and how you could write Perl scripts, and how you could make interactions happen, and how you could capture FormData and serve up different things, and it was a lot of copying and pasting.My major at the time, I think was psychology, because it was like a default thing that I could do. But then I moved into computer science. I did computer science for about a year, and I felt that that was a little bit too narrow for what I was hoping to sort of do. I was starting to become more entrepreneurial. I had started selling websites to people. I had gone to a couple of local businesses and started building websites, so I actually expanded that and ended up doing sort of a major that straddled computer science and management, like business administration. So I ended up graduating with a degree in e-commerce and internet marketing, which is sort of very early, like before any of this stuff seemed to even exist. And then from there, I started a web development company, worked on that for 12 years, and then I ended up selling that off. Did a startup, failed the startup. Then from that startup, went to another startup, worked there for a couple of years, went to another startup, did a lot of consulting in between there, somewhere along the way I found serverless and AWS Cloud, and then now it's sort of led me to advocacy for building things with serverless and now I'm building sort of the, I think what I've been dreaming about building for the last several years in what I'm doing now at Serverless, Inc.Rebecca: Wow. All right. So this love story started in the 90s.Jeremy: The 90s, right.Rebecca: That's an incredible, era and welcome to 2021.Jeremy: Right. It's been a journey.Rebecca: Yeah, truly, that's literally a new millennium. So in a broad way of saying it, you've seen it all. You've started from the very HotDog of the world, to today, which is an incredible name, I'm going to have to look them up later. So then you said serverless came along somewhere in there, but let's go to the middle of your story here, so before Serverless Chats, before its predecessor, which is your weekly Off-by-none newsletter, and before, this is my favorite one, debates around, what the suffix "less" means when appended to server. When did you first hear about Serverless in that moment, or perhaps you don't remember the exact minute, but I do really want to know what struck you about it? What stood out about serverless rather than any of the other types of technologies that you could have been struck by and been having a podcast around?Jeremy: Right. And I think I gave you maybe too much of a surface level of what I've seen, because I talked mostly about software, but if we go back, I mean, hardware was one of those things where hardware, and installing software, and running servers, and doing networking, and all those sort of things, those were part of my early career as well. When I was running my web development company, we started by hosting on some hosting service somewhere, and then we ended up getting a dedicated server, and then we outgrew that, and then we ended up saying, "Well maybe we'll bring stuff in-house". So we did on-prem for quite some time, where we had our own servers in the T1 line, and then we moved to another building that had a T3 line, and if anybody doesn't know what that is, you probably don't need to anymore.But those are the things that we were doing, and then eventually we moved into a co-location facility where we rented space, and we rented electricity, and we rented all the utilities, the bandwidth, and so forth, but we had Blade servers and I was running VMware, and we were doing all this kind of stuff to manage the infrastructure, and then writing software on top of that, so it was a lot of work. I know I posted something on Twitter a few weeks ago, about how, when I was, when we were young, we used to have to carry a server on our back, uphill, both ways, to the data center, in the snow, with no shoes, and that's kind of how it felt, that you were doing a lot of these things.And then 2008, 2009, as I was kind of wrapping up my web development company, we were just in the process of actually saying it's too expensive at the colo. I think we were paying probably between like $5,000 and $7,000 a month between the ... we had leases on some of the servers, you're paying for electricity, you're paying for all these other things, and we were running a fair amount of services in there, so it seemed justifiable. We were making money on it, that wasn't the problem, but it just was a very expensive fixed cost for us, and when the cloud started coming along and I started actually building out the startup that I was working on, we were building all of that in the cloud, and as I was learning more about the cloud and how that works, I'm like, I should just move all this stuff that's in the co-location facility, move that over to the cloud and see what happens.And it took a couple of weeks to get that set up, and now, again, this is early, this is before ELB, this is before RDS, this is before, I mean, this was very, very early cloud. I mean, I think there was S3 and EC2. I think those were the two services that were available, with a few other things. I don't even think there were VPCs yet. But anyways, I moved everything over, took a couple of weeks to get that over, and essentially our bill to host all of our clients' sites and projects went from $5,000 to $7,000 a month, to $750 a month or something like that, and it's funny because had I done that earlier, I may not have sold off my web development company because it could have been much more profitable, so it was just an interesting move there.So we got into the cloud fairly early and started sort of leveraging that, and it was great to see all these things get added and all these specialty services, like RDS, and just taking the responsibility because I literally was installing Microsoft SQL server on an EC2 instance, which is not something that you want to do, you want to use RDS. It's just a much better way to do it, but anyways, so I was working for another startup, this was like startup number 17 or whatever it was I was working for, and we had this incident where we were using ... we had a pretty good setup. I mean, everything was on EC2 instances, but we were using DynamoDB to do some caching layers for certain things. We were using a sharded database, MySQL database, for product information, and so forth.So the system was pretty resilient, it was pretty, it handled all of the load testing we did and things like that, but then we actually got featured on Good Morning America, and they mentioned our app, it was the Power to Mobile app, and so we get mentioned on Good Morning America. I think it was Good Morning America. The Today Show? Good Morning America, I think it was. One of those morning shows, anyways, we got about 10,000 sign-ups in less than a minute, which was amazing, or it was just this huge spike in traffic, which was great. The problem was, is we had this really weak point in our system where we had to basically get a lock on the database in order to get an incremental-ID, and so essentially what happened is the database choked, and then as soon as the database choked, just to create user accounts, other users couldn't sign in and there was all kinds of problems, so we basically lost out on all of this capability.So I spent some time doing a lot of research and trying to figure out how do you scale that? How do you scale something that fast? How do you have that resilience in there? And there's all kinds of ways that we could have done it with traditional hardware, it's not like it wasn't possible to do with a slightly better strategy, but as I was digging around in AWS, I'm looking around at some different things, and we were, I was always in the console cause we were using Dynamo and some of those things, and I came across this thing that said "Lambda," with a little new thing next to it. I'm like, what the heck is this?So I click on that and I start reading about it, and I'm like, this is amazing. We don't have to spin up a server, we don't have to use Chef, or Puppet, or anything like that to spin up these machines. We can basically just say, when X happens, do Y, and it enlightened me, and this was early 2015, so this would have been right after Lambda went GA. Had never heard of Lambda as part of the preview, I mean, I wasn't sort of in that the re:Invent, I don't know, what would you call that? Vortex, maybe, is a good way to describe the event.Rebecca: Vortex sounds about right. That's about how it feels by the end.Jeremy: Right, exactly. So I wasn't really in that, I wasn't in that group yet, I wasn't part of that community, so I hadn't heard about it, and so as I started playing around with it, I immediately saw the value there, because, for me, as someone who again had managed servers, and it had built out really complex networking too. I think some of the things you don't think about when you move to an on-prem where you're managing your stuff, even what the cloud manages for you. I mean, we had firewalls, and we had to do all the firewall rules ourselves, right. I mean, I know you still have to do security groups and things like that in AWS, but just the level of complexity is a lot lower when you're in the cloud, and of course there's so many great services and systems that help you do that now.But just the idea of saying, "wait a minute, so if I have something happen, like a user signup, for example, and I don't have to worry about provisioning all the servers that I need in order to handle that," and again, it wasn't so much the server aspect of it as it was the database aspect of it, but one of the things that was sort of interesting about the idea of Serverless 2 was this asynchronous nature of it, this idea of being more event-driven, and that things don't have to happen immediately necessarily. So that just struck me as something where it seemed like it would reduce a lot, and again, this term has been overused, but the undifferentiated heavy-lifting, we use that term over and over again, but there is not a better term for that, right?Because there were just so many things that you have to do as a developer, as an ops person, somebody who is trying to straddle teams, or just a PM, or whatever you are, so many things that you have to do in order to get an application running, first of all, and then even more you have to do in order to keep it up and running, and then even more, if you start thinking about distributing it, or scaling it, or getting any of those things, disaster recovery. I mean, there's a million things you have to think about, and I saw serverless immediately as this opportunity to say, "Wait a minute, this could reduce a lot of that complexity and manage all of that for you," and then again, literally let you focus on the things that actually matter for your business.Rebecca: Okay. As someone who worked, how should I say this, in metatech, or the technology of technology in the serverless space, when you say that you were starting to build that without ELB even, or RDS, my level of anxiety is like, I really feel like I'm watching a slow horror film. I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no, you didn't, you didn't, you didn't have to do that, did you"?Jeremy: We did.Rebecca: So I applaud you for making it to the end of the film and still being with us.Jeremy: Well, the other thing ...Rebecca: Only one protagonist does that.Jeremy: Well, the other thing that's interesting too, about Serverless, and where it was in 2015, Lambda goes GA, this will give you some anxiety, there was no API gateway. So there was no way to actually trigger a Lambda function from a web request, right. There was no VPC access in Lambda functions, which meant you couldn't connect to a database. The only thing you do is connect via HDP, so you could connect to DynamoDB or things like that, but you could not connect directly to RDS, for example. So if you go back and you look at the timeline of when these things were released, I mean, if just from 2015, I mean, you literally feel like a caveman thinking about what you could do back then again, it's banging two sticks together versus where we are now, and the capabilities that are available to us.Rebecca: Yeah, you're sort of in Plato's cave, right, and you're looking up and you're like, "It's quite dark in here," and Lambda's up there, outside, sowing seeds, being like, "Come on out, it's dark in there". All right, so I imagine you discovering Lambda through the console is not a sentence you hear every day or general console discovery of a new product that will then sort of change the way that you build, and so I'm guessing maybe one of the reasons why you started your Off-by-none newsletter or Serverless Chats, right, is to be like, "How do I help tell others about this without them needing to discover it through the console"? But I'm curious what your why is. Why first the Off-by-none newsletter, which is one of my favorite things to receive every week, thank you for continuing to write such great content, and then why Serverless Chats? Why are we here today? Why are we at number 100? Which I'm so excited about every time I say it.Jeremy: And it's kind of crazy to think about all the people I've gotten a chance to talk to, but so, I think if you go back, I started writing blog posts maybe in 2015, so I haven't been doing it that long, and I certainly wasn't prolific. I wasn't consistent writing a blog post every week or every, two a week, like some people do now, which is kind of crazy. I don't know how that, I mean, it's hard enough writing the newsletter every week, never mind writing original content, but I started writing about Serverless. I think it wasn't until the beginning of 2018, maybe the end of 2017, and there was already a lot of great content out there. I mean, Ben Kehoe was very early into this and a lot of his stuff I read very early.I mean, there's just so many people that were very early in the space, I mean, Paul Johnson, I mean, just so many people, right, and I started reading what they were writing and I was like, "Oh, I've got some ideas too, I've been experimenting with some things, I feel like I've gotten to a point where what I could share could be potentially useful". So I started writing blog posts, and I think one of the earlier blog posts I wrote was, I want to say 2017, maybe it was 2018, early 2018, but was a post about serverless security, and what was great about that post was that actually got me connected with Ory Segal, who had started PureSec, and he and I became friends and that was the other great thing too, is just becoming part of this community was amazing.So many awesome people that I've met, but so I saw all this stuff people were writing and these things people were doing, and I got to maybe August of 2018, and I said to myself, I'm like, "Okay, I don't know if people are interested in what I'm writing". I wasn't writing a lot, but I was writing a little bit, but I wasn't sure people were overly interested in what I was writing, and again, that idea of the imposter syndrome, certainly everything was very early, so I felt a little bit more comfortable. I always felt like, well, maybe nobody knows what they're talking about here, so if I throw something into the fold it won't be too, too bad, but certainly, I was reading other things by other people that I was interested in, and I thought to myself, I'm like, "Okay, if I'm interested in this stuff, other people have to be interested in this stuff," but it wasn't easy to find, right.I mean, there was sort of a serverless Twitter, if you want to use that terminology, where a lot of people tweet about it and so forth, obviously it's gotten very noisy now because of people slapped that term on way too many things, but I don't want to have that discussion, but so I'm reading all this great stuff and I'm like, "I really want to share it," and I'm like, "Well, I guess the best way to do that would just be a newsletter."I had an email list for my own personal site that I had had a couple of hundred people on, and I'm like, "Well, let me just turn it into this thing, and I'll share these stories, and maybe people will find them interesting," and I know this is going to sound a little bit corny, but I have two teenage daughters, so I'm allowed to be sort of this dad-jokey type. I remember when I started writing the first version of this newsletter and I said to myself, I'm like, "I don't want this to be a newsletter." I was toying around with this idea of calling it an un-newsletter. I didn't want it to just be another list of links that you click on, and I know that's interesting to some people, but I felt like there was an opportunity to opine on it, to look at the individual links, and maybe even tell a story as part of all of the links that were shared that week, and I thought that that would be more interesting than just getting a list of links.And I'm sure you've seen over the last 140 issues, or however many we're at now, that there's been changes in the way that we formatted it, and we've tried new things, and things like that, but ultimately, and this goes back to the corny thing, I mean, one of the first things that I wanted to do was, I wanted to basically thank people for writing this stuff. I wanted to basically say, "Look, this is not just about you writing some content". This is big, this is important, and I appreciate it. I appreciate you for writing that content, and I wanted to make it more of a celebration really of the community and the people that were early contributors to that space, and that's one of the reasons why I did the Serverless Star thing.I thought, if somebody writes a really good article some week, and it's just, it really hits me, or somebody else says, "Hey, this person wrote a great article," or whatever. I wanted to sort of celebrate that person and call them out because that's one of the things too is writing blog posts or posting things on social media without a good following, or without the dopamine hit of people liking it, or re-tweeting it, and things like that, it can be a pretty lonely place. I mean, I know I feel that way sometimes when you put something out there, and you think it's important, or you think people might want to see it, and just not enough people see it.It's even worse, I mean, 240 characters, or whatever it is to write a tweet is one thing, or 280 characters, but if you're spending time putting together a tutorial or you put together a really good thought piece, or story, or use case, or something where you feel like this is worth sharing, because it could inspire somebody else, or it could help somebody else, could get them past a bump, it could make them think about something a different way, or get them over a hump, or whatever. I mean, that's just the kind of thing where I think people need that encouragement, and I think people deserve that encouragement for the work that they're doing, and that's what I wanted to do with Off-by-none, is make sure that I got that out there, and to just try to amplify those voices the best that I could. The other thing where it's sort of progressed, and I guess maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but the other place where it's progressed and I thought was really interesting, was, finding people ...There's the heavy hitters in the serverless space, right? The ones we all know, and you can name them all, and they are great, and they produce amazing content, and they do amazing things, but they have pretty good engines to get their content out, right? I mean, some people who write for the AWS blog, they're on the AWS blog, right, so they're doing pretty well in terms of getting their things out there, right, and they've got pretty good engines.There's some good dev advocates too, that just have good Twitter followings and things like that. Then there's that guy who writes the story. I don't know, he's in India or he's in Poland or something like that. He writes this really good tutorial on how to do this odd edge-case for serverless. And you go and you look at their Medium and they've got two followers on Medium, five followers on Twitter or something like that. And that to me, just seems unfair, right? I mean, they've written a really good piece and it's worth sharing right? And it needs to get out there. I don't have a huge audience. I know that. I mean I've got a good following on Twitter. I feel like a lot of my Twitter followers, we can have good conversations, which is what you want on Twitter.The newsletter has continued to grow. We've got a good listener base for this show here. So, I don't have a huge audience, but if I can share that audience with other people and get other people to the forefront, then that's important to me. And I love finding those people and those ideas that other people might not see because they're not looking for them. So, if I can be part of that and help share that, that to me, it's not only a responsibility, it's just it's incredibly rewarding. So ...Rebecca: Yeah, I have to ... I mean, it is your 100th episode, so hopefully I can give you some kudos, but if celebrating others' work is one of your main tenets, you nail it every time. So ...Jeremy: I appreciate that.Rebecca: Just wanted you to know that. So, that's sort of the Genesis of course, of both of these, right?Jeremy: Right.Rebecca: That underpins the foundational how to share both works or how to share others' work through different channels. I'm wondering how it transformed, there's this newsletter and then of course it also has this other component, which is Serverless Chats. And that moment when you were like, "All right, this newsletter, this narrative that I'm telling behind serverless, highlighting all of these different authors from all these different global spaces, I'm going to start ... You know what else I want to do? I don't have enough to do, I'm going to start a podcast." How did we get here?Jeremy: Well, so the funny thing is now that I think about it, I think it just goes back to this tenet of fairness, this idea where I was fortunate, and I was able to go down to New York City and go to Serverless Days New York in late 2018. I was able to ... Tom McLaughlin actually got me connected with a bunch of great people in Boston. I live just outside of Boston. We got connected with a bunch of great people. And we started the Serverless Days Boston for 2019. And we were on that committee. I started traveling and I was going to conferences and I was meeting people. I went to re:Invent in 2018, which I know a lot of people just don't have the opportunity to do. And the interesting thing was, is that I was pulling aside brilliant people either in the hallway at a conference or more likely for a very long, deep discussion that we would have about something at a pub in Northern Ireland or something like that, right?I mean, these were opportunities that I was getting that I was privileged enough to get. And I'm like, these are amazing conversations. Just things that, for me, I know changed the way I think. And one of the biggest things that I try to do is evolve my thinking. What I thought a year ago is probably not what I think now. Maybe call it flip-flopping, whatever you want to call it. But I think that evolving your thinking is the most progressive thing that you can do and starting to understand as you gain new perspectives. And I was talking to people that I never would have talked to if I was just sitting here in my home office or at the time, I mean, I was at another office, but still, I wasn't getting that context. I wasn't getting that experience. And I wasn't getting those stories that literally changed my mind and made me think about things differently.And so, here I was in this privileged position, being able to talk to these amazing people and in some cases funny, because they're celebrities in their own right, right? I mean, these are the people where other people think of them and it's almost like they're a celebrity. And these people, I think they deserve fame. Don't get me wrong. But like as someone who has been on that side of it as well, it's ... I don't know, it's weird. It's weird to have fans in a sense. I love, again, you can be my friend, you don't have to be my fan. But that's how I felt about ...Rebecca: I'm a fan of my friends.Jeremy: So, a fan and my friend. So, having talked to these other people and having these really deep conversations on serverless and go beyond serverless to me. Actually I had quite a few conversations with some people that have nothing to do with serverless. Actually, Peter Sbarski and I, every time we get together, we only talk about the value of going to college for some reason. I don't know why. It has usually nothing to do with serverless. So, I'm having these great conversations with these people and I'm like, "Wow, I wish I could share these. I wish other people could have this experience," because I can tell you right now, there's people who can't travel, especially a lot of people outside of the United States. They ... it's hard to travel to the United States sometimes.So, these conversations are going on and I thought to myself, I'm like, "Wouldn't it be great if we could just have these conversations and let other people hear them, hopefully without bar glasses clinking in the background. And so I said, "You know what? Let's just try it. Let's see what happens. I'll do a couple of episodes. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. If people are interested, they're interested." But that was the genesis of that, I mean, it just goes back to this idea where I felt a little selfish having conversations and not being able to share them with other people.Rebecca: It's the very Jeremy Daly tenet slogan, right? You got to share it. You got to share it ...Jeremy: Got to share it, right?Rebecca: The more he shares it, it celebrates it. I love that. I think you do ... Yeah, you do a great job giving a megaphone so that more people can hear. So, in case you need a reminder, actually, I'll ask you, I know what the answer is to this, but do you know the answer? What was your very first episode of Serverless Chats? What was the name, and how long did it last?Jeremy: What was the name?Rebecca: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.Jeremy: Oh, well I know ... Oh, I remember now. Well, I know it was Alex DeBrie. I absolutely know that it was Alex DeBrie because ...Rebecca: Correct on that.Jeremy: If nobody, if you do not know Alex DeBrie, not only is he an AWS data hero, as well as the author of The DynamoDB Book, but he's also like the most likable person on the planet too. It is really hard if you've ever met Alex, that you wouldn't remember him. Alex and I started communicating, again, we met through the serverless space. I think actually he was working at Serverless Inc. at the time when we first met. And I think I met him in person, finally met him in person at re:Invent 2018. But he and I have collaborated on a number of things and so forth. So, let me think what the name of it was. "Serverless Purity Versus Practicality" or something like that. Is that close?Rebecca: That's exactly what it was.Jeremy: Oh, all right. I nailed it. Nailed it. Yes!Rebecca: Wow. Well, it's a great title. And I think ...Jeremy: Don't ask me what episode number 27 was though, because no way I could tell you that.Rebecca: And just for fun, it was 34 minutes long and you released it on June 17th, 2019. So, you've come a long way in a year and a half. That's some kind of wildness. So it makes sense, like, "THE," capital, all caps, bold, italic, author for databases, Alex DeBrie. Makes sense why you selected him as your guest. I'm wondering if you remember any of the ... What do you remember most about that episode? What was it like planning it? What was the reception of it? Anything funny happened recording it or releasing it?Jeremy: Yeah, well, I mean, so the funny thing is that I was incredibly nervous. I still am, actually a lot of guests that I have, I'm still incredibly nervous when I'm about to do the actual interview. And I think it's partially because I want to do justice to the content that they're presenting and to their expertise. And I feel like there's a responsibility to them, but I also feel like the guests that I've had on, some of them are just so smart, and the things they say, just I'm in awe of some of the things that come out of these people's mouths. And I'm like, "This is amazing and people need to hear this." And so, I feel like we've had really good episodes and we've had some okay episodes, but I feel like I want to try to keep that level up so that they owe that to my listener to make sure that there is high quality episode that, high quality information that they're going to get out of that.But going back to the planning of the initial episodes, so I actually had six episodes recorded before I even released the first one. And the reason why I did that was because I said, "All right, there's no way that I can record an episode and then wait a week and then record another episode and wait a week." And I thought batching them would be a good idea. And so, very early on, I had Alex and I had Nitzan Shapira and I had Ran Ribenzaft and I had Marcia Villalba and I had Erik Peterson from Cloud Zero. And so, I had a whole bunch of these episodes and I reached out to I think, eight or nine people. And I said, "I'm doing this thing, would you be interested in it?" Whatever, and we did planning sessions, still a thing that I do today, it's still part of the process.So, whenever I have a guest on, if you are listening to an episode and you're like, "Wow, how did they just like keep the thing going ..." It's not scripted. I don't want people to think it's scripted, but it is, we do review the outline and we go through some talking points to make sure that again, the high-quality episode and that the guest says all the things that the guest wants to say. A lot of it is spontaneous, right? I mean, the language is spontaneous, but we do, we do try to plan these episodes ahead of time so that we make sure that again, we get the content out and we talk about all the things we want to talk about. But with Alex, it was funny.He was actually the first of the six episodes that I recorded, though. And I wasn't sure who I was going to do first, but I hadn't quite picked it yet, but I recorded with Alex first. And it was an easy, easy conversation. And the reason why it was an easy conversation was because we had talked a number of times, right? It was that in a pub, talking or whatever, and having that friendly chat. So, that was a pretty easy conversation. And I remember the first several conversations I had, I knew Nitzan very well. I knew Ran very well. I knew Erik very well. Erik helped plan Serverless Days Boston with me. And I had known Marcia very well. Marcia actually had interviewed me when we were in Vegas for re:Invent 2018.So, those were very comfortable conversations. And so, it actually was a lot easier to do, which probably gave me a false sense of security. I was like, "Wow, this was ... These came out pretty well." The conversations worked pretty well. And also it was super easy because I was just doing audio. And once you add the video component into it, it gets a little bit more complex. But yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's anything funny that happened during it, other than the fact that I mean, I was incredibly nervous when we recorded those, because I just didn't know what to expect. If anybody wants to know, "Hey, how do you just jump right into podcasting?" I didn't. I actually was planning on how can I record my voice? How can I get comfortable behind a microphone? And so, one of the things that I did was I started creating audio versions of my blog posts and posting them on SoundCloud.So, I did that for a couple of ... I'm sorry, a couple of blog posts that I did. And that just helped make me feel a bit more comfortable about being able to record and getting a little bit more comfortable, even though I still can't stand the sound of my own voice, but hopefully that doesn't bother other people.Rebecca: That is an amazing ... I think we so often talk about ideas around you know where you want to go and you have this vision and that's your goal. And it's a constant reminder to be like, "How do I make incremental steps to actually get to that goal?" And I love that as a life hack, like, "Hey, start with something you already know that you wrote and feel comfortable in and say it out loud and say it out loud again and say it out loud again." And you may never love your voice, but you will at least feel comfortable saying things out loud on a podcast.Jeremy: Right, right, right. I'm still working on the, "Ums" and, "Ahs." I still do that. And I don't edit those out. That's another thing too, actually, that one of the things I do want people to know about this podcast is these are authentic conversations, right? I am probably like ... I feel like I'm, I mean, the most authentic person that I know. I just want authenticity. I want that out of the guests. The idea of putting together an outline is just so that we can put together a high quality episode, but everything is authentic. And that's what I want out of people. I just want that authenticity, and one of the things that I felt kept that, was leaving in, "Ums" and, "Ahs," you know what I mean? It's just, it's one of those things where I know a lot of podcasts will edit those out and it sounds really polished and finished.Again, I mean, I figured if we can get the clinking glasses out from the background of a bar and just at least have the conversation that that's what I'm trying to achieve. And we do very little editing. We do cut things out here and there, especially if somebody makes a mistake or they want to start something over again, we will cut that out because we want, again, high quality episodes. But yeah, but authenticity is deeply important to me.Rebecca: Yeah, I think it probably certainly helps that neither of us are robots because robots wouldn't say, "Um" so many times. As I say, "Uh." So, let's talk about, Alex DeBrie was your first guest, but there's been a hundred episodes, right? So, from, I might say the best guest, as a hundredth episode guests, which is our very own Jeremy Daly, but let's go back to ...Jeremy: I appreciate that.Rebecca: Your guests, one to 99. And I mean, you've chatted with some of the most thoughtful, talented, Serverless builders and architects in the industry, and across coincident spaces like ML and Voice Technology, Chaos Engineering, databases. So, you started with Alex DeBrie and databases, and then I'm going to list off some names here, but there's so many more, right? But there's the Gunnar Grosches, and the Alexandria Abbasses, and Ajay Nair, and Angela Timofte, James Beswick, Chris Munns, Forrest Brazeal, Aleksandar Simovic, and Slobodan Stojanovic. Like there are just so many more. And I'm wondering if across those hundred conversations, or 99 plus your own today, if you had to distill those into two or three lessons, what have you learned that sticks with you? If there are emerging patterns or themes across these very divergent and convergent thinkers in the serverless space?Jeremy: Oh, that's a tough question.Rebecca: You're welcome.Jeremy: So, yeah, put me on the spot here. So, yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that I've, I've seen, no matter what it's been, whether it's ML or it's Chaos Engineering, or it's any of those other observability and things like that. I think the common thing that threads all of it is trying to solve problems and make people's lives easier. That every one of those solutions is like, and we always talk about abstractions and, and higher-level abstractions, and we no longer have to write ones and zeros on punch cards or whatever. We can write languages that either compile or interpret it or whatever. And then the cloud comes along and there's things we don't have to do anymore, that just get taken care of for us.And you keep building these higher level of abstractions. And I think that's a lot of what ... You've got this underlying concept of letting somebody else handle things for you. And then you've got this whole group of people that are coming at it from a number of different angles and saying, "Well, how will that apply to my use case?" And I think a lot of those, a lot of those things are very, very specific. I think things like the voice technology where it's like the fact that serverless powers voice technology is only interesting in the fact as to say that, the voice technology is probably the more interesting part, the fact that serverless powers it is just the fact that it's a really simple vehicle to do that. And basically removes this whole idea of saying I'm building voice technology, or I'm building a voice app, why do I need to worry about setting up servers and all this kind of stuff?It just takes that away. It takes that out of the equation. And I think that's the perfect idea of saying, "How can you take your use case, fit serverless in there and apply it in a way that gets rid of all that extra overhead that you shouldn't have to worry about." And the same thing is true of machine learning. And I mean, and SageMaker, and things like that. Yeah, you're still running instances of it, or you still have to do some of these things, but now there's like SageMaker endpoints and some other things that are happening. So, it's moving in that direction as well. But then you have those really high level services like NLU API from IBM, which is the Watson Natural Language Processing.You've got AP recognition, you've got the vision API, you've got sentiment analysis through all these different things. So, you've got a lot of different services that are very specific to machine learning and solving a discrete problem there. But then basically relying on serverless or at least presenting it in a way that's serverless, where you don't have to worry about it, right? You don't have to run all of these Jupiter notebooks and things like that, to do machine learning for a lot of cases. This is one of the things I talk about with Alexandra Abbas, was that these higher level APIs are just taking a lot of that responsibility or a lot of that heavy lifting off of your plate and allowing you to really come down and focus on the things that you're doing.So, going back to that, I do think that serverless, that the common theme that I see is that this idea of worrying about servers and worrying about patching things and worrying about networking, all that stuff. For so many people now, that's just not even a concern. They didn't even think about it. And that's amazing to think of, compute ... Or data, or networking as a utility that is now just available to us, right? And I mean, again, going back to my roots, taking it for granted is something that I think a lot of people do, but I think that's also maybe a good thing, right? Just don't think about it. I mean, there are people who, they're still going to be engineers and people who are sitting in the data center somewhere and racking servers and doing it, that's going to be forever, right?But for the things that you're trying to build, that's unimportant to you. That is the furthest from your concern. You want to focus on the problem that you're trying to solve. And so I think that, that's a lot of what I've seen from talking to people is that they are literally trying to figure out, "Okay, how do I take what I'm doing, my use case, my problem, how do I take that to the next level, by being able to spend my cycles thinking about that as opposed to how I'm going to serve it up to people?"Rebecca: Yeah, I think it's the mantra, right, of simplify, simplify, simplify, or maybe even to credit Bruce Lee, be like water. You're like, "How do I be like water in this instance?" Well, it's not to be setting up servers, it's to be doing what I like to be doing. So, you've interviewed these incredible folks. Is there anyone left on your list? I'm sure there ... I mean, I know that you have a large list. Is there a few key folks where you're like, "If this is the moment I'm going to ask them, I'm going to say on the hundredth episode, 'Dear so-and-so, I would love to interview you for Serverless Chats.'" Who are you asking?Jeremy: So, this is something that, again, we have a stretch list of guests that we attempt to reach out to every once in a while just to say, "Hey, if we get them, we get them." But so, I have a long list of people that I would absolutely love to talk to. I think number one on my list is certainly Werner Vogels. I mean, I would love to talk to Dr. Vogels about a number of things, and maybe even beyond serverless, I'm just really interested. More so from a curiosity standpoint of like, "Just how do you keep that in your head?" That vision of where it's going. And I'd love to drill down more into the vision because I do feel like there's a marketing aspect of it, that's pushing on him of like, "Here's what we have to focus on because of market adoption and so forth. And even though the technology, you want to move into a certain way," I'd be really interesting to talk to him about that.And I'd love to talk to him more too about developer experience and so forth, because one of the things that I love about AWS is that it gives you so many primitives, but at the same time, the thing I hate about AWS is it gives you so many primitives. So, you have to think about 800 services, I know it's not that many, but like, what is it? 200 services, something like that, that all need to kind of connect together. And I love that there's that diversity in those capabilities, it's just from a developer standpoint, it's really hard to choose which ones you're supposed to use, especially when several services overlap. So, I'm just curious. I mean, I'd love to talk to him about that and see what the vision is in terms of, is that the idea, just to be a salad bar, to be the Golden Corral of cloud services, I guess, right?Where you can choose whatever you want and probably take too much and then not use a lot of it. But I don't know if that's part of the strategy, but I think there's some interesting questions, could dig in there. Another person from AWS that I actually want to talk to, and I haven't reached out to her yet just because, I don't know, I just haven't reached out to her yet, but is Brigid Johnson. She is like an IAM expert. And I saw her speak at re:Inforce 2019, it must have been 2019 in Boston. And it was like she was speaking a different language, but she knew IAM so well, and I am not a fan of IAM. I mean, I'm a fan of it in the sense that it's necessary and it's great, but I can't wrap my head around so many different things about it. It's such a ...It's an ongoing learning process and when it comes to things like being able to use tags to elevate permissions. Just crazy things like that. Anyways, I would love to have a conversation with her because I'd really like to dig down into sort of, what is the essence of IAM? What are the things that you really have to think about with least permission? Especially applying it to serverless services and so forth. And maybe have her help me figure out how to do some of the cross role IAM things that I'm trying to do. Certainly would love to speak to Jeff Barr. I did meet Jeff briefly. We talked for a minute, but I would love to chat with him.I think he sets a shining example of what a developer advocate is. Just the way that ... First of all, he's probably the only person alive who knows every service at AWS and has actually tried it because he writes all those blog posts about it. So that would just be great to pick his brain on that stuff. Also, Adrian Cockcroft would be another great person to talk to. Just this idea of what he's done with microservices and thinking about the role, his role with Netflix and some of those other things and how all that kind of came together, I think would be a really interesting conversation. I know I've seen this in so many of his presentations where he's talked about the objections, what were the objections of Lambda and how have you solved those objections? And here's the things that we've done.And again, the methodology of that would be really interesting to know. There's a couple of other people too. Oh, Sam Newman who wrote Building Microservices, that was my Bible for quite some time. I had it on my iPad and had a whole bunch of bookmarks and things like that. And if anybody wants to know, one of my most popular posts that I've ever written was the ... I think it was ... What is it? 16, 17 architectural patterns for serverless or serverless microservice patterns on AWS. Can't even remember the name of my own posts. But that post was very, very popular. And that even was ... I know Matt Coulter who did the CDK. He's done the whole CDK ... What the heck was that? The CDKpatterns.com. That was one of the things where he said that that was instrumental for him in seeing those patterns and being able to use those patterns and so forth.If anybody wants to know, a lot of those patterns and those ideas and those ... The sort of the confidence that I had with presenting those patterns, a lot of that came from Sam Newman's work in his Building Microservices book. So again, credit where credit is due. And I think that that would be a really fascinating conversation. And then Simon Wardley, I would love to talk to. I'd actually love to ... I actually talked to ... I met Lin Clark in Vegas as well. She was instrumental with the WebAssembly stuff, and I'd love to talk to her. Merritt Baer. There's just so many people. I'm probably just naming too many people now. But there are a lot of people that I would love to have a chat with and just pick their brain.And also, one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot on the show as well, is the term "serverless." Good or bad for some people. Some of the conversations we have go outside of serverless a little bit, right? There's sort of peripheral to it. I think that a lot of things are peripheral to serverless now. And there are a lot of conversations to be had. People who were building with serverless. Actually real-world examples.One of the things I love hearing was Yan Cui's "Real World Serverless" podcast where he actually talks to people who are building serverless things and building them in their organizations. That is super interesting to me. And I would actually love to have some of those conversations here as well. So if anyone's listening and you have a really interesting story to tell about serverless or something peripheral to serverless please reach out and send me a message and I'd be happy to talk to you.Rebecca: Well, good news is, it sounds like A, we have at least ... You've got at least another a hundred episodes planned out already.Jeremy: Most likely. Yeah.Rebecca: And B, what a testament to Sam Newman. That's pretty great when your work is referred to as the Bible by someone. As far as in terms of a tome, a treasure trove of perhaps learnings or parables or teachings. I ... And wow, what a list of other folks, especially AWS power ... Actually, not AWS powerhouses. Powerhouses who happened to work at AWS. And I think have paved the way for a ton of ways of thinking and even communicating. Right? So I think Jeff Barr, as far as setting the bar, raising the bar if you will. For how to teach others and not be so high-level, or high-level enough where you can follow along with him, right? Not so high-level where it feels like you can't achieve what he's showing other people how to do.Jeremy: Right. And I just want to comment on the Jeff Barr thing. Yeah.Rebecca: Of course.Jeremy: Because again, I actually ... That's my point. That's one of the reasons why I love what he does and he's so perfect for that position because he's relatable and he presents things in a way that isn't like, "Oh, well, yeah, of course, this is how you do this." I mean, it's not that way. It's always presented in a way to make it accessible. And even for services that I'm not interested in, that I know that I probably will never use, I generally will read Jeff's post because I feel it gives me a good overview, right?Rebecca: Right.Jeremy: It just gives me a good overview to understand whether or not that service is even worth looking at. And that's certainly something I don't get from reading the documentation.Rebecca: Right. He's inviting you to come with him and understanding this, which is so neat. So I think ... I bet we should ... I know that we can find all these twitter handles for these folks and put them in the show notes. And I'm especially ... I'm just going to say here that Werner Vogels's twitter handle is @Werner. So maybe for your hundredth, all the listeners, everyone listening to this, we can say, "Hey, @Werner, I heard that you're the number one guest that Jeremy Daly would like to interview." And I think if we get enough folks saying that to @Werner ... Did I say that @Werner, just @Werner?Jeremy: I think you did.Rebecca: Anyone if you can hear it.Jeremy: Now listen, he did retweet my serverless musical that I did. So ...Rebecca: That's right.Jeremy: I'm sort of on his radar maybe.Rebecca: Yeah. And honestly, he loves serverless, especially with the number of customers and the types of customers and ... that are doing incredible things with it. So I think we've got a chance, Jeremy. I really do. That's what I'm trying to say.Jeremy: That's good to know. You're welcome anytime. He's welcome anytime.Rebecca: Do we say that @Werner, you are welcome anytime. Right. So let's go back to the genesis, not necessarily the genesis of the concept, right? But the genesis of the technology that spurred all of these other technologies, which is AWS Lambda. And so what ... I don't think we'd be having these conversations, right, if AWS Lambda was not released in late 2014, and then when GA I believe in 2015.Jeremy: Right.Rebecca: And so subsequently the serverless paradigm was thrust into the spotlight. And that seems like eons ago, but also three minutes ago.Jeremy: Right.Rebecca: And so I'm wondering ... Let's talk about its evolution a bit and a bit of how if you've been following it for this long and building it for this long, you've covered topics from serverless CI/CD pipelines, observability. We already talked about how it's impacted voice technologies or how it's made it easy. You can build voice technology without having to care about what that technology is running on.Jeremy: Right.Rebecca: You've even talked about things like the future and climate change and how it relates to serverless. So some of those sort of related conversations that you were just talking about wanting to have or having had with previous guests. So as a host who thinks about these topics every day, I'm wondering if there's a topic that serverless hasn't touched yet or one that you hope it will soon. Those types of themes, those threads that you want to pull in the next 100 episodes.Jeremy: That's another tough question. Wow. You got good questions.Rebecca: That's what I said. Heavy hitters. I told you I'd be bringing it.Jeremy: All right. Well, I appreciate that. So that's actually a really good question. I think the evolution of serverless has seen its ups and downs. I think one of the nice things is you look at something like serverless that was so constrained when it first started. And it still has constraints, which are good. But it ... Those constraints get lifted. We just talked about Adrian's talks about how it's like, "Well, I can't do this, or I can't do that." And then like, "Okay, we'll add some feature that you can do that and you can do that." And I think that for the most part, and I won't call it anything specific, but I think for the most part that the evolution of serverless and the evolution of Lambda and what it can do has been thoughtful. And by that I mean that it was sort of like, how do we evolve this into a way that doesn't create too much complexity and still sort of holds true to the serverless ethos of sort of being fairly easy or just writing code.And then, but still evolve it to open up these other use cases and edge cases. And I think that for the most part, that it has held true to that, that it has been mostly, I guess, a smooth ride. There are several examples though, where it didn't. And I said I wasn't going to call anything out, but I'm going to call this out. I think RDS proxy wasn't great. I think it works really well, but I don't think that's the solution to the problem. And it's a band-aid. And it works really well, and congrats to the engineers who did it. I think there's a story about how two different teams were trying to build it at the same time actually. But either way, I look at that and I say, "That's a good solution to the problem, but it's not the solution to the problem."And so I think serverless has stumbled in a number of ways to do that. I also feel EFS integration is super helpful, but I'm not sure that's the ultimate goal to share ... The best way to share state. But regardless, there are a whole bunch of things that we still need to do with serverless. And a whole bunch of things that we still need to add and we need to build, and we need to figure out better ways to do maybe. But I think in terms of something that doesn't get talked about a lot, is the developer experience of serverless. And that is, again I'm not trying to pitch anything here. But that's literally what I'm trying to work on right now in my current role, is just that that developer experience of serverless, even though there was this thoughtful approach to adding things, to try to check those things off the list, to say that it can't do this, so we're going to make it be able to do that by adding X, Y, and Z.As amazing as that has been, that has added layers and layers of complexity. And I'll go back way, way back to 1997 in my dorm room. CGI-bins, if people are not familiar with those, essentially just running on a Linux server, it was a way that it would essentially run a Perl script or other types of scripts. And it was essentially like you're running PHP or you're running Node, or you're running Ruby or whatever it was. So it would run a programming language for you, run a script and then serve that information back. And of course, you had to actually know ins and outs, inputs and outputs. It was more complex than it is now.But anyways, the point is that back then though, once you had the script written. All you had to do is ... There's a thing called FTP, which I'm sure some people don't even know what that is anymore. File transfer protocol, where you would basically say, take this file from my local machine and put it on this server, which is a remote machine. And you would do that. And the second you did that, magically it was updated and you had this thing happening. And I remember there were a lot of jokes way back in the early, probably 2017, 2018, that serverless was like the new CGI-bin or something like that. But more as a criticism of it, right? Or it's just CGI-bins reborn, whatever. And I actually liked that comparison. I felt, you know what? I remember the days where I just wrote code and I just put it to some other server where somebody was dealing with it, and I didn't even have to think about that stuff.We're a long way from that now. But that's how serverless felt to me, one of the first times that I started interacting with it. And I felt there was something there, that was something special about it. And I also felt the constraints of serverless, especially the idea of not having state. People rely on things because they're there. But when you don't have something and you're forced to think differently and to make a change or find a way to work around it. Sometimes workarounds, turn into best practices. And that's one of the things that I saw with serverless. Where people were figuring out pretty quickly, how to build applications without state. And then I think the problem is that you had a lot of people who came along, who were maybe big customers of AWS. I don't know.I'm not going to say that you might be influenced by large customers. I know lots of places are. That said, "We need this." And maybe your ... The will gets bent, right. Because you just... you can only fight gravity for so long. And so those are the kinds of things where I feel some of the stuff has been patchwork and those patchwork things haven't ruined serverless. It's still amazing. It's still awesome what you can do within the course. We're still really just focusing on fast here, with everything else that's built. With all the APIs and so forth and everything else that's serverless in the full-service ecosystem. There's still a lot of amazing things there. But I do feel we've become so complex with building serverless applications, that you can't ... the Hello World is super easy, but if you're trying to build an actual application, it's a whole new mindset.You've got to learn a whole bunch of new things. And not only that, but you have to learn the cloud. You have to learn all the details of the cloud, right? You need to know all these different things. You need to know cloud formation or serverless framework or SAM or something like that, in order to get the stuff into the cloud. You need to understand the infrastructure that you're working with. You may not need to manage it, but you still have to understand it. You need to know what its limitations are. You need to know how it connects. You need to know what the failover states are like.There's so many things that you need to know. And to me, that's a burden. And that's adding new types of undifferentiated heavy-lifting that shouldn't be there. And that's the conversation that I would like to have continuing to move forward is, how do you go back to a developer experience where you're saying you're taking away all this stuff. And again, to call out Werner again, he constantly says serverless is about writing code, but ask anybody who builds serverless applications. You're doing a lot more than writing code right now. And I would love to see us bring the conversation back to how do we get back there?Rebecca: Yeah. I think it kind of goes back to ... You and I have talked about this notion of an ode to simplicity. And it's sort of what you want to write into your ode, right? If we're going to have an ode to simplicity, how do we make sure that we keep the simplicity inside of the ode?Jeremy: Right.Rebecca:So I've got ... I don't know if you've seen these.Jeremy: I don't know.Rebecca: But before I get to some wrap-up questions more from the brainwaves of Jeremy Daly, I don't want to forget to call out some long-time listener questions. And they wrote in a via Twitter and they wanted to perhaps pick your brain on a few things.Jeremy: Okay.Rebecca: So I don't know if you're ready for this.Jeremy: A-M-A. A-M-A.Rebecca: I don't know if you've seen these. Yeah, these are going to put you in the ...Jeremy: A-M-A-M. Wait, A-M-A-A? Asked me almost anything? No, go ahead. Ask me anything.Rebecca: A-M-A-A. A-M-J. No. Anyway, we got it. Ask Jeremy almost anything.Jeremy: There you go.Rebecca: So there's just three to tackle for today's episode that I'm going to lob at you. One is from Ken Collins. "What will it take to get you back to a relational database of Lambda?"Jeremy: Ooh, I'm going to tell you right now. And without a doubt, Aurora Serverless v2. I played around with that right after re:Invent 2000. What was it? 20. Yeah. Just came out, right? I'm trying to remember what year it is at this point.Rebecca: Yes. Indeed.Jeremy: When that just ... Right when that came out. And I had spent a lot of time with Aurora Serverless v1, I guess if you want to call it that. I spent a lot of time with it. I used it on a couple of different projects. I had a lot of really good success with it. I had the same pains as everybody else did when it came to scaling and just the slowness of the scaling and then ... And some of the step-downs and some of those things. There were certainly problems with it. But v2 just the early, early preview version of v2 was ... It was just a marvel of engineering. And the way that it worked was just ... It was absolutely fascinating.And I know it's getting ready or it's getting close, I think, to being GA. And when that becomes GA, I think I will have a new outlook on whether or not I can fit RDS into my applications. I will say though. Okay. I will say, I don't think that transactional applications should be using relational databases though. One of the things that was sort of a nice thing about moving to serverless, speak

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Rebecca: Hey, Todd, I'm going and looking for a gym. Actually, I hear you've joined a gym. Which one?Todd: Yeah, actually, there's a real nice gym downtown. It just opened about a month ago. Maybe two months ago. It's really nice.Rebecca: OK, what's the name of it?Todd: The name is Fitness Club.Rebecca: Good name.Todd: Yeah, so, and it's pretty much has everything. I mean it has, you know, free weights, of course, and it has all the latest machines.Rebecca: Ah, good.Todd: Actually some of the machines are kind of tricky,I really don't know how they work yet. I'll have to ask the staff.Rebecca: So it's more than a treadmill? It's a whole big machine that you don't know how what to do?Todd: Exactly. I'm actually afraid to get on the thing. I don't want to break it, you know.Rebecca: Is there people that can help you?Todd: Yeah, actually, that's part of the problem is that you can't use any of the equipment unless you get trained for it. They're really specific, so you have to have guidance. It's kind of annoying actually because, you know, everything... they have a system and they know based on, you know, your membership what machines you can use and what you can't.Rebecca: OK. But what happens if, like I've been to a gym before do I still need to get the training before I start?Todd: Yeah. That's how I was. I told them that I, you know, had been lifting weights for a while and they didn't care, so you have to get certified to use all the equipment. It's kind of inconvenient.Rebecca: OK, so, do they have classes though?Todd: They do. Actually, they pretty much have everything. They have yoga, kick boxing, spin classes, dancing, so the schedule looks pretty diverse.Rebecca: Oh, that's good. I do prefer classes than weights.Todd: Only one thing that's bad about the classes though is that cause it's new, and it's a new gym and there's lots of people and it looks like it's pretty crowded in there, I think you have to reserve what classes you're going to join.Rebecca: Oh, really.Todd: Yeah, isn't that terrible.Rebecca: Oh, geez, I usually just like to walk in.Todd: Right, right, right.Rebecca: Yeah, when you feel like going to the gym, you go.Todd: Right, right. One thing that is nice though is they have an actual gym floor, like a basketball gym, so you can play basketball. They have volleyball tournaments, so I mean, if you like more traditional sport, like tennis, they also have tennis courts. You can do that as well.Rebecca: Oh, that's good. I do like tennis. I love tennis actually.Todd: Well, actually, if you're interested I'd be glad to take you down to the gym and show you. I think you get a free trial workout.Rebecca: OH, that's good. That's good. So how much would it cost per month?Todd: Well, 'cause it's new it's kind of expensive. It costs about fifty dollars a month.Rebecca: Oh, wow!Todd: Yeah, but if you buy a membership, a two-year membership, you can get a two-year membership, I think for eight hundred dollars, so it saves you some money so it's kind of reasonable.Rebecca: And I suppose if you pay for two, you know you have to go then.Todd: Right. Right. It's eight hundred dollars for two years, five hundred dollars for one year, or fifty dollars a month.Rebecca: OK, yeah.Todd: Oh, one thing that's really cool too is that they have a social center. They have like an area where you can get like fruit drinks and coffee and stuff like that and just hang out. It's quite nice.Rebecca: That's good. So after the workout, go and have coffee.Todd: Right. Right.Rebecca: Lovely. OK. So, yeah, I would love to come and have a look at it.Todd: OK, well next week, anytime, just give me a call. I'll take you there.Rebecca: Alright. Great. Thanks.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Rebecca: Hey, Todd, I'm going and looking for a gym. Actually, I hear you've joined a gym. Which one?Todd: Yeah, actually, there's a real nice gym downtown. It just opened about a month ago. Maybe two months ago. It's really nice.Rebecca: OK, what's the name of it?Todd: The name is Fitness Club.Rebecca: Good name.Todd: Yeah, so, and it's pretty much has everything. I mean it has, you know, free weights, of course, and it has all the latest machines.Rebecca: Ah, good.Todd: Actually some of the machines are kind of tricky,I really don't know how they work yet. I'll have to ask the staff.Rebecca: So it's more than a treadmill? It's a whole big machine that you don't know how what to do?Todd: Exactly. I'm actually afraid to get on the thing. I don't want to break it, you know.Rebecca: Is there people that can help you?Todd: Yeah, actually, that's part of the problem is that you can't use any of the equipment unless you get trained for it. They're really specific, so you have to have guidance. It's kind of annoying actually because, you know, everything... they have a system and they know based on, you know, your membership what machines you can use and what you can't.Rebecca: OK. But what happens if, like I've been to a gym before do I still need to get the training before I start?Todd: Yeah. That's how I was. I told them that I, you know, had been lifting weights for a while and they didn't care, so you have to get certified to use all the equipment. It's kind of inconvenient.Rebecca: OK, so, do they have classes though?Todd: They do. Actually, they pretty much have everything. They have yoga, kick boxing, spin classes, dancing, so the schedule looks pretty diverse.Rebecca: Oh, that's good. I do prefer classes than weights.Todd: Only one thing that's bad about the classes though is that cause it's new, and it's a new gym and there's lots of people and it looks like it's pretty crowded in there, I think you have to reserve what classes you're going to join.Rebecca: Oh, really.Todd: Yeah, isn't that terrible.Rebecca: Oh, geez, I usually just like to walk in.Todd: Right, right, right.Rebecca: Yeah, when you feel like going to the gym, you go.Todd: Right, right. One thing that is nice though is they have an actual gym floor, like a basketball gym, so you can play basketball. They have volleyball tournaments, so I mean, if you like more traditional sport, like tennis, they also have tennis courts. You can do that as well.Rebecca: Oh, that's good. I do like tennis. I love tennis actually.Todd: Well, actually, if you're interested I'd be glad to take you down to the gym and show you. I think you get a free trial workout.Rebecca: OH, that's good. That's good. So how much would it cost per month?Todd: Well, 'cause it's new it's kind of expensive. It costs about fifty dollars a month.Rebecca: Oh, wow!Todd: Yeah, but if you buy a membership, a two-year membership, you can get a two-year membership, I think for eight hundred dollars, so it saves you some money so it's kind of reasonable.Rebecca: And I suppose if you pay for two, you know you have to go then.Todd: Right. Right. It's eight hundred dollars for two years, five hundred dollars for one year, or fifty dollars a month.Rebecca: OK, yeah.Todd: Oh, one thing that's really cool too is that they have a social center. They have like an area where you can get like fruit drinks and coffee and stuff like that and just hang out. It's quite nice.Rebecca: That's good. So after the workout, go and have coffee.Todd: Right. Right.Rebecca: Lovely. OK. So, yeah, I would love to come and have a look at it.Todd: OK, well next week, anytime, just give me a call. I'll take you there.Rebecca: Alright. Great. Thanks.

Caroline:Hi, Rebecca. Thank you so much for joining us today at the vipHome Podcast. We're going to talk about realty, a little bit of your entrepreneurial side, and just learn a little bit more about you and how you've been so successful in the industry. So thank you so much for joining us.Rebecca:Awesome. Thanks for having me, I'm excited to be here.Caroline:So I guess we should start with a little bit about you, how you got started in the industry and where you've seen the most success to date.Rebecca:Yeah, so I just celebrated my five year anniversary in real estate, which it doesn't feel like five years. It feels like maybe three.Caroline:That's so exciting though, what an accomplishment.Rebecca:Yeah, and I'm excited about it. It's been a crazy five years. I never had any intention of getting into real estate. I went to college to be a high school math teacher, and I love math to this day. I'm such a math nerd. I love calculus and the whole thing. And then I just realized that teaching math, high school math wasn't for me. So after I got out of college, I worked, I was a store manager for a while. And then I worked at an insurance company as an account manager for a couple of months. And that was not me at all. I took a couple months off and my mom actually suggested I get into real estate.Rebecca:I had lunch with her one day and she was like, I think you might want to consider it. And I'm like, the commission is kind of freaking me out a little bit. And, I had watched my fair share of HGTV, which is about the extent of my knowledge about real estate. But, I got in touch with my broker who I've been with since day one with McDowell homes, which is an independent company here in Cleveland. And I heard about her business and the real estate world. And I just took a leap of faith. I jumped right in and that was kind of it. So I don't have any really fun stories about how I got started. I don't have any family in the business. I didn't have any agent friends that I knew. I kind of just had to figure it out, but it's worked out. It's been really fun. I can't see myself doing anything else, so.Caroline:That's so cool. I started in finance as well. I was a finance major and went into analyst work and all of that. And here I am in partnerships. So I feel when you think something's right and then you're like, maybe it's not. So, that's wonderful. So here at vipHomeLink, we are really focusing... I mean, our app as a whole is about home management, making home ownership easier. But with that, we're also looking from, our consumers and our customers to make sure that they're always sort of the forefront of what we're working towards in our goals. Can you share a little bit about how your clients, I mean, obviously selling homes, you need clients, but what that relationship is like and how you kind of keep that relationship over the course of time?Rebecca:Yeah. With my team, it's really important that we essentially just treat our clients as our friends and, they become our friends to where we spend a lot of time with them. We chat with them. So keeping that relationship alive, and that's from day one. We might meet a client from day one and we treat them as a friend. And so, that relationship is really important with my team. It's five star service from start to finish, and chatting with them, and we continuously spend time with them. We do pop buys, social media is really huge in keeping in touch with them, once things are over.Rebecca:And providing some sort of value to them from day one, even after the transaction, whether it's real estate related value, whether it's just, anything. Anything that they need, we want to be a resource and we want to be a friend. And so I really make sure that I'm doing that and my agents are doing that too. And so that's why they feel comfortable referring us other business or doing a second or third transaction with us, because we're able to provide that value and we treat them more as friends. It's not just about real estate, especially with this whole pandemic, we've reached out and said, how can we help you? It's not about real estate needs. It's just about how can we help you, whatever it is. So we're really-Caroline:Yeah. I feel like when we just hopped on the phone a few weeks ago at this point, I was like, wow, she is so nice. I would want to work with you. So, I mean, I definitely see the friendly side to you and to your success. My fiance and I are actually looking to buy a house, we're trying to figure out what town to go in and anything like that. Do have any, I mean, I know Cleveland is different than New Jersey, but do you have like tips for first time home buyers or suggestions that you kind of share with them to make their home buying experience a little bit easier?Rebecca:Yeah. Obviously as a new home buyer, it's very intimidating. You're making a very large purchase, sometimes the biggest purchase you'll ever make, right? And so, it's really intimidating, you kind of sign away everything, all your very personal information you're giving and taking that leap of faith into home ownership.Rebecca:And so we really try to navigate each step of the transaction from the preapproval process to the home searching process. We hold your hand every step of the way, as far as all of our clients, whether they're a first time buyer or maybe they've been around the block when purchasing homes, or maybe they haven't purchased a house in 10 years and they aren't familiar with the process right now. We navigate everything from start to finish with them so that they don't feel like they are left in the dark.Rebecca:Any questions, we're always available. We have our phone all the time. And I think that's really important because if you don't have that open communication, your client is going to feel alone. And it's very scary at times, and so, really navigating every step of the transaction, even just if they're panicked a little bit and just talking to them as a friend, like I said, even just, it's going to be okay, let's talk about it, let's go grab a coffee and, whatever. Just to kind of ease their mind a little bit is... And, I didn't realize what it was like until I bought my first house. And I was like, oh my gosh. And so it's really helpful to kind of go through that personally, just to be able to understand what they're going through and really be able to hold their hand.Caroline:Yeah. I think that's so helpful. We put two offers in on a house, or two separate houses and they both went into bidding wars, and we ended up not getting either of them, which is fine. I mean, whatever, a little sad, but our realtor was such a support during that, because they were like, you don't have kids, you're not trying to get your kids into a school system before September. And I have to say, it was such a confidence booster for me, knowing that it wasn't me who lost the house. It was just the nature of the industry. So I give you guys so much credit because, I mean, I'm personable, but I don't think I could be as supportive as somebody whose like, oh, you lost this house, but, we will find you a new one.Caroline:I think that would be, so it's definitely a talent that you have. So, I found you on social media and we sort of got to talking that way. Can you share a little bit about how social has encouraged your business and kind of made you stand out a little bit? I'm sure in Cleveland, if people search you, you have a huge Instagram following, and can you share a little bit about how, A, that has changed, I guess five years, maybe it hasn't changed that much, but how you see that maybe growing in the future?Rebecca:Yeah, absolutely. So, basically how I got started, my first year in the business, I had a pretty solid first year. I was rookie of the year at my company. I had a decent amount of sales, but I was still obviously trying to navigate, figure it out. I was going to listing appointments, buyer consultations up against agents that have been around for 15 plus years. They were a lot older than I was. I got my license at 24, I'm 29 now. And I really realized pretty quickly that, even though I was connecting with the clients and, getting the sales, I still needed to figure out something longterm that was going to work for me, that was going to make me stand out.Rebecca:And so when I started the Instagram, it was a hobby. I had really no intention of making it what it's become today. I love real estate obviously, and I love photography on the side. So it was kind of the perfect place for me to share my love for both of those. And so while I didn't have any intention of making it any real sort of impact for my business, I realized as I was growing the Instagram and spending time on it, that that was the Avenue I was kind of looking for, right? To stand out amongst these agents that were going up, they had big book of business behind them, and I really didn't. So as I realized, that was the platform I was looking for. I know social media, I was able to share things, and things about my business, things about my personal life.Rebecca:I started utilizing that more and more. And so now majority, almost all of my business comes from there. A lot of the speaking activities and things like that, I own a speaking consulting business that I launched last year. So, a lot of that stuff comes from the Instagram to referral business from other agents, not agents on my team. I met them from Instagram, builders, developers, I have relationships with are from Instagram too. So, I do spend more time on that because it really is a majority of my business.Caroline:That's really cool. Can you tell us a little bit about, you said you had a speaking engagement service. I think I got it wrong, but can you share a little bit about that too, and how that kind of, it keeps you on top of your game for a realtor and, maybe it's a passion, but can you share a little bit more about that?Rebecca:Yeah, absolutely. So I launched my own speaking consulting business last year at the beginning of the year, it's [inaudible 00:09:46] Seminars and Consulting. So, I really never, ever thought I would have a... Own a business where I am publicly speaking in front of large crowds. I took a public speaking course in college as a core class. I don't even know how I passed it, because I got in front of those people and just was freaking out. I didn't know what to say. So it was really unintentional. I started getting asked to speak at conferences and things about Instagram for your real estate business. The first one I ever, I traveled to New York and I got, it was a paid speaking engagement. I did two Instagram classes while was there, and I felt like I had to take this opportunity. They were paying for me to go, they were paying for my travel.Rebecca:They were giving me a fee too, and it was a great opportunity to get in front of a ton of agents, and kind of share my knowledge about Instagram and building a business through social media. So I had a really successful first trip, and then when I shared that online, I got asked to go to another trip and then another trip. And it was more and more to where it just made sense for me to launch a business. And so now I travel, I mean, not right now, obviously with everything kind of going on, but last year I did a lot of traveling. I went to LA to speak, Key West Florida, I was in Oklahoma. I mean, I was in a lot of different places to speak about utilizing social media for your real estate business. And some other things mixed in there too.Rebecca:That's not the only thing that I speak about. And then this year, I had a lot of trips planned, I've done all of them virtually thus far, but I love that side of it. It's fun. I love teaching agents. This is just, it's a tough business. There's an 80% failure rate for first year agents. And it is, yeah, it is a hard business to get into. And if you don't bust your butt and hustle, it's really hard. And so I love being able to teach other people how they can take their businesses to the next level. And then the consulting side of it is just a one on one with a client. If a realtor comes to me and they say, I want one on one help from you, to help build my social profile or whatnot, then I work with them one on one to help their businesses grow.Caroline:You are a woman of many talents, that is so impressive. How do you think... Sorry, how do you think social media and the pictures that you post kind of influences people to engage with you? I mean, there's so many accounts out there nowadays and people, and not every house is so Instagram ready, but you can't necessarily just post your good listings versus you're not as good listings. So how do you think the power of a photo really changes from photo to photo?Rebecca:Yeah, that's a great question. So this was something I realized kind of earlier... Well, I guess it took me a little bit to realize this, but when I first started the account, I was just posting house, house, listing, sale, inspection, just straight up houses, basically what you kind of expect from a realtor. And then when I started sprinkling in a little more personal, or not necessarily personal, but other things in there, I started realizing that my engagement levels were higher on those types of posts. People know that I'm a realtor, they expect me to be selling houses, but they want to know the other aspects of my life and my business. And especially through social media, that is a place for you to show who you really are and connect with people personally, because my goal on there is for people to get to know me and my personality so that they trust me enough to reach out to me, to want help with real estate.Rebecca:And so now I share, I really never share my sales. I might share a couple of them on my Instagram story per se. I'll sprinkle my listings in here or there, but it's not about that. I now share stuff that's more personal to me. My followers, I know love my travels and that's something that's really important to me and I love doing, so I share a lot of that. I share a lot of behind the scenes stuff for people to get to know me, anyone that knows me knows that I am a big coffee drinker. I love my coffee. And people know that from following me on social media. In fact, one of the conferences I went to at the end of last year, I was back in New York speaking. And I had two sessions, and in between the sessions, three different realtors, who'd been falling in Instagram, brought me coffee.Rebecca:And I had one really dark one, here's one with a lot of creamer in it, because they knew without even getting to talk to me in person, they knew from my social that I love coffee. And so it's a really great place for you to share more about you personally. I think some agents kind of drop the ball with that when they're just sharing houses or they're just sharing home inspiration or things like that, because you don't really get to show your true personality and who you are. But it is important to share a mix of different things on there, so you can connect with different types of people.Caroline:Yeah, definitely. I feel like I've done a similar reach out that we, how we got connected, similarly with other agents and a lot of them are so focused, which is great. I mean, it's their job on selling homes and making sure that what they're selling is out there, but you definitely see sort of a staleness in that sort of relationship with them because that's their only focus. And I feel like it's such a common question in a job interview, be like, what do you do outside of work? I think that sort of carries over to when you're posting on Instagram as well. So I mean, nowadays with COVID and sort of this pandemic, things are more virtual. Can you share a little bit about how that's affected your business and how you've kind of transitioned into that sort of house selling mode?Rebecca:Yeah. To be honest, when we all were needed to be quarantined at home and things really kind of started to changing, my business and my team's business didn't really shift where it was necessarily coming from, because the majority of that was already coming from social media anyways. In fact, when things shifted, our business that actually got busier because more people are online, right? They're sitting at home, they might not be working, they're scrolling their phone, they're scrolling Instagram, they're scrolling Facebook. And so there were more people. And so we shifted obviously how we were doing things, virtual presentations, all electronic signing versus maybe before it was, some electronic signing.Rebecca:So, the way that we interacted with the client was obviously shifted, but where the business actually came from did not shift for me and my team just because that's where it was kind of already coming from. So that was really nice for us, that we didn't feel like, okay, now we have to panic and figure out where our business is going to come from, because a lot of it was already through social. It was more so just adjusting how we were doing buyer presentations, listing presentations, phone calls, electronic signing, like I said, all of the mechanics per se, is really, more so, what changed for us.Caroline:Got it. Well, that's good for business. So I mean, that you're all of a sudden not changing, but with that, virtual, you said e-signing and stuff like that, how are home inspections done and the different sort of, before you say yes, I want this house to put an offer in. And then to them actually signing on the dotted line, did that process change at all? Or were inspectors allowed in the houses, or how did that sort of work?Rebecca:Yeah. So in the state of Ohio, real estate was deemed essential pretty early on. So that being said, we were able to do showings. We obviously had to follow CDC guidelines, wear the masks, sanitize, a lot of the sellers were leaving the lights on and doors open before we got there. So limited, the touching and things like that.Rebecca:Inspectors were allowed in the home, photographers were allowed in the home. We just have to make sure that we're obviously social distanced if they're there. We had some sellers who asked that only the inspector come to the inspection and not me and not the client. As long as we had that in writing from the seller, we were able to do that and just send an inspector there. But otherwise, we were deemed essential. So we were still allowed to show. Now, I did have quite a few clients that really didn't want to meet in person. So, there were a lot of FaceTimes, there were a lot of virtual showings, a lot of virtual open houses. I still haven't done an in person open house, and so a lot of that is virtual. But we were really able to navigate to where it worked out for everyone while we were still being safe.Rebecca:And luckily for us in the state of Ohio, we did fight for it to be deemed essential, which included the inspectors. Some of the appraisers were not wanting to go in the houses. So they were either doing, you could send them photos or they might even do a drive by. So, that changed a little bit, but luckily for us here, we were still able to keep the businesses going, title companies as well, to where the transactions and the showings didn't have to necessarily stop.Caroline:That's so lucky. I feel like here we're, I think most of the real estate that I've looked at is all virtual and then anything sort of beyond that is as well. Whether it's you going in and FaceTiming, but so that's great. Kind of while we're on the topic, can you share a little bit about Cleveland real estate and how you sort of see that differ across the country? I mean, you do a lot of engagements in different parts of the country with different realtors. So can you just, do think there's a difference, or can you share a little bit about how you may be when you're speaking to somebody in New York versus Oklahoma, you would maybe change your engagement pitch?Rebecca:Yeah. Great question. So anytime that I've done a virtual presentation right now with kind of with everything going on, I really try to just keep it very general to how you can keep your business alive through social media. So that if one state's essential and one's not, I'm making sure that it's... You can do it for anyone, basically. Because a lot of the presentations I do, sometimes they open them up to realtors anywhere, and obviously every state's different, everyone's doing things differently and some realtors weren't comfortable, even if they were deemed essential, they weren't necessarily comfortable going into those houses, which is okay. You have to make that decision for yourself and everyone has to do it the way that they're most comfortable with.Rebecca:So, when I share how to kind of keep their businesses going during this pandemic, it's really stuff anybody anywhere can do. It's all on social media, it's video and different things like that. And there are also things that you can do after things kind of go back to more of a somewhat normal. There are things you can do for your business forever, moving forward. So, that's kind of what I did, and then I would chat with agents per state. I recently did one for Colorado and they just recently kind of started opening back more. Whereas in Ohio we've been essential for a while and things like that. So I really just try to keep it general for everybody so that everybody can use what I'm saying, no matter where they're at.Caroline:That's so helpful. I feel like I would love to, not that I'm a realtor, but I feel like you could just really captivate the room. So one of our segments in our podcast is homeowner horror stories. So maybe you can share a few or one that may be from the realtor side that you're like, oh my God, this is crazy. So do you have a few stories or a story that you could share, sort of that was horrific?Rebecca:Yeah. So my first year in the business, I was showing a couple a house and it had an alarm and I did not get to the alarm in time. I'm scrambling to get the alarm code, and I just didn't turn up, which happens. You might not know where it is or you might be trying to pull it up on your phone. Your wifi is not going as fast as you need, you didn't write it down. So the cops showed up at the house, because the alarm went off, right? So, I'm like, great, I gave them my ID. I gave them my business card, fine. Well, it turns out that there was a warrant out for my buyers.Rebecca:So, that was one of the crazier ones that I have ever had happen to me. So ever since then, if there's an alarm in the house, it is written down, I confirm where the alarm system is so that I can get right in there to turn it off. But yeah, that's probably the craziest thing that's ever happened to me. I have a lot of crazy stories and weird finds that I've seen in houses, but that one definitely takes the cake.Caroline:Did they arrest the buyer?Rebecca:They did take the buyers, so I did not get the sale. That was not a sale I got. Yeah.Caroline:I was going to be like, oh, there was a squirrel in the house or something. Oh my God, that's so crazy.Rebecca:It was crazy. So I haven't had anything quite as crazy happen since then, but yeah, that's up there.Caroline:That's crazy for a long time, in my opinion. That would... Wow. Okay. Okay. So, kind of pivoting from horror stories, do you have some wisdom and advice for homeowners? I know we started touched on this in the beginning, but just some quick tidbits that you would be like, this is what you need to know, and this is what somebody did. And I have suggested a temporary one moving forward, I think. We've spoken to realtors, but everyone has different thoughts and opinions. So, if you just had a few quick pieces of advice and some wisdom, that would be great.Rebecca:Yeah. Especially if you're buying for the first time, there are certain things that you might not realize with home ownership. And we kind of talked about this before, which is why this app is so awesome to me, but making sure that you know with your mechanicals, how often they should be checked. We see a lot of times when we go to the list, that maybe they had a furnace or AC that might've been a little bit older, but they never bothered to get it serviced. And so now it might have some issues, or might need replaced. And so we kind of put them in contact with the right people that they can call to get it serviced, different things like that. A lot of them like to be updated on their market just to see what things are going for in their neighborhood and stuff.Rebecca:And they'll call us about that. So we'll keep them updated on that. We provide basically any type of contact anyone would need. A roofer, a contractor, it's always really nice to have a list of people that you can give a call, because you never know what could happen. I mean, you can move into a brand new construction house and a couple of months later, something could bust, and it happens. So we want to really be a resource for that and just keeping those things in mind.Rebecca:And then also during, this is more so during the buying process, not necessarily after they've already bought, but it's important to realize that you don't necessarily need to spend what you necessarily have been pre approved for. Especially if you're a first time buyer. Sometimes you see you're pre approved for 300,000 and then, oh, well, this looks great, and look at this house. And, it's important to realize, you do want to make sure that you're prepared if something were to break or, for saving purposes. And so we, we try to make sure that our clients are comfortable with what they're spending and know that, we might be able to find them just as nice of a house that they're looking for, not at the absolute max of their budget, so.Caroline:That's super helpful. I feel like going through it myself currently, where we are, because we're outside of Manhattan, the prices are just insane. Especially for a first time price. I look at them and I'm like... And my parents always are like, put 20% down, blah, blah, blah, such a parent thing to say. And that's kind of what we're looking for, but anything that is in our price range is either top of the price range, but it needs no works on the outside or is lower on the price range, but needs a lot of updates. So we're currently in the struggle of, do you pay a little bit more to do a little bit less or vice versa?Rebecca:Right.Caroline:So I think that's great advice because, for me, I would not want to do that much work, but it also, I don't need to spend every dime just to get, that picture perfect house either, so.Rebecca:Right.Caroline:I guess we'll see what happens, but, can we touch a little bit about the preapproval process? I know it's a pretty easy process, but can you just share a little bit of insight on that and sort of how that helps moving forward, before they actually put an offer onto a house?Rebecca:Yeah, absolutely. So we really make sure that our clients, before we even start the home search process, that they get a preapproval. Number one, we want to make sure that they are able to buy obviously, and they want to know, we don't want to waste their time and the seller's time leaving the house and everything. So, we get them in touch with a lender, we see what finance programs are best for them and what their price might look like. And that might differ per area that they're looking at.Rebecca:We have some areas here that have really high taxes and so, their price point might fluctuate. So we put them in touch with a lender that we have, that can get them pre approved fairly quickly. And we aren't able to submit offers without that preapproval in hand, and especially right now, things are moving fast. There's all kinds of multiple offers situations, I'm sure you've seen that as a buyer yourself. Things are moving very quickly, a lot of multiple offer situations, and they won't even consider, even if you're not in a multiple offer situation, sellers usually won't consider an offer without a preapproval because they don't want to take their home off of the market for someone that they don't know is qualified to buy a home.Rebecca:The other thing that's really important is making sure they know what they're pre approved for, because what we don't want to happen is they think they might be pre approved at a certain price point, we show them that price point, and then maybe they're only pre-approved a little bit less than that. And now their expectations are too high and it's harder to get them to know what it is that they can buy. So it's really important that we make sure of that, and some people get a little bit freaked out with the preapproval process. It's scary, you're giving a lot of personal information to somebody that you don't know, right? You're giving your credit score, you're giving your taxes and your earnings and everything to a complete stranger over the phone, and it's very scary. And so we really try to hold their hand and let them know the importance of it. And, let them know that they're not going to be able to buy a home unless they're able to get pre approved, and willing to do that.Rebecca:And we make sure we put them in touch with a trusted lender, someone that we've had good experience with before, we have in house lenders that are fantastic. So it's really, really important if you are a buyer, that you take that first step and get pre approved before you've even stepped foot in a house.Caroline:Yeah. When we were just looking and we had a person to do the preapproval, we just weren't a hundred percent sure. And then all of a sudden, we were like, okay, we're going to do a preapproval, then we'll put an offer in on the house, then we were so excited. And, before we blinked the house was already gone and I was like, oh, so do it in reverse order next time.Rebecca:Yeah.Caroline:How long does a preapproval last? Are you doing it for every house that you're putting on offer on, or are you doing it for a period of time, or does that differ by state as well?Rebecca:Yeah, we don't do one per house. Now, we will have the amount changed on the preapproval per what it is that they're offering, but usually they last 90 days. And then, if you haven't found a house by then, you'll want to get back in touch with a lender. They'll just run everything again really quickly. You don't need a fresh one per house that you put an offer in on. If the first house happens to not work out, you just want to make sure if there's a difference in price that the buyer is still able to buy depending on the different price point. But yeah, I mean, once you get the preapproval, my lender usually gets it done pretty quickly on the phone. He emails me the copy of the preapproval, it has the type of financing. If they need it to sell their home, it has the home sale contingency on it, has the amount on it. And that way, everything's ready to go when they're ready to put an offer in.Caroline:Wonderful. That's cool. I mean, yeah, I'm going through it now. So it's always nice to just hear a difference in the, not even opinion, just from somebody else. We don't have one realtor, we've been pretty steady with one, but we've been looking into different areas of New Jersey. So the realtors are sort of staying, I guess, in their location. So we're getting sort of dual advice from two different people. So it's been a time, that's for sure. So, I'm kind of just about at the end of my questions, but I know we really like to ask our guests who have used our app, vipHomeLink, kind of what they like about it and what they would sort of recommend to their clientele. We think it's super helpful, it keeps everything on track, whether you're just putting in some information or you're really using it to track your maintenance and management updates. But can you share a little bit about, if you've used it and what you liked about it and why you would recommend it?Rebecca:Yeah, absolutely. So, as I told you when we first chatted, I was super fascinated about this, because we see so many buyers who purchase a home and then these certain things they forget about, and it really, it's more money out of their pocket at the end of the day, if they forget to get a furnace service, just because they feel like it's in good working condition, or maybe it's newer. And then, if they're not getting it serviced regularly, they might have to replace it a lot sooner than they thought or it might buy, so I think it's really great. And everybody has a smartphone these days. So, why wouldn't you have the app?Rebecca:It's just such a great place to put everything, reminders. If you have a great paint color and you want to keep track of the paint color, and then, you get new furniture two years later and it nicks your wall, and you're like, oh my gosh, what paint color? It's all right in there for you. So you don't have to... Because otherwise, what I would have done is chipped the paint off my wall, take it to the Lowe's, have them match the paint. And now I have a big nick in my wall. And so this way it's really nice, it's really super great. And it's great for realtors too, because it's really a cool gift that you can offer to your clients. So if you do closing gifts, we do closing gifts for all of our clients, just giving them the app for a year or something is a really great gift idea and it will take so much off of their plates.Rebecca:And then as far as the homeowners that are watching this, I think everyone should have one. And I actually had a conversation with my mom the other day, I sold my brother and his wife a condo, maybe two years ago. And my mom was having a conversation with them and asked him if he'd ever had the furnace serviced since he bought it. And he was like, no, it works fine. And I was like, listen, he needs to get this app because he's going to pay for that. And he's going to be mad that he didn't go ahead and do something. So, it's really a great thing to have. I think everyone needs to have it, and for the realtors that are watching, it's a really great gift that you can offer your clients.Caroline:Ah, thank you so much. We really do appreciate that and we agree, everyone should have it. So, yay. But that's kind of wraps up a lot of my questions. Did I miss anything? Did you want to add anything? I want to make sure that we got it all.Rebecca:Yeah, no. I mean, hopefully this was helpful for the buyers that are watching out there. I know a lot of the markets right now are crazy. It's not just Cleveland, it's everywhere. So, make sure that you are chatting with your realtor upfront, just to kind of know what you have to look forward to, the transaction, everything. And for the realtors that are following, make sure you're having those conversations with the clients, because I think sometimes they're thrown if they put an offer in and miss out and, we're seeing a lot of that. So, but hopefully this was helpful for everybody.Caroline:Yeah. It was wonderful. Do you mind just sharing where people can find you on Instagram and a little bit more about you and then we could wrap up?Rebecca:Yeah. So, I'm mainly on Instagram, as we've kind of talked about, my Instagram handle is Rebecca.Itali.realtor. So you can go ahead and just follow me on there, and then my contact information is on my profile. So if you just click contact, it'll email me directly. It'll call, if you want to text me or anything directly, I'm not quite as active on Facebook. So, I'll just give my Instagram stuff, because that's usually where you can find me, so.Caroline:Perfect. Thank you so much. Well, Rebecca, this has been wonderful. We'll chat soon, and thank you again for your time.Rebecca:All right. Thanks for having me, take care.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Gareth: What do you think?Rebecca: I don't know. A lot of times, I think people who commit crime might commit crime because they want attention, or they don't get the amount of attention that they feel that they need. They want to be loved, or they want people to pay attention to them to know that they existed. You know, - I'm here, hear me roar type thing.And maybe I've heard things that sometimes, abortion might actually potentially be related to a decrease in crime rate, because instead of having this child that maybe you don't want, you won't care for, who will grow up feeling unloved and potentially commit crime, you don't have the child. So then, it becomes not an option.Gareth: Oh, yeah, definitely. Psychologically, when you're not cared for, and you're not loved, and no one's ever said that they love you, that can have a huge impact - yeah, definitely. So to go from one foster home to another foster home to another foster home, and to have foster parents that don't really care for you; they just put food on the table, and they clothe you, and they send you off to school, and they never hug you, they never kiss you, that I'm sure will have an effect on people, and kind of maybe lead to more crime.Rebecca: But I think another thing that could also be helping is we keep ourselves busy a lot more in the home now because of all the new technology. And you know, you can be online chatting for hours on end, or you could be playing video games. Again, a lot of the media tries to say that, you know, the video games is the cause, but sometimes I wonder if maybe because we're all at home playing video games, well, if you're at home doing something else, you can't be out there causing crimes, right?Gareth: Yeah.Rebecca: So sometimes I wonder if maybe that's related.Gareth: Sometimes we don't even know our own neighbors.Rebecca: Yeah.Gareth: I once heard this story, I don't know if this one is true, but if a woman's - and this might be in appropriate - but if a woman is being raped, or someone is going to try and rape her, she should say - Fire!Rebecca: Fire - yeah. I've heard it.Gareth: Instead of saying 'Rape!'Rebecca: Or - Help!Gareth: Because with fire, it will spread, and it will affect others around that place where the fire started. So if someone owns a shop nearby, and they hear someone say - Fire! then they'd be more worried about helping.Rebecca: Yeah, I've heard a similar thing. If you actually get in a situation where you need help, scream - Fire! because people come running because that might be immediately a danger to themselves.Gareth: Hm.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Gareth: What do you think?Rebecca: I don't know. A lot of times, I think people who commit crime might commit crime because they want attention, or they don't get the amount of attention that they feel that they need. They want to be loved, or they want people to pay attention to them to know that they existed. You know, - I'm here, hear me roar type thing.And maybe I've heard things that sometimes, abortion might actually potentially be related to a decrease in crime rate, because instead of having this child that maybe you don't want, you won't care for, who will grow up feeling unloved and potentially commit crime, you don't have the child. So then, it becomes not an option.Gareth: Oh, yeah, definitely. Psychologically, when you're not cared for, and you're not loved, and no one's ever said that they love you, that can have a huge impact - yeah, definitely. So to go from one foster home to another foster home to another foster home, and to have foster parents that don't really care for you; they just put food on the table, and they clothe you, and they send you off to school, and they never hug you, they never kiss you, that I'm sure will have an effect on people, and kind of maybe lead to more crime.Rebecca: But I think another thing that could also be helping is we keep ourselves busy a lot more in the home now because of all the new technology. And you know, you can be online chatting for hours on end, or you could be playing video games. Again, a lot of the media tries to say that, you know, the video games is the cause, but sometimes I wonder if maybe because we're all at home playing video games, well, if you're at home doing something else, you can't be out there causing crimes, right?Gareth: Yeah.Rebecca: So sometimes I wonder if maybe that's related.Gareth: Sometimes we don't even know our own neighbors.Rebecca: Yeah.Gareth: I once heard this story, I don't know if this one is true, but if a woman's - and this might be in appropriate - but if a woman is being raped, or someone is going to try and rape her, she should say - Fire!Rebecca: Fire - yeah. I've heard it.Gareth: Instead of saying 'Rape!'Rebecca: Or - Help!Gareth: Because with fire, it will spread, and it will affect others around that place where the fire started. So if someone owns a shop nearby, and they hear someone say - Fire! then they'd be more worried about helping.Rebecca: Yeah, I've heard a similar thing. If you actually get in a situation where you need help, scream - Fire! because people come running because that might be immediately a danger to themselves.Gareth: Hm.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rebecca: So, what do you think are some theories are then about that could lead into helping, you know, prevent crime?Gareth: Well, there's a story that I once read about, and it's the New York Subway, on how there was so much crime on the New York Subway. And they started cleaning up the subway and the trains, and they wouldn't allow any graffiti on the trains.Rebecca: Mm-hm.Gareth: And if a train went in the morning and stopped at a station, and someone wrote graffiti[涂鸦，涂画] on the window or on the door, that train will be taken out of service -Rebecca: Wow.Gareth: --cleaned up, and then put back in service. It actually improved, or it kind of decreased the crime rate, so that there weren't so many crimes committed. There's a whole theory about this, and it's called - Broken Glass Theory. Like if you live in a community that doesn't care about the community, then, you're more likely to destroy it or to break it.Rebecca: Yeah.Gareth: If you do have a nice place to live and everyone respects that place, it tends to promote more respect in people.Rebecca: So, maybe a way to help decrease the crime rate would be to get everyone involved more in the community and to build - to start a cleanup program or something along those lines.Gareth: Exactly, yeah. I can't remember a case a while back in America, where a group of students were into The Matrix.Rebecca: Mm-hm.Gareth: And it's a movie where they wear trenchcoats, these black trenchcoats. This group of students went to a school and they started killing people. And they promoted in the press that it was because of the movies that these kids were into and the games that they played. And they pretty much went into the school and they did everything like a shoot-them-up game, like a game, like Halo, or these games where this first-person shoots and you go through the level and you have to destroy the enemies and promote to the next level.Rebecca: Mm-hm.Gareth: They pretty much copied that kind of system strategy when they went into the school. So, the newspapers said that it's because of this that these kids killed everyone.Rebecca: Mm-hm.Gareth: But I don't know if that's actually true. I don't like - there are so many people that do play these games, these shoot-them-up games, and why aren't they going around killing other people? It's probably something else that happened to these kids that triggered them, and it didn't help that they were shooting people in these video games, but it wasn't the trigger. It probably was some other trauma in their life that caused it.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rebecca: So, what do you think are some theories are then about that could lead into helping, you know, prevent crime?Gareth: Well, there's a story that I once read about, and it's the New York Subway, on how there was so much crime on the New York Subway. And they started cleaning up the subway and the trains, and they wouldn't allow any graffiti on the trains.Rebecca: Mm-hm.Gareth: And if a train went in the morning and stopped at a station, and someone wrote graffiti[涂鸦，涂画] on the window or on the door, that train will be taken out of service -Rebecca: Wow.Gareth: --cleaned up, and then put back in service. It actually improved, or it kind of decreased the crime rate, so that there weren't so many crimes committed. There's a whole theory about this, and it's called - Broken Glass Theory. Like if you live in a community that doesn't care about the community, then, you're more likely to destroy it or to break it.Rebecca: Yeah.Gareth: If you do have a nice place to live and everyone respects that place, it tends to promote more respect in people.Rebecca: So, maybe a way to help decrease the crime rate would be to get everyone involved more in the community and to build - to start a cleanup program or something along those lines.Gareth: Exactly, yeah. I can't remember a case a while back in America, where a group of students were into The Matrix.Rebecca: Mm-hm.Gareth: And it's a movie where they wear trenchcoats, these black trenchcoats. This group of students went to a school and they started killing people. And they promoted in the press that it was because of the movies that these kids were into and the games that they played. And they pretty much went into the school and they did everything like a shoot-them-up game, like a game, like Halo, or these games where this first-person shoots and you go through the level and you have to destroy the enemies and promote to the next level.Rebecca: Mm-hm.Gareth: They pretty much copied that kind of system strategy when they went into the school. So, the newspapers said that it's because of this that these kids killed everyone.Rebecca: Mm-hm.Gareth: But I don't know if that's actually true. I don't like - there are so many people that do play these games, these shoot-them-up games, and why aren't they going around killing other people? It's probably something else that happened to these kids that triggered them, and it didn't help that they were shooting people in these video games, but it wasn't the trigger. It probably was some other trauma in their life that caused it.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rebecca: So, Gareth, what's your daily routine like?Gareth: My routine is actually a little irregular. I have a different working schedule for each day of the week, but on a weekend my son usually wakes me up about half-eight, nine o'clock, and after that we go downstairs, and I get him some cereal like he likes at the moment chocolate rice Krispies and he has a bowl of them and we watch Toy Story. He loves Buzz and Woody.Rebecca: Every weekend the same movie?Gareth: Exactly. Again and again and again. Yeah, so we watch it a lot. On weekdays, though, I usually wake up at six a.m. I have to go to work at eight, so I commute on the bus and train and that takes an hour and a half. It takes a long time, and then I work. I get home about sevenish. I have dinner with my wife. Usually if I come home late, she waits and she'll have dinner with me, and sometimes she'll wait until like nine.Rebecca: Whoa!Gareth: Yeah, pretty late, so it's really nice.Rebecca: Are you a morning shower person or a nighttime bath, relax person?Gareth: Yeah, so actually I think I'm a kind of night owl. I work much better in the evening and I get more done. In the morning I'm a little bit like a zombie, but these last years, working have kind of trained me to be an early bird. Waking up so early, as I do, I've kind of adapted to it, so. But I much prefer the evening.Rebecca: So you would come home from work and eat dinner and then take like the bath to calm down to go to bed at night?Gareth: No, actually I prefer showers than baths, but yeah, I usually relax with my family and watch a movie or read a book. My son's really into Dr. Zeuss books. They're classic children's books from back home and they're great. Even for me, like that's the good thing about having kids, you kind of get reattached to your, and feel kind of nostalgic[怀旧的] about your old activities like the things that you did when you were a child.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rebecca: So, Gareth, what's your daily routine like?Gareth: My routine is actually a little irregular. I have a different working schedule for each day of the week, but on a weekend my son usually wakes me up about half-eight, nine o'clock, and after that we go downstairs, and I get him some cereal like he likes at the moment chocolate rice Krispies and he has a bowl of them and we watch Toy Story. He loves Buzz and Woody.Rebecca: Every weekend the same movie?Gareth: Exactly. Again and again and again. Yeah, so we watch it a lot. On weekdays, though, I usually wake up at six a.m. I have to go to work at eight, so I commute on the bus and train and that takes an hour and a half. It takes a long time, and then I work. I get home about sevenish. I have dinner with my wife. Usually if I come home late, she waits and she'll have dinner with me, and sometimes she'll wait until like nine.Rebecca: Whoa!Gareth: Yeah, pretty late, so it's really nice.Rebecca: Are you a morning shower person or a nighttime bath, relax person?Gareth: Yeah, so actually I think I'm a kind of night owl. I work much better in the evening and I get more done. In the morning I'm a little bit like a zombie, but these last years, working have kind of trained me to be an early bird. Waking up so early, as I do, I've kind of adapted to it, so. But I much prefer the evening.Rebecca: So you would come home from work and eat dinner and then take like the bath to calm down to go to bed at night?Gareth: No, actually I prefer showers than baths, but yeah, I usually relax with my family and watch a movie or read a book. My son's really into Dr. Zeuss books. They're classic children's books from back home and they're great. Even for me, like that's the good thing about having kids, you kind of get reattached to your, and feel kind of nostalgic[怀旧的] about your old activities like the things that you did when you were a child.

更多英语知识，请见微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rebecca: Alright, so today we're going to talk about kids and technology. So Gareth, you're a father. Do you have any opinions on when children should be introduced to technology?Gareth: Yeah, I have a lot of opinions. I'm really interested in parenting, being a parent, and also technology, so it's interesting, and I often wonder whether or not I should let my kid play with computers and when I should start introducing these kinds of technologies like a cellphone and that kind of stuff.Rebecca: So do you have any interesting stories about this and children?Gareth: In the last two weeks, my sons -- we've -- his grandfather actually, they are in cahoots[结伙，勾结] about it. They destroyed, nearly destroyed, my computer. So I have a laptop computer, an Apple laptop computer, and I left it at home, and I went to work, then I received an e-mail from my wife saying, call me as soon as you can, and I panicked and I called her as soon as I could, and she said that her father-in-law and my son were eating dinner and my father-in-law had glass of milk, and he spilled it all over the computer.Rebecca: Oh, know.Gareth: Yeah, so when I heard this I thought, "Oh, no, it's probably damaged, destroyed" I probably need to send it to apple care and get them to retrieve my data, but luckily I got home and it works fine. I haven't noticed any damage, so far, but because it's water and it's coming into contact with metal, I'm worried that it's gonna rust over time, and start to damage it. So that's the kind of first story that I have about that. The second story, it happened today.Rebecca: Today?Gareth: Yeah, so yeah, I love apple products and I often want to buy the latest product, so I bought an iPad, and last night it came, so I downloaded some apps and I put some music on there, some photos on there and I found this really, really good app for my son, and it's about toy story, and he loves toy story, and it's a great app. It's like a book, but you can color the pictures and it reads the book to you, and you can record your own voice over the top of it, so I can, later on, get him to record his voice and act out some of the parts, so I've got this app loaded onto the iPad and I left it with him this morning when I came here, and my wife called me to say that he's already damaged to connector. Like he's bent the connector, and I don't know if it's damaged the iPad. Hopefully, it hasn't but I'll find out soon.Rebecca: Oh, my goodness. So maybe trying to keep kids away from technology when they're young is better.Gareth: That's what I've learned.Rebecca: At least cheaper.Gareth: Exactly. If you had asked me this question two weeks ago, I would have said yeah, give them technology. Let them play, but now no.

更多英语知识，请见微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rebecca: Alright, so today we're going to talk about kids and technology. So Gareth, you're a father. Do you have any opinions on when children should be introduced to technology?Gareth: Yeah, I have a lot of opinions. I'm really interested in parenting, being a parent, and also technology, so it's interesting, and I often wonder whether or not I should let my kid play with computers and when I should start introducing these kinds of technologies like a cellphone and that kind of stuff.Rebecca: So do you have any interesting stories about this and children?Gareth: In the last two weeks, my sons -- we've -- his grandfather actually, they are in cahoots[结伙，勾结] about it. They destroyed, nearly destroyed, my computer. So I have a laptop computer, an Apple laptop computer, and I left it at home, and I went to work, then I received an e-mail from my wife saying, call me as soon as you can, and I panicked and I called her as soon as I could, and she said that her father-in-law and my son were eating dinner and my father-in-law had glass of milk, and he spilled it all over the computer.Rebecca: Oh, know.Gareth: Yeah, so when I heard this I thought, "Oh, no, it's probably damaged, destroyed" I probably need to send it to apple care and get them to retrieve my data, but luckily I got home and it works fine. I haven't noticed any damage, so far, but because it's water and it's coming into contact with metal, I'm worried that it's gonna rust over time, and start to damage it. So that's the kind of first story that I have about that. The second story, it happened today.Rebecca: Today?Gareth: Yeah, so yeah, I love apple products and I often want to buy the latest product, so I bought an iPad, and last night it came, so I downloaded some apps and I put some music on there, some photos on there and I found this really, really good app for my son, and it's about toy story, and he loves toy story, and it's a great app. It's like a book, but you can color the pictures and it reads the book to you, and you can record your own voice over the top of it, so I can, later on, get him to record his voice and act out some of the parts, so I've got this app loaded onto the iPad and I left it with him this morning when I came here, and my wife called me to say that he's already damaged to connector. Like he's bent the connector, and I don't know if it's damaged the iPad. Hopefully, it hasn't but I'll find out soon.Rebecca: Oh, my goodness. So maybe trying to keep kids away from technology when they're young is better.Gareth: That's what I've learned.Rebecca: At least cheaper.Gareth: Exactly. If you had asked me this question two weeks ago, I would have said yeah, give them technology. Let them play, but now no.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rebecca: Alright, so Gareth, who's your best friend?Gareth: Ah, difficult question, but I would have to say that my wife is my best friend.Rebecca: You're wife so then where did you meet?Gareth: We met in England when I was eighteen. My wife was twenty-one, and we met at university.Rebecca: At the university really. So why are you such good friends?Gareth: I think because we can share true feelings. With some of my friends I tend to hold a little bit back. I don't necessarily, give all of myself to them, so with my wife I can tell her that I'm sad or upset or angry or happy and we can talk about a lot of stuff, and I feel very comfortable and yeah, just realized with her.Rebecca: That's really nice. What do you guys normally do together?Gareth: We like movies and TV shows. We're really into American TV shows and we just finished up watching Lost. It's an American TV show that went on for quite some time, like six years, and we watched it from the very beginning and we just watched the last episode and we like TV shows. We also have two children so most of our time is spent playing with them. Going out. We like to travel a lot, so we often travel back to my home country, England, and my mom's living in America at the moment so we're planning to visit her for Christmas.Rebecca: Sounds like a lot of fun.Gareth: Yeah, it is. Definitely.Rebecca: So then, the big question: do you guys ever fight?Gareth: Oh, yeah. Of course, yeah, but that's the good thing about it. It's making up after the fight that's important. So it doesn't matter that we fight and I think that most couples early on tend to avoid conflict and they tend to bottle stuff up inside, but then if you do keep that inside you'll end up resenting the partner for it, so I think it's healthy to give your opinion and that's what my wife and I do. We often tell each other when we're unhappy, and the reason why and we discuss it and we often fight and sometimes it gets heated, a heated argument, but then we makeup and it's good. It makes us stronger. It makes up realize what annoys the other so.Rebecca: So you can avoid them in the future.Gareth: Exactly, yeah.Rebecca: Sounds really nice. That's really great. Thank you very much.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rebecca: Alright, so Gareth, who's your best friend?Gareth: Ah, difficult question, but I would have to say that my wife is my best friend.Rebecca: You're wife so then where did you meet?Gareth: We met in England when I was eighteen. My wife was twenty-one, and we met at university.Rebecca: At the university really. So why are you such good friends?Gareth: I think because we can share true feelings. With some of my friends I tend to hold a little bit back. I don't necessarily, give all of myself to them, so with my wife I can tell her that I'm sad or upset or angry or happy and we can talk about a lot of stuff, and I feel very comfortable and yeah, just realized with her.Rebecca: That's really nice. What do you guys normally do together?Gareth: We like movies and TV shows. We're really into American TV shows and we just finished up watching Lost. It's an American TV show that went on for quite some time, like six years, and we watched it from the very beginning and we just watched the last episode and we like TV shows. We also have two children so most of our time is spent playing with them. Going out. We like to travel a lot, so we often travel back to my home country, England, and my mom's living in America at the moment so we're planning to visit her for Christmas.Rebecca: Sounds like a lot of fun.Gareth: Yeah, it is. Definitely.Rebecca: So then, the big question: do you guys ever fight?Gareth: Oh, yeah. Of course, yeah, but that's the good thing about it. It's making up after the fight that's important. So it doesn't matter that we fight and I think that most couples early on tend to avoid conflict and they tend to bottle stuff up inside, but then if you do keep that inside you'll end up resenting the partner for it, so I think it's healthy to give your opinion and that's what my wife and I do. We often tell each other when we're unhappy, and the reason why and we discuss it and we often fight and sometimes it gets heated, a heated argument, but then we makeup and it's good. It makes us stronger. It makes up realize what annoys the other so.Rebecca: So you can avoid them in the future.Gareth: Exactly, yeah.Rebecca: Sounds really nice. That's really great. Thank you very much.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Rebecca: So, Diego, I hear that Mexico has some really great food and that you love to cook. What's your favorite food in Mexico?Diego: My favorite food in Mexico is chiles en nogada. Chiles means pepper and this is a very traditional Mexican dish because our flag is green, white and red, so this plate, the peppers are green, and then it has a white sauce on top of it and then it has a grain sort of fruit. It's red fruit and it's representing our flag so it's very... It's a very historical plate in Mexico. It's very famous.Rebecca: Oh, wow. I don't think we have anything like that in Australia. It'd be hard to get something that you'd eat that's blue and red and white.Diego: Blue and red.Rebecca: Yeah. Maybe fish.Diego: Fish with strawberries.Rebecca: I don't think that would work.Diego: Yeah.Rebecca: So what about tacos? Do you eat them a lot?Diego: Yeah, we eat them a lot. Tacos is like Mexican fast food, so there's a lot of tacos stands in Mexico, and you can have them in all sorts of ways: with cheese, with onions, with meat, with different sauces, like green sauce, hot sauce, red sauce. Yeah.Rebecca: Do the tortillas... do they stand up or are they round ones that always fall over when you go to eat them?Diego: They're the round ones and they're also soft so they're not corn chips.Rebecca: Like the ones we get.Diego: Yes.Rebecca: Not true Mexican.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Rebecca: So, Diego, I hear that Mexico has some really great food and that you love to cook. What's your favorite food in Mexico?Diego: My favorite food in Mexico is chiles en nogada. Chiles means pepper and this is a very traditional Mexican dish because our flag is green, white and red, so this plate, the peppers are green, and then it has a white sauce on top of it and then it has a grain sort of fruit. It's red fruit and it's representing our flag so it's very... It's a very historical plate in Mexico. It's very famous.Rebecca: Oh, wow. I don't think we have anything like that in Australia. It'd be hard to get something that you'd eat that's blue and red and white.Diego: Blue and red.Rebecca: Yeah. Maybe fish.Diego: Fish with strawberries.Rebecca: I don't think that would work.Diego: Yeah.Rebecca: So what about tacos? Do you eat them a lot?Diego: Yeah, we eat them a lot. Tacos is like Mexican fast food, so there's a lot of tacos stands in Mexico, and you can have them in all sorts of ways: with cheese, with onions, with meat, with different sauces, like green sauce, hot sauce, red sauce. Yeah.Rebecca: Do the tortillas... do they stand up or are they round ones that always fall over when you go to eat them?Diego: They're the round ones and they're also soft so they're not corn chips.Rebecca: Like the ones we get.Diego: Yes.Rebecca: Not true Mexican.

In this episode, Founder of Sway deodorant, Rebecca So, discusses how she developed and tested her apple cider vinegar based natural deodorant, the underarm detox period, and a bit of deodorant education. Rebecca also talks about how she's trying to bring more attention to underarms by creating products that look beautiful enough to post on social, but also make your underarms look and smell fabulous. Show notes: nachesnow.com/91

Show Summary: (Full Transcript Below) Rebecca Blaevoet  from Tactile Vision Graphics joins Jeff Thompson in the Blind Abilities studio and talks about the new contract with Disney to produce accessible coloring books. Rebecca talks about the products and services Tactile vision Graphics provides and how they started in the business. Below) Rebecca Blaevoet  from Tactile Vision Graphics joins Jeff Thompson in the Blind Abilities studio and talks about the new contract with Disney to produce accessible coloring books. Rebecca talks about the products and services Tactile vision Graphics provides and how they started in the business. From Tactile Maps, Braille Greeting Cards and providing people with the accessible material at a timely rate. From handouts, to knitting plans, the team at Tactile Vision Graphics takes pride in their work and attention to detail. Rebecca is visually impaired and understands the need for Braille and Tactile production  as it allows for enclusion and access to information not readily available. Join Rebecca and Jeff in this conversation on Tactile, Braille and accessible coloring books. Yes, Disney Coloring books! Be sure to check out Tactile vision Graphics on the web. Contact: You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com Send us an email Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Store. Full Transcript: Accessible Disney Coloring Books? Yes, Coming Soon! Learn about Tactile Maps, Braille Greeting Cards, and the Wonderful Services from Tactile Vision Graphics. Rebecca: Yeah, we've grown up with coloring books and we grew up with Disney. One of the things about our coloring books that we've always found is they're sort of inclusionary, vision-impaired kids can kind of have a cool sort of interactive activity that they're sighted peers understand. Jeff Thompson: From Tactile Vision Graphics, Rebecca Blaevoet. Rebecca: If a young person or an early reader who picks up one of our coloring books, they can also practice reading. We're great proponents of braille and tactile in museums, big time. Jeff Thompson: Creating Disney coloring books for the visually impaired. Rebecca: Well my husband is the ideas guy. So he years ago said you know what, we should really approach Disney and see about doing braille coloring books. And I said you gotta be kidding, come on, they wouldn't talk to us. We can do the braille for the roses in red on top of the color print, and so it's quite good. We can do transparent braille even, so you can have the braille dots in transparent ink. Jeff Thompson: Tactile maps, braille greeting cards, accessible coloring books, accessible calipers, from tactilevisiongraphics.com.  Jeff Thompson: Isn't that amazing? You make that phone call and what if they do say yes? Rebecca: I know, I know, that's the risk, right? The only risk is that they're gonna say yes. And it was a good risk. Jeff Thompson: And we're so glad that Rebecca took the time to come and join us in the studios at Blind Abilities, that's where you can find podcasts with a blindness perspective. Check us out on the web at wwww.blindabilities.com, on Twitter at Blind Abilities, and download the free Bind Abilities app from the app store and Google Play store. That's two words, Blind Abilities. And I wanna thank you, the listener, for tuning in to Blind Abilities. And now please welcome Rebecca Blaevoet from Tactile Vision Graphics. We hope you enjoy.  Jeff Thompson: Welcome to Blind Abilities, I'm Jeff Thompson. Today we're talking to Rebecca Blaevoet and she's from Tactile Vision Graphics from Ontario, Canada. How you doin' Rebecca? Rebecca: Just fine, thank you for having me on your show. Jeff Thompson: Thanks for taking the time on such a short notice coming on to Blind Abilities and sharing some of the news and about what you do with Tactile Graphics, braille and books, all sorts of stuff. And especially these coloring books that I just heard about that you're gonna be doing with Disney. Rebecca: Yeah, it's really exciting. Jeff Thompson: So how are you doing? Rebecca: I'm well, I'm well, yeah. Jeff Thompson: That's good, well is good. Rebecca: Well is good, yes. Jeff Thompson: So where are you from? Rebecca: We are in Windsor, Ontario. Jeff Thompson: Oh my gosh. Rebecca: So not that far from you I think. Jeff Thompson: That explains the metric calipers. Rebecca: Yes, metric and the imperial calipers. Jeff Thompson: Yeah, that really caught my attention because I do woodworking and having calipers, especially accessible calipers, would be a great benefit. So finding that on your website was really cool. Rebecca: A lot of our customers are in the states, but we do things that are sort of Canadian relevant as well. Jeff Thompson: I found a whole slew of stuff, books, coloring books of course. Rebecca: Oh, yeah, yep, tons of things. Jeff Thompson: As soon as I opened it up and I saw you do tactile maps for campus, or transcribe stuff into braille, it was like oh, I get it. So many times people start campus and they got an idea of it, but it's nice to get a general tactile feel of relationships. Rebecca: Absolutely. Jeff Thompson: We have East Bank and West Bank at the U of M, so they could definitely find the river and then give them an idea of where it is. That's how I like to use tactile. Rebecca: Oh, absolutely. And not everybody has a lot of facility with it, that's the thing. The more information you have, the better, Even if people didn't grow up using tactile graphics very much. Jeff Thompson: So you're vision-impaired yourself. Rebecca: Yes, I am. Yep, my husband is fully sighted, but I'm vision-impaired. Jeff Thompson: What got you into the tactile and the braille side of things? Rebecca: Well, it's kind of an interesting story actually because my husband and I had talked about starting a business and we both wanted to do that. And I thought we would end up doing language translation and it's a very, very difficult field to break into. There's a tremendous amount of competition and it's worldwide and a lot of it is automated. And it's terrible, it's not even, it really gets subcontracted and subcontracted. So we did a bit of language translation work and my husband said look, you're an expert in braille, there's a gap in the market for good braille translation companies that actually have people who are blind working in them. And he said why don't we look into starting a business doing that? So between the braille and the tactile graphics, which there really was a gap at that point, we started a business. We were living in Europe at the time and so it was in Britain. And then we had the opportunity to, there was a company here in Canada and they were retiring and they wanted somebody to take over the business who understood about braille and tactile graphics and they approached us to do it. So that was how we ended up back over here. Jeff Thompson: That's really cool. When did you start reading braille? Rebecca: I was six probably. Jeff Thompson: Six. Rebecca: So a lot of years ago. Jeff Thompson: Great time to start, right? Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Not everybody has that privilege of starting to read braille when they're six, but if you do, it's great. Jeff Thompson: Yeah, I was 36 when I got the opportunity to start digging in to-- Rebecca:  I see, I see, yeah. Jeff Thompson: Actually, some girls at the school wrote me a note, so I was forced to read. If there's a motive to read, there you go. Rebecca: That's right, that'll be it for sure. Jeff Thompson: A teacher actually had me pick a braille book of a book, my last book that I had read. Rebecca: That's a fabulous technique for getting somebody motivated to read braille. Jeff Thompson: And children's books. Rebecca: Yep. Jeff Thompson: Because you kinda can almost predict the sentences. You're almost following along, but you're moving forward. Rebecca: That's right. Jeff Thompson: Something I could relate to, like let's hop on pop. Rebecca: As an adult that's exactly right, especially familiar children's books, rhyming books, yeah, all sorts of good techniques for that. Jeff Thompson: And that's something that Tactile Vision Graphics has. Rebecca: Yeah, we do a lot of children's books and that we inherited from the people who had the business before us. We think it's really important to have some early learning books where it's letters and numbers, and also raised print and images that go along with that. And we have some basic storybooks and things that are in grade one braille and contracted braille, a little bit more of the more advanced things, but that's when we get into custom production more than sort of standard offerings. But the coloring books, an interesting development from that because vision-impaired people don't, sometimes we don't know what it is we're touching in terms of an image. Because in print you can use perspective and all sorts of other sort of devices to communicate three dimensionality when it's only two dimensions. And so early on we said you know what, we should label these pictures because it's gonna teach people what the shapes of things are in sort of in the abstract. And if you've only been used to touching, I dunno, a three-dimensional fireplace for example, how would you depict a fireplace in a tactile graphic when a person might be used to touching what a mantel feels like or the brickwork on the side of a fireplace? So it seemed important to label the pictures, that also teaches reading. If it's a young person or an early reader who picks up one of our coloring books, they can also practice reading. So there's a sort of multi-learning happening with our stuff a lot of the time. Jeff Thompson: Yeah, one of the things that I always found interesting when I first came across tactile graphics is I was just checking it out and someone says it's George Washington crossing the Delaware, or something, or the Potomac. Better get my rivers right, the Delaware. Rebecca: Which is it? Jeff Thompson: Luckily it was labeled, so I could figure it out. Rebecca: Yeah, that's right, exactly. You do need a hint sometimes. Jeff Thompson: Like you said, perspective. You mentioned coloring books and that's something that happened to strike my attention. Could you tell us something that happened with Disney and your books? Rebecca: Well my husband is the ideas guy. So he years ago said you know what, we should really approach Disney and see about doing braille coloring books. And I said you gotta be kidding. Jeff Thompson: Yeah, right. Rebecca: Come on, they wouldn't talk to us. Anyway, he said no, look, here's a phone number, call them. Rebecca: So I did with a fair bit of trepidation. Didn't get anywhere on the first phone number, I think they were going through some restructuring at that point. They were renaming some of their branches and things, consumer media and interactive. But we persevered and found another phone number and got to talk to somebody in New York who immediately gave us the phone number of somebody else. And that's where it started. So it was about a year and a half ago that we made our first phone contact with people who really seemed quite interested in our idea about doing braille learning activity books, primarily coloring books, but then with other sort of learning pages included. And they really liked the idea. And so little by little we've developed a plan and they came with a contract and we're starting design work now. So it's very exciting. We have 15 books planned over the next three years. We may increase that number on various different themes, classics, series with Mickey Mouse and Bambi and Winnie the Pooh and things. Jeff Thompson: It's Disney. Rebecca: It's Disney, I know, I know, it's crazy. Jeff Thompson: It's endless, plus your husband was right. Rebecca: Yeah, he was. Yep, his ideas are usually good ones. I'm the bean counter in the middle going well I don't know whether we can afford that. I don't know how many, anyway, I'm very much tend to be the pragmatist about these things. But he was right. Jeff Thompson: Well Disney beans are good. Rebecca: Yeah. Jeff Thompson: That's good for you, that's what got it into the news. Disney, it was like Disney? Oh, tactile. It makes so much sense because we've grown up with coloring books. Rebecca: Yeah, we've grown up with coloring books and we grew up with Disney. One of the things about our coloring books that we've always found is they're sort of inclusionary. They promote inclusion. Vision-impaired kids can kind of have a cool sort of interactive activity that their sighted peers understand. And everybody wants to color as a kid whether you can see or whether you can't see. And here's an opportunity to do that and these characters are ones that we all know. So at least people who grew up in North America certainly do and Europe, and I venture to say they're pretty worldwide in terms of their popularity. Jeff Thompson: My brain always like to think real fast and I'm going do you remember paint by number? Rebecca: Yep, I never did it, but I do remember that-- Jeff Thompson: Yeah, I remember that, it made you like perfect. Rebecca: I know, yes, yes, absolutely. Well, the scope is as creative as we wanna be in terms of what can be included in these activity books. But everything that we design has to go through them. They're very, very, what's the word I'm looking for? They're extremely conscientious in helping you as a licensee kinda get it right. And also their brand is important to them so they wanna make sure that everything that gets released is good, that they can be proud of it. Jeff Thompson: Well that's good. I think they have one of the highest quality controls over their brand. Rebecca: They're amazing. Yeah, yeah, we've learned so much about quality control working with them, they're very, very thorough. Jeff Thompson: This even leads into, this may not be something that you've thought about, but like a braille label for a crayon. Rebecca: Yeah, well we do braille labels. We haven't done any for crayons, it's a fabulous idea. We do braille stickers and braille labels. It's actually a really good, good suggestion. Jeff Thompson: Your website's quite extensive with some of the stuff and it actually casts ideas to people too, because the first time I opened it up I saw tactile maps for a campus. What a better thing for a person to get a perspective or a relationship to the geographic layout of a campus? Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, a university campus or a college campus is often so big and so picturesque, and lots of open spaces and curving paths. And as you say, U of M has a river and how does that feature into the landscape of a campus? And vision-impaired people are already starting with a sort of less information than their sighted counterparts have. So having tactile maps of campuses are a really useful tool, however extensively or not a person would use that item, it's a good thing to have available. Jeff Thompson: Kinda gives us a peak, just a little hint. Like oh, that's next to the library. Rebecca: That's it, exactly. Jeff Thompson: I know that. And the next time they go they can stop with their cane or their guide dog and know if they go one block further or the next building, which some campuses is a block. Rebecca: Something like the name of a street, Sunset Street. Okay, is that just within the campus or if you see a building, some other building unrelated in the city that's got the same address, it's got an address on Sunset Street, you'd say oh geeze, I wonder if I could take that street back up to the university campus? I bet I could. It gives you other clues to how to navigate around the city you live in and how to make your travel as seamless as possible as a pedestrian like with a guide dog or with a white cane, or even on a bus route. Jeff Thompson: Plus you do transcription for braille. Rebecca: Yep, we do. Jeff Thompson: Like if someone had handouts or something. Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, we like doing that kind of stuff, academic transcription. We can work to fairly tight deadlines. We enjoy those sorts of projects where it seems like an impossible amount of text to have to generate in a finite number of days and it's like yeah, bring it, we'll take it. It's always helpful if we have some idea that it's coming, it's nice. We've sometimes gotten a university or college will say look, we've got this math exam coming up, the exam's happening next Wednesday, we probably won't get it till Monday, can you do it? And we're like yeah, email us as soon as you have it, we'll put it in the UPS or Purolater the next day, we'll turn it around and get it back to you on the exam day if we have to. Jeff Thompson: That's good service. Rebecca: We think so. Jeff Thompson: Timing is everything when you're talking about receiving braille at the same time your cohorts receive their books and stuff, that's always been an issue. Rebecca: And I certainly know from my own experience that if you're taking a course and it's complicated, say it's in my case it was Russian, and having books arrive a year late. What kind of craziness is that? You shouldn't have to receive your course materials a year late. And if that's what that the company that you tend to send stuff out to does, well find a different company. Because students oughtn't to have to wait that long. But that can go for academic materials, but it can also, I remember at one point early on we were at a trade show and we were approached by two elderly women who said we're part of a knitting club and we asked our local blindness agency to produce a pattern and they said we'd have to wait nine months for it. Well our knitting club is starting the pattern next week, can you do it for us? And we said sure. It's a lot of work, patterns are a lot of work. Anyway, we got it done for them. And they were able to participate with their knitting club. When everybody else had the pattern, so did they. And that's a lot of fun. It's fun to be able to give somebody that kind of contemporary sort of inclusion as well. Jeff Thompson: Well getting there on time because no student wants to graduate and then start receiving their books afterwards. Rebecca: No, that's an insult. Yeah, it's true. Jeff Thompson: We talked about campuses and tactile maps for this and that, but I saw museums. Now that's really important to me because I've been to museums and I shuffle around, walking around, and yeah, there's something behind the glass or there's something over here. And there's these big placards that have something written on them and people are going oh, hmm. Rebecca: I know, people can spend 10 minutes in front of those things. Jeff Thompson: And yet with a map, they can actually know what's in front of them. Rebecca: Yeah, we do a fair bit of work with museums, both maps, sort of floor plans to help people know where the exhibits are located. But also overlays for artifacts that might be behind glass or information booklets about a particular museum exhibit. So it's not practical to put braille all over those big panels that you're talking about. I really try to discourage museum curators from thinking that that's a good idea, because you've got a vision-impaired person whose gotta stand there and hold their arms up horizontally out in front of them, but read a vertical space for as long as it takes to get through the braille. But also they're blocking the way for other museum visitors to be able to read the placards as well. So we tend to recommend a portable sort of booklet that somebody can take with them and maybe find a place to sit and read if they want to, maybe in the museum coffee shop or maybe they have benches or seats and tables to sit outside of a particular exhibit. A lot of museums have audio guides as well, which are great, except that it closes you off from your family or friends that you're strolling around the museum with. Where a portable booklet you can still read that and be interacting with your family and friends as well. We're great proponents of braille and tactile in museums, big time. Jeff Thompson: Awesome. Now when you're talking about doing a map or something of that nature, do you use like a thermal braille? is there some method or process? I know a lot of people that are into braille and tactile have all these techniques and stuff, what's your popular way of-- Rebecca: We do have a particular process which it's quite unique, there are only a couple of other companies in the world that use it, and it's not swell paper and it's not Thermoform and it's not embossed, it's its own thing. And it's a proprietary technique, but it allows us to be able to do colored braille. So for instance, we do greeting cards and stuff as well. So that's a perfect application for this where it might be a greeting card in full color, say it's a Valentine's card and it's in full color and it's got red roses and everything. We can do the braille for the roses in red on top of the color print. And so it's quite good, we can do transparent braille even. So you can have the braille dots in transparent ink on top of a print piece of paper. And that works well for menus and stuff too 'cause you can have a bar menu or something where it's a wine list and then the braille is transparent on top of that. Jeff Thompson: Oh, that's nice. Rebecca: But that's unique to our process. It's very durable, it feels nice, and it's quite unique. It's also a little bit labor intensive because it's very much a hand done process, but it produces a good effect. Jeff Thompson: And that's what matters. Rebecca: Yep, I think for the end user that's what matters. Jeff Thompson: And people can find these greeting cards, these book, coloring books, maps, and request some special stuff that might be unique to them. Rebecca: Yes. Jeff Thompson: Like I even saw something that was a recycling schedule. I never thought about-- Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. Jeff Thompson: Is it on Tuesday or is it on next Tuesday? Rebecca: Yeah, yep, yep. Now of course with smartphones you can get some cities anyway that are sort of progressive and think about these things. You can get e-reminders and e-waste schedules, but like our desktop calendars and our pocket calendars, some people really function better with that kind of reference material in a physical format that they can refer to. And so a recycling schedule would be a great application as well for that. Yes, people can request all of that stuff from our website which is tactilevisiongraphics.com. There's a contact us link, there's phone number, email address, all of that. Jeff Thompson: It's all right there. Rebecca: Yep. Jeff Thompson: Rebecca, when can people expect to see their first coloring books with the Disney characters? Rebecca: That is a good question. We expected that we would be ready to start shipping at the end of January, but they have told us that that's far too ambitious and we need to push that deadline back by a couple of weeks. So I would think that it'll be soon, but given the fact that we're learning a lot about this process the farther we go into it, I hesitate to forecast a date. However, I do believe that once we get the first one out, it's a pretty steep learning curve to know how to do the vetting process, but once we get the first one out, subsequent books can come out in fairly quick succession. Jeff Thompson: That's great. So when we get out of this big deep freeze, we have something to look forward to in the springtime. Rebecca: Yes, yes indeed, indeed we do. Jeff Thompson: Well Rebecca, I wanna thank you very much for coming on the Blind Abilities and sharing this great news about the Disney books, about the products that you provide. If you're interested, check it out. That's tactilevisiongraphics.com.  Rebecca: Dotcom. Jeff Thompson: There we go. Rebecca: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this, I really appreciate it. And just that you reached out to us. Jeff Thompson: Nothing against sighted or differentiating between sighted and blind or something, but it's so neat to know that I'm so glad you're blind, put it that way. Rebecca: Yeah, I hear ya. Jeff Thompson: But people who get into businesses like this, it's nice that they have a perspective of what is good braille, what is good tactile quality-wise? And with your experience starting at age six, you know what good braille is. Rebecca: That's right. Jeff Thompson: Yeah. Rebecca: Yep, I do. My husband and I make a, I think we make a pretty good team because as I say, he's the ideas guy, he's good at the graphics side of it, and I'm a dragon when it comes to quality control about the braille. So we work well together. Jeff Thompson: You'll never get Disney, right? Rebecca: Who'd wanna talk to us? Jeff Thompson: Isn't that amazing? You make that phone call and what if they do say yes? Rebecca: I know, I know, that's the risk, right? The only risk is that they're gonna say yes. And it was a good risk. Jeff Thompson: Well there you go. Rebecca: Yep, pretty cool. Thank you for all your time. Jeff Thompson: Well thank you for coming on and you have a great day and I'll be in touch. Rebecca: Okay, talk soon. Jeff Thompson: All right, buh-bye, Rebecca: Buh-bye. Jeff Thompson: Such a great time talking to Rebecca Blaevoet from Tactile Vision Graphics. You can check them out on the web at tactilevisiongraphics.com. And it sure is gonna be exciting when the first release of the Disney coloring books, the accessible Disney coloring books from tactilevisiongraphics.com come out. So stay tuned. And a big thank you to Chee Chau for his beautiful music. You can follow Chee Chau on Twitter @LCheeChau, Chee Chau, Chee Chau. Once again, thank you for listening, we hope you enjoyed it. And until next time, bye-bye. [Music]  [Transition noise]  -When we share -What we see -Through each other's eyes... [Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence] ...We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities. Jeff Thompson: For more podcasts with the blindness perspective: Check us out on the web at www.BlindAbilities.comOn Twitter @BlindAbilities Download our app from the App store:  'Blind Abilities'; that's two words. Or send us an e-mail at: info@blindabilities.com Thanks for listening.

Rebecca and Andrew talk about the way plants work in their lives – through sharing about their studies and personal journeys with plants. They also talk about fear and how pushing through that brings better things even though it isn't easy. Finally they also talk about traditional knowledge and how to respect elders an indigenous people.  Find Rebecca at BloodandSpicebush.com and the classes at Sassafras-School.com Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcription ANDREW: [00:00:01] Welcome to The Hermit's Lamp podcast episode 93. I am here with Rebecca Beyer, who is an herbalist and plant person and does all sorts of wonderful things in that environment. For [00:00:17] those who don't know you, Rebecca, give us . . . give us a quick introduction. Who are you? What do you . . . what are you about? REBECCA: Hi! I'm about, I guess, I'm about Appalachia and I'm about plants and [00:00:32] I'm about traditional witchcraft. That's like those three things. I think. ANDREW: Yeah. Well, if people don't know what Appalachia is . . . REBECCA: Yeah! ANDREW: Let's start with that, because maybe not everybody does.  REBECCA: That's so interesting and [00:00:47] I love that you all are up in Canada. So it's really cool to to know, you don't know what Appalachia is! [chuckling]  ANDREW: I mean, I think people . . . I do, but yeah, let's, let's just make sure nobody has to go Google anything mid-podcast.  REBECCA: That's such a good idea. Yeah, Appalachia is a region, [00:01:02] which is debated, that's cultural and ecological in the Eastern side of the United States. It's a mountain range that extends from, culturally, I would say, you know, Western Pennsylvania through Northern Georgia, [00:01:17] but mountain-wise and ecologically through a few different regions on the Eastern Seaboard, kind of inland. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: So, this big mountain range, the Appalachian Mountains. Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And there's a lot of spiritual tradition that's [00:01:32] kind of from that area, right? Like a lot of, sort of more folk magic and you know, those kinds of approaches, right? REBECCA: Yeah, that's one of the things that I am a student of and teach is Appalachian folk magic, and [00:01:47] I'm very passionate about . . . and especially where plants and plant lore come into that story. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. So did you grow up with that or did you find your way into it? Like how did that come about for you? REBECCA: That's a good question. I did not grow [00:02:02] up with it. I grew up on a farm in New Jersey. ANDREW: Okay. REBECCA: And, yeah . . . and halfway in both states. And it's funny cause when I tell people I'm from New Jersey, they're like, "Oh, you're not, you don't seem like you're from New Jersey at all," and I'm like, "Are you saying like, I'm not an asshole," like what? ANDREW: [laughing] REBECCA: What are [00:02:19] you saying? I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on the air. ANDREW: I'm sorry to everybody in New Jersey who's listening to this. Yeah. REBECCA: Well, I'm sorry, because I like, you know, I had a beautiful upbringing in a very pretty little country spot in central New Jersey. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And I [00:02:34] loved our little farm, but we didn't raise plants. We just raised animals.  ANDREW: Okay. REBECCA: But I've always loved, I feel like since I was a little girl I wanted to be a witch. It was just something I've always been interested in and I was raised in the Unitarian Universalist Church. [00:02:49] So I met a lot of witches and it was easy to start studying witchcraft seriously. At around 12, I kind of dedicated myself to studying it and, through that, became more interested in plants and realizing that they could be used for more than food. [00:03:04]  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. And, so how did the head of the Appalachian part come in? Like, did you meet somebody, did you like, you know, go stand on a mountain and be like, oh, this is home. Like . . . ?  REBECCA: That's a good question. [00:03:19] I was obviously a very weird kid as we've, most of us probably were. ANDREW: Sure. REBECCA: And very socially isolated. We moved nine times when I was a kid, so I didn't have strong connections with other human adults till I was 18, when I moved to Upstate New York to go to college [00:03:34] at Bard College, and I met my now best friend Sarah Lynch Thomason, who's an Appalachian ballad singer, who's from Nashville, Tennessee. And she moved to Asheville right after we graduated from college. She graduated ahead of me, and she was like, you [00:03:49] HAVE to move here, Asheville, North Carolina, like, it is what's up. So I just packed my truck with all my things and drove to Asheville. And--after I graduated from college--and I just lived in her living room for two weeks. ANDREW: Right. REBECCA: And then I just fell [00:04:04] in love. I tried to leave, once, I think to go back up to Vermont where I had been living before, and I think that lasted like three weeks and I came back. So that was in 2010 when I moved here. So I've been here for longer now than anywhere I've ever lived in my life. ANDREW: It's [00:04:19] interesting how, you know, like I think about . . . I mean, Vermont's got lots of mountains. Upstate New York's got lots of mountains, you know? It's funny how, you know, from a geologic point of view, anyway, there's [00:04:34] this like, oh look. Well, it's all mountains. What about . . . what is it about those mountains? What is it about that place that drew you in or captivated you?  REBECCA: That's a good question. Well, I think, geologically speaking, the Appalachians are so special, [00:04:49] because they're some of the oldest mountains in the world, which we forget in America. We often like to excoticize--and I'll say North America, to include all of us on this continent--like to exoticize things from far away, but we have some of the most ancient land masses [00:05:05] in existence right at our fingertips, and it's pretty incredible. And plant communities that are very unique. And to me, the extreme biodiversity of where we live in southern Appalachia, where I live is temperate [00:05:20] rain forest. So we have more plants than anywhere except for North Alabama, which has the most diverse plant life in the United States.  ANDREW: That's amazing. REBECCA: Mm-hmm.   ANDREW: And did you find . . . do you feel like . . . You [00:05:35] know, like, lots of people talk about sort of spirit of place, right? as a thing that's sort of emerged into people's awareness more over time. And you know, at least more recently from my perspective. REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: You know, do you feel that that's part of it [00:05:50] for you? Like is there, is there a spirit of the land where you're actually hanging out that's, that's part of your life?  REBECCA: Yes, my friend Marcus McCoy who started the Veridis Genii Symposium . . . ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: When I was [00:06:05] early 20s--you probably know him--when I was in my early 20s, I stumbled across his blog, Bioregional Animism, and it really changed . . . It gave me words for things that I had felt but I didn't know were names for and other [00:06:20] bloggers have now gone on to further that idea, which was, you know, kind of coined, I'd say in the 70s with the rise of bioregional scholarship, on just like, policy and land management.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: They took it deeper, you know? I [00:06:35] wrote a lot of my thesis--I have a master's degree in Appalachian Studies--and I wrote my thesis on--which is really silly, I know. But I looked a lot at like the history of bioregionalism and like what makes Appalachia and regional studies important. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And [00:06:51] to me, in this globalized world, you know, we struggle for meaning, you can see it everywhere. Especially white folks, like without any cultural, strong cultural ties, will grab onto any strong cultural tie from any culture that [00:07:06] we can find. And yeah, and I think a lot of that comes from a lack of grounding in place. So to me, I do think there is a spirit of Appalachia. My friend Byron Ballard, who's a well-known Appalachian folk practitioner, she, in our area, says there's [00:07:21] a mother Appalachia, this kind of an entity that makes this place so special. And to me, I'm also a musician, I'm an artist, and all the things I do revolve around Appalachian folk practice. And to me, it's like helped me ground in, because [00:07:36] I wasn't raised here . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: Into the life way and the art way and the music way of this place. And not necessarily say, this is mine, it's from me, but wow, I participate in this, and I love it, and I want [00:07:51] to, you know, support it and continue it and nurture it.  ANDREW: Yeah. I think it's always interesting when people, you know, or never mind people. For me, you know, I mean, I found my way into being a Lukumi, you know Orisha [00:08:06] practitioner, right? You know, so, I'm initiated in an Afro-Cuban religion, you know, and that's, that's been my journey for, you know, getting towards being 20 years now, you know, but I think that it's really always interesting when people are looking [00:08:21] for that meaning and they find it somewhere else. How do you go about exploring that and connecting with that, in a way that is, you know, respectful, meaningful in a broader context, because it's . . . [00:08:36] I think that you know what people do in general, even if it's not respectful, might be meaningful to them personally, you know, but problematically culturally, right? But what do you think about . . . how you know, how, how would you recommend people approach this [00:08:51] kind of stuff if what you're talking about is something that they're drawn towards?  REBECCA: Yeah, I think that's such a good question and it's a sensitive one. You know, there's . . . I always notice that I feel fear and I feel nervousness when [00:09:06] talking about these things, because, unfortunately the way that people communicate online is very different than how they'll communicate in real life. [laughs] Discovered . . . I just taught a class, this is a great example, and I think will answer this question, on [00:09:21] the uses of fumatory plants worldwide to address cultural appropriation issues. ANDREW: Sure.  REBECCA: Because, specifically with white sage being overharvested, and a lot of indigenous Western folks saying, hey, can you guys slow your roll on this, you know? buying all this unsustainably [00:09:36] harvested sage? [laughs] ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: So, like, why do you feel the need to burn this plant specifically, when it's not part of your cultural lineage? And I don't think anyone at this point in the world is like, you can't do anything that's not from your specific ancestry, because I mean I have eight different ancestries. [00:09:52] You know? And it's . . .  ANDREW: Sure. REBECCA:  Most people do. And, and, and I think that's not what people are saying, and a lot of folks get defensive, and say, "Well, what, am I not allowed to do anything?" and it's like, "No, calm down. [laughs] No one's telling you that." And I think what you're doing when you're initiated in something . . . [00:10:07] Initiation is an invitation. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: If you are studying with a person from that, you know, Afro-Cuban lineage, who's saying, "You're welcome here, come into this space." That's very different than when someone says, you know, "I'm gonna self study [00:10:22] this thing, and then declare myself an expert and then make money off this thing . . ." ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And never study the cultures that this thing comes from. ANDREW: For sure.  REBECCA: Yeah, because what I do, I'm not technically Southern Appalachian, but I practice and teach Appalachian folk magic. And some people, I'm sure, would take issue with that. But [00:10:37] what do I do? I think it's all about how we how we raise up the cultures that we are benefiting from. How do we support them? How do we not try to speak for them and do the like white savior thing? And like, how do we invest [00:10:53] ourselves in the continuance and preservation and nurturance of the cultures that bring us such joy and meaning. And I include myself in that even though, technically, Appalachian folk culture is largely based on some things I have cultural access to. It's also based [00:11:08] in Cherokee and African traditions. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. For sure.  REBECCA: That have direct lineage too, that I need to respect and call attention to.  ANDREW: Yeah, and that's an interesting thing about a lot of those, you know, Appalachian, you know, root work, hoodoo [00:11:23], like a lot of those, sort of, you know, from there, heading further south, traditions are really such an interesting meld of, you know, of cultures, right? REBECCA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW:  You know, they're, they [00:11:38] involve stuff that came from Africa through the slaves. They involve stuff that came through the indigenous communities that were there alongside those people, you know, and then they have a mixed in, you know, depending on the region, [00:11:53] you know, European Christian or other folk traditions too, right? Like it's such a . . . it's such an interesting meld and I think that it's so helpful to really respect the fact that they come from a bunch of different places. They [00:12:08] come from all those lineages, you know?  REBECCA: Yeah. Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Yeah, because it's easy to, like, it's easy to be like, well, you know, this is just like this person's thing or this is that person's like . . . They're diverse and their strength [00:12:23] comes from that history, right?  REBECCA: It's true. It's true, and it's great talking to my friends who are hoodoo practitioners, and saying, you know, the first time I met my friend Demetrius, who I don't know if you know, from New Orleans at [00:12:38] Veridas Genii Symposium. We were kind of like doing a comparison like, what do you, do you do this, in hoodoo?  And he's like, well, do you do this in Appalachian folk magic? And it was just like, such overlap that we were like, of course, these things are so similar. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And it was wonderful and then we were like, "Let's sing a Scottish [00:12:53] ballad," you know, and like, because he does a lot of ballads. And then I'm like, let's, you know, he's like, "Do you want to learn this song in this West African language?" And I was like, "Oh heck, yeah." It was just, it was really cool, because it was like living that experience of seeing the lines . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: By sharing verbally [00:13:08] those things and song and in tradition and looking at different charms we were talking about. ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  REBECCA: And I loved that. It was really special and what you're saying, too, is, we tell stories about traditions being [00:13:23] all one thing and they're . . . One thing I learn as I get older--and I'm 31, I'm not terribly wise--but I notice things are always more complicated and beautifully complex than we think they are. ANDREW: Mm-mm. REBECCA: The're never black or white. It's just [00:13:38] complex. ANDREW: For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think that one of the other things I want to circle back to, you know, is, you mentioned, you know, briefly about, like, sustainability and stuff like that. And I think that that is [00:13:53] also such an important part of the equation of what's, what we're talking about here too, right? Like, you know, if you're going to live in, you know, in connection with plants and connection with [00:14:08] the spirits of the, of a place or whatever, right? I think that, that that attention on making sure that it's sustainable, making sure that there's some left, you know, like . . . I mean, you know, in my tradition, we use a lot of plants and some [00:14:23] of them do grow up here. Some of them I grow myself inside. And you know, some of them are just not possible in the far far north where I practice, but you do what you can. But you know, one of the things that my elders always stress is, you know, you never [00:14:38] take it all. You always leave enough that it keeps going, right? You always want to make sure that whatever you're working with, that, you know, later on it'll have regrown or next season it will regrow or whatever, because there is this eye towards . . . [00:14:53] You know, this is, this is a thing forever, hopefully. And therefore we want to keep that going forever, you know?  REBECCA: Yeah. Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: Yeah, I teach foraging classes as my day job. [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah! REBECCA: That's what I do [00:15:08] for a living. And this year, I'm actually going to teach foraging at the University of North Carolina. ANDREW: Amazing. REBECCA: As a college course. I know, I feel so honored. It's one nice thing about having an Appalachian Studies Master's, is now I can teach at colleges and that's, you know, even though they pay terribly, it's very good. [ringing phone] ANDREW: [00:15:23] I'm sorry. Can we pause for one second here? I've no way to make the phone stop ringing. [whispers] Stupid phone! [laughs] It's . . . REBECCA: Also, I have to say . . .  ANDREW: What's that?  REBECCA: Your mustache is spectacular.  ANDREW: Thank you, thank you. REBECCA: It's like, that mustache is [00:15:39] on point.  ANDREW: I started it as a joke, like a year and a half ago. Somebody on the radio was saying like, mustaches are coming in. And I was like, I've never grown a mustache. I wonder if I can grow a mustache? And, and then, I started growing it and I posted to Facebook and [00:15:54] everyone was like, yes, keep it going, and now, I'm just like, all right. This is my, this is my life now, so. REBECCA: That's amazing. Mustache life!  ANDREW: Mustache life.  ANDREW: Mustache life. All right, I'm going to clap and then we can start again. [claps] All right. [00:16:09] You were talking about teaching at the university.  REBECCA: Yeah, I'm really excited to get to teach at UNCA. I'm teaching foraging, and you were speaking about sustainability, and there's a lot of interesting, confusing, [00:16:24] complex arguments about wildcrafting in the United States, especially. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And in Canada, and any place that is colonized indigenous land. And what, as settler folks, who are European ancestry, like what are our responsibilities to [00:16:39] be good wildcrafters. Some people say you shouldn't wildcraft at all, zero percent is sustainable. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: Others say, you can just take indiscriminately and do whatever you want. But obviously, I think the truth, there's no such thing as truth, [00:16:54] but I think a more balanced view is somewhere in between and something I've been really interested in and enjoying doing is: there's a lot of plants we call invasive and some of them radically alter their landscape, like one of my favorite plants, kudzu. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: Which [00:17:10] on Gordon White's podcast, I mentioned I like kudzu and you would not believe the angry humans on those comments. [laughs] ANDREW: I would, I would.  REBECCA: I did not say we should go plant kudzu. I did not say like throw its seeds everywhere. I just said I love kudzu. And that triggered [00:17:26] a lot of people. Because it's edible, it's medicinal, and I'm in recovery from alcoholism, and kudzu's root has some great compounds in it that specifically help with the cravings for alcohol. So it's one, spiritually very in line with my heart and my personal journey. So, [00:17:41] and it was used in Japan and China for that purpose for a long time. But it's just funny because I can harvest as much kudzu is I want, you know, and like, I'm not going to put a dent in it. [laughs] But, I mean, if I want to harvest as much bloodroot, a native [00:17:56] plant, as I want, I can destroy that plant population. ANDREW: Sure.  REBECCA: So, it's just so . . . And, like, to me, saying all or nothing is never the right answer because harvesting invasives is actually beneficial to the environment, because it frees up space for more native [00:18:11] plants.  ANDREW: Yeah. I love dandelion. REBECCA: Me too! ANDREW: And you know, there's another one, like there's just, you know, I could never get rid of it in my garden, even if I tried probably. So, the amount that I can [00:18:26] take of that is basically everything that's showing, any time I want, and it just, you know, give it two or three weeks and boom, they're back again with another crop. REBECCA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: You know, so, yeah.  REBECCA: And those plants have followed us from Europe here and [00:18:41] from Asia and from all the different places that all the different people that live on this continent now come from and it's the story of the colonization of this continent is evident in our plant life. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And it marks the times that all the different people have come over here. And [00:18:56] all the different trading has occurred. You know, kudzu came over, I think, in the 30s and 40s for the World's Fair, as an erosion control plant and a crop for animals to eat, because it's very good for horses and cows and pigs and chickens and [00:19:11] [laughs] and people to eat, it's fine protein. So, I just think, you know, focusing on harvesting invasive plants and plants that are abundant is a great way to ask the question: Is this sustainable? And also know that you will never know the answer. ANDREW: Uh huh. REBECCA: A lot of: plant [00:19:26] world are like, "I know the truth!" And you're like, you do? That's . . . Okay. I see you're very confident in yourself. Because we're always finding new things out, and ecology is just like folk magic or any magic spiritual tradition, always changing.  ANDREW: For sure. And also, you [00:19:41] know, with climate change.  REBECCA: Oh, yes. ANDREW: Like, I think that that's another thing that comes into this where it's like, we might have an idea based on, you know, our experiences or our lifetime or you know, maybe even like our parents' or grandparents' lifetime, [00:19:56] but, things are changing a lot now. And you know, that's going to change what, what all these plants do it, you know, and and also, you know all these, you know, continuously there are new plants being introduced and shifting back and forth [00:20:11] and all that kind of stuff, right? So. It's such a dynamic system.  REBECCA: Dynamic is such a good word to describe it. And I think, you know, once again, it's so funny. Like I even feel fear saying like: Invasive plants. Harvest them. Because you know, it's like, it's tough. People have very strong opinions [00:20:26] about how plants are to be managed and a lot of very good and important hard questions come up around that. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: But the thing is, we do need to eat and heal ourselves from illness.  ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: Most of those things can [00:20:41] be done with a lot of the invasive plants. And that's not to say I never harvest native plants. Like I use poke a lot, which is a native plant, but most people think it's a noxious weed. They'll say, oh, that's a weed. ANDREW: Sure.  REBECCA: It's not, it's a native plant. It's, you know, it's just [00:20:56] funny that people are like oh, this horrible weed. And I'm like, what are you talking about? ANDREW: Well, it's true. It's like, you know, so a bunch of the plants that grow around here, that I use often in my religious practice, [00:21:11] you know, purslane, you know, stuff like that. You just find them growing out of the sidewalk, right? Like, in the city, it's, you know, you just, you go down the back lane way and you're like, oh look, you know, here's this one and that one [00:21:26] and you know, and they're just growing up between cracks in the cement and wherever, because those, those really hardy, you know, aggressive plants, you know, one, they have a lot of strength magically, you [00:21:41] know, in a general way, I think. But, but, two, they, you know, they're, they're everywhere and again, they're the kinds of things where it's like, you know, you don't take it all but also, even if you did, they're so resilient, like, people are [00:21:56] trying to get rid of them all the time and they cannot, you know, so yeah, it's very interesting. REBECCA: Yeah, and that's a great way too, to find places to forage. I talk to a lot of farmer friends and I'll say, you know, I love dandelion root . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: For its liver medicine. And it [00:22:11] definitely is, you know, is a plant I feel is aligned with the element of air, it's very good for spirit work and communication, but also not toxic so you can use it with impunity in some ways. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And call my friends and say, hey, do you mind if I bring my apprentices and our trowels out and we'll dig some dandelion [00:22:26] at your house. And they're always like, oh come on over. Or you call people in, you know, and they're like, oh, come on over. So we go to different farms and kind of weed them. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And then we go home with all the things that we want. It's a great symbiotic relationship. [laughs] ANDREW: For sure. Yeah, I have [00:22:41] raised beds in my, in my garden . . . REBECCA: Oh! ANDREW: And then the rest of it is this sort of crummy hard pack, you know, dirt that's . . . whatever was like, you know, when [00:22:56] they built it, they filled in because we're over a parking garage, right? And yeah, it's, all the stuff that grows there is all wonderful energetically. And you know, dandelion, and plantain, and you know, like all that kind of stuff. It's like we [00:23:11] would just go out in the yard and my kids are like, you know, they go ahead and pick a bunch and come back and make salad out of it and all that kind of stuff, you know, because it's there, and it's useful if you know what you're looking at, right?  REBECCA: Kids are so good at learning plants. I teach a lot of children. People bring their kids on our foraging tours [00:23:26] and they always, at the end of the tour, can recite every plant we met. And the parents are like, oh, what was that one? And the kids are like, you know, it's bitter, hairy bittercress and I'm like, oh good job. [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah.  REBECCA: They know everything. And they'll remember all the uses. They're so good. ANDREW: That's amazing. [00:23:41] So, I'm curious, because you've mentioned this a couple times now. Is the sort of, you said, I'm afraid to talk about this. I'm afraid to talk about that.  REBECCA: Yeah! [laughs] ANDREW: What . . . [00:23:56] tell me about the reservation. Like . . . REBECCA: Yeah! ANDREW: What, what is it that you run into around that? REBECCA: Well, I think a lot of it come up recently for me with my fumatory herbs class. I got a lot of really mean aggressive and [00:24:11] I would even say violent communications around me daring to suggest to folks of non-North American indigenous ancestry that maybe they shouldn't burn white sage with impunity. And I [00:24:26] think, I tried to say this compassionately and patiently as I could, I tried not to use attacking language. I called my, you know, my own self and my own shortcomings into the conversation, because I make mistakes constantly. I don't know the right answers. I'm just guessing. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: I'm just trying, you know? [00:24:41]  ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: And I . . . the venom with which strangers will write to me is horrific, and it's funny because, you see this over and over again, on Internet communications. Because when I taught my class in person, I was terrified that people would yell at me . . . [00:24:56] ANDREW: Sure. REBECCA: There would be fighting in the class. Like I was afraid it would be really bad. I had probably 40 people show up to this class. It was incredible. People were compassionate and patient. Nobody got a millimetre out of line. ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: And [00:25:11] just like, I thought that was the case, but I'm so glad to see this is true. And everybody was just building together. Asking questions. Even if someone didn't understand something, no one was like well, you're an idiot for not understanding this complicated concept. [00:25:26] And I just appreciated how kind people were to each other and I see that that's the case. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: You know but online when you're anonymous . . .  ANDREW: Definitely. Yeah. REBECCA: And that's where it comes from for me because I just see other herbalists and I'm [00:25:41] often holding myself back in my work, I think, because I'm terrified to make mistakes and hurt people. But it also prevents me from sharing more information, or you know, providing access to education to more folks that want it. ANDREW: Yeah. I totally get that. You know?  REBECCA: You feel [00:25:56] that way? ANDREW: I . . . last fall, I had made an Orisha Tarot deck with . . . that got published through Llewellyn. And so, it's basically everywhere. And--which [00:26:11] is great--and the amount of apprehension I had about being an outsider, about, you know, even, even with the blessings of my ancestors, or like, my elders, my ancestors, the spirits through divination, like, even with [00:26:26] all those things, there's just like "ohhh, man," like waiting for that, that, you know, potential thing, right? And sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't, right? And definitely online is a place where it's way more likely, because online people [00:26:42] . . . Be kind, people, just be kind! I'm sure nobody listening to this podcast is mean online. REBECCA: [chuckles] ANDREW: But, yeah, but, but, that apprehension, right? And then also that realization, now that it's out there, that how much people [00:26:57] are benefiting from it, you know, and how much people are, you know, telling me how grateful they are that I made this offering, you know, to the world and whatever. And I think that it's such a delicate line . . . REBECCA: Yeah.  ANDREW: For, for us, [00:27:12] for people doing work, for people offering teaching, you know, and that, there's so many people out there who are just like, "Rah, rah, rah, do your thing, screw everybody, give no fucks, whatever" and I'm always like, that's horrible. Like, let's not be like [00:27:27] that! That's not useful. REBECCA: [laughs] Yeah! ANDREW: But then also there's like so many people doing good work like, you know, what you're up to, where it's, there's also that like, "Oh, should I? How's it going to go? What's gonna happen? I don't know," you know? REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: And, [00:27:42] and, and it's real, you know, that tension is really real. And I think that so many people experience it around their work and stuff. You know, how do you find your way through it?  REBECCA: I think a lot of it is, I try to use, [00:27:57] like I am an incredibly privileged person. You know? ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: I'm a large able-bodied white tall physically able person, who can appear heterosexual in certain situations. [laughs] And I . . . And [00:28:12] feminine, you know, and it's . . . So I can use those things to leverage messages and voices that are erased and largely unheard in my friends' communities, especially my indigenous friends. And I do a lot of work with [00:28:27] with the Catawba Indian nation. And the . . . I'm hoping to do some more with the Cherokee Nation around ethnobotany. And reestablishing control over the knowledge of foraging to the people who taught it to my ancestors here. [00:28:42]  And I think it's kind of crazy that me, as a European-ancestored-person, am going and teaching indigenous people how to forage, because their own knowledge was erased from them, through genocide. And it's, to me, like acknowledging those things, and like [00:28:57] when we come together as people in the real world and real life, together, me and my friends and those nations, we can create pretty amazing things. And we talk about really hard, uncomfortable, scary stuff and it's tough. You know? It's hard. It brings up a lot for both of us. But [00:29:12] instead of allowing it to paralyze us and prevent us, we're like, what can we build from the space? Like, where do we go forward? Let's acknowledge these things, talk about the hard stuff, the history, the harm caused by my ancestors, and let's [00:29:27] build something new from that. You know? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And I think that's really tough. It's because we don't know what to do. None of us really know. And for me, like constantly giving word, voice, accolade, and when I have extra resources, [00:29:42] putting my resources towards the people whose land this was and is, still. That to me is what I can do. And I know that's not what everyone would say is the best way but for me, I know, I don't . . . Unfortunately, being [00:29:57] a Appalachian folk magical practitioner is definitely not a great way to make a lot of money . . . BOTH: [laughing] REBECCA: I don't have a ton of resources and I have a lot of debt. ANDREW: Uh-huh.  REBECCA: But I have a lot of non-monetary resources, like access to academic information. [00:30:12] So I do a lot of research for my friends who don't have access to journals. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And I give them, you know, my university, don't tell my university I give them my login.  ANDREW: Nobody from university is listening, it's fine.  REBECCA: I know. They're not. Don't worry. But just finding ways to constantly figure [00:30:27] out like, okay, who am I speaking for? How can I help make space for others to speak and how can I make my resources available to them that are most helpful? And not what I think is most helpful, but what they need.  ANDREW: Yeah. I think that part about asking [00:30:42] people what they need? I mean, I think it's such a such a piece that gets overlooked so often in any kind of restorative approach.  REBECCA: Yes! ANDREW: Right?  REBECCA: Restorative, yeah.  ANDREW: That, like, say you're sorry, like whatever [00:30:57] it was, personal thing, you know, a generational thing or whatever, say, "Hey, I'm really sorry this happened, and then ask, like, "Is there something you need? Is there something that, that you think that I might be able to do that you need?" And then you can really [00:31:12] see where the conversation goes, right? Because I find so often people make these apologies or, you know, like, you know, I mean, again, maybe I'm being judgmental about people who are raging against you about using white [00:31:27] sage online, but I'm like, listen, just start with an apology, or just start with saying, "Huh. Well, what could I do instead. What might make sense?" You know? And maybe, maybe there are people, and probably there are people, who a hundred percent like have a deep deep connection [00:31:42] to that plant? Or, you know, like the white sage plant. Or there are lots of ways in which you can procure stuff sustainably, if you want to. REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: Like, you know. I got some stuff here. There's a new farmer in [00:31:57] Ontario who started growing stuff. You know, he got laid off from his job and he started expanding what he was already farming for himself, and it's great. You know, it's local, it's organic. It's . . . You know, it's sustainably harvested because [00:32:12] he's farming it himself, right? You know, it's great.  REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: Right? So like there's lots of options but being mad about it. That's not, like, that doesn't help anybody and . . .  REBECCA: Yeah, they don't like being told they can't do something. People are mad at me for saying . . . And I didn't say that. I said, "Hey, [00:32:27] maybe listen to indigenous people."  ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: And too, look at how this plant is now entering threatened status. And like, these are two things that are very important for different reasons.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, and I think too, you know, I mean, it's [00:32:42] always something that's very interesting to me, because my approach to working with plants, outside of my traditional stuff, which I learned from my elders, is I go for walks in the ravine, you know, or in the the forest in the valley here or [00:32:57] even in the lane ways. And, when I find a plant, like something'll grab my attention. And I'll be like, "Huh? What are you? What's going on?" And I'll just sit down and hang out with it for a while.  REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: And, you [00:33:12] know, none of those plants are mad. I've yet to find an angry plant. You know? I mean, like, that kind of like, conflicty energy, you know. Even, even plants that are in competition with each [00:33:27] other or whatever, I never have that feeling from them, that they have that aggressiveness, you know? And I think that it's an interesting thing to sort of ask yourself when you're working with plants. Like, what is the energy of this plant, [00:33:42] and how am I aligned with it? And how are my feelings aligned with it? And what's going on from there? You know? I don't know, does that make any sense to you? REBECCA: Oh, definitely. And I think . . . I totally agree with you. And I was talking to a friend the other day and he's like, "How do we separate [00:33:57] the spiritual from the political?" And I was like, "I don't think we can, and I don't think we should, at this point, but I think I see why people want to." They say, "Oh, can we just leave politics out of it?"  ANDREW: Sure.  REBECCA: Like well, that would be great. But unfortunately, with [00:34:12] the way things are, we can't. And it's . . . there's, you know, a lot of Internet explosions around things like that. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: Because people are like, "Well, you, don't bring up politics at this event." And it's like, well, you can't talk about plants or harvesting [00:34:27] or medicine and magic and not talk about the people it's come from, how we know about it.  ANDREW: Yeah.  REBECCA: And the story of how we got to this point. And it's . . . We need to do better as you know, as a community, especially, you know, in the white herbal world and [00:34:42] white practitioners need to do better about being open to like, talking about hard stuff and realizing it doesn't mean they have to fling themselves off a cliff. [laughs] You know? ANDREW: For sure, right? Yeah. REBECCA: You know, sometimes people think that's what people are asking of them, and it's like no one is asking you to fling yourself off a cliff. Maybe some people are, but you [00:34:57] don't have to do that. And it's just about being able to say like, whoa, what's the real story of how I got this information?  ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: And you know, the real story of when I harvest poke, I know what poke's medicinal uses are because indigenous and African [00:35:12] folks told my ancestors those things. So I need to, every time I work with that plant, I think about that. And I don't think about it in a negative or combative way. I think, like you're saying, I think about it in a, like, thank you, gratitude.  ANDREW: Yeah.  REBECCA: A building.  ANDREW: [00:35:27] Yeah. I don't think we can ever separate. . . I mean, yeah, I don't think we can really ever separate or ought to, as you say, at this time, separate politics from our spirituality. You know, I think that that that makes no sense at all [00:35:42] to me and even historically, you know . . . REBECCA: Yeah. [laughs]  ANDREW: You know, you look at a lot of, like the the stories of the Orishas going back, you know? So many of them demarcate political shifts in power and other kinds of things that [00:35:57] are, that are historical, you know? This group came in. They took over this, this region. They deposed the kind of person who was in charge. And the spirit that that person, you know, was most aligned with got a new story, where they [00:36:12] got demoted somehow because of something, right? Or what have you, you know? There's a lot of that. And, it's why, when I wrote the book that goes to my deck, I included the politics, a bunch of politics, all through it and even a chapter in the front that's . . . The, the header is like, why are there [00:36:27] politics in this book? And you know, and it's like, there's a few pages on like why, why I wanted to, you know, really make sure I was engaging in honoring some of that political content because it's true of the religion, it's true of [00:36:42] the world, and it's true for people who are living in the world and using these tools or these plants or whatever. We're all running into politics all the time, you know? And so I thought the idea that we could free ourselves from that somehow is, I [00:36:58] don't know, reminds me very much of like the Golden Dawn notion of like . . . REBECCA: [laughs] ANDREW: We'll get back to like the one true history behind all of the movement of the last, you know, thousands of years since Egypt and we'll, you know, access pure spiritual being or whatever. It's like no. That [00:37:13] doesn't exist. You know? REBECCA: I think you're so right. That was really well said and I totally agree. And I . . . it's . . . to me, I don't want to shame the, like when I hang out with a lot of hippies in Asheville and they're like, we're one human family. I'm like, we are, you're right and it's . . . it's great. [00:37:28] We're all humans. We have these shared human experiences. But within that human experience, my experience is very different than my friend who's, you know, Latinx or a person of color or disabled or a differently [00:37:43] abled or you know, blind or deaf or like anybody that experiences the world and and the, unfortunately, the baggage that the world puts upon them, in our culture . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: The different reasons and the different oppressions that people experience. [00:37:58] I don't understand the . . . Like, for me it's difficult to understand when people are like, let's just pretend that things don't exist, because it's hard! ANDREW: Sure. REBECCA: To deal with and it's hard when you don't experience a lot of those things, to be compassionate enough to say, what would it be like? What . . . How can I put [00:38:13] myself in that person's shoes? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And be compassionate to them, and be like, wow, you have had it way more difficult than me. And that doesn't mean that once again, I need to jump off a cliff, but it means I need to be aware of how I move through the world and who I'm stepping [00:38:28] on, who I'm profiting off of . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And who I'm supporting in the way that they would like to be supported, not the way I think they should be supported. ANDREW: For sure. REBECCA: And like you said, I don't . . . I always tell my students, I'm like, I don't know the answers. I have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm just . . . [laughs] I [00:38:43] do have some idea. But I'm guessing and I'm list-, trying to listen to my friends, and what their needs actually are, and I make mistakes. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And I have to be sorry, like you said, and then ask, what do you, what word did you use, recon-, not [00:38:58] reconstructed, but re- . . . You used a great word to kind of describe that asking somebody, what can I do? What do you need from me? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: To- . . . true apology. ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I can't remember right now, but you can rewind and listen to it later. [laughs]  REBECCA: [00:39:13] Well, that word, you know . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And that concept of . . . That to me is so integral in our in our work, especially with plants. It's so complicated. And like I said, many people will either say, "Right on," you know, or say "Wow, [00:39:28] she's a crazy communist," you know, or "Wow, she's actually horrible and she shouldn't harvest any plans at all." And I know, at some point, I want everyone to like me . . . [laughs] You know, I want everyone .  . . I'm a very people-pleasing person, being socialized female growing up, you [00:39:43] know, I always want to make everyone happy and feel safe. Also quadruple Cancer here. ANDREW: Wow, that's a lot of Cancer. It's a lot of Cancer. The struggle is real, eh? REBECCA: A real struggle but, I've got a lot of fire too. So it's hard to find out . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: What to truly do about that. [00:39:58] But I think what you've said, like, and the way you handled it in your book . . . There . . . People will be mad at us, no matter what we do in life and dislike us and that's okay.  ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: Looking for places who are causing real harm. That's to me more important than dealing with people who are on the Internet screaming. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: Real [00:40:13] purpose. [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, people can, people can do whatever they want on the Internet. It's fine. It's the Internet. I mean, it'd be great if people were kinder, but well, it's the Internet. So. [laughs] So that's the modern monster we've created right? Now, it's [00:40:28] funny, I've been . . . So, I guess, I have a question for you and then we will wrap up because you know, we've been on the phone for a while here, which has been super fun and we could probably talk for a long time. But so, my [00:40:43] question is: If you were to pick a plant or maybe a couple plants, that you think their energy harmonizes with kind of what we've been talking about here. What, what plant would that be, for you, for somebody [00:40:58] to get to know, you know, on an energetic level or whatever level makes sense, you know?  REBECCA: Yeah, that's such a good question. I think, for me, one of my most patron plants is mugwort, Artemisia vulgaris. ANDREW: Uh huh. REBECCA: And [00:41:13] it-- [laughs] Most gardeners in my town will be like, I hate mugwort, because it has running rootless, and it goes all over the place . . . ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: And it's a weed. But mugwort has been used historically all over the world as a banishing herb. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: The way that [00:41:28] many like new age folks use white sage now, which is not really its intended purpose, is what I've been told . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: By different folks and you can read a lot more about that by actual indigenous people online. If you want to look up the original uses [00:41:43] of white sage, I'd encourage you to do that. But mugwort, whether burned or even just hung up as a bundle, was used to keep away evil, to cleanse things, to remove disease-causing spirits, and in Asia, as well as North America and Europe, [00:41:58] and now it's naturalized. It's not native. It's naturalized all over the United States in lots of different species. And they're fragrant. They're edible, medicinal, important plants and I invite you to meet mugwort. And especially if [00:42:13] you have German ancestry, it was one of most important fumic plants of the German folks, which my last name means "from Bavaria." So, as you can imagine, that's some of the stuff I focus on in my work, but I invite people that to meet mugwort, because when you harvest it, you're weeding [00:42:28] out an invasive plant, you can make all types of food and medicine, and I have a post on my blog about the history of its magical uses, if people are curious with it.  ANDREW: We'll include a link in the show notes, for sure. That's awesome. Yeah, mugwort's [00:42:43] a really great one. You know, it's funny. It's amusing. I don't know. I don't even know what the right word is. I'm always surprised at how hard a sell it is to people sometimes? When other things are just such an [00:42:58] easy sell, right?  REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: But, but now I'm just going to be like, you know, look, Rebecca says you should use this one. I'll there put a little sign above the . . . You know, your face, saying, "Get this one!" right where we sell it in the shop. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, [00:43:13] the one that I leaned on a lot through, through that kind of like journeys with this stuff was, was actually was dandelion. REBECCA: Hmm. ANDREW: You know, it's a sort of like, you know, partly because of its notion of like, that deep [00:43:28] taproot as sort of staying deeply grounded in my own practice and being really really like grounded in what I do. Partly, you know, because of, like even though people see it as a weed, the beauty of its flower, right? That sort of like [00:43:43] offering of a radiance to the world throughout what I'm trying to do with my work, and also because it's, you know, often used for like detoxifying and stuff like that, that sort of like inner cleanse. It's like, I've got to root out this stuff, that's conditioning and [00:43:58] cultural baggage and other things, so that I can be more authentic to myself and what I need to be doing, you know? So that was definitely one that I leaned down a lot. You know, last year, especially through the summer time, [00:44:13] whenever I was like, feeling, feeling that worry about what was going to happen when the thing came out. I was like, all right, let's go out in the garden, dig up some dandelions, make some tea, or like hang out with them, or put a put a bunch of them on the table for a while or whatever, you know, so. [00:44:28]  REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: Yeah, for sure.   REBECCA: That's amazing. I love that. Thanks for sharing that with me.  ANDREW: Yeah! So, for people who want to check out what you're up to, and people should definitely check out what you're up to. Where do they find you? Where . . . [00:44:43] what are you up to, where are you hanging out online right now? REBECCA: Where do I lurk? Well, I have a website and an Instagram account called Blood and Spicebush. And my website is BloodandSpicebush.com. Spicebush is one of my favorite native plants and a blood cleanser, [00:44:58] hence the name of my website! And I also run a small folk herbalism school with my friend Abby Artemisia, called Sassafras School. And you can find us at Sassafras-School.com. And we have a few more spaces left in our yearlong [00:45:13] program on folk medicine and wild foods, as we're both female botanists and foragers and medicinal practitioners. So, we're excited to share that, because there's lots of amazing clinical herb programs, but we've seen there wasn't really any folk [00:45:28] program. So we decided to give it a go and see how that goes. ANDREW: Nice. That's awesome. Amazing. And you're going to be in Hamilton this summer, for folks who are local to the shop. So, you know, we'll put a link in for where you can find that as well in the notes, [00:45:43] but, Rebecca's going to be up in up in our part of the world a little bit where the shop is, so.  REBECCA: End of June. Yeah. ANDREW: End of June, yeah. Well, thank you so much for being on. It's been a wonderful chatting with you. Thank you. REBECCA: It was a pleasure. Thank you. 

Danah: This is Danah Hashem speaking and, for this episode, our 8th episode, we wanted to deviate from some of the patterns we’ve been following in this podcast so far because we want to pause to reflect on and honor the passing of one of our colleagues, Lori Johnson. If you’ve been following along with the podcast, you may know her from her episode with her daughter, Alex Johnson, on summer reading, from our introductory episode, or you may recognize her voice as the introduction to each of our episodes thus far. What you may not know is that Lori is the true originator of this podcast as a whole. It was her idea, her vision, and her passion for continued growth and exploration in our teaching that created the opportunities and the motivation we needed to get this podcast off the ground. She’s the reason this podcasts exists, and so it seemed important that this podcast acknowledge in some small way her passing. On this past November 7th, we lost Lori suddenly and unexpectedly. The depth and breadth of this loss is overwhelming. This podcast represents the tiniest, most microscopic fraction of the ways in which Lori kindly and gently inspired us all to push ourselves to be better and to continue our learning. And so, in honor of all she did and all she left behind, we want to dedicate this podcast to Lori, and we want to take some time to reflect on the power for goodness that a loving, driven, and thoughtful teacher can have on the people and places around them. And so many of the members of the LCA community who have contributed to and supported the production of this podcast have taken the time to share briefly about the impact that Lori had on their lives and pedagogy. As we hear their words, we’d like to thank you for being a part of this episode, and honoring Lori alongside us. Rebecca: So, my name is Rebecca Lefroy, and I’m the newest hire here in the English department at LCA. Lori hired me in June, and I still remember my first meeting with her which was I think supposed to be a short meeting, but maybe went on for 2-3 hours in which we talked about all things education and, from that moment, I could see her enthusiasm for students, her enthusiasm for reading, her enthusiasm for, um, professional development and innovative pedagogy, and all those things were only confirmed when I came to work with her in September. Um, Lori and I taught middle school English together, and she had a whole wealth of information on middle school students and how best to teach them English. I would so often go to her for book recommendations for students. If you had a really specific need for a book for a student, she would know exactly what book would be best. She knew young adult literature inside and out, and was just so perfectly suited to that role, so, from a middle school english perspective, she will be missed hugely. She was also my mentor, so we should be meeting right now, and, um, in our mentor meetings, we had such fun discussing not only nitty bitty practical things like how to use the portal and how to report, but bigger ideas about pedagogy, about how to wrap up a lesson effectively, about the point of homework, um, about individual students and how best to address their needs and help them. She was always so available to me. Not only did she give me that full hour, but she would interrupt what looked like much more important conversations with other people to come and help me. She noticed when I looked troubled or worried about something, and she would check up that I was OK. She had a huge heart for developing new teachers, and I’m very sorry that I only got to learn from her for a couple of months. She also had a huge amount of energy. She had her finger in so many pies in the school, and I’m sure we’ll keep discovering more of those pies. She would come into school before me and leave after me, and I would be exhausted by the end of the day, but she would still be very merry and very jolly,

The guest speaker in this podcast features Rebecca So, the COO of Sway Company LLC. Rebecca gives insight into her unique all natural deodorant and how she built her business. For more information on sway check out the company website at www.lovemysway.com. Keynotes on this podcast: -Understanding the commitment of becoming an entrepreneur -Rebecca discusses how she found an opportunity to create a product out of her dissatisfaction with the other products in the market and her plans to grow her business Thank you to our sponsor Crowdsourced Books. Crowdsourced Books provides you with all the resources you need to become a successful author. You can find out more by visiting www.crowdsourcedbooks.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneymatters/support

How’s your deodorant working?! Rebecca So had a hard time finding a deodorant that works. Natural, chemical, clinical strength, roll-on, sticks, paste, cream, you name it – she’s tried them all. Most of them don’t last long or are just plain ineffective, especially on anxiety sweat. So, Rebecca decided to do something about it. Rebecca joins Justin to discuss launching the business, building a consumer products brand, and differentiating in a crowded market.

It’s a classic story. A sultry summer’s night: Two suave British students of Arabic and one flustered American activist talk about being Western women in Palestine. Rebecca: “So what’s it like traveling in the West Bank ?” Lola: “Sometimes it’s … Continue reading →