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Melissa and Kevin Lee played an important role in what we know now as NightScout and the DIY movement.  Their interest was initially sparked because they wanted to have children. Melissa lives with type 1 and Kevin has an engineering background. They jumped in with many other "hackers" to create what we know now as Nightscout and other DIY systems. By the way, the Lee's children are now ten and eight! Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! In Tell Me Something Good, wedding bells for a T1D couple – which spark some fun stories from others in the community.. and an update on a change my son made after our last episode. Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Sign up for our newsletter here Listen to our "Steel Magnolias" episode about pregnancy, type 1 diabetes and community featuring Melissa Lee, Kerri Sparling & Kyrra Richards here. Find all of the "We Are Not Waiting" episodes of the podcast here #Wearenotwaiting ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone      Click here for Android Episode Transcription: Stacey Simms  0:00 Diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop created for people with diabetes by people who have diabetes. By Real Good Foods, real food you feel good about eating and by Dexcom take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with Dexcom.   Announcer  0:19 This is Diabetes Connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  0:25 This week, Melissa and Kevin Lee played an important role in what we now know is Nightscout and the DIY movement. It's kind of hard to remember but those early days very different. Melissa remembers what it was like the first time Kevin for husband followed her numbers and acknowledged what a hard day she'd had.   Melissa Lee  0:45 And I didn't realize I just looked at him and he said, this is how every day is, isn't it? And like I still get chills thinking about it. They say it was the first time that anybody outside of me or another person with diabetes looked at I said I see you. This is hard.   Stacey Simms  1:02 Melissa and Kevin were interested initially in the DIY movement because they wanted to have children. Their kids are now 10 and eight. We have a lot to talk about. And tell me something good wedding bells for a couple who live with type one. And that sparked some fun stories from others in the community. plus an update on a change my son made after our last episode. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Welcome to another week of Diabetes Connections. I'm so glad to have you here. I'm your host Stacey Simms we educate and inspire about type 1 diabetes by sharing stories of connection. And this is a story of connection. Melissa and Kevin have so many wonderful anecdotes to share about finding the DIY community about those early exciting days about the projects they worked on. And we talked about what it's like as a married couple to go from not sharing any information. about diabetes to being some of the first people to be able to see CGM information, you know, how does that change your relationship? How do you talk about it? And we'll get to that in just a couple of minutes. It was great to talk to them. I wanted to bring you up to speed first, though, on something that I mentioned. Well, Benny mentioned it when I spoke to him last week. So Benny is my son, if you're new, he was diagnosed right before he turned two. He is now 15 and a half. And we talked last week about changing a bit of our routine, he has been taking a long acting insulin called Tresiba for almost two years along with using an insulin pump. It's a method called untethered, I'm not going to rehash the whole thing. I've talked about it many times. But if you are new, that will link up more information in the show notes and you can go back to listen to last week or previous episodes with Benny about why we did that. bottom line he was using so much insulin because of puberty and maybe some other issues genetics who knows that it was very, very helpful to add an additional basal source that took the pressure off the pump inset, but Over the last month, his insulin use has gone way down. And that is because of three factors. He's probably coming out of puberty, he has lost a lot of weight. And we are using the control IQ system, which we noticed right away meant we were doing far fewer big corrections and we just used it so much less insulin on it. So during the show that the last endocrinology appointment, Dr. V, had said it was fine to go off the Tresiba, no problem, do it when you want if you want, and Benny said that he did want to do that. So as I'm taping this, it's probably about eight days since we made this switch. It takes about two to three days everybody's a little different to get Tresiba out of your system. It works a little differently than some other long acting so it takes longer to get out of your system. We did have a rocky three days but we were used to that we knew that was coming and just as I had hoped control IQ the software system with the tandem pump and the Dexcom just has worked even better than it did before and I don't talk about specific numbers with my son. That's not how we Roll, but just to give you some perspective has been about 70% in range, you know, it goes up, it goes down very happy with that number. He has been 80% in range, I think 82% in range for the last seven days as an average and two days where he was like 98% in range. It's crazy. So I don't think that'll continue because that's how diabetes works. Right? Don't you find sometimes it like lulls you, when you make a switch, it always starts out great, and like a week or two later floor like the rug just pulled out from under you. So we'll see. I want to get to Melissa and Kevin. But at the end of the show, I'm going to talk a little bit more about some changes we've made recently, in addition to Tresiba, we have changed how we use sleep mode. So stay tuned at the very end. I'm going to talk about that. But I know not everybody uses control IQ. So standby Diabetes Connections is brought to you by Real Good Foods. It's really easy to compare and see what we love about Real Good Foods. If you put them side by side to other products, I mean their breakfast sandwiches, six grams of carbs, 18 grams of protein compared to like, you know 2636 grams of carbs in other products and a lot less protein and a lot more junk. If you look at their cauliflower crust pizza, you It's amazing. Not every cauliflower crust pizza is actually low in carbs, you know this you got to read the labels. So Real Good Foods, nine grams of carbs in there cauliflower crust pizza. Some of the other ones have 3540 grams of carbs. I know everybody eats low carb, but you know, you want to know what you're getting. You want to really be able to see, well if I'm eating a cauliflower crust pizza, you might as well eat you know, a bread crust if you want 40 carbs per serving. Real Good Foods is just that they are made with real ingredients, you know stuff you can pronounce. It's so easy to find. They have that locator on their website, it's in our grocery store. It's in our Walmart, and you can order everything online, find out more, go to Diabetes, Connections comm and click on the Real Good Foods logo.   My guests this week are part of the history of the diabetes DIY movement. longtime listeners know that I am fascinated by the we are not Waiting crowd. And I can't say enough about what they have done for our community. In fact, I'm actually trying to put together an oral history. And we've talked to a lot of people since 2015. When I started the show about this movement. The big problem is a lot of these wonderful engineering and tech types are a little spotlight adverse. You know who you are, but I'll get there. I did reach out to Kevin and Melissa, because, you know, I've talked to Melissa a few times about pregnancy and type one and other issues. I think that the show we did as a panel with other guests about pregnancy in type one and Steel Magnolias is frankly, one of the top 10 episodes, not because of me, but the guests are so amazing. And that night gets so much praise on that episode, people, you know, women pass it around. I'll link that up in the show notes. But you know, I hadn't heard Melissa and Kevin's story, and their names always come up when we hear about the early days of the DIY builders. So our talk today is about much more than the technology it's also about marriage and kids and diabetes and sharing data. You know how that affects your life. Quick note, Kevin now works for Big Foot biomedical and Melissa works for tide pool. If those names don't mean anything to you, if you don't know what those are, or you know what they do, might be a little bit of a confusing interview. There's some presumed knowledge here, I will put some links in the show notes, you may want to go back and listen to previous episodes about the we're not waiting movement or just check out the links. Also, it is really hard to get people to acknowledge the difference they've made. These are all very modest people. God loves them, but I do try. So here's my interview with Kevin and Melissa Lee, Melissa and Kevin, I am so excited to talk to you two together. Thanks for making time to do this. I know how busy you both are.   Melissa Lee  7:43 Thank you for having us on. This is a fun thing to get to do.   Stacey Simms  7:47 I don't know if Kevin's gonna think it's that fun. We'll see. And I say that because in the small way that I know you you don't seem like you're quite as conversational and chatty is as we Melissa, well, we'll see how it goes. Kevin, thanks for joining us and putting up with me already.   Melissa Lee  8:04 Well, you know, he actually is until you stick a microphone in front of his face. Oh, okay. You know, beyond that, yeah.   Stacey Simms  8:12 Well, let's start when when you guys started, and Melissa, I will ask you first How did you meet?   Melissa Lee  8:17 Oh, this is a story I love to tell. And Kevin's gonna already be like, why did I agree to do this? So this was like 2006 and I spent a couple of years doing internet dating. And you know, I'm very extroverted and and like a go getter. And I had just been on, like, 40 bad days, basically, on the internet. Basically, I was broke from spending money on lots of different dating sites, and I found a free one. But during that one, it turns out that this guy was on it because one, it was free. And two, he liked their matching algorithm that tells you a little bit about why you needed so we met online and then What a year and a half later, we were married. Wow. So yeah, we were married in late 2007. At the time, I was a music teacher. And Kevin, how would you describe what you did in the world? Kevin: I was working at Burlington, Northern Santa Fe, just deploying web applications as a contractor to IBM. And then in our early years, you worked for capital, one bank doing infrastructure architecture, and then later for American Airlines doing their instructor architecture. So we like to say, you know, we've been in finance he's been in travel is been in transport. He's been in lots of different fields doing that same thing that I just said infrastructure architecture, which I will not explain.   Stacey Simms  9:44 So, Kevin, when did you go from checking out the algorithm of the dating app, to noticing that perhaps the diabetes technology that your girlfriend and fiancé and wife was using, when did you notice that it really could be done better. And then you could do it   Kevin Lee  10:02 became a little bit later. And it first I kind of just let her her do her own thing. She managed it. She managed it well. And then as we started to progress, and we both wanted kids,   Melissa Lee  10:16 yes, we got back from the honeymoon and I had babies on the brain and two of my bridesmaids were pregnant. And then I have this whole, you know, in our pregnancy podcasts that we did together, I had babies on the brain, but I had this diabetes hanging over me. And I think that that was a huge motivator for both of us. So like mid 2008, my insulin pump was out of warranty. Kevin Lee And so that's that's whenever I really started to encourage her and I started getting involved and saying, hey, let's let's go experiment. Let's find what's what's right. Let's look at what else what other options exist and didn't find too many other options but no, we I did switch I switched insulin pump brands and we started talking about this new thing that was going to be coming to market called the CGM. Melissa Lee So I got my first CGM within the next year. And Kevin immediately started trying to figure out how it works. So this was the freestyle navigator. And this was like 2009. I think I was maybe already pregnant or about to be pregnant. And Kevin was trying to hack this device.   Stacey Simms  11:25 So what does that mean? When you said you started to figure it out? What did you do?   Kevin Lee  11:29 Well, it bugged me that the acceptable solution was the we had this little device that had a range of measured in the 10s of feet. That was it. And I had a commute. At the time, I was working at American Airlines and my commute was 45 miles one day daily, and she was pregnant, and I just wanted some sort of assurance that she was safe and there was no way to get that and I just wanted to be able to You know, it was obvious that this center was sending the data that I wanted on the available through an internet connection. How do I get that? Ultimately, that effort was unsuccessful. And that's when we started going to friends for life. And there, that's where we saw I guess Ed Damiano’s connected solution where there's remote monitoring, and we saw the Dexcom. And that's whenever I thought, hey, if that's an option, and so we started looking into the Dexcom and switched over.   Stacey Simms  12:39 I'm gonna jump in because I'm a little confused. When you said you said Damiano’s connected set up, I thought that he was showing off what is now called the iLet and the new the bio hormonal insulin pump. What was the Dexcom component to that that you hadn't seen before?   Kevin Lee  12:54 So it was just a simple remote monitoring, you know, he needed to be able to as part His research to be able to remotely monitor the patients that were well,   Melissa Lee  13:05 specifically, he had an early version of the bionic pancreas had a Dexcom that was cabled to a phone. Oh, and so if you look back at like, 2012 And so like he I remember Kevin holding the setup in his hand and looking at it and being like, you know, this is fascinating. Like, I have an idea.   Stacey Simms  13:30 Because at the time and I'll find a picture of it, but it was cable to a phone. And there were at least two insects from the pump. So you had to have the the CGM inset and then you had to have two pumping sets and then the phone cable for the bionic pancreas at that time. Am I thinking of the right picture?   Kevin Lee  13:45 No, I really should   see all of that.   Melissa Lee  13:49 You know, like we're so old at this point.   Like, like eight years ago now I wasn't realizing because how have my children are but this You know, I want to say that this was even before we'd have to go back and back with them.   Kevin Lee  14:05 Yeah. And that was just the moment that hey, okay, this is another alternative. And we were, we were actually looking to switch at the time because I think that's when the note and I switched.   Melissa Lee  14:17 Okay, we had to switch because navigator went off the market in 2011. So this is right around the time, we just switch to that.   Unknown Speaker  14:24 So what did you do with the Dexcom ,   Kevin Lee  14:26 whenever we noticed that there was a little port that was also used for, for charging and for data, I connected to it and started reverse engineering it sending data and seeing what we got back and trying to get that data off. It was first connected to my little Mac MacBook Pro. And I just had a goal over Thanksgiving to be able to get that data out of the CGM. And it took three or four days and I was able to get basic data out of the system. In premiere, it was just as simple as uploading it, and then visualizing it.   Stacey Simms  15:06 So for perspective, and I want to be careful here because I know there were a lot of people working on a lot of different things. I'll be honest with you. I'm not looking for who was first or when did that happen? Exactly. But just for perspective, is this basically the same thing that we then saw, like john Costik, put up on Twitter when he said he got it like on the laptop? Or, like, what would we have seen if we had been sitting in your house that day?   Right back to Kevin and Melissa, but first, you know, it is so nice to find a diabetes product that not only does what you need, but also fits in perfectly with your life. One drop is just that it is the sleekest looking and most modern meter I family's ever used. And it's not just about their modern meter setup. You can also send your readings to the mobile app automatically and review your data anytime. Instantly share blood glucose reports with your healthcare team. It also works With your Dexcom Fitbit or your Apple Watch, and not to mention, they have that awesome test strip subscription plan, pick as many test strips as you need, and they'll deliver them to your door. One drop diabetes care delivered, learn more, go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the one drop logo. Now back to Kevin answering my question about what does it look like when he figured out how to reverse engineering the free the Dexcom data.   Kevin Lee  16:30 Absolutely that we would you would have seen a little text flying by saying this is the the glucose number. Yeah, on the on the computer. It wouldn't have been very exciting to most. And from there, Melissa tweeted out saying hey, we have the data available from our Mac and I guess that's where Joyce Lee picked up on it and wanted some more information.   Stacey Simms  16:55 All right. So Melissa, take it from there.   Melissa Lee  16:56 Yeah, you know, Joyce has been a real champion as those early days. Why date and so I remember her reaching out to me and saying this is this is really interesting. I want to know more. And in this was the same year that Dana and Scott were bringing their thing to life with what was then DIY APS. This is around the same time, same era in history that, that john Costik was doing his great stuff and with Lane Desborough and the early days of Nightscout, so all of these things were happening in these little pockets, and we were just another little pocket at the time. One of the things that concerned us was whether we were doing something that was going to be shut down really quickly, like there's something that you find knowingly or unknowingly, it's kind of like when you agree to the terms on iTunes. So when you use these devices, there's something called an EULA and End User License Agreement. And these eu la say, you're not going to reverse engineer this product. And so we were a little cautious about what we wanted to diseminate in terms of like your take this and run with it, but that culture was still developing. And so at the end of that year was the big d-data event at the diabetes mine summit, where there were a few really key DIY influencers sort of in the room. This is where Lane first coined the we are not waiting and, and the next day I was at that summit, and I was hearing Howard Look speak about what had happened at the d-data summit the day before. And I was like, Oh, my God, Kevin has to plug into this. So we want to help this initiative. Like we want to be a part of this. We have so much to offer we this whole remote monitoring setup that he had built for me. And at the time, like by then I think one of the biggest things we have done is Kevin has developed do you want to talk about glass.   Kevin Lee  18:51 Yeah, it was just a another way to visualize the data. So Google Glass, I don't know if you remember that. It was a kind of a connection eyeglass. Yeah, in some ways, it was ahead of its time in other ways. It was just a really interesting idea. I got a pair, and I was able to have it alert me when she crossed the simple threshold. And I was able to see historically three hours or 12 hours or whatever it was without having to pull up a web page. It was just kind of always there and on available for me if and when I needed it. So it was just kind of an ambient thing in the background that I didn't feel like a I had to worry about.   Stacey Simms  19:38 Interesting. Kevin, I'm curious in those early days, so if I could just jump in. You know, you you don't have type one. You care very much about someone with type one and you're doing this because you care about her and want to make sure she's safe. When you started meeting other people who were doing the same thing. What was that like for you? I know it's chancy to ask an engineer about how they feel but it had to have been nice to get kinship with these other people who basically spoke your language and also understood the importance behind what was going on.   Kevin Lee  20:07 Yeah, so that was actually really kind of interesting whenever we first started sharing that we wanted to share it just with a small group of people. And I think it was Manny Hernandez that introduced me directly to Wayne and Howard and a few other Brian Maslisch.   Melissa Lee  20:28 yeah, so I like to tell the story that I chased Howard Look down in the hallway after that, and was like, you have to connect with my husband. And then that didn't seem to work. So that's when Manny was like Manny Hernandez, who was the founder of Diabetes Hands Foundation. He is a good friend of ours and he was like, No, I have to connect you to these guys.   Kevin Lee  21:15 And so there's this pivotal email thread from January of 2014, where we started exchanging The well, here's the project that I've done and Lane says, Well, here's a project that that we've been working on and we call it Nightscout. And so we, we kind of exchange notes. And then it was a little bit later that Lane, well, maybe not lane. Exactly. But that's when the the whole CGM in the cloud and the Nightscout. Early foundations started to show up on on Facebook. I think that's whenever another engineer had published the code on GitHub, and started to set appears. Here's how you set it up. Well, there weren't many in my situation, you know, one of the engineers was a parent. And I think we actually made a really great mix. And I think that that's part of what made the successful so one of the engineers working on the project was A father of a type one I represented the spouse and some of the other engineers were personally affected by by type one, and definitely added a different level increase the camaraderie between us. Those are early days we were were on the phone almost nightly. As soon as I get off my my day job, I'd go home and work on the evening job of trying to get the next set of features out or to fix some new fixes. I love to describe this day because throughout 2014 he would walk in the door and he was already on the phone with the other devs from night out. And if I walked in the room where he was working on the computer, I would be like, Hey, Kevin, and then I'd be like, hey, Ross Hey Jason, because I assumed that they were on the phone. Hey, Ben.   Melissa Lee  22:56 Like it was staying up all night long. They didn't sleep. They did this all day long. Kevin talk a little bit about the pieces you brought in tonight that from our system that we created, and then we like I, I have two producing diabetes data. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna claim a lot of that. But I was just plugged into it. If people are familiar today with Nightscout, which many listeners may be like, what piece did they hold in their hands? That was yours.   Kevin Lee  23:26 So the the piece that I was so connected with was the what we refer to as the uploader. It was just a piece of extracted the data from the CGM and then uploaded it to the Nightscout website. The early days. I don't know if you remember it was the little 3d printed case with a phone that you got that happened to have a data plan and a wire connected to the the CGM. Right whenever Nightscout first came out, I was I was hesitant to start I mean, this was like the first few months I was hesitant to contribute. I wanted to see What I could do, but as it started to pick up be there, it was obvious that the pace of development that I was doing on my own was not going to equal what the rest of the community could be doing. But then he and I had these other features, which I'll go into in a moment here that I felt the community could benefit from. So we started having early conversations with Ben and others. How do we fold in functionality that I had into the current uploader, that functionality was essentially the early ability to follow on a native phone app, it was decreasing the size of the packet and uploading more so using less data. It was an Android watch, being able to get the latest data on an Android watch. It was used in camping mode. I don't know if you're familiar with that. But the early days of knights count we had the pebbles that We're kind of Bluetooth connected smartwatch, that use the little EEG displays. Those required you to be connected to the internet. And one of the devs Jason Calabrese had said, I'm going camping next week. And I'm not going to have internet connectivity. And I sure wish that that I could. So I thought about it for a minute. And were able to quickly reconfigure it the existing code to be able to get that data on the watch without an internet connection. So   Stacey Simms  25:32 camping mode literally came from a camping trip. Yes.   Kevin Lee  25:37 Jason Calibrese’s  says camping trip.   Melissa Lee  25:40 So well, and then the code that became xdrip which like thousands of people use today.   Kevin Lee  25:46 So that's, that's a great thing about open source community, whatever ideas reverberating off of each other and become more pronounced and it essentially becomes the sum is greater than the whole.   Unknown Speaker  25:59 Let me ask about xdrip, though, was it originally called Dexdrip? was that one of the first times Dexcom got involved and said No thank you, or did I miss remember that,   Melissa Lee  26:10 that was all part of Emma Black’s history. Emma took the code that Kevin and created and, and created built on top of that to create Dexdrip. And Dexcom did say you can't use our name and became accept yeah that you're remembering correctly. It was a very friendly discussion. And so it was renamed to xdrip. But you bring up an important point about how industry was reacting to all of us in late 2014. The team at Medtronic actually invited many of the community members who were working on that into sort of the belly of the beast, and to come in and talk to them about the why and the challenges and the what could industry do and and What are we not hearing and just sort of like a meeting of the minds. But what was so cool about this is this is the first time that many of us had met one another in person. So here, people have been working on this for a year or two. And now suddenly, it's a table with Dana Lewis and Scott Lybrand with john Costik with Ben west with me with Kevin, with Jason Calabrese, like we're sitting around a table for the first time and talking with industry as this United Community. So it felt a little less, to me, at least as someone who's been really involved in fostering community, right? It felt to me like there's the start of something here. And that was a really exciting meeting. We like to joke that nothing came of it. I was gonna ask about that. But to me like that was exciting. It was this energy of like, we all came to the table and said like, these are the needs of the community. This is why we need remote monitoring. And this is what we're gonna do next. And you can either help us or understand we'll do it anyway. And so that was that we are not waiting spirit.   Stacey Simms  28:08 Well, and that was a very pivotal time. And, Melissa, let me just continue with that thought if I could, it was such a pivotal time, because you all could have said, we are not going to continue without you. Right? We need this. But it seemed to me and again, it's hard to for me, you know, it's funny that it's so long ago now. But it's only four. It's like, it's only five or six years ago, really? The seeds of that community. And you can see it just in the Facebook group with CGM in the cloud and everything else. There's 10s of thousands of people now who are part of this community. You know, did you saw the seeds if it Then did you ever imagine it was gonna get as big as it is now?   Unknown Speaker  28:48 Is it crazy to say yeah?   Kevin Lee  28:54 to directly answer the question. Yes. And that's where we were actually Faced with a another really tough decision of how do we continue to solve these problems? And we started to see the scalability problem that what we viewed as a scalability problem within the community. How do we continue to support it? And how do we deliver this safely to masses? It was a choice that we had to make of if we're doing the industry and we, we try to do it this way. I don't know there, there isn't really one right or wrong way to do it, but it was just a another way. And we believe that by joining the industry that we could deliver something simple, easy, and we could make it scalable and supportable for the masses.   Melissa Lee  29:44 I think those things like those meetings with Medtronic or, or Dexcom, early on. I mean, I remember sitting in Kevin Sayers office at Dexcom and I was there for a completely other reason. I was there on behalf of Diabetes Hands Foundation said and I just like went off about night prayer. But those conversations gave us a really like I want to recognize my privilege in that to be able to be in a position to go sit with leadership at these big diabetes device companies. But let us see that there was a way to bring the change we were doing outside. I don't want to use the word infiltrate because that sounds   to infuse what industry was trying to do with community perspective and patient perspective and and the change that we knew was possible. And that resulted in both of us for huge career changes.   Stacey Simms  30:43 And we will get to that for sure. Because it's fascinating when you mentioned and you know, we're doing a lot of name dropping here. And if you're if you're new to this and you've listened this far, I promise. I will be putting a lot of notes on the episode homepage and you can go back and listen to other episodes, but there's a lot of names that have Gone By. And a lot of names that you mentioned are people who either founded or were instrumental in the founding of newer independent companies that came out of at least as I see it, this DIY wave that happened in the mid 2010, that you all are talking about. And now you both, you know, you work with these companies and for these companies, but I want to continue this the scalability, as you mentioned, because it's remarkable that even as all those companies, I mean, Big Foot tide pool, you know, even as these companies came out of this, you're still servicing all these, and I'll call us lay people. I mean, I, you know, most of the people who were early adopters of Nightscout or things like that seem to have some kind of engineering background or something that helps software makes sense. But then the floodgates opened, and it was just easy for people or easier than it seemed for people to do that. Kevin, was there a point that you kind of remember looking at this and thinking, you don't have to be an engineer.   Kevin Lee  31:59 That's actually part of the reason why I continue to contribute with Nightscout and in the early days, we decided we were going to go ahead and launch on the Play Store. So we set up an account. And you know, instead of having to go out download the source code, compile it, we distributed it is via the channel that users were used to receiving their their app from. Another thing that we introduced was the barcode scanning. So what we found out was set up of the app was a little more complex than it needed to be. And so we introduced the the concept of barcode scanning to set that up,   Melissa Lee  32:42 which now exists in the commercial like every time you start a new transmitter on a Dexcom system today, you scan a barcode on the side of the box. Kevin did that. I remember, I'm not claiming but next time did not develop that on their own. I am just claiming Hey, we.. yes.   Unknown Speaker  32:59 out Yeah.   Stacey Simms  33:02 Yeah, that's wild. I did. Yeah, I was thinking about that. Because now that's, of course, that's how we do it. And Melissa, I know I'm kind of jumping around here, but I have so many questions. I wanted to ask you earlier. What was it like for you? At this time? You said, Well, I just provided the data. I mean, what was it like for you during this time other than, you know, just popping in and saying, Hey, honey, how were the phone calls going? It had just been exciting and a little nerve racking for you. What was it like,   Melissa Lee  33:30 by my count, and again, Not that it matters? I think I was the first spouse to be followed.   Sounds creepy, doesn't it? I was the first CGM stocks 4000. Now, um, but one of the things, it did a few things for me, and I'll never forget one day I was in the kitchen and I've got babies and toddler and lay like it had just been a day right when you're a young mom, and you've got Little ones and it has just been a day and Kevin walks in and he said, and you've had a really hard day and I just looked at him like, Are you an idiot? Yes.   And I was like, What are you talking about? And he was like your numbers. Oh, and I just looked at him and I didn't realize I just looked at him and he said, this is how every day is, isn't it? And like I still get chills thinking about it Stacey I like it was the first time that anybody outside of me or another person with diabetes looked at me and said, I see you this is hard. And I didn't even know like I probably said yes, you idiot I've had a hard day   Unknown Speaker  34:46 I doubt it.   Kevin Lee  34:48 I had worked on some some code to make Nightscout available via personal assistance. Think the Alexa and Google Home and, and other things. And while I was experimenting and testing it, it became very clear that I was not allowed to ask what what those values were.   Melissa Lee  35:14 He was like, it’ll will be so handy. And if you're in the middle of cooking and you've got like, you know, stuff on your hands, you can just ask it. But like, what you don't do is you know, your wife snaps at you. And you say, Alexa, what's her blood sugar right now? Like, that is not what you do. So now the story I was going to tell Oh, Stacey, you're gonna love this one. So this is like early 2015. And I am the Interim Executive of a nonprofit and I'm representing patients at this endocrinologist a meeting, and I'm alone in a hotel, and I had been out with all these endocrinologists and we've had tacos at a bar and I have no idea what my glucose was, but I had calibrated my CGM with probably tacos all over my hands. I go to bed. Well, this poor man, I'm in Nashville. He's in Dallas. This poor man is getting   Kevin Lee  36:09 the blood sugar was reading his 39. Yes, for those who don't know, is the world. The CGM can read anything below that he registered   Melissa Lee  36:19 as low. I have my phone on silent because I've been out with all these professionals. So he had called me 18 times. It didn't go through Sunday night disturb so far in two hours reading, like a 39. So hotel security burst into my room. Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Lee, are you okay? Do we need to call an ambulance, this string of expletives that came out of my mouth? I will not repeat on this good family show. But I was so mad and you know, I'm calling him and I'm like, I'm like 130 right now. Fine. by that same token, I have lots of like really lovely stories where You know, I'm alone in a hotel in New Jersey, and he wakes me up in the middle of the night to say, you know, wake up and eat something, honey. So, yes, there is a good story, but I must prefer the story where he had security break into my room. Oh, my God over over what nights? That was it. So, you know, but to your question, we really were on the very bleeding edge of understanding things that you actually already deal with, with your son today and that people deal with today in terms of how will we actually establish boundaries on how much of my data you get to react to and for all the times that it is a benefit? Where are the times where it's like, no, I actually have to cut you off. We're now like seven years into him following my data. And so in some ways, I think we both see where people will get to when following data is the norm you know, should it ever scale by Live in terms of now, he doesn't look at my data all the time. Now he knows when to respond when it weren't so good. But it made me feel understood. It also made me feel a lot safer to know that just have somebody else watching my own back. I'll be celebrating 30 years with type one this year and celebrating is, you know, you've been   away there. But like to know that like somebody else is just there to pick up a little bit of slack you have for someone like where you are, it can be hard because I know when teams don't always appreciate or show their appreciation in the same way. But there is an appreciation for the fact that that you're there to pick up a little bit of slack just as much as there is resentment and issues with boundaries. And in times when they really need to just shut your assets off. And so I feel like we're just a little bit further down that road in some ways, you know, we'll let you know when we have it all figured out. But Exactly.   And what's right for us as a couple is not necessarily going to be right. For every couple, you know, there are couples that really feel like, no, my data is mine. And I don't trust you not to react to it in a way that's going to make diabetes any harder for me. And I think that that's what we 100% have, that I'm very fortunate to have is that I trust Kevin, to react to my data, the way that I'm comfortable with him reacting to my data.   Stacey Simms  39:33 So both of you, through this process wound up not only having two kids, but you made big job changes. And you now both work in the diabetes sphere. And I hope you don't mind I'd really like to talk about that a little bit. Because I mean, you mentioned the beginning. Listen, you're a music teacher. And you're right, your background, your music professional. You are Bigfoot for a couple years and now you are a tight pool and you're basically I'm going to get a But you're helping tide pool so that they can better train people and kind of explain to healthcare professionals and the public to kind of I look at that as translating, is that sort of what you're doing there?   Melissa Lee  40:12 Yes or no. So for instance, I know your family has just started with a new piece of diabetes technology. There were certain training modules that were there to support you. There's certain learning materials that were provided to your child's doctor so that they understood what they were prescribing. There's a user guide that comes with the stuff that you use in your family today, if you're buying things from companies off the shelf, and what the DIY community when we're talking about scalability, and how important that is to each of us having a knee accessibility, scalability availability like these important, how do we bring this to people in a way that they will actually be able to access tide pool announced about a year ago that they were going to take one of the DIY, automated insulin dosing systems and actually bring it through FDA review. Part of that is it has to have the kind of onboarding and support materials that your insulin pump he buys a medical pump and has today. So I am leading the development of all of those materials for both the clinics and the doctors, as well as for the end user to learn the system.   Stacey Simms  41:30 And Kevin, you're still a big foot. So you're a principal engineer there. What excites you about what you're doing there? Is it again about the accessibility because I know you know, Bigfoot is not yet to market but people are very excited about it.   Kevin Lee  41:41 Yeah. Accessibility is one of the large parts and reliability going through the DIY stuff. It's happening at an incredible pace change is happening there and things break things don't always go the way that you intended. There has to be balance there somewhere? Well, you have to have services. I mean, look at what happened recently with server outages and different companies, you have to be prepared for how am I going to support this time, I'm going to keep it running, you know, whatever the it is, it's that the reliability, we're all we're all human, that's humans behind the scenes, making the the changes and improvements that we rely on. So how do we do that safely and effectively as possible to minimize the impact and continue to increase the value to the user?   Stacey Simms  42:37 This might be a very dumb question. But Kevin, let me ask you, Melissa mentioned the the new software that we're using, and she's talking about control IQ from tandem, which is the software that we've got now. And there are other commercial quote solutions. There's other commercial systems coming out when you look back at all the stuff that the DIY community did, and is continuing to do. Do you feel like you guys really, really pushed it along? I mean, I gotta tell you and I know nothing. And I never even used Nightscout and people laugh at me. But I think we would never be close to where we are commercially. Does that add up to you?   Kevin Lee  43:12 Yeah, it adds up. It's not for everyone. You know, it is bleeding edge, the community, in a lot of ways drives industry.   Stacey Simms  43:21 You I'm not asking you to say specifically without this wouldn't have that. But it just seems to me that we would have gotten there eventually. But I don't know that the people behind Knight Scott and so much of the other things you've mentioned, really either got into industry and help push things along or helps with the FDA. You know, is it as kind of an outsider on this. Can you speak to whether that's true?   Kevin Lee  43:44 Yeah, absolutely. I think that it had you I mean, that's the nature of competition. There was an unmet need in the community and the unmet need was was fulfilled.   Melissa Lee  43:55 Well, what I would say is industry needs to see that something viability as an idea and so, I firmly believe that many of these things were floating around in companies as potential developments in the pipeline. What the community did with our DIY efforts is say, we are so desperate to this thing, we will just build it ourselves if you can't deliver. And so I think it helps prioritize like I've seen almost every company in the industry actually skip over other things that were in their pipeline to get to these things and reprioritize their own product roadmap to try to deliver. And I don't think it's, I it's not in a Oh, we better get this or the community is going to do it themselves way. It's a, okay, this is a real need, and we should, we should focus our resources on this. A lot of ways it's a playground for industry to concepts, live and die much more quickly in the DIY community than they do and it allows you to to iterate faster and find out what does and doesn't work, open source communities have existed outside of diabetes, obviously, it's a and throughout the last few decades, we've seen what happens in the open source world actually drive change in the industries to which they're associated. And so I think there are analogies to this in terms of like, what happens in the software industry, with personal computing with consumer electronics, so I don't, I don't find it at all odd or ridiculous to say that the DIY community and diabetes has actually resulted in change within industry. I mean, if only if, like you pointed out so many of those names, but we, you know, we're dropping them because we want to see people recognized for their extraordinary contributions, right. But all of those people, many of them have gone on to found companies, invent new things, join other companies. What's your Modeling about open source communities, regardless of field or genre or whatever is that you see that you see new people roll in with new ideas and lay new work on the foundations of code that were left behind and innovate and continue to innovate. And so we will see the DIY community around forever, they will continue to innovate. And we will also see many of those innovators move on into the industries in which they're working. This is a personal choice that they have to make them they'll go through the same decisions that we did. And not everybody. Well, I mean, Dana lewis is not associated with the company. We're not saying that that's an inevitability, right? But it's pretty common. You have to be pretty geeky probably to know of other open source communities. And I'm, you know, Kevin is way more well versed to speak about that, but in the way of fan   Stacey Simms  46:56 before I let you go, this all started because you wanted have kids, right? This this is the timeline that you set out from your weight the beginning here, and your kids now they're both in grade school, your daughter's 10, your son is eight. I'm curious, do they know their part in this story? Because it's not an exaggeration to say, and I'll say for you, it's not an exaggeration to say that you wanting to have kids sparked action in Kevin, that, frankly, has helped thousands of people. I know you didn't do it alone. I know. I know. I know. But your kids know the part that they played   Melissa Lee  47:31 to a degree like they know that we help people with diabetes. And they take that really seriously. As a matter of fact, when I was changing roles from my role at Bigfoot to my role at tide pool, my daughter's first question was like, but you'll still be helping people with diabetes, like will Bigfoot still be able to help people with diabetes like yes, it's all it's all good. We're all good. We're all still helping people with diabetes and they've grown up with these things in the sense that we love to tell the story of when our son was about three years old and he would hear the Nightscout song that would was basically the alert that would play. And he knew that when I was low, there was a bag of sour ball candy on the top shelf of the pantry that came down. So he would hear that sound that Nightscout song and that song was sour balls to him and he was “sour balls sour balls!” he  was all in or maybe like two I mean, he was little It was too and so like it became the sour balls song, right? You know, the other day he heard the Nightscout will song play and he said mom who undid that song and I posted something to Facebook. Well basically lane desborough and better that song or found it. I wrote something about like I just set my son down. I said, let me tell you the story of our people and how we came to the valley of silicon you know, which is of course not the way I said it to an eight year old but as you know amusing myself But essentially, you know, there is some of these folks that they literally do talk about uncle lane and Uncle Manny and Uncle Ben and like my daughter thinks she has a lot of uncles. But, you know, so they know that we've helped a great many people. And as they as they get older, and we can sort of expound on that, then I think, well, let's be honest, they won't care.   For a while, right? teenagers will be like we shut up about, oh, they'll care.   Unknown Speaker  49:30 They just want to know they care.   Melissa Lee  49:34 Someday, they'll appreciate it, and a different way, but that's what they know. Now,   Stacey Simms  49:40 Kevin, you also said this was about your commute, making sure Melissa was safe. Knowing that Melissa is a very strong and independent woman. Do you feel like she's safe? Did that check that box for you all this hard work?   Kevin Lee  49:53 Yeah, absolutely. This is kind of something that she went into earlier, but I really view the monitor. That I've done and the work that I've done is really just augmenting and trying to simplify and make her life easier. We first started dating, I actually told her that you will never find somebody work harder at being lazy than than me. And, you know, that was just the testament of I wanted to automate all the things that are just repetitive and predictable and easily managed to try to get that out of the way. And that comes from the background of operations and managing online sites. Being able to automate those those aspects have helped me feel like it's more safe. And then you know, other times like with with monitoring, it's great to be able to just see that you know, she's about to go out for a walk and then I happened to look over at Nightscout see how much insulin she has on board and where she is and say, you might want to run a temp basal. So it's just there. To try to augment and help her navigate it. And so yeah, it does give me a sense that she's safer because of this. Melissa Yeah, that's right. I got really mad at him the other day, he was right. I was like, whatever. And I left the house and I went massively low. I was walking the kids to school. I was like, Yeah, well, fine. So you know, there's that two parents completely unfamiliar to you. And   Stacey Simms  51:21 it sounds more like my marriage actually diabetes or not. That's just a component of marriage. Yeah, she was right again. Oh, oh, well, you know, thank you so much for spending so much time with me. I love your story. I just think that there are just amazing people that I hate have diabetes. But I'm glad if you had to that you've done so much for so many others who have it as well. And I really appreciate you spending some time to tell us these things from years ago now because they're really are important as we move forward. So thanks for being with me.   Melissa Lee  51:56 Thank you so much for being interested in the story and for help. Others here are cranky, Stan.   Unknown Speaker  52:08 You're listening to diabetes connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  52:14 Much More information at Diabetes connections.com you can always click on the episode page and find out more transcript is there as well. I just adore them. I know the interview went longer than usual, but I couldn't help myself. And as I said in Episode 300, when I looked back on 300 episodes, Melissa really helped change my place in the diabetes community by inviting me to speak at master lab in 2015. That really did change how I felt about where I want it to be helped me find and focus my voice. I really can't overstate that enough. So thanks Melissa, for doing that. And again, lots of information went by very quickly let them name dropping there in a good way. And I promise I will keep on the Nightscout crew. I may ask some of you as you listen to lean on your friends, I'm not going to mention any names here. But people that I have reached out to, and they're the usual suspects. If you search, we are not waiting, or Nightscout on the website, you'll see some big omissions. So I'll talk more about that on social media, we'll get them as a community. Maybe it's just me, you know, who's fascinated by this. But I do think it's a very important part of our history that we need to document because in a few more years, many of the solutions that people like Kevin were working on are going to be all commercial and all FDA approved. And isn't that wonderful, but I don't want to forget what happened. And I think it'll be great to look back. Okay, enough about that. I got Tell me something good coming up in just a moment. And then stay tuned. Later, I'm going to tell you another change we made to how we use control IQ with Benny, but first diabetes Connections is brought to you by Dexcom. And it is really hard to think of something that has changed our diabetes management as much as the Dexcom share and follow apps. I mean, what really amazed me we started it when Benny was about nine years old, the decks calm and we got shareable. little less than two years later, and the most immediate change was how it helped us talk less about diabetes. And boy did that come just in time for us because that's the wonderful thing about share and follow as a caregiver, parent, spouse, whatever, you can help the person with diabetes managed in the way that works for your individual situation, and going into those tween and teen years. It sounds counterintuitive, but being able to talk about diabetes less what's your number? Did you check what's your number? You know, so helpful. Internet connectivity is required to access Dexcom follow separate follow app required learn more, go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the Dexcom logo.   I am cheating a little bit this week for Tell me something good because while I usually read you listener submissions, I saw this on beyond type ones Facebook page, and I just had to share they did a whole post about people with type one getting married and they wanted Hear the wedding stories. So they started out with a a big Congrats, by the way to Kelsey, her husband Derek, and this adorable picture of them. They're both low at their wedding and they're sipping some juice boxes. And Kelsey is part of the beyond type one Leadership Council. So congratulations to you both. It's a really adorable picture. I'm gonna link up the whole Facebook thread because people share stories like you know, I had my pump tucked into my bra and I didn't think I needed during the wedding or I was a bridesmaid and I had it there and I had to reach in, um, you know, other people who went low trying on wedding dresses. I mean, I remember this. So this person writes, I went low in David's bridal trying on wedding dresses. It's a lot more physical than you think getting in and out of dresses and slips, hot lights and just emotions. My mom had to run across the street and grab a Snickers. I was standing in the doorway of the fitting room and inhaling a Snickers, praying I didn't get any on the clothes, which just added an extra level of stress. I remember a Polish ties into the employee helping me and he was like I don't even worry about it. And he stayed with me to make sure I was okay. Another woman writes my mom came up to me right before we were set to walk into the reception. She told me she had hidden a juice under our sweetheart table in case I went low. I've been diabetic 30 years and my mom still carry snacks for me in her purse. Sure enough, right after dinner, I ended up needing it. And the last one here, being excited, nervous and unable to sit still. I did a long and intense bike ride prior to my evening wedding. Luckily we had a chocolate fountain at our reception and I spent a large chunk of the night at or near it, and this goes on and on. So what a wonderful thread congratulations to everybody who is talking about their weddings and their their wonderful stories of support. And the humor that's on display here is amazing. So I will link that up. You can go and read there's there's dozens of comments. If you've got a story like this Hey, that's what Tell me something good is for send me your your stories, your milestones, your diversities, your good stuff, you know anything from the healthcare heroes in our community. With cute who put his first inset in to a person celebrating 70 years with type one I post on social media just look for those threads. Or you can always email me Stacey at Diabetes connections.com. Before I let you go, I had promised to share the other change we made to control IQ. In addition to eliminating the long acting basal that we had used, you know, untethered for almost two years, we decided recently to completely turn off sleep mode. I know a lot of you enjoy sleep mode 24 seven, as we said back in our episode, gosh, in late December, when control IQ was approved in the studies, they called you folks sleeping beauties, because you enjoy that 24 seven sleep mode. But I found that since school has ended, and we're trying to figure out what to do with Benny for the summer, there is nothing really that's keeping him on a regular sleep schedule, and it's gotten to the point where he is now so nocturnal, and I'm hearing this about a lot of my friends with teenagers. Maybe I sound like a tear. Parents go to bed at like four or five, six o'clock in the morning. I walked into his room at eight o'clock in the morning the other day, I wanted to ask him a question. I was like, I gotta wake him up and he was awake can come to sleep yet. You know, it boggles my mind. It's all topsy turvy. And we'll get back into a routine at some point, but I'm not really willing to make a big fuss about it. He's key is keeping busy overnight. I guess his friends are up, I don't know. But anyway, the point is, he's eating it really weird hours. And when he was in sleep mode, we noticed that it wasn't helping as much right because it doesn't bolus you in sleep mode. It only adjusts Faisal. So if you under bolus for his you know, Pad Thai at two in the morning, it wasn't helping out and true story. I asked him about that. Like, what's this line? And what happened overnight here, were you sleeping He's like, No, I was in the kitchen eating leftover Thai food. So we decided that his numbers during the the quote, day when he was sleeping, we're hovering right around 90, maybe a 110. I mean, it was very in range, right? No need to mess with that. So I didn't think we needed to add sleep mode. And I did want to predict when he would actually be sleeping. So we just turned it off. And that has made a big difference too. So I guess the bottom line is figure out what works for you for your individual situation, the weirdo wacko situation, if it's us, but you know, use this technology to benefit you, whatever way that is, if it's sleep mode right now, 24 seven, if it's no sleep mode, it's exercise mood all the time. And it'll be so fascinating to see. And this ties back into the DIY movement, right? It'll be great to see the flexibility that we will get in the next couple of years because, you know, Medtronic had a tie a higher target range, because they were first with the hybrid closed loop. tandem has a lower one Omni pod, we'll have a more flexible target, you can set your own target when they come out with horizon and of course, tandem and everybody else is going to be moving to that direction as well. And it just keeps getting better. But it gets better because people like Melissa and Kevin Lee pushed and pushed and without these folks, and there's so many of them, of course, right who said we can do it better, we would not be where we are. I truly believe that technology companies would be five or six years behind and if you're new To the show new to the community and you're excited about, you know, control IQ or horizon or whatever you're using. Or maybe you're using, you know, loop off label with Omni pod, I would urge you to go back and check out our earlier episodes from 2015 and 2016. And learn about the really early days of the community, obviously, by 2015. We're talking about things that happened in the early 2000s. You know, I don't want you to misunderstand that. That happened in 2015. But you know what I mean, okay, obligatory book commercial. And if you've listened this long, you maybe you own a copy of the world's worst diabetes mom, if you own it and love it, do me a favor post about it. The best way to word of mouth about the podcast and the book is always if you could tell a friend post in a diabetes group post on your own Facebook page, you know, I love this book. It's on Amazon, highly recommend it. If you've read it, and you don't like it. Forget that, you know, you know, just recycle the book. It's thanks as always, to my editor, john Buchanan's from audio editing solutions. And thank you so much for listening. I'm Stacey Simms. I'll see you back here next week. Until then, be kind to yourself.   Unknown Speaker  1:01:09 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Simms media.   Unknown Speaker  1:01:13 All rights reserved. All wrongs avenged

Your car refuses to start. It's hot as hell, and your kids are sweating in the backseat. You call a service station and a smiling gentleman arrives very quickly to help get your car started. All will be fixed and you'll be on your way soon, right? Right? Don't be so sure... If you would like to submit a story for the chance to have it narrated on this channel, please send your story to the following email: Bish.Busta@gmail.com Music: All music was taken from Myuuji's channel and Incompetech by Kevin Mcleod which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/user/myuuji http://incompetech.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've all fallen in love with at least one fictional character, right? Right? Don't lie to me. Anyway, why do we fall in love with them anyway when they're not real people?

  Let's Talk about Self Reflection and Mental Clarity... On this week's episode of the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry I get a chance to do some self-reflection on myself for my podcast listeners to here. July is minority mental health awareness month and it also happens to be the time when new doctors across the country begin their training. I remember being an intern myself and being put in the position that I was suddenly responsible for someone else's life. It was a crazy experience being a medicine intern but one that I cherish till this day. I remember that what helped me get through the tough days was the self confidence I had that I was going to be the best doctor for my patient even if I didn't know everything I knew that I could find the answer. Self reflection is defined as meditation or serious thought about one's character, actions, and motives so I thought it would be important for you guys to see that in action with myself. I think it's important that we all take a look at ourselves to see what we are doing right and most importantly what we are doing wrong to get better. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and share the episode with a friend or family member. Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, Soundcloud, iHeartRadio, Spotify Sponsors: Lunch and Learn Community Online Store (code Empower10) Pierre Medical Consulting (If you are looking to expand your social reach and make your process automated then Pierre Medical Consulting is for you) Dr. Pierre's Resources - These are some of the tools I use to become successful using social media Social Links: Join the lunch and learn community – https://www.drberrypierre.com/joinlunchlearnpod Follow the podcast on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/lunchlearnpod Follow the podcast on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/lunchlearnpod – use the hashtag #LunchLearnPod if you have any questions, comments or requests for the podcast For More Episodes of the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry Podcasts https://www.drberrypierre.com/lunchlearnpodcast/ If you are looking to help the show out Leave a Five Star Review on Apple Podcast because your ratings and reviews are what is going to make this show so much better Share a screenshot of the podcast episode on all of your favorite social media outlets & tag me or add the hashtag.#lunchlearnpod Download Episode 116 Transcript Episode 116 Transcript... INTRODUCTION: Dr. Berry: And welcome to another episode of the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry. I'm your host, Dr. Berry Pierre, your favorite Board Certified Internist. Founder of drberrypierre.com. CEO of Pierre Medical Consulting, who helps you empower yourself for better health with the number one podcast for patient advocacy here with the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry bringing you Episode 116. And this is going to be a solo episode and I like to take this episode as the launch episode because over the next two to three weeks we are going to be having some amazing guests talk to us about self-awareness, stress relief, what's causing stress in our life. And of course the Lunch and Learn community, you know I've talked about this ad nauseum. If the mind is not in check, it does not matter what you do with the physical, right? So I want to like really bring this next couple of weeks in where we start reflecting on ourselves and start looking at ourselves and seeing, you know, what's causing us a problem, what's causing us concerns. And of course this is actually, depending on when you're listening to this, July is actually Minority Mental Health Awareness Month. So of course, why not be self-reflective within mental health awareness month. If you got any time to be self-reflective, to kind of look at yourself and look at all the stressors that are in front of you, might as well do in July. So if your minority, I know I have a lot of non-minorities who listen to the show. But if you're a minority, this is the month to do so. So if you have not had a chance, remember to subscribe to the show, tell a friend and tell a friend and like, hey, you got this amazing podcasts I want you to listen to with Dr. Berry. Please do that asap. And before I let you go, I want to read off a couple of five-star reviews that I recently got. Like I said, I always encourage you guys not only just subscribe to the show, but also leave me five-star reviews so I know that I'm actually doing a good job. So this review says everyone should listen to this podcast, relevant information so that you can live a better, healthier, and longer life. Shout out to Nate Henry, number one. The next one says, very informative, engaging podcast to help everyday people maintain healthy and happy lives. Thank you, Candace. So again, if you have not had a chance to go ahead and subscribe to the show and then leave me an amazing five-star review like that so I can give you a shout out here on the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry. So without further ado, Episode 116 let's get ready. We're talking about self and self-awareness and getting ourselves together for the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry. EPISODE Dr. Berry: So when we talk about self, right? Because I think this is a theme that I really wanted to hit home when I get the chance to kind of think about podcast topics and I get to ask you guys, you know what stuff you'd like to hear. And mental health is always a big one. Self-reflection is always a big one. So I wanted to kind of to self-reflect on my own here on the podcast this week. Just so we can kind of get an idea of what that means and what's so important about it.   As a podcast or as a physician, as a program director and father and husband and all these different hats that I choose to wear, I volunteered to wear, I love to wear. It's one of those things where sometimes your life can get so busy. That a lot of times you don't even get to really reflect on everything that you do. Especially whether it be good or most importantly whether the bad, right? Because I think it's one thing to self-reflect and only think about all the good stuff you do. But when you're self-reflecting and you start thinking like, wow, I could probably do blank better, whatever that blank is for you. I think it really kind of hits home the onus of being okay with yourself and okay with what you're doing and how you're doing it. So as a physician here, when I think about what we're doing on a day to day basis as a hospital physician, taking care of patients inside the hospital, the most acute patients, the most sick patients, and doing everything we can to get them better and what that does to a person's psyche, right? I see it all the time. You know, again, as a program director, I take care of 18 residents who I'm responsible for from the day they set foot to the day they leave, right? And sometimes even a little bit after they leave. But most importantly, it's seeing that transition of what it does to a person, some mental clarity, right? When they're just the fresh side medical student and they become the fresh shot intern and then they become the hardened senior resident who is often getting ready to attack the world. Right? So I get to see kind of all three of these different levels at come to play within my job. And it's one of those things whereas we talk about minority Mental Health Awareness Month. I always questioned and a lot of times some of the questions I ask them really isn't about the clinical aspect of what they're doing, but the more, the mental aspect of what they're doing. A lot of my, one of my favorite attendings, Dr. Kanner would always ask us why? Why are you doing what you want to do? Why do you want to send a patient on this medication home? Why do you want to consult this person? Why are you using this medication versus that medication? He was always big on the why. Because one, he's an older physician, so he already had, you know, a little bit beef with us younger physicians who he felt did more quote-unquote cookbook medicine and didn't really understand why they were doing things. Just kinda did it because they read it in a piece of paper and didn't think things through, right? So his big thing was understanding the why process of it all. And honestly he's probably one of the best physicians and attendings I've ever had in my life because it's completely changed the trajectory only of how I do things, but why I do the things I do. And then why I do and train my residents, even my medical students the way I do. Because there's always an onus of understanding that when it comes to book-smarts, you'll eventually get the book smarts, right? So I can give you plenty of articles to read to get what the information and answer I'm looking for. But if you don't know why you're getting the answer information I'm looking for. If you don't know why I'm asking a question. That is where the learning problems tend to fall to, right? So that's not something that he was big on. So he was always big on making sure we understood the why of things and why things tick the way they did. So when we think about self-reflection and self-care and you know, those are big, obviously big keywords that you hear a lot now, especially in the mental health space. I always questioned my physician colleagues how often they're doing this because I think now one of the biggest pushes at that you see, especially in the physician space when it comes to mental health, is you know, the onus of burnout and burning out and essentially being tired of doing what they're doing. And when you think about burnout, you think about like, oh, this is a person who may have been practicing for five years, 10 years, 20 years, and now they're finally tired of doing something. But we see that this burnout process is happening much sooner. I got people who aren't even finishing residency and they're already talking to like they're tired. When I think about them being tired, right? I always questioned is it that you're tired of doing whatever job you're in at this moment or your expectations of the job that you had when you first started are much different than what they are when you're actually in a job, right? Like how many of you may have started a job or started a project or started a relationship, right? And which when they started it was looking all good when it started, everything was clicking and then something happened in the middle where that clicking didn't happen anymore. That dissociation of what I thought was gonna happen and what's actually happened suddenly got realized. And I think what's happening with physicians is that for us, a lot of us are going into fields and practices with different intentions. And a lot of us are going into these organizations are going into these situations thinking that like, oh, it's going to be this way. And then unfortunately at the end, realizing it's a totally different ball game. And that's why I stressed to my residents to understand like, hey, you know what? This is what's your future, right? So I just want to let you know so you can understand to have some outlets because as a premedical student, especially, I'm talking to my premedical students right now because they already know my attendings and my physicians already know. As a premedical student, you really don't have too many outlets because you really don't have too much time. Because most of the time you are just spent studying and learning. Again, I remember as my, like this is how I remember my birthdays, right? Which is crazy. And my birthday's in December (so trying to search terrorists). So my birthday's in December. So usually when it was my birthday, there was usually a finals. I was having a study around. So when I think about my birthday's like, key birthdays, right? Like 21st birthday, 25th birthday. I always remember studying for a certain final. Like that's how I remember studying for my birthdays. It wasn't like, oh I can't wait till my birthday come so I can, you know, party and drink or cheaper car insurance. It wasn't nothing like that. It was like, oh my 21st birthday, here comes organic chemistry. On 25th birthday, okay here it comes, I think it was like anatomy, physics or biochemical some course, right? Like it was some class that I remember having to study with for a final four and I couldn't even like I said, I couldn't even really enjoy the birthday. My birthday is always got celebrated after finals was over, because I couldn't do it during the meantime or probably wouldn't have made finals. So it was one of those things that, and I knew that as a premedical student, right? So as a premedical student, I realized very early that medicine was taking a lot of my time and I didn't like it. And I wish I could say it got better as a medical student. It didn't. As a medical student, you know, you're spending countless hours, you can ask my wife, you have spent your spending countless hours having to learn and learn and you know, you got people telling you that, hey, if you don't do well on this one test, your whole career is going to change. Like have kind of referencing the boards and we could probably talk about boards forever. But here is me, a medical student. Again, I'm happy, right? Because I did all of that I was supposed to do to get to being a medical student realized that I still got a lot of work to do because I wanted to become a resident somewhere. I didn't know what profession but I knew I wanted to become a resident somewhere. So there's another opportunity to just taking my time. And of course, I've always been adept that social media. I always saw my friends is like life in, right? Like this, I like to call it life and my friends were life in a way. On Facebook and Twitter and all like I could just see them just life was just happening and having families and you know, they're taking trips and they're working. Again, as a medical student, I didn't work at all. Right? So I see all of these like lavish things that happened and I'm like, ah, I'm just on outside. More frequently, I was on the inside of a library looking out wishing I was there. So as I became a resident, I always made it a key point to really kind of take back my time. Like I've said, I've talked about this before. One of the biggest transitions that I've made as I became what I think is, this is my trademark by now, shout out to Dr. Dre, medical mogul, right? One of the transitions I may do becoming a quote-unquote medical mogul like I said, was the fact that I wanted to take back my time. Right? Like I want it, the time that I have been giving away as a premedical student, giving away as a medical student, giving away as a resident, right? I wanted to take that back and I wanted to take it back and do something I wanted to do. Not something that I was forced to do and not something that was scheduled to do. I wanted to do something that I wanted to do. And being a physician, you know, sometimes you get kind of pigeonholed into dealing, you know, physician things, right? Going to a clinic or going to the hospital or you just keep kinda pigeonholed to do in those things. But I knew like I liked other stuff, right? Like I've always been a big tech person. If anyone who follows me on Instagram knows I recently had to switch out my Wi-Fi card and a couple other than my battery and a couple of other things. Right? Like I always liked doing those types of things. So tech and you know, messing with computers was always something that was very interesting to me. It was always something that like, you know if this medicine thing no work, I may fall back on tech. And here I was as a resident, as an attending soon to be. And you know, I'm coming into my own and I'm becoming a medical mogul and I'm taking back my time and I'll be like, what can I do? Like expand myself and like get back some of the time I want. Well I did that, right? Like I went to the tech and I, you know, even now I do a lot of tech-related things. If you go to my website, drberrypierre.com, if you check out my resource page, I do a lot of emails related marketing and funnel creations. Again, these are terms that you are probably unless you're in the know, mean absolutely nothing to you and that's okay. Right? But like it was something that I enjoy. I actually loved doing it and I quote-unquote do that on a side, on top of all of this stuff, right? And you're listening to a physician on a podcast, right? That's not actually common, unfortunately. Because I feel like a lot of physicians should be podcasting. And just a quick side note, I think a lot of physicians, I think if they journaled their experiences probably wouldn't be as burnt out as they are because I think a lot of times, them being burnt out is because they are internalizing a lot of things. And I'm big on, you know, letting people know what's happening. And I've been blogging since I was a medical student. I've been letting you know how quote-unquote shitty this system it was for a while because it's not a surprise, right? Some of my gripes with medicine, love it to death though, can see myself doing anything else, but there is some issues that need to be corrected. But I feel that if all physicians journaled, I feel like if all physicians wrote a book, did a podcast, did a blog, something that allowed them to express what they were thinking at more than anything else, I think that would be absolutely phenomenal. So when I think about this self-reflection where I’m at now. Again, now I'm an attending, now I'm starting to take back my life and I'm starting to see a different world, right? Like I'm seeing medicine for what I thought medicine was. This engine of education and this vehicle that I could be the quote-unquote captain of. And that's why I started doing all of this stuff I do in terms of the blogging and video blogging and obviously this podcast in which you listen to right now. All of it was because now I was happy and now when I was doing medical stuff, I didn't feel like it was a chore anymore. And right when I had that realization when I was able to self-reflect to say like, wow, like this is what I should've always been doing.   My life has been on cloud nine ever since. Right? Like again, I joke, but I always laughed at, I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe they still pay me like to come to do this thing. Because I would probably do it for free. Don't tell him. Right? Don't tell my job that I probably would do that thing for free because like I can't believe like they let me in charge of those residents. I got some residents who listen to my podcast so they're going to have a good laugh at this. But I can't believe that I'm the reason why someone's going to go from a medical student to be a medical resident, right? I don't want to say the sole decision-maker, right? But I got some sway in who becomes a resident at Wellington regional and it's such an interesting concept to me because it was something that I never pictured myself. I guess I never really pictured myself doing it, at least right now. I figured this was something that I'd probably do when I was old and, you know, kinda tired and I'll just kind of fall back and then, you know, this position will kind of open up for me. But, you know, God said, Nah, you need to do this right now. I need you in this position right now. And you know, we're going on year three right now. We're actually going on year three of being a program director and it's been a beautiful sight and I've met amazing people. I met amazing premeds. I've met amazing medical students. I've met amazing residents, amazing administrators long way. Right? Like all of these things that are able to come to fruition because I was able to look into myself and say like, hey, what you doing right now isn't enough. Right? What you're doing right now isn't benefiting enough people. I need you to do more. I need you to step out and do more and expand. And that's where I think the clarity of my mental health has come in because I realize that those times, you know what, this is stressing me right now. And the things that are stressing me, I need to do something about it. Again, I was an attending physician who was stressed about the way medicine was going. I was stressed about the way the job was treating me. I was stressed about the way it was affecting my family and I realized I need to do something to make this change. This was a goal that I've always dreamed of when I was an elementary student. I was in elementary, I was saying I was going to be Dr. Pierre. And here I was. I was Dr. Pierre and Dr. Pierre was not happy. And I need to change that asap. So that got changed and once I changed that, once I recognize these other stressors in my life and I got them out of there, right? The black cloud that was around me as a physician went away. When it went away, it’s been nothing but blue skies and summer rain every now and then. But it's been an absolutely an amazing experience and this is what I hope to be able to bring to you guys. Just a little reflection over this next few weeks of the podcast. I want you to be able to think of these next three, I guess next four if you include this one. I want you to think about these next four podcasts it's like a one running show where we're going to be talking about just stress in general, right? Because stress sucks. Let's be honest. It sucks when you're your stress, right? Everything is not a peachy keen when you're stressed, right? Everything is not all good when you're stressed. And sometimes some people have one thing that's causing them stress but it's causing them stress repeatedly. Some people have multiple things that are hitting them all at the same time and that's causing stress, that's causing problems. And then you have others who are like, I don't know what's going on but I know something it's over me. So that's one thing that I really want to hit home. We're going to really talk about stress over the next three weeks. And then when we talk about stress, we're going to be talking about what we can do to heal ourselves. And really I'm talking to the physicians. Of course, Lunch and Learn community, you know, I got a wide range of people who listen to me. I got some physicians, I got a lot of helper, practitioners. I got a lot, you know, quote-unquote common people, when I say common, I don't mean just not in the health care field, but who are interested in wanting to learn more about their health. I got a lot of people in different worlds who liked to talk about health, like to listen to health or maybe just like listen to me. I don't know. Right? You tell me, right? Somebody fits in some category, right? Clearly, health is on your mind because there are a million different podcasts you can listen to and you still listening to me, right? So whatever that is, I want you to grab and hold to that and I want you to think about what are some of your stressors over these next month. And think about what are you doing to try to break these stressors down. What are you doing to try to say I need to get these stresses out of here? And again, physicians, stressors, burnout. We know what happened, we know the end result. The end result means fewer physicians. The end result means more physician suicides, right? And this isn't just a physician thing, right? It's a lot of different careers that fit into the same pattern. Someone goes into a career thinking about one thing, they go into a relationship thinking about one thing, and it's a totally different thing once they get there and then problems arise, right? So we're at the stage, especially for a lot of physicians where there's a lot of problems arising because we're realizing this isn't what we signed up for or what we thought we signed up for. Because honestly, it's probably already, it's probably been like that. We just didn't know because physicians before us, they weren't doing any journaling. They weren't doing any blogging, they weren't doing any podcasting. So they never actually told us, who knows? That's my theory, right? My theory is this medicine thing probably been sucking for a while, but because the folks ahead of us didn't document anything, we had no clue. And now we just kind of walk in here looking crazy. But that's a whole another discussion. So we're going to talk about the stress this month. We're gonna talk about stress relief this month. We're gonna talk about how to be a better you this month. And then most importantly, this is something I love. And I can't wait for you to listen to this guest, Dr. Brad, when he comes on. First of all, he's phenomenal, and if you get a chance, Dr. Brad Volara, he's performance coach and he's going to get us really high. Like I said, I'm excited about the interview and that interview hasn't even happened yet. Right? But I already know it's going to help energize Lunch and Learn community and help them look at themselves and say like, okay, no, no, no. I'm worth more than I'm thinking I'm supposed to be aware of. Because me personally, I think I'm worth a lot, right? And mentally I think I'm worth a lot. But that's because I got the clarity, right? I want everyone in Lunch and Learn community to get that same clarity that I got. So they're walking around like they don't stink, right? That's what I want at the end of this month. So if you don't get anything from the end of this month, by the time August rolled around, I want you to say like, well, you know what? I know some of my stressors in my life. You know what? I know some ways to relieve some of that stress in my life and you best believe I know what my value is. You best believe I know my worth is. So if you don't get anything, I want you to get those three to four pieces of things from me and then, you know, leave the show and do whatever you want. But don't leave a show until that happens, right? So like I said, I can't wait for you guys listen to next month as it's going to be a great set of episodes, a great lineup of guests coming up. And you guys have a great and blessed day. I'm gonna see you guys next week. I better see you guys next week. Download the MP3 Audio file, listen to the episode however you like.

Happy 7th Birthday to this Podcast, 7 Days a Geek. He's Baaack! Terminator: Dark Fate is discussed, from the Quadfather's point of view. We also chat Syfy's Happy and all of Season 8 of Game of Thrones

SVEEP Awareness Radio Drama | Abhiyum Ammavum | Tamil Drama | Voting is our Right | Don't Sell Your Votes SVEEP Awareness Radio Drama | Abhiyum Ammavum | Tamil Drama | Voting is our Right | Don't Sell Your Votes Voice Over Artist : Abhi Script, Sound Mixing & Direction : Mukesh Mohankumar Associate Direction: Rupan

In the wake of Davos 2019, the World Economic Forum, tensions are running high. Large companies are being scrutinized for reaping huge tax breaks while not giving back to the community. CEOs are trying to balance a board's expectation of making fiscally responsible decisions and also maintaining a culture of trust and creativity. Should tech entrepreneurs be tasked with fixing the world? Is it their responsibility?        TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: What's up guys? Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest. I'm PJ Bruno, and I'm thrilled to have with me today two very close buddies. Across from me is Boris Revechkis, product manager here at Braze, and also I believe descendant of Rasputin? Is that-   [0:00:34] Boris Revechkis: That's accurate, yes. What's up everybody?   [0:00:36] PJ Bruno: Cool. Here he is. And to my right, your left, we have also a good friend of mine, Ryan Doyle, who's recently become an AE here at Braze. He is the legitimate country boy turned bonafide city boy. How you doing here Ryan?   [0:00:50] Ryan Doyle: How y'all doing? Yeah, no. Only recently, seven months now.   [0:00:54] PJ Bruno: Wow.   [0:00:54] Ryan Doyle: Yes.   [0:00:54] PJ Bruno: What a turn.   [0:00:55] Boris Revechkis: Doyle Farms.   [0:00:57] Ryan Doyle: Doyle and Son Farms.   [0:00:58] Boris Revechkis: Doyle and Son Farms.   [0:00:58] Ryan Doyle: Remember where you came from.   [0:00:59] PJ Bruno: That's right.   [0:00:59] Boris Revechkis: Love it.   [0:01:00] PJ Bruno: How you guys doing? I know, Boris you're fighting a cold-   [0:01:03] Boris Revechkis: I'm getting some cold.   [0:01:03] PJ Bruno: And somehow you made it here today, I love that.   [0:01:05] Boris Revechkis: I'm hanging in there, doing it for the podcast.   [0:01:09] PJ Bruno: God, that's the commitment we need to see more of, kind of across the board.   [0:01:12] Boris Revechkis: I may faint. I may faint during the podcast, but if I do, just go on without me.   [0:01:16] Ryan Doyle: We'll keep going yeah.   [0:01:17] PJ Bruno: Yeah, we'll edit it out. We'll edit out your faint-   [0:01:19] Boris Revechkis: Perfect.   [0:01:19] Ryan Doyle: I can do your voice.   [0:01:21] PJ Bruno: Ryan, how you doing buddy?   [0:01:22] Ryan Doyle: I'm doing fantastic. Just meetings, meetings, meetings, deals, deals, deals.   [0:01:26] PJ Bruno: Cool.   [0:01:26] Ryan Doyle: They really crack that whip.   [0:01:27] PJ Bruno: They do, don't they?   [0:01:28] Ryan Doyle: Yes.   [0:01:30] PJ Bruno: You told me yesterday you had a cool little prospecting adventure and a weird experience.   [0:01:35] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, you want me to talk-   [0:01:36] PJ Bruno: Can you share? Yeah, yeah. Give a little splattering of it.   [0:01:39] Ryan Doyle: So, just the background on it was, I had a prospect who came to Braze because they were launching an app. That app had to do with paying with your face. It's a facial recognition technology. They wanted to put in coffee shops, so when you walked in you wouldn't swipe, tap, nod, whatever, you would just grab your drink and go. So I walk up to this guy's office, and there's a camera, and a screen that shows me my face, and it pulls down a match from the internet of my face. Like with a little rectangular box and some matrix-y numbers side by side, and it says, "Welcome Ryan Doyle." I'm like, "Oh, this is weird." So I go in, and he's telling me about the launch. They're talking about these pieces of third party data that they've been using at this coffee shop downstairs to test this out. Where someone will come in and they'll say, "Hey Boris, welcome back. Do you want this latte? Your significant other loves it too." Or, "Maybe you'd like to try this," or, "How's your dog?" or, "How's your child?" On the creepiness scale, they found that mentioning someone's dog was much creepier than mentioning how their children were.   [0:02:45] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:02:46] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, but, they ran into the issue of, a couple of people they talked to about their dogs, their dogs had passed away.   [0:02:51] PJ Bruno: Oh God.   [0:02:52] Ryan Doyle: Doesn't happen as frequently with children I suppose.   [0:02:55] PJ Bruno: You hate to see that.   [0:02:56] Ryan Doyle: You hate to see it.   [0:02:57] Boris Revechkis: That's all very disheartening.   [0:02:59] PJ Bruno: I mean, you got to walk that line between personalizing and not going too personal.   [0:03:03] Ryan Doyle: Too personal.   [0:03:04] PJ Bruno: I feel like that's same thing goes for conversation in general. Anyways, thank you Ryan for that little tid bit.   [0:03:09] Ryan Doyle: Yeah. It was an interesting night on the live.   [0:03:12] PJ Bruno: That's good. That's good. So we got a lot to get to today. Really excited to jump in. Our first article, Amazon Isn't Interested in Making the World a Better Place by Kara Swisher from New York Times. This is, we all know that, I mean, most of us probably know at this point if you live in New York City that Amazon pulled out of their second HQ that they planned to have in Long Island city. Boris, you're a Long Island city boy.   [0:03:37] Boris Revechkis: I am. I'm a Long Island city resident.   [0:03:39] PJ Bruno: Were you excited to potentially have them move into the neighborhood?   [0:03:43] Boris Revechkis: Not particularly, and I don't think there were many in the neighborhood who were. Yeah, I have a lot of mixed feelings. Obviously, we working in tech, in some sense, have a horse in the race, but I don't know that they really considered the effect on the surrounding community. Obviously the backlash reflects that.   [0:04:04] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:04:04] Ryan Doyle: Yeah.   [0:04:05] Boris Revechkis: I think they could've done a lot better job in laying the ground work for that. A few weeks ago, I tweeted, which seven I think, at least seven people read that Amazon should just take some of the benefit that they were getting in taxes and just plow that into the subway system. Just be like, "Here. Love us."   [0:04:24] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:04:25] Boris Revechkis: Then, "Okay, fine. Now we have, okay, we have common interest."   [0:04:28] PJ Bruno: Exactly.   [0:04:28] Boris Revechkis: Be a part of the community. Contribute.   [0:04:30] Ryan Doyle: It's a corporate good will.   [0:04:30] PJ Bruno: It's as easy as that. Right?   [0:04:31] Boris Revechkis: Yeah. Kind of like get the public on your side, and it just didn't seem like they really cared what people thought about the whole situation.   [0:04:37] Ryan Doyle: They were shopping for a deal.   [0:04:38] Boris Revechkis: Yeah. Pretty much.   [0:04:38] PJ Bruno: I guess so. Yeah, I think a lot of the uproar came up, I think Miss Swisher put it so well in her article. "In an era when all kinds of public services are being cut in the city's infrastructure is crumbling, why is a trillion dollar corporation getting so much?" Then it was finally revealed how much, $3 billion in tax breaks.   [0:04:57] Boris Revechkis: Yeah.   [0:04:58] Ryan Doyle: I think-   [0:04:58] PJ Bruno: So people were kind of up in arms.   [0:05:00] Boris Revechkis: This is really reflective, I think, of the whole, and this second article we'll talk about later, the whole combination of these factors where you just have a system that's sort of out of wack. The incentives that drive progress are now driving outcomes that are clearly undesirable. Like, this article doesn't hold back in that regard, but like I love the phrase "modern [hellscape]". Like shooter for to San Francisco is a modern [hellscape], which is, that's strong language.   [0:05:24] Ryan Doyle: That's really strong.   [0:05:25] Boris Revechkis: That's strong language and-   [0:05:27] PJ Bruno: Pretty polarizing.   [0:05:29] Boris Revechkis: Yeah. Obviously she's talking about genuine problems, but is that direction we want to go in, or is that something we want to try and tweak the system so that we don't get pushed in these directions? I do think that the Amazon move into the city was something that would exacerbate the kind of issues that would push us in that direction, in the direction of problems like San Francisco has.   [0:05:50] Ryan Doyle: There was like an argument on the other side of it where the incentives that we were handing out as a city to get them here, we're far, far below what we would gain in economic incentives. Part of the argument was like, "Well, we're not giving them anything tangible. There's three billion in tax credits and what not," so it's not money that exists-   [0:06:07] Boris Revechkis: A future tax, yeah revenue.   [0:06:09] Ryan Doyle: And ready to put somewhere else, but I feel like my personal notion is that that money does come from somewhere. It comes from us in our future taxes, and part of it did come out of New York state incentives to bring new businesses here. It would've retired 1.5 billion out of a $2 billion grant that companies get for moving business to New York state. I just think part of the sentiment that I agree with is maybe people in general are tired of this trickle down notion where we put up a big amount of money, or some type of incentive with the hope that it would come back to us. I think we've just been fatigued with that type of situation over and over.   [0:06:45] PJ Bruno: Yeah. I think that's spot on.   [0:06:48] Boris Revechkis: In terms of concentrating the wealth too, we can, ideally, we would just replace that same activity by encouraging many other smaller companies to come to New York instead of one giant company. And trying to encourage the same type of outcome, but by spreading that tax revenue, or rather, break around to other companies and other industries.   [0:07:11] Ryan Doyle: I mean, Braze is here. We're about to move to a new office in New York City. Where's the incentive? You know?   [0:07:16] Boris Revechkis: That's true.   [0:07:17] PJ Bruno: Where's the tax breaks guys? I was surprised to see Amazon buckle so quickly. You know? It just seems like at the first sign of scrutiny, boom, they're out. Now it seems like they just want to bolster their office in D.C. I was very surprised that they didn't-   [0:07:33] Boris Revechkis: I think it becomes like a no-win scenario for them, because having to fight back all the negative attention if they tried to negotiate, the publicizing of the negotiations would probably be very damaging I think. So I think they decided it was just, "Why do this?"   [0:07:47] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, and I wonder if they'd had so little investment in New York already. I mean, it was just in word that they were coming here. So far, this deal is only how old that another city might've reached about, but, "Look, here's the incentive, we can provide. If New York doesn't want it, we'll give it to you."   [0:08:02] Boris Revechkis: Right.   [0:08:02] Ryan Doyle: Maybe that's yet to be announced. I thought I heard Nashville somewhere out in the ether that that might be the other location they go to.   [0:08:09] Boris Revechkis: But it's also, it's not like they're not here. Right? They have an office here. They have many employees here. They're going to continue hiring and expanding in New York and their existing office. So it's not like all or nothing. It's so-   [0:08:19] PJ Bruno: They have a foot hole.   [0:08:20] Boris Revechkis: Right.   [0:08:20] PJ Bruno: They didn't feel like they were losing much I guess.   [0:08:22] Boris Revechkis: Right.   [0:08:22] Ryan Doyle: Yep.   [0:08:23] PJ Bruno: Well, I for one, being an Astorian, and that's in Astoria for those of you who don't know.   [0:08:28] Boris Revechkis: Nice.   [0:08:28] PJ Bruno: I'm thrilled that there's not going to be so much congestion, and it's not going to turn into a complete circus on my train.   [0:08:35] Ryan Doyle: Your apartment's going to stay nice and cheap.   [0:08:37] PJ Bruno: You know what? Let's hope so. As long as I can not have a lease, and as long as my landlord just keeps all the stuff off the books, you didn't hear that here.   [0:08:47] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, we're going to cut that out.   [0:08:48] Boris Revechkis: Yeah, we'll take that out. We'll take that out in post.   [0:08:50] Ryan Doyle: That's fine.   [0:08:50] Boris Revechkis: Perfect.   [0:08:52] PJ Bruno: Perfect. All right, well let's move on to the big topic this week. As you guys know, Davos, which we all know at this point is the knight, former smuggler in service of Stannis Baratheon from Game of Thrones-   [0:09:06] Boris Revechkis: The onion knight. Man, I love the onion knight.   [0:09:07] PJ Bruno: I'm just so curious, like what's going to happen to him in the final season. That's what I really want to know.   [0:09:11] Ryan Doyle: I've never watched Game of Thrones, and you really lost me there for a second.   [0:09:15] Boris Revechkis: Wow.   [0:09:15] Ryan Doyle: I feel like I want to wait for it to all be released.   [0:09:18] Boris Revechkis: Can we just edit Ryan out of the entire podcast?   [0:09:19] Ryan Doyle: No, no, no. See, I've got the plan. They're going to release all of Game of Thrones. I'm not going to deal with all this anxiety and anticipation. I'm just going to watch it when I feel like it.   [0:09:27] PJ Bruno: You're really good at planning anxiety out of your life these days. Like, any time you identify it-   [0:09:31] Ryan Doyle: That's why I'm hanging out with you last.   [0:09:33] PJ Bruno: Wow. I noticed that. The patterns are starting to, this is a loaded moment.   [0:09:37] Boris Revechkis: This is a loaded moment. I'm not watching the last season, I'm just saying. I can't I refuse to watch it until the books come out.   [0:09:41] PJ Bruno: You can't do it?   [0:09:42] Boris Revechkis: I need the books. I need the books. Give me the books. Are you listening George R. R. Martin? You're out there, aren't you? I know you're listening to this podcast. Finish the damn book.   [0:09:52] PJ Bruno: Let me course correct a little bit. Davos, of course we're talking about the world economic forum that went down just last week I believe. There's this great article that Tim Leberecht did for Ink Magazine called Purpose Washing, Hustle Culture, and Automation: Business at a Crossroads. It's just a really good, I mean, I love his opening statement here, so let me just read it for you guys to get us in the zone. "Business leaders today must constantly wrestle with opposing forces. They must embrace data, and at the same time listen to their gut feelings. They must cater to efficiency pressures, and also create a culture of trust and creativity. They must ensure short-term profit, while thinking about the long-term impact of their business, acting as 'civic CEOs', stewarding 'woke brands'. Now some may call this ambidexterity, or others schizophrenia. At any rate, it's not surprising that being stuck in the middle of such dichotomy breeds uncomfortable tension and conflicting rhetoric. Double agendas can lead to double speak." You guys read this one, right?   [0:10:58] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, that's heavy.   [0:10:58] Boris Revechkis: Sure did.   [0:11:00] PJ Bruno: Oh, it's heavy. I mean, any initial thoughts? Ryan, you want to kick us off here? We're going to edit you out, but just go ahead.   [0:11:09] Ryan Doyle: Just on the whole topic of Davos, there was ... I just found it so interesting, like its kind of come to the head as like our own New York representative, who was kind of in this Amazon fight. Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been talking about this certain type of marginal tax rate, and those things get brought up at Davos. People laugh at it, but it was the reality for a long time in America to have a very high tax rate marginally on a certain group of users. So, just to hear these topics brought back up right now, and then at Davos, it all just seems so timely. Then was kind of kicked off, I think again yesterday when that Tucker Carlson-   [0:11:50] PJ Bruno: Thing with Fox News.   [0:11:51] Boris Revechkis: So beautiful. Can I just call out how amazing it was that you said, "Users," instead of, "Tax payers"?   [0:11:56] PJ Bruno: Nice.   [0:11:56] Boris Revechkis: Love it. That's Braze life right there.   [0:12:00] Ryan Doyle: I just got out of a sales conversation, so let me reset. Let me reset.   [0:12:03] PJ Bruno: Rewire.   [0:12:04] Boris Revechkis: We have 300 million users in this country.   [0:12:07] PJ Bruno: You got any hot takes from the article here?   [0:12:09] Boris Revechkis: There were a lot of big ideas in this article. A lot of it was about inequality in general, which is, you know, that's a trip. We can spend a lot of time on that. A lot of it was about AI, and refers back to what we were talking about earlier with that company doing face recognition, and privacy, and responsibility. Like in the quote you read, the pressure, the tension between using data, and exploiting data, and making people uncomfortable. I thought it was interesting that the Microsoft CEO had come out in favor of a US version of a GDPR, which is very cool.   [0:12:38] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:12:39] Boris Revechkis: I mean obviously, I think at Braze we're very much behind that idea.   [0:12:42] Ryan Doyle: We would love that.   [0:12:42] Boris Revechkis: We would love that idea.   [0:12:43] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:12:44] Boris Revechkis: Yeah. I think that speaks to that sort of idea of responsibility. Right? Don't use data in ways that makes people uncomfortable when they're picking up coffee.   [0:12:52] Ryan Doyle: Don't mention their poor, dead dog.   [0:12:55] Boris Revechkis: Yeah, exactly. Maybe what we need is actually some legislation to create some barriers, some boundaries so that collectively we're not cringing when we walk by an advertisement and it's asking us about our last doctor's visit.   [0:13:09] Ryan Doyle: Jeez. Well, if I could just add in, I think one of the reasons we haven't had legislation is, this was in one of those articles that kind of attack myth that's been going on for a long time. That Silicon Valley is here to save the world. All these tech founders come in, and they have an idea that will not only benefit us in a business sense, but, "We are going to change the world to be a better place." Maybe that's why legislation has been so slow to get up behind it, because we not only know what people are doing with our data because it's such a new occurrence, but we kind of trust these people who say that they are going to change the world for the better. So, I think we're starting to see for the first time that might not be the case.   [0:13:49] PJ Bruno: But that's the thing. Does that mean that if you decide to start a company and become a tech entrepreneur, it is now on you to make the world a better place? Like, obviously I think if you have the means, you should try to give back, but does that mean it's just a given? It's inherent anytime a tech leader tries to start something new? Is it, "Well, you know, keep in mind you must be giving back"? You know, or is it just like, "You need to pretend to give back"?   [0:14:15] Boris Revechkis: Question for life.   [0:14:16] PJ Bruno: Question for life.   [0:14:17] Ryan Doyle: I think because, is it our duty as human beings to always try to make the world a little bit better of a place? Not just tech founders PJ.   [0:14:24] PJ Bruno: Jeez.   [0:14:26] Boris Revechkis: Jeez. Personally, I don't know whoever believed that the full T-tech industry would unequivocally and unambiguously make the world a better place without making profit first. Like, our society, corporations, businesses, are economy is structured around organization which are obligated to increase value to shareholders.   [0:14:49] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:14:50] Boris Revechkis: Put the shareholders interests first. Like, that's how our society is organized. It's great that tech founders want to make the world a better place. Anyone who does want to, it's great, but the reality is that when a company becomes large enough, and then also becomes publicly traded, you are obligated to make certain kinds of decisions. That's the way our society is structured. An interesting counter pointer alternative to that approach would be something like a B corporation, which is something that's come up in like the last decade or so, which is kind of cool.   [0:15:22] Ryan Doyle: What's that?   [0:15:23] Boris Revechkis: It's like a non-profit that basically has come up with this, so they're like S corps and C corps. They're like the, C corps are the most common and all that. This is like a non-profit that says, "We'll certify you as a B corporation," which means you're not just looking out for your share duty to your shareholders, but you're also incorporating into every decision you make, you're impact on the community, on the environment, on society at large. It's very difficult, and not a lot of huge brands have done this yet.   [0:15:51] Ryan Doyle: Are their any examples?   [0:15:53] PJ Bruno: I was about to say-   [0:15:53] Boris Revechkis: Like Ben & Jerry's.   [0:15:54] Ryan Doyle: Like an honest corporation?   [0:15:54] Boris Revechkis: Kickstarter is a B corporation I think.   [0:15:56] PJ Bruno: Ben & Jerry's?   [0:15:58] Ryan Doyle: Of course they are.   [0:15:58] PJ Bruno: I knew I liked those.   [0:15:59] Ryan Doyle: Yeah.   [0:15:59] Boris Revechkis: It's not widely popular yet, but because it's really onerous, because you're now saddling like your board and your whole organization with this responsibility, because you're not just here to make us money. You're here to think about your impact on everyone, your employees, your customers, your surrounding community, the environment, etc., etc.   [0:16:14] Ryan Doyle: Right.   [0:16:15] Boris Revechkis: In conjunction with your financial responsibilities and interests. So it's not easy, but the idea being that we're trying to change the incentives, or this is an attempt to change the incentives corporations to do better.   [0:16:28] Ryan Doyle: We don't have to legislate that as a norm, but it would be cool to incentivize those types of bigs, just to have a little more people who are thinking in that mindset.   [0:16:37] Boris Revechkis: Yeah.   [0:16:37] Ryan Doyle: Yeah.   [0:16:39] PJ Bruno: Sorry. One of the things they picked out from this article, that I thought was an interesting thing, was the idea of reinventing capitalism. Is it a business or a government affair? I mean, I'm curious to know what you guys think, because my instinct is that it should be ... Maybe I'm just more regulation prone, because at this point, there's like a lot of bullies in the game with a lot of money and a lot to lose. We need to level the playing field a little bit, but yeah. I mean it just, I don't know. Who's it on?   [0:17:13] Ryan Doyle: I think that it has to be a dance, because it takes two to tangle. Right? Business is not going to have a direction without regulation, and regulation won't have anything to regulate without the growth of business.   [0:17:23] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:17:23] Ryan Doyle: I just read this interesting book on Teddy Roosevelt, and some of his first run-ins with monopolistic industries, and how he really came to be known as the trust buster. It's just interesting this dance that happens where there might be a little give with business, and then government does a little take, but then government gives a little over here. Then there's a little more take by business. So, I think it's definitely something that happens in parallel. I just think that we might be asking it because business seems to be moving faster at the moment.   [0:17:52] Boris Revechkis: Yeah. I think there's sort of this ideal that is always pushed that from the very start of a company to the point where it's Amazon's size, it can operate under the assumption that growing is always good, and representing a larger share of your market is better always. But ultimately, we have to recognize that, in a purely mathematical dynamical system sense, when you get that big your constraints are now different. You're not just like a fish swimming through the sea. You can now touch the edges of the sea. Right? You're like, it's a fish tank now and you're a big fish, and every motion of yours, you're hitting the walls and you're crushing other fish.   [0:18:35] Ryan Doyle: That's a good way to put it.   [0:18:35] PJ Bruno: Yeah, it is.   [0:18:35] Boris Revechkis: Also, you have to, the rules of the game have now changed. The rules, as far as government is concerned, have to account for that. You can't just treat that big fish like a tiny fish in the ocean.   [0:18:46] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:18:46] Boris Revechkis: With where the limits are, pretty much unreachable once you've started to actually hit the edges of the tank, like the rules of the game need to change. Otherwise, things will go wrong. I think that's just pretty much what monopolies are and why that happened 130 years ago, 140 years ago, and why we're running into it now with tech companies. Government is behind in this industry because we have people who ask Mark Zuckerberg in congressional hearings how his company makes money. They have no idea what they're talking about, and they're just completely out of their depth. Therefore, we're now in a situation where these companies are just occupying such a vast proportion of these industries, that their every decision rocks the boat, to use another ocean, water.   [0:19:28] Ryan Doyle: I like how it metaphors dude.   [0:19:29] PJ Bruno: Doesn't resonate with me.   [0:19:30] Ryan Doyle: I'm a big fish in a small tank.   [0:19:34] Boris Revechkis: So, yeah. I mean, we just have to, we have to come to the terms of the fact that we need to, and even the companies themselves need to realize like, "Hey, you're not just a company anymore that's striving to get more customers and generate more revenue. You have such an outsize influence on your surrounding society that you have to think ahead." It's like the same thing with climate change. You can't, not to invoke another massively complicated and heavy topic-   [0:19:58] Ryan Doyle: You're not getting deep enough here yet.   [0:19:59] PJ Bruno: We'll save it.   [0:19:59] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, we'll save it.   [0:20:00] Boris Revechkis: Like, you have to be aware of your outputs and what you're doing to the surrounding area. You can't just keep throwing poison into the river and assuming it'll wash away to the ocean, when now the whole river is tainted, and the ocean is tainted, and whatever, whatever.   [0:20:13] Ryan Doyle: Still talking about metaphors.   [0:20:14] Boris Revechkis: Total a metaphor.   [0:20:15] PJ Bruno: Yeah. A little real life too.   [0:20:18] Boris Revechkis: Yeah.   [0:20:18] PJ Bruno: Cool. I mean, any closing thoughts from you two before we wrap her up?   [0:20:23] Ryan Doyle: I mean, I just had one question in all of this to ask Boris, because we touched a little bit on AI and machine learning today. I wanted to ask with Boris, specifically his role here has to do with AI and machine learning. I guess, how do your moral obligations play into your day-to-day role or how you see yourself in the AI industry and learning industry? Do you ever think about the impact your decisions or your work has, and if so, how do you try to exercise judgment in the work you put out?   [0:20:53] Boris Revechkis: I mean, the short answer is absolutely. The more involved answer that we may or may not have time for-   [0:20:59] Ryan Doyle: It's a big closing question.   [0:21:00] Boris Revechkis: It is. It is.   [0:21:00] PJ Bruno: I love it.   [0:21:01] Boris Revechkis: The bottom line is that we have to, you know. Braze as a company, I think, embraces the idea that we have to be responsible with our choices and we have to consider their impacts on people. So, we have to be mindful of how we allow our own customers to use data to influence their relationships with their own end users in a way that is responsible. To use another analogy, here we go again, the way I like to think of it, if you were just like a general store owner in the old west. Your customers are coming in, and you have a business, and you're trying to see where you're making money, where you're losing money. You would find your best customers, you would try to figure out what they want, and you would cater your business to insure your own livelihood and well being. So in a lot of ways, our customers are trying to do the same thing, but they're trying to do it for millions of their own customers. So of course they can't do it, and they can't have an army of people trying to parse all the data and interactions that they have with all their customers. You need machines. You need algorithms to go and figure out what the patterns are so you can say, "Oh, this pool of customers like products x, y, z. We should focus in this area. We should cater to these customers. We should communicate with them more. Here are the customers that are disaffected. They're not interested in us anymore. Why are they not interested? We need to do better." Right? It's like those common sense questions that any business own would ask, we're now just using machine learning and AI. We're helping our own customers use machine learning and AI to answer those questions, just at a scale that's unmanageable to do without those tools. Again, long answer, but as long as we're doing that without using data in a way that would clearly make people uncomfortable and would leverage data that they don't want us-   [0:22:36] Ryan Doyle: We'll use data we didn't have the right to use.   [0:22:37] Boris Revechkis: Exactly. So I mean, GDPR is really like almost the shield for this. Right? Like, "Hey, we're just not going to use data in ways that is irresponsible or that people don't want us to do in order to further these ends." But when people are explicitly told what's going to happen to their data, and how we and our customers are going to use it, and they're okay with that, great. That's sort of what it comes down to.   [0:23:01] Ryan Doyle: Thank you for answering that.   [0:23:02] PJ Bruno: Yeah, I appreciate that too.   [0:23:03] Boris Revechkis: Yeah.   [0:23:04] PJ Bruno: I want to close it out real quick. I think this article is so good, and I really love the closing paragraphs. So this is how he summed it all up. "A perfect storm is brewing: the agony of old systems, the void left by less and less trustworthy tech platforms, the disruption of the labor markets by the fourth industrial revolution, and the critical importance of reinventing capitalism and redefining the meaning of meaningful work. In the middle of conflicting agendas, CEOs will have to make tough choices. The most responsible of them know they will have their role to place in tackling all these issues, but are also humble enough to realize that, now more than ever, business can't do it alone." Is that a cough drop?   [0:23:51] Boris Revechkis: Sorry. I had to get a cough drop.   [0:23:52] PJ Bruno: All right. Well, signing off, this is PJ Bruno.   [0:23:56] Ryan Doyle: This is Ryan Doyle.   [0:23:57] Boris Revechkis: And Boris Revechkis.   [0:23:58] PJ Bruno: You guys take care. Come see us again sometime. [0:24:00]

As everyone knows, beautiful female artists want nothing more than to rekindle the EC Comics art style and draw panel after panel of women in skimpy clothes and painfully obvious cold rooms terrorized by demonic hordes.... Right? Don't tell us that CELLAR DWELLER (1988) lied to us! Don't blink or you'll miss our boy Jeffy Combs doing his best Patrick Bateman impression in the first 5 minutes of the movie, but if you do, you can kind of fast-forward all the pointless character development in the middle and just get to the good stuff - a doe-eyed rubber suit monster wrecking all these art school weirdos' days and munching on their body parts. There's also a sweet decapitation, so you know your HMN boys are having fun on this week's episode.This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

B030: Unfuckable Anthony is so cool he don't give a fuck 1 star review for this episode: "trying too hard, lame." If you love this episode, sign up to the real unfuckable Anthony's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/WhosRight Mentions: Who's Right podcast, Small Town Mentality podcast, My Worst Holiday podcast, Jamie Dunn & Agro, Shit Happens When You Party Naked podcast, Blunt Mommy podcast, #nooffense podcast, Gareth's Random Ramblings podcast, Noise Pollution podcast, Talk me Down podcast, Baked and Awake podcast, The Not So Crazy Podcast of Blizzard the Wizard and Eli podcast, Heavyweight Chumps podcast, Raw Onion podcast, Spunk Lube, Flesh Light, Izotope audio plugins, a certain brand of medical software starting with S, the Man Brain Christmas Tree Forgot to mention sorry: Po Boys podcast, your awesome podcast, others

Get It Right (Don't Mix It Up) Episode 2 by Wellsradio

Don't just take someone's word on uour health..do some research and find out what's really going on..take the ball into your own hands and really make a change to better your health... WBLU 77.7FM DA CYPHER

Get It Right (Don't Mix It Up) by Wellsradio

Steve Larsen: What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. So here's the real mystery. How do Real MLMers like us create and cheat and only bug family members and friends who want to grow a profitable home business? How do we recruit A players into our downlines and create extra incomes, yet still have plenty of time for the rest of our lives? That's the blaring question in this podcast. We'll give you the answer. My name is Steve Larsen and welcome to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. What's up guys? Hey, hopefully you're doing awesome. I know it's been a little while since I've published here. I've been at several events. I've spoken at several events. Been flying like crazy. It's been a lot of fun. What I wanted to do for this episode was, I wanted to drop in a recording of me coaching the people who were inside of the program that I sell called Secret MLM Hacks. And it's been a lot of fun coaching them. I realize that I've now brought almost 900 people through this process or similar process as well, and had a lot of success with it. I've been able to go through it and help create millionaires, many of them now, and it's been great. And so one of the things that I notice, there's always this point as people start to learn something new, that they will go through, it happens to pretty much everybody that I've ever seen and watch. And what they'll do is, they'll sit back and they will start to question the very process that they're going through. And what I wanted to do is, I wanted to drop in. It's kind of special, guys. It's unique. There's three things that I ask every single person that I am coaching to go through internally. And so the next, it's like 20, 30 minutes, something like that, but it's totally worth it I promise, for you to go through and see what those three things are that I drop out to my students to help them know what I expect from them as they move forward inside of my program. So if you're sitting on the fence or whatever, every Friday what I do is, I always want people to know that I am there for them to help them answer questions, to coach them along the path, to push them when they need pushing. I look at myself as a coach. I tell them I'm a coach. Now, one thing about a coach is that coaches don't always make things comfortable. The purpose of the coach is to cause progression. And sometimes progress requires a little bit of pain, or discomfort, or things that are new, things you never ... Anyway, this is me going through and setting kind of the premise as far as hey, here are the three things that I require. And what's kind of cool is, regardless if you're in my program or not, these are things that you can use inside your own downline that I think that you will be able to help set the bar so that you create people who are people of action. One of the things that is most dangerous is when you recruit a whole bunch of people, which I've totally done this before, and probably most of us have, but you recruit a whole bunch of people who are not expecting to run on their own. Right? How do you get someone past that? And so this what I tell my people. This is what tell not just the people in my group, but also people inside of my very downline to help set the bar and help people realize that, yes, I'll run, but I'll run with you, not for you. These are the three things that I have people go through and understand. Anyways, I'm going to cue this over here. You can even take notes if you'd like to. These three things though, drastically, drastically, I've always found increase the speed of success for the person who is either in my downline, or the person I'm coaching, whatever it may be. Anyways, hopefully you guys enjoy this. Thanks so much. Guys, I'm excited for today. I hope you're doing well and I am just thrilled to be part of this group. I'm so touched by the number of you guys that are just out there just killing it, just doing everything that you can to just run forward. One of the hardest things I have as a coach is, I've had a total of about 900 people, ish. Let me think. Yeah. It's almost 900 people, 900 people in the last year that I've coached through these kinds of processes and similar thing as you guys are going through right now. And the thing that gets heartbreaking for me is this whole idea that, you guys, no one's teaching what I'm teaching. You've got the material, in my mind, the best tools, in my mind. You've got the best stuff that's out there, your complete Blue Ocean Strategy. You've got all this stuff that's out there. And the thing that hangs people up, it's like, well. What is it then? It's actually the ability for the individual to believe that it can work, and that's it. That's it. The ability to believe that it actually can work. And yes, Stephen, I totally get it. And yes, I will marry the process. One of the things, every once in a while I get someone to reach out. They're like, "Are you telling me that I actually have to put a few things into this? I actually have to work on it?" I was like, "Well, yeah. It's a business. Of course you have to." But it's not completely turnkey all the way? It's like, no, it wouldn't be valuable then. Are you serious? Are you serious? I've turned key to everything that I can. You know what I mean? And it's hard for me to see that as a coach. So those of you guys who are, you're out there, you're hustling. You're trying to apply all the stuff that I'm teaching. You're going through and you're just going through the motions. You're just doing it. I thank you. It means a lot to me. It's heartbreaking for me to see that. I've been where you are. And two years ago, I was broke, guys. And I went through and I started putting all these pieces together and putting these ... And it's crazy. I ended up getting my first Two Comma Club award. What? That's crazy. Million dollars through a single funnel. Crazy. Changed my life. And I started coaching people on this process. And over the last year I've had over almost 900 people in, which is crazy, that I've had a chance to bring through at this, both personal coaching students, you guys, Russell's group, which is huge, another group of mine that I have that's big. And it's been just, it's so fun. But it also is an emotional roller coaster for the coach. And those of you guys who have an existing team and you're trying to get people to take action, you've been through that before and you know what I'm talking about. And so I'm very appreciative of you guys and just going forward and just doing it. There's been a ton of success stories already in this group alone, and it's not that old. It's pretty new still, actually. And I've had a lot of people reach out, and it's the classic excuses. Well, I don't know that I have time. It's like, "Are you serious? This can make you a million bucks. What's the worth to you?" It's not going to be done in a week? No. How long does it take for my four year old to grow into an adult? Years. Right? I want to shortcut that process for you by a ton if you just do what I tell you to do on it. But one thing I want you to know and understand and be a part of and realize is, I wish people would just stop questioning the process. The process works, but people get so caught up in questioning whether or not the process works that they're not actually doing the process. So sit back like, "Will that actually work?" Why don't you get there, try it, and find out. You know what I mean? It's so much better to do it that way and do it that model than it is to go the other way and start questioning every little thing. Something, doing something, is always better than sitting back and questioning. You just won't get anything done. At the very bare bolts of it, I have never seen anybody who actually is failing when they just have pig headed discipline running towards stuff. It may not even be the fact ... They might not even be running towards the right thing, but just the fact that they're running, they drastically increase their chances of actually being successful with something. Rather than sit back and go, "Oh, what about this? What about this? What about this?" So I'm so thankful because, especially those of you guys, typically it's those who get on these calls with me or will see them later that are the ones that are actually doing it, pushing forward. And not to be a jab at anybody, I hope that it's a teachable moment though. If you want to look back and think to yourself, "Am I actually teachable?" Right? A lot of what I teach you guys, I think it was model three, goes through and teaches you more about internal beliefs of your customer, or your prospective customers, of people you'd want to sell both on your product and your downline. And what I want you to do, what I invite you guys to do, is to take the time to sit back and think to yourself, "Self, what are my false beliefs about what Stephen's telling me?" And do the same thing to yourself as what I'm trying to teach you to do to your customers. Start asking yourself, "Am I believing him or am I?" Because I know it works. I was just at Funnel Hacking Live in Florida this last week. And it was so cool to sit back and watch 90 more people get their Two Comma Club award and sit back and go, "Wow. They were from my program. They were from my program. They were from my program. They were from my ... " Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Holy crap. And it's cool to see that. I know the process works. The issue I run into is the person's individual belief. And funny enough, I have to treat you like I do a normal customer like you have to. Right? Just because you're in this program, it's not over for me. Just like when you get someone in your downline, it's not over for you. You've got to continue to look at them and go, "What is the belief? What's the belief that these people are struggling with as far as taking an action?" I an put a cattle prod to your back and get you to do something for a little while, but that's not sustainable. It's better for me to sit back and think, "What is the belief?" Behavior is driven by belief. So if I want to affect your behavior, I've got to [inaudible 00:09:10] your belief. What's the belief you have about this program's success, or my product's success, or my downline's ability to make you ... Does that make sense? And then I go, "Hey. Now that I know what the vehicle related beliefs are, now what are the actual internal beliefs?" Which, typically go towards things that are insecurities, meaning someone will go, "Oh, this looks like it could work for me, Stephen, but I'm not a coder. I don't know any ClickFunnel stuff." I'm not a coder either. Or, I'm not going to know what to say. I'm not going to know what to do. I'm not good face to face with people. I'm not either. That's why I freaking built a funnel for it. Right? Does that make sense? I constantly am looking at what you guys are doing. I'm constantly, and I'm watching. Just so you know, I'm watching and I'm seeing where you guys are and I'm seeing what you're doing and I'm watching. I'm trying to be reactionary to what it is he's doing in a way that we've been more successful with it. So I am going back and as far as the external, that's the next one. And people will blame their ability to be successful on things that are away from them. I can't be successful with this program, or I can't be successful with this downline, or with this product, whatever it is, whatever you're selling. I can't be successful because of this, and they blame it on that. They blame it on things away from them. Time, I don't have enough money. I don't have enough energy or resources. I work a nine to five. So did I, guys. That's how I bootstrapped the whole way. Okay. My ability to be successful, I can't do it because, boom, look at this. My spouse, they're not going to be supportive enough. Right? Those are the internal and then external things that people deal with, and so I'm watching. I'm watching you. Not in a creepy way, please understand. But I'm watching you. And I'm watching and I'm going, "Oh, gosh dang it. That's the thing right there. They're struggling with this, or they struggling with that." And the thing that just will wreck me on the inside is when I sit back and I watch people and I'm like, "You wouldn't be saying that. The reason you are saying that is because I sound like you're believing that in order to be successful, you have to have zeros and ones running through your veins." Not true. Or, you feel like you've got to have a ton of time. Well, yeah, but I'm going to short cut the five years I've taken to do this hopefully down to five weeks. You know what I mean? And shorten it down if you're just willing to feel ... So the thing that I have to ask you to do and I know that I'm preaching to the choir here because you guys are on here with me and you're typically the ones who are doing it, which I'm very excited for and just so appreciative. I can't tell you how much mental kudos that gives me to see you and watch you be like, "Oh, man. He's doing it. She's doing it. They're doing it. Yes, yes, yes, yes." Road block, sure. Right? Something unexpected, something hard, absolutely, totally going to happen. But to stop questioning the process and just marry the process and be willing to give yourself to the pieces of sacrifice it requires to be vulnerable, to sit back and go, "I don't know this. And the first time I start publishing, Stephen, I'm going to look like an idiot." Well, yeah, duh. I did too. And you go back and you're like, "Oh, my gosh." And you start backtracking, backtracking, backtracking, backpedal, backpedal, backpedal. And you've got to be able to know and marry the process as you go. I'm thankful for you guys like crazy, those of you guys that are doing it. It makes it worth it for me. At this point of where it am, it doesn't have anything to do with money. I want to be able to be building something that has direct impact and is able to go. If I can get you to do it, think of the dozens and maybe even hundreds, maybe even thousands of people it will affect as you teach your downlines this stuff. I know it works better. I know it does. I'm doing it. Right? You guys know it does. You're in it. And if I can get ... This is how we change an industry. And so I'm attacking it from several levels. I'm trying to help you guys, us, the little guy. I'm trying to help us get this done. And then I'm also starting to work through some possibilities of working through a few different MLMs from the corporate angle who are willing to accept this stuff, who are not trying to use it to crush the little guy. You know what I mean? I'm very careful. I do not want that to happen. So anyway, it means a lot to me, so if I can get you to believe that the process is the way and that you marry the process and set your own feelings aside and understand that there will be moments of embarrassment. You're going to be feelings you have no idea what to do. Sometimes you'll be like, "Oh, my gosh. Tech stuff, or not enough time in my life." There's never enough time in your life. That's all an excuse. Or this, or that, if you can get past that piece of it, holy crap guys, the world is your oyster because you're able to go through and actually make progress on these things without actually sitting back and going, "Is this actually going to work?" You're never going to find out if you just keep asking that. You know what I mean? So I'm thankful for you guys. And then the second thing I would encourage you to do is find somebody to teach quickly. Find someone to teach quickly the things that you are learning. It will solidify it in your head. It's the way I got through school was by ... Even random people, I would just teach random people the stuff I was learning from teachers that day. And it's what got me from completely failing and getting kicked out of college. True story. And going back, reapplying, getting back in and almost getting straight As the rest of college. And it was that piece right there. A few other things as well, obviously. Very religious, I certainly believe that God helps me with that. But one of the things I did on my part was to make sure that I was teaching people what I was learning, so please do that. And keep learning and teach what it is that you're learning. So I'm like, "Publish. Publish. Publish." That's what you're publishing. You're publishing the things that you're learning. Someone had asked me the other day, "Stephen, when do you think you'll run out of podcast content?" I'm like, "I never thought of that." Maybe at the very beginning when I started, but that is it. I brainstormed over 100 episode topics just like this last Monday, or Tuesday I mean. And 100, and someone was like, "When are you going to run out of stuff?" And I was like, "Wait a second. You believe that I know all this already." When I started publishing a year and a half ago, no. I was like, "Whoa. Okay. Thanks for saying that." Here's the big secret. Here's the big secret. You are learning with me and I publish as I go. And if you can get to that spot, start publishing what you are learning, it will change your life because it will solidify the message in your head. You're teaching what you're learning will solidify it. You're bringing people along with you and if you wait to be the guru on the mountain, nobody's going to follow you when you're this expert already. They're going to look at you and go, "I don't know if I can get where you are because look where you are." And since you haven't documented your journey down in the spot when you weren't up here, when you're down here and you're still kind of figuring it out. And you mess up and you've got the blunders. It's the reason why my first few episodes are not that good. But I leave them up there so that people understand, yeah, Stephen's gone through his own transformation. Right? So if you're like, "I'm brand new," you're in the perfect spot to start publishing, which is why ... What is it, model four that goes through that? Model four or five goes through and actually teaches you more about the actual publishing parts and why I do what I do. That's why that's in there, so that you can go through and do it, have the funnel and start actually implementing this stuff because you're in a prime position to start publishing as you're just one chapter ahead of everybody. And they'll see the transformation and your speed will increase. And it's not a linear curve. It's an exponential curve. And it'll take a while and you'll feel stupid for a little bit. And you'll blunder up and there'll be things that people will not be able to follow you on. And then suddenly one day you're just like, "Wait a second. Today I didn't take one step. I took five, but it felt like one. Huh." It's happening to me right now. I left my job three months ago and it's happening right now. And I can feel myself on this curve and it's been really weird, but it's been really cool. And since I published before I felt myself kind of like leveling up fast. That feels weird to say that. But since I was publishing beforehand, I have a lot of people reaching out going, "Stephen, it's so cool to see you out there just winning and doing it. Oh, my gosh. It's so cool. It's so refreshing to know that there's some guy out there who's actually pulling it off. It's not just all a whole bunch of smoke." And I'm like "Of course not. What are you talking about?" And so I was like, "Well, if I follow this guru or that guru, I don't know. Were they always like that?" There's no documentation of them being somebody down here. And so publishing is your safety net for this entire game, all of it. I know I've said that before, but it is. It's your safety net for the whole game. And if I can get you just to publish, oh my gosh, that's so much better. That's so much better because if you jack something up on some ... Whether or not we're using ClickFunnels, I don't care if you're using ClickFunnels or not. It'll speed up your progress a lot. It will. But if you don't want to and you don't have the cash for it, that's fine. Start asking yourself. How do I afford it? And get it eventually. My first funnels were on YouTube. Literally, they're just YouTube videos with links on the bottom. There you go. Until I could afford and asked myself the question. How can I afford ClickFunnels? And started developing little assets that paid for it. I just want you guys to do it and I'm excited for you to be part of this. Just marry the process. Be willing to go through some of the cuts and scrapes that are required for any individual as they start to move up, I should say. Increase their income. Increase their influence. Gain a following. For you to have a following by definition means you must be a leader. And that's what I wanted to do was to help you develop into that person. And if you can publish and you can start building these funnels and you start doing all this stuff and start learning, I know I dump a ton of stuff on you guys on that course. It's a lot. I know it's a lot. But I'm trying to overwhelm your brain in the right ways that cause growth, not scared-ness, like oh crap, I'm never going to make it. I hope it doesn't do that to you. But if I can cause overwhelm in the good ways and decrease the time. Guys, I have all of college I slept maybe four to five hours, maybe a lot of times three every night, all of college, learning this stuff. I would after, in the middle of my nine to five job, I would get to the office at 6:00 AM. I did this for such a long time. I'd get to the office at 6:00 AM and then I would go and I would be working on my own stuff until 9:00 AM for three hours. And then I would be on the clock for my employer, Russell. And then I would stop at about 6:00 PM. Hang out with our kids. At about 8:00, I would start again. And 8:00, I did this every day, every day. 8:00 PM, I would start again and I would go until another three hours, until about 11:00 PM. I'd go to sleep. I'd get back up at 5:00 and I'd do it all over again. And what I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to shortcut the time. You have to know some of this stuff. The only two tasks you need to know in this whole business, you've got to figure out how to innovate and how to market, which ultimately is exactly what the course teaches you. Everything else is a cost on the business. Don't worry about your logo. Stop worrying about what your colors are. It doesn't matter what your mantra is. How do you market? That's not what a mantra is. How do you market? Which is storytelling and belief shifting. And how do you innovate, offer creation? That's it. And then once you can understand those things, then I bring you into this whole thing called funnel building. If you want to you can take it to the big leagues in the ClickFunnels area. But before that, it's just fluff. It's all noise. Anyway, I want you to know where this path is. And if you can just stick to it and just do it, man, it's so rewarding. It's so rewarding to look back. I was telling one of my buddies the other day. For the first time in my life, and I'm about to turn 30 in like three weeks, yeah, about three weeks. For the first time in my life, I feel fulfilled. Isn't that interesting? I mean, professionally. Fascinating, isn't it? And it's affected all these other areas of my life. But it came with a crap ton of grinding. And so I'm trying to cut out the crap and the fluff and the noise and the junk that does not matter for you to actually get there. And if I can do that ... Just marry the process and don't spend time doing that. Make the sins of commission, not omission. Meaning, just act. Make mistakes of committing, committing, committing. Maybe you're in action. You're actually doing stuff. The status thing is when people sit back and their making the mistakes of omission, meaning they're just sitting back and they're just questioning. Well, I'm not going to start until I go beginning to end. That's garbage. You're not going to do anything. Total garbage. If that's your belief, please be coachable in this moment and let me tell you that is not a correct and accurate belief. That is not. You do not ever know beginning to end ever. If you wait to, you'll never see. You'll actually never do anything. If you instead sit back and you say, "Look. These are the three steps that I'm going to take right now." And in fact, I only care about step number one. And you put your foot out there and you take that step as perfectly as that step can be placed, boom, you take that step. Funny enough, after step number three usually, for me anyways, I can see a thing. It's pure black. I have no idea. I have no idea what I'm going to be doing on the 25th. You know what I mean? I don't know. But I know where the peak is and I'm just heading towards the direction of that peak. Is there a way for me to get to that peak with the most efficiency? Yeah. Totally. But I don't know that until I'm there. And hindsight's 20/20. I don't know that until I've gone through it. So if I can sit back and look back and go, "Oh, man. Next time I do this, I should do it that way." What I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to make it instead of a line up to that peak where it's like, all over the place, I'm trying to go through and help you know, look, the straight line is by doing this and then this and then this and then this. But don't worry about this, this, and this, until you do just step number one. And funny enough, a new step number three will appear when you place your foot down. Boom, new step number three. That wasn't there until I placed my first step. Interesting. What if I placed my next step? You don't learn anything else until all you're learning is, you're learning how to place the next step, the new step number one. Boom. Oh, sweet. What? A new step number three appeared. Right? And that's how it happens the whole way through. And the thing that will ... It rips me up on the inside, guys. I know I'm totally on a soap box right now. I'll get your questions in a moment here. The thing that rips me up on the inside, I'll be coaching these people. I just had a chance to speak in front of 3000 people last Friday. It was super fun. It was amazing. And the thing that eats me up on the inside is when I sit back and I watch people and they're like, "Stephen, that sounds really good. And I see what you're doing. I actually think it works, but there's these other areas over here. I just don't know how they work, so I can't get started." No. That's not how it happens. That's not how anything is built. That's not how any progress is made. This is enough for me to get motivational and passionate over. And yes, I'll shake my computer screen and I'll let you know that this is the way it works. It is as much of a faith game as it is anything else. Entrepreneurship is really the story of the relationship with you. And as you sit back and you're like, "Oh, man. This whole game, I've got to get good at this game. I've got to get good at this game." You'll find that half of it is having an idea of what to do next. The other half of it is being okay with the fact that you don't know what to do next. And so being okay with this ambiguity and you've got to sit back and go, "Here's the step I see that I can take." You take it. You don't sit back and try to figure out step two. You're not even there yet. Don't worry about it until you take that first step. Right? Don't worry about step number three until you've taken step number two. Don't even worry about it. And so I applaud you is all I'm saying. Develop that mentality of it. I got voted the nicest kid in high school, seriously, the nicest kid in high school out of 600 people who were graduating. It shocked the crap out of me. And the reason why is because I was not the nicest kid in high school. And not in my mind, I was not expecting that award at all. I was the shyest kid. That's why I was nice. I just wasn't saying anything. I was a little rage machine on the inside. And what I had to learn, especially in this game, is that it's all about being able to develop yourself and get over those barriers. So what I'm telling you is, I had to go and I had a serious fear of adults. I had a hard time talking to people. Doing this, oh my gosh, it would've killed me. Now it's like breathing. It's totally fine. But take it from a guy who had a really hard time getting over this kind of stuff. I've told you this in the course. I would take my computer and I would stand in front of a mirror and I would mute the audio and I would literally just physically mimic because I was buttoned up physically, emotionally, speaking, nothing. I had all this anxiety on the inside. And the way I broke myself from it was by being willing to be uncomfortable. And this whole game, like I said, it is about the relationship that you have with yourself. It's like the second story that's actually happening. And for those of you guys who've gone through the training piece where I talk about the heroes through journeys, that's what this is. We think that the main journey, which it is, the main journey we're going on is this whole thing. We're like, "Hey. I'm going to go and I'm going to try and make a million bucks. And I'm going to build a sweet downline, a sweet team." That's cool. That is the main journey. The real journey though, is the journey of transformation that's happening underneath. It's the internal transformation that happens that's going on, on the inside of you. And I'm trying to teach you to be cognizant of it. Because if I can teach you to look back, be introspective and go, "I don't know if this works." Or, I think one of my false beliefs is, I believe I don't have enough time. And you can self solve, oh man, your speed to success is so much faster. It's like, so much faster, because now you'll be in a spot where you can start self teaching and have a relationship with you where you can develop. You can change. You can grow. And you can look back at yourself and go, "Oh my gosh. I'm not performing in this area very well because I have a hard time with this, this, and this." And just acknowledging the fact that you know what those things are, it's self discovery. And be like, "Oh, man. The way I was raised taught me that, yeah, there's no such thing as anyone who's actually going to make it." You know what I mean? Whatever that is, whatever that is for you. And as soon as you become cognizant of it, you can do something about it. So I'm trying to teach you to be introspective. Look back on yourself and go, "Sweet. All right. These are the areas I'm struggling with. Tactically, this is what Stephen's telling me to do. Okay. But you know what, he doesn't know me personally. And this whole area here I'm struggling with. What am I going to do? What's the thing I'm going to do to help break me and move forward and develop in a spot where I can actually get to the spot and start moving forward on this?" I'm just going on. I'm going to town right now, huh? That's the thing that I try and get people to understand. That's what I'm trying to help people take on and have ownership of. Okay. Do not put the roles of personal development on others. It is not in a course. It is not in anywhere else. Those things can jumpstart you, but it's ultimately on yourself. And if you can learn to be introspective, self medicate in the correct ways where you can go forward and literally craft your own path, oh my gosh, this game gets so fun. It gets so fun. Are all the answers for you personally inside Secret MLM Hacks? Yes. For offer creation, for message creation, for funnel building, learning how to build and automate systems, things like that, yes. For you as an individual, no. There's no way anyone could ever do that besides you. And I believe, God, and your relationship there. But if you can look back and be like, "Oh my gosh." I had to realize. I remember the day I was ... I don't remember where, but I remember the realization, oh my gosh. I suck at talking to people. Isn't that interesting? And a lot of people walk up to me now and they're like, "There's no way, Stephen. Are you kidding me? You're so good at that piece, that part." Well, let's go here. Let me take you back. If you guys want to, go three years back on my YouTube videos and watch me try to do a periscope. This was back when periscopes were big. One of the funniest things you'll ever see. They're terrible. They're terrible. Right? But it's me publishing when I'm not really far down the path yet. And if you can do that, it's so cool, guys. It's so fun. And your ability to transform other people will also increase because they will be ... You'll take them with you, which will break a whole bunch of beliefs that they'll have if you come at them when you're already here. And if you're already here, that's fine. But you've got to get vulnerable, and not just with other people, with yourself. And that's how the whole things happens. That's how you speed this thing up. Anyway, I just talk like crazy. Hopefully that's helpful to you, though. I'm very passionate about this and entrepreneurship itself because if I can get you to be introspective, to stop questioning the process, to marry it in a way that says, "You know what, I don't care how long it takes." Those are the people who put their head down. They don't look at a timeline. They put their head down and they just work. And suddenly they look up one day and they're like, "Holy crap. Look where I am. Huh, I really like that. I'm going to put my head back down again. This is cool." That's exactly what happened to me. You're like, "Whoa. Okay. Sweet." And it happened one day when I was sitting there next to Russell. And I had been teaching a lot of stuff in his place when he couldn't get up on stage. That's crazy, by the way. I was able to do that because publishing, I was practicing. I was telling stories. I was re-breaking, rebuilding belief patterns. What I'm trying to help you guys understand is that I sat back and I remember what happened to me one day. And all of a sudden Russell turned to me and he goes, "Dude, you're better at teaching offer creation that I am now." I was like, "Bro, you're Russell Brunson. Are you sure you just know what you just said?" He's like, "I'm being serious, Stephen." I was like, "Whoa. How did that happen?" And I started looking around again and I was like, "I'm publishing like an animal. I'm looking around. I'm coaching. I'm being coached and I'm also coaching." That's very key. I'm teaching people what I'm learning. And nothing but even just a year, that was technically a year and a half has passed. What if everybody did that? And I started looking around and I was like, "I'm going to put my head back down and do this more." And it just increased my speed and it feeds on itself. And now there's nobody who's sitting back going, "Come on, Stephen. Do the next step." I wake up just smiling. And I'm like, "Let's go take on the day," because I've created my own testimonial of myself being able to do it. And I'm trying to get you there. It doesn't happen, I can't cause it for you. But I can get you in an environment and teach you the environment where it happens. And you will have to develop it on your own as you do this process. It's so freaking awesome when you get to this spot. It causes belief on a level that no one can teach you because it will come from inside. And you'll learn a better relationship with yourself. It's really exciting, anyway. Hey, thanks for listening. 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Life Insurance expert Billy McDougall, takes us on a journey that can completely evolve your life insurance business. Learn why questions are the key to success. View more at MarkMiletello.com. Note: “Where The Insurance Pros Meet” is an audio podcast and is meant for the ear. A transcript of the audio is provided for referencing a particular section or for you to follow along. Listen to the episode to get the most out of our show. We use both speech recognition software and human transcribers to create the transcripts so they may contain errors. If you’re going to quote us in print, please be sure to check the corresponding audio. TRANSCRIPT   Speaker 1: Where the Insurance Pros Meet, Episode Four. Billy McDougall: He said, "Your credibility, your professionalism, all of that is going to be defined not by the things that you say, not by the things that you prove in terms of your product knowledge, but by the quality of your question." Speaker 1: Where the Insurance Pros Meet is a Podcast that brings the greatest talent in the world together. Managers, coaches, and producers. The very best experts the insurance and financial services industry has to offer. Get ready to change the way you do business to have your most successful year ever. Now, here's Mark Miletello, a top 1% producer, manager, and your host of Where the Insurance Pros Meet. Mark Miletello: Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Today is an exciting day. I think most of you are going to gravitate toward our guest that we have because he is an agent. He's an agent who started from scratch. One of my first hires as I went into management 10 years ago. He started really from the medical sales industry and transitioned into the insurance industry. To be able to watch him from day one of his career has been a real treat. He's led my agency. He's been a leader in the company. I believe you're going to love to hear from our guest, Billy McDougall. Billy McDougall: Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me. Mark Miletello: Well, I'm excited to be with you and a couple reasons why. One is you are an agent that I've watched come into this business from an outside industry. You've started from scratch. I've watched the progression of going and you learning different styles. You've learned from several people in the industry, and you've continued to evolve until now. You have one of the most dynamic and powerful life insurance discussions I believe I've ever seen. I'd like to think I played a part in helping you get there, but I'm excited to see the success you're having. You've won back to back Agent of the Years, as well as you are a fireman and you risk your life right now in the California wildfires to protect us, to thank you for your service and welcome to the show. Billy McDougall: Thanks, Mark. Appreciate it. Yeah, I do want to extend a thank you to you. You laid the groundwork for me in this industry. You helped me get my peanut or meet me and just figure out what it meant to have discussions, meaningful discussions with clients. You've also helped me to reach out within the industry and find the very best and brightest and to try and [inaudible 00:02:46] my discussion even more, so thank you for everything you've provided for myself and for my family. Mark Miletello: Well, thank you. Of course, you're my client, so thank you. Having you part of the test pilot group with this entirely new life discussion ... Tell us first before we get into what you're doing now, and using you as the Guinea pig and the test pilot of really transforming and evolving our life discussion. Now, what we're basically launched on VanMark.life. Tell us a little bit about when you got started. Some of the struggles you've had, some of the successes you've had in discussing life insurance. Billy McDougall: Honestly, when I started, I didn't really know much of anything about life insurance. I was joining what I thought was just a PNC company and then it was made very apparent that we were primarily a life insurance company, and that honestly kind of scared me a little bit because you must own car insurance by law. You must have home insurance to carry a mortgage, but you don't have to have life insurance, and I was fearful of how it would be received by clients. I did, I guess I grew in my knowledge of it. Really embraced and just fall in love with the product, and the need that we instill in families. I'd say that I started by just trying to establish a level of professional knowledge with my clients. I think if you go back and listen to the types of discussions that I had with clients when I first started, they were effective relative to product knowledge. Mark Miletello: Right. Billy McDougall: They weren't super effective relative to generating a discussion. They were still very much one-sided. I believe I probably did 90% of the talking and the client only did 10%, and hopefully, I was able to stay in their good graces long enough to let me finish through that discussion. Mark Miletello: Oh no, I agree. As a matter of fact, I think I still have that recording where you came into my office eight or nine years ago and delivered a mock, not presentation, of course. But at the time, I was your only liaison to the industry, so you were basically duplicating my process and maybe a couple others that I introduced you to. I think that's kind of the way we've all been taught, or maybe we feel like even, regardless of the way we've been taught or not, it's so much information we feel like we must get through within an hour, which ends up sometimes becoming two hours that we feel like we have to talk 90% of the time. Right? Billy McDougall: Correct. Yes. Honestly, part of that for me was when I first started, I thought that I had to legitimize myself in being a professional in the eyes of the client. I believe that that was done by showing them how extensive my product knowledge was. Mark Miletello: Right. Billy McDougall: That lends itself to a presentation-style discussion. Mark Miletello: Well, when you say "presentation-style discussion", expand on that and tell us what that means to you. Billy McDougall: Well, I think I was very effective in getting across points. Whether or not those were received is a completely different aspect, in whether they're received in the way that they want to be received. It's kind of like, what do they say? You throw a spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. That's how those presentations were. Though they were effective, and I was able to sell life insurance with those, they were a lot of work. It was trying for myself to keep the clients engaged. I had to constantly battle and do work against their attention spans, relative to what I thought was hopefully important in their lives, instead of me really having a good discussion where they're doing 90% of the talking. They're engaging me, and we're addressing things that are relevant to the first and foremost, relative to these products. Mark Miletello: When you say "presenting", I think what I heard you say is you feel like when you call it a "presentation" or you're presenting to the client, you feel like 90% of the time you're talking because you're trying to express a level of professionalism through your product knowledge, through the extensive details of the bells and whistles of the product, right? Billy McDougall: Yeah. Mark Miletello: Great analogy. You're throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. What that means is you're spewing this product knowledge so much that every now and then, something sticks. But you know what? You did a pretty darn good job of it. You came right in, won trips, won Agent of the Year, led my agency for three or four years in a row. What was so bad about it if it works? Billy McDougall: It wasn't so bad. In fact, it was tremendously effective. But it made it very hard for me to consider a change. In fact, there are national speakers that I had heard multiple times, multiple years in a row before I made a commitment to do something different. I can't even honestly tell you what triggered that desire to make a change, but I finally did. I took a leap of faith and I completely rearranged my ... The presentation is gone. It's not a presentation at all. Everything now is a discussion with the client, where I'd say they're doing at least 50% of the talking. On a good day, much, much more. It's much more engaging for them. It's much more specific for what they care about, and it's much more effective in terms of making sure you have a good product then because ethically then for me, ultimately, I only want what's best for the client, and their opinion is the one that matters. If I'm giving them a presentation, how am I meeting their needs? I'll tell you, I've had just so much fun in changing this into a true discussion, helping them organize their thoughts around important concepts like life insurance, financial planning, based on helping them by leading them through a sequence of questions that are relevant to those things to understand what matters to them. Mark Miletello: Well, I heard you say something in there. A strange word to our industry in the form of meeting with a client, but you said you have fun with clients. I remember when you and I were on the cuff, and it's okay to say it. You and I were together, following Van Miller, and Van Miller and I, of course, have developed VanMark.life, which you were instrumental in helping us. At this point, I don't know who comes up with what. I'm sure it all stems back from Van, and Van says it stems even further back to the mentors in his. Yes, whether it's Gary Kinder, or Tom Hegna, or Brian McKnight, or Van Miller, or all those things, I do recall, and it's been about two years for myself, so I'm trying to put the timeline together. But you and I decided at some point that we had to start with the first step of calling our new, evolved presentation, if you will, a life insurance discussion. I think that was the first step of reminding us of, number one, not to talk so much. Right? Not to just continually beat them up with bells and whistles and product knowledge. At some point, we ... I still let it slip every now and then, but I've conditioned myself to even call the training platform and its own lifeinsurancediscussion.com, that that's the first step I think, Billy, that you and I walked through was to start reshaping how we talk to clients by even what we call what we're doing. Then you said, "having fun in a meeting". How do you have fun at a meeting? I mean, I think we all think it's a little bit fun what we do, especially when we win and we make sales and have success. But I think you're talking about a different kind of fun. Right? Billy McDougall: Always at some level in the meeting, you have the sensation that you're helping lead them down a road, and I think that the client has that same sensation. Van Miller is just fantastic and been listening to him speak over multiple years now, multiple occasions. One of the things that he said, and this goes back to where I was trying to establish, initially when I was new in the industry, my credibility, he said, "Your credibility, your professionalism, all of that is going to be defined not by the things that you say, not by the things that you prove in terms of your product knowledge, but by the quality of your questions." I just thought that was just the oddest thing to hear, and I wrote it down multiple times from multiple speeches that he's given on national podiums or regional podiums. Finally, I internalized that. It's been incredible, the things that he said. I literally just last week had someone who said, "You're the most knowledgeable insurance and financial advisor I have ever met with, and I'm 51 years old and I've been dealing with people my whole life. For the first time, I really have a sense of understanding and comfort in what I'm trying to accomplish." That's because I had him do all the talking. Everything was questioned. The thought process is we all want to be good at insurance and financial planning, as clients. As clients, we want to be good at that. We want to do it well. There's nothing in there that is exceptionally difficult. Everything is very much common sense, but people don't have organized thoughts around those considerations, so they can conclude, so the types of questions we ask help them organize their thoughts around insurance and financial planning. When you do that, it becomes a lot of fun because it's truly a fun, interesting conversation, give and take, instead of, "Let me control this time so I can have you here, understand, and value what I'm trying to share." It truly has just been interesting conversations, and you have to be willing to put yourself out for that. Once I finally did, I was just like kicking myself, going, "Oh my gosh. I should have done this years ago. I should have trusted Van in the very beginning because it has absolutely changed the way my clients view me. It has changed my level of enjoyment and excitement in terms of what I'm doing, and it absolutely changed consistency, and satisfaction, referrals." Across the board, it's just opened the floodgates in terms of changing my business. Mark Miletello: I talked to Van, and as of the recording of this show, as of today, I just launched the lifeinsurancediscussion.com training platform that allows the agent to walk through that same process that you and I have walked through in an organized fashion. It's just funny that you haven't even seen the finished product, but you know that what it took you and me... You're right. You and I heard Van say it. We went to four different speeches where we've heard him talk. We had the same set of notes. I even told Van this last week. I said, "Van, it's hard when something works for someone, and whether you're selling five life apps a year or a hundred, whether you're selling $5,000 in premium or $50,000 as a multiple-line agent, or $250,000 or more, you feel like you have a process that somehow works, that gets the job done." I remember you saying earlier, you had to decide to throw all that out of the window. It's not that we forget because we still have those things, those stories and those discussions that we can pull out, such as stories of the farmer and the seed and things like that. But I think what took you and me two years to get to was letting go of the way we do things and say, "Okay ... " The funny thing, Billy, you and I have challenged each other to have a complete interview discussion with a client, and try to ask questions the entire time. Now, I think it's virtually impossible if you were to record yourself to not have a statement in that entire 45-minute or hour-long meeting. You're going to have statements. Billy McDougall: Of course. Mark Miletello: But I think it's a fun challenge for each other to say, "Hey Billy, let's try to go through an entire life insurance discussion with just asking questions." I've tried to do that. It's impossible, but it's fun to try. Billy McDougall: Yeah, and Van has some interesting nuances that he uses in his discussion. When he needs to address a point to drive home a concept for them to consider and decide how they value that concept, he'll ask them. He'll say, "Do you mind if I share a story with you?" Now, you're engaging them instead of just launching into, "Well, I've got a story for you about this." Or, "Do you mind if I share with you this aspect or another?" Those little nuances help to keep that sensation, that feeling of it being very conversational, even in points where you need to get them a little bit of detail so that they can make a better determination of their opinion. Mark Miletello: Billy, you and I have kind of started this path together a few years ago, like I mentioned. At times, we've talked about it, we've shared notes. I put together a PowerPoint of my thoughts and even recorded voice-over over each slide. At the same time, I give you credit for doing the final piece of the puzzle that needed to be done for me as an agent. Not talking about management. I'm just saying as an agent in the business, as peers I guess I should say, what I credit you is getting it on one page. That's what I've always told every educational department I've worked with, and process that I've been. You must get it on one page for agents to wrap their brain. I'm giving you the credit on the show for being the guy who put the final pieces of the puzzle and got this life insurance discussion on one page. Can you tell us the importance of that, how you did it, and tell us about that one page? Billy McDougall: Absolutely. Well, first, none of that is original content. None of that is an original thought. All of that is stuff that I've garnered basically standing on the shoulders of giants. People like Van Miller, people like yourself, other people in the industry, Tom Hegna, using their concepts and their ideas. I said, "Okay, there's such a great amount of knowledge there, and I'm just not that smart of a guy. What I really need to do is I need to have a way, on a consistent basis, whether I'm on and having good discussions with clients, or whether I'm a little flat and I'm not good. On a consistent basis, something that can ground me and help me stay on track in terms of not a presentation, but in terms of appropriate ideas to bring up questions about, to discuss." What I did is I took basically some of the main components that I feel like I identify the most, taxes, volatility, fees, inflation, leverage, and I kind of built out, I don't know if you want to call it an outline or an agenda. It's just something that's good for me so that I can track along with the client and I know where I'm going next, and we address those things in that way. I'm able to be consistent in my discussions. The discussions go whichever way the client wants them to go. But I'm sure we've all been in meetings where a client brings up something, you're off on a tangent, and you never end up back to addressing some of these issues and concerns that really the client needs to consider for them to have organized thoughts and move forward in the insurance or the financial world. Mark Miletello: Yes, and having an agenda ... Really, I've gotten away later in my career from using or having an agenda. You've been one of the few agents that I've worked with that has always used an agenda, and you make no excuse. In fact, you make it a great thing. You tell the client, "I have an agenda, so we don't get off track. We're going to go through this, and I'm going to actually take notes and give you a copy of this." That's one thing that I've just been amazed at the way that you do is that the notes that you have from your meetings are by far the best that I've ever seen. It's better than my own. What I like about it, and back in the early days when you needed my help, and you would send me that, it would just blow me away. But what it does is it helps you keep a record of the client's goals, dreams, wishes, needs, and deliver that back to the client and present that back to the client by saying, "This is what you told me, and this is how we're going to fix it," which I think is a great idea that I've seen very few people, if any, do in a life insurance discussion or sale. But putting it on one page, then an agent can take all this world of information that we've been gathering for two years, and thinking that it's just so much. It's drinking from a fire hose, using a fireman aspect there. That's what I felt, and I've led this industry as a life insurance agent, and to me, it was like drinking from a fire hose. To me, having it on one page helps you wrap your brain around, "Hey, I can do this. I can learn this. Not only that, I can deliver this." You've told us a little bit about where you've come from. You've discussed what a presentation means to you, and you've really defined it since you've been talking. But point blank, Billy, now I'll ask you the question. What is a life insurance discussion, and how can an agent stop everything that they're doing? What were some of the recommendations you would make about having a discussion? Tell us what a discussion means to you. Billy McDougall: That's a tough question to answer, but I'll tell you how I formulated my process for asking good, relevant questions. First, I had to identify the areas that made sense to discuss, and we already kind of went into some of those things. There can be many more areas, and you can add that to your agenda. "What other items do you have on the table, Mr. Client or Mrs. Client, that you would like addressed here?" Mark Miletello: Right. Billy McDougall: Once I identified those, it was really a test. I sat down with multiple people, and I went through the process and they'd stop me. They say, "No, you're telling. You're not asking." I'd have to step back and think, "Okay, I don't want to lead a client in a direction. That's unethical. What I want to do is discuss a topic." You can drown them in some stuff briefly about it, but get their opinions on it. What that discussion looked like for me? Don't get me wrong, I think that Van does have the finest questions in the industry. His CDs are on repeat in my car. I've listened to them for hundreds of hours. I happen to have long commutes, so it allows me that time. That stuff just comes out in the discussion. But it was coming out just kind of randomly. I wasn't using it very effectively. The reason that I went to that one-page outline or agenda was to help make sure that I captured those specific things. Van impressed upon us a handful of things. He said, "You should be silent in the discussion. It really should be the client who does almost all the talking. Your discussions should be short. They should be 45 minutes or less." That is just scary and painful to hear. That includes taking applications. That's Van's recommendation. Mark Miletello: Yeah. Billy McDougall: That's hard for me. I'm a pretty analytical person, and that's been a real big thing for me to do. Van says, "If there's an analytical bone in your body, you need to get rid of it right now because you can't be that way." He speaks well. He has this concept of, "You know, it's your responsibility. You are the financial professional. It's your responsibility to know every little minute detail of how your product works, the implications to your clients. All that stuff is you. Now, your responsibility in helping a client understand what they need is not necessarily explaining to them every specific detail about how that product works, but instead, what that product does for them. That's dictated by the things they deem to be important." That was a shift for me, being an analytical person. Instead of digging so deeply into individual things, talking more about broader concepts. I find that 95% of my discussion with clients is broad, on large topics, broad in scope, and maybe 5% of the time we may look at an illustration. Mark Miletello: Yeah. Billy McDougall: It has probably flipped from what it was when I started in the industry. You're so focused on solutions, and you hear that in the industry. Right? "Don't be solution-focused. Work on the problem. What does the client want?" But I just didn't know how to bridge that gap, and Van's information, the way that he has interviews with clients has been super effective in helping me do that. I just had to organize a way for me to be able to have that discussion consistently with each client. Mark Miletello: Yeah, and that's why Van and I came together is that, again, two years of following him and listening to the CDs, hundreds of hours, trying to figure out a way to have a discussion and ask questions, versus ... That's a tough thing to do, and it's a hard process. It's tough to swallow, but it can be done. I think it's hard to continue on and giving the listener out there exactly how to do it, and that's why I told Van, I said, "We need to come together, form VanMark.life, and we need to show people a process where they can learn what took us two years to learn, they can learn in two weeks. They can learn in two months." Having it on a training platform so that they can walk through what you and I walked through every step of the way, but much faster, and get to that realization that how do you not talk about the product when that's what you're there to offer? The bottom line is, you're talking more, like you said, of big picture items. You're talking strategies and you're talking philosophies. Yeah, it's very effective. It's a dynamic. It is fun. You walk out of there feeling like you really are on the side of the client, instead of presenting a product. Billy, I appreciate your time. Looking back over your career and the successes you've had, can you pinpoint one area where you would tell a new agent, "Don't make this mistake." Did you have a fumble at some point along the way that you would guide a new agent or maybe a veteran agent not to make the same mistake? Billy McDougall: I think that we've all fumbled in our careers. I certainly have. I like to try and be very honest about those so that I have them as an opportunity to learn. Have a level of humility that allows you to be open to input from everyone. Someone who's a lesser agent with less experience can give you valuable input that you can implement to be successful. I'd say the biggest thing, the biggest mistake I have made is the unwillingness to change when I feel like, "Hey something's working. I've got a process. It's going to be hard for me to consider doing something else." But I certainly wasn't going to do any better, and I wasn't going to help my clients any better by continuing to do what I was doing. There is only so much time in a day. The top producers have better products, business. More commissions on the book, more premiums on the book, more people helped. They have the same amount of time in the day that we do, so listening to Van a hundred times say, "You need to stop doing what you're doing and try something different to make yourself better, and to be a better resource for your client." Stepping away and doing that is a big leap of faith, and I wish I had done it sooner because you're fearful of change. But that change makes my career so much more fun, so much more rewarding. Mark Miletello: Well, I love those late-night calls where you say, "Mark, I wrote a 2,000-a-month permanent life insurance plan." "I wrote a 300-a-month term life app, and the client begged me for it." You're having much more fun, and I think I get it, and I try to be that way. I try to take your advice. I want to always continue learning, but sometimes you think you know enough and you stop learning. I think that's your fumble is you need to be coachable, right? Even at our stage, whether you're a new agent or a veteran agent or in between, you need to be able to look around, evolve what you do. You must constantly evolve, for sure. Billy McDougall: Absolutely. Mark Miletello: Yeah, so let me ask you this. You've been in the industry for 10 years. You've seen a lot of change, and I'll put you on the spot. In this show, we like to get a professional prediction. What do you see 10 years down the road, and let's kind of keep the topic in life insurance? I know you're a multiple-line agent, and that makes you even more phenomenal for life premium that you collect. But looking down the road, what is your professional opinion and advice to the agent? What does the industry look like, and how do we fit in? Billy McDougall: I don't know the answer to that, of course. Nobody does, but my best guess would be, at a certain point, the government's going to take some of these tools away from us. These are tools that we want people to get an opportunity to have organized thought around those things, consider them, determine if they want them, and have access to them. There is some level of urgency, and it's not on the client. It's on us. It's on us as agents. We need to be as effective as we can in having quality discussions. Not pushing products, not selling products, but reaching out to as many people and giving them information so that they can make good decisions for their families. It's okay if they thoughtfully reject ideas, but it's not okay if they're never given the opportunity to do that. There are only a few times in a person's life where they're going to talk to a professional like you. Scarcity, there's going to be some of that moving forward in the next 10 years. Mark Miletello: Well said. Well said. You're right. It's a fun question. I like to hear what professionals in the industry think about our future. It's always optimistic that we're going to be needed. I love what you say, that we're going to be even more needed to have a better discussion and ... You're right. Giving the client just the opportunity to have the discussion is what most agents aren't giving their clients.I want to tell you to thank you for joining us on Where the Insurance Pros meet. You are a consummate pro. I like to think of you like my big brother, and of course, I'm older than you so I can't say that. But I like to think of you in the way that I think of him that every time I get around him, I learn something. Billy, if I can say one thing about you, that's what I would say is I learned something. Thanks for now becoming a mentor of mine. Billy McDougall: Hey, same with you, Mark. I appreciate you very much. Thank you, sir. Mark Miletello: Thank you.

GE Podcast EP 6 You Win, Perfect! 1. Opening song 2.Welcome (GE podcast, overview of show) 3.Song:("I Do it(Giving)"- Mouth Pi3ce) 4. Lyrics {"Nothing Above You" - Eshone Burgundy [Verse 1:] Feel like I'm writing letters to myself Each time be like a letter to myself Reminded that I was blinded by no remorse I threw shots And He responded with a cross Young sheep temporarily lost Shepard keep me covered He would never cut me off True talk that can never be false New patterns like I'm covered in Lebanese cloth And it's been conviction over addition On top of that more faith over suspicion More grace being poured over my snapback I cannot deny God's love it's real that's that I'm from a place where they ask you where the cash at? Answer that wrong you might become a hashtag Naturally I possess the same tendencies So Lord keep me away from the wrong energy, please } 5. Word to the Wise (Being a New Creature Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new thing shave come. )[10 min] 6. Song (Bear With Me"-Propaganda feat. Marz Ferrer). 7. Sponsored by JMS [1-3 min]. 8. Community matters (. ) [10 min] 9. Song ("Free(feat T-Jay)- GAWVI). 10. Main Topic:: That Perfect Work James 1:2-4 2 Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. 4 And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. [15 min] 11. Song ("Y.C.H.M.B."- Aaron Cole). 12. Just because it's Common doesn't make it Right (Don't make me lay down my religion) [5-10 min]. 13.Critical Mass ("Tresa's Lullaby(Dreamer)"-Tresa Jerell). [10 min] 14. Closing Thought: Alex Wolfe [5min] Close [1-3 min] 15. Song “Lotto(feat Cousin Neighbor) -Cousin Neighbor" 16. Outro Instrumental ("Blowout"-Theory Hazit )