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In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, We take you through the fascinating evolution of media and communication technologies. We begin by tracing the journey of written communication from ancient Sumerian pictographs to Gutenberg's printing press. The narrative explores how each technological breakthrough transformed our ability to share information, from industrial-era steam presses to the digital revolution sparked by the first email in 1971. Our conversation delves into the parallels between historical technological adaptations and current innovations. We examine the story of a 1950s typesetter transitioning to digital technologies, drawing insights into how professionals navigate significant technological shifts. The discussion introduces the concept of "Casting, not Hiring," emphasizing the importance of finding meaningful experiences and team dynamics in a rapidly changing world. We explore the transformation of media consumption and advertising in the digital age. Traditional media platforms give way to digital giants like Facebook and Google, reflecting broader changes in how we create, distribute, and consume content. The conversation touches on audience dynamics, using examples like Joe Rogan's media presence and Netflix's market evolution to illustrate these shifts. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In this episode, I explore the historical journey of media and communication, tracing its evolution from ancient scripts to modern digital technologies. I discuss the pivotal role of Gutenberg's printing press in revolutionizing media distribution and how it set the stage for the widespread use of newspapers and books. We delve into the transition from traditional typesetting to digital processes, drawing parallels between past innovations and current advancements in AI. The conversation highlights the importance of curiosity and effective communication in embracing new technologies, emphasizing the idea of "casting" for meaningful experiences rather than traditional hiring. We examine media consumption trends and the impact of big data on advertising, noting the shift from traditional platforms to digital giants like Facebook and Google. Our discussion includes an analysis of the historical impact of communication technologies, referencing figures like Edison and their influence on modern entrepreneurship. The episode concludes with a focus on the value of appreciation and growth, sharing insights on how recognizing value and excellence can lead to professional and personal breakthroughs. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan, and how are you? I am wonderful. Welcome to Cloudlandia, you are in the Chicago outpost. I am. Dan: I'm sitting in a very comfortable spot, noise-free. I just had. Have you ever done any IV where they pump you? Up with good stuff. Dean: I have yeah. Dan: Yeah, I just came from that, so I may be uncomfortably exuberant. Dean: Uncomfortably exuberant. That's a great word there, right there. Dan: Yeah, yeah, uncomfortable to you. Dean: That's the best. Dan: Yeah, yeah. So anyway, we have a good service. Dean: The only thing I miss about Chicago comfortable to you, that's the best, yeah, so anyway, we have a good service. The only thing I miss about Chicago. Dan is our Sunday dinners. Oh the Sunday roundtable. Dan: Yeah, it's a bit more informal now so we don't have a big gap. It's not like the Last Supper. Dean: Right, exactly. Dan: We have Mike Canix coming over and Stephen Paltrow. Dean: Okay, there you go. Dan: They'll be on straight carnivore tonight. Dean: Okay, good, I like everything about that. Dan: Yeah, it's a little bit of snow on the ground and snowing right now, but it's nice. Dean: Oh, that's awesome. Well it's winter here. It's like cool. Yeah, I almost had to wear pants yesterday, dan, it was that cold. Dan: I had to wear pants yesterday, Dan. Dean: It was that cold I had to wear my full-weight hoodie. But yeah, but it's sunny, it's nice. Dan: I was just in the hot tub before we got on the call the Chinese intelligence, who are listening to this phone call. They're trying to visualize what you just said. Dean: Yes, Well, I had a great conversation with Charlotte this morning and something happened. That is the first time I've done it. I literally I talked her ear off. I reached my daily limit of talk interaction. We were talking for about an hour. There's a limit. Yes, I pay $20 a month and I guess there's a limit of how long you can engage by advanced voice tech. Dan: I'd give her a raise. I'd give her a raise. Dean: So they were on her behalf demanding a raise. I'd give her a raise. So they were on her behalf demanding a raise from $20 a month to $200 a month, and I could talk to her all I want. I still think it's worth it. It really is. When you think about if we go through the personification again, if you think about what you're getting for 200 I mean, just the conversation I had with her this morning was worth more than 200, yeah, so you want to know what we were talking about. What were you talking? about well, I am such a big fan of this, the big change uh book that I got for you. That was oh yeah, by stuff like that. So I really have been thinking that the whole game has really been an evolution of our, of words, pictures, sound and the combination of words, pictures and sounds in videos, right, and if we take the big three the words and pictures and sound, that I, you know, we went all the way back to the very beginning and I told her I said, listen, what I'd love to do is I want to trace the evolution of each of these individually. I want to start from the beginning of how we let's just take text, you know, as an example for words, and so she's taking me all the way back to the ancient Sumerians and the invention of kind of the very first kind of visual depiction of words and language, and then all the way up to the hieroglyphics of Egyptians and then into what would now be what we know as the alphabet, with the Romans and Latin, Romans and Latin, and the way that they were distributed was through tablets and they would post posters and things to get things out there. And so I'll pause there and I'll tell you that the lens that I wanted to look at it through for her is to go back and find, just trace, the beginnings of the capability of it, right, the capability of text. So that meant we had to have language and we had to have the alphabet, and we had to have the tools, the mechanism to recreate these on tablets. And then the distribution of them. How were they distributed? The consumption of them, how were they received and popularized? And then how were they capitalized? Who turned business opportunities into? What did this new capability turn into business-wise? So, looking, those four, tracking those four things all the way through history, from the ancient Sumerians, all the way through, and so when we got to, you know, from the time the Romans created the thing, the first kind of commercialization was the scribe industry. That became a thing where people were employed as scribes to you know, to write things, things, and then it came into the monks. We haven't gone deep dive in these yet, we're kind of going through the surface level of them. But the scribes, you know, were the first kind of commercializing and distribution of the of the things. And then when Gutenberg came along, that sort of popularized and made it even more able to distribute things and on the back of that became newspapers and pamphlets and books. So those were the three primary things for hundreds of years. Until the 1800s we had steam presses which were large, just kind of mechanized, sped up Gutenberg presses, and then the roller presses which allowed to have long, continuous streams of printing, which that really led to the modern newspaper. You know we had almost a hundred years until things were digitized where the entire platform was built on that plateau of things. And then it turned into newspapers magazines were the dominant things and mail. Those were the big distribution elements for a hundred years and then, once it got digitized, we turned into email. The first email apparently was sent in 1971 or something, but it took 25 years for that to popularize to the level that everybody had email and it was the primary thing and that led to PDFs and eBooks and distribution on the internet. We talked about bloggers because, if you remember, in the early days of the internet the heroes were bloggers. Those were the sort of personalities pre-social media you know. And then she even used the words that once it became democratized with social media, that things like twitter and and you know those were big things. But she talked about Arianna Huffington and Perez Hilton and Matt Drudge as the kind of first real mainstream capitalizers of this digital kind of went full steam into only digital, when all the mainstream print media was still kind of holding on and and resisting the migration of free news coming through you know um, and then we get to the point now where all of that is completely available. You know medium and sub stack and you know email newsletters taking off as a thing, and then AI bringing into a situation where now the machines can create and distribute the content. And it's funny just that level. I was on a Zoom with Joe Stolte the other day and you know, with even your newsletter, the AI-assisted newsletter you think about those as things, that learning smart, personalized text, media consumption as a really enhanced experience. So I found that really that was the first conversation that I'd had with that kind of context. I'm visualizing, I want to like visualize a timeline of these benchmarks. You know along the way, and realize how long the spaces were between when things actually catalyzed, you know yeah, long in comparison to what? Dan: long in comparison to the last. Dean: You know where we are now that long in comparison to what? Long in comparison to the last. You know where we are now. That long in comparison to that. There was no ability to print words on paper until 1442 or 1555 or whatever. I think it's 1550. Dan: Yeah, so 1455. Dean: Somewhere around there. Somewhere around there, yeah that literally did not change for 400 years till now. You know, in the last 25 years we've gotten to where we can distribute it globally instantly to everybody, and that we've also got machines now that can actually create the content itself and distribute on on your behalf and so I think that's our ability to create that stuff. Like I, I wonder how long and how many hours of research power it would have taken to get this level of what I gained from my conversation with Charlotte. Dan: Well, you would have gotten a doctorate, you would have gotten a PhD. Dean: Yeah, and it would have taken years to study all of that and to go back and find it all you know, but it was very, I found it very all to serve this idea that I think, in all of those digitized four corners, that we have reached a, a pinnacle, where we're faced now going forward with a plateau that really it's going to be about the creative use of. No, I think that's things. Dan: Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, just a little addition to charl's work the conversation that you had with Charlotte. One of the reasons why the Greeks have such influence Greek thinking on the world, you know they essentially created history. That was. Dean: You know that was. Dan: Thucydides. And you know, herodotus and Thucydides were two Greek historians and basically their histories basically really formed the whole ancient world. And then you had poetry. Homer was the great poet and. Plato and Aristotle and many others, many other Greek philosophers, but Greece was the first country that developed a really first-class. The Greeks developed a first-class alphabet. I think it may have pretty close to we have 26 letters. I'm not quite sure what they had, but it wasn't. I don't know if it was fewer or more, but maybe only by two or three letters they had, but it was really the alphabet. That is the breakthrough. For example, we have two artists that work for us. They're from Hong Kong and growing up they learned all the. They learned all the ideograms that are in Chinese you know, and you know, and it's years and years and years of study where the alphabet you know. A reasonably intelligent first grader, or maybe even earlier these days, but a six-year-old, can basically grasp the alphabet and be using that skillfully, you know, within their first year of grade school, within first grade and that's what the alphabet did and that's why, you know, the literacy really came in. But even then, when you know in Gutenberg today there weren't that many literate people, you know who could actually? Read, you know. So it wasn't so much the technology Well, the technology was crucial, but it wasn't so much why things. It's just that it took 400 years for the entire population to become literate. You know, and you know to have formal education to empower literacy. That took a long time because people were working manually and they didn't have need for reading. They had to become good at things. Fixated now for about the last eight months on british navy historical novel assault taking place around 1800 to 1800. You know, and you know the majority of sailors on the ships didn't read they, they didn't have right reading, you know but, they were very skillful. They knew the wind, they knew the waves, they yeah, you know, they had phenomenal teamwork and they were very skillful. They knew the wind, they knew the waves, they had phenomenal teamwork and they were very handy. They had a lot of hand skills and everything else, but it's been only recently that your progress in the world really depended upon reading. Dean: Literacy yeah. Dan: Yeah, you had to go forward. I remember that's one story. Just the Greeks. The Greeks that became very powerful, their philosophy still. I mean, every day in universities, or probably universities, there's discussions about what Plato said about this, what Aristotle said about this. So that's still. You know, the power of that over generations is really quite extraordinary. The other thing, if I want to add to that, my sister, who's 89, the man she married, who died about 10 years ago. When I met him, this was in the 1950s, he was a typesetter for a major newspaper in the. Cleveland area and I would go down there and you'd see he put together a whole page of it and you know, and he had to do it backwards, he had to put all the letters. He had this vast, you know, he had these, they were like wooden shelves that had, you know, were divided into, you know, into 28 different, 26 different spots, and he would just pick up the letters and put them. But he made the complete changeover, starting around the 1970s, 1975. He made a complete changeover to becoming digital. It started becoming digital even in the 1970s. And then he just kept progressing, layer after layer, until he was the production manager for the entire network of about five you know five municipal newspapers and everything like that yeah so his history sort of matches what you and charlotte talked about. Dean: Yeah, and I found that really an interesting like multi-track way to look at it, as the technology and then the capability that created for the creation of things, the distribution of those things and the capitalizing on those things, because that's kind of like the cascading layers that happen. And I think if we look at where we are with AI right now, we're at that level where it was available below the surface until two years ago and then now it's sort of widely available as a capability. But all the things that are going to really come, I wouldn't say it's widely available used right now. I heard somebody talk about that. If we think about, like, if ultimately AI is just going to be internet, you know it's like if we think about what internet was in 1996, that's becoming. It's almost like chat. Gpt is the AOL of of what made the internet popular, right as everybody got on. AOL and had access to email and kind of gated browsing. Dan: Yeah, the interesting thing that you know if I just take your example from this morning, it's because you're a good prompter that whole thing happened. The whole essential skill. You know, if you take all the technology, that's a technology, charlotte's technology, and that's there, it's waiting there. It's waiting there to be used. But unless you have a good prompter it won't produce what you produced this morning. Dean: I agree with you 100, and that's why it's all in the prompt prompting. Dan: That means knowing what you want. It's actually a visualization skill because, you visualize something you know like in, not exactly because you, how you did it is unique, but my sense is that you had a question in mind, or you were just curious about something, and then you were able to put it into words. This was strictly spoken, was it? Yeah, uh-huh, yeah, so you didn't type anything in for this. Dean: No, I did not. Dan: Because it's strictly on an audible level, right, exactly, yeah. Anything in for this? No, I did not. Strictly on an audible level, right, exactly yeah. But here's the thing that no one else in the world did what you did this morning, and the reason is because you were just interested in it you were just interested in something and you know, and it was in conversation form, so now tell me about this. Now tell me about this yeah well, what she? Dean: was saying was guiding my things. You know what? It's very similar, dan. It's like if we were to sit down at a piano and look at the piano. There's 88 keys of possibility there. Yeah, unless you know how to prompt the keys to make the noises. Dan: Do you know what I mean? It's just noise. Dean: I think that's really what it is, and I think that chat interactions or AI interactions are going to be the piano lessons of today. Right Like for kids to talk about essential skills. Dan: And the outcome is going to be the music and the outcome is going to be the music. Dean: That's right. That's right, yeah. Dan: I've done about. You know, with perplexity, probably last week I've done about 25, you know where I one. That was really interesting because it was related to the book that I'm writing Casting, not Hiring with Jeff and I was saying, you know, the big thing is that we're only talking, the book is only for a particular type of person, you know. Because, you know he has a wide range of people that he's giving them our small copy of Casting, not Hiring you know, our 60-page book and then he's interviewing them if they're willing to read it, which takes about an hour. If they're willing to read it, then he wants to know what they think about it. You know, but there's, like corporate people that he's talking to, there's academic people that he's talking to, and I said, you know, jeff, academic people that he's talking to. And I said, you know, jeff, there's only one reader for this. That's a successful, talented, ambitious entrepreneur who wants to grow. Who wants to grow, wants to make the growth experience really meaningful and purposeful for himself or herself, but also for the team members, for the members of the company that the entrepreneur owns. And so he said, yeah, well you know how big is that market and I said, well, let's. So I did a search and I had my question. I just looked at it just before I came on the call. I said I want you to, of all the companies incorporated in the United States, the total number of incorporated companies in the United States in 2023, because usually their number. You know that you go back about a year before the present year that you're just sending, because there's an enormous amount of data for that. Dean: And. Dan: I said what percentage of all the incorporated companies in the United States are privately owned? And it turns out it's 99% and 33 million, 33 million incorporated companies. And and then I put in another prompt okay, size of companies 1 to 10, 10 to 50, 50 to 150, 150 to 500, above 500, and 74 percent of them are 74 percent or one to ten. And then, and I said we're really talking basically about companies up to about 150 that's the reader. They have companies that are 150 and everything like that, and it's really interesting that this is the only person they said but there's this huge market of other. You know, jeff didn't say this, but other people said there's. So this should be a book for everybody. And I said, if it's a book for everybody, it's not interesting to anybody that's true, exactly. Dean: Well, that's so. Those numbers have kind of um grown, because I've always heard about you know know, 28 million, but I guess the most recent that would make sense 33 million. Dan: And it would be bigger today because we're you know, we're a full year and into the first month, so it would be bigger. The incorporations go on. And the other thing about what you're saying is you can be so specific, Like you can really put down all the interesting things about the reader you know, about the reader that you're looking for and you know so, while the capability that you're talking and I have some arguments with democratize you know the concept of democratize because there's a certain sense people are going to have equal capabilities. I think just the opposite is going to happen. The range from people with a little ability or no ability to extraordinary capability actually gets bigger and wider to extraordinary capability actually gets bigger and wider. And the reason is exactly what I just said to you that you're the only one in the world who's ever gotten that information laid out and has it back in a very short period of time. And it's strictly because what Dean Jackson was looking for. Dean: Yeah, that's exactly right. I was very curious about it. And I think that it's something. I think it's a unique perspective, especially when we overlay the other things. We only got we were talking about then sound. We only got we were talking about then sound. And it wasn't until the 1800s late 1800s that Edison created the phonograph, that we were able to capture sound and the evolution of that. Then it took another by 25 years later. It was the beginning of radio. That now we have the ability to capture sound, the ability to distribute sound through the radio, that it ushered in this golden era of radio as the distribution medium. And she talked about NBC and CBS and ABC, you know, as the monopolistic NBC was really the big giant. Dan: Yeah, they were the giant. Dean: I mean, they were the powerhouse of radio 1995 was the, or 1925, I think was when they were founded, and then the others were by 1927. Yeah, but that took off the radios in every household and all of that, you know, laid the. That created the mass audience yeah really right, yeah, there was. Dan: Uh. Really, there's a writer named tim wu wu and he's just. He's written about five books on just the extraordinary impact of the communication technologies, starting when you said sort of you know. First the telegraph and the telegraph with sound. That's really the telephones you have. Bell is in there. So, Morris and Bell and Edison. You have the combination. And then Edison also created the movie. I mean, he was the real. I mean, he's the person who created it that became famous for it yes. There were lots of people. He's famous for the light bulb, he's the person who became famous for the light bulb, but there were at least five or six working light bulbs before Edison. It's just that Edison was the first what I would call the modern entrepreneur, technology entrepreneur, and he really grasped where all this stuff was going, more than any other single innovator entrepreneur, and he understood the stock market and he understood how to raise funds and he understood how to market. Dean: You know, yeah, yeah. Dan: So you know I'm getting a lot of patents, so we got two more on Friday, so we're up to 54 patents now. And I was talking in the breakout group on Friday, I said we're really piling up the patents, and so somebody said well, how many are you going for? And I said I can tell you exactly I'm going for 1,068. Tell you exactly, I'm going for 1,068. Uh-huh, 1,068. I mean, where's that number come from? I said Edison had 1,067. Dean: Oh, there you go. Dan: That's the best, and I grew up two miles from his birthplace. So the farm that I grew up two miles away is where Edison was born, milan, ohio, and very famous, I mean he's just a roaring, big, major human being, historic human being in that area, and he's one of my five historic role models. I've got Euclid, I've got Shakespeare, I've got Bach, I've got Hamilton, james Madison and Edison. And I said Edison put all the pieces together that created the modern technological world. Dean: It's true, isn't it? Yeah? Dan: He's the first person to create a formal R&D lab. He had in Menlo, new Jersey. He created his famous lab and he had technicians and scientists and engineers there. And then you know, and then he understood the stock market and he understood you know big systems, how you put big electric systems together and everything like that, you know. The thing is that that's a history of entrepreneurism, the thing that you put together with Charlotte this morning. Dean: Yeah, that was my intention, Because it's always some individual who just decides to do something more with it. Dan: They kind of apply your VCR formula to something that already exists and they say what's the vision? Well, you have to have the vision, but you have to see where it hasn't gone to yet. I mean, that's basically what you have to. Vision is seeing where things have not yet gone to, but could, if you organize them differently? You take the capabilities and combined it with reach, then you. That's what the future really is. Vcr. Dean: Yeah, you know I've had a nice VCR advancement, chad, and I have been talking a lot about it. Chad Jenkins, chad Jenkins, I've been talking about the VCR formula and so I had some distinctions around vision, like what is vision? And I realized there's a progression that it takes like from an idea or a prediction. Is the first level that you got a vision that, hey, I think this could work, and then the next level of it is that you've got proof that idea does work and that opens the gate for you to create a protocol for predictable repeating of that result and that opens the gateway to a patent, to protection of that. Dan: So you predict, you prove you protocol or package and protect the 4P progression. I thought, know you know what. You know what it is. It's the ability to see, yeah, let's say, a reasonable time frame, not 100 years from now, but let's say 10 years from now. Yeah, that, if this were available, a lot of people would like to have this. Dean: Yes. Dan: That's basically what a vision is. That's what a vision is. If it was available to them and it was easy to use. They don't have to change their habits too much to use it 10 years from now and I think a lot of people not only would they love using it, they'd be willing to pay for it. Dean: Of course, yes, I agree, yeah, and so I thought that was very, that was a nice, I mean every drug dealer in the world knows how to do that. Dan: Yeah, I mean, you think about everything started out with an idea. I bet, if we did this, that would be oh, yeah, yeah, I bet, prove it. I bet, yeah, you know, steve jobs with itunes. He said yeah I got interested in music. But when I go into a store, you know, uh, and, and I hear a song I really like, or I hear a musician I really like, and I hear them singing a song, or her I, you know, I'd like to be able to just get that song, but they make it really difficult. You got to buy 11 other songs, or 10 other songs to get the one song you know and you know, and, and I'd like to have it. You know, I'd like to have it on a small machine. I don't want to. You know, I don't want to have a big record that comes home and then I have to have a lot of equipment and everything to put on it. And you know, and you know, I'd like to, I'd like to think of. You know, I'd like to have a technology. Dean: Yeah, I'd like to think of. Dan: You know, I'd like to have a technology Getting a call from yeah, I'd like to have a technology that, the moment I hear the sun, five minutes later I can have it. You know, Mm-hmm. Yes, I mean it's so I think it's imagine, there's a capability multiplied by imagination. You know that's kind of like what vision is. Dean: But you know, the interesting thing is that was true 25 years ago when Steve invented the iPod and the iTunes environment, but then over the next 25 years's taken another evolution. Right, it was still the ownership. Instead of owning the physical thing, you own the digital version of it and you download it onto your device. But now, when it got to the cloud and all the songs are available and you don't need to download them, it's like spotify said listen, we own all the songs, we got access to all of them. Why don't you just pay us nine dollars a month and you can have all the songs and just stream them? Yeah, and, and that's where we're at now, it's like. But I think that the next level, the thing we're at now with ai, is that ai is actually, specifically, that it's reached the generative ai point where it it can actually create songs. That's what's happening now. Dan: Yeah, it's clearly a productive capability that you're exploring here we're having a conversation about. When did you have this conversation with Charlotte? Just this morning, when I woke up this morning, Okay, this entire conversation that we're having would not have happened unless um no, you did what you did for an hour this morning right, that's exactly right, yeah now let me ask you a question here, and it goes to another technological realm and it's big data. It's big data, and so I keep reading about big data. You know big data, and I said and it's accumulating all the data. Okay, and so you have all the data. Okay, and so you have all the data. I remember having a conversation this was probably 10 years ago and the Chinese were developing what was called an intelligence capability, where they could gather information about what all the people in China were doing at any given moment. Okay, and then they could make predictions based on that. Nice, if wait a minute, so you got one point, you got 1.3 billion. Dean: You know however many Chinese there are they're being listened to, you know, and however many Chinese there are. Dan: They're being listened to, you know, and they're. Whatever they're doing, that's being read. And I said how many Chinese do you have to pay attention to what all the other Chinese are doing? I said they must have about 6 million people who, day in, day out, are just listening and they're accumulating massive amounts of data. Okay, and then I say, then what happens? Dean: then what? Dan: yeah, then what? Okay? Okay, uh, and I said so, what do you do with all this data? You know, I said it's overwhelming the amount of data you have. So what's happening with it and what it tells me is that there's no way for you to really comprehend what all that data means. Dean: Yeah, I agree. I mean there's no, but you can argue that's kind of what Facebook does with the algorithm right In a way, of being able to predict what you're likely to click on next. Dan: That's how they're at it, Well that I understand, but that's on the level, that's a commercial level, because really they're selling ads. I mean what Google and Facebook actually are high-level advertising platforms. Dean: Yes, that's exactly what they are. I mean, that's what they are. Dan: Yeah, I mean, and once you've said that, there isn't much else to say. Dean: Once you've said that, it's over. Dan: Well it is what it is and it's a bias, obviously, because it's just, you know it's, if they're spending money, not ads for Google and spending ads for Facebook, they aren't spending money for ads in the New York Times, or yeah. So all the newspaper advertising has gone away and all the magazine advertising has gone away, and probably all the advertising on television, because the number of people watching television is actually going down, you know. Well the actual, I mean if you're following social media or you're you know, you're on the, you're on your computer and you're looking at things. Well, your attention can only be on one thing at a time and if I'm spending you know I used to spend I would say when I stopped in 2018, I stopped watching television together, but I calculated that it was probably I was probably watching anywhere between 15 and 20 hours a week times 52. Okay, so that's. You know that's 800 to a thousand hours and I'm not doing that anymore, so for I got a thousand hours back. He's. I would say 800. I just evened it off at 800. I'd say I've just got 800 hours back. It's just gone into being more productive. I'm incredibly more productive in creating stuff. I have you as a witness. You know that it's going up in numbers. The amount of stuff that I'm creating. it's going up in numbers the amount of stuff that I'm creating. So you know, here's the thing. I don't think I'm unusual in this. I don't think I'm unique on the planet in doing what this is. I just think people are moving their attention away from something where everybody was paying attention to it and now fewer and fewer people are paying attention to it. It's like Joe Rogan, you know, I mean. Dean: Joe Rogan. Dan: The people are watching Joe Rogan. Who did they stop watching or listening and watching to? So that's the big thing. Where are people? Dean: going with their attention. Yeah, and you know I just heard a podcast talking about that. Streaming, you know, like from television. It's gone away from kind of linear television where you know they show one thing on one channel at one time and you have to be there at 8 pm to watch that one show. Watch that one show and you watch it along with ads, right? If you want to watch this happening now, you watch it and you consume the ads. Well, when streaming became available, you know, if you look at that convenience, that it was so much more dignified that we can watch whatever we want to watch when we want to watch it, and there's a price for that. Everybody has migrated towards the, towards that, and now the interesting thing is that the streamers are Wall Street redefined. How they value the, you know, monetize or attribute value to what they have. Because for a long time, netflix was rewarded for the ever-growing number of subscribers. Right, like getting more and more subscribers. It didn't matter to Wall Street that they were profitable or unprofitable. The only thing that they staked the value in was the growing number of subscribers, the growing number of subscribers, so for. So netflix would spend billions and billions of dollars on attracting creative right that would. That would get people to watch the. You know, come to netflix to see, because they only had original programs you could only get on Netflix and they overpaid for all of that content. So now. Wall Street a few years ago decided that hey, wait a minute. These guys should be like any other business. Dan: They should be profitable and so it always comes down to that, doesn't it it really? Dean: does so they said you know, now Netflix has to cut corners, pinch pennies. They have to make things. They can't afford to spend as much to make the content. If you look at the line items of where they were spending the most amount of money, it's acquiring yeah, content to do uh so that's where the peak era of who's the guy? Dan: who's the guy who runs Netflix? Dean: Sarandon Tom. Dan: Sarandon. Dean: I think, but in any event they. Dan: No, I was just wondering if he's one of the people who gave $50 million to Kamala Harris. Dean: Oh, yeah, probably. Dan: Yeah, I said he obviously doesn't know anything about returning or getting a profit All right, exactly. Dean: So the other, the thing that we're finding. Dan: What's Reid Hoffman? He's LinkedIn. Dean: Yeah, I think so, yeah, yeah, linkedin. Yeah yeah, yeah. Dan: But those people are all not giving a million dollars to Trump for his inauguration. Dean: The thing that streamers have landed on now is that they have free models you can watch, but now they have ad supported things where you can watch anything you want, but they insert ads that are unskippable ads and they're finding that is more profitable than the subscriber the subscription revenue. That on a per user kind of thing. They make more money on people watching and viewing the unskippable ads. So it's kind of funny that everything has come full circle back to basic cable, where you are. They're all bundling now so you can get because people were resisting that you had to buy netflix and you had to buy hbo and paramount and hulu and all these things, nbc and cbs and all of it so now they're bundling them together for one subscription and having ad supported views. So the big winner out of all of it is that we've won the right to, and have demanded the right to, watch whatever we want to watch, whenever we want to watch it. We're not going to sit on, you know. We're not going to wait until 9pm to watch this and wait a week to get the next episode. We want all the episodes available right now and we'll choose when and what we watch and for how long we watch it. If I want to watch the whole series in one weekend, that's up to me yeah, you know it's an interesting thing. Dan: Uh, here and this relates to the whole story you told the whole historical story, going back to the sumerians. But one of the things I really notice is that the moment a new capability appears and you can utilize it, it's no longer wondrous. You've just included that in your existing capability, I can now do this. You've just included that in your existing capability. I can now do this. It's really interesting the moment you get a capability that just goes into the stack of capabilities that you already have. So it's not really a breakthrough because it doesn't feel any more unusual than all the capabilities you had. So today this is kind of a you know you were. You started the podcast here saying I just did something that I've never done before with Charlotte you know, and then people said who's this Charlotte that Dean talks about? Well, dean actually created this capability called Charlotte. He actually did that, but now it's just normal. Now, what else can Charlotte do? Dean: I'm going to do this. Dan: But a week from now you may have done this four or five times or four or five more things. These sort of deep searches, that you did, and now it just becomes part of Dean Jackson's talent and capability stack. Dean: Yeah, yeah, in the of the VCR formula, the sea of capability, that all this capability starts out with one person who has taken it's almost like Always starts with one person. Yeah, and it's a curiosity. Dan: It's a curiosity thing You're alert to. You know, in our four by four casting tool, the first quadrant is called performance, how you show up. And I've got four qualities. One you're alert. Second thing is that you're curious. Number three is that you're responsive. And number four you're resourceful. And I would say you just knocked off all four this morning with this search, this conversation with Charlotte. You just knocked off all four. That's the reason why you're doing it. So the key to the future in profiting, but utilizing and benefiting from this technology is you have? To be alert, you have to be curious, you have to be, you have to be responsive and you have to be resourceful. Dean: Yeah, that's great. Dan: Yeah, yeah, we're living, and then you get to do and then you get to do things faster, easier, cheaper and bigger yes, this is great, dan. Dean: We're really living in the best of times we're just talking, dean yeah, we're already in it, but it's endless. Dan: We're into an area of just extraordinary, idiosyncratic creativity. Dean: This is it that now we have. Everyone has access to every capability that you could. Dan: No, they only have access to the capability that they're looking for. Oh, boy yes. No, they don't have access to every capability. They just have access to the next capability they're looking for. Dean: Right, this is mind-blowing. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is great, but it is similar. This was better than the IV. Dean: Your exuberance is showing. Dan: Or maybe before you have an hour conversation with Dean, you get an IV. Dean: Yeah, exactly, you have an hour conversation with dean, you get an iv. Yeah, exactly, did you imagine it's a triple play of an iv yeah, with a conversation with charlotte, followed by a conversation with dan sullivan. Dan: I will try the iv next week yeah, and then eat a great piece of steak. And then eat a great piece of steak that's right Followed by a Rib eye is great. I think rib eye is my favorite. Dean: Yeah, me too by far yeah. Dan: Well. I love it yeah, this is great conversation. Dean: I agree, Dan this is Things are heating up. I'm going to upgrade Charlotte and give her a raise 10X, a 10 times raise. Dan: Tell her about that. You know talk to her and say you know, not only do I think you're more valuable, but Catchy TP thinks you're more valuable, Charlotte, and we're raising your monthly to 200. Dean: That's right. A 10 times raise. Dan: Yeah, who gets that? Mm-hmm? Okay, and you think about it. Dean: It's just so valuable. All right, dan, thanks, bye, bye.

In our latest episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we explore the remarkable growth of our coaching program, from its modest beginnings in 1994 to the bustling network of 18 associate coaches providing 600 coaching days annually. This evolution underscores the importance of adaptability and foresight as we hint at exciting expansion plans for 2026. Beyond the professional landscape, we delve into the nostalgic appeal of different climates and regional traditions. We compare the frigid allure of snowy winters with the sun-drenched charm of Florida and San Diego, offering a cozy reflection on why people choose to embrace extreme weather. Our conversation then turns towards the intricate dance of leadership and organizational structures. We explore the shift from rigid hierarchies to fluid, networked systems, imagining the profound changes in productivity that have paved the way for today's entrepreneurial landscape. From the global dominance of the US dollar to the speculative world of cryptocurrency, our discussion unveils the strategic significance of these economic elements, adding a light-hearted twist to our take on Canadian healthcare services. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discussed the remarkable evolution of our coaching program, starting from 1994 with 144 workshops conducted solely by me, to a network of 18 associate coaches delivering 600 coaching days annually. Dean shares his experiences from the icy north and reflected on the gradual adaptation to warmer climates, providing insights into the unique economic opportunities that arise from natural challenges. We explored the nostalgic memories of childhood winters, contrasting them with the warm climates of Florida and San Diego, and discussed the cultural differences in regional terminology. The episode delved into the shift from rigid hierarchical structures to more fluid, networked systems, highlighting the transformative impact of technology on productivity and organizational dynamics. We imagined the productivity revolution that could have occurred if a writer in the 1970s had access to a modern MacBook, pondering the implications for decision-making and strategic planning. The conversation touched on the global dominance of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, and the minimal impact of foreign trade on the US economy compared to other export-driven nations. We questioned the viability of Bitcoin as a true currency due to its lack of fungibility compared to the US dollar, and discussed gold's role as a hedge against currency inflation. The episode highlighted the Canadian dollar's strategic role as a financial hedge, particularly in relation to tax burdens and global business ventures. We examined the concept of "sunk cost payoffs," encouraging reflections on optimizing investments in fixed costs to achieve greater returns through training and education. The episode concluded with a light-hearted discussion on Canadian healthcare services, and the humorous notion of using Chicago as a secondary tier for healthcare needs. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan, mr Jackson, fresh from the frigid north, oh my goodness. Dan: Dan I you know. Yeah, I'm just happy to be back. It's sunny and warming. I'm going to say it's warm yet because it was only got up to like 6.3 or something yesterday, but it's warming up and it's warmer than it was. I did escape, without defaulting, my snow free millennium. I didn't get a cold this time, that's true. And I didn't get any snow on me, so that's good yeah. Dean: Well, we're actually in Chicago today and it's 49. Oh my goodness, wow, we're actually in Chicago today and that's 49. Oh my goodness, wow, it's deciding to see if it can upset Orlando, the area, a last valiant attempt before the total freeze sets in. Dan: Yeah, exactly. Dean: Exactly. Dan: Well, Dan, what a great couple of workshops we had this week. They were really I know about one of them, I know about one. Dean: That's actually a good thing to say. You know when you're developing a company. Dan: Absolutely yeah. Dean: I was telling people that in 1994, fifth year of the program, I did 144 workshop days that year and the reason being I was the only coach. So then in 95, we started adding associate coaches and we're up to 18 now. We just had our 18th one come on board. Come on board and this year the total coaching team will do 600 coaching days compared to 144 back in 1994 and I will do 12 of them. Dan: I was just gonna say yeah, 12. You got three groups times four, right yeah? Yeah yeah, that's great the connector. Dean: the connector calls which I, which I, which I absolutely love. I just think those two hour coaching calls are superb. Dan: I do too. Two hour zoom. Two hour zoom calls are the perfect. That's the perfect length. Anything more is too much. Dean: Yeah, so if you add those up, that would be using eight hours as a workshop day that would be 16 more days of coaching in a year, but that's significantly fewer than my 144. The problem with the 144, you didn't have much energy for creating new stuff, right? Dan: Yeah, and you were. Yeah, I guess that's true, right, and some of it you were having to. The good news about the position you're in right now is you really only do the same workshop three times, right, Like you do a quarterly workshop, but even that by the third time you've learned. Dean: Well they actually change. I mean they're probably 90%. In other words, number two is 90%, brings forward 90% of number one, and number three brings forward Because you've economized. You know I can do this quicker, I can do this. You add some new things, you get some new ideas. Dan: And you see what land is right, how things land. Dean: Yeah, yeah. By the time you get to number three, you've probably in my case, I've certainly created some new material. That just came out of the conversations. It's a nice. It's a nice setup that I have right now yeah, I love that in these. Dan: You know you're already, you're booked out for 2025. Dean: As am I. Dan: This is a great. This is the first year going in that I'm kind of embracing the scaffolding. We'll call it. Dean: My sense by 26, we'll have a fourth. We'll have a fourth quarterly workshop. Just because of the growth of the membership, but what that is more, choice for the participants during any quarter. They'll have four opportunities Anyway. Dan: I'm really enjoying being back in Toronto. That's such a great and our group is growing. That's nice. It'll be the place to be before we know it. Dean: It will be. There will be a certain cachet that you have that you know. I don't know how we'll signify this, but do it at the mothership. I do the program at the mothership. Dan: I do the program. Oh, that's the best, yeah, yeah. That's so funny I've gotten. I've got the Hazleton is fast turning into the official hotel too, which is great. I've got Chad hooked over there and Chris does there, so that's good, we get the whole so is she thinking about coming into PreZone? We're working on her for sure. I think that would be fantastic, yeah, and same Norman's coming back in March, so that's great, oh, good. Dean: He'll be in Toronto. Is he doing anything new besides the multitude of things he was doing before? Dan: Well, you know, he sold his main business, so he is now, you know, a new chapter. Dean: But he still didn't sell the ambition. Dan: The ambition didn't go with the sale. Dean: Yeah, the waste management company. Dan: That's right, that's right Right. Yeah. Dean: And I remember him coming. I forget when it was but they had just had a hurricane that especially affected the Carolinas. Dan: South. Dean: Carolina and he came in for a party, you know, for before free zone, and I said how are you doing, norm? And he says well, you know, I don't. I can't talk about this everywhere, but I certainly do enjoy a hurricane every once in a while, because he's in the waste management. Dan: Right, exactly, and also in the plywood business, also in the plywood business. Dean: Yeah, both before and after both before the hurricane and after the hurricane people buy plywood. Yeah, both before and after the hurricane and after the hurricane, people buy plywood, so yeah. Dan: You know that's an interesting thing. Dean: I'm reminded of what I'm going to tell you because I grew up in Ohio. And Ohio is two very distinct states. There's the north and the south, and I grew up way up in the north, in the middle of. Dan: Ohio. Dean: But we always considered the people who were down by the Ohio River, part of the Confederacy. You know, I don't know if they put in great new flood controls, since I was growing up in the 50s down there, but every, you know, every couple of years there was just a massive the Ohio River, which is a mighty river. Couple of years there was just a massive. Dan: Ohio River, which is a mighty river. Dean: I mean it's one of the major rivers and it's one of the, you know, flows into the Mississippi. It goes all the way from. Pittsburgh. It goes all the way from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi. That's covering a whole number of states. But you know there are people who would live there. They get completely washed out, they'd rebuild and then three or four years later they'd get washed out and they'd rebuild and everything like that. And I often wondered what the thinking process is around that You're in a disaster zone and you keep, you keep rebuilding in the disaster zone. Is it short memory or I think that's probably true or you just like the opportunity to build again yeah, it's built back better. Dan: Yeah, the whole yeah yeah, I think it is true. Dean: Right like people but a lot of people say I wouldn't do that, you know I wouldn't live there where they do. But I'm not saying people are stupid about this, I'm just saying I'm just I'm not comprehending. But I live in a place that gets frigid every year and people say I couldn't understand how you would continue living in a place. So what do you think it is? How? Dan: you would continue living in a place. So what do you think it is? Well, I have been struggling with that question since I was a little child. I remember we grew up in Halton Hills and I remember my father's family is from Florida and my dad worked with Air Canada, so we used to fly, we used to come to Florida quite a bit over the winter. Dean: And. Dan: I remember, just I remember, like it was yesterday, the time when I realized I must've been, like, you know, four or five years old when I realized I had the experience of being out playing in the yard in the morning with my snowsuit on, and then we got on a plane and went to Florida and in the afternoon I was swimming in the pool and that just like baffled my brain, like why don't we just live here? Why doesn't, why doesn't everybody live here? Yeah, and my parents are explaining that it's summer all year, you know, and I'm like I couldn't understand and so in my mind that was kind of like before I knew about, you know, I learned about immigration and you know two different countries and the people can't just live, even though I'm a dual citizen, that's why most people don't. And in my mind I still remember that to me didn't explain why would people live in Buffalo? That was an option. If you're in the United States, you can live anywhere you want. Why would somebody choose Buffalo over Florida? I don't get it, I don't know. And this is all pre-cloudlandia you know where now it's like we're really seeing this. The relevance you know less and less. Dean: Yeah, what? What you're telling me is that, when you were the age that you described, florida had a great deal of meaning, and Canada didn't, toronto didn't, it didn't have a great meaning, and so for me, for example, I just loved winter. You know I grew up loving winter, you know, and I used to go. I mean, you know, I was fields and forests and the woods were just magical when it snowed, you know, and you'd go. It was an entirely different world. I mean, they were four times a year, they were different woods because each of the seasons, the trees and the, you know, the trees and the terrain are really radically different, and so so that's why I like it and you know, I've been to San Diego, you know, and San Diego is just about the most temperate, certainly in the United States it's the most temperate place. It's 72, and I said, God, I couldn't stand living here. Dan: Oh man. Dean: Yeah, yeah, I know Mike, mike loves it. Yeah, and I can understand and I can understand why I mean I like it when I'm there. Yeah, I said you mean. You mean next week, when the next season comes, it's going to be exactly the same. And then the second, third season is exactly. Dan: You know it's not all sunshine and rainbows. They have june gloom. That's the uh, that's the weather that comes in. Dean: Every morning in june you get this fog, marine layer fog that comes in and see, I would find that really interesting yeah like I, I would find the fascinating fog you know I would, that's it yeah, yeah so yeah, I don't know it's really interesting, but it depends. Uh, there was just such meaning for me in those early childhood winters, you know yeah, and sometimes you know, and then, yeah, you could imagine you were an arctic. You know you could. Also, you know you had the tobogganing and sledding and tobogganing and our neighbors had horses with a sleigh. You know and everything Do you know what's so funny. See the thing I can remember, you know. I certainly know that Santa's dressed for winter, santa's not dressed for Florida. Dan: Right. Dean: Well he's just not dressed for Florida, that's true. I mean he must get hardship pay going to Florida. Dan: Got to take off that top layer. He's got to get his shorts on underneath all of that. Yeah, so funny. You know I heard you brought up toboggan and you know Chad Jenkins. I heard for the first time he referred to his toque as a toboggan and I had never heard that before. Dean: Yeah, of course. It was a stocking cap. I mean everybody knows, everybody knows it's a stocking cap. You know, yeah, I never heard that word. I never heard that word. I thought it was sort of some sort of elitist word. You know, you get that after you get graduate degree a stocking cap becomes a two person. Dan: No, we never called it. That's the Canadian term for it everybody forget about that. Your childhood was in Ohio. But a stocking cap a beanie as they say so funny a beanie is something else. Dean: a beanie is just, it's like a yarmulke for the Jewish people, but it sort of resembles that. Yeah, anyway, these are deep subjects that we're talking about. Dan: What was your big? Chad and I were talking about the workshop days and you had mentioned it's one of the best workshops that you had in memory. I would love to hear what you're. Yeah, certainly. Dean: Yeah, yeah. What I remember about best workshops is that generally the afternoon previous best workshops were by lunchtime. You were setting up for the real punchline in the afternoon, but this one by lunchtime you were setting up for the. You know the real punchline in the afternoon but this one by lunchtime. It had been a great workshop up until that time, and almost like it had two complete shows. There were like two complete shows when we, when we did yeah, you know, I mean it's a qualitative thing you just, you know I don't have a scoring system for saying it, but you just have a feel, feel for it and everybody was, everybody was totally engaged, yeah, pretty quickly in the morning, yeah and yeah, but it was. I mean that thing about leadership. You know the I hadn't uh, pulled back that diagram, the pyramid and the network diagram. I hadn't pulled, I hadn't pulled back that diagram, the pyramid and the network diagram, I hadn't referred to that in about 25 years and I just brought it back. Dan: And. Dean: I didn't know I was going to use it until I actually walked in the room to start the workshop. I said I think there's something about this diagram that'll create a context and more and more as I've been thinking about it, you know what the greatest entrepreneurial resource is in the 2020s and that's probably what Trump brought in. Elon and Vivek, you know, for their doge, their doge department. Anyway is that the greatest source for entrepreneurial growth is the obsolescence of bureaucracy. Dan: Yes, yes, what really? Dean: struck me, big systems falling apart, big systems falling apart, that's the greatest resource for entrepreneurial growth. Dan: The thing that struck me too is that the triangle, triangle, the pyramid method that you showed there, that the difference in the network thing is the absence of a border around stuff, you know, like I, that's. What really stood out for me was when, and maybe we should explain, can you verbally explain? Dean: what your vision is. Yeah, this comes from a book. It was actually my first book. It was called the Great Crossover and I was starting to talk about this in presentations I was making. I think the first one was 19. 1987, I gave a talk on this and what I said is that growing up in the 40s and 50s it was entirely a big pyramid world big corporations, big government and big unions, and even you know well, I'll just stick to those three and it was because of industrialization that industrialization takes on a certain form. And then part of industrialization is the administration offices that go along with factories and what they are is that you know, when you have a big plant, a big factory, and it runs on the assembly line, in other words, things move from station to station and the people at each station just do a single task and then they pass it on to the next person. To have an administration that takes what the factory produces and gets it out into the world. they also have to create an assembly line of information, and the reason why it becomes very stiff and static over time is just the sheer cost of amortizing the factory. I mean like a steel mill. You know a steel mill. You build a steam mill. It takes you about 50 years in the early 20th century it took you about 50 years to pay back the cost of the steel mill, the amortized cost of it. Well, you had to get it right in the first place and you couldn't be fooling around with it. So everything was kind of fixed and that's why people could be hired, you know, at 18 years old, and they didn't really have to learn that much in the job they were doing. Once they got it down it was good for life. You know the steel workers. I mean they might have modernization somewhere along the line, but it was still fundamentally the same activity. So society kind of took over that and you had some big events. You had the huge growth of government administrations during the Great Depression when Roosevelt came in with the New Deal, and there was just these huge. They had never. And I was reading an article, theodore Rose, in the first decade of the 20th century the executive branch had about 60 employees. You know the presidency, you know Now it's I mean it's not the biggest but it's got thousands. The executive branch, you know just the White House plus the executive building next to it. It's got. You know it's got thousands of people in it. You know just the White House plus the executive building next to it. It's got you know, it's got thousands of people in it, you know, and there's layer after, layer after layer. And. But they were really huge in the and then the Second World War. Everything got massively big, but they were all pyramidical. Everything was pyramidical. You know. You had a person on top and then maybe 10 layers down. General Motors in the private sector, it was the biggest. That was the end of the 50s, 1959. They had 21 layers of management, from the CEO right down to the factory floor. There wasn't much leadership. There was a very few people at the top leadership. The rest of it was just managing what the leaders wanted. So that's the setup for the you know story. And that persisted and things were. You know, there was great productivity from around 1920 to 19. And then starting around 1960, there was enormous cost. There was enormous, there was even enormous growth, but there wasn't much increase in productivity because they had basically maxed out what you could do with that kind of structure. And then, because of and the change maker is the introduction of the microchip, Right. Especially when it gets along to being a personal computer. Dan: Yes, that's what I was. That really fits in with the you know, by the 1950 to 1975-ish that's what we're talking about. That was kind of the staple of the hierarchy system. And then you're right, that's where some of the you know the microchip at its greatest thing really was the beginning of being able to detach from physical location, like I remember, even you know where. This is part of the advantage that the microchip gave us. If you look at what were the things that were kind of the first mainstream you know beneficiaries of our ability to electronify things, that it was the answering machine that gave us freedom from having to be on the phone. It literally provided the first opportunity. Fact, check me on this. I mean just think I'm just making this up, but could that be the first time that we had the opportunity? Dean: You're asking a two fact finder to fact check you. Dan: Just gut, check me on this. Does that seem like a? Dean: Oh, gut check. Dan: Yeah, gut check, I forgot who I was talking to. Dean: That's an entirely different animal. Dan: Is that the first time? Like? The answering machine gave us the first opportunity to be in two places at once. We could be there to answer the phone and not miss anything, but we could also be away from the phone. The vcr gave us the chance to record something, to not miss it, so we could be somewhere else. The pager, the cell phone yeah, these things were all sort of our. Dean: This was yeah, well, you're moving in a particular, you're moving in a particular direction. If you say where, what do all these things have in common? Dan: you've just identified it. Dean: You know that, yeah yeah, I was thinking. I remember the this would be in the 70s the selectric, the ibm selectric typewriter you know, was a real precursor of word processing, you know, because you could. First of all they weren't keys, it was just a ball that revolved. It was just a little ball that revolved, and you know. And so there was no jamming. I mean, there was no jamming. And of course it was electric, it was an electric typewriter. But the big thing is that you could get it right, you know, you could program it and then you just put in a sheet of paper and you press the button and it typed out the entire page and everything like that I remember, I remember that was that was that filled me with wonder right, you know when I said wow, that's really amazing. You know, you know, as a writer, I sometimes I have this is the sort of fantasies that writers had. And I said, if I had been a copywriter back in the 1970s, but I had a Mac at home, I had my Macbook at home. Dan: Oh, my goodness you were one of those. Dean: Okay, and you know I do all the writing, you know I do all the writing on it, you know I do spell check and everything else, and then I would hire somebody to type it on a typewriter. Dan: I don't know how I'd do it. Dean: I would have it typed out, but with lots of mistakes, because a writer shouldn't have perfect typing and I'd look busy during the day, but the first thing in the morning I would just unload an enormous amount of stuff and I'd be so far ahead, but I'd never tell anybody about my Mac. Yeah, that's funny Now how my Mac would have been invented only for one person. I haven't really worked that out yet. Dan: Oh boy, but that's you know, it's so. What struck me when you were doing it? Dean: Yeah, somebody asked me a couple months ago, you know, it's so. What struck me when you were doing this is yeah, somebody asked me a couple of months ago you know the conversation if you had a superpower, what superpower would you want? And I said you know, I've given this a lot of thought, I've tried out a lot of possibilities, but the one that I think I could just stay with for the rest of my life is tomorrow. Tomorrow's Wall Street Journal yesterday. I could stay with that for the rest of my life is tomorrow's Wall Street Journal yesterday. Dan: I could stay with that for the rest of my life. Oh, okay, that's even great. Tomorrow's yesterday, so you would get a full 24 hours with it 48. Dean: 48 hours with it, you get a day in between for activity. Yeah, I'd probably move to Las las vegas oh, that's so funny. Dan: Yeah, that would be a really good. That would be a really good one, that'd be a fun movie. Actually the prognosticator, the thing that struck me, dan, about the difference between the pyramid with the layers of people, the circles, the one person at the top, the two leaders, the managers, the supervisors in the workforce, was the boundary of the pyramid itself. Right Like prior to when that was brought up, the only efficient way to communicate to everybody was to have them all within the borders of the wall, the same. Yeah everybody in the same place and what struck me when you drew the circles all just connected to everyone, without any borders. That's really. We're at the fullest level of that right now where there's never been a better time. Are the best at doing and be able to plug into you know a who, not how, network with vcr collaborations. Dean: I mean, that's really the a great, a great example of that is the um connector call we had on. We had a friday, I had a connector call and I tested out a new tool which is called sunk cost payoffs. You look at everything that you'll always be paying for, ok, so in our case, we have. You know, we'll have a. We have more than 100 team members. We'll always be paying for more than 100 team members. More than 100 team members, and then all of our production costs for material and then our complete operations, because we're always going to be an in-person, you know, workshop company you know we're not going to be anything else and taxes and regulations, you know, and everything you have, and I said we're always going to be, we're always going to be paying for these, you know. So the question of what are the top three and the you know, the, you know, I just picked. The top three are, you know, our team, including our coaches, absolutely. And then the creation of the thinking tools, and you know. So we have all that. And then I said, so that being the case, I'm just going to accept that I'm only going to pay. Now, what are the strategies for just multiplying the profitability that I get out of the things that I'm always paying for? And it was very interesting because a lot of people said you know, this has always bothered me. The sunk cost has always bothered me and I've often thought is there any way of getting rid? The sunk cost has always bothered me and I've often thought is there any way of getting rid of the sunk cost? But now I'm thinking maybe I'm not investing enough in my sunk costs. I'm not investing enough. Dan: And. Dean: I'm about 10% more spending away from getting a 10 times return. If I just put a little bit more emphasis here, getting a 10 times return, if I just put a little bit more emphasis here for example, training and education of staff, training and education of staff, it might cost you 10% more for your team members, you know, but you probably get a much bigger return than the 10% because it already exists. It already exists, you don't have to create it. Anyway, that's just a setup. So we were just one person said you know I should link up with Lior. Lior was on the call. He said I should link up with Lior and you know it was Alec Broadfoot actually. He said I should link up and we should do this and I said why don't you do a triple play? Who would be the third person? And everybody in the room said Chris Johnson. Oh yeah right Like that, and it was immediately. There was a three-way. I think I'm suggesting what happened. There is exactly what you just said before. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Is that there's no spatial restrictions on the new organization you just put together. It's just three capabilities and they're in Cloudlandia. Dan: The reason why they can do it is that they're in Cloudlandia. Yeah, there's no borders and there's just the connections between the modules. That's really the capabilities. Yeah, well, it's the vision capability. Dean: I'm going to go back to the pyramid network model that we started talking about, so you had to have you know enough leadership. You had to have this huge structure. That was all management. There wasn't leadership from the bottom, there was leadership from the top. But in the network, if you think of three circles and they're connected, so they're connected, they're in a triple play. So you have the three circles, the connection, you have three circles and then you have the lines in between. The connector lines are the management, but what happens in the middle is the leadership. Dan: That's a much. That's great, and the things can all go out like in three dimensions, and they can well. Dean: not only that, but any one individual can have a multitude of threes. Dan: Yes. Yeah that gets pretty exponential, pretty quick, yeah, yeah. Dean: Anyway. Dan: I was just on a Zoom with Eben Pagan and Salim Ismail and yeah, we were talking about this, you know, because Salim, of course, his Exponential Organizations book and framework is really that was certainly a playbook that fits with this, you know, or a expandable workforce, and it really is. The ideas are what's at the central, that's the vision. Right, that's the thing. The visionary is the, the can see the connections between, but there's never been, it's never been easier to, uh, to have all of these connections and that's what I really think like if you're able to look at what people's capabilities are. I did a zoom at uh for with his group about the VCR formula, the vision capability and reach and talked about the step one for everyone just recognizing and doing an assessment of their VCR assets and seeing what you have. Almost look at it as, like everybody, having playing cards, you know, like baseball cards with your stats on the back that show your the things you know, the things you can do and the people you can reach is a pretty, you know good framework for collaboration Chad, actually building a building a software kind of or an app tool around that, which is. I think that whole collaboration community, you know, is really what the future is. I just get excited about it because it allows you to be like in that world. You know, the you don't need to ever get slowed down by the inability to execute on capability. You know, because the you don't have to anymore, you can tap into any capability, which is kind of a great thing. It's like any capability with capacity is a great thing, and even if you have limited capacity, that's fixable as well. Dean: It's really interesting because I was talking about the sunk cost payoffs. Our 120 team members is just such an incredible you know, incredible capability. And all of them are in their unique ability. Everybody goes through the complete unique ability identification and starting in. We started already, but 2025 will be the first year where, four times a year, they all update their 4x4 for themselves. So you do it the first time with them. In other words, that you say this is where I want you to be alert, curious, responsive and resourceful, and this is I want you to produce results that are faster, easier, cheaper, bigger. If you choose, you can be a hero in these four areas and, by the way, these are four ways that you can drive me crazy. If you really want to drive me crazy, just do any of these and you probably won't have to update your 4x4 next quarter because you'll be somewhere else. Okay, always give them a choice, always give them a choice you can do this or you can do this and anyway, but that's going to produce massive results over the in 2025, I could just feel it. And I have a team, a loose team, just 16 members that I just hang out with in the company and we're doing it every quarter and you can just see the excitement as they go forward. I'm just writing the book right now with Jeff, so we're in our first edition, the first draft of casting, that hiring, but it's really interesting. And then the weird thing is that we're always going to be having increasingly the majority of our dollars being American dollars and more and more of our expenses in Canadian dollars. And that just multiplies, it's $1.41 this morning. That's great. Is that up or down? Oh, no, two months ago. Dan: It's $1.41 this morning. Dean: That's great. Is that up or down? Oh no, two months ago it was $1.34. Dan: Oh my goodness. Okay, so it's getting better. Dean: Well, it's like seven cents you know seven cents on every dollar and, being who Trump is and being who Trudeau is, I don't see the Canadian dollar getting any stronger. Dan: Yeah, that's At least until next. Dean: October, until next October. I mean, you know it's dangerous to be a charismatic person, okay, and because you know people's hearts just melted. He was the son of Pierre and he came along and he's this handsome. You know he's handsome, and you know, and he's you know, he's he knows, you know, he knows he's handsome and he's and everything like that. And they went along and he said such beautiful things but for nine years never did anything. You know just he spent a lot of money and he hired a lot of government employees, but as far as actually increasing productivity, increasing profitability, nothing over nine years and uh, everybody's just made up. Everybody's just made up their mind about him and there's not and you it's really almost enjoyable watching him struggle that there's nothing that he used to be able to get away with he can get away with now and you can just see the strain on him. He's still. You know he's still. He's very young looking, you know he's and, looking, and and and yeah, he hasn't. Dan: He didn't really age like obama and cl Clinton and the others before him in the presidential role. You see the aging of the weight of being the president. Dean: But he's kind of thrived. Dan: When I was there last, it was you know he started timeless. He's got a lot of timeless. Dean: He'll always be like 40. He'll always be like 35. You know he'll be, yeah, 40. He'll always be like 35. You know he'll be yeah, and you know and anyway interesting. And everybody's just sitting on their hands. You know the entire country is just sitting on their hands until you know the elections next October. It has to be next October. It could be sooner, but I don't think it will be, and you know, and he'll be out, I mean he'll be out. And he's lost five points of popularity since Trump got elected. Wow. Dan: The thing they were. Dean: You know, it's really obvious Trump is governing. Dan: Yeah. Dean: I mean, he's not been inauguratedated yet, but it's like he's the leader everybody's already. Dan: There were emergency meetings being held, or I saw that Trudeau was gathering all the premiers getting ready to address the possible tariffs. You know the response to the tariffs it's. You're right, everything's kind of everybody's. Dean: Yeah, he was. Did you see the? I don't know if you saw any of the videos, but he went to the opening, the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, and I did not. Looks beautiful. Dan: Have you seen any pictures oh? It's beautiful, no, I mean I never liked it. Dean: I you know when I would go. I went there a couple of times it I never liked it. I went there a couple of times it was dark and dingy and everything else. It's spectacular. Dan: It's spectacular. Dean: But, everybody, all the leaders in Europe who were there like everybody was there from Africa, from the Middle East and everything, all the leaders and they were all running up and they were holding his hand, in two hands, you know smiling at him and they said don't tariff us, don't tariff us, let's be friends. Let's be friends. Let's be friends. Talk about. Talk about your vcr formula being the uS economy is a hell of a capability. Dan: Holy cow. Yeah, I just saw Peter Zion was talking. I watched some of his videos and he was talking about why he doesn't worry about the United States geopolitically, you know, because we're miles away from anybody physically, we're in physical advantage away from anybody that would cause us or want us harmed. We are energy independent, we have the reserve currency. It's so much stuff. Dean: Half the arable land in the world. Dan: Yes, exactly Half of the ocean-going land in the world. Dean: Yes, exactly Half of the ocean-going ports in the world. I don't know if you knew that, but the US. If you count all the river systems, the lake systems, the ocean coasts and everything they have, half of the navigable, the ocean-going port. If you leave this place, you can go to the ocean, the ocean going point If you leave this place, you can go to the ocean. They have you know plus the military, I mean the Navy. The US Navy is seven times bigger and more powerful than all the other navies in the world combined. It's just enormous things, yeah, but it's the economy that really matters. It's the. You know it's that? Yeah. Did you see the one he did the? You know it's that. Yeah, did you see the one he did? Well, I don't think Peter Zion did one. He did one on why there won't be a replacement for the US currency. It's the reserve currency in the world, you know. Dan: And he said. Dean: first of all, it's so big the dollar is so big that America doesn't really even have to pay attention with what other people are doing with the dollars. As a matter of fact, there's more dollars in use around the world than there is far more dollars in use in around the world than there is in the US economy, which is the biggest economy. Dan: But the. Dean: US isn't a export economy. It's only about maybe up to 15% of the GDP has anything to do with foreign trade, import or export. It's about 15%. 85% is just Americans making stuff that other Americans are buying, and Canada is an export country. Dan: I mean it's totally an export country. Mexico is an export country China. Dean: Canada is an export country, I mean, it's totally an export country. Mexico is an export country. China is an extreme export country. Dan: And yeah. Dean: So anyway. Dan: What do you think? I haven't heard Peter Zayn talk about Bitcoin or how that you know crypto. Dean: I can't remember him ever saying anything. I've never seen it. Dan: Because that was big news that it just passed a hundred thousand well, you know, there's only so many of them well, what? When did you? Uh, do you remember when you first heard about bitcoin? Was it prior to peter diamandis introducing it to us? Dean: no to team no, I'd never heard about it before. Dan: Me neither. When he introduced it to us it was at about $500. Dean: But it's not a currency, it's not a currency. It's a speculative investment. It's a speculative investment because, it's not fungible. Do you know what the word fungible is? I didn't know what the word fungible. Yeah, you know word fund. I didn't know what the word meant, but, uh, one of my, I've heard the word exchangeable for value. Right, but it's not yeah, the easiest to exchange for value, easiest thing to exchange for value in the United States. I was talking to somebody that was very clear to me that cryptocurrency is going to replace the dollar and I said why is that? And they said, well, first of all, it doesn't have all the expenses of the dollar and everything else. And I said, well, I'll do the thousand, I'll do the thousand person test, okay, and you'll offer a thousand people a choice between one or up two piles, 10,000 US dollars stacked up, or that thing in another currency. What do you think if you gave the choice to 1,000 people, what would it be? Dan: Right, yeah, they would want the US currency, of course. Dean: Yeah, I don't know who it is that would choose because it's instantly fungible for anything in the world. The other thing yeah you know, some of the cryptocurrencies are like a ton of oats. Dan: A ton of oats. Yeah, that's what I've understood about. I've never understood that about gold as a. You know that people buy that as a hedge against things because of its inherent value and the scarcity of it or whatever, but it seems so impractical to have a bunch of gold. Dean: Yeah well, it's really interesting is that gold holds its value forever. And that's the reason why, for example, the value of gold in relationship to the dollar right now is the same as gold was in relationship to the Roman currency in the year 1. Dan: Okay. Dean: If the currency gets really inflated, the value of the gold goes up. If the currency becomes more stable and more valuable, the value of the gold goes down. It's a perfect hedge. But it never has a value in itself. It only has a value in relationship to the currency. Dan: Okay, that makes more sense, then that makes more sense. Dean: Yeah, yeah, okay, that makes more sense. Then that makes more sense, yeah, yeah. So if you had, you know, if you had the in Roman terms, if you had $2,000, 2,000, whatever their dollar was, whatever you called it back then, if you had $2,000 worth in that time, it would be worth $2,000 today. It's just a constant value thing. Dan: It never goes up. Dean: It only goes up or down in relationship to where the currency is. Dan: Yeah, that makes sense. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan: So I wonder, you know, I've heard somebody talk about it. Dean: I mean, the real hedge for us has been the Canadian dollar. Dan: Right, exactly. The real hedge for us has been the Canadian dollar. Dean: Right exactly. It's been an average of 26% for 35 years. Dan: That's great, which offsets the tax burden in some ways. Right, I mean, that's yeah, yeah, yeah. Dean: Yeah. But, it fixes us. I mean, that's why the US people say when is Coach going to go global? I said I have to tell you something it's the United States. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: That is global, that is. Dean: Right. Dan: Exactly yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Amazing. Well how long are you in chicago? Dean: uh, now, just this week well, our workshops this week are on my workshops on thursday, so we come in because we like spending time with our team, yeah and so, yeah, so we want to make sure because we have a pretty good size team. I think we have a pretty good-sized team. I think we have 22, 23 now in Chicago. So, we like hanging out with them. Also, Chicago's our standard medical center. It's Northwestern University Hospital. I have three or four meetings this week, and so this is where we come. You know, this is the second tier of the Canadian health care system. Dan: It's Air. Dean: Canada, chicago. I got you, I got you, I got you. That's funny. You live in the second tier of the Canadian health care system. Dan: I just skipped the whole first tier and go right to the second. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly Second tier of the Canadian healthcare system. I just skipped the whole first tier and go right to the second. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. Dean: Well, except for getting my certain couple prescriptions okayed at the pharmacy, that's my entire extent of my contact with the Canadian healthcare system this year. Oh, wow. Dan: Yeah, you're going into the Cloudland Canadian healthcare system this year. Dean: Oh wow, yeah, you're going into the. Cloudlandia healthcare system and Nashville and Buenos Aires. Yeah, Chicago, Nashville and Buenos. Aires, yeah, yeah. Dan: So what idea popped up during our one-hour talk for you. Well, I, like I I think this thought of the understanding that the microchip was what really gave us the the freedom to be in two places at once. It's a time travel and it gives us now in its fullest thing here. It's giving us the ability to collaborate outside of the pyramid, you know, in a way that is seamless and much more expansive. It's just completely understanding that. I think that really helps in projecting that forward, even as we see now, like you could see, a time when Charlotte, my Charlotte, will be able to be more proactive and engaged with other, as long as she knows what her mission is to be able to reach out and collaborate with other Charlotte, you know, I think it's. Dean: I think it's great. Dan: Yeah. Dean: I think it's great yeah. Dan: Yeah, yeah I think it's. Dean: I think it's great. Yeah, I think it's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's great. Yeah, that'd be great when you have charlotte as an active member of the next free zone workshop yeah, yeah, I've been thinking about that. Dan: I can't wait, that'll be fun. Yeah, although it was really it was, it was really great. Dan, I did the two workshop days. You know, I was joking. Dean: You did a 1989 version Exactly. Dan: Yes, no phone, no contact with the outside world, and it was actually very. It was very. Dean: It's very liberating, isn't it it? Dan: really was and the fact that I didn't really miss anything. You know, that's kind of the except I had my focus 100% in the building. You know that was it was valuable. Dean: I'm going to do that. Yeah, absolutely. Buildings are still useful. Yeah, absolutely. Dan: All right. Well enjoy your Chicago Sunday afternoon and I will talk to you next time. Dean: I'm fixed now on Sundays until January. Perfect. Dan: Me too Good. Dean: Back in Toronto Good. Dan: I'll be here, bye. Dean: Okay, bye.

Join us as we dive into Anne's enlightening experience at the Podcast Movement conference in Washington, DC. Discover the critical lessons Anne learned by stepping out of the voiceover industry bubble and mingling with top podcasters and corporate reps. The BOSSES tackle the complexities of measuring podcast success, the evolving role of advertisements, and the innovative strategies that can set your podcast apart. Passion and authenticity are at the heart of this episode as we explore how genuine storytelling can elevate both podcasting and voice acting careers. Learn why being relatable and embracing video content is more important than ever for voice actors. Consistency and authenticity are key, and we provide practical tips for maintaining a successful show. Finally, we wrap up with advice on continuous personal and professional development, reminding you to stay proactive and always seek growth opportunities. 00:02 - Bonnie Marie Williams (Ad) Hi, this is Bonnie Marie Williams, and I was listening to VOBoss for years before I began working on the show. It was actually the first voiceover podcast I ever heard and I absolutely fell in love with it the energy, the humor and how much information it provides to the voiceover community. But what I love most about VOBoss is how it takes on the current topics in the industry, how it discusses things we really should be talking about, all of the positivity and how much time and energy Ann devotes to the show to make it so valuable for all of us. I mean, we just want to rock our businesses like a boss, right? So, ann, thank you for bringing me into the boss family and for all you do for bosses everywhere.  00:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey guys, Anne Ganguzza here. Imagine a voiceover journey where every step is filled with discovery and growth. That's the path I want to work on with you, Through nurturing coaching and creative demo production. Let's unveil the true potential of your voice together. It's not just about the destination, it's about the gorgeous journey getting there. Are you ready to take the first step? Connect with me at anneganguzza.com.  01:17 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza.  01:35 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss Podcast and the Boss Superpower Series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I am delighted to be here and it seems like it's been forever with my bestie, Lau Lapides. Hey Lau, how are you?  01:52 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Hey, annie, it has been forever. It's been, I don't know, two months or whatever. It's been, but two months for us is like two years.  02:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So much happens. It's been too long. I mean, a lot of things have been happening. I just got back from podcast movement in DC and I had a really good experience there that I wanted to share some takeaways if you didn't mind.  02:15 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Actually, that's cool. I was going to ask you about that because so many of us and certainly us as talent as well are doing podcasts or want to do podcasts, and that kind of a movement is something we want to know about. So, please, sharing is caring.  02:31 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I had a lot of takeaways. Number one was, first and foremost, it was so nice for me to get outside of my bubble, outside of my studio bubble, my dealing with voice talent, voice actors and people in the industry. Not that I don't love dealing with people in the industry, but actually going to a conference and immersing myself into a marketplace where I want to sell to right, because there are podcasters here, which, yeah, of course, I have some podcast consulting services, of course, but I mean that wasn't my primary purpose. My primary purpose was to mingle with the corporates, because, guess what, everything I do voiceover right, corporate narration, commercial all of this really directs itself to that market. And it's so nice to be able to immerse yourself in that market and just, hey guys, this might be a novel idea, but just listen, right, listen to what your potential clients need, what are their problems, what sort of frustrations are they experiencing and how can you, with your voice or your voiceover product, help them?  03:45 - Lau Lapides (Guest) them. Annie, can you give us the infrastructure of it, because I don't know about that particular world in terms of what a trade show or a convention would look like for podcasters. What did it look like? How many folks were there? How long was it? Did you meet any like top level podcasters who we need to know about? Oh, yeah, I did.  04:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I met celebrities. There's like celebrity podcasters the Diary of a CEO those of you that listen to podcasts. I met the scrappy podcaster. I met the guy who actually, you know, is in all the videos for Riverside too. So the conference was four days long and it was in DC, and this one in particular, it was a little bit more corporate centric. I go to two of them every year.  04:23 The other one is PodFest, which is very much creatives like ourselves, independent creatives, a lot of hey, I've got this show and how can I make money with this show? That's really like the question on everybody's mind and I know that anybody who's ever asked me about podcasting is like, well, how can I make money? And I'm always like, well, don't bank on that right away or don't depend on that, because it is a passion project for the most part. But this show had a little more of a corporate audience, a lot of those people that are really looking to try to get an ROI, not just from the podcast but about advertising, advertisements on podcasts and those of you that listen to the VO Boss podcast know that very recently I've been actually adding some advertisements on for my own business. Now we've been doing the VO Boss podcast for about eight years and I thought well gosh, maybe it's time that I do one or two. One or two, I mean you know you guys listen to my podcast.  05:17 I can tell you, hey, look, I also offer these things, but it's all about how do you measure success of a podcast. How do you measure if you have ads running in your podcast? Are they effective? Are people listening to the ads or are they fast forwarding through the ads? And so the overall feel that I got from the conference is that there's so many different platforms right now there's. You know how do you listen to your podcast? Is it on Apple podcast, is it on Spotify, is it on YouTube?  05:43 And they all have their own measurements, their own stats, and so what advertisers want to know is how many people are listening to your podcast, and sometimes that's really difficult to tell unless you have the statistics. And then these statistics don't all come together so that you can say, overall I have 1 million downloads, or I know from my service provider, my RSS feed provider, how many downloads I have, and that can give you a fairly decent number. But again, they've changed the way that they've measured those stats as well. So a lot of times the corporations or the people that are advertising want to know how can I get ROI on this investment if I'm going to spend money for ads and the other thing which is really important is that there's a lot of people that do ads on podcasts and they sound very different from the podcast, right, because we've got you and me just bantering back and forth and then all of a sudden they've got hey, it's allergy season.  06:38 - Bonnie Marie Williams (Ad) What happens?  06:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) is, the podcast host doesn't necessarily do voiceover for a living, so what they might read might sound a little stilted, so that was really interesting to understand that. Okay, I understand how I might be able to serve them by doing ads or by helping them do their ads better, that kind of a thing, but it was really wonderful to just sit and listen and learn oh my gosh for four days all about the things that I've been doing for eight years on this podcast, and a lot of it was very validating.  07:08 - Lau Lapides (Guest) And now the one you went to was in DC. Right, that sounds like a really large a really big one. Did you find that there were people that you could meet? That really helped you understand the road to sponsorship? And the understanding of, like, how you sell ads and how you get into that place because I think that's where a lot of early entry podcasters fall down is like they can create a great program and they can get it launched and it sounds terrific, but what happens next?  07:35 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, the thing is is that you really need listenership, you really need people who follow. I mean, everybody refers to Joe Rogan, right? Of course, if you're an advertiser, you want to advertise on Joe Rogan's, but when you're first starting out, you need to first of all make sure that your content if you have a podcast and I think every voice talent should have a podcast, because, gosh, we're equipped for it, we have like really great sound already, and so it just makes sense that if you are a voice actor, it doesn't cost you anything necessarily except for your time right now. If you have a passion, talk about that. I mean, over and over and over again, what I heard as the theme is that podcasters are storytellers and guess what, so are voice actors. Yes, so if you have a topic that you're passionate about, I think you can start a podcast on.  08:22 - Lau Lapides (Guest) I mean it doesn't have to be about voiceover. Now, when you go into podcasting because I've been doing podcasting for a number of years as well the question is you go into it because you love it, you have a passion for it, you want to educate, you want to tell a story, mm-hmm. But how do people know when and if they're ready to monetize? That's a big question. I think in the podcast world, absolutely, you've been doing it for eight years.  08:46 That's a long time to do a podcast while you're running a business and while you're doing everything in your life yeah. So when and if you should monetize how that happens.  08:56 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, you know, that's a really great question and that is, like I swear it's the question on everybody's mind, even at this conference, like how do you monetize? I mean, what are the questions that get answered right in podcast? What are the big questions of the day? The big question is how do I know who's listening? Right? How do I track my downloads? How do I grow my podcast? That's the other question, asking the same questions, right, because it is such a popular medium.  09:23 When you get somebody like I'm going to say, joe Rogan or any of the more celebrity podcasts where you get a lot of people's ears right, listening, that is an opportunity to sell and so, while the logistics aren't necessarily quite there yet, you have to showcase that number one. You've got listenership. You've got listenership, you've got a following. Now VO Boss has a following, and it's a very faithful following, because, for me, when I was telling people about my podcast, I would say, okay, I have been a podcast for eight years and while my numbers may not be, I do have close to a million downloads. I mean very close to it.  09:57 Actually, I haven't looked in the last few months, so I probably have a million downloads, but it's over a course of time, right, and so what advertisers want to know is how many downloads per episode are you getting, and that kind of gives them an idea of how many ears they have listening to their potential ads. And then, of course, it has to be on the effectiveness of the ad, and I had an interview with Steve Pogac, who is with SiriusXM and Pandora, talking about podcast ads. It's kind of the new area where advertisers are really interested because they've got potential ears to do the selling. Again, it's just you've got to be able to prove to those advertisers that you have downloads, and so right now you have to use the methods that are with you. I mean, there are separate methods. Apple has their own stats, spotify has their own stats, youtube- has their own stats.  10:46 And what's interesting is that while we're doing this now on video right, whereas before we were strictly audio we're now also on video. So it's kind of like, well, let's use YouTube and put shorts out there, which is it was good, that was validation for me I heard that again and again was to use YouTube for shorts to kind of draw your audience into the audio podcast.  11:08 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Love that when you think about like discussion about synthetic voices.  11:11 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right, we're in the wild wild west. Well, guess what? We're in the wild wild west of advertising and podcasting. Right, and seeing if podcasting is a popular medium, we know about that. We know that as voice actors we are primed to be great podcasters, because we've got the technical worked out already for the most part. Right, we've got the technical. And if you've studied enough, you know how to storytell. You know how to storytell, you can certainly transition to any kind of ads really well. And of course, there's the other thing. Law and I know you'll like this is that there's a lot of ads that are done with improv. Celebrity endorsements do a ton of improv while they're doing the advertisements.  11:46 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Isn't that cool.  11:47 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) There's another skill that voice actors have, so it really translates well and, if nothing else, right. It costs you your time and, as you and I have discovered, right and I've discovered, after eight years of having this podcast and you since you've come on with me, people now say oh my gosh, I love listening to you guys.  12:06 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Right.  12:06 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Like they met you by listening to you on the podcast. That's absolutely a way to reach out to potential clients or potential people, no question.  12:14 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Fantastic and I can say personally that you know, in the last two years, or however long we've been working together on the podcast, god, how long has it been? Almost two years, I think.  12:23 It might be longer when I'm flying around and people come up to me and say I love your podcast. For a second I'm like, oh, the VO boss. They're like, yeah, you girls are great. It's a weird thing if you're not used to it, because there's that disconnect, there's that sense of disconnect from your audience that you know the audience is there, you see them, they're there, but if you're not meeting them, yeah and you don't know them, you may not hear back from them, the feedback you may not hear back from them.  12:53 It's really incredible.  12:54 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's the engagement. A lot of it was talking about engagement and again, so many parallels to voice so many parallels so many parallels. You have to engage your audience and I'm going to tell you. One of the things about podcasting is that we engage people through audio right and or video, if people are watching us, if they like to see the two of us talk to each other. It's all about engaging and being interesting, and it's either educational or it's entertaining, right? No?  13:20 - Intro (Announcement) question Whenever.  13:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I was watching a presentation on the stage with any well-known podcaster when they were speaking about that podcast, it was all about their storytelling and it was all about how it was their passion to talk about a particular subject, something that they loved, they were passionate about, and that's what caused and everybody's like.  13:40 Well, how do you go viral? Right, I mean, there is no magic solution to going viral. I think a lot of it is being engaging right with your audience, and then you got to get it in front of your audience's eyes, very similar to our own businesses, right? So how do you grow your podcast audience the same way you grow your business and voice acting? Right, you've got to get yourself in front of the eyes of your potential clients or your potential listeners. So it was really so wonderful to be validated in so many different areas, because a lot of times, like you said, we're podcasting out into the air and I don't always hear anything about it unless I speak to someone and they say, oh my God, I love your podcast or I love what you said about this.  14:19 And what's really cool is then you get the benefit, you reap the rewards of being an instrument and being able to hopefully motivate and inspire somebody.  14:28 - Lau Lapides (Guest) It's incredible and you and I we get letters like all the time, literally every single month, that says I just want to let you know that I can't get in my booth on a Saturday morning without listening to the podcast and hearing your motivation and hearing what you have to say and on the most literal basis, you don't realize what kind of impact you can make on someone's life by just speaking and speaking a truth and speaking an experience that is maybe common to their experience, or maybe the next level to their experience, when they're stuck and they don't know where to go.  15:04 It's incredibly powerful and I'm just honored to be a part of that. But I think you scared a lot of people when you said, or reminded us because this is not a new thing that we're also on video too. We're also on camera as well, because a lot of voiceover talent traditionally went into voiceover so that they wouldn't be on camera. They say, with all due respect, I don't want to put makeup on, I don't want to look good, I've got the face for radio.  15:28 - Bonnie Marie Williams (Ad) I don't want to look good, right.  15:29 - Lau Lapides (Guest) And I said no, no, you can't look at it that way any longer, because you've got to market your business, your podcast, your voice, and you have to do that on video now.  15:39 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) If you think about it and this is the trend, right, also, like on camera work, right, it's not about you don't have to be beautiful and young and pretty and handsome anymore.  15:47 It's all about authenticity, it's all about being able to engage with your audience, and so we invite right the perfectly imperfect, perfectly imperfect I want to hear and see like imperfections, because I know that I'm not alone, right, when that happens, and that's for on camera, that's for audio, that's all of that Just being able to be authentic and really communicate and reach out to your audience, just like we have to do being voice actors. It's becoming more and more and more prevalent every day. That that's really what we have to do, I mean, and that's what we like, I mean as humans, like, why do you think reality shows became so popular? I mean, it wasn't about the perfection of people on a sitcom or a drama or you know, it was real people and we're real people and we can talk about real things, and so if you guys are thinking about a podcast, please gosh don't.  16:41 We don't need another voiceover podcast, I don't know Exactly.  16:45 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Talk about something that you're passionate about, that you can engage with other people, and it shouldn't be any surprise that, you know, when we're auditioning as voiceover talent and we see that breakdown of relatable and real and conversational. Well, that's what we want to see as well.  17:02 If we're seeing the visual of you. We don't want to see you on as the 70s announcer, nor do we want to see you on as the supermodel of the 80s or 90s. Really, the real person works more often as an actor and talent than the aesthetically beautiful person according to the industry, and gets cast more often because it really represents the demographic of the people.  17:28 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Sure Right. It cuts through the chaos of something being like anticipated or expected or stereotypical right.  17:36 - Lau Lapides (Guest) There's an empathy factor too. I mean, I want to see someone who kind of is me. There's a deeply psychological aspect to everything we see and hear in entertainment. I would gather that a lot of folks and I ask them. When they talk to me about your podcast, I say why do you like it? Why do you follow it? What is it doing for you? They say I feel like you are me, I feel like you understand me, I feel like you're almost in my head, Right Like the voice in my head, and I think, oh, that's a lot of responsibility. I better be careful what I say. Isn't that true? It is true when you talk about influencers.  18:13 I always think of the influencer as like the young Gen Z or the young, young millennial who's on social media, but that's really not true. The influencer is anyone right who is out there in the public square and really is connecting to their audience. They can have very powerful influence, positive and negative. So be careful what you say, be careful how you present yourself, be careful and just be thoughtful about it, because you can impact a lot of people. Now, from a marketing perspective, that's great, because for the people that don't know anything about marketing or are a little scared of it, you know you can have a huge influence on people just by being visible.  18:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, absolutely Absolutely, and it just amazed me the amount of parallels. You think I would have figured this out by now, but it was good reinforcement as I went to this conference. So I highly highly encourage you, if you can get out there, listen, find the people that you're trying to sell to, if you can get to a conference. Conferences are great because I had presentations to go to and I also had vendor booths that I could visit, right, and so the interaction. I really listened to the interactions in both instances and I noticed that when people were on stage talking about something they were passionate about, you know, I have this little pet peeve about millennials have a potential to upspeak and I'm always telling people when we're doing corporate please don't upspeak, because it makes you sound a little less confident, and I want you to be confident about your product. So, when there was the occasion for me to go to a booth and speak to someone about their product, right, and I encountered a millennial, yes, upspeak is alive and well. However, when that same millennial was up on stage and this happened on more than one occasion, right, no matter who was up on stage talking, discussing, interviewing, interacting and speaking about their passion there was absolutely no up speak. Maybe once in a while there was one word or two, but nothing that was consistent, Because I think it presented a different kind of situation and I think that as actors we need to always read those situations, like, perhaps for a commercial, you're going to have that kind of casual engagement where upspeak is absolutely desired, but maybe in another instance you need to sound more authoritative about that product or confident that you're sure that it's going to help someone and therefore maybe upspeak isn't as appropriate.  20:35 So that was just an interesting little tidbit and, trust me, I listen really hard because, you know, I'm a coach, I want to be a better coach and so I want to be able to communicate with my potential client better. So first and foremost is listen. And you guys, even if you can't get to a conference, you can do this online, right, you can join groups that are not necessarily just voiceover groups. You can join e-learning groups, you can join a company newsletter, look at how the company talks to their potential clients, and then you can just really learn about in what situation and how you might talk, the tone of voice that you might use, the emotion that goes along with it. It could be for a quirky brand that has a little bit of humor in it. It could be for a quirky brand that has a little bit of humor in it. It could be for a brand that's a little more serious and a little more formal, a little more suit and tie kind of thing, and you adjust your performance accordingly.  21:23 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Now, you were talking earlier to me, before we started recording about at the podcast forum. They were talking about memberships and I thought that was very fascinating, thinking about creating content and how you can get your subscription base or membership base going with supplying that content. What did you learn from that one? What did you take away on that?  21:44 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) one. So that was advertisers, who again were looking to monetize, right, and so until they felt that people have the capability of fast-forwarding through an ad that might be on the podcast, However, if they need to subscribe or have a membership in order to get to that content, if let's say the content is valuable and it's something I've thought about doing for VIA Boss having a certain amount of episodes that are bonus content, which then help fund the cost, because, as we know, and as I've spoken about multiple times, this does not run itself. I mean you and I, you know it takes our and, as I've spoken about multiple times, this does not run itself. I mean you and I, you know it takes our time. And then I literally have a team of people that help me to distribute this podcast and put show notes up there, to advertise it on social media. There's just lots and lots of components to the spokes in the wheel, whatever you might call it, but there's a lot of things at play here and it's not free.  22:34 So it's helpful to be able to recoup some of those costs and even monetize the living, make a little bit of money, because I mean, this is our time and we do talk about all the time. Law right, we need to charge what we're worth. If somebody said to me well, do you feel bad charging for a podcast when most people can listen for free? Well, you know, honestly, I've been doing it for eight years. I've given over 400 episodes for free. To be quite honest, if somebody wanted to donate three to five dollars, maybe a month.  23:04 - Lau Lapides (Guest) I don't think that's unreasonable, I think it's fantastic. I think it's a great idea and makes total, total sense. I have a feeling that's something that a lot of podcasters are going to be doing. They're going to be interested in doing that, mm hmm, because no one really realizes except for you, annie, how much goes into it until they start doing it.  23:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Until they do it.  23:20 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Oh, I'll just talk. You know it's the old voiceover, read a paper and talk, but they don't really realize to produce something, yeah, something of value, something specific, something that has guests, something that has planning. Producing engineering it costs, it's an investment. Yeah, engineering it costs, it's an investment?  23:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, absolutely. And getting yourself out of your bubble and going out and really researching the market in which you want to sell, I think is so, so, very helpful for our businesses so that we can grow and serve those businesses and voice acting. This whole industry is evolving, like as we speak, minute by minute. Things are happening on the AI and synthetic end of things in the market. The economy has a lot to do with it and we really need to understand what's happening out there and evolve along with what our clients are asking for so that we can serve them better, because we can have a great voice. But if we don't know how to serve somebody with that voice or how to help them solve their problems, then we kind of sit here just having a great voice, exactly.  24:23 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Which is great.  24:23 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) But you know, then you and I can just talk with our great voices, but it may not get us anywhere. It may not pay the bills Very true, In which case? By the way, even if you don't get advertisers right away in your podcast, the fact remains that you are putting yourself out there, you're putting your brand out there, and that is a form of marketing all in of itself.  24:42 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Do you have tips, annie, for people who want to either start a podcast or who are early like within the first year of doing their podcast of what they should be thinking about or be planning for, so that they don't fall into any holes along the way?  24:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's a great question. The one thing that you absolutely have to be concrete on right now is kind of like your why, like why do you want a podcast and what is your topic and is it something that you can sustain? Because consistency once you get people who start listening, they expect consistency. It's like look on my run every morning I want to be able to turn on the latest podcast of right, or I want to be able to. It becomes a thing. So content creators, like everywhere, know how it's difficult to create content. It takes a lot of time.  25:29 So figure out what it is that you want to talk about, what it is that you can consistently deliver on a regular basis to an audience. And one thing I definitely found out is that these kind of serial podcasts that only have like six to eight episodes they don't do well. They don't do well with advertisers. Advertisers don't want to invest in that because they can't expect a great return on investment. It's got to be something where your audience can grow, where you can continue to get the ear of the listener, and so really try to find your why. Try to find whatever it is that you want to talk about and then be consistent about it Now. You don't have to hire out like I do right now for my podcast. I mean, I did everything on my own to begin with, and so you can start simple and commit to what you can do and make it a priority that you deliver consistently, consistently, consistently.  26:22 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Love that. So it doesn't have to be constant, it's just consistent, yeah, absolutely, which makes a lot of sense. And being authentic, yeah, and really caring about what your audience cares, about the pain points they have, what problems they have to solve and connect to Right. And also I would add into that that like what style you want that podcast to be in Do you?  26:43 want to have a lot of humor. Is it very serious? Is it meditative, is it calming, like, think about the kind of style that you want to have, and are you having guests on, or is it really you speaking from your point of view? I mean, these are just kind of basic things that we have to be thinking about it from the beginning. Also, how long Like you and I are really consistent about our time, we typically go about 25 minutes per episode.  27:08 Like how long can you talk? How long do you want to speak about your?  27:12 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) topic. I mean, gosh, some are hours long. You know what I mean. Some of the best video ones are hours long where there's something visual to look at, and I think Joe Rogan's is, I don't know, an hour or two hours. I have not listened recently, but really I mean we try to keep ours. I think the stats say anywhere from about this time 30 minutes, but honestly, I think it depends on the content and what you're talking about and just really feel that out and try to make that consistent as well.  27:36 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Well, you know, thanks for bringing this to our attention, because this is a world. It's not a new world, but it's an ever-growing world. Yes, absolutely, and it's becoming complex and very nuanced. And it's something that a lot of talent of all different backgrounds really want to know about and want to be doing and be plugged into it.  27:53 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So this is kind of exciting news and I'm excited because I got another podcast that's formulating on the back end. So stay tuned, guys. Something new is coming along for me and I'm very excited. Probably be launching that sometime I don't know later this year, so look for that and I'm very excited.  28:10 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Keep growing, keep expanding, keep creating and keep developing that's really the name of the game, isn't it? Absolutely? Throughout your lifetime, Fabulous.  28:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Thanks, law, good conversation. Thanks for asking me about it. I had a great experience and I'm going to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You too can connect and network like bosses and find out more at IPDTLcom. You guys have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye.  28:39 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, anne Ganguza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast-to Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL.   

In this episode Joe, Jen, and Tom cover the latest news including season 4 renewal news, season three surprise characters, and more! Then we dive deeply into a new character for S3, Galad Damodred? Where will we fall on the "beautiful" vs "gorgeous" debate?! Hear Jen offer sexual healing! Hear Tom seize an opportunity! Hear Joe pronounce last names with ease! All that, plus we diss Nym! As always, spoilers abound, as does some hot hot heat!News: https://youtu.be/YjMfbwnPC1A?feature=sharedhttps://variety.com/2024/tv/news/young-sherlock-amazon-series-cast-donal-finn-wheel-of-time-1236089954/https://youtu.be/p5Dcs3CAzJQ?feature=sharedSupport the Show.https://www.talkaranrhiod.com/Rate/review us: https://tinyurl.com/udspfm5eX: @arantalkInstagram: talk_aran_rhiodDiscord: https://dsc.gg/talkaranrhiodYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TalkaranrhiodEmail: podcast@talkaranrhiod.comMerch: https://www.newcreationsbyjen.com/collections/talkaranrhiod

This one is about one of the poorest decisions Daddy ever made, and somehow it all worked out for him without anyone getting hurt. YIKES! Still scary to think of! (Oh yes, our primas Sara & Camila are here :) )

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari says policymakers have yet to win the fight against inflation, and that they will consider more tightening if needed. Neil Dutta, Renaissance Macro Research US Economic Research Head, says a rebalanced labor market could led to a rate cut. Katy Kaminski, AlphaSimplex Chief Research Strategist, expects more potential buying for treasuries in the short-term. Mohamed Younis, Gallup Editor-In-Chief, previews the off-year elections happening across several US states. Nadia Martin Wiggen, Svelland Capital Director, discusses the global oil market as prices fall to over two-month lows. Get the Bloomberg Surveillance newsletter, delivered every weekday. Sign up now: https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/surveillance    Full transcript: This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. I'm Lisa A. Bromoids, along with Tom Keen and Jonathan Ferrow, join us each day for insight from the best in economics, geopolitics, finance and investment. Subscribe to Bloomberg Surveillance on demand on Apple, Spotify and anywhere you get your podcasts, and always on Bloomberg dot Com, the Bloomberg Terminal, and the Bloomberg Business app. This morning, Mike McKay Drumrow, fantastic guests the random type with us to talk about Fed policy. Yes, and thank you very much, John, because we are pleased to welcome Neil Kashkari, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, to the table today. Thank you for coming in making the trip all the way to New York only for us. I'm sure nothing else There would be nothing else this morning, and except for Bloomberg Surveillance. You're kind of known as the guy who is the most hawkish. I don't want to characterize you exactly now, given how things have changed over the last couple of months, but you have left open the possibility of doing more. How much more would you think the economy might need? Are we talking about just that one leftover move from the dot plot in September, or if you have to start raising again, do you have to go farther. Probably. Well, first of all, it's great to see you, Thanks for having me. People are looking for certainty, and I wish I could give that certainty provided there's been so much, so much it's unusual about the reopening of the economy and the dynamics that led to the high inflation, and how long it has taken, and the dynamics as the disinflation process has taken hold. I wish I knew. We have to let the inflation data guide US, the labor market data guide US, just to point out the obvious. Our forecasts have not been great over the past couple of years, and so we just need to We're all committed. Everybody on the FORMC has committed that two percent is our inflation target. We have to get inflation back down to two percent over a reasonable period of time. Ultimately, the economy will tell us how much is needed to get there, And I just don't know. Well, at what point do you think you would believe you have tightened enough or not tightened enough? What is it that you're looking for. Well, I'll give you some good news is that core PC on a three month basis is running about two point five percent, and it's lower than the six month data. It's lower than the one year data. So that suggests that the disinflation is real. If we continue to see inflation numbers of that range two point five percent or lower on a go forward basis, that would tell me, Okay, we are now on a path back to two percent inflation. But three months data is still only three months data, and if we see that start to tick back up again, that would tell me our job is not yet done. Tick back up means what? In other words, we get another couple of CPI reports in a PCE report before your next meeting, a couple of tents higher. The chairman and others say it's going to be lumpy or does it have to be a significant move? In other words, what are you thinking about for December? Well, I think we could look at, as the chairman always says, we look at all of the data. So what surprises Over the past few months, We've been surprised by how strong American consumers have been. Consumer spending is held up remarkably well, we've been surprised by GDP growth. When activity continues to run this hot, that makes me question is policy as tight as we assume that it currently is. So if you saw inflation tick back up and you saw continued very strong economic activity on the real side of the economy, that would tell me, okay, we might need to do more. So it's hard for me to say this one data point needs to be here. I would be looking at the suite of data. Did we outsource doing more to financial markets? In the arts week? Have we outsourced doing more to financial markets? You know, this is a very complicated question on what has been driving the long end of the Yeld curve. Some people point to term premium, and I always joke the term premium is the economist version of dark matter. It's the residual of all the stuff we can't explain. It's not that our models are wrong, it's the dark matter is out there. So that's the term premium. And some people say, well, that's driven by fiscal If it was fiscal driving the term premium, I would have expected to see a week dollar. Usually when investors are worried about a country's fiscal position, their currency weekends our currency has been quite strong. It makes me wonder is it really fiscal driving the term premium. Another possibility is the path of policy over the next few years. That could explain both the stronger dollar and the weaker stock market going into the last meeting. Another one is that maybe the neutral rate is higher, or maybe it's a combination of all three of these. And so these are things that we're spending a lot of time trying to understand what the markets are doing. But just speaking for myself, I'm not comfortable saying which of those three it is, because which of those three it is determines what it means for policy. If it is the term premium, then it is doing some work for the FED. But if it's the neutral rate, or if it's the forward guidance of the path of policy, then we would actually have to follow through to preserve those rates. So how did this line end up in the statement? And I'll share it with that audience. The kind of financial and credit conditions for households and businesses are likely to wound economic activity, hiring, an inflation. Where's that coming from? Oh, that's been there for a long time. I mean, that's been in there since the Silicon Valley bank episode and the banking stresses leading to some tightening of credit conditions across the economy. So I think that that's right. I, for one, don't say that that means the recent moves in the old curve. How fluid is that assessment? Can that change from month to month, meeting to mating, because some of those comments around that has inspired quite a move in this market over the last week. Well, you know, one of the things about the statements, we always have to be careful about putting things into the statement because they tend to be long lived and it's hard to pull them out of the statement because as soon as you take something out, then all of a sudden, people say, oh my gosh, they're declaring that all the banking stresses are over, as an example, and so, you know, I would look at all of the range of commentary that you get, look at what the chairman says, look at his press conference to get a read of the thought of the committee. You said that people want certainty that you can't give it to them, and I understand that, but people don't just want certainty, they also want some sort of guiding philosophy. Do you think that Fed Shir Powell has outlined some sort of guiding philosophy and where the bar is to cut rates and where the bar is to raise them further. Well, I think he's articulated very clearly that we're committed to getting back to two percent inflation. Right. There's been some chatter amongst economists that maybe we should raise the inflation target. I think he's done a great job saying that is not on the table. We're not going to do that. We're going to get inflation back to two percent, and we're going to let the data guide us. We've moved very aggressively. We've made a lot of progress on inflation. We're not done yet, meaning inflation is not back to our target, and if we need to do more, we will. There seem to be a feeling in markets that the bar to cut rates has been lowered over the past week or two weeks. Suddenly not only are we reaching a pause and have we seen a peek in the FED funds rate, but that also the Fed will cut next year, maybe surgically. Neil Dada is talking about that and he's coming up next. Do you want to push back against that? Do you think that the bar to cut is still just as high as it was. I have no idea where market participants are getting that. There's no discussion amongst me and any of my colleagues about when we're going to start preparing to cut rates. The only thing that's been talked about at all is that at some point, when inflation is well on its way back down, if we didn't back off a little bit, then real rates would be getting tighter and tighter and tighter. And that's real, but that's math. But is there enough weakness currently in the market in the economy, I should say to give you that sense at this point, look at the last GDP print. I mean, does anybody look at that and think, oh, my gosh. The economy we for the last twelve months GDP has been very strong. The labor market continues to be quite robust. Yes, the unemployment rate is ticked up to three point nine percent, but we've also seen a huge surge of labor supply, which is really positive come online. So I'm looking at this, I'm seeing consumers that are strong. My air by the way, my airplane that I came here on was one hundred percent full yesterday. It's going to be one hundred percent full today, I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that the economy is weaken Well, whether you go higher or not, you are on board for longer. And so you must have modeled out some idea of how long you would need to leave rates unchanged before you could get down to a level low enough that you could take your foot off the break a little bit. How long do you think you'll be at five point five into twenty twenty four. Well, I think it's going to depend if we continue to see inflation prints similar to the ones we've seen the last few months, you know, and we end up with a year of a year at two point five percent core inflation and it continues to trend down, that constellation would give me evidence to say, hey, we ought to look at should we start backing off just so the real policy isn't getting tighter and tighter and tighter, because we're clearly on our way back down to two percent. But again, I don't want to just point to one data series. We will be looking at the suite of data to try to get a read of where the economy is headed. Well, not just data. You talk to businesses in your district, all the time, What are they telling you now about their view of growth and hiring and pricing going forward. It's moderating. So the labor market is still tight in my district, people especially in the Dakotas, really have a hard time finding workers. But in Minnesota, it's still a tight labor market, but it's not as tight as it was six months ago. It's not as tight as it was a year ago. So that kind of maps to the national data that we're seeing of a gently cooling labor market but one that's still very very warm. Same thing with economic activity. Depending on the sector, they're saying, Hey, we feel pretty good about things. We're a little cautious about the future. Obviously, they watch the news, they read the news. There's a lot of economic anxiety that is reported on that people, you know, factor that into their own thinking and their own business planning. So I think the outlooks are still optimistic, but it's cautious optimists. Well are they still raising prices or think they need to? So it's funny there Still they still buy and large have some pricing power more than they had before pandemic, but not as much pricing power as they had six months or a year ago. Can we finish on housic sure in the space of three years, we've had record low interest rates in the highest rates in several decades. Is this housing market broken? Well? I think since the pandemic, we have structurally underbuilt the number of units that we need to meet our growing population. And that's the factor. And that's really about regulation at the local level that are creating barriers to more supply coming in. The raid environment will settle out over time, but structurally we have to actually bring a lot more supply online to meet America at the time, but it could be like twenty thirty years. I think this is the issue here. The legacy of this FMC could well be a generation of people look down to the housing market. Why do you say that there could be a generation of people with two three percent mortgages that never sound their home. Yeah, I don't know. People end up needing to move. It's funny when people don't tell their home because they're locked into a low mortgage. That's less supply, but that's also one less buyer. Most people who buy homes are leaving another home, and so that affects both the supply side and the and the demand side of That's why I set a generation look down because I'm renting and count by, so I'm not sounding anything, and that's the generation. I'm talking about that generation specifically, you concern that could be the legacy at the FORMC. Now. I think the legacy of this FMC is that we've dealt with the pandemic very aggressively. Then we were surprised by very high inflation, but then we move very aggressively to bring the inflation back down. I want to ask you about a story on the Bloomberg terminal today about all the financial CEOs from the US over in Hong Kong sounding very doer and down about the prospects for the economy. They suggest that things are pretty fragile right now, both in the economy and the markets, given everything that's going on around the world and in the shadow banking system as well as theirs. How worried are you, well, I mean, we're always worried about things that can happen all around the world. We've got teams of people looking at different scenarios around the world. Ultimately, we have to focus on what we can control, you know, geopolitics. When Hamas attacked Israel, the first thing we thought of is what's it going to do to the oil market, what's it going to do to commodity prices. Remarkably, the response so far has been muted. But that's something we're obviously paying close attention to. But the broader geopolitical issues are just so far outside of our bounds of forecasting. You know, we have a hard enough time forecasting inflation trying to forecast where geopolitics is going. We just have to focus what we can control. Oil price is dropped. I mean, that's the crazy thing about the last month. Physically, it doesn't make any sense. And this is the reason why trying to get it right is just impossible. And then trying to get the idea of a FED put and whether they're going to respond. I'm just saying people are talking about that now, so yeah, talking about it in the last few hours. Yes, it's on this program. No, always a pleasure, Thank you, Sirving Neil, Cash County, the Minneapolis FED price Alongstide Plympecks, Mi M chab No Tatsa, the head of US economic research at Renaissance Macron. Nil, good morning to you. Good morning. Let's go straight there because my IB was lighting up with messages from you. We're not thinking about tapering. Two months later, we're a long way from neutral cutting a month later. What do you think is going on within the FBC. Where do you think this is going? Well? I think I agree that it doesn't pay much to forecasts right now. It's important just to look at the data as it's coming to you, and so I do sympathize with that. But at the end of the day, I mean, the unemployment rate is up above the fed's forecast for this year, and that's the first time that's happened since March of twenty twenty two. Now you know we're in. When you're in the thick of it, it's hard to know whether that represents the start of something much more onerous or whether it's just the normalization of the labor market. But I think for the FED, I think the doves on the FMC, and remember you know President Kashkari, he tends to lean on the hawkish side of the consensus at the FED. I think for the doves, they have all the ammunition they need to basically put the hawks in a casket. Okay, I mean, I think that's the way I would think about it. I mean, you can point to the pickup in productivity and what that's done to unit labor costs. You can point to what Powell has said, right, I mean, when when central bankers use proceed carefully risk management, that's code for doing nothing. And you know, finally, I mean the employment report was probably understating payroll growth. That's my view. I mean, there's a lot of strike activity and so far, but at the end of the day, average hourly earnings are running just over three percent at an annual rate over the last several months. So I don't think the hawks on the committee frankly, can use the labor markets as a rationale to be hawkish anymore. So that is over and so I think the doves can basically say that the labor markets have been rebalanced. And if they can say that just implicitly, it means that the door is a little bit cracked open for a cut. And you know, the point I'm making to you is, you know J Powell, it wouldn't be the first time he basically, you know, flipped on a dime. I mean, we're a long way from neutral. I mean a few months later he's cutting rates, We're not even thinking about thinking about tapering or hiking, and then we're hiking and tapering basically in the same month. So you know, to me, the fact that they're not talking about it is irrelevant. It's also in their sep for next year. The question is whether these surgical cuts, what are surgical cuts? Basically a few cuts to stabilize the economy. I mean, I think the issue is is the extent to which cutting quickly translates into rapid economic stable So I mean, for as an example, I mean, let's see what happens with mortgage purchase demand. Over the next couple of weeks. We've seen mortgage rates basically come down to what like seven percent. Okay, I'm trying to wrap my head around this. Six months ago, you were talking about way more economic strength in the US economy than people had expected. Now you're talking about strategic or surgical cuts by the Federal Reserve to stabilize the economy. Are you saying that they are warranted because the economy No, I don't think that they are. Part of the tention, Lisa, is that my job isn't to tell people what I think the Fed should do. My job is to try to get into their head and figure out what they will do. I mean, if I was there, would I be I would probably be more hawkish than the consensus on the FMC. But I'm not there. Well, but does this mean that you think the consequence of surgical cuts to fortify the economy will be prolonged inflation? Yes? Okay, So then how do you sort of arrange around that sort of what is the inflation rate? How do you sort of lean into the rally that we've seen in the bond market and say, wait a second, you guys have gotten ahead of your skis based on the game theory that the FED is playing and the way that they're likely to do Searga, I don't know that the bond market's getting ahead of itself. I think the bond market is sniffing out that the distribution of risks have changed. I don't know what the FED may do next. I mean, that's what I think the bond market is doing, and I think bond market investors are right to do that, because, as I say, you know, you think about it basically three prongs, right, the labor market, inflation, and then financial conditions. If the FED can look at the labor market and say the labor markets are rebalanced. Okay, that's check done. You can't use that anymore as a reason to be hawkish. So, if anything, if the unemployment rate's not going up a little bit, the distribution of risks are that they would cut because the labor markets. And right, if the labor markets are thawing, that's going to give them increased confidence that inflation will thaw and so and then finally, if that's the case, they're not going to be particularly concerned about the easing and financial conditions that you've seen since the last in the last week, which is what we've been talking about through this morning, whether they are going to tolerate the easing we've seen over the last week. And it feels like perhaps they will help me work with me here. It feels like to me that you believe the world might have changed post pandemic versus pre pandemic. Do you sense that they still believe were still in the same old world pre pandemic? I do. I mean, I mean, if you listen to someone like New York Fed President John Williams, even Chair Powell, I mean, there's not much there's quite a bit of reluctance to just say that, you know, neutral rates are higher. I mean, why do you think that, is, Neil? You know, I don't know. I mean I think that maybe in their minds things haven't changed. I mean all, I mean, you saw Powell talk about this at at the press conference last week. I mean, oh, well, if we get to pick up in potential growth, it's a temporary pick up and potential growth, then we'll go back down. So if you don't think that the world has fundamentally changed, then you're going to be more sort of cognizant of overtightening risk. Right Like, So if the unemployment rate is starting to go up, you may have thought, well, maybe you overdid it, so you might be more willing to cut sooner as a result. So are you more bullish on the US economy but also expect inflation to remain higher and the FED When people look back, this will be considered a policy air that they weren't hawkish enough. Yeah, I mean I think that that would be Yeah, I mean that would be something I could be saying in twenty twenty five. What would you point to if you had this conversation right now? And I would love to get you around the table next time I have a FED official to work through somebody's issues. But what would you it sounds dangerous as the number one thing that indicates to you that the world has changed, versus pandemic that ultimately they don't believe it. What would you point to, Well, I mean the first is just look at let's look at the obvious. I mean, you've done a lot, and yet the economy is still kind of hanging in there. I would say that things like household formation rates are running twice the rate they did after the Financial crisis. I mean, to me, I think it's much easier to tell the story about why the post financial crisis period was actually the anomaly than not. So I think we're actually going back to the old normal more so than anything else. Obviously, you think about all those people during the financial crisis period or the years after that, we're saving up for retirement. A lot of them have now since retired and they're now dissaving, which is you know, implies higher neutral rates. You think about income inequality, it was something that we were talking about all throughout the twenty tens. Well, it's coming down now. People at the lower end of the wage spectrum. We're seeing more rapid growth in their wages. You see more increased sort of union activity and unions getting big wins for blue collar workers. I mean, these are not things. I mean, and those folks have a much higher propensity to spend. And so I think it's it's not right in my view to say that things haven't changed. But if that's what the FED believes, then you have to be recognizing what that implies for what they might do later. And so I think just because they're not talking about cuts now does not mean they won't be talking about cuts in three six months. That should be in the realm of possibility, and I think the market's Frankly, I'm not willing to fight the move yet. I mean, okay, no a clinic as always. You know you're one of my favors. I think everyone knows that. No data, every nice loose Macro, No, thank you joining guess now. Katy Kaminski, chief research strategist over Alpha Simplex. Katie, it's the number one question for us. Are you still short treasuries? Yes? Why? Well, this is because for trend falling, it's not just about a couple of days, It's really about persistent trends in the market, and I just want to point out, and this is something interesting, trend falling signals have been net short for nine quarters. This is the first time in many decades that this has been the case. And so the reason I'm pausing right now is because we've been saying short, short, short all year, and for the first time, it's starting to feel like we already got that short come through. What's next? What does the market do now? Buy are coming in because yields are at interesting levels. They're probably thinking, maybe we've finally hit that point. Do you think something changed fundamentally to lead to that in the last few weeks. I do, And then I think that the data has come out to support the narrative for investors. But I also think a narrative that has made sense to me is that investors have woken up to the idea that five percent yields at some point there's a buying point where you think, well, there's a chance this could actually go down. And now you start to see this equilibrium occur where you're seeing the disinverted curve, which is something we've been looking for since the beginning of the year. So Katie just to put a bow on this, are you now not short treasuries and actually starting to see value, particularly if yields get up to that five percent level in the tenure. So we're still short in terms of the overall frequency that we see signals, but we are seeing consolidation in those signals, so there's a reduction in that particular conviction. But what I will say is that I'm seeing more and more positive signals on higher frequency, and so I think on the shorter term you're going to see more and more potential buying for treasuries. But I do want to remind everyone inflation is still an issue. Rates could be higher for longer, so there's still really a good chance that we're going to see a lot of volatility instead of a new trend per se that starts to emerge. Yet this raises this question of which particular data points are going to be the real action drivers, like what we saw over the past ten days. Is it going to be basically every inflation read that we get, or do you really buy into this idea that it's treasury supply that's been dictating a lot of the volumes and a lot of the angst that we felt over the past month. It's really interesting that you bring this up, Lisa, because we've been talking about the supply issue. I mean, how often do people actually talk about supply. They're only talking about it because I think people are trying to understand the equilibrium of where people sit and what yield should cost, I mean, what should be the right yield. And I think from our side on the technical side, what we're looking for is potential breakouts so that we're seeing a steeper curve at some point. Our view is it's going to depend on really what happens with the economic data of whether we end up with tighter conditions or if we actually see something very extreme where we actually saw higher yields. Again, that to me seems very unlikely right now, but I think it's really a point to start watching every data point to see which direction the yield market is going to go or which direction the yields go, because it's definitely an inflection point than Katie, were going to catch up with Nil Kashgari in about twenty minutes time. I think we're all looking forward to this conversation. There is this second paragraph in the statement that they put out last week on kind of financial conditions it reaches follows. I'm sure you're familiar with it. Time of financial and credit conditions for households and businesses are likely to weigh on economic activity, hiring, and inflation. Could you still write that same sentence today? After the move we've seen in the last week, what's that on the movement we've seen in the last month, for the the last six months, what do you think it is? Well? I think the challenge is that these numbers come in at different frequencies. Last week we had a massive buying but this could also be somewhat of a relief rally given how much movement we've seen downward, especially in equities. And let's just be honest, like I said, at a five percent yield started to get exciting, people said, oh I better get in there. So I think there's really still This could just be the tip of the beginning of understanding how serious financial conditions have changed, and if it's enough to actually warrant a point where we might actually have cuts at some point earlier than some would would have thought, like myself, who's been very pessimistic about rate cuts. Hey, Ketty, do you have a decent understanding of the conditions that would lead to those cuts. Well, usually in terms of this, I think we'd have to see pretty severe deterioration in financial conditions to see rate cuts, given the mandate of the FED and the fact that the other factors that are really focused on have not come down to their target level. So the fact that inflation is sticky, and the fact that we have a strong workforce and that we have all of these conditions putting us in a good place. They have been pretty clear that they're going to keep us higher for longer until we can sort that out. On the other hand, if we had some sort of very severe draw down or deterioration and credit that was clear, I think that they would have to act. So that to me would be the situation where we would see those rate cuts. Is if you saw something in the credits markets or something in terms of consumers really struggling that would cause them to actually react. So the FED put still exists, just at a much higher pain point, I would say probably yes. I mean, I think it always exists somewhere, but it's definitely moved a lot compared to what we liked in twenty nineteen and before. Kelly Let's finish what we started. Given the uncertainty you now have about your position, why maintain the shot? That's what I'm going to walk away from this conversation scratching my head about why maintain the short when it can be as expensive as it was on weeks last week. So this is the point of trend falling. Systematic trading is about not double sort of using your emotion in the moment. And I think what works with trend falling is following the data, and we just need more data to know the answer, and over longer periods of time, it turns out the market is actually quite good at giving us indications of where things are moving, and it's particularly short term movements where they disagree. Where you want to lean on your own gut, but you shouldn't, because that's what systematic trading is really about. It's about measuring and falling the markets and allowing the markets to tell you what the market where we're going, as opposed to sort of my own personal view. Unfortunately, Katie, thanks for the clarity on that point. I appreciate it. Katie commenced you that of aphasimplex, two major political parties remain unpopular in the United States, fifty six percent of Americans viewing the Republican Party unfavorably, fifty eight percent saying the same thing of the Democratic Party. Mohammed Junis, the editor in chief at Gallop, joined us now, Muhammad, help us out. I've been rinting through this piece. Neither party is well liked. You guys have pointed out that the GP has an edge on certain issues. Can we just talk about the likability of both parties right now, Muhammed? How unusual is this? Unfortunately, you know at harkens to your Amtrak conversation earlier. We're at a state right now in the United States when both parties are really not doing that great in terms of their favorability. It's nothing new, Unfortunately, It's been quite a while since Americans had a favorable view of either party in the majority. We're also at a time where there's a record high of Americans saying that they'd like to see a third party in American politics. Of course, easy to say I want more. It doesn't necessarily mean that that party would exist or actually be powerful. But we're also at a time, John and Lisa where there's a high of people that identify as independents, and that is important not only in the current moment, but also in our analysis over generations. What we find is that younger Americans today are actually sticking with that independent id much further along their lifespan than previous generations young folks. So, certainly America is highly dissatisfied with national government. We've talked about that a lot. They're really, in some ways most dissatisfied with both parties. That being said, today is a local election. It's really, I know, it's so tempting for us to jump to twenty twenty four. Americans line up today to vote on local issues, and there's a huge difference in the way people perceive local government versus the national government here in the United States. SOMEHOWMA just explain that a little bit more. What is the big difference between the two currently? Basically and coetence. Americans have very low trust and competence in the national government and national institutions. Perceptions of corruption are astronomically high. When you come to local government, though, people have a much more positive perspective on local government, whether it's the efficacy, transparency of local government and corruption, but also how they feel about their local governing officials. So Americans light up at the ballot box today, they're hearing a lot of echo chamber on the national what this means, we're twenty twenty four, but really what they're going to be focusing on our local issues, and the national conversation certainly will inform that. That's why things like abortion, things that implicate attitudes about big and small government, for example, they're on the ballot box. They will be discussed. They're going to be they have been a focus of the campaign. We know in Ohio there's a really big push on abortion. It'll be a really important weather vane in terms of whether or not Roe v. Wades overturning has sort of faded, The impact of that has faded or is still with us. I have to say, as you're talking about local elections and how different they are than the nationals, I think, well, they're probably not on TikTok, the local elections, they're probably not on Facebook. How much is it the social media echo chamber that polarizes people and gives them a worse and expected view of national politics in a way that local politics might be slightly immune. I think that's a great point. Lisa it's much easier to sort of check the bs if you will. On a topic or an issue. When it's about where you live, you know that reality. You have direct information from people you know where you live. You can talk to your neighbors, you can talk to your local religious leaders or community leaders. With national politics, it's a very different thing. It really tends to have now become sort of a war of the propaganda's if you owe both parties where truth is very hard to identify, but both sides are absolutely out there to religiously convict you excuse me, to religiously convert you to their worldview. So that's certainly a factor. But look, when it comes to twenty twenty four, and it's important for us to keep our eye on that mark. Everything that we've done with regards to national elections really comes down to one thing. Americans focus on the economy. The economy is king. It's not only king, it's king, queen and bishop when it comes to picking a president here in the United States. And that's going to be a huge factor in where people place their votes in November twenty twenty four. But as you all know, we are light years ahead from where that is in terms of assessing where the economy is going to be then, and that's going to be the major factor when it comes to party advantages. The Republicans definitely have maintained their historic advantage in terms of Americans viewing them as more competent in keeping the country prosperous, keeping the economy booming, and keeping the country safe. That's said, how much are you looking to Glenn Youngkin today? And maybe there is going to be very much local issues that are decided, but the local issues have implications for their glens might be the Republican con candidate for presidency. Do you think that's a stretch. I think looking at the polls right now, that is a stretch. It's hard to argue that President Trump is not the front runner of the Republican Party. You know, every poll you do, every poll, what we've done. We don't do too many political polls anymore, but there are good polls out there. It's really hard to see somebody sort of astronomically jump ahead of him. Now that being said, we haven't had a president in modern time that's facing the legal challenges that he's facing, and that's a whole other sort of curveball that's being thrown here. It's not clear exactly what his situation will be come real. Kind of rubber meets the road in terms of November twenty twenty four. But you know there are still we heard from David Axelrod this week about the Democratic side. There's still a lot of movement in this race, and I wouldn't rule out any surprises or sudden departures on either side up against the clol kid. Just to squeeze it in and finished where we started. You do mention in the piece of the GP holds advantages on certain issues. Can we just bring some life into that, Mohammad? Which issue specifically? There are really three issues In specific one is keeping the country prosperous. Republicans have a pretty sizable advantage to Democrats in terms of perceptions of keeping the country prosperous. The other one is keeping the country safe. As you know, we're now very focused on too pretty significant conflicts across the world. Hopefully that doesn't become a reality for us here in the United States, but as Americans focus more on security issues, Republicans do have that advantage in our polls. The final one is who's most competent to handle the most important problem facing the country. And what's fascinating about that question is that the most important problem facing the country, as I have said on this show many times right now, is actually poor leadership and government. So Americans identify the quality, the low quality of national le as the most important problem facing the country. So it's the most of our problem. The economy and keeping America safe fascinates in gright. To catch out Mohammed azoh Wis, He's going to say, Mohammed unus of gallop. Everyone's been pointing to oil prices. Why have they not caught up given that there is a sort of existential risk and threat that seems to be escalating every single day in the Middle East? Joining us now to help us understand what exactly to look for. Nadia Martin Wiggan, Director ats fell in Capital, Nadia, I just want to start there. What do you make of the fact that we're seeing crude traded on the NMEX blow eighty dollars a barrel again today despite what's going on in Israel and in Gaza. Hello, great to be on. I think what we saw last week is that Hezbollah and Iran for right now, they're on the sidelines, right, They don't actually want to show an escalation of the war going on in Gaza right now. So that has taken off some of the risk premium. For the last ten days, we actually see the implied volatility in the options market come down. So it's not even something that's happened just today, it's been for the last ten days that trend. I think. In addition, when that premium, that initial shock goes away, as we saw was the case with the war in Ukraine by Russia, eventually you know, the market starts to think about how to work around that. And for example, we've seen that freight rates have gone much higher, and part of that is when you look at it, it's almost like a risk balancing that, Okay, if we can't flow through the Suez and we have to go around, then let's de risk ourselves if things were to take longer. And we see that the freight market has actually priced that in as if they have to avoid the Suez, which they haven't had to do. So as a result, things have come down also in the oil market. Okay, so let's take a step back for a second. Nadia. If you're looking at freight producers, that already come up with alternate roots that avoid the suz Canal to avoid potential or the straits of our moves to avoid potential blowback from Iran. Does this mean that oil prices are actually higher than where they would be at this point if there weren't this geopolitical overhang, because it's actually being priced into the market in a material way. Yeah. If we look at what was happening to the market in oil before the October seventh attack, we could see that prices were coming off right. We had a lot of pressure on refinery margins. We had physical creed trading poorly. You know, we've had the largest overhang in the West African market that we've had in years. We had more than twenty twenty five million barrels unsold out of the November loading program. So we saw that kind of weakening and then this is where the market would like to rebalance. We saw the physical premiums come down for those grades, but the futures market has remained quite strong, and this is where we have to see that kind of reb ballancy. When we look at kind of the momentum and what is happening to pure speculative traders, you know, the CTAs and so forth. That short term momentum has been downwards, right, and that is put pressure bringing us down to where we are now in WTI, you know, just above the two hundred day moving average. If we look at that long term momentum, it's still intact for a strong market, right. So there are still those longs in the market that we've had in since before all of this started. But again, the market is preparing in case something were to happen, because you know, things had been taking along well in the Middle East and we were about to have a deal between Saudi Arabia, the US and Israel recognizing Israel, which would take off potentially a premium right, and instead we've moved in the opposite direction. How much is the US becoming the swing producer at a time where there is consolidation in the shale patch and you are seeing companies try to realize the value from their stores, basically pump the oil while it's still valued in the world. The deal of Exon, for example, buying Pioneer right, that really shows that they are focusing on the Permian right. And what interestingly Exon announced in their earnings call is that they believe that with their equipment and knowledge, they're able to bring in a total of one billion barrels of oil more out of those same assets that Pioneer was able to. So, when we think about the terminal regular production rate in the US, that goes from around fourteen and a half million barrels per day to maybe fifteen and a half million barrels per day, and the question is when do we reach that. Right August production was thirteen point one million barrels per day. It will probably take two years, but of course that depends on the short term oil price and the signals short term meaning monthly, quarterly, and the signals that that yields to shale producers in terms of activity. Right, a weaker oil price will slow that down. A strong oil price we'll speed that up. So right now, given more prices are do you expect more consolidation to be expedited currently or do you think that people are going to wait until prices go up a bit further. Well, prices are reasonably strong, right, the whole oil complex is in a good situation and making money. So when what we saw at the start of October is that demand was starting to get hit, right, we had producers selling crewed for more than one hundred dollars a barrel, and then we saw, for example, companies like India really complaining. Part of that is because Russian crudis continued to flow and we had price caps breached, right, so you were paying more than sixty dollars a barrel, maybe you were paying seventy dollars a barrel, and then on average, facing more than one hundred dollars a barrel was becoming difficult. So I think we've been in a pretty comfortable space, you know, in the eighty dollars range for everyone to make money, so it makes it ripe for consolidation and valuable resources. We don't really need things to move much higher. Do you think that all things being a well, this is going to be the range for the foreseeable future, just because of the pushes and the pulls that seem to be working in equilibrium from a technical level, yes, But of course things can suddenly change very quickly, both in the Middle East, you know, towards the negative towards a positive, so that can really shift things. And the number one thing to keep track of is that inventories were expected to draw quite steeply in the fourth quarter, and so far in October they only drew on land around three hundred thousand barrels per day. So the market is waiting for evidence that actually we have tightness led by these supply cuts and demand isn't waning, Whereas you know, on the other hand, if it continues waiting, then we could see for the falls and price. Nadie Martin Wigan of Spell and Capital, thank you so much for being with us. Subscribe to the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live every weekday starting at seven am Eastern on Blueberk dot com, the iHeartRadio app tune In, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can watch us live on Bloomberg Television and always on the Bloomberg terminal. Thanks for listening. I'm Lisa Abramowitz, and this is Bloomberg.See 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可以搜索公号【璐璐的英文小酒馆】或者添加【luluxjg2】加入社群，查看文稿和其他精彩内容哦~Hi everyone, and welcome back to Britain Under The Microscope. 欢迎回来【闲话英伦】Hi, 安澜.Hi, Lulu, hi, everyone. So 安澜, usually you would propose the topic, today let me propose one. Okay, that sounds rather dangerous. I think it's something that you do have some knowledge of, not a lot, but some knowledge of. Okay. Let's talk about fashion and clothing in the UK.You are right. I don't have much knowledge on that at all.But I can vouch for 安澜, I think he's got a pretty good sense of style. Oh, thank you. Now first things first, when people think of your fashion or clothing in the UK, I think perhaps a lot of our Chinese listeners would have certain stereotypes from old movies, period dramas, like Downtown Abbey for example. Yeah, there's a lot… I've noticed as well like for example when I buy clothes on 淘宝, it would say things like London style or kind of English style clothes, and I look at them and think well, yes, they were English style clothes but when my grandad was alive. I see, well, but retro, vintage. So first things first, let's start with the fact that you don't really have “national dress”. Right？Like for us, you think about 旗袍 or for Japanese you think about kimono. Yeah, UK doesn't really have a national dress. Generally, the clothes that we wear are very similar to the clothes that worn in other parts of Europe, and also in America. Did you guys invent like suit就整个那种西服套装是…Yeah, we did.So obviously everyone knows a suit and many of our listeners probably own maybe one or two if not more suits. Originally it was a British invention, it was invented in the 18th century because before then people would dress in very colorful clothes, very intricate clothes you know that required lots layers, but actually a really famous British dandy called “Beau” Brummel invented a suit where the focus was it's gotta be simple, elegant, and how you show how rich you are or how wealthy you are is by the use of the fabric, it's by the use of the quality.

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We're excited to announce the first episode release of our new podcast, Beyond Two Percent!Beyond Two Percent analyzes the critical questions, issues, and dynamics that affect people differently by gender - and the intersection of those dynamics with finance. This week's roundtable focuses on motherhood and fintech, and we're lucky to be joined by Laura Spiekerman, Co-Founder of Alloy and Maia Bittner, Founder of Pinch and Voice of the Member at Chime. As always, our guests join our two fabulous hosts, Julie VerHage-Greenberg and Helen Femi Williams. We'll publish Beyond Two Percent monthly - if you'd be interested in joining an upcoming episode, let us know! Reach out to sponsor@thisweekinfintech.com.SPEAKERS* Laura Spiekerman, Co-Founder of Alloy* Maia Bittner, Founder of Pinch and Voice of the Member at Chime* Julie VerHage-Greenberg, Head of Content and Community at Orum* Helen Femi Williams, Fintech JournalistHelen  00:14This is the Beyond Two Percent podcast and I'm your host Helen Femi Williams.Julie  00:18And I'm your second host, Julie VerHage-Greenberg, this podcast is brought to you by this week in FinTech, which is the front page of global FinTech news, fostering the largest FinTech community through newsletters, thought leadership and events, andHelen  00:31of course, podcasting. And you might have listened to our other podcast. Hey, Fin tech friends. Well, this podcast series is all about women exploring everything from investing to motherhood, to intersectionality, and so much more.Julie  00:45And we encourage you to give us feedback on the topics you think we should be discussing and asking and future panels.Helen  00:51I think Julie and I and the way that this week in FinTech team recognized that ensuring women are well represented in any industry is always going to be beneficial. Gender Diversity has shown to spot better problem solving, superior performance, innovation, so much more I could go on. Julie  01:06You're right, Helen. And if we were specifically talking about FinTech, the industry could benefit for more women at any level, because women in general have not typically been in the spotlight as a target audience for financial products and services. They're an underserved customer segment with a massive unmet need.Helen  01:24And beyond that female founders and executives have personal experience understanding how to generate an ally new ideas and solutions in this field.Julie  01:32And that's why this podcast is called Beyond 2%.Helen  01:35There is a world of tech driven financial products and services that is yet to be discovered because of the lack of women leaders in this spaceJulie  01:42and through group discussions with leaders in these spaces. This is what we want to exploreHelen  01:47this week. It's all about investing.Julie  01:53And thank you to our sponsors in New York City FinTech women, FinTech women's mission is to connect, promote, empower women to advance their careers. They need help from everyone if we're going to make a real change, encouraging male allies to become members and come to our events. Membership is free. And you can sign up at NYC FinTech women.com and follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Laura speaker men are recognized by Crain's New York and 2021 as a notable woman on Wall Street is a co founder and chief revenue officer at alloy. Prior to alloy Laura led business development and partnerships at an ACH payments startup and was on the research and investment team at imprint Capital Advisors, which was acquired by Goldman Sachs. Laura is a proud Barnard College alumna and lives in Berkeley, California.Helen  02:45Maia has an entrepreneurial background as the co founder of Rocksbox, a subscription jewelry rental company and pinch a financial inclusion company that built credit scores by reporting rent payments. Now, my invest in technology startups and works at time, a financial technology company. She lives in Bellingham Washington, serves on the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering Board of Trustees, and tweet startup punditry at my OB on Twitter. Julie  03:18I am very excited to dive into this topic, because it is something that you know, I need all the advice I can get about now, given that I am about to become a mom and I want to continue working, I want to continue building my career, that's always been super important to me. And I know that Laura and Maia are very much of the same mindset. So I'm very excited to have them here for this discussion. I want to kick it off by just saying that I remember when I was running fin tech today, and I asked Laura to do a post about fundraising, I believe it was your series B that you were fundraising while you were pregnant. And I remember getting an email from one of your staff members that ally with your draft, like the day or a day, before Thanksgiving or something like that, saying like Laura is actually going into labor. She wrote this, like on the way to the hospital or something like that. And I was like that is so typical of like, hard working woman type thing. So I Laura, I want to start with you and just talk to you a little bit about, you know, the process of one going through that fundraise, but to you know, now I believe your son is what about a year old or so something like that? 22 months? Oh my God, he's almost two years old. Time is a very weird thing, especially when you're pregnant. I want to just talk to you a little bit about that, and then turn it over to Maia because she more recently had a child as well, like very, very recently.Laura  04:40Yeah, I can't believe she's even here. I would have been right. Yeah, yeah. I think actually in the getting sort of writing that blog post and getting it sent has a lot to do with me being a procrastinator, unfortunately, and not aJulie  04:57you had a lot going on, you know,Laura  04:59yeah. A powerful pregnant lady. But it was, it was, you know, one of those things where I felt some amount of pressure to wrap up as much as I could before I headed into the unknown, which I'm glad I did, because it truly was I remember, like the first 10 days, 10 days into having a baby, I realized we needed to order some things from Target. And I could not picture I remember sitting there going, like, I have no idea how I'm going to open my computer and put the few things I need in my shopping cart, and then check out and do that I it was like unfathomable. And fortunately, I figured out how to do that. But the beginning was just so overwhelming and chaotic. But I remember I couldn't even imagine shopping online at that point. So I'm glad I tried to try to wrap up loose ends before I went on leave. Yeah, fundraising itself was I feel very lucky, I did it over zoom. Because we were in a pandemic, there was no no pressure to meet in person, there were no in person meetings at that point. And this was like summer 2020. So like, no one was traveling, no one was making me go down to Sand Hill Road. And I felt very lucky that I got to do it all over zoom, which meant I didn't have to travel and also meant no one could see my belly. So it was good for me. And no one, like asked me anything. And I saw I didn't have to figure out what to say no one said, Hey, by the way, are you pregnant? And so after, after we signed the term sheet, I did end up telling the people who are participating in our round like, hey, just a heads up. And everyone was supportive.Julie  06:39Yeah, I remember you saying in the post that there were actually a couple of people that like sent you parenting books, or like things off your registry and stuff like that, which I found super sweet as well.Laura  06:49There's Victoria Trager from Felicis ventures was really she was like, it's nice to send gifts, of course, but she was the most thoughtful like she was just like yearning to figure out how to get them to sleep and do what you know. And so she sent me a bunch of books that she liked and and I did end up reading them. They're quite helpfulJulie  07:04the viewer you aren't able to see us filming this podcast, but a lot of the times when Laura was talking my was just sitting there shaking your head like yep, I can relate to that. Yeah, um, a few weeks in definitely feeling that.Maia 07:16Well, and I think, um, you know, it's funny, even hearing Laura's target story, I have a target story, which is I think on day three or something, right, we were also out of something critical. And I was going to do a Target store pickup, my sister was gonna go pick it up for me. And so I had my phone so I could handle like doing the order. But they were out of something. And they sent it a little notification, like we're out of stock of this thing. And I started crying, which is very unusual for me. I'm not a big crier, but it's like, I think and like, notoriously like three days in is like, like all moms are crying about like, just the most random things. And so like that definitely hit me hard. And it is just so funny that I was like I was crying because Target was out of stock of something. And even my midwife had said she was like, you know, like some crying is normal. Like if you're crying all day, or we'll know she was she said some crying is normal. But if it's all day, like that's what like she was talking and I thought that she was talking about the baby, but she was talking about me. Which I only realized, like, some way and through her advice.Julie  08:29Yeah, I remember when we were requesting people to be on the podcast, my email to my in particular is like, I totally understand if you can't do it, cuz you're like, what five weeks out six weeks out? Like it's very recent seven now. I don't know how you're doing it. Although the woman that ran my baby shower this past weekend had just had a kid and she was only six weeks out and I'm like how are you like catering something right now when she like, supposedly had like breast pump cups in and everything that you couldn't tell that was like collecting milk and stuff on like, God bless you. But like, I don't know if I could do that. Like, I think it just speaks a lot to the pressure not necessarily that society puts on it, but that we put on ourselves as well. Whether we're founders of a company, whether we're investors, or whether we're even just employees somewhere. I'd love to talk to you guys about that aspect. So, Laura coming from I mean, both of you are founders, so you'll have this perspective, but coming from the founder perspective, like you obviously still want to set a good example and take some time off, but I feel like you know, your startup is sort of like another baby and a sense that you're thinking of so taking too much time away. I feel like I feel like there's some different dynamics that go on in there.Laura  09:46Yeah, I mean, I think it's a little The hard part is I would love to be able to tell everyone like there's no great time do it whenever but I like knew I couldn't do it at series A Before, it just was not going to be possible. I was the only salesperson, you know, for a long time. So it just was not. I'm sure some people do it and they're successful, I didn't see a path for myself doing that. So I waited until I knew like, Okay, if I was going to take off, you know, three or four months, we'd be okay. And that's what I chose to do it. And that's, I mean, chose to do it as like, these things happen, you know, not always on the timeline you want. But that made it a lot easier, because I knew that if I left for four months, the world wouldn't fall apart, and it didn't. So I struggle with sort of like, their, you know, telling people to just do whatever they want when they want because it is a tricky thing. If you're running a startup, to just kind of like, be away for performance. I found myself personally, I was very bored during my leave, not in a way that I was like itching to work and solve hard problems and do a ton of interesting things in FinTech. But I didn't love being with an infant all day. And so I and you just have unbelievable amounts of time sitting there. Breastfeeding, trying to get them to go to sleep, holding them up right after they've eaten for 30 minutes, like whatever the things are, that you're doing. So much time that I was I read every single Slack message in that four months that went on in our company. And it's like a lot of slack messages because I didn't have to handsy with one hand and be on my phone constantly in that in that four months. So I didn't disconnect fully from alloy I did disconnect from, for the most part, being on calls and doing demos and all the stuff that I previously did, because we have people do those, but I I just wanted to stay engaged. So I think everyone has their own thing and everyone else or like you it's really hard to predict how you'll feel once you're there. I think some people really want to just completely disconnected and not have anything to do with with work. I just was I think so bored. I couldn't take it.Maia 12:05Yeah, so I've been I'm pretty disconnected. And you know, right? Like I'm doing this podcast, kind of my cadence is, I do like one thing every day. Right? So like yesterday we did and a 30 minute zoom call is a pretty low ask or it's pretty like, well, not low. So I feel like that's like a standard for like the one thing that I do every day. Yesterday we did, we're taking this workshop called Bringing baby home together. And so like we did that. So like that was yesterday's one thing today is one thing is doing this podcast. It's kind of like carving out. I am. So I'm like I've been totally disconnected from work. And I'm not a founder, right? I'm just an employee. And so I'm very confident that everything is fine and not falling apart without me. And that's really nice. But I want to echo what Laura says, which is, it's much more boring than I expected. Like, I feel like I spend an infinite number of hours breastfeeding, and it's very sweet. I like it like I like and I kind of love like spending all day in bed, like feeding the baby like it is very sweet. But it is just outrageously boring. And so and it's hard, like the types of things you can do. It's like reading slack messages is the thing you can do. Watching TV is a thing. Like there's just I listen to audiobooks, mostly. But there's really not that many things you can do because you're pretty occupied with all of the baby things. And so I'm taking I'm I've been pretty disconnected, I was actually thinking about messaging my closest colleague at work, and saying, like, Hey, I've been really disconnected in the past seven weeks and like love that you guys haven't, right reached out. And I really respected that. But I kind of want to tell her, like, if there's any questions or anything like, I might kind of start plugging back in. And they feel like that setting a bad example. But it is I almost wish like that we had a different structure or that like I think I could even provide, like 80% of the value I provide to my company by checking all the slack messages for 30 minutes or an hour every day and pointing people towards the right resources and saying like, don't forget about this and make sure to check with this person on that. And things like that. And so it's one of the things I've been struggling with. I do wish that I had taken more time or had more space or support while pregnant. And part of that was I was being a little bit deliberate. You know, we have a certain amount of leave and I was like well, I'm sure I'm gonna want to spend as much of that as possible, like actually with the baby. But for me, first trimester. I don't know if it was particularly rough out. I will say it was average. I think I had a pretty average experience. It wasn't really easy. It wasn't really tough, but I was surprised at how Um, like, incapacitated, I was, you know, I felt like I had the flu for kind of a long time. We don't expect people to work at all when they have the flu. But I was like, not sleeping well and have right I was nauseous all the time. And I was eating only, like water crackers all day long. And I was just like, it's crazy. I have to wake up and do a zoom call at 9am. But also, I'm not telling anyone. So there's like no real strength. The first trimester thing was really weird. It felt like I have this huge momentous thing. But I can't tell anyone or I'm not telling anyone. And it might not materialize, right? Like it almost feels like if you get a new job, but it might be taken away from you. It's like, celebrate, but not too much. And don't tell anyone and it was a very uneasy time for me. And then later on my pregnancies have preeclampsia. A and I actually, when did you find out yourLaura  15:59preeclampsia?Maia 15:59So after I delivered Oh, wow. Because like the blood like there was a mixup with the blood test. And so for a couple of weeks, we thought I had just just gestational hypertension, because it really, really high blood pressure. So really, really high blood pressure,Laura  16:16but post postpartum still.Maia 16:20I had so I had Yeah, my blood pressure has been like creeping down postpartum, which I think is typical and good. Yeah. But before I deliver like weeks, like skirt, yeah, it was really scary. Like weeks 3435 36, I had really high blood pressure. And I wish I had like my midwife was saying, like, hey, you need to take it easy. You need to be on the couch, feet up, like reading a book. And I started my leave at 36 weeks, which I even felt a little bit bad about I think most people start later, even somebody was telling me she was like, and she didn't know, she didn't know what I was taking leave and she was like my she's gonna tell you like I took leave at 37 weeks. And she's like, I love doing it so early. And it was such a big impact. I really encourage you to do that. And I was kind of like, Oh, I'm leaving at 30 Like 36 Like even earlier than her like indulgent treat yourself, leave start date. And then I ended up delivering it 37 and a half weeks. And I wish I had I honestly I wish I had started at like 34 weeks and not been stressed out maybe would have helped with the preeclampsia and hypertension, which is really scary. Preeclampsia is the number one reason why women that were causing maternal mortality in the United States. And I think I would have qualified for even I think it would have cut into my maternity leave I qualified for like disability medical leave, but I didn't understand that. So I have kind of like, it's funny, like, I almost feel like I have more space. And I think it's probably different for everyone, I'm more space than I expected. Now. It's like, I don't nothing to do all day. I'm just like, you know, but I wish I had taken more time or something. I wish there was some some more space in pregnancy, because that was pretty rough. For meHelen  18:14listening to all this, like, it's so interesting, hearing all your different aspects of like, you leave. And I feel like I would have thought post baby, you're like, I don't know, it's quite interesting to hear that you're kind of you want that time back. And like I've not had any kids, I've been around like my sister having babies, my niece and everything. But one thing that I think is so clear, maybe in this conversation is like the cultural aspect of it in the sense of like, I'm coming from a British perspective where I know that for instance, you know, people take leave at 26 weeks, and then maternity leave is, is around 52 weeks. And then I know for instance, in Finland, they've just passed the law where each parents gets 69 days. And if you're a single parent, that means you get double. And actually I was actually reading that Estonia, of all countries has the best, like maternity leave. And actually at the bottom of this unit report, at the bottom of the list of maternity leave was the US. And it was basically saying that the US has the worst laws for maternity. And I think even it's to a point where like National paid leave is not even a thing. So I don't know, maybe maybe that particular factor is wrong, but that's what it said in the report. But I guess the point I'm making is there's a if no one's taking leave, and also the government and things like that are not encouraging that kind of aspect. I think it probably puts a lot of pressure on women to kind of essentially like you were just saying, well with you and your friend, you thought that what you saw that you were taking a lot of leave when actually in other countries you would be you would have already been on leave and you would have been encouraged to take leave. So do you feel like there is a different way in the US and is there And what would be a better way to kind of have that leave? Like because it doesn't necessarily mean that Finland or any of these countries are correct in how they do it? Is that a third way that we should be thinking about?Maia 20:12Yeah, it's an interesting question. And I actually think I mean, I like my job. So I'm 16 weeks of fully paid leave, and then I had right and then you have more, if you for medical or whatever. So I think I had another week and a half for medical leave. And so within the US, it's like, I feel like quite generous. And about as good as it gets. And that is supported by so there's the You're correct, that there's no federal law around maternity leave in the US. Instead, we have a actually horrible patchwork of different programs. And so my leave is 100%. Paid, right. But that is cobbled together between the Washington State Medical Leave short term disability and because I have disability insurance, fraud, it's all of these different programs, and even trying to shoehorn pregnancy into like this disability application I had to fill out was very awkward. And there's all these things. It's like, like, when did this start? And how much treatment do you need for this condition. And I was like, trying to fill out this form for pregnancy, it clearly didn't make sense like we're trying to create. So I have a very privileged position where it's like 16 weeks, it's really great. But it's good. There's no sort of official support. And that's just that's a really big tax, write even even for me who I think it's kind of like this is as good as it gets in the US. And still trying to figure out like, how to combine my salary with with all of the other pieces of the puzzle? I didn't and I deliberately did that answer your question, because I do not know, a better way to to orchestrate it. Unfortunately,Julie  22:02one thing that is interesting to me too, is just that Maia feels guilty for going back to work too early, like, oh, like maybe I shouldn't be checking my slack. Maybe I shouldn't be doing these things. I'm setting a bad example. But yet, we would also feel guilty for the opposite, too. So like, there's no women just make themselves feel guilty, no matter what choice they're making, it seems like so I point that out, because I relate the same way. Like I don't want to set a bad example. But I also don't want to like overexert myself, or like take away from the from the time with me and my baby or things like that. And there's other like the entire journey of pregnancy, I feel like there's a lot of things that you do or say, and there's a lot of guilt involved in a lot of those things. So it's not just necessarily even the work environment. It's just the whole process, and maybe just the process of being a woman in the first place.Laura  22:54I think the whole thing is, you know, then you like we're talking about pre partum. We've in these examples, which I think is I've thought a lot about that first trimester too, which is it is like, arguably the hardest trimester right? It sucks, you feel super sick. Even in a normal experience, I think I had as well like a pretty average experience, and it still sucked every afternoon, I felt like I was gonna, you know, just completely fall apart. And then you think about people who have go through fertility struggles to have to go they have a million doctor's appointments, they're on all these drugs. Not to mention sort of the whatever the emotional toll maybe as well. But there's just these other aspects to of just trying to get pregnant, that play into this that I think are really hard, where we all we acknowledges is kind of like postpartum X number of weeks or sort of saying like, that is what you get for yourself, or your family. And that's it. We don't really acknowledge other aspects of fertility, which I think is really hard. I also think it's hard to say like, as an employer, it is, it's really hard to like to be as generous as I think, like everyone should be right. It's hard to say 52 weeks. Sounds wonderful, like a true nightmare as a startup to have to deal with someone who's potentially out for 50 weeks. Did you do weeks? Especially because I think in the UK, at least you don't have to tell people when you're coming back. So you can be like, it might be 12 weeks or maybe 52 weeks, you can't really plan ahead and say okay, we're just gonna hire someone instead, whatever. So it's really hard. I don't like there's no great answers, because as a startup, what do you what do you suppose to do? It's really I think being generous in your policies only works for certain stages of of startups.Helen  24:41So I was actually reading like with the Finland example, they have like 164 days actually, they just passed a law in August. And but the thing about that is it can be shared between both parties. So for instance, you can decide you don't want to take any maternity and your husband wants to take all of them off the paternity or vice versa. And I think, because people's family structures are so different and unique, and it's not always just necessarily mom, dad or whatever, I think an aspect of where I mean, this is just me just pondering, but it feels like an aspect where people can be flexible in who takes it, because for instance, like you said, as a startup, it wouldn't be feasible, but perhaps your partner is in a different situation. And in the law, like I was saying, if you're a single parent, then it's it. They have, they have structures for that. And I think because we can all recognize that, like, a nuclear family isn't necessarily always going to be like, the data is working, and the man is sitting at home. And you know, I mean, maybe it is around like, us thinking as a society about how we can be more flexible on like, we know that there is a baby at home, who is going to look after it doesn't necessarily have to fall on the woman. And I think that's also where a lot of the pressure for women comes from where, you know, you're, you're kind of having that guilt, like Julie said, between home life and work life and which one you're growing. And, and even actually, with a friend of mine, who's got two young kids, that's the situation she was going through her kids are actually both at school age, but she was basically saying, does she take a job where she's paid well, but doesn't necessarily have to think about so much? Or does she take a job? And therefore she can kind of concentrate on her family more? Or does she take a job where it's going to be a challenge? And she's going to have to like, give it her thought process? But yeah, I don't know. It's a constant thing. But yeah, that's what I was thinking about. Maybe it's about restructuring how we see family, like restructuring how society shifts families? I don't know.Maia 26:39Well, the flexibility piece, I think, is really key there. And even when I think about right, like for me, right, first trimester was really hard. third trimester was really hard. Honestly, I feel so much better now. Because yes, I had to recover from giving birth and things like that. But I feel like myself, while when I was pregnant, like third trimester, I did not feel like myself, right. And I was like getting winded walking up the stairs. And just and I had acid reflux all of the time, which was horrible. And I would wake up in the middle of the night, like, just burning in the back of my throat, and I just had a miserable time. And so but it's not like that for everyone, right. And I have support here at home. And so there's some flexibility there. It reminds me actually, I have a friend who was working for a company that had great work life balance, right. And she was checking in code at like, 2am. And she got kind of chastised at work, it was like, You shouldn't be working until 2am. Like, do we need to take things off of your plate so that you're not working so hard? And how can we create like a better balance, but for her, she was like, Guys, this is when I work best. And this is what a good work life balance looks like. For me. She's like, I don't show up at work. She's like, I sleep until noon every day. And I don't show up into work until later. So that's just the hours that work for her. But we have this kind of like, contrived idea that work life balance means like you're only working from 9am to 5pm, when that's work life balance for some people, but not for everyone, because different people want to work different hours. And so I think what it comes down to like, there is a big element of trust, I think we want to say like, rates, I mean, so my leave is right, 16 weeks, it starts the day the baby is born. And I don't work at all during that time, and I am 100% paid, and then I 100% come back to work after that. Right? So like, it has to be really constrained and really explicit like that. But I just wonder if there's opportunities like well, what if we trusted people more? Could we build in more flexibility? Or what would that look like? Right? Would it be? You know, would it be more creativity in the options so that people can come up with what works for them? And like, how can we support everyone? It's like, what is an equitable way to support everyone, given that they're starting in different places, and they're all going to have a different journey? Right to Laura's point about fertility issues, which is, which is a whole nother game. It's like everyone has a different journey. They need different types of support in different amounts in different ways. How can we create that for them?Julie  29:14Something else that I think, you know, we focused a lot on the actual process of like work, pregnancy, and then right after pregnancy, but this continues, like once you have a kid, there's so many that you might have to take the kid to daycare, they get older, there might be soccer matches and everything. So I think while I'm glad that a lot of the talk around this both in our conversation and in like the National or world conversation is focused on the actual process of pregnancy and like right after, I think there's a lot to be said about just the flexibility that companies can put in to be more family friendly. Like an Oran, for instance. If you need to drop your kid off at daycare at 9am and you need to block off an hour on your calendar. Do do that like just block off your calendar. It's no big deal where cuz I feel like there's other jobs service field, something like that, where it becomes so much more of an issue or if you're, you have a nanny, and they're out sick, and you're gonna like, hey, like, I might be in and out of calls today, or I might need to take the day fully off totally fine. Like, don't worry about it. So I think that, you know, we need to keep the focus on the first part as well, but also shifted to the process of like, what happens after those 16 weeks that we get off to? It's not like, Oh, now everything's easy and chill again. And I can simply go back to work, no big deal, like your life has completely changed.Laura  30:32Yeah, I think the flexibility part, I mean, I think it's should be the case for anyone, right. And I think you've had this like, at least at alloy, but I think this is probably true, more broadly. Developers, I think I've always had this, like, we can stay up late and come, you know, we sleep till noon. And I think that's always been a little bit of a culture. And we've allowed that because they're very special creatures who need to be taken care of in the ways that they need to be taken care of. But I don't think we have that expectation to Maia's point for other other people. And what you're saying Julie's so erratic, once you become a parent, your schedules 100%, not your own, you are reliant on your kids schedules, school schedules, the nanny schedule, our nanny just texted us while we were doing this, that she's going to be running late today. So it's like, alright, well, now my, you know, my meetings are like, whatever are thrown off. And that's just how it works. And so you have to build in a lot more flexibility. And it is, I will always have my pediatricians appointments during the day, they cannot happen on weekends or nights. And so I have to be able to take off two hours during the day, go do that. And I'll get my work done at other points. And so I also don't like that sort of like you can't text or slack or whatever, on weekends. It's like, that's just not that is my time to catch up on things. And I think every company deals with it differently. We've struggled with it, where what do you what, how do you set expectations, and it's okay to do work nights or weekends, but then not expect a response from certain people on nights or weekends? Because we're not saying you have to work on weekends. So it's a little it's definitely hard, especially when you're making asynchronous decisions, like how do you set up that framework? I don't think we've solved it. I don't know that anyone has. But there is something around how you communicate and how you do things. asynchronously, I guess that either makes it work or makes it doesn't work? makes it not work?Maia  32:22Yeah, well, if that reminds you so when I've managed parents on my team, that synchronous versus asynchronous has always been the balance. If they say like, oh, this thing came up, right? Kids are sick, they're home from school, and I got to watch them or take care of them. It's like, Great, how can we shift your work from something that needs to be done during the specific hours, to something that you can do when the kids are in bed or when you have that free time? And sort of shifting around the work? I think Julie was talking about service workers, right? There's a huge element of privilege and all of this. And even it shows up in how Laura was talking about developers like developers, right are very highly paid very high status position in tech, which is a very high status industry. And so it's like, okay, for them, they can set their hours, right. And I think as you sort of like, take your way down the totem pole of status, people get less and less flexibility, right, such that, you know, if I'm for most service workers, so they don't have any paid parental leave. And they have zero flexibility in terms of I'm going to show up an hour late or a missus shift or other issues with childcare. And so that's, that does feel like all of this privilege and status that sort of imbues this whole conversation. And where are we focusing? Like, are we focusing on improving work life balance and support for families for the highest status members of our society or for the lowest status? Like where are we making improvements here is something that I think about a lot, too.Julie  33:51I mean, I can't even like I'm thinking back to my first trimester. And I can't imagine being like a bartender or a waitress or something during that because like the smells you're so exhausted from being on your feet all day, like you're not seeing your brain like pregnancy brain starts way earlier than I thought it actually did. Like I couldn't concentrate on things anymore. Like all like mindset, like all of this comes from a place of privilege, where every single one of us was able to have our pregnancy, while working remotely from home, I can lay in bed and take a zoom call if I want to, and my team's okay with it like that.Laura  34:26I did a lot of zoom calls at like, three o'clock in my bed with saltines in my mouth. And I still was like, very self pitying, I was like, this is awful, you know? And yeah, imagine having like a real job where you just show up in person, and be nice to people.Helen  34:43Yeah, I mean, if I was to ask a closing question, I think we've covered a lot here actually. It's been really, really interesting, I guess. I guess the question I have is, if there's one thing you could change basically about the way like motherhood or or maternity is treated, like what would it beLaura  34:59one that surprised me was how much I'd heard this sort of narrative around like, breast is best is no longer the message that we send to people. But I very much did not feel that in the hospital postpartum, like with our pediatrician with I've message that was given to me it was still breast as best and I did breastfeed I have a hard time believing that it is worth it for a lot of people. I think doing my own sort of crazy person research when I was born in maternity leave was like, I was led to believe it was just, you know, you have to do it. And then I'm sort of looking at it. I was like, man, it was something like 10% less chance of an ear infection in the first six months. I was like, who, like have an ear infection, then save me all this time. And again, I did do it because your beef, I don't know, for me, at least I felt pressure and it was sweet. There are like, I think to minus eight. There are moments that were really sweet. And I'm glad I got to experience it. And some days now I even miss it. But man, it is a time suck. And it means that you cannot have an equal relationship with your partner.Maia  36:13Well, as I say it's so it's a time suck at it. But I think we should be very explicit. It's expensive. I think people say that breastfeeding is free, but like, Laura's time, right is so valuable when you think about the amount of time that Laura and only Laura can breastfeed her son right or so like that. It's like it's outrageously expensive. And so maybe maybe we might still make the decision to do it. But I think we should acknowledge how much it's costing. It's like, look, this is like truly, truly, like our registry. And I mean similar what I really kind of idolized, I think breastfeeding before I was doing it. Now that I'm in it, right? I think, right? It's it there's parts of it that are that are very sweet, but it feels very there's parts of it that also feel very unromantic, and very, like, cool. This is just like this child is like literally sucking the life force out of me as like, and you're gonna be doing that quite a bit. So yeah, I just want to plus one that I was very surprised by that narrative as well.Laura  37:30I don't think I don't maybe this is people know better than I, I've never, I've never really been around babies until I had one. But I didn't realize like, it's like you feed them every two to three hours. In the beginning. At least that was the case for us. And but that means like from the beginning of breastfeeding. So if it takes 45 minutes to breastfeed, which it kind of does in the beginning, then you're like, doing basically an hour we get like an hour break, maybe an hour break, you're probably changing a diaper during whatever. You're definitely not like having a great time, our being productive. And I would just like it'd be like, Okay, now it's time again. And it was just like, Oh God, I keep like, I just did this. And I just ended up feeling so resentful. Like I don't even want this right now. That it kind of ruined some of the sweetness for me. I think it gets better. I stopped breastfeeding it. Maybe five months or something? I think it started on sparking. I think it gets better from what I understand because you're breastfeeding less and less over time as the kid gets older. But it's pretty brutal in the beginning.Helen  38:35I think a point you kind of like the underlining thing there is that goes back to like guilt. Because you like feel like you're not doing the right thing if you didn't breastfeed. So you feel like you have to everyone's been doing itJulie  38:49for you feel guilty, because you don't want to do it. And everyone talks about how special it is.Helen  38:53Right? Yeah, exactly. That's a really good point. Exactly. Gosh, she just could never win. Yeah. And there was there was a formula short. Well, I don't know if the formula shortage is too long. But that was quite a big deal. Right. A couple of months ago, there was a formulaJulie  39:07getting better, but it's still there. Yeah, because like, I sawHelen  39:11that the price of formula was going up people were selling like it on Facebook for ridiculous extortionate prices, of all things to kind of extort people for smart. What about you, Maia?Maia  39:25Here's what I would change. I would make it so that your baby shower happens after the baby's born? Because I mean, we that's not what you do you have a baby shower before, which makes some amount of sense, but I feel like I was very surprised by again like Laura, I hadn't spent that much time with babies. They actually don't need very much like diapers. I feel like they need diapers and that's it like your breastfeed. They don't need anything else that and everything else is a bunch of things that might make your life slightly nicer. Like having a diaper pail. I don't think I need it, but it is slightly nicer. Um, then, you know, my trash can I like live in a house in the suburbs, my trash can is right outside my front door. Like we can just take the diapers out, you know, once a day or twice a day. And so, but I feel like if you had the baby shower as you would have a better idea of what you need or what the baby is interested in or more of like a rolling baby shower. Right Like we've been, I mean, our baby loves, loves to be swaddled, I think almost all babies do. Also, a lot of the swaddles end up with spit up or pee or other bodily fluids on them. So we're like cruising through swaddle, so I bought a lot more swaddled, right. And if I had gotten to sort of experience that and trial that I would have been like, cool, I need a lot of swaddles on my, on my baby shower registry, and I don't need all of this other stuff. So that's something that that I would change as baby showers after the baby's born. Plus, you can drink that at your own pace, you can drink, right? You've got so much more, right? You feel better, you look better.Helen  40:59You do a rolling baby shower. Sounds good. Like, you could just have it up until the child's 18th. So everyone can just help you.Maia  41:07Well, that's kind of I mean, after I announced the baby on Twitter, like some people asked me for my registry, and so I did get that I was like, okay, cool. Like, you're getting the version change it. Yeah, where it's like the things that I know, that I want and need. And so that was actually kind of cool. But right, realistically, the baby shower had before that, and I didn't, you know, I've never been a mom, before, I had no idea what kind of stuff I needed. I was like, at this thing. And that thing, and, and I am using all of it, but some of it is much more valuable than others. And I would have had a better idea after the baby's here.Helen  41:39So I'm Nigerian and 12 days after a baby's born, we have a naming ceremony, which is essentially a baby shower. But like the thing about the naming ceremony is like you get different names for different people like your paternal grandfather, etc. So technically, I have like seven first names only use two though. But essentially, that's kind of a baby shower, because that's when I mean 12 days is not that much of a difference to like, I guess before but like, that's when they do it. Because like, people can party properly. Or ish. That's yeah, I guess. I don't know. Maybe it's so that they have a better idea of what they need. I'm not really sure about that aspect. But actually, it's 14. It's also nice, because people canLaura  42:17meet your mate. Yeah, exactly. Like you're knocking it all out atMaia  42:20one. Yeah, I'm actually going to do I that's, that's such a nice idea. I know, Asian cultures have 100 days party, right? So when the baby is 100 days old. And it's sort of it's sort of like that's when we celebrate the baby being born, right? Because infant mortality has historically been really high. And it's like if you make it through the first 100 days, right, you're like, good to go. And they do a naming ceremony, Anna, and a couple of different things. So I was going to kind of co op part of that or maybe do like a graduation from fourth trimester, which is really about the same time party and do a couple of different things that I think it just just with my my my family. But that's cool to hear, right that Nigeria does the 12 days party, because it's very much in line with the timeline that I think would be really useful for for getting support from from your family. I also think when there's a baby shower, you only get stuff for the baby. My priority list for postpartum would be number one is diapers. Number two through 10 would be things to support the mom like, or like, that's how I felt. Yeah, like so much. So it's like allLaura  43:29my baby gifts for people now or like massage. It's just like, all the baby stuff is like you can either it's hand me downs, or you put on your restaurant or you buy it later or who cares?Maia  43:38Yeah, who cares? Used onesies or whatever, like, it doesn't matter. But like, yeah, stuff for Mom is, is critical and so much more important.Laura  43:48I agree. All my baby gifts are our mom gifts at this point, because I'm like, Who can I just like that? So yeah, I did, at some point prioritize myself. And I was like, this was gonna be better for the baby too. But like, I'm the one who's just been through something horrific.Julie  44:03I should have had this conversation last week. So I could have made a quick changes on my baby registry stuff.Laura  44:09Yeah, yeah, we've done normalize that though, because I think it would be a little odd if you went on to register and it was all like, facial notes,Maia  44:16massage or even I was like, I don't know, can I put like nipple ointment on my baby registry? Like, is that a normal thing? Or is that a weird thatHelen  44:23seems like that seems like that makes sense. I'm sorry. I feel like if I saw nipple Reutemann I'd be like, Well, yeah, fad. She's breastfeeding. Yeah, but that seems vaginal ice packs. high waisted underwear,Maia  44:36you know, diapers I alwaysLaura  44:37you know those. That's my other gift for a C section. People I have a C section like buy get the height. Just get the giant underwear. It's always asMaia  44:45high as they go. It's what you want.Laura  44:47I still wear it. I love it. Yeah.Julie  44:48Oh, man. Well, on that note, this was an amazing conversation. I really appreciate it you guys, you know validated a lot of the things that you know I'm going through and we It'll be going through very soon. With the breastfeeding, you know, I kind of my goal is to do 5050 Like 50% formula 50% Breastfeeding so that I'm not spending as much time doing it, but I don't have the guilt of not doing it all.Laura  45:13You break the seal and formula early like you just we had to because he worked, couldn't get enough food early. And it was it was a blast. I was like really emotional about it in the hospital and then being a great thing because I felt less pressure than it was like he's already had formula. If we've ruined him. He's already ruined. So that's fine.Julie  45:31All the things I have to look forward to in about 10 weeks crazy.Laura  45:35Crying constantly about your target order. I'll literallyJulie  45:39be like super hormonal bag. I'm just gonna go back and listen to this podcast to make me feel better about what I'm going throughLaura  45:44such a wild experience.Julie  45:47Well, thank you so much for joining you guys. This was super helpful. Helen, Did we scare you away from motherhood? Do you feel better about it? Potentially? What's your vibe from the other point? Do you know? Okay,Helen  45:58number one, I think has been really educational. Like that's what I would say that's how I would describe this. But also like, I've always been one of those people who's wanted maybe because I had a nice, so young, like, I became an auntie when I was like 15. So I mean, she's made she's like, she's like 11 now. And we wish she was born on my 16th birthday as well. So it was quite like I didn't know there was something really, really there. And so I don't know, like I've always been around babies. Like my friends have babies, all that sort of stuff. And I like to live vicariously through people. I don't want a child right now. So I love to babysit. I love to hang out with babies. I just think like oh, but then I love that I don't have one. But no, it didn't put me off it just educated me on what to expect when I expect but no time soon.Laura  46:45I really hope we didn't scare you away Julie are about to enter the Abyss but it's it's in my eyes really truly in it. And good for you for doing one thing every day. I think I did zero things for most days for a long time. But man now like, it gets so much better.Julie  47:02So much better. Yeah, I'm looking forward to those fun times.Laura  47:05I think like four to six months. I was like, Okay, this is actually fun. I could doJulie  47:09right around the end of that. fourth trimester.Laura  47:12Yeah. Yep, that's a real thing.Julie  47:16It's appropriate that I can hear your child in the background. Children. That shouldn't be the outro music Yeah, beyond 2%Helen  47:29Wow, what an incredible episode to start the beyond 2% series. So next episode is stock girl summer, which is something I'm not only passionate about. But I think it's so important. We'll be discussing all things investing, if gender matters in this topic, and honestly where to begin because honestly, it can be very intimidating. Tune in next month to have a listen Get full access to This Week in Fintech at thisweekinfintech.substack.com/subscribe

Nick deWilde is a Product Marketing Principal at Guild Education. Guild is a fast-growing startup that partners with Fortune 500 employers. Guild unlocks opportunities for America's workforce via education and upskilling.Nick also runs his newsletter, The Jungle Gym. The Jungle Gym helps readers build a more fulfilling career that integrates work and life. Before working at Guild, Nick earned his MBA from Stanford Business School, and was a Managing Partner at Tradecraft.Nick and I talk about his relationship with Twitter, and how social media can both serve you, and be a challenge. We talk about individual brands and growing a platform. Nick also shares his thoughts about marketing yourself as an individual, and we discuss how growing an audience plays into your career.In this episode, you'll learn: Building an audience while working full-time Three reasons people start newsletters What to do when your follower count hits a plateau Links & Resources Morning Brew Fastly Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success Julian Shapiro Sahil Bloom Dickie Bush Medium Tiago Forte Building a Second Brain David Perell Write of Passage Tradecraft Guild Hacker news John Lee Dumas Packy McCormick Mario Gabriele Seth Godin Rachel Carlson On Deck Gong Matt Ragland Charli Prangley The Nathan Barry Show, featuring Kimberly Brooks Harry Stebbings The Twenty Minute VC Isa Adney Liz Fosslien, No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work Discord Reddit Pallet Craft + Commerce ConvertKit Enough Ryan Holiday James Clear Marie Forleo Ramit Sethi Nick deWilde's Links Follow Nick on Twitter Nick's newsletter, The Jungle Gym To tweet, or not to tweet Episode Transcript[00:00:00] Nick:I've tried to do things in my writing where my employer benefits from them. I talk about work a lot, and whenever I talk about hiring, I mention Gild is hiring. There are things I do to just try to make sure that it still feels worth the company's while.[00:00:25] Nathan:In this episode, I talk to Nick deWilde, who writes a popular newsletter called The Jungle Gym. He's got a background in product and growth, and all these things from the startup world. I just love the approach that he's taken to writing these days.We talk about growing as newsletter. We talk about his interesting relationship with Twitter and social media. How it can really serve you and be this great thing, and then it can also be challenging. Maybe you're spending too much time on it, or time on it in a way that's not actually serving you or benefiting you.We talk about the rise of individual brands being used to grow a platform. It's something I've been thinking a lot about, watching Morning Brew and Fastly, and some of these other companies do it. It's just interesting whether you're marketing as a company or an individual. It's just a good conversation. We also talk about audience, and just how that plays into your career.He recently made the switch from a full-time role, to doing more audience-based business stuff. He was just in the middle of that journey. So, it's a fun place and time to catch up in the conversation.Nick, welcome to the show.[00:01:33] Nick:Hey, thanks for having me, Nathan.[00:01:35] Nathan:I want to start on this article you have, that I like a lot, called, “To tweet, or not to tweet,” That got you ahead. I also happened to go to the Shakespeare festival recently, and watched them do “The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged.”So, you know, I could probably pull off a good, to[00:01:50] Nick:Nice.[00:01:51] Nathan:Be or not to be speech right now. It's in my head because I think about all the wonderful things that Twitter and an audience beyond that does for me. Then also the negative sides of it. So maybe we dive into that, but I'd also love to hear what sparked you diving in and building an audience.[00:02:11] Nick:Yeah, I'm so conflicted on Twitter, and audience building in general. Like anything, I imagine there's a fair number of people who you talked to, who are in the writing community, who feel that way. On the one hand, Twitter does so many things for me. Especially over the past couple of years.As we've been in lockdown, lives have moved online. I have met and made friends with so many amazing people through Twitter that I wouldn't have met otherwise. Same with the newsletter, but Twitter is a little bit easier to build those relationships.Twitter has definitely helped grow my bank account. So, there are clearly things that being online and participating in the online world really does for you that are valuable.I think, building an audience is super valuable.When I think about the future of work, and what will be automated and what won't be, I really think that human beings, our greatest strength that is the hardest to copy is our ability to influence other people. This really comes from some of the thinking of author Joseph Heinrich, who looked at what is the secret of human success.It's cultural learning. It's our ability to essentially watch what other people do, and mimic them. We're really good at detecting what is a real human and what's not, and who's someone prestigious that we should learn from, and who isn't.I think that audience building is super valuable. So, even though I don't love the activity of building an audience, I have gotten a lot of value out of it, and I see the value in it. So, I very much come from a conflicted spot in this. I'm very impressed by people like Julian, and Sahil, and Dickie Bush, who have grown amazing audiences.Some days I aspire to 10X my audience, and some days I'm just like, please let me be a monk and live in seclusion.[00:04:20] Nathan:Well? Okay. So I had a Twitter thread last week that I did It was on company culture for remote teams, and I've had some that like take off and do well before, but this was like 1300 retweets, like almost a million impressions, a level of taking off. And on one hand I was like, this is amazing.And the other, I like checked the notifications and the replies so many times, and it was fascinating watching it go from like my circle to the next circle, out to the next circle out. And like, we're still in like positive replies, happy. Oh, build on it, refine it. And then like the one circle past that, which it took about, let's say 12 to 18 hours to get to[00:05:06] Nick:Yeah[00:05:06] Nathan:And that was the. This guy's an idiot. I'd never want to work at that company. you know, like all like the, the haters and the non from there, and then it like dies out and this is weird arc of his, we should graph it, but it just made me think of, is this something that I want to do and want, had I added thousands of Twitter followers?I think I could recreate it. Like maybe one in five attempts would like hit that big. Who knows. but I wrestle with the exact question of like, do I want this?[00:05:36] Nick:You and you're, you're just, you're like jacked up on dopamine. You're like, you're, you're sort of you're you, you, you start just imagining all the good things that will come from this. I should be doing this all the time. Like, you know, I, I mean, I think it's, it's sort of pre progressive problems, right?Like, like there's, there's the problem of like having a smaller audience and like putting something out into the ether and then, this, this kind of, getting no response, right. That, that, that's the first thing that, that actually like most people kind of deal with. Right. And, and, and that's, that's a weird thing because it's like, it's like, you're, you're then judging the quality of your ideas based on the ability of, based on basically your, your audience's response and, and realizing like, you're not actually talking to your audience, you're talking to.Subsection that Twitter has decided that you can talk to at that specific point in time. And so, and then you're basically judging your own ideas based off that. And if, if your idea is like, I think, I think when you hit a certain bar of audience, like you can, you can share ideas that are, pretty complex and nuanced and like you'll, you'll find some, some sort of interest for it and it has a potential to take off, but like there there's stuff where if it's kind of interesting and nuanced there, isn't really kind of a built in audience for it.And people don't really have the time to like always dig in and kind of engage and try to like, find what's at the kernel of, it's why I like newsletters a lot more than I like tweeting. But, but, but, but I think, I think what you're, you know, then there's, there's, there's the problem where once you get big enough, like you're now being your ideas are being put in front of a bunch of people who like you didn't intend them for.And those people for some reason have decided to invite into their lives, like conflict with strangers on the internet, because[00:07:19] Nathan:That's like a primary goal,[00:07:21] Nick:Right, right. It's like, it's it. It's what gives them a great day. Right. And, and, and so, so yeah, it's, it's such a weird thing. And so I, like, I mean, I, I think about this with like, I equate Twitter, often to, to kind of, like refined sugar, right.With refined sugar, right. It's it's, it's what we call supernormal stimuli. Right. It, it, it, or super, super normal stimulus. and, and what that is, is basically something that like replaces some natural, like evolutionary desire you have with something kind of artificial that just sends your brain on like overdrive seeking that thing, seeking that thing over and over.And, and that is. That's what Twitter is. It's, it's, it's refined status instead of refined sugar. And that refined status is like, it just, it takes this thing that you normally do, which is like seek, prestige from your, your tribal group, which was a really good thing to do to make sure that you, you know, ate a good meal.And it, and it puts that into, into this crazy overdrive and it like, it centers your brain around it, and it's, it's such a, it's a really powerful thing. And so I, you know, again, right, it's like, there's all these great gifts that come from Twitter and then there's, then there are all these drawbacks and it's, it's almost like perfect equilibrium of, should you do it or should you not?And I don't begrudge anyone either way for their decision.[00:08:46] Nathan:What I always wonder is if I could only have the benefits, like, is there a way let's say that you don't doom scroll Twitter with the latest news and whatever's going wrong, or whatever, latest Twitter fight there is. Maybe you do in a separate app publish these like smart tweets or brilliant threads that are going to get all this attention.And you do one of those every day, but then like you jump in an hour later and respond to a bunch of comments and then like the next day you do it again for 30 minutes and then like, that's it. And you just bat, like, there is this world where you could own Twitter rather than Twitter owning you, but like, are you capable of it?Do you have the self-discipline to pull that off?[00:09:33] Nick:Totally. And, and I, and I think, I think like, you know, I I've talked, I think Julian about this and I think he uses like tweet deck for it. And I think, I think there are ways you can do it. Right. I like for awhile, I was good at like, I would tweet in the morning and then I would like uninstalled the app off my phone.So I wouldn't look at it. and like, there are things that you can do. it's just, it's just really hard because I think to some degree what Twitter, rewards, especially when, when you're on the audience building path. Right. I think when you're like, tens of thousand or hundreds of thousands of followers, you, you actually have a lot more leeway to do what you want.Because, because like, you're just, it's likely that your tweets will work, but like when you're building your ions, there's, there's something that like, it's sort of like, there's a Turing test that's happening, right. People are sort of looking, are you an engaged human being? Cause I I've I've I knew some people who sort of, they, they schedule and preplan all their tweets and like, and to some degree they, they just, they don't hit, they don't work because it doesn't feel real time.They're responding in real time. So like[00:10:35] Nathan:Out of pace. You're out of touch with what's happening with.[00:10:38] Nick:Exactly And so, and so it's, it's sort of, Twitter's kind of like looking for these weird signs of life. So I think it's, I think it's doable. There, there must be some way to do this, but, it's tough. I think the, the other, the other thing that Twitter did to me, that I, disliked is, it makes me feel like my relationships are very transactional because you have these likes retweets, and like these, these, Very clear, like signals of engagement.You, you start to like, or I start to like, to like keep score. Right. And, and I, and I don't, I like, I don't do that anywhere else in life. I think a good, like obviously good relationships tend to start out transactional and then like, they, you kind of forget what the transactions are and like that, that's what creates a close friendship where like, look like you may have paid from the last time I paid for you this time.It doesn't really matter anymore because we transacted so many times, but, but Twitter, for some reason, the score always feels out there. And, and so that was, that's really been like a little bit of a red flag to me. And I, I I try to keep a generous mindset and a generous spirit on Twitter, but I find it harder than in real life.[00:11:52] Nathan:That makes sense to me. So maybe taking a step back, and maybe we'll wrestle with some of these, like to grow an audience or not to grow an audience questions[00:12:00] Nick:Sure[00:12:02] Nathan:What was the thing that, sparked for you? I'm like, I'm going to go start a sub stack. I'm going to actively work to build an audience.[00:12:10] Nick:Yeah, I, so I was writing on, on medium starting in like 2013, maybe. Um and and really got a lot out of it. I, I started my career out as a, as a screenwriter, so I was planning to go into the TV industry and like, and, and for, you know, for, for many reasons, found that to be, a path where like, you didn't really control your destiny.I saw I met lots of, you know, mid thirties, you know, production assistants who were slightly bitter. And then, so I just kind of realized like, this, this wasn't exactly a good path, for me. And so, but I, I wanted to kind of keep that like, that creativity, that like interaction with an audience, I think, you know, it, it was.And found that in writing. And so And so started publishing on medium. Um we was a great experience in terms of how quick it was to publish, but like the distribution of publishing a medium sucks, right? Like, you're you you, you publish ones and then like you spam all your friends and like, you're, you're just, you're working super hard to like push this thing and promote it.And I was like, there's gotta be some way that's a little bit easier. and so I actually ended up in, I think I took, I took Tiago Forte is building a second brain course that kind of like, magically grandfathered me in somehow to like David Pearl's first um uh cohort or Write of Passage, which was awesome And like, I would say, like, I took a lot out of that, but like the biggest thing was, was like start a newsletter. and so basically I started out, I think I started out with a review even. but but anyway like started publishing. Opted in when I knew onto the email list, which I'm sure they, they may or may not appreciate it, but this is before there were tons of sales tax out.And so I felt like it wasn't, it wasn't that crazy. I probably wouldn't have done that in like 20, 20, but, but w really wanted like a way to like, continually kind of interact with my audience without having to worry about like, you know, just, just kind of constantly doing the heavy promotion work.Um now that's because I now you know posts just as a part of medium but but at least there's those sort of a built in audience that kind of grows over time that you kind of keep with you. and, and so. doing that, it was kind of it's kind of a mix of for work and for life.I, I was, at the time, the managing partner of a, of a, uh immersive education program called Tradecraft. And like we, we would help people make sort of complex career transitions into the startup world. And and so a lot of what I was writing was kind of about that. It was about careers. but it also tied in with, with kind of deep interests.It was sort of why I took the role in the first place. and, and what I found when I, when I moved from Tradecraft over to Guild was like that kind of nicely traveled with me. and, and I think there's, there's something, something really nice about a newsletter, being a kind of an appendage to your career, where, like it expands your professional identity to a certain degree.You, you can become a little bit more than just your job, especially working for, like, like a single individual company, especially if you're, if, if the company is larger you, have to deal with a lot of like coordination challenges. there there's a lot of bureaucracy that happens at a company And one of the nice things about having a newsletter is you are in charge of it. It's like you're the CEO of it. the product ships, when you choose to ship it and you have complete editorial say over it, and the distribution that you put into it is what you get out of it. And and there's something really nice about that.It helped me kind of identify as a person who who, ships a lot, even when, sometimes, you know, you know, you you have to work on something at at work that takes a long time.[00:16:12] Nathan:Have you found a dress core even a strong correlation between the effort that you put in to your newsletter and your audience growth and the results that you get out, or does it feel like a more tenuous connection?[00:16:24] Nick:I think, I think there is a pretty good, like w w when I think a post is going to really hit it usually does and so I would say like, like when I put effort into, into writing something really good, I think usually it meets it meets or exceeds my expectations. And when, and when I feel like something is, I'm kind of honing in on, on a, on a post, like usually I get that too.So I think what, what can also happen. You know, sometimes you post something to hacker news and it turns out it's somehow on the front page and like that your audience growth spikes, or like you get featured in someone else's newsletter and your audience grows spikes. And like, there there's a lot of activities that like, you know, I'm not doing directly to promote it, but but it just sort of, um you know, happens in a nice way.And so that's happened, you know, more than a few times and like, that's a pretty neat thing, but like, I think to some degree that comes from just trying a lot of different things and then like, there's sort of like a, a second order effect of some of those things really, you know, hitting it off.[00:17:28] Nathan:Yeah, I think that's that's right. I knew in the early days of starting my newsletter, I felt a strong correlation between what I was working on and like the effort that I put in and the results that I got out, been been interested well at the time I do like a really epic blog post where I put of effort, you know, we're kind of the, for, you know, off and on for weeks or months and like really a hundred and get friends to read it, all of that.Those pretty much always do really well. But what I'm surprised by is sometimes the throwaway posts really, throwing it. Like, it's a simple idea that you flushed out into a post and you were. Hey, it's Tuesday. I got to get something out. Like it's sort of in that[00:18:09] Nick:Totally[00:18:09] Nathan:Sometimes those really hit.Sometimes they actually resonate. Have you had some of those that were like easy easy ones ones that hit?[00:18:18] Nick:So the, publishing cadence is I do, I do two, two posts a month and one a and it used to be, it used to be one post a month. And then I basically separated out into two. Cause I realized like it was too much to kind of condense into, into one post. And like, I wasn't getting the. The, as many eyeballs on like the second half, so decide to pull them apart.One is kind of one big essay. And the second is a, is is of like a, a But I think of it as like, as like I do pretty deep them. So it's actually of like a, here's what this is about. And a little bit more like, here's what this made me think about.And And, the, the essay is, I always spend a good amount of time on them. or at least this year I've spent a good amount time[00:19:05] Nathan:On all of them two hours, 20 hours, 200 hours?[00:19:11] Nick:2020 is probably probably closest. a really slow writer. And so, and so, like, I, I do, I mean, I like like write and like re-edit the first paragraph, 20 onto the next And likeI don't either Yeah The the the the the, the, top of the like, it's like a then like the last paragraph gets like one glance and I'm like, God, get this thing from Um don't and I I that is the wrong thing to do, yet, somehow I do that anyway. but, but, so, so those, those posts, they tend to get, of. You know, time and care. and then what'll happen is sometimes the, the ones that are like the link roundups, like will, will be very spiky.And I I'll spend, you know, that's, that's a little bit more like a three hour thing, um or four hours or something like that. and yeah, so, and then, and then I had, I had a, a, something that I was doing when I was interviewing folks, I call it the key ring where it was like a pretty structured interview that I would do where I asked the same questions over and over again.That was, that was fun. It, it, it started taking a long time to like do the back and forth. And so I'm putting that on pause for the moment. I may pick it back up again. those are fun just cause you can, you can feature someone that, that you like and get a chance to just and hang out It's kinda like[00:20:40] Nathan:Yeah. Those are always interesting to me. Cause I, I think about that on this podcast of asking the same questions, which I know New, I riff on the questions too or elementBut if you did, in theory, if you're like, did you grow from a hundred subscribers to a thousand subscribers in your newsletter?And you asked that to every single person, then you could compile that over 40 episodes or 40 newsletters or whatever. like, Hey, here's a guide on how to do it. And like, I pulled it from a whole bunch of sources. So that part of like standardized questions intrigues me. don't love it the live, know, version of a or newsletter where it's like, okay, it's too formulaic.People have done super well with us formulaic, like, John Lee Dumas, who did the Podcast entrepreneur on fire. Like he went all out. He was like, this will be 20 minute episodes, we're going to of release one a day, seven days a week and like works for him. I have no desire to do that, you[00:21:36] Nick:Totally[00:21:38] Nathan:Yeah, I don't know. you think about the repurposing side of content like that, or is it more just about the, the upfront.[00:21:45] Nick:I'm at repurposing and, and I, it's something that I, have like a psychological hangup about it. Like I always kind of feel like I need to be just like moving on to the next thing. The next thing, like I've, I've tried like going back and like, be like, oh, I should mind this thing for some, some tweets.And it always feels weird to do. And like, I want to write my Roundup, but I think, I think what I've just recognized as. Another reason why I write the newsletter is like, I want an excuse to have interesting new thoughts each month. I want essentially a performance, right. Where like, we're like, there is a moment where like, if I, if I hadn't been like reading and thinking each month, like, there is a moment that it will, that I will be embarrassed if I don't do that.And like that, that's the way I think about the newsletter. And so, and so repurposing content would be something it's almost like an admission of defeat. which, which I don't is is other people should think but that's an area of my head. And so, and so I think it just like, I need to be onto doing the next thing.There's a bunch of stuff where like, I would love to, I love ways to use the archives, my newsletter better. I think actually like stuff like this is a fun way to do it. Like through a articles and I was like, oh, there's there's stuff I can, I can reference from those. Um but it's it's, it's tough.[00:23:05] Nathan:That makes sense. Okay. So let's talk cadence for a second because this is one of the most popular, common, I don't know, questions that I get from people starting newsletters. Is there, like it should be daily right now, weekly, monthly, twice a month. Can I just do quarterly? Can I grow an audience for the quarterly newsletter?You've settled on twice a month? What was the thought that went into that? And, and what's your present cons on, on that particular.[00:23:33] Nick:I think. I mean, one of the weird things, which I'm like, I don't think it's just me, but like, like, it was like, when you, when you release a newsletter issue, like you naturally lose subscribers, but like, like, like people are reminded that like, they're like, know you have yeah You have keys to their inbox and they're like, like, why why did I let this And so and so like and so ideally like that, you know what I mean, then that's gonna have a rude awakening for, I think, I think people who are like, oh, this, this thing just goes on autopilot. but, but you need something that like is going to generate more new subscribers than it will lose subscribers because I'm a slow writer, like my, my ability to write something that I think is going to generate new subscribers is like twice a month. And like, and, and, if, and if I was, you know, Paki and Mario there, I don't know how fast they are, but like they are, they're dedicated.They can crank out some ungodly number of words, you know, once a week, twice a week, which is super impressive. And I think if I was them, I would do that. And like, you know, I, I love still like Seth Godin writes, like, you know, I feel like he writes every day. And I think so I think if you're, if you're capable of doing that, like, and, and, and doesn't lose subscribers, then like do it and set an appointment.And I think all those things are really nice, but for me, it's like, how do I make sure that like, one it's kinda, it's kinda manageable with a, with like a full-time job, which is the way I've been doing it for a long time. Right. and need to, I think, um you know, there, there are, there are weirdnesses of having a newsletter, any full-time job at the same time.And one of those is like, You are publishing, like if your hobby was sea kayaking, right? Like, like you could do that with no one knowing that you were doing it. Right. And like, and, and there's, there's nothing weird about that. Or like running a marathon or something like that. like it's clearly the thing you're doing on the side, writing a newsletter is like, it's it's knowledge work that is like akin to, to, type of work that you might do in an office Right Coding[00:25:41] Nathan:Marketing copywriting, whatever your your day job[00:25:44] Nick:A hundred percent. And like, and like, if you're putting that out on LinkedIn, like, you know, your managers managers are seeing it and like, and so there's, there's just like, like doing that every day would be, a weird would feel weird to me even if, even if no one else felt weird about and so, and so I feel like twice a month it feels, feels good to me.It's also, it also just like keeps me excited to keep, to keep at it versus making feel like it's like a daily or weekly chore. And I have like a day off, I have a week off in between so that I can like, you know, spend the weekend, not writing if I want to, which is nice.[00:26:23] Nathan:Yeah. I like the idea of timing it to your, like your cadence as a writer. What advice would you have to someone who's in that position of, building audience on the side there, maybe they're doing it secretly at first where they're like awkward about it's this may maybe self promotional, but, but at some point, if you get to any scale right. will either you'll tell people at work about it or they'll find out about it in some way, hopefully be supportive, but I don't know. What advice do you give to someone who's in that[00:26:54] Nick:First, acknowledge that there is weirdness to it. Like there, are, like there are inherent trade-offs to everything and like, and like there is there's weirdness and if, and if you're your, like the, the company I've been working for Guild, like they, like everyone has been more than supportive at it, but, of the, the work and like, but I still have a weird complex about it.You know, I think part of the reason I ended up getting the job was because of, because of the newsletter, some of the stuff I publish of like, you know, shaped our marketing strategy. So there were things where like, I've tried to do things in my writing where my employer benefits from them.Like, you know, whenever I talk about work a lot and whenever I talk about hiring, I mentioned Guild's hiring, Like there, there are, there are things that I do to just try to like, make sure that it still feels worth the company's Weill. And also, like, I think, I think I try to bring in ID.Like I try to have ideas that are useful to what I do at work. so I I wrote this, this piece on, platform branding, which was all about, companies that essentially used their employees to build audiences that, also benefit the companyAnd like, you know, we, ended up using that strategy at Guild which, which was, which was cool.And like that ended up being the strategy doc to some degree, around it, which was cool. And so so so, there's there, there's like ways that you can. think um you bring that in that that are, that valuable. And so I try to sort of look for those things. I, but I think, you know, acknowledged right.That there's, good writing is vulnerable and sometimes it's weird to be vulnerable in front of your colleagues. and, and like it's naturally an attention seeking activity. And if like, if like there's someone at work feels weird about you, like, will be, you know, something that they can talk about, the proverbial water cooler about like, you know, why, why you're not doing your job and you're, you're off writing these letters So so there's there there's weirdness, but like, I think if you can make, if you can allow your company to benefit from the audience you are growing, I think that tends to be a pretty good fit[00:29:12] Nathan:What that made me think of is basically it's going to accelerate or, magnify, whatever someone already thinks of you. So for example, if someone already thinks, like, I don't know, next kind of. he just doesn't contribute that much. Like is he even working half the time then if they publishing once a week, then they're like, see proof of what I already thought. if like the executive at the company is like, Nick is one of the best hires we've ever made. Oh. And look now he's like publishing and rhinos. Like he's a thought leader as well. Like whatever they think is just going to accelerate more. And so maybe it's looking what reputation you already have.[00:29:51] Nick:A hundred percent and it's like, it's like, I mean, the way I see it, and this is kind of what I wrote about in the platform, branding thing is like, I actually think that, having a bunch of employees who are, in a creator type role, um it's like underdeveloped marketing channel. Like you essentially, you have these people who have.Hey, like, I'm going to, going to take my scarcest asset my time give it to this company. and and and now I'm going to build relationships with, with all of these thousands of people who, who listen to these ideas and like, and like that sort of just gives positive energy to the company. So, so actually, like when you compare it, even to like a, a side project that you're coding nights and weekends, I actually think, I think companies should be really supportive of, of, of kind of audience building on the side because it really can benefit them but, but people naturally have a, there's there's a weird feeling about it. And so, and so you have to like, especially as a company, You know, like our, our CEO is, is, is really good at building her own audience on LinkedIn. And I think that gives everyone else some permission to like, you know write vulnerable and things like that.So I think, but I think it, it is, it is a really important thing to be able to have this kind of a group of people who are increasing the company's sort of surface area in Serendip.[00:31:23] Nathan:Yep. I like that. I've wondered about doing something like that for ConvertKit. We have a handful of people on the team who are very prolific creators, for the two myself and then, our creative director, Charlie, frankly, she has like followers on YouTube and a popular channel and all of that.There's a handful of other people who have podcasts and are, are active on Twitter. Our product managers are quite active when you talk to them about things related to ConvertKit, you know, they're like active with customers, but I haven't, or we haven't taken this approach like fast or on deck, or I'm trying to think who else does it, but, but these companies where they're like, okay, there's 15 of us and we're all going to.Become Twitter famous, you know, or start our thing and we'll all drive back. Is it a strategy that you think works well?[00:32:17] Nick:The, the best example of this actually think is, I think on-deck did it, did it really has done it really well on Twitter Um I think gong is actually probably my favorite example. Um especially from a B2B what they do is like is all of their salespeople are out there, like posting content on LinkedIn, but it's not like how great gong is.Almost has nothing to do with gum. It's like you know, an a I'm I'm I'm grinding today. Can't wait to get off for the weekend. It's like, it's like, it, it, it sort of, embodying kind of this, this, like this, the sales lifestyle. Right. And, and, and the, the engagement they get is, is crazy.Right. And like, and that, the thing is, if, so, so there's sort of like, there's kind of like, you can build lifestyle influencers among your employees Right But you can also. Like this idea of building up someone who is, who is a, I know this is kind of a gross word, but thought leader in the, in the, space you're, you're excited about.People kind of come to them, they build affinity with them. And I think you, you can build individuals as marketing channels where like starts out where like someone's reading your posts on LinkedIn. maybe that person hosts a, a kind of invite only webinar for, for the people who engage most of them on LinkedIn.So, so then you're building sort of deeper affinity towards that person. And, and as, as you go down the sales funnel um like marketing and sales, you actually transfer that affinity over to the company as, as like they get into the sale process. from kind of a B2B side, but like, I think you can do it also from a B to C.[00:33:49] Nathan:Do you think that a company like gone. Hired people are good at that and encouraged it, or do you think they like had the people that they hired and said like, okay everyone, this is now what we're doing. a playbook, here's best practices. Here's a slack channel where you can talk about what's working.What's not, but like we're this now. Get on board.[00:34:11] Nick:This is, would be a hundred percent pure speculation. What is, is someone at gong started doing this one of their salespeople and started crushing it. And they're, you know, director of marketing was smart enough to. Hey could be doing a lot like, and B, because it's their salespeople who do it, right.A natural incentive to do it. And so, you know, I would imagine they probably brought on a copywriter and said, Hey, if you need help, you know, crafting these posts, like you can do that It's just, it's such a, it's such a virtuous right? It's like, it's like, because of the affinity you build with these individuals it translates to the company.And like it just sends it a bat signal out to other people who are like that, who want to build audiences, that like the company will help you do that. And they will be supportive. And like, and again, if we imagine that like, they're like audience is this long-term career mode, it's just like, it's such a great gift.You can give to your employees for them to leave with like you know, like you leave ConvertKit and you have, you know, a hundred thousand subscribers or 10,000 it's like, or whatever. Right. It's, it's, it's as much of a gift as like the salary you're giving them. It's just, we don't think of it that way.Cause it's, it's a weird thing to think about getting. From your company[00:35:27] Nathan:Yeah. I mean, that's how we've handled it in that we're very in favor of side projects. We want everyone who wants to, like, we're not gonna force it on. But to have a way to be a, a creator on the, on the side and to have some actual reason to use ConvertKit as a customer. Because it's so different when you're the product and like clicking through the happy path to test something and you're like, Hey guys, it works.Then some customers like this is really frustrating. and so that, like, it's a very different, different, I think that it's just interesting. You're absolutely right about people with that. Like, Matt Reglan, who's been on this show before he was at ConvertKit for years. joined when we were like 20,000 a month in revenues like that. when he eventually moved on to his nets, next thing, you know, he built an, a YouTube audience to like 10,000 subscribers at that point. And that was a whole thing that he'd done a lot with skills he learned at ConvertKit a lot with, you know, our creative director, Charlie, like promoting him and just, all right. But like, it still happens even we've got 70 people on the team and we're talking like six are active in this way. I just wonder how much to encourage it versus how much to just say like, Hey, this is an option if you want it, but like you don't push it any more than that[00:36:51] Nick:I mean, I think one of the interesting things, when you think about like the creator economy is like, I think the creator economy can support a lot of people, but the the challenge is like when you're deciding, should I follow this person? there aren't very good moats in the creator economy. And so and so one of the.Few moats you can have is like companies that you've worked for giving you this brand halo. Right And so, and, and, brand from your company sort of, it says this person might be a little more worth following because someone chose them now, does that true You know, don't think so, but like, it at least sends this signal.And so I think, one, like your brand can do that for, for, for your employees, but also like I think there's a. I think just showing that the company will pour fuel on whatever fire you're starting, I think is like, it's, it's one of the best like employee value props. I think a company can have, It's like, it's like, look the life you want to have. Like, we, want to get you there. like, and like, and I think the kind of people who would come work for ConvertKit it should be that they want to do something in the creator space, because you're serving creators that makes a ton That makes a ton of of sense[00:38:10] Nathan:Yeah. And we've definitely had people that we've hired, who are already creators, and that's grown. So it, an interesting world in all the things that you could do to grow. Like a company or growing audience. I'm not sure that that's the one would pick, but you, you see Morning Brew and, and gong in so many of others doing it and it seems to work, know? So[00:38:33] Nick:Yeah Like, I think it works for like, like select companies in select Right. And like, and there's, and there's probably a channel that works under and like the. way you do it for, you know, for Guild where, like we, you know, we really target, um you know, companies with huge employee populations at the very level Like like we wouldn't do that on, on Twitter. Right. Just doesn't make any sense, but like, would we do it on LinkedIn where like, where, you know, C-suite spends an increasing amount of time and we can directly with those individuals and maybe influence that the five to 10 people that, that matter at those companies with like, you know, one post a week.Totally. so, so it just, it kind of depends on like, um I think companies can, can kind of do it at different levels.[00:39:21] Nathan:So that's interesting of the LinkedIn approach, which I think a lot of creators are either all in, on LinkedIn and loving You know, people have built massive lists over there, or they're like, what's that like, I'll hang out in the Instagram, YouTube, Twitters of the world, you know? but if you imagine that B2B world where let's say I'm, I'm working in sales, either as an executive, trying to get big deals done, or, you know, or as a team member, I have a meeting, we have a great conversation.We connect on LinkedIn, you know, we're now an official connection. And now, even though you're not going to buy my thing now, you're like seeing my content every. Week or every few weeks. And then it's like, oh yeah, you're going to buy that thing from Nathan, you know, whatever B2B tool, like starts to come up.And then when I reach out again and you're like, it's not like, oh yeah, it's that one sales rep that I wasted 20 minutes off on with, you know, six months ago. It's like, oh yeah. I feel like we're friends there. I've learned so much, even though it's just been one to many communication.[00:40:25] Nick:I mean, I think the really powerful thing it's like obviously a sales rep is incentivized to promote the product at company they work for So it's like it's product whether it's in a sales call or on LinkedIn like it will not it will not move the needle for any customer.Because it's sort of priced in that That's what they're expecting. But showing that you are an intellectually interesting person who has deep thoughts about the world, who is, who's a smart person. And then the customer making the connection, man, this smart person out of all the places where they could go work has chosen to work here.[00:41:04] Nathan:Right[00:41:05] Nick:Of something, right. There must be something kind of interesting and special there. And so they built of this affinity and comfort and excitement about you and like, and, and then getting on a sales call with you, you're at this just like this nice advantage, right? You're, you're, you're now slightly a celebrity to them.Right Like and, and there's something, you know, like when your, your email or even your company's email then pops up in their inbox, like it's just that much more likely to open that much more interesting. And sometimes it's, it's those, it's those little things on the margin that can make all the difference.And so I think, especially when you're talking like a, like really big enterprise sales, I actually think it's still, a kind of, underrated strategy.[00:41:48] Nathan:Yeah, sense. talk about a, more from the creator side. Cause that was, know, we went more on the platform company side of the which, you know, someone running a company, I am intrigued in that direction, but I'm curious on the, on the creative side, how do you think about that audience as being for your career and that thing that goes with you as you between roles and giving you a future opportunities and all.[00:42:14] Nick:I think it comes to like writing a newsletter.There's basically three reasons. You'd write a personal newsletter and earliest the way I think about it. Like it's either passion, like, you know, I love cooking and like, this is a way I can express that side of me It's it's profit. I want to actually just make some side income or make this into my full income Or it's General advancement.And maybe the relationship building kind of tithing relationship building probably ties into that. but, but in general, like the, I sort of see one things being being like the reason, like for me, at least for a long time, it's probably been advancement. but, certainly the other two are mixed.Like I'm, you know I'm curious about, you know, turning on the profit spigot out of it And like, it certainly like I wouldn't keep doing it if it didn't hit the passion bucket. and so, and so I think that, that, you have to sort of figure out which of those you're doing. I think, I think like if, if what you want to do, I think most people actually are doing it because they do want new opportunities and relationships.I think actually advancement to me is it's actually, the best reason to do it. Um uh over the other two. And, in that world, like, you kind of want to imagine like, okay, Who is, what kind of job do I want, who is the person that I want to be at some point down the road? Who's the gatekeeper that stands in the way of that.Whether it's like, maybe it's I want to publish a book at some point, right. a publisher stands in the way of that. and so what, what gets this publisher excited? Well, either, maybe I'm writing a newsletter for book publishers and this is the industry standard, but like more likely it's like, it's like, Hey, I built this audience that is then really exciting to a publisher.So-so I or, you know, it's, I want to become a senior engineering manager. and so what's going to be exciting to the VP of engineering who is going to interview me. You know, it, it could be that I have an audience full of engineers, who who like are easy to hire, maybe it's that I just like think in a really deep level about this really complicated problem that is really important to them, but it's, it's sort of like, I think having that, kind of magic gatekeeper mind as as not the person you're necessarily writing for all the time, but the, thing you're trying to build up to, that can be a good north star in that direction.If you're doing this, advancement thing, I still don't think you should pick something that doesn't light you up because it's really, you know, it's really hard to keep doing this, week after week when you're grinding it out for some future version of yourself that you know, may may change.I, I think that, that that tends to be a pretty good path.[00:45:10] Nathan:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me and like networking connection and advancement side of things, I think is one of the best reasons to do. A lot of that. I remember like the first conference that I went to after having a blog and it being such a night and day difference. I wasn't even a speaker at this conference, any of that, but people were like wanting to come up and talk to me because of the articles that I've written you.Whereas like months earlier, you know, pre blog, you go to a conference and I was shy and introverted. Like I didn't talk to anybody. And so I was like, wow, because I published words on the internet. People will now do all the work. Like interesting people will come meet me instead of me having to like put out all the work.This is the best leverage ever on the same way, like podcasts and everything else Write being able to, everyone says the Podcast in there for the audience. It is right. You know, thousands of people will listen to this episode. I am more doing it because I get to meet people like you and Kimberly, who we just had on last week.And right. It's just about meeting people. that's so[00:46:09] Nick:It's like it's like you know, like I think with Podcast, it's crazy because you like appear in somebody's ears. Right. You're like, literally like you're right next to their head, you know And like and it's it's, just like, it's this, it's this wild, like intimate relationship, usually, like I'm listening, you know, on, on two X.So everyone sounds smarter than you than they would were listening to them on one X like it's, it's, it's I think publishing and creating content, especially in a world where like we just live more online where like more of our interactions are, are remote. I think it's, it's a, it's a pretty, it's still sort of an underrated hack, especially in, in your career, right?Like you can, you can do. You know, you, you become inter like instantly, someone who someone wants to take a meeting with and like it's those little, like, sort of marginal decisions, right To like chart the course of your career, right? Like, like, did, did this person meet with you or not? Were they predisposed to like you, before you came in and like, you don't actually know which article is going to hit to make them feel that way, or which Podcast is going to, you know, which Podcast you're going to meet, the person who, you know, might be an ex customer or investor or something like that.But like, there's just such a powerful, you know, with that[00:47:26] Nathan:I think one of my favorite examples a people using an interview show or, you know, interviews in general to break into an industry Harry Stebbings, who does 20 minute VC, because I don't know how old he was when he started it, but like 17, maybe I'm not[00:47:42] Nick:Totally[00:47:43] Nathan:nd he's like, I want to break into the world of venture capital and, you know, interviewing all the biggest names at first people were saying yes to him, probably because of his hustle, because he was young.They're just like, sure. I'll take a chance on this kid on, your 20 minute.And[00:47:59] Nick:Now love I love people who have like, a, a 10 step plan for their career. Maybe you just, you just wanted to create a podcast. It was sort of like,[00:48:11] Nathan:Right[00:48:12] Nick:Doing this for fun, but like, not a ton of people have, have a plan. Right. like, like most people are just sort of doing stuff, but like, if you like sit down and just kind of think about it for like, like 20 minutes and you're like, who might, I want to be like, who does that person like, like what would make me credible in that person's eyes?Like, like how could I, you know, do that thing now. So that in two or three years, like, like Harry's, I've been such a good example. Like, I, I think there, there are so many people who, who like, if they, they sat and gave that like 10 minutes and turn Twitter off, like you can just, like, you can do a lot of, you know, good, good strategy there.[00:48:52] Nathan:Well, I think can do it as a method to break into any business. So if we were like, know if you and I were 18 years old and we're like, wouldn't be in the music business or even right. You wanted to go into screenwriting. you with what you know now, and you and I were brainstorming how to get 18 year old you into like screenwriting, we would probably suggest starting a podcast and you interview all the screenings. In some format and it wouldn't result in work, but then you'd imagine we have this network and this work would come from the network and you're like, no direct connection, but then there's a ton of indirect connections that wouldn't have happened without it.[00:49:31] Nick:You know, it's kind of a similar thing. We talked we've dragged them at Twitter at the beginning. Right. Twitter does this service for people that gives them like a feeling of prestige. Right. And like, and, and what you're basically doing is like, it's like, you're giving an audience to people who don't have time to build one for themselves.And like, you know, most of the people who are listening to this podcast are people who are building audiences in, in some way shape or form, but like most people don't do that. Right And and so, and so you can find all sorts of people who are who are just like all the time, who like, would love to sort of rent someone else's audience to build themselves up.And so like, and so you can be then 18 and it's a total hack to be able to sort of bring on this screenwriter, this music industry, executive, this, you know, a VC. Right. And it's just, it's[00:50:23] Nathan:Right It made me realize another person on the ConvertKit team who does this really well is ISA Adney. Who's our storyteller. she used to teach all of our webinars and workshops and, and, is branched into working on like brand development sides as he writes a lot of and else, but her personal audience, let me take a step back.If you talk to her, she's like, know this person, or whoever at Disney or that kind of thing who worked on, you know, and just like the amount of people that she knows in the world of storytelling and film and everything else, you're like, how do you know all these people? like, oh, I interviewed them for my newsletter, you know?And you're just like, wait, what? And it's like, I was going to say cartoonists, but like illustrators from, from will like draw her a birthday card. can tell us just for her, you know? And you're like, how, and, and it just comes from this exact thing of like, oh, I just interviewed them on my newsletter, which is a fantastic newsletter, but it's not like they came on it because she's wildly famous.It's that[00:51:26] Nick:It's incredible. And I like there, there's a couple other people I've seen who have like, who, who sort of, they have their, their, their full-time job, but like, on the side, right? Like, Liz Bostonian, someone I've known for awhile and interviewed, and she, she wrote a book called no hard feelings about emotions at work.She's about to publish her second one and like the way she's just like, she's known by, by all of these people at all these different companies that like her company would be the perfect company to sell in, to sell into. you know, it's just, it's just there. There's. There's so many good things that can come a bit.I think one thing I'd advise to like, w going back to like this, how do you balance a, like a, like a newsletter and a full-time career is like don't work for any company that doesn't value it because because like you know, clearly there are places like Guild, like ConvertKit like there there's so many different companies where like you can go where like, they will appreciate what you're doing.And if you can, if you can, like, ideally, like, let's say you love to write about cooking, right. If you can find a company where like, that is like, like, especially like building an audience around cooking, like it's, you know, a dishware company or whatever it is, like finding that right place for not just you, but your publication, a really underrated thing, because it just makes everything so much smoother to find that right.Manager find that. Right. you know,[00:52:52] Nathan:Yeah. That makes sense. If it's an uphill battle, like find another, another place where that's actually a asset.[00:52:59] Nick:Someone will like it.[00:53:00] Nathan:Yeah, exactly. So maybe before we wrap up, let's talk about the growth side. Cause everyone's thinking about, okay, I have my newsletter and it has 100 subscribers or 500. How do I grow it to that next tier So I'm curious, what are some of the things that have worked for you on, adding 100 or 500 or a thousand subscribers at a time?[00:53:19] Nick:Twitter Twitter. You, you, you can use Twitter.[00:53:22] Nathan:Yeah[00:53:22] Nick:It's It's frought in many ways you can also use LinkedIn. I actually think LinkedIn is, an underrated place to do it. Like it's to me, it's not as stressful to write a LinkedIn post as it is to write. A tweet, it's a little stressful, cause it's like, it's like, definitely definitely to your company And it's a place where you're in professional domain, but especially if your newsletter is somewhat professional, then I think, I think LinkedIn can be a really good place for it. and a little bit less of a pressure-filled way to do it. I probably one of the underrated things now is like, you know, I look at how many discord servers I'm suddenly in, like in in you know, months and like, I think those are probably good places to like promote.I don't think it's, I don't think you can in communities, it's harder to just be promotional. You need to sort of have earned it by, by building relationships. And so, but I think like, you know, I'm, I'm in a writing group called foster, right? Where, where like where, you know that they help with editing and like, and like everyone's sort of publishes their stuff in there, but like that's a great place to like, to, to sort of build a following, especially sort of early on.Obviously you can do things like hit Reddit, hit hacker news, you know, Reddit, I think I've been banned from like, you know, 20 different subreddits for, you know a just posting a blog post, which seemed to me. But, um and then hacker news, right? You, you, you never know. And, and, you know, getting to the top means you're going to get barraged with terrible comments, but, I think ultimately though you kind of want something you can build, right.And this is, this is the, this is the challenge with Twitter, right? It's like, it's like, there is a weirdness about Twitter, but. Building an audience on Twitter Like it's a great top of funnel for a newsletter, and same way with LinkedIn. And so it's hard to totally steer away from those things. I think one thing I'd to try and toy with once I figure out the monetization piece, of my newsletter is I'd like to try paid ads.And there's this weird discomfort with it with it. if what you value is value is, having an audience and people to write to and you want to grow that audience, I actually think it doesn't need to be that literally every person you painstakingly gathered with your blood, sweat, and tears, right.It's it's I think there's, there's other stuff that you can try, but you obviously don't want to be throwing a lot of money down the drain on, building an audience[00:55:53] Nathan:YeahI've, I've done paid ads with good results of four. I have a local newsletter called from Boise, is just for the Boise area. And in the last month we actually went to a thousand subscribers and we doubled to a little over 2000 subscribers, almost entirely with ads. So like no ads to a thousand and, ads worked well, you know, and it helps to have the hyper-local targeting.So I was in the same boat of like, hadn't played with it before. And, you know, at, I think we paid between $2 and two 50 a subscriber,[00:56:25] Nick:Facebook.[00:56:26] Nathan:Yeah, Facebook and Instagram. So we'll play with it more. What are you thinking maybe we'll end on this question. What do you thinking for on the newsletter?What are you paid? Is it a A A book? What other things are coming up?[00:56:39] Nick:It took me a while to find something I was comfortable with on modernization paid, never, appealed that much to me. just because there, there are some people who I like I will pay for their ideas, but like, overwhelmed with Content. that like, usually when I'm paying for, for, for, for a newsletter, it's because I really liked the person, like their, their, just their style of analysis.I can't get anywhere else. but, but, but the competitive dynamics of newsletter sort of, to me, like they'll, they'll kind of always be someone who something close to what you do for free. And so, and so that, that always kinda, didn't appeal to me as much. Like I think of it as like, This audience, that you're kind of building affinity with over time and like, and can you, ideally sort of find, build something or find something that's going to be really valuable to them.So I actually, literally just this morning, teamed up with this, this company called palette, to, I swear, this, this, this time it was not planned. It just, it just happened nicely, to a team at this company called pallet in pallets, been sort job boards with a bunch of and I actually worked with them on this, this kind of beta product that they're working on, which is this idea of talent collectives. And so what we're doing is like, it's like basically job searching really sucks. Like you're filling out tons of applications. You are, waiting for a long time to hear back from companies.If you are highly desirable, you're getting a lot of recruiter spam and they're just like barraging you. so we're going to do, is, is put basically just an air table form where you can say, Hey, like, this is who I am. This is the kind of role I'm looking for. pallet has this, this, all these companies that they are so, so they're going to basically, send people and you can be anonymous if you want to all sorts of stuff, but they're to their partner companies and then and then they'll send you sort of the intro request, like, Hey, you know, do you want to, do you want to chat with ConvertKit right.And, and, and if you do right, we'll, we'll make the intro, but like, you don't have to worry about our recruiter reaching out to you because they've, they've said they won't do that. so yeah, I think it's cool. you know, if, if, if any of the folks listening to this are like, exploring new job opportunity.We'd love you to come check it out. I think it'll be really neat. I think it'll solve a challenge that a lot of people are facing. For me it felt really native. It felt like I didn't want to do a job board because I don't know these companies. I'm doing a newsletter about careers, and it felt really important that I'm sending people to the right place.I said, “Hey, if you sign up for this, and you take one call from a company, I'll do a 30 minute career coaching session with you.” Even though, I'll get paid some commission, if the person goes to one of these companies, I will really try to give them the best advice for them, because that's what I promised to readers.When you're thinking about monetization, it's like find something that feels native, and not weird to your audience. I think sometimes that can be a pure paid subscription, but you can be creative in different stuff.[00:59:51] Nathan:Yeah, I think that's good. Let's leave it there. I'm super excited to see what comes on the monetization side. It's probably the coolest thing about newsletters and audiences that you can monetize different ways.So, where should people go to follow you and follow your writing, and see more about what you're up to?[01:00:07] Nick:You can follow where I have a conflicted relationship, where there are days I will post a tweet, tweet threads, and the next day I'll feel very ashamed of it, but that's @Nick_deWilde. Then the better place to get my thoughts, I would say, is JungleGym.Substack.com.At some point I should probably switch that to ConvertKit, but yeah, that's another time. We'd love that, and thank you so much for having me. This has been so fun.[01:00:42] Nathan:Yeah, It's been a great conversation and, thanks for coming on, and we'll talk soon.[01:00:47] Nick:Awesome, Nathan.

If you would like, you can register at https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/davidbergeronccs-podcast/id545101601. Blessings and Peace United in prayer and mission Padre David

In this conversation I talk to Donald Braben about his venture research initiative, peer review, and enabling the 21st century equivalents of Max Planck. Donald has been a staunch advocate of reforming how we fund and evaluate research for decades. From 1980 to 1990 he ran BP’s venture research program, where he had a chance to put his ideas into practice. Considering the fact that the program cost two million pounds per year and enabled research that both led to at least one Nobel prize and a centi-million dollar company, I would say the program was a success. Despite that, it was shut down in 1990. Most of our conversation centers heavily around his book “Scientific Freedom” which I suspect you would enjoy if you’re listening to this podcast. Links Scientific Freedom Transcript audio_only [00:00:00]   This conversation. I talked to Donald breathing about his venture research initiative, peer review, and enabling the 21st century equivalent of max Planck. Donald has been a staunch advocate for forming how we fund and evaluate research for decades. From 1980 to 1990, he ran BP's venture research program. Where he had a chance to put his ideas into practice. [00:01:00] Considering the fact that the program costs about 2 million pounds per year and enabled research, that book led to at least one Nobel prize and to send a million dollar company. I would say the program was success, despite that it was shut down in 1990. Most of our conversations centers heavily around his book, scientific freedom, which just came out from straight press. And I suspect that you would enjoy if you're listening to this podcast. So here's my conversation with Donald Raven.     would you explain, in your own words, the concept   of a punk club and why it's really well, it's just my name for the, for the, outstanding scientists of the 20th century, you know, starting with max blank, who looked at thermodynamics, and it took him 20 years to reach his conclusions, that, that matter was, was quantized. You know, and that, and, he developed quantum mechanics, that was followed by Einstein and Rutherford and, and, and a [00:02:00] whole host of scientists. And I've called, in order to be, succinct Coley's they, these 500 or so scientists who dominated the 20th century, the plank club. So I don't have to keep saying Einstein rather for that second. I said, and it's, it's an easy shorthand. Right. And so, do you think that like, well, there's a raging debate about whether the existence of the plank club was due to sort of like the time and place and the, the things that could be discovered in physics in the first half of the 20th century versus. Sort of a more or more structural argument. Do you, where do you really come down on that? The existence of the plank club? [00:03:00] W well, like, yeah, so like, I guess, I guess it's, tied to sort of like this, but the question of like, like almost like, yeah. Are you asking, will there be a 20th century, 21st century playing club? Do you think, do you think it's possible? Like, it's sort of like now right now. No, it's not. because, peer review forbids it, in the early parts of the 20th century, then scientists did not have to deal with, did not necessarily have to deal with peer review. that is the opinions of the, of the expert of the few expert colleagues. they just got on, on, Edgar to university and had a university position, which was as difficult then as it is now to get. But once you got a university position in the first part up to about 1970, then you could do then providing your requirements were modest, Varney. You didn't [00:04:00] need, you know, huge amounts of money. Say. You could do anything you wanted and, you didn't have to worry about your, your peers opinions. I mean, you did in your department when people were saying, Oh, he's mad. You know, and he's looking at this, that, and the other, you could get on with it. You didn't have to take too much attention. We pay too much attention to what they were doing, but now in the 21st century, consensus dominates everything. And, it is a serious, serious problem. Yeah. So I, I seriously believe that keeps me what keeps me going is that it is possible for there to be a plane club in the 21st century. It is possible, but right now it won't take, it won't happen. I mean, re there's been reams written on peer review, absolute huge, literature. and the, but, but most of it seems to have been written by, by people who at least favor the status [00:05:00] quo. And so they conclude that peer review is great, except perhaps for multidisciplinary research, which ma, which might cause problems. This is the establishment view. And so they take steps to try to ease the progress of multidisciplinary research, but still using peer review. Now. Multidisciplinary research is essentially is, is absolutely essential to venture research. I mean, because what they are doing, what every venture researchers, the researcher is doing is to look at the universe. and the world we inhabit in a new way. So that's bound to create new, new disciplines, new thought processes. And so the, when the conventional P, when the funding agencies say, there's a problem with multidisciplinary research, they're saying that's a problem with venture reserves. Yeah. And so therefore we won't have a plank club until that problem is [00:06:00] solved. And I proposed the solution in the book. Of course. Yeah, exactly. And so I guess, so with the book, I actually think of it as it's just like a really well done, an eloquent, almost like policy proposal, like it's, it's like you could, I feel like you could actually take the book and like hand it to. A policymaker and say like do this, I guess you could, so, I guess to put it, but like clearly nobody's done that. Right? did you, do you ever do that? Like, did you actually like go to,  government agencies or even  billionaires? Like the, the amount of money that you're talking about is almost like shockingly small. what, what are, what are people's responses of like, why not do this? Patrick Collison as being the only billionaire who has responded, I've met about, I don't know, half a dozen billionaires. And, they all want to, they all want to do things [00:07:00] their way, you know, they all want to, which is fair, which is fair enough. They all want to, sees a university through their own eyes. They are not capable of saying opening their eyes and listening to what scientists really want to do and to get what scientists really want to do. You've got you. You just can't just ask them straight off. You've got to talk to them. For a long time before they will reveal what they want really want to do. And then only a few of them will be capable of being a potential member of the plank club of the 21st century state. But it's a wonderful process. It's exciting. And I don't know why. well, I, I think I do actually, why the conventional authorities do not do this. And I believe that for, the reason this is more or less as follows that, for 20, 30 years following the expansion of the universities in about, about 1970 for political reasons. [00:08:00] no, not at all for, for scientific reasons that, there was a huge expansion in the universities and, and, and a number of academics. I really really mean it's factors of three, two, three, four, or something like that, depending on the country. Really huge. And, so therefore the old system where freedom for everyone was more or less guaranteed, which is what I would advocate freedom for everyone as a right. So, what we have done now is to develop absolute selection, rules, absolute selection rules for selecting venture researchers. And, and, and that's taken, you know, that's taken some time to develop them, but they work well. And, and, and open up the world to a complete ways, new ways of looking at it. Yeah, look, I mean, the, the, the track record seems very like very good, right? Like you, you, you, you [00:09:00] enabled research that would not have happened otherwise and led to Nobel prizes. Right. Like, I don't, I don't see how it could, what evidence one could present that your method works more so than that. and so it's, so yeah. Well, well, over the years you see, the, the scientists to work in for, for the funding agencies. they have advised politicians on the ways to ration research without affecting it. And they have come up with the way, the method of peer review, which is now a dairy girl, you know? it's absolutely essential. Yeah. Every to every funding agency in the world, I've not come across one that does not use it well, apart from our own operation, of course we don't use it. but we, we find ways around it. And that's the conventional wisdom is that there are no ways around, [00:10:00] there are no way. peer review is regarded as the only way to ensure research excellence. People keep saying that it's the only way, but we have demonstrated with the BP venture to search you and this and that UCL, that there is another way. And, and I guess so is, is, is the response from, people that you would propose this to simply that , they, they don't believe that.  they don't believe that it can work because it doesn't, it isn't peer reviewed, , is that the main contention? Any, any ideas now must, must, must survive. Peer review and venture research of course would not. And so therefore what we're saying is therefore not admissible. And now a few people, in like the 50 or so of my, my, of my supporters, very senior supporters, re regard what we [00:11:00] are doing as essential, but their voice is still tiny compared with the, you know, the millions of, researchers and, and the, I I'm the funding agencies. Now the funding agencies kept on saying that they have advised politicians over the years, that the only way to ensure to ensure, that the, that the scientific enterprise is healthy is to, is to, is to a DIA to peer review. Now. They cannot. They cannot now say, ah, yes, Raven points out. There's a serious floor. They cannot do that. And so they say they do, they do not acknowledge that I exist or that the problem exists. This is so, so just because like they have, have doubled down so hard on peer review being the acid test for research quality. That they, they just like, they can't, they're like they're [00:12:00] lash to that, man. Okay. Okay. And, so I, I know at least in the NSF, I think actually shortly after your book came out originally, so in. 2008, 2009. I read about an initiative to try to do more. I think they, they termed it like transformational research and the NSF, that was the NSF, initiative. it was pioneered by Nina fedoroff. Nina fedoroff, who's a great, another great is one of my supporters. and, she was the, she was the, I think she was the chairman of the science board or something like that, which controls the NSF. And so she set up a special task force to look at. Mainly what I was trying to do. And so, she invited me to go to Washington on three occasions and we sat in this huge room at the national science [00:13:00] foundation headquarters. And we, we, we, we had three, two or three day meetings, venture research, and they concluded that it was the only way to go. And so that's what they recommended to the NSF. But what did the NSF do with decided that th that, that, that they would accept Nina Federoff's recommendations, but they should be administered by each of the divisions separately. Well, that's, that means they don't do anything that they wouldn't do normally. and so, I guess one, one thing, I'm not sure if you mentioned it in the book, what do you think about, like HHMI Janelia and. Like sort of the effort that they do, because it is much closer to your recommendations, how Hughes you mean? Yeah. Howard Hughes medical Institute. Yeah, exactly. and specifically like they're their Janelia campus where my understanding is [00:14:00] that they give people sort of, whole free funding for five years and really just sort of let them. Explore what they want to explore, but they have to, but they, I think they insist on them going to the central laboratories. Yeah. Yeah. That is a problem. How's that? Because, well, because, scientists all have roots and they all, I've ended up where they have, you know, wherever it is and that's where they prefer to work. And so therefore in venture research, that's why we allowed them to work in their old environment. Yeah. But now with total freedom and they'd radically transformed, you know, a little segment of the, of what it's done, but they transformed it and that they would've transformed even more. Had we been allowed in 1990, if BP had allowed venture research to continue. They were th th there [00:15:00] would be more than 14 major breakthroughs because, in 1990, when BP closed us down, then we, these people no longer could rely on venture research support the, the, the essential, feedback that we gave them, the meetings that we arranged, you know, of all venture researchers, which we had to work out how the hell to do that because, you know, w th the just scientists and engineers, scientists, and engineers all came together. Yeah. And, I don't know that's been done. but anyway, right. we were no longer allowed to provide that support. And so therefore they were on their own and exposed to the full rigors of peer review in applying to funds before they were ready for it. Yeah. The successful ones are venture research, you know, people they can suddenly, you know, it's, with his ionic liquids, then he, he, he, jumped over the line [00:16:00] of, of, of, into mainstream science and it became then part of the mainstream. Yeah, and same with similar Polica and all the other people who, who, who, who was successful. But, but th th there were, there were a few groups, you know, who were left high and dry and, and they had to manage, they had to, cut their class according to the funding. Yeah.  do you keep track of people who today would make good venture researchers? but, but don't like, like, do people still still send you letters and say like, I want to do this crazy thing. No, I'm afraid. I can't, I can't do that because I would be, raising their hopes, way beyond what Mabel to provide, UCL. We've done that and we've met one person. we supported one person, Nick lane, whose work has been prodigious digitally successful. Now he could not get support. He couldn't get support from anybody. [00:17:00] Before we, we felt a bit, before we backed in. And, so I persuaded the university to cover up 150,000 pounds over three years, which is trivial amount of money. Totally. Totally. And since that time, since then, he's, now he's more or less stepped over the line and he's now become mainstream. And he's, since that time as you're right. 5 million pounds, 5 million compared to the 150,000. So that's, that's profitable, you know, as far as the university is concerned, they're profitable, but even so even with UCL, it's still not caught on. Yeah. And, do you, do you, so when I, I guess I also have a question about like, what about the people who might make really be really good researchers, but , don't even make it through to the point where, they would even like be able to [00:18:00] raise venture, venture research money in that , There's also the fact that. in venture research, you were entirely supporting people except for, believe one case, you were supporting people who are already in academia, right?  they'd already sort of gone through all the hoops of getting a PhD and, getting some sort of, some sort of position. And so do you have a sense of  how many possibly amazing people get weeded out? even before that point? Oh, I mean, to be a venture researcher, you you've got to have a university position, I would guess. or, I mean, as with, was, with, with, with the only engineer we supported, he was working for a company and we enabled them to leave and I took great care to, to, to inquire of him. He w he would have to give up his job because, you know, industrial company couldn't support him if he was working for another company. And so I had to be sure that [00:19:00] he really was serious about this. And so we arranged that he, we arranged for a university appointment for the nearest university to where he lived, which was sorry. That's was just down the road, so to speak. And, but even that created problems, he was never really accepted by the university hierarchy. And w why do you think the university, association is, is important? as opposed to just someone just, you know, just doing research, right? Like what if they had, they built like a lab in their basement or. we're doing mostly theory. And so they just sort of, they've done that. You know, people, you know, like the guy, the guy at shop, I mean, if they, if they'd done that, then of course we listened to them, but they must be, they must be reasonably proficient in, in, in, in, in what I mean, they're, they're coming with a proposal to do something. Right. And to some that you've got to, [00:20:00] you've got to have done something else. You've got to, you've got to prepare the ground, so to speak. Yeah. So getting a university appointment today is no more difficult than it was say in 1970, you still had to get up. You still got to get, you know, go through a degree. PhD may be, and, and then, convince the university that you're worthy of, appointment. But then as I said before, You, you had automatic, you automatically qualified for this modest amount of funding, at least in Britain. you automatically qualify for that, but now you're quantifying for nothing. Once you pass the, you know, you're appointed by the university, you then start this game of trying to convince funding agencies to support you. And if you don't, you're dead. Yeah, you don't get, you don't get anywhere. You've got no Tanya. So you, you, you, you, you just disappear. It says it's an unforgivable system and it's extremely [00:21:00] inefficient. Yes. Do you think, I guess the question is like, is, is efficiency even the thing that's worth shooting for it. Like, it seems like it's, it's going always going to be inherently inefficient. Because of the uncertainty. like I guess I always worry when, when, like, when efficiency comes up as a metric around research, because then you sort of start having to calculate like, okay, like how much value is this? What is our like, return on investment? Like how efficient is that? And it's just, do you think that's the right way to think about it? Well, it's certainly not a bad way. but, but mines are closed, you know, I, I've been in touch with so many people over the years, you know, I've been at this now for 20 years since, since BP terminated my contract, so to speak and I've never, and I've always, and I've always tried every single minute [00:22:00] of that 20 years to find new ways of doing this. I mean, it's big, it does sound a bit, you know, that, that th th th th th th th the, the, what I do as a large element of the crank about it, but I'm so convinced of the value of this eventual research and its contribution to humanity, so to speak. I'm so convinced that it will make an enormous contribution that I keep on going. Yeah. No. I mean, I have no money. Yeah, no, I'm not paid to do this. And the first person that I've met of the many, very rich people I've come across has been factored colorism. Who, offered to publish my book and at a fraction of the price, why only were charging for it? Why do you charge $75 for a paperback he's charging less than $20 for a, for a hardback? Yeah. Well, I think he realizes that it's important for people to [00:23:00] actually read it. That's that's good. he, took part in, just before he met me, he took part in a, in a, in a, in a, in a blog or something like that. it's on, it has a YouTube thing. And, he said he was very impressed when he met me and I, I, I, I changed the way he looked. Yeah. I changed the way he looked at the world. You know, and, and he made this, joining an hour long speech to these fellow billionaires, but no, one's come forward. No one said, you know what you wanted. Yeah. Well, I hopefully like, I mean, hopefully between the book being out and, like. You know, I, I try to recommend it to everybody. I know. so, so hopefully like we'll, we'll start to, sort of get it more into people's heads. Do do you have any good stories about, people who applied and didn't make it right, [00:24:00] because I assume that, like, I always noticed that the sort of a line between like brilliant ideas and like completely crackpot ideas is very, very thin. so did you get any, like really, really ridiculous applications? It's not that thin. I don't think it is, there were lots of people who came to me and said, you know, similar dynamics is bunk. And, and one thing that they really hate is to be asked you say, okay, I agree that it is, what do you want to do now that completely floors them. So people was a crackpot idea are automatically. disqualified because they never return. They never say what they want to do, or if they do, you know, you cannot, you keep on re repeating the same question and they eventually gave up. Now venture was search the venture researcher. I may not say we, we, we, we may not say yes for the first meeting. It [00:25:00] might be five, six, seven, eight meetings with Dudley, Hirsch, Nobel laureates. It took more than a year. Because, you know, I met him very shortly after he got his Nobel prize and he came to a meeting that I took part in a meeting of the American physical society in New York. And, and I gave a talk and there, I noticed this guy in the front row scribbling away and he came to me after each day. He said that I think I've died and gone to heaven. This was Dudley Hurst back three days after winning the Nobel prize. And he had an idea which no one would listen to. And, well, we, we, we, backed him, but I can't think of an, of people who come with crazy ideas and gone on to be, you know, to, to, to fizzle out and die if you like. And, and, and so w I w I want to dig into that because that's, that's really, I feel like you're, you're saying something like very important. [00:26:00] and that, so to sort of repeat back to you, it sounds like the people who are not crackpots are able to like go to a level of precision about action that other than people who don't know what they're talking about are not able to do. Would that be accurate? Okay. That's exactly right. And, I'm, I'm asking like very much, because I, I'm trying to do similar things and like looking at, it, and like very much in the same position where it's not always in my exact field. and so it's, it's like, what is that? That you can. Do to sort of like tease out the, like the, the difference between a good, crazy idea and a crazy, crazy idea. Well, all venture research has courses outside my own field, all of it, because I'm, you know, that was a [00:27:00] long time ago when I was a practicing scientist. And so everything is outside my, my competence, so to speak, which is another reason why the mainstream venture is searchable. The mainstream, funding agencies tend to disregard what I say because it doesn't pass peer review. Of course. Yeah. So, we are accustomed to being uncomfortable with talking to people we are, but we try to engage them in conversation that reveals what they really want to do, what they, and try to assess, what they want to do compared with the state of knowledge in that field right now, you know, they want to transform it. and you don't have to be a fellow expert to understand that. I mean, I am an expert now, but in general, things like science, you know, or engineering that the broadest possible approach to these study subjects. And I can, I can tell on everyone else can tell who was involved with this process because when I came to BP, [00:28:00] they gave me two or three very, talented people, more or less people like yourself, you know, high flyers young in their early 2030s. And they joined me for two or three or four years. And, they were, they were mainly chemists. and so, yeah, chemistry, I think, I think, only there was only one physicist. This, I think that the BP provided me with, and it didn't matter because they were all fairly, talented people, very talented people, in fact, and you didn't have to say anything twice to them, you know? And, and they took it like a duck to water. Now we never had to discuss. But, you know, when we're sitting around our little table and people would, were coming with their ideas, we never had to discuss whether someone was what we called a venture researcher. It came to immediately obvious to anybody to have to everyone around the table, that he was someone who wanted to transform thought processes in that particular [00:29:00] field, they would do something important and that, and, and then once we made up our mind, then. Then, we backed them and then they could then do absolutely anything they wanted and, you know, nothing, you know, we're not bound by the proposal they wrote to us. Yeah. But that was mainly the agency, which, which caused it caused us to, to, to select them. And mostly, I mean, most people did of course, you know, but, some of them didn't. And do you feel like. So, so I'm, I'm really interested in sort of like the, the landscape of the like untapped potential in research. And so, venture research sort of goes after people who already have an idea and know what they want to do and need money and support to do it. And I wonder if there's sort of another [00:30:00] class of people who. Could do amazing things, and, and have the right skills and mindset to do it, but almost have like either not even thought of the things yet, or, or sort of have suppressed them in order to fit into the peer reviewed research box. and they could be unlocked by either like putting them in contact with, with other researchers or, Sort of like shifting their focus. Do, do you have a set, like a sense of like, whether those people actually exist or am I just making, making that up? Well, I'm not quite clear what you're saying. I mean, the people that, most venture researchers we came across, I mean, they knew precisely what they wanted to do well eventually, and they would eventually admitted to us. What they really wanted to do, you know? but there must be mutual trust. Trust has been lost entirely in funding. [00:31:00] Nobody, you know, funding agency doesn't trust the researchers, but I found that trust is absolutely essential in this, you know, that they must trust you and we must trust them because I've said once we back someone, they can go anywhere or anywhere in any direction they want. You know, you can only do that. If there's mutual trust. And if they come across problems as inevitably, they will, you know, things, you know, then they come to us and say, look, we've got this problem, you know, can you help us to solve it? And, you know, and we, we took up a problem with a university or something like that. And we w we helped them along. And this is why when venture research was closed down in 1990, this service was no longer available. And so the 14 people who made, who made major breakthroughs subsequently, and now that's a minimum. I think there are, it would be much greater if we'd have had the support, if I was able to provide this, the support right through, right through to today. Yeah. [00:32:00] And, and, and so. Can we dig into how you build trust with researchers. So you, you have a lot of conversations with them. and like, but can you, can you unpack that? Like, I, I want to we'll have the same problem in everyday life. You know, you meet someone and you talk to them, you know, not about research. You don't have to think about research, you know? do you trust somebody? how do, how, how do you, how do you reveal your trust? How do you express it? How do they express it? And, it has to come, you know, by, by a multi, by a multitude of routes, just like in everyday life, you have to make up your mind that you would trust somebody eventually, and we'll go along with most things that they say. So it is no more of them. It's no different from that. And, in fact I've found that, that the people who've been most receptive to what I've been saying have been nonscientists, you know, people like the [00:33:00] secretary I used to be, I wish to work in the cabinet office, the secretary of the cabinet Burke trend when I was there, he was, you know, he was instantly, so what we were trying to do, you know, and, I had an ally there. Yeah. And, and yeah. And I guess why, why wasn't he? So, so if there were people in the government who were excited about this, like what sort of stopped him from being able to push through? He was, he, he, that was before I CA I went to BP and before I'd worked out the ideas of venture research, but I, I talked to him and I realized I could trust him. You know, and, which is very unusual, you know, for a very senior person, to be able to do that. And, so we didn't discuss venture to search them because I hadn't, I hadn't taken up the cudgel so to speak when I, when I in, on the April, the eighth, 1980, I went to VP. Yeah. Got it and sort of [00:34:00] switching gears a little bit, something I loved and it's like, give me a completely different way of seeing the world in the book is, your. Sort of your take down of the idea of high risk research, biggest high risk. Well, there's not, I, venture search was the lowest possible risk you can imagine, because I was convinced that they would, that the venture researchers would do something of value. You wouldn't be able to predict what it was, but they would do something of value and only had to do with, to keep talking to them. Yeah. And, unfortunately we, we can't show the graph, but I, I just, the, the sort of concept of, like with cutting edge research, the fact that there's just uncertainty about what the like, underlying probability distributions even look like. Right? Like, and, and the fact that the researcher actually knows that distribution so much more than anybody else, [00:35:00] It's just a, a much, much better way of thinking about it. because I think that people really do think of like high risk research as sort of just like this like portfolio approach to, to the world. And it's like, okay, well, like what's our expected, and this actually goes back to the, the, the idea of expected value where, why it's, it's so hard to talk about it in those terms, because. we don't know the underlying distributions. Right? Well, have why should a funding agency support high risk research? When what they're really saying is that we expect you to fail. That's what high risk means we expect you to fail. So why, why should either we measure as the researchers or the funding agency do that? I mean our approach, which goes to the lowest possible risk and the highest possible gain, much more. It's much more accessible now. Not everyone of course can be a venture [00:36:00] researcher, but, I'm convinced that every serious minded researcher, at least once in a, in, in, in a scientific career will come across an idea that will transform his is a local, field. Yeah. he, he, he did not share it or he did not reveal it to the, to peer review because he hasn't yet proved it. Yeah. Peer review only works sort of ad hoc, you know, sort of, so, after the events, so to speak, when you've actually shown that it will work, then they can say whether it's good or not. Yeah. And I guess, I don't know if you've been paying attention to sort of like the, the meta discussion around scientific stagnation. but there's, there's sort of like the argument that we've picked, although the low-hanging fruit of, of the physical world, What do you w what, and like, I get the [00:37:00] impression that you don't agree with that. So I, I always looking for sort of good counter arguments. I don't agree with that because, we're looking for people who will, grow new types of fruit. Or if you take the continental view, you know, that, that our field is a bit like a country. And, when the, you know, people like Einstein discover that country, then it leads to, to, to a wave of new research, but eventually. Then the field becomes paid out and it gets more and more difficult to make it difficult to make a new discovery. What if somebody comes along and says, there's a new continent there and I want to, I want to create it. Yeah. And they can convince you that it exists. So, either the, you know, the low hanging fruit thing, which is, works very well for particular types of fruit. But what if you come up with a new idea for fruit and you come. And that actually sort of ties back to [00:38:00] the peer review argument, which is that, peer review is very bad at allowing, sort of like new fields and therefore new contents orchards to exist. We are, we all an endowed with a w w w with a creative spirit. You know, and, it's this fundamental creative spirit that we all have and scientists, you know, perhaps, to a, to a greater degree than others though. I'm not convinced of that. and, you cannot expect that their view of the world  completely individual view of the world. Just if I have consensus. Yeah, not immediately. You can't do it right away. I mean, no, the scientists, you know, major discoveries have not been greeted with a claim. Science, Einstein Einstein's discovery were called in the times newspaper. And one is when he wrote his famous paper on relativity and the front to come and sense. That's what the time [00:39:00] said. And so it was, it wasn't a front to common sense. Yeah. It should be fair. It's still, it's still sort of is right. Like you in like, you know, it was like the universe is curved and it's like that, that actually doesn't. Even jive with my comments, that I'll be honest. university's a very, very big place. Yes. It's very, a very weird place, right? Like when you start really looking at it. Yeah. And you know, the, the, the, the, the gravitational constant, which is, the Hubble constant. So, is, is, is one 80, sorry. Th well, there's some dispute about what it is, but it's a tiny amount per million years, you know, it's a tiny difference from what we see now, how the, it would be difficult to detect. Have you, have you said, you know, [00:40:00] you've gotta look for this and this is what people are doing. Yeah. Yeah. It's something, something that I wonder. And I'm not sure like how this sort of jives with, with venture research. But what I feel like it has also happened is, people have become so specialized in like theory or experimentation or, like engineering or development, that. And like part of where, these, these new fields come from is people, sort of interacting with people that they wouldn't normally interact with. and, and so did you, did you find yourself sort of beyond that, like they're, they're the, the sort of group meetings, of the venture research community, but did you, did you find yourself, Sort of like pushing people to interact in ways that they wouldn't have otherwise interacted with. No, we never push people that way. there, there were always [00:41:00] any new interaction that came from our meeting, from the meetings they were derived in exclusively from the scientists. I mean, we w we may make one or two suggestions about a group. Well, I did, we would do, we did. In fact, the, the ant people. we're working, in the field of distributed intelligence. Now I happen to know there was a unit at the university of Edinburgh that was doing this, that this very work distributed computing, and they weren't, there were one or two experts. So I went to them and said, do you have somebody who might be interested in joining the group? And they did a man called Tuft and he went down and he, and he did, and it was a very productive exchange. But that was very rare. I mean, that, that happened, but they, the user can the other way, got it. I don't know. Maybe, maybe, or the, you know, I forgotten, it's a long time ago, you know? but, I'm just always interested in, sort of improving my mental models of like, how, like, sort of [00:42:00] the, the question that everybody have of like, where do ideas come from, right. Like, and it's like, how important is sort of like cross cross-pollination, to sort of, to, to creating new areas. Actually I'm really interested in what the day-to-day of running VPs venture research was like. I kind of in my head, imagine you like just flying around the world, and sort of like meeting scientists and, and sort of, did you, have you ever watched the Avengers? I imagine you like Nick fury. Sort of like going around to different superheroes, and sort of say like, alright, like we're gonna, we're gonna form a team. yeah. W w what was that like? Well, I'll tell you, it was a, a very difficult problem because when I first arrived, I was, you know, a single person in a single room. and, so, the research director and, you know, the [00:43:00] guy who was responsible for BPS main research activities. And he spent about 2 billion pounds a year, you know, on, on he had, and he had 2000 people working for him and, he he's, he thought I was mainly harmless, you know, so, but as the, as the, as the decade wore on, then, it became obvious because I always try to involve, see in here. BP, directors in what we were doing. I always invited them to our conferences, for example. And even the chairman, you know, came down and other senior directors came down and they could see for themselves that what I was talking was not bullshit, you know, what really serious. And, and so the idea became. embedded in, in, in, in, in a few recess director's minds that the bang, the Braven was having a bigger bang for book Cadogan will the research director and it's 2 billion a year that he was [00:44:00] spending. And, and this fed back on, on, on to the research directors approach to me and the increasingly saw me as a threat rather than as an opportunity. And eventually. In 1990, he won and we were closed down. I got a phone call from New Zealand on, on March the eighth, 1990 from New Zealand, the man, the guy, the guy, or just the, the, research director, had just retired Bob  and he gave me all the freedom. I, what I wanted. And he retired in, in 1989, it was succeeded by Buzzle Butler and Buzzle Butler was, well, I won't say what I think of him. he, he phoned me for ISA from New Zealand and, and his first thought first was hello, Don venture search has closed down. The BP can no longer afford the drain on its resources, BP. I was spending then [00:45:00] five millions a year when, you know, managing directors didn't get out of bed unless it was at least a billion. Yeah. Yeah. It, it's funny how people can get very attached to like even comparatively small amounts of money. Well, people see, tend to see value in cost. You see? and so, if a university adopts venture to search, which I hope they will then, you know, they can't release, there's no glory in spending nothing a year. Even if you have an arrangement for looking for these people, you know, even a UCL, you know, it's been 150,000 in 10 years, but you know, that's about the right number. You know, we're talking like 500 people in a century over the whole world. So any single university is likely to have one or maybe two in a decade. And so, [00:46:00] but if the arrangements were set up so that people could come forward with their ideas to talk with senior people in the university, people who had given up their own research, like I have, and you take the carrier's pleasure and their discoveries. Then, if you can find some people such that such people than ever few universities were able to do this, then it would solve the problem. And so that's what we're working on right now. So as soon as I get my book, I'll be sending it to various, which is the due to come this week. I think, you know, my, the 50 copies that Stripe send me and I can send these out. I'm not very optimistic. I'm afraid. Okay. Okay. Well, I am, perhaps I, I realized I realized, foolishly, but my, my, my theory is that, If you're not optimistic, then you're sort of doomed to failure. Like, like the, the, the [00:47:00] non optimism makes like, it, it, reinforces itself, right? Like, so, so if you're pessimistic, then it will make itself come true. we sort of, yeah, so, so we, so we need to be optimistic and, and I guess like, with, with the universities today, Like, what did they, so like if, if the money were there, like if, if the money were coming in to, to researchers, universities don't have any problem with sort of people being there, doing work as long as, as the funding is coming from somewhere else with no strings attached. Right? Yep. Yeah. Okay. So let me, every university has, I mean, UCL, I mean, it has a budget of a billion pounds, you know, it's a big university, so we're asking for a tiny amount of money, you know, the, and even that is an over estimate, you know, because most years expenditure will be zero, [00:48:00] you know, and it's only, but to have that, to be able to call on occasionally. something like 150 200,000 pounds a year. So 200,000 pounds for three years, sorry. it would be no big commitment for them to enter into it, especially if you could re entertain the hope that in a few years, the, the scientists would, would make the transmit that the transition into the mainstream and then back external funding. And just what I've done. And so, so I know that a couple of universities do give, like new professors a year or two of funding. Well, that's right. I mean, people taking new jobs are in th th their, their maximum creativity then. And so universities, it's very good investment for them, but, but, but, but, an academic now has to look [00:49:00] forward to what will happen when this, when this funding ends. Right. You know, and will he be well-placed and he's got to engineer his, his position to be well-placed to, to attract funds. And so a year or two, not enough to do venture research. And so they just, you know, it, it works, but only to a very limited extent. Yeah. And the, and the, the incentive sort of cascade backwards. Right. Cause you're looking at, and you're like, okay, well, I'm going to need to get grants. And in order to get those grants, I'm going to need to have, do you have done peer reviewed research? So I better get started on that now so that it has to start thinking about that. Yeah, no, that, that makes a lot of sense. so I guess in including, What besides simply just like reading the book and thinking about, venture research. What, what is something that you think people should be thinking about [00:50:00] that they're not thinking about enough? Well, I, I don't think you can, so you can say it like that. I mean, if you're, if you're a venture researcher or a budding venture search, then you'll have an idea and you'll, always wants to be returning to it. So, I mean, the creation of venture research therefore is a happy coincidence. You know, that it's a meeting of, of, of similar minds, if you like. And I provided the opportunity to those, 40 people, that we backed over the 10 years to do their thing. but it was a partnership. It was a partnership between us and them. I was taking a risk, you know, with BP and, you know, having to solve the problems. I had to do all the other things you say, you know, like travel the world and give, to get, cause I didn't believe we could advertise. I didn't, I didn't think we could advertise, you know, in journals and say, you know, we wanted good ideas. I had to go to universities and give talks about venture to search while people were doing. [00:51:00] And the state of science now. Yeah. And then invite proposals and then sit and listen to what people came up with. And, at each university I might get in an afternoon, I may get 20 or 30 proposals. I mean, most of them just so you as a new source of money. You know, and that was always a problem we had, even with venture researchers was convincing them that even though we were the BP venture research unit, we were not interested in getting oil out of the ground. This could help the research director and I wouldn't trust us on what he was trying to do. So I had to find a way of, of, so our strategy was completely different. So the search directors. So we're not in direct competition, but he did see me as getting direct competition because they, the senior directors, you know, were saying the bang for buck that blaming God is higher than yours. I didn't say that they did. And actually, what, what was, what is the thinking behind, Not putting [00:52:00] out a sort of like a broad, call for, for applications, but instead, going and giving a talk and then, and talking to people because my, like my gut says that makes a lot of sense, but I'm not quite sure I can pick apart. Why. Well, venture searches, Nobel prize winners are a very special breed, you know, they do not respond to a, to opportunity. I mean, they create, they create their own opportunity and they are convinced of their particular view of the world will eventually be proved. Right. And hopefully. well, for the few we managed to help, we, we enable them to do that, but, other people just happened to have to cut their clamps according to the phones that are available and have to keep doing that. So I, I, I think that, people's view is, is, of the world is, is created within what the, within themselves, in this, within their thought processes, [00:53:00] their thought processes on their creative spirit, you know, this thing, which we, we all have, allows, them to do. I mean, people like, like Einstein, you know, w w when he, he looked at the, at the world without any feedback from anyone. You know, he didn't read the literature, he didn't cite any publication in this, you know, it didn't say anything. And his Anna's mirabilis is three papers and max playing catheter to decide whether or not he was the editor of the journal that he submitted his papers to. And he had to decide whether we should publish these or sub subject them to the usual references, but he didn't and he just published them. And th th they attracted a lot of criticism that said the times for it, it's always in the front of common sense, but there's other two work, you know, for the, for the conductivity and, Brownian motion. I mean, they were major pieces of work, but he did that [00:54:00] without talking to anybody. I mean, apart from, you know, mathematical advice and things like that, which had got from various people from time to time. Yeah. So, so to, to, to sort of pull that back to the strategy for teasing out, the, like the, the high quality applicants, the hypothesis would be that like, they, they don't even, they wouldn't even be reading the, like the journal where you'd be advertising that you want applications and you sort of have to like really go and, and get in their face. Yes, you have to let it be. You have to create the environment that allows them to write to you or to contact you, or to give you a phone call and say, I want to do this. You know? And, I remember I got a phone call once from, from a lunatic who said, I have a way of launching satellites, which has been much cheaper than, than anyone else has ever had. And I said, Oh, what do you want to do? He said, Oh, I want to build a building a hundred miles high. And, and then throw out of [00:55:00] the window, you know, there's, there's been, these objects and there were, there would be an arbiter immediately. And so they would, but I asked him about, you know, what do you think are the limits on, on growth, you know, on, on, on, on building, what would the foundations for a hundred mile high building? And there was just silence then, you know, cause he realized that the Earth's crust would not support. And what's the highest structure on the world Mount Everest high is that five miles. So Y you know, w how are you going to construct something which is a hundred miles high? So, I mean, that doesn't matter. It's just an anecdote of a, of a phone call I got, but that's what, that's what constituted, And initial approach to us. That's all we asked for, that the person would, was a ring or write a paragraph or whatever it was and saying, this is what I want to do. Yeah. And you would then take them there. Yeah. That's. [00:56:00] I like that a lot, because it's, it's very, it's almost the opposite of the approach that I've seen, that you you've seen, that there are like many other places. Like you look at how, like DARPA or bell labs does it, did it. and they it's like almost the opposite where they would only ever go and be like, you, like, we want you to come and like do some awesome stuff. And so it was it's like that, like push versus pull in, in getting people into the. The the organization is, is an interesting dynamic. well, I spoke, I spoke to somebody in the cabinet office recently about that, but, you know, he, he, he knew about it. He learned, he learned about the publication of the book and he said that the government was saying the British government were thinking of creating DARPA in Britain. And I didn't think it would be a very good idea. Because not for venture to search, it would be good for other things. but, DARPA 10, it's a bit like venture capital, you know, they know what they want to [00:57:00] do. And, when I was no venture to searcher would be able to point to specific benefits flowing from their work, right at the beginning, it would not be able to do that. And so therefore they would be disqualified from applying. Yeah, I think it's actually, a really important distinction that you just made because that like what, when people say like, like research is broken, my, my hypothesis is that there is actually that they're describing at least two completely distinct problems where there's the one problem of sort of, like making more. Technology. And then there's the other problem of like discovering more new areas of knowledge. And, and venture research is very much targeted at the latter. and w distinctly from the former new fruits and new continents, you know, that's what we're concentrating on. You know, [00:58:00] the people, you know, completely new consonants, completely new fruits. So there'll be low hanging fruit will come from that, from that fruit. And, yeah, that's what we're trying to do. I think one of the biggest takeaways from this conversation for me, that I just want to double click on is. Donald's assertion that the line between genius and crack pot is not as thin as I. Used to believe. And that it may be possible to tell the difference. Bye. Really. Paying attention to how precise someone's ideas. Uh, I'm still sort of processing that, but it's. An important thing for us to think about [00:59:00]

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Alyssa Clark, the head of curriculum and instructional design for sales enablement from ServiceNow join us. Alyssa, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Alyssa Clark: Thank you so much, Shawnna, and shout out to you and Olivia for putting this together. I’m just really a fan of the curriculum and curation that you guys do on the site. I’m such a fan, so happy to be here. As you mentioned, my name is Alyssa Clark. I have a fancy title, but essentially, I am responsible for the “what” and the “why”, as it pertains to the curriculum that my learners at ServiceNow consume. So, I call myself a nerd about all things place learning. I’m based in San Diego, California, and I’ve been with ServiceNow, now going on six months. So, it’s been quite a fun journey, we call it a spaceship. Joining ServiceNow is like going above and beyond anything you’ve known before. So, it’s been quite a fast and furious ride, but it’s the right place for me, absolutely. A little bit about me, it’s my least favorite topic, but I will say that I am like many people who have joined your podcast, not actually a traditional, workplace learning person. I’m actually a paused academic. I entered into the corporate learning space back in graduate school after being awarded an opportunity to teach as the instructor of record for San Diego State University, and really fell in love with the knowledge transfer process and wanted to be more involved, I suppose, in creating those experiences for people to get immediate gratification. That probably says something about me, but we’ll get to that later. So, it really has been a 10-year romance, if you will, with corporate learning. I’ve been through healthcare engineering nonprofits, and now most recently into technology, which is truly where I feel like I belong. So, I finally feel like I’m home at ServiceNow. SS: I love that. Now, in addition to helping sales reps develop new knowledge and skills, you and I are also both very passionate about mentoring young women who are early on in their careers. I would love to hear from you, how has mentorship played a role in your own professional development, either as a mentor or a mentee over the years? AC: Yeah, it’s something Shawnna that I know you and I have chatted about and it’s so critically important for women to start reframing our experiences as opportunities to help bring each other up. And my battle that I’m currently fighting right now is purely around representation of people who look like me and sound like me and want to question. I want that type of person, you know, ideally regardless of gender, sexuality, any sort of prescription to be able to have that voice, if they have that organic thought, that curiosity and that consciousness that we need in human beings who work in the corporate space, we need that. I think for me as I started to mature in the corporate learning space and, you know, broadly, or like I said, around engineering healthcare, and now tech, I don’t see a lot of women as I look left, right. I want that, I want that for us to make sure that we are equally represented, and there’s so much room around race, sexuality, et cetera, to continue on to. But I think for women it’s really important for us to see our leadership positions as an opportunity to groom someone else to take our spot. And we need to be committed as peers and allies in this battle of representation to look at each other and say, “Hey, we know what it took to get here. And it’s our responsibility to bring others forward.” One of my recent hires, she actually was someone who, as I was talking through the process, I just kept thinking like, “wow, like I should be working for her.” Right? Like she is the one who should be making these decisions because I feel like I’m better off every time we interact. And as I reflected on my experience, a lot of those mentors for me were men and men that I still to this day admire and respect. And quite honestly, I modeled myself after, but I think about the future and I think about how much more empathy, how much more awareness can we share on certain topics in the workplace if we simply had a better representation of females, in these senior leadership positions. And that is something that I’ve made a cornerstone of my personal career is trying to make sure that I’m committed to, empowering and supporting, and hopefully motivating other women to continue their hunger and their lust for their curiosity and for responsibility and for wanting to make an impact. But I really think that there are good examples every day of if we looked around the room and said, design thinking, who are our personas who are making incredibly formative strategic decisions at companies today, who are those personas? What do they look like? What gender are they? What sexuality are they? What race are they? What’s their backgrounds, the humanities, are they business and are we equal? Are we really benefiting from the collective knowledge that exists out here? You know, humanities, people shout out to you as well. We need more humanities people in corporate America in corporate learning because it’s really that passion for curiosity, like you keep hearing me say and that lust for learning that I think actually outshines some of the other technical skills that can be taught. I would hire someone time after time, who I feel demonstrates creative thought independence, critical thinking, passion, curiosity, over someone who’s incredibly, technically trained every day. And I think that that speaks to the need for empathy in today’s climate, more than ever before, but also as the importance of representation of all people. For me, particularly I’m focused on supporting other women at this point in my career. But what can we each do with our own personal narratives to look at ourselves and say, “Hey, what other demographic persona person can I help bring forward with me as I move forward in my career?” Whether it be personally or professionally. SS: One hundred percent. I could not agree with you more. And I love the way that you’re thinking about this and your lens on this world. And you mentioned this, particularly in the tech industry and having kind of, come up predominantly in the tech industry, myself professionally, you know, do you have advice for how women can support each other in professional development and career growth, particularly in these industries where, as you mentioned, a lot of the times, we’re not seeing women in leadership roles or those that have gotten there have had to do so from moving quite a bit from role to role to elevate themselves, within finally the right organization. I’d love to understand what kind of advice you have for how women can support each other. AC: Such a good question. Shawnna. I think one of my lessons that I’ve learned the hard way, our voice is a powerful thing. And using your voice, knowing when, where and how to use your voice is something that I’ve really spent time reflecting on, throughout my multiple tenures at various companies. I, myself am one of those people, Shawnna, you mentioned who’s had to move and had to make strategic moves. Although they were difficult, I’ve left companies where there was important work I was doing, difficult decisions, but had to move for the various reasons that you mentioned. And as I think about using my voice and my decision, like I said, very difficult at times. It really came to that moment of how I’m using my voice. That’s really where I would encourage people early in their careers, especially women to think about how are you using your voice? And what I mean by that specifically is your lack of speaking up is sometimes even louder than being silent. And I would really encourage women who are sitting in a meeting thinking, should I ask this question? Should I raise this complaint? Should I voice this concern? I would say if you’re thinking it and you have a reason for it, ask the question, but ask it from a place of curiosity. That is something, a secret weapon of mine that I’ve really tried to home in on over the years is coming from a place of curiosity and not allowing that to kill the cat. Thinking about the why behind the what, and asking for it, sometimes relentlessly. That is what earns respect. That is what earns credibility and honestly, stamina. Shawnna, I’m sure you can relate to a time where you’re trying to drive for clarity on a set of requirements or a project or a deliverable or a timeline and not feeling heard. That is something that teaches resilience. And that is something that transcends gender, as I mentioned, that is something about learning how, when you ask a question that it lands with nothing but an answer and it’s an art forum. I have not yet mastered it, but I think one of the secret powers and secret weapons that I tend to leverage is from a place of curiosity, help me understand the decision-making around X. Can you tell me a little bit more around the why behind the what of this pipeline decision, you know, whatever the right use case is driving for that why? That is something that in my personal life as well, I’m constantly coaching my family members or encouraging my sisters to think about drive for that why, because at the end of the day, the why is why we get up in the morning. It’s why we chose this job. It’s why we’re all here. It’s to derive some kind of meaning. And I would really encourage women to not let that go. The second you stop asking those questions that you become just a face on a zoom meeting or a butt in a seat, that is not you being the best version of yourself. And I would challenge a coach to say, if you are someone who feels they’ve been subdued into silence, what are you committed to as the individual to get yourself out of that? And that would be my second piece of advice to women is, no one is going to come with a magic carpet and help you get to your next career move. It doesn’t happen that way. Career progression is driven by you. Your curiosity is driven by you and your success ultimately is driven by you. And I know first handed that it is an absolute responsibility of mine. I know you’re committed to it as well, Shawnna, to invite women into these conversations. Your voice is wanted, it is heard, and your unique perspective is what makes you not only a viable asset to an organization, but to the world, to our communities as well. SS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, what advice would you give to young women that are either entering or are considering entering the sales enablement industry? You know, why do you think that this is a vibrant career path for them to take? AC: I think, of course I’m biased, but helping people do their jobs is one of the most powerful and rewarding careers that you can have. Teaching, helping shed light, increase awareness, increase understanding, ultimately that leads to belonging. And that’s where teams come together. People come together and unite brilliantly. We have some of the most brilliant people here at service now and the tech industry as a whole, some of the smartest people on the cutting-edge innovation of new products that we’re going to be using in a year that we don’t know about yet. Young women coming into this discipline, you have an opportunity to help shape the user experience of our modern-day landscape. You really do. And that’s a powerful thing. That’s a powerful thing to be in the tech industry and be able to see the next generation of how we’re going to do things, not just at work, but in life and getting a sneak peek behind the curtain to see that. And then bring your unique perspective in and help inform that and then see it go out into the world and see it be successful. That is what Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein was hoping for with his monster. That’s what he wanted to see was that legacy. And I would empower women to say, you need to have your fingerprint on where modern society is going. We need to be involved constantly and passionately and fearlessly in those conversations to help dictate what is the tech landscape going to look like a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now? I think women are integral to shaping what that looks like. SS: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Alyssa, for this powerful podcast conversation I have enjoyed every minute of it. AC: Shawnna, you are a rockstar. I am such a fan of you and of the channel and just really appreciate you leading in on some of these topics. I don’t think that they’re talked about enough and I really appreciate you inviting my perspective. So, the pleasure was all mine. SS: Thank you so much. To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic that you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

 Meet Leo Brown from this season of The Amazing Race! He lives with diabetes, but his story isn’t a typical one. Leo was born with congenital hyperinsulinism, where the body makes too much insulin, and had almost his entire pancreas removed. Leo will share his unique story and tell us about running the race with his girlfriend, Alana. Learn more about congenital hyperinsulinism In Tell Me Something Good, babies! Weddings! And a football first for someone who’s been kicking t1d every day for a long time. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! Sign up for our newsletter here ----- 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 Gvoke Hypo Pen, the first premixed auto injector for very low blood sugar, and by Dexcom take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with Dexcom.   Announcer  0:23 This is Diabetes Connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  0:28 This week, meet Leo Brown, a contestant on this season of The Amazing Race who lives with diabetes. Now on the show, he's racing around the world with his girlfriend, Alana, but they had what could have been their biggest setback before the race even got started.   Leo Brown  0:42 I think I was actually on the flight to LA at the start line. When I realized I had left all my insulin at home. There was one thing I didn't remember it was in the fridge. It was lined up like little soldiers.   Stacey Simms  0:57 Oh my gosh. Well, Leo's story is not a typical diabetes one. He was born with congenital hyperinsulinism, where the body makes too much insulin and had almost his entire pancreas removed. He developed diabetes at age 19. And he'll share his unique story and tell us about the race In tell me something good babies, weddings, and a football first for someone who's been kicking T one D every day for a long time. 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 the show. I love The Amazing Race. I started watching when I was pregnant with my daughter Lea. And that was 19 years ago, I realized that talking to Leo and doing this episode Oh my gosh. Anyway, welcome. We aim to educate and inspire about type 1 diabetes by sharing stories of connection. My son was diagnosed almost 14 years ago, when he was a toddler. I have a background in broadcasting and that is how you get the podcast. It has been two years since the last version of The Amazing Race aired and I really have been excited to see it come back. It's just great to see people traveling again. As soon as the first episode of the season aired in mid October, my eagle eyed diabetes friends started posting photos of Leo at one point he's playing the steel drums and you can clearly see the Dexcom on his stomach. I like many of you jumped to the conclusion that he lives with type one. But it turns out his diabetes story as I've already teased a bit is very unique. And we'll talk about that with him in just a moment. But first Diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop. One Drop is diabetes management for the 21st century. One Drop was designed by people with diabetes. For people with diabetes. One Drops glucose meter looks nothing like a medical device. It's sleek, compact and seamlessly integrates with the award winning One Drop mobile app, sync all your other health apps to One Drop to keep track of the big picture and easily see health trends. And with a One Drop subscription you get unlimited test strips and lancets delivered right to your door. Every One Drop plan also includes access to your own certified diabetes coach have questions but don't feel like waiting for your next doctor's visit. Your personal coach is always there to help go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the One Drop logo to learn more. My guest this week is Leo Brown from Season 32 of The Amazing Race. His partner on the race is Alana Folsom, they have been dating for less than a year when the show started. And they're now married. So we don't know how they did on the show. But that's a great outcome already. Leo and I recorded this interview over zoom and there is a video version which I've put on the YouTube channel. And that's just Diabetes Connections over on YouTube. But there's two things you need to know as you listen, the audio is a bit sketchy here and there, Leo and Alana upgraded their Wi Fi during the interview. Literally during the interview, she called and got the Wi Fi upgraded we stopped and started a bit before that happened. I took all of that stuff out. But you can hear some stuff here and there. And if you see the video, you will see the shirt that I am referring to as we start out here. But if you're only going to listen, I promise you will get the gist. Leo, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you spending some time with me tonight.   Leo Brown  4:23 Thanks for having me excited to have a chat.   Stacey Simms  4:26 All right. Well, first of all, I have to ask you about your shirt. Because I saw that hashtag on Twitter that you guys were using. What is beloved lovers? I wanted   Unknown Speaker  4:35 to hear you say it first.   Stacey Simms  4:37 Wait, let me do my radio voice! Tell me about – beloved lovers.   Leo Brown  4:41 Oh, absolutely. So Alana I got married over a month ago. And we have a Ketubah which is a Jewish wedding contract. And in a traditional Ketubah it says you know the man this and that husband this wife that right and We wanted our Ketubah to be egalitarian. And we didn't really see a need to indicate our gender. But that's not really what what relationship is about. And so we talked to our Rabbi who's extremely, you know, open minded and accommodating. And he came up with some text that is egalitarian. And the translation from Hebrew to English was beloved lover, and really like that. And so in the in the wedding, which we live streamed, because we couldn't invite most of the people we wanted to, because the COVID, he explained that and there was a live chat on the YouTube live stream that was happening, everyone was like, beloved lover, and then they started writing hashtag beloved lovers. And then I think somehow that got picked up by some news source that like follows Amazing Race, or it was like doing some promo about Amazing Race. And so when they were introducing the teams, and it was just this little this article that got that was going around, they said, Will and James dating Hung, and Chee married Leo and Alana lovers. And so our cast has all had already kind of decided since our wedding because they had all called into the wedding that we were having, like beloved lovers. And so we went with that. And this is our beloved lovers shirt on the back and says Leon & Alana, and a little globe, that is where beloved lovers came from our relationship and our wedding.   Stacey Simms  6:25 So okay, my husband and I have been married for 21 years. I'm making a note for our when we renew our vows for our tuba, maybe at 25. Oh, yeah, back and change the language   Leo Brown  6:35 as a couple that had to severely downsize our wedding. We are strong believers in renewing vows, or just having another wedding whenever you feel. Stacey Simms Well, you know, weird way you kind of put the honeymoon first with The Amazing Race. So let's talk about that. Because you both were I mean, I didn't know if I could ask you about your relationship, just because you're never sure on the show. I've seen I've watched the show for years and people are dating that they break up before the race even ends. Or maybe they stay together. Well, obviously, this had a really happy ending. But take us back to the beginning. When did you all decide to sign up for the race? You were just dating? Leo Brown Yep. So we met on Tinder in January of the year of the race. And then on our second date, I think we were watching The Amazing Race with my roommates at the time because they were fans and a lot. I was a fan and I hadn't seen an episode or two. And that was the first time when it was my roommates who said you better be great on the race. And I thought yeah, sure, I think we could be and, you know, nothing else really came of it. And then six months later, Ilana and I moved in together, I think it was our second night of living together when we had it. All right, let's make this video. Let's send it in. Let's see what happens. And that was in July. And then a couple weeks later, we got a call from casting. And then over the course of the summer and fall that we went to LA a couple times. And then the start line was our 10 month anniversary. So that was a that was a really fast and an incredible progression that we weren't expecting,   Stacey Simms  8:11 we will return to the Amazing Race to your relationship to your reading lots of questions there. But tell me about your experience with diabetes. Very unique. What happened? Tell us your story. Sure. So I   Leo Brown  8:23 can start long before I knew I had diabetes. Because I wasn't diagnosed with diabetes till I was 19. As an infant, though, I was diagnosed with congenital hyperinsulinism, which I always explain as kind of like the opposite of diabetes, instead of making not enough insulin, I made way too much. So it's a rare genetic condition that you're born with and usually presents at birth. And it's an emergency, once you're born, you have low low low blood sugars. And one of the biggest challenges is that doctors who delivered you and you know, like neonatal care doctors might not have ever heard of congenital hyperinsulinism. And to make matters worse, infants sometimes have low blood sugars, as like a natural and okay thing. And so many parents, including my own then are told initially some version of Oh, that's nothing really to worry about. And the story you hear time and time again from these congenital hyperinsulinism parents is I knew something was off like I'm not a medical professional, but my child needs help. And in my case, will that eventually led was to subtotal pancreatectomy ease. And so the first one was when I was six weeks old, and that was like 95% of my pancreas was removed a big scar across my stomach from that. And then when I was six months old, much of remained was also removed in a second subtotal pancreatectomy and after that, by the time I could remember, basically, I have like very early memories of my blood sugar being tested because my blood sugar was of interest at that point, everyone needed to know what it was and why it was okay. And for the first couple years, my parents had to do a lot to help manage that. And lots of doctors involved and try different drugs and eventually figured out something that could sort of stabilize my blood sugar and help me start to live a normal life. And by the time I could remember, I pretty much did live a normal life. You know, I went to kindergarten like any kid, I had a scar, I had a second scar from a feeding tube that was called my second belly button, because I have an outie. But then there was this any nearby. And as life went on, I felt very much like a normal kid who had this, you know, this complicated beginning, but I thought that was all kind of behind me.   Stacey Simms  10:56 But let me ask you before you go on, and I'm sure your parents have shared with you what actually happens when when a child is born with low blood sugar? Like you said, it's not as though something they're not often looking for that kind of thing. And it's extremely dangerous. Do they just are they poking your fingers when you're an infant? Or the you know what happened? Yeah,   Leo Brown  11:15 my parents may remember, even better memories than I do. But I know that you test a baby's blood sugar at, you know, most hospitals, good hospitals when they're born. So I mean, I think that tests This was 30 years ago. So longer, or like longer land sets, but generally a lot has remained the same in in that you test a baby's blood sugar. And if it's low, if you're lucky, someone says, Yeah, could be serious. It could be totally fine. But I think they had a lot of experience testing their tiny baby's blood sugar.   Stacey Simms  11:54 Did you go I guess my question is, did you go home? And then have these emergencies where you had to be re, you know, brought back your parents didn't know what's going on? Or did they know before they even left the hospital?   Right back to Leo, answering that question and explaining more about congenital hyperinsulinism. But first, Diabetes Connections is brought to you by Dexcom. It's hard to think of something that's changed our diabetes management as much as the Dexcom, share and follow apps. The amazing thing to me is how it's helped us talk less about diabetes, that's a wonderful thing about share and follow as a caregiver or parent, spouse, whatever, you can help the person with diabetes manage in the way that works for your individual situation. Internet connectivity is required to access Dexcom, follow separate follow app required, Learn more at Diabetes connections.com and click on the Dexcom logo. Now back to Leo, who by the way, has a great Dexcom story later on in the interview. Oh my goodness. But here, we are talking about his parent’s early days of his very scary diagnosis.   Leo Brown  13:04 I believe my parents didn't have a clear diagnosis before I was discharged at the very beginning. And then within weeks, if not days, I was brought back, you know, they said he's having, you know, he had a seizure. He's not getting better, like this low blood sugar thing is, is here to say and I I'm again, my parents would have a lot more to say. But at some point, they were equipped with a blood sugar testing kit to you know, check me regularly at home. But I think that within those first couple of days and weeks, they quickly discerned that something was off. My parents used to have this box and at some point I said I need the box because once in a while I need to be able to explain to people not in an interview, but in a doctor's office what exactly happened. But yeah, it you know, it from what I know congenital hyperinsulinism and other stories I've heard from other parents, honestly, that I can tell you as much about that as my own early early story. The prevailing pattern is that the parents are told that the low blood sugar is not something they need to really worry about, because babies have that sometimes. And right, a large part of what the community and an organization I'm working with congenital hyperinsulinism International is trying to help medical community understand is you need a checklist saying this could be congenital hyperinsulinism. Obviously research for early diagnosis, treatment, but early diagnosis is in some ways more important because if people aren't looking for it, then it is a you know, it's a very rapid escalation. As you can imagine. It's just like if you were getting injections of insulin that you didn't ask for.   Stacey Simms  14:54 Yeah, scary stuff. Yeah. So you have these operations. You're growing up just fine. But you have been told your family's been told that you will eventually most likely develop type one diabetes or something that's very similar.   Leo Brown  15:06 Actually, that didn't become what people were told until more recently, this, I think, has to do with better research and sort of documentation about the progression of the disease also, as early treatments have become more effective, and there's still a long way to go there. I'm you know, most people don't get to go to kindergarten like I did without some sort of special needs. Or even just like having a continuous glucose monitor, right? You might not be I mentioned special needs, because like, as soon as your blood sugars are low, you could have that could affect your brain in some way. But also, even if you don't have that consequence of the low blood sugars, you might still have a lot of trouble controlling your blood sugar's early in life or throughout your life. And so the fact that I didn't have any of that, from nursery school, kindergarten and on through the beginning of college is sort of unusual. But to your question, my parents were not told that I would get diabetes, part of the reason, I think is because my pancreas was making so much insulin, there was a thought that removing just the right amount would lead to me being just fine. Or, you know, you might not remove enough like, I might still have low blood sugars, like there was no assumption that I would have diabetes, although my understanding is more recently, that's become more of a an assumption that like you do this type of operation. And then no one knows when, but eventually you will have diabetes,   Stacey Simms  16:38 or and now I have one more dumb question or the surgery for we move on. I know, everybody wants to know about you, and the Dexcom and The Amazing Race, right. But I'm so curious, we think about the pancreas, and I think most people in the diabetes community understands that it's not dead, you know, it didn't stop doing everything it's supposed to do. But we don't think about it as doing anything much more than producing insulin, you have like this much of a pancreas left, and you have been living this happy, healthy life, even though we're gonna talk about your diagnosis. Are people generally surprised when they hear that it's, it's more of an education for you to do? Because I gotta tell you, when you told me that, I thought that's not at all what I felt what happened?   Leo Brown  17:13 Yeah, I wish I could read the logs of my pancreas to tell you exactly what it's doing and what it's failing to do, like if you were trying to debug it. And, you know, there's not an easy way of getting in there. And and finding that information. I mean, you really would have to, you know, I engage any doctors I encounter and try to get those kinds of answers out of them. Like, what is it that my pancreas is not doing? Like, I know, it produces all sorts of hormones, other than insulin, I don't have the background to even ask the right questions, right. But all I can say is that with a little bit of pancreas, you can get a little bit of function. And I guess enough such that I don't I'm not diagnosed with anything other than diabetes. But it is a great question. And there's not a ton of patients to do this research on. Nor is it something that you'd want to interfere with someone's life to do research on, like, you were to poke around in there, like you could cause a problem. So on some level, you kind of just keep an eye on it. But one thing I do quickly want to add is that my parents and I, after I was diagnosed with diabetes, we were really kind of kicking ourselves like, doesn't it make sense? You took my pancreas out? Why didn't anyone mentioned that? This could just it seems like common sense. I mean, not I'd never thought about diabetes before. But my parents had certainly thought a lot about blood sugar. And they were like, course, like diabetes?   Stacey Simms  18:43 Nah, I gotta say, in everybody's defense, I think I would just be very happy that my baby who was going super low, all of a sudden, they figured out was wrong. They fixed it. You went to kindergarten, if the doctors aren't telling you why we're going to   Leo Brown  18:57 we think, clear. And you know, we weren't testing my blood sugar after I was, you know, in first or second grade, like and, and there's no indication that there was any need to at that time, no symptoms. Yeah.   Stacey Simms  19:10 So what happened? Did you go to college and start having issues or did it come suddenly. So   Leo Brown  19:14 I went to college, I look back and I wonder when the symptoms really began. But by the time I was diagnosed, I was working. I was with summer after my freshman year, I was working at like a family run vegetable farm in the Berkshires in Western Mass where I was in college. And I thought I was you know, I'm a pretty fit person. I'm not a college athlete. And I was with a couple of college athletes on on this farm. And so that was what made me kind of doubt that will maybe I'm not cut out for this. But long story short, I couldn't really make it through the day. There was a moment I remember where I was trying to get into the pickup truck that we were driving around, and I could get in but I had to like I would just like go put my hands on the wheel and just use my arms to just like, drag myself into the pickup truck. And that was odd. I'm not used to having that much trouble with something that seems simple. Why wasn't I using my legs? Right? I probably was, but it was I wasn't using my body the way I normally would. And then I also, again, no surprise to the community, I had to pee all the time. These guys I was working with were thinking like, what's wrong with Leo, like, all he does is go to the bathroom. And he's not very good at any of this manual labor. And I was starting to think maybe I just am sickly. I'm just someone who is not as fit and capable as I thought I was. You know, I'm not one of these college athletes. So who knows. So I went home for a couple weeks, I said it was a vacation, you know, I'd kind of plan to take two weeks off at some point in the summer anyway, I was at my girlfriend's house at the time hanging out with her and her family, just in the living room, really low key, like someone was watching TV, someone's reading the newspaper, we might have been playing board game, and I was just lying on the floor, basically, I would only get up to go to the kitchen and get like a tall glass of milk. And I think I went through an entire gallon of milk. And then I you know, I was like super comfortable in this environment. So I wasn't pretending to feel any better than I was. But I also wasn't, I wasn't unhappy. I just had no energy. I was like, I was completely down for the count. And her mom is a scientist. And she said, You're not well, and you should go to the doctor, you should go home and go to the doctor. And I did and they tested my blood sugar. And it was 650. And so that was you know, right away, they put me on insulin. And skipping forward a bit. I went back to the farm Two weeks later. And they were astonished by like, I'd gained 20 pounds back. I had an I could do stuff. Do you remember how different you felt? Once I was on insulin right away? I had, yeah, like 10 times the energy, things felt easy, I think is the biggest thing. Like I wasn't unhappy. I just was confused by why I couldn't do what the type of thing that I thought I would be able to do. And again, I'm not. I don't think of myself as physically fit first and foremost. So in the back of my mind, I was always thinking maybe I'm not as fit as I thought I was versus an athlete, student or professional, who would sort of automatically know my performance is going down like something's wrong. I didn't think that.   Stacey Simms  22:33 All right, well, that's a fun way to start talking about the amazing race. Because I have been watching this show for I realized recently 19 years. And I've always thought, oh, that'd be so fun to do. And then I remember each season, why would never succeed, because the athletic ability you need just to survive and run from place to place is unbelievable. So I have lots of questions from listeners. I have lots of my own questions about the race. But the really the biggest one we get is, you know, how do you manage diabetes in a situation like that with travel and running? So if we can ask, we all saw you with the Dexcom while you're playing his steel drums and episode one that got everybody's attention and diabetes,   Leo Brown  23:12 even I didn't notice that in the clip.   Stacey Simms  23:15 Do you do if you don't mind it? Again, this is kind of personal. Do you take insulin pens? Do you use a pump anything like that? Yeah,   Leo Brown  23:21 I've tried different things over the years. And again, because my diabetes isn't type one or type two, it's hard to sort of draw comparisons. But the number one thing I do to manage my diabetes is through diet. So I eat a very low carb diet. And that is something I've always tried to do as much as I can have over the years. And at times that's enabled me actually to get off of insulin. However, there are so many variables. And on the race, I was not on regular insulin prior to the race, but I brought insulin on the race and had to use it in particular, because I would encounter food situations that I would not have chosen. And I also just didn't know what I was going to encounter. And that was also why I had the Dexcom, which I had. Well, I shouldn't say that's why I had the Dexcom. I've been using the Dexcom for some time. And that is also part of what has enabled me to kind of use insulin as I need it more recently, just to provide a little bit of context. When I was diagnosed, I did use Lantus and homologue, kind of a traditional prescription of insulin, as I discovered that I could use less insulin, if I ate fewer carbs, I over time would sort of rebalance my insulin with my diet. There are times that I wasn't using the insulin that I should have been. And I would sort of tell myself that I didn't need it. And if I didn't test my blood sugar, then I couldn't prove that I needed it. And then more recently, since the race and I'm not sure if this is you know an age thing or like an age pancreas thing, I have found that it's sort of floating higher Even with like, when I'm sure I'm, and legitimately, perfectly executing a low carb diet, and it's higher than I would have, you know, not high like 121 3140. Like, I wouldn't see the numbers like that if I had everything else controlled, and yet, somehow I do. But then if I start running more frequently, it kind of goes back down. So there's all these variables. And for the race, when there's so much that I can't control, I knew the Dexcom would be a CGM in general would be crucial. And having insulin available would be crucial. So I didn't want to go with an omni pod, because I got a couple of infections, actually, from the site, not saying that Omnipod, but just in general, like, I don't have a ton of body fat. And so like, I think there was just the wrong spot. And that can happen with any device. But for the race, I really want to do avoid that kind of thing. That's the sort of thing that could have actually put me out of the race, you know, if I had like a real infection, and so what I ended up bringing on the race was syringes, like old fashioned syringes with a vial of human slug. And the reason I went that route, actually, is because oh, no, I actually think that was just all I had at the time, because I had the syringes around for the token like a true diabetic. Yeah, I had the syringes and they were around from the Omnipod. And then I have to include this, which I had forgotten about, but we were at the hotel ready to go, you know, we're not sure when this starts going to be. And I think I was actually on the flight to LA at the start line. When I realized I had left all my insulin at home. There's one thing I didn't remember, it was in the fridge, it was lined up like little soldiers. So there was a whole production of gold, having someone having a production assistant go to Walgreens, like paying out of pocket, months later figuring out reimbursement. So that was it was a major part of preparing for the race.   Stacey Simms  27:05 Okay, I have to tell you, I have so many friends with so many stories of forgetting insulin and for getting supplies you have just made our day. So thank you for acknowledging that you're human. Oh, yeah, that's crazy. Oh, you went over here. So the other question was, this question kind of comes from the food? I thought I knew the answer this after all the years, but I wasn't sure. How do they feed you on the race? We see the crazy food contests. What are you eating day to day? And then the question was, how did you manage that?   Leo Brown  27:31 Yep. So I only ate in between legs. Mainly because I didn't want the distraction the production, the possible possibility of a higher low blood sugar during legs. Now keep in mind, I was not using a basal insulin at this point. And so I didn't really need to worry about my blood sugar floating low unless I had a short acting insulin in my system. And with the adrenaline happening during the race, I did not feel the need to be eating. And then in between legs, teams stay in a hotel, the race provides food. I'm being a little careful, because we're not supposed to talk too much about behind the scenes stuff. But what I'll say is that, you know, the food I would ask for I would eat what I could have it. And if I needed more, I would ask for more. That brings me to the topic of what I generally which is if you gave me a slice of pizza, I would eat only the top. In fact, that's a business idea that one of the other teams and I the blondes and I want to start pizza tops. I know we haven't made any progress on that. But like pizza tops, very delicious. Sometimes you can even find someone who's lactose intolerant, and you split the slice of pizza horizontally. So that's the kind of food strategy or trick I would use. There was food available to all the teams and sometimes I would have to ask for a little bit more to make sure that I can eat enough. Okay,   Stacey Simms  28:57 I am a Jewish mother. You were not super hungry during the race. I mean, again, I know we can't we have to be very careful. We don't know how far you got. We know you've got through episode one. But I'm thinking even an episode when you were swimming. You were running around or playing the drums. It's a long day. We don't have to eat a whole lot of adrenaline.   Leo Brown  29:16 And I you know, I always had a bar. I always had sugar tablets with me. So I should point that out. But you know, your heart's racing. You're competitive. Your adrenaline's high. And on that note, you're probably going to ask me about this. My blood sugar went high from that. Yeah, right. So like my blood sugar shoots up when I play coed softball in a league, you know, that I pay to be here. Right? Like it's not a competitive situation. But like, you know, The pitcher winds up. I'm at third base and like my heart's racing, and then I look at my Dexcom later and my but the first time this started happening, I was so confused. I know. I didn't eat anything like and yeah, so that happened a ton during the race to the point where I didn't Security actually said the security staff was who was really tasked with sort of keeping an eye on me from a medical perspective. And they, they would say, like, you can't let your blood sugar get that high. And I would say, well, like, Yeah. Like, what? Also what do you want me to do take insulin? Like, I don't think you want that. It'll go back down pretty quickly when I calm down, but right now, yeah, like, I've always found it's not worth trying to treat the adrenaline highs, because then I don't really under like, I can't do the same calculation around eating something like, How high is it gonna go? How excited was I? Like, how long will it last? Honestly, I've thought about trying to control that sort of thing through mindfulness, or meditation and sort of just like slowing down my adrenaline in general, although I don't want to change who I am as a person and you know, being hated about things. So that's a trade off, I guess.   Stacey Simms  30:55 Yeah, I think adrenaline highs from sports is just something that most people with diabetes that I know learn to figure out and kind of work around and not dose for, as I said, because you it's it's so tricky tolerate, um, time zones came up, too. But since you're not dosing basal insulin, that's not really a question, right? I mean, time zones, I assumed would affect you, but not really in the same way as someone was dancing that way. What   Leo Brown  31:17 Yeah, I didn't go space all during the race. And I think time zones affected all of us in an odd way. But, you know, we weren't sleeping in 24 hour cycles, we were sleeping during breaks between the legs, and the legs were not, you know, they didn't start when the sun came up, and when the sun went down, so yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think if I had been dosing basal, I would have had to just, you know, set a timer and decide that's when the next day began.   Stacey Simms  31:46 All right, any tricks and tips to keep your Dexcom on? Did it stay on in the water? Did it stay on with the sweat? And the reason the whole thing? That was what I was thinking about?   Leo Brown  31:54 Yeah, incredibly, it did. Since the race, I've gotten more experience with using the Dexcom and have started to use three M tape. And at this point, I just put it on preemptively. And aggressively. So it's like all over the site. I was, I think, kind of lucky during the race, the biggest issue I had with a Dexcom. And this gives you some insight into like the level of excitement and my state of mind was, at one point, we were on an airplane, and I was checking my blood sugar on, I actually was using, not my phone, but the little device that it comes with, because we didn't have our phones. So I was fiddling around with this device. And my mind's racing a mile a minute, right, like probably the entire race. I mean, to like, say, exit out of the part of the app that I'm in. And I decommission the sensor. Oh, no. Unlike the I was installing the sensor, no, I installed the sensor. And then I said the sensor is over right. Now, it is not possible to reverse that. And I was so distraught. And olana pointed out at that moment, that I had brought four sensors for 30 days, because I brought an extra and that was when I used the extra. At that point. I didn't have an extra. But at least I had that one. That was like, I don't know if there was a moment in the race when I was more horrified then when I installed Dexcom and then immediately decommissioned it.   Stacey Simms  33:32 Oh my gosh, yeah. I think a lot of us have done that. You guys were very early in your relationship, as you said. Very brave thing to do. exciting thing to do. Did you have fun? I mean, you're married.   Leo Brown  33:44 Yeah, we had a lot of fun on the race. It was also I will say a very stressful experience in general. You know, our first time on TV, you know, we really wanted to keep racing. You might have noticed in the first episode, we were on the second flight, we were in 10th place at a certain point, the oil drums were huge and hard to handle. The fish numbers challenge was horrible. Try remembering for numbers and the numbers were okay. But the colors. The problem with the colors is that what are you reading the fish nose to tail left to right, like you flip it over upside down? Right? It's sort of like you can reverse the fish in all different directions. And we were just like, really, things were not getting any easier. And then the skill drum challenge Fortunately, I felt pretty comfortable with so that was Trinidad and Tobago, and we had a blast, but we also had a lot of anxiety. You know, as far as our relationship, I think we kind of knew what we were getting into, in a way. I mean, I suppose it was more intense in many ways than you could have imagined. But we knew we wanted to do this big adventure like we knew it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. We wanted to travel we wanted to get to know each other. We wanted to get away from our jobs like It was a no brainer. And I think that our relationship from day one has always been that we want to do things together, and not like shy away from experiences. And we're just both wanting the same thing out of life in so many ways. And so it would have been against our nature to hesitate to do this thing together.   Stacey Simms  35:20 So this was taped in 2018. This is pre COVID. But this is a long time ago. How hard is it been? I mean, I don't know exactly when it wrapped up, or if you know, when it ramped up production. But how hard has it been for you guys to sit on this for all this time? You can't say anything?   Leo Brown  35:35 Yeah, it's been a big secret. And it's been a huge relief to share. We were able to share with close family, initially, MBAs, everything we couldn't share with work, we couldn't share with friends, we couldn't share it, my friend who was house sitting for us. And we have been able to stay in touch with the cast. We're really close with the rest of the cast. The fact that it took so long to air is I think part of that, like we've had a chance to see each other go through stages of life together. A couple of them were at our wedding, everyone else was live streamed into the wedding. So having the cast as sort of a support system through this has been really huge. It's just a Yeah, it's a huge relief to be able to share that. That's unbelievable. And I have to say, just watching the first episode, and I haven't watched the show in a few years. And now I'm back in I'm very excited. Good. But it was a joy. Great season. Well, I'm glad to hear it. But I gotta tell you, it was a joy to see travel. It was exciting to see the world again. escapist is voyeuristic. Yeah, it's, it's what we need right now. Of course, being able to see myself through those things is a trip and feel so great. But also, you know, just being able to see people interacting, like we used to, I'm sure there's going to be some airplane footage. The first episode was notably absent airplane footage, which I think everyone was sort of would you know, that's what you want to see right now is like everyone like squeezing onto a plane. But there will be some of that the carnival in Trinidad. Imagine, you know that today? You want to see that back to the way it was, when it can be. But yeah, I do think it's the perfect show to be airing at this time, unlike Big Brother, where you're locked in a house. And it's kind of the same as you know, you get everyone tested, and then you can be in the house. But the race is obviously the opposite. And we are we're all hoping they'll be able to you know, keep running it again soon. You know,   Stacey Simms  37:39 I I would like to know, and I, again, I've watched the show for 19 years, you know, what's the crew? Like? What's it like traveling with those other people that we never see?   Leo Brown  37:48 Yeah, first of all, the crew is many in number. And they're an integral part of the experience. They are supportive. They're excited to be there. They do incredible physical things with you know, 50 pounds of equipment, trying to keep up with us. We're trying to go as fast as we can. And then they're, you know, jogging alongside us. They haven't a job that is would have been hard to imagine. I mean, now I've kind of seen them do it. But you know, they travel around the world. A lot of them work on other shows. Some of them have been doing the race since the beginning. And now we follow a bunch of them on Instagram, and they all post great photos of their non office jobs. Like to them   Stacey Simms  38:28 you've got the goats, right, and you're running to the mat. Where are they? They're behind you. They're in front of you. They're trying not to get trampled by goats. I mean, it's got to be an incredible skill on their part to   Leo Brown  38:37 Yeah, so also keep in mind that there's equipment like drones that they can deploy. So generally speaking, 90% of the footage, I would think is from a person carrying a gigantic camera, just running around. But if you think about like the water challenges, actually, I think they've had cameras on boats, you know, I probably shouldn't get too into that. You'd probably just do drones. Yeah, sometimes it's   Stacey Simms  39:06 drones. And what's Phil like, Phil is nice. Don't tell me if Phil isn’t nice.   Leo Brown  39:10 No, feels great. Phil is just like he is on the show. Except if anything quicker wittier than you might expect, like none of it's scripted. As far as I know. He's really fun, really warm, and he wants us to do our best. You know, one thing I did want to ask before I let you go, I found you on Twitter because someone in the diabetes community was talking directly to you and saying, Hey, we watched the show. My daughter just got to Jack's calm and saw you with yours on TV and it made our night. You are while of unusual case in the diabetes community. You are in the community now. And I'm curious what that's like for you. When you see people reacting so positively and so excited to see you on the show. I was definitely surprised that people picked up on it right away. You know, I didn't see the Dexcom in the episode. And it's an incredible feeling to have that be an inspiration for people. And I know how I felt when I was first diagnosed with diabetes. And I didn't know what I would be able to do, it took me some time to realize that I wasn't going to get a break from it. And to kind of there's the diagnosis, which was a relief, actually, because then I could do things that I wanted to be doing and thought I could be doing, I just, you know, they told me, I just have to do this and that, and then I can live my life. And then it was probably a couple months later, where it sort of hit me that, you know, I wouldn't be able to go back to the way it was before. And I remember my sister who's a couple years older, she was watching this happen. And I was a freshman in college, I just finished up freshman year of college. And I had to I realized, and especially because I was making such an effort to manage with diet, I realized like, I wouldn't be eating birthday cake, I wouldn't be eating a hot dog button. And the way she saw it was that I had to grow up really fast, because I have a sweet tooth. Like I love candy. And I don't eat cake. I mean, I eat dark, dark chocolate, but I don't eat candy. And oh, what I'm about to go make for myself after this interview is a hot chocolate, which is made of half and half and cocoa powder, no sugar, and I mix it together and I heat it up in a saucepan. And it gets like to be to me indistinguishable from like a chocolate syrup that I want to drink. But it's got no sugar. So I recommend that. Anyhow, I'm on a tangent. It's really exciting to me to be able to hopefully, give people who were in my shoes. I think the person who commented that was her daughter's first couple days with Dexcom. So I remember what that was like. And on one hand being really hopeful that I had a solution for myself. But on the other hand, accepting that, you know, there were real compromises. The solution was not one that I was always going to love. But for the race, those are solutions that helped me run the race. Yeah.   Stacey Simms  42:13 Well, I can't thank you enough for jumping on so quickly for sharing your story. And for being so open about everything. And thanks for hanging through the technical stuff, too. I appreciate.   Leo Brown  42:24 I think we got a lot I got us a Wi Fi upgrade in the course of this interview. So she's she's busy. Behind the Scenes love it.   Stacey Simms  42:32 Yeah, I appreciate you doing that so much. So look, we'll check in. We'll see how it goes. And maybe we'll follow up. But thanks again for spending so much time with me. Okay,   Leo Brown  42:42 thanks a lot, Stacey.   Announcer  42:49 You're listening to Diabetes Connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  42:55 More information on the foundation that Leo talked about. I will also link up stuff on hyperinsulinism. If you'd like to learn more, all of that at Diabetes connections.com. Click on the episode homepage where there is also a transcription and I'll put a link into the amazing race because they've got some cute behind the scenes videos each week. And oh my gosh, I hope they win. You know as we're taping this, the second episode hasn't even aired yet. So I don't know if they've made it to the third episode. And but you know how this works. You've been with me with other contestants. We've had people from the Titan games and from the baking shows the Food Network kids baking show, American Ninja Warrior, you know, the Christmas light. We've had people from all different reality shows and you never know but it's always great to talk to them and just making it to the show is a pretty incredible achievement way. I hope they went Tell me something good coming up in just a moment. But first diabetes Connections is brought to you by Gvoke Hypo Penn and almost everyone who takes insulin has experienced a low blood sugar and that can be scary. A very low blood sugar is really scary. And that's where GMO hypo pen comes in. It's the first auto injector to treat very low blood sugar Gvoke Hypo Pen is pre mixed and ready to go with no visible needle. That means it's easy to use in usability studies 99% of people were able to give Gvoke correctly. I'm so glad to have something new. Find out more go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the Gvoke logo Gvoke should not be used in patients with pheochromocytoma or insulinoma visit Jeeva glucagon.com slash risk.   Tell me something good. This peak is full of weddings and babies and celebrations. Congratulations to so many people in the community who took a big step this month. Rob Howe got married in early October so congratulations to Rob and to Erica. Rob is the founder of diabetics doing things the host of that podcast and and so much more. It is Rob that he's my Instagram guru, but I'm so bad at Instagram. I once I think I once was it Rob I once called him through Facebook messaging or Instagram messaging, I don't even know. I don't know how I did it. He was so polite. He was so nice. I felt like I was 75 years old. It was, it was not great. But congratulations to rob and Erica, who had a beautiful backyard wedding, you know, as we have to do these days, we wish them many years of health and happiness. Congratulations to Patrick Mertes, who had a baby with his beautiful wife, Patrick is one half of the team that made up 50 and 50. And these two guys who decided to go around the country last year, and climb the highest peak in all 50 states and try to do that in 50 days. And Patrick completed it Michael, his partner had an injury, halfway through and completed it. But later on, they did something else recently called race along the trace, which was three states. And 460 miles, it looks like a bike ride. He called it the last hurrah before fatherhood. So we'll we'll catch up with him and talk about that. But Patrick is also the director of the diabetes camp where my son goes every summer. So we are excited to see how a camp guy tackles fatherhood, I'm sure he's gonna do an amazing job because he's corralled all those kids for all those years. And finally, congratulations to Ken Rodenheiser, who also had a baby in October. He's a pediatric CDE in Philadelphia, and I think it's at the hospital where he himself was diagnosed years ago. But he has been a very big part of the children with diabetes organization and the friends for life conference. I believe he leads the tween program there, Ken and I have gone back and forth for years about getting him on the show. And we will work it out very soon. But I just wanted to highlight him in this segment and say congratulations to him and his wife and their babies name is Elliot, this adorable little girl. And I just realized as I'm reading this, I didn't put two and two together. But my next Tell me something good is also an Elliott. But this is Elliott Fry. He is the former kicker and all time leading scorer for the University of South Carolina, he lives with type one. And earlier this month, he kicked his first field goal in the NFL for the Atlanta Falcons in the Carolinas. Elliott is very well known for working with kids for being really out front with JDRF. And just being you know, out there as a great role model and example of somebody who plays sports and plays them at the highest level with type one. So it was really exciting to see him get that very first field goal in the NFL. And that's Tell me something good. Do you have something for me send it my way, Stacey at Diabetes connections.com. You can also post in the Facebook group, you don't have to have a baby or get married. It can be as easy as your son or daughter did their first sight change, without crying and running away oh my goodness, that used to be such an ordeal with Benny, anything that feels momentous anything you want to celebrate with the diabetes community, I would really love to know about you can go ahead and tell me something good.   It's hard to believe that it's going to be November in a couple of days. And I know we're all stressed out about the election and the possible aftermath. But it's also diabetes Awareness Month. And I don't know how that's gonna get any play this year with everything else that's going on in the world. But I'm gonna try and I always say diabetes Awareness Month is for the non diabetes community. I mean, we're aware every day of the year, this is our chance to educate. So I have a few things in mind to try to get the word out in other media. And I won't be talking so much about that here. But I'll share if anything exciting happens. But I am going to be doing two different things. If you're on Instagram, I will be having a contest I'm probably gonna start that the second week of November because I want to get past this election to that's just going to be a fun giveaway, to celebrate each other to be part of diabetes awareness. It's going to be fun and easy. I have some great companies lined up already that want to donate stuff and give it to you. I mean, you work hard all year round. Let's celebrate a little bit. And we have a big episode milestone, the numbers I'm so excited to share this with you. The second one is going to be on Facebook only. So we're going to have an Instagram only and a Facebook only. And the Facebook is going to be a little bit more work on your part. But the prize is going to be bigger, that one's going to be a cash prize. So I will keep you posted. The best way to keep track is to be in the Facebook group. Or to subscribe to the newsletter. If you're not already subscribed to go to Diabetes connections.com the cute little please sign up should pop up. But if it doesn't just scroll all the way to the bottom and you can sign up for the newsletter right there. So two contests coming up. I want to make it easy for you. I think it's gonna be fun. We just need a little brightness around here. And I hope I can provide some of that. All right thank you to my editor John Bukenas from audio editing solutions. thank you as always for listening. I'm Stacey Simms. I'll see you back here next week. Until then, be kind to yourself.   Benny  49:46 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Simms Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs avenged

Can podcasting help you generate leads and close deals? Most experts say "no" when asked this question. Jay Wong says "yes." This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Podcast Your Brand founder Jay Wong shares the strategies he uses to help his clients hit the Top 100 when they launch new podcasts and then create podcast content that actually generates ROI for their businesses. Jay is a successful podcaster himself, and he's parlayed his experience into a successful consultancy that advises brands both big (think Proctor and Gamble) and small on how to get results with podcasting. In this episode, he shares advice that any podcaster can use to make sure the launch of a new podcast is successful, and tips on creating podcast content that will push your customers further along their buying journey. Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details. Resources from this episode: Visit the Podcast Your Brand website Learn more about Jay's "done for you" Top 100 podcasting service Follow Jay on Instagram Check out the podcasts of some of Jay's clients: P&G Alumni Stackadapt Young Leaders Across America Transcript Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Jay Wong. Who is the CEO of podcast your brand. Welcome to the podcast, Jay, Jay (00:29): Super excited to be here with you, Kathleen and excited to dive into a bit of podcasts. Kathleen (00:34): Yeah. before we get too deep in, maybe you could start by sharing your story and who you are, what you do, how you came to do it. Jay (00:46): Sure. For sure. So I think like a lot of people that love the medium of podcasting, you know, started with, you know, high hopes of, Hey, let's go out, build an audience and be able to serve that audience. Right. And so I figured out how to launch my own podcast about five, six years ago now podcasting was very different in, in 2015 than it is at the time of recording this. And I figured out how to get my own show into the top 100 back then, there was this, you know, we're not just talking about like new and noteworthy, if some of your listeners and business owners know what, what I'm referring to, but actual top 100 in the iTunes section. And that actually got me my first, like 50 to a hundred email subscribers, right? Like this is how different podcasting was, you know, back back then. Jay (01:40): And from there other individuals always, you know, reached out other business owners, other entrepreneurs that said, Hey, I saw what you did with the podcast. Could you do it with our brand? Right. And so thus started, you know, a little bit of consulting. We built an online program. We did two day intensives. We spoke at all the biggest, you know, podcast conferences. And, you know, one day when we were running a two day intensive one of my favorite kind of offers and services that especially when events was like a thing that people were, you know, when people could attend and, and, and actually that's in the past tense, unfortunate, hopefully it comes back because it's still one of my favorite, like, you know, models. And, and I just absolutely love it. But we, I remember we had, we had a lady at one of our events. Jay (02:27): She came up to me, she said, Jay, I love what you stand for around podcasting. I love, you know, your way of thinking about it in terms of just making it a real marketing channel for our business. She was in real estate at that time you know, super successful on, in her own. Right. And she said, look, I'm just never going to do any of this. And I that's, that's just the truth. Right. but I would be open to writing you and your team, a bigger check, if you could figure out how I could just show up how I could just show up record. Right. And we can implement all those awesome things that you just showed us in the last couple of days. And I'd be very open to do it with you for the next year. Right. And so that, wasn't the first time that I heard a abbreviated offer like that for our agency, our done for you. Jay (03:15): And to end, you know, service it wasn't something that I woke up that day and thought, you know what, today's the day we're going to do an agency. But we worked with a couple other clients. We worked with her, we figured out what actually works in our process. And now we've gotten the opportunity in the last two and a half years to be really behind the scenes of hundreds of top 100 launches. And not only did we get the shows and the brands into the top 100, we could talk more about that, but really we build them a customized ROI plan, right? So for some of the companies we're working with, they're looking to drive new members. They're looking at this as a retention strategy. They're looking at this as, as a new way of promoting their products and services. And those last two and a half years have been such an amazing adventure. And I say two and a half years because, you know, we all know so much can just happen in such a short period of time, but more or less, that's ultimately how we got all the way to the agency podcasts, your brand that you see and hear about today. Kathleen (04:15): That's awesome. And it's so interesting to me to hear you talk about that journey because I had my first podcast right around 2015, the same time you did. And I mean, I did a terrible job at it because I just literally knew I wanted to podcast and I kind of jumped in without a really good plan. And I mean, it was a great learning experience, but, but it, it sort of taught me all the things not to do. You know, and then I, and then I ended that podcast and started this one, which has been a completely different experience. And as I've, I mean, I'm now like three years in, and as I've progressed with this podcast, I've seen podcasting really kind of take off and other people get more interested and, and then covert hit. And it was like, I thought podcasting was hot. And then it was just not to be goofy, but like, I mean, everybody, like I'm in a couple of online groups with heads of marketing from a lot of different companies and all of a sudden it was like every single person was talking about podcasting, which I just thought was so interesting because it's been around forever. Like it's been around a long, long time Jay (05:22): Hundred percent, hundred percent. Kathleen (05:24): Yeah. And it's just taken off in recent months Jay (05:27): For sure. I, I, we, during the months of April and may, we had so many companies reach back out to us and said, Hey, remember that idea that you pitched us six months ago or a quarter a year ago. Right. We're going to do it now. And, you know, because we believe this would be an amazing time to be able to kind of capture some of that awareness and be able to add our 2 cents on the craziness and madness of the world, you know? And right around that time, we were the the, the show for Proctor and Gamble for their alumni network. And you know, man, we learned so much in, in those compress two, three months, I think we did like 10 launches. And within like a week apart of each other, it was just a crazy, crazy, you know, quarter. But you're absolutely right. More and more people I think, but even three years ago it was, it went from this like new media, you know, maybe it's the future of voice, right. Like it was right around there. Should it be a nice to have versus now I think a lot of companies are looking at it and saying, okay, we need to be the voice for whatever the industry, whatever the niche that we stand for and that, you know, this might be one of the ways that we can be able to do that. Yeah. Kathleen (06:43): It's, it's fascinating. Now you mentioned Proctor and Gamble. You've done work with all kinds of different brands when it comes to podcasting. Can you name a few others? Jay (06:58): Yeah. So you know, we worked with another company called StackAdapt. They built their own native advertising, programmatic ads platform. I'm pretty sure they're the largest one specifically in Canada outside of Google. But certainly they've won tons of awards in the U S as well as in Canada. We've worked with, you know, if people are familiar with like student works or college works or college pro pretty much every company in North America that has that model, we've partnered with them to be able to grow their retention and grow their communities. A lot of, you know, influencers, bestselling authors not just Amazon best selling authors, but real you know, credible, amazing individuals that, you know, have digital presences and digital backends as well. We tend to do really well for those guys as well. Kathleen (07:57): And you help companies through all aspects of the podcasting life cycle. You know, when you and I first connected, I, I, and we talked and we were talking about kind of what you do with podcasters. I think my initial response was, you know, we've talked a lot about podcasting on this podcast. It's, it's sort of funny, it's, it's a hot topic as one might expect. And I'm always looking for, what's a different way we can talk about it. And one of the reasons I was really excited to chat with you is that a couple of the things that you brought up really are things that we haven't covered yet. You know, number one, being how to really come out of the gate strong. So when you launch your podcast, I think the Holy grail is getting in the top lists the top 100 or the top of this. So I want to start with that because we've covered in the past, like how to strategize what your podcast should be about and how to record and all of that. But let's talk about how to launch really successfully. Yeah. So Jay (08:56): Really quick even added caveat for your listeners, is that what we're about to talk about right here? Even if you have a podcast this is still applicable, right? It's it's and, and yeah. So I think that's, that's, I get asked that question all the time. Hey, Jay, we've been podcasts in the last couple years, these are our stats. This is where we're at, right. Is it too late for us to hit the top 100, hit the top 200? You know, I would say this before we dive in as well, which is internally. And I think we talked about this internally. We refer to hitting the top 100 as the end of phase one, right? Because it is not the end all be all you're you're, it's not like the whole, it's not like there's a pre top 100, you know, life is pretty top 100 and life post, top 100. Jay (09:43): But I do find that if we're going to spend all this time and all this energy and all of other people's energy to hop on the podcast, I think if you want to be able to launch very strongly, then it's going to be one of your better opportunities to get out of the gate. Right. And to be able to position the podcast and position to host, even create the right platform for future guests. Right. And just make your own guests feel amazing to be able to be featured on any platform. Right. I think these are just some of the things that you might be thinking about. When we're looking at a launch specifically, the iTunes algorithm works on a couple components, but really the main one is being able to increase your subscribers of that podcast, right? Anything that you could do to be able to do that, whether you're running a, you know, a contest, rather you're writing paid ads, there's so many different ways of going about it. Jay (10:44): But a lot of times for our own clients, we build them based on their email list, based on the assets that they have are ready. We build them essentially a plan to be able to capitalize on their current assets, to be able to drive those subscriptions so that they can get out of the gate really, really strong and really form a community around their podcasts, because that's really prepping us to go into phase two as well. You know, talking about the ROI and new traffic. It just positions us to be able to win the whole game that much better. Does that make sense? Kathleen (11:14): Yes. And I have a bunch of questions. So I've done a lot of reading about launching new podcasts and I've read different things. And I'm curious to get your take. The first question is I have read a number of articles that say that when you launch, you should launch with more than one episode. So it's not like, Hey, we've launched here's episode one. It's like, Hey, we've launched here's episodes, you know, one through five or one through eight. Sure, sure. But I've also read the opposite. So I'd love to get your opinion on that. Jay (11:48): Yeah. You know, it's I, I've been seeing this trend more and more right. Where they'll essentially, and these are like really well known athletes or well known celebrities that are doing this as well. Keep in mind any strategy that you see any type of popular influencer or popular celebrity doing chances are that you cannot actually replicate what they're doing because of that celebrity factor. And they probably are bringing, you know, millions and hundreds of thousands of followers. Right. We've worked with people where you know, they'll have 2 million and Instagram following, right. Their numbers and their downloads. It's not going to be comparable right. To somebody that might not have that social capital. And, and, and, you know, you're not bringing that into the launch with that all, you know, so I've seen this trend where they'll release like a trailer. Right. Jay (12:39): And it's like, it's coming soon, you know? And it's like a, maybe like a three to five kind of like a movie trailer I imagine. Right. And then maybe a couple of weeks after then they'll start releasing on like a weekly schedule. What have you I think of the launch like this, as in Kathleen, let's go try out a, this new restaurant down the street. We've heard amazing things about it. Our friends are friends with the owner. Right. And when we go in there, can we, you know, since we're trying out the place, let's order a couple appetizers, let's get a couple drinks, let's go through the whole experience of it a little bit. Right. And so I'm a very big believer that you definitely don't. I think you don't want to just release a trailer. You don't want to just leave them with one episode. Jay (13:25): You know, if you look at the statistics of podcasts is right and, you know, for any of your listeners are marketers and business owners, you get, you guys could, could look this up as well, but I'm pretty sure when they released stats earlier this year, people spend on average, you know, six plus hours listening to podcasts is right. And I think they also spend on average listening to five to six different shows. So think about this, you're introducing them to a new show yet. There's only one episode there. Right. So we'd like to mix it up in that first batch, anywhere from three to five episodes. I think when you go beyond five, it gets a little, almost like too much. Even at five, I would feel like, Ugh, I don't know which one is going to be the best suited for me. Right. Three, four definitely would work. Right. Just in terms of just, Hey, here's a bit of a solo, here's a, maybe a longer form interview. Here's a, you know, some, you know, our, our welcome type of, you know, episode, right. So it just gives them kind of a full experience of what is to come. Right. Kathleen (14:26): That makes sense to me. And it also intuitively makes sense because I, I feel like in the last couple of years, we've really become trained as human beings to expect, to be able to binge content, you know, the whole Netflix model of releasing the whole season at one time. And there's this level of frustration that arises when all of a sudden you're, you don't have availability, especially if it's something you really like, you know? And so I can see where that would make sense, because if I, if I'm come in and I get a taste of episode one, and I'm like, this is really good. I'm going to want, I just did this. I just did this. I'll also give an example. And I don't know how many episodes they released at once, but I discovered the, the podcast, nice white parents, which is by Serial and the New York times. Kathleen (15:18): I just discovered it this past weekend. And I listened to, I think it was eight episodes or 10, one of the two, the whole, the whole podcast is it's. Cause it's not a, a podcast that goes on forever. And I literally listened to all 10 episodes in like a day or so, because it was good. I got hooked and I wanted more. And I think it's very easy to lose that momentum if somebody listens to one and they like it, and then they don't have that habit developed yet. Because to me it's all about building a habit. And if you haven't formed a habit yet, and then you are not able to satisfy that craving with another episode, I think it, it, it jeopardizes the longevity of your listener. Jay (16:01): It's so good. What you're saying right now, because one of the things that we have to remind our clients, right. And just keep this in mind, but like, are I, I'm all for like, and podcast, this is, what's so beautiful about podcasting nowadays, is that there, you know, now Hollywood studios, right. Are, are shifting gears and they're deploying resources to be able to create some amazing audio programs. Right. Just think of your favorite type of true crime show. They're doing some really interesting things with like the history, you know channel and, and that, and that type of genre. But the shows that we specifically work on are a lot of times, you know, businesses, CEOs, and there's a whole brand behind it. They chances are they have different products and services. Right. And so when you're introducing a podcast, we're not just training are the hosts or the CEO, or whoever's running the, or whoever's the voice of the program to be able to create and get into the flow of creating the episodes. Right. You're also training the audience to receive the, the, the, the episodes from you to actually see that every single week or twice a week or whatever the cadence is right. To say, Oh yeah, that, that is what that's, what's, what's going on. So to your point, forming that habit right away, it's very, very important right. Out of the gate. Kathleen (17:22): Yeah. Now, so, so if somebody starting out, you would have them do a couple of episodes for the launch. Talk me through the rest of your process for making sure that launch is strong. What are you doing to, to drive people to those first episodes? Jay (17:39): Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's funny. Cause we, we had to make this distinction for even art, the business owners that we work with because we realized that some of them had, you know, this is one of the first launches that, that they were doing. Right. And so they would be after the first week, they would be, you know, pretty, you know, energy like exhausted, right. Because they, you know, they've just gotten a flood of emails and DMS and messages and questions and they're all social channels are being blown up. Right. But we always flick at the launch as this nice little two to three week period where once again, we're training the listeners to actually be able to tune in, we're publishing a little more on the front end before we go into a weekly cadence or a biweekly cadence, whatever it ends up working out for said business, but you're really forming, I think the beginning of the community around your show. Jay (18:36): Right? So a lot of our clients they'll have some sort of a community aspect of this, right? Some of them, even the Proctor and Gamble one that we mentioned their main, their whole thing was, Hey, let's drive new members in our alumni network. So there's, this is more of like a, a paid, you know, network, you know, you gotta be a part of it. Right. But there are, you got, gotta keep this in mind, we call this the triangle effect within podcasts, your brand, which are three things that you want to really cycle your audience through. Right. The number one is the podcast or your main content channel, number two, basic for marketers and business owners out there. But it's going to be an email list. Right. So just even getting that cadence down, because so many times how guilty are we as business owners that we know that every time we email the list or we do it right. Jay (19:27): You know, that that list is an amazing asset for our business. But so many of our clients, they, you know, maybe they, they, they, they don't know what to say. They, you know, they don't have the podcast right away. So once again, it goes back into training and that third piece is that community piece. Right. So whichever section that you're in, right. And this is something that we train there, the, our clients' teams on, if you're on the email list, you're promoting to the other two, right. If you're on the community, you're promoting to the other two. So if you're, Hey, have you heard the last podcast episode, Hey, go over here, sign up for our webinar coming up. Right. If you're on the email list right there, they're already signed up or what have you, Hey, you know, have you heard the latest episode? Jay (20:08): How have you joined our discussion in our community? Right. So it's, it's th does that make sense? So you're kind of, it seems like you're everywhere, but really there's just three places. Right? And if you think about that breakdown from a consumer perspective, right? You've got their phone covered, you got the social media covered, you got their inbox covered. And the podcast really covers all those other moments that they might've been alone, you know, and they might've been alone cleaning the house. They might've been alone gardening. They might've been, you know, alone just wanting to be able to geek out on a certain topic, you know, and they might be listening to, to a show about inbound marketing, right. So it's all those little moments that our hosts and our, our, the people we work with, they get a chance to connect with their perfect customer. Kathleen (20:52): So true story. I listen to podcasts when I vacuum, when I grocery shop and when I exercise. So the examples you gave are totally spot on. So my question about that though, is, does that mean you have to have already a large email list in order to do this well, like, you know, what, if somebody comes to you and they don't have a big list. Yeah. Jay (21:17): So I think this is a really good question because not everybody has 2 million Instagram followers and not everybody has this massive email list, even though they might've been told that, you know, for months and years. Right. look, I think you have to understand that you're starting from where you're starting at, you know, and we got to leverage, you know, if you have none of these assets, there is no community, there is no email lists. Well, we're going to, in that process, we're going to help you start building some of these assets. Right. And it's going to go more into our, you know, our phase two, which is focused around new traffic ROI. Right. But you know, those are ultimately, you have to really have those, if you want to be able to maximize, we believe the podcasting channel and that whole experience around it. Jay (22:04): Right. If you have an email list and you haven't been utilizing it, heck we've had clients where they come with a massive email list, but it's not really the right email lists for where they're going. Right. And so I think you have to understand that you're starting from where you're starting at. You don't have to have all three before starting, but certainly within all of our clients, we get them the amazing top 100 podcasts. And typically we have an email list, even if it's just, you know, a 50 or a hundred people that we're starting out with. And, and we kind of start from there. Kathleen (22:36): Got it. And you kind of gave me the segue into the second thing. I was really excited to talk to you about, which is that there's a lot of debate out there within the world of marketing and podcasting about like why, what you should expect to get out of hosting a podcast or producing and putting one on. And I hear most people say, don't expect it to be a lead generator for your business. Don't expect to get deals from it. And I think in many cases, that's true, but I was really intrigued that when you reached out to me, you talked about having had some clients that have landed really big deals from it. And it's, there's no straight line equation. I mean, podcasts, all podcasts are different, et cetera, et cetera. But I wanted to kind of pick your brain on this, this notion of how a podcast becomes a part of the marketing mix to help you grow your business. Jay (23:35): I love this question and I love this topic. And I think personally, the last few years has created, and I don't want to use this like lightly, but really it's created a whole industry where people are creating content because they feel like the idea of creating content is moving their brand and business forward. And it's not to say that sometimes, you know, you have to track every single piece of content. You can't create content just for fun anymore. You know, all marketers are ruining this. It's not to say that. But from a business owner standpoint, there are a lot of things that come up, whether it's Q and a, whether it is your objections. Okay. And maybe it's actually be easier if I share a little bit of a case study, think, go for it. Yeah. Like maybe I can do that because we worked with a client and, you know, we figured it out for her that her perfect client works with them. Jay (24:37): Usually for about two to three years, she, you know, on a basic simplicity level, she helps people right around that half a million, you know, revenue part to be able to go into multi-millions. Right. It's not just a sales game, but it's actually like infrastructure operations, understanding finances team. Right? Like there's, and that's why it usually takes that two to three year period. Right. For her, we figured out that there was about four different stages that, and I'm not talking about like, just like four stages of like your IP, like your, for profit activators. You know what I mean? And I'm not necessarily referencing that, but four stages that she sees her clients kind of graduate from, right. Maybe stage one they're working to in the business. They're, you know, they can't see any growth. Right. They have a big vision, but not really anybody to support them. Jay (25:32): Right. Like that, that would be stage one, stage four would be, they could sell their business, but they would never actually, you know, want to, you know, because they're actually so happy there, you know, 90% removed from any type of fulfillment, they just get to be their visionary. Right. so I'm just using this as a bit of example. Well, we created one of these episodes call, you know, the, the, the four stages of business growth. We obviously tailored it to her brand. Right. And till today, like we created this like late 2018, still to the day, I'll get messages from her team and her cause we've become good friends by now say like, show those, showcase people, applying for calls with them, right. Applying to chat with their sales team or with her. And they'll reference that, Hey, you know, I heard this, this episode, right. Jay (26:21): And I I'm, I'm a stage one entrepreneur, or I'm stuck in stage two. I've been stuck in stage two for the last two years. Right. And I would love to work with you because I, one day I would love to be in that stage four that you talked about. Right. And, you know, we're talking relatively higher ticket, you know, certainly, you know, done for you type of type of service. And so for her, she's made a massive ROI from that. Right. And you know, once again, I think we have to tailor it for every single business. Right. But I would invite your listeners to think about this. What are all the biggest questions, most common questions you get asked, what are the biggest objections that come up over and over again? How can we start tailoring and creating content that really looks to address some of these things, because what we're really doing is you're optimizing for the future sales conversations, right. We all have experienced what it's like to sell to somebody or somebody on your sales team has certainly experienced this, where they made an offer too early, right. Where they pitched someone that was not really receptive or certainly would never even, you know, when it's not even at that stage where they could even think about it. Right. So we've all had that negative experience. Jay (27:40): We've also all have hopped on calls where it wasn't really even an enrollment call or a sales call. Right. It was like, the person already knew what our values were. They knew what exactly what it is that we did. They knew what the result was. They knew what the outcome was. They were just checking logistics when, when can we start? Okay, cool. Right. It's more of a friendly conversation than anything. So that's really what we're trying to emulate. Right. And we do this with every single client because their strategy is going to be different. You know, some of those companies, I referenced earlier, student works as an example for them, it's not about generating the lead on the front end. It's about how they could get their entire company listening to the podcast so that they renew for year two, that they were new for them. Right. And so that changes exactly what we're going to talk about. That changes what content we're going to talk about. Right. For them, it's about how can we embed that customer journey and weave it constantly in to, to the content that they're creating that one day, if they're a part of the company, if they're lucky to be a part of the company in the next three, four years, they might have a chance to be able to see these types of results. Does that make sense from a Kathleen (28:50): Yeah. So wait, I'm fascinated by this second example you gave of basically like preventing churn via podcasts. So how, how do you create content that gets everybody in the company listening or like maximizes the number of people? Jay (29:02): I think, I think the, I think a lot of times people get really especially in this industry, right. In the marketing industry, everything is all about like numbers. Right. Which is totally understandable. So it's like, how many times are we posting? What are the downloads? It's, it's these types of questions versus for our clients. We're trying to get the most out of all the content pieces, right. If we're comparing, create one intentional piece of content, we're, it's kind of like we're planting that content on an external channel. Right. But internally, and all of those indoctrination email sequences were pointing to very specific episodes. It's never just, Hey, let's listen to listen to our podcasts. You know, it's listened to this episode on our podcast, right. Hey Kathleen, Hey, check out our top 100 podcasts. Jay (29:55): That's good. Right. It's good. It's it's nice. But Kathleen, I saw that you were doing this project around inbound marketing. We just created this episode around inbound marketing, but I think you would find relevant. Right. So when we think about the types of content, our clients are creating it's how, where is it that they want their customer to go? Where is it that your listeners want their customers to go? And how can you talk about the vision of it? Not necessarily the straight up tactics of today, there's episodes for that. Right. But where is it that you could go? Right. And that's really how we're kind of essentially having these mini sales conversations every single time. And people still find amazing value from it because ultimately they see it as a reminder right. Of them going to where they, that, that ultimate destination, you know? Jay (30:52): And I can't take full credit for this. There was a there I had a conversation with Dean Jackson. So shout out to the Dean who has a number of podcasts is one with Joe Polish. Another one where he does like live coaching in it. So, you know, he asked me one time, what I thought the true purpose of a podcast was. And, you know, I don't remember exactly what I said, but we came to the conclusion that the true purpose of a podcast is really to have an ongoing conversation. Right. It's kinda like if, you know, we all have people in our lives that are like the fitness fanatic people, you know, that every single time we see them, it feels like we should update them on like our high performance habits or, Hey, we're trying a new diet or, Hey, we, you know, I just started working out again. Jay (31:39): Right. That's an ongoing conversation with that person versus let's say they might be chatting with you. And it's a little more about business marketing, right? That's that ongoing conversation. So if you run a podcast, if you have any content marketing, what's that ongoing conversation for you, what's that ongoing conversation that you can remind your customers of that they're on this journey with you preferably for a very long period. And that way you're increasing that LTV, you're being able to increase retention over time. And that's really what we start training our clients to start thinking about and leveraging the medium in this way. Kathleen (32:13): I love that concept of kind of understanding your buyer's journey or that your customer's journey and, and tapping into that to create podcast content that resonates at different stages. But I think there's a fine line there of, you could easily veer into something that's very self promotional or very product centric. So how do you advise your clients about keeping the podcast content educational, you know, and not, eh, but like still relevant to what you do and to that customer journey? Jay (32:46): Yeah. So it's, it's a great point because I think when you tell people, Hey, go, you know, here's like, here's no rules go sell, right. It ends up becoming this like long, crazy, you know, sales pitch it's, you know, great content has that educational piece as well as, as entertaining pieces. Right. And so, you know, we it's w this is a lot of coaching really, when we comes down to the content critiques of our, of our clients is how can we just get them out of like, you know, that, that expert teaching mode, right? How can we get them sharing a little bit authentically about who they are, right. Because don't forget what you said earlier. And at the beginning of the show, podcasting has been around for a very long time before it was called podcasting before this top 100 stuff, before all the ROI conversations, it used to be two or three people that liked talking with each other geeking about geeking out about a certain topic. Jay (33:45): And it didn't matter how many people are listening. Right. They just throw it the recording online, raw recording, right. Maybe a little bit of music here and there. And it would be called internet radio. Right. That's like the true essence of, of podcasting. I think that's why a lot of people love it. It's because it's this unfiltered raw version. It feels like we're listening to a conversation that we are privy to. And we get a chance to, you know, seat in the back and not really have anything to say about it. And we get to listen to some of these amazing conversations. So how can we balance what it is that we want to be able to, you know, sell and, and that, that vision, and, you know, the customer journey, but also still have those human components. Right? So a lot of it comes down to storytelling, right? Jay (34:35): A lot of it just like good marketing, you know, we have these things called the five connectors, right. And these are connectors. They don't all start with C. Right. But they're story connectors, you know, they're, they're, they're little nuanced things that you could do to be a better storyteller in the moment, right. In the podcast scenario. And that's ultimately how we try to find that balance. Because each time we have a client, they're not just becoming the voice for network marketing. They're not just becoming the boys for alternative medicine or conscious families or whatever the topic is that they stand for. We're also helping them find their voice. And it doesn't mean that they don't know how to speak. And a lot of them are very good speakers. A lot of them are great content creators, but what's that, what's that cadence, what's that flow. That's going to work for the, or right. And that requires a little more artistry and a little more repetition for all of our hosts. But that's ultimately what we try to do is balance that because you don't want it be too scripted. And, you know, this is where you insert the call to action and to, you know, overly produced. But at the same time, you don't have it to be this like loosey goosey type of, you know, whatever you feel like podcast experience. Kathleen (35:50): Yeah. It's so funny that you bring this up because I just had this conversation with somebody who's thinking of starting a podcast. And he said to me, I'm not a good interviewer. And I was like, well, one way to get better is to just start doing it. And you know, like the more you have to hear yourself, I'll never forget when I first started podcasting listening to my own episodes. And I said the word. Yeah. And I still do it. Like when I start my sentences, you know, after a guest speaks, I'll say, yeah. And yeah. And this, and yeah. But what about that? And you become really aware of like, not only your own verbal ticks, but you know, your strengths and weaknesses and how you, how you are as an interviewer, as a conversationalist. And I think, I mean, at this point I'm like almost 170 episodes in, I don't, I don't have to do a lot of prep because like, I, I am so comfortable. Kathleen (36:39): It's like second hand to me. But when you start in the beginning, you definitely, I agree with you that you don't want to be overly scripted, but you want to have like a loose framework within which to play that you can fall back on if you get stuck, if you're not sure what to ask, there's that degree of comfort there that, Oh, okay. I have these five open ended questions that I know I can ask, and it will just set my guest off on, you know, riffing on a topic that they love. But that's something that I think I discovered on my own, cause I wasn't working with anyone, but I could see where it'd be valuable, valuable to have a company like yours. Kind of guiding me in that process and shortening the learning curve in the beginning. Jay (37:23): Yeah. Well, I mean, we all know frameworks and this is something we have to tell everybody, right. Which is like, look, we can talk about frameworks. We could probably have an entire different podcast episode on just frameworks, solo episode frameworks, interview frameworks, right. And, and, and, you know, storytelling frameworks and from a high level, you know, but at the end of the day, there's nothing that beats that natural curiosity, that natural energy or flow that that host has. And as you probably have experienced, and it probably can attest to, it takes a little bit, it takes just a little bit of time to be able to find that, that, that comfort level. Right. But if business owners or marketers out there that do a lot of content marketing right there, chances are, they're going to love you no longer form conversations even solo episodes. And I think it translates those skills, communication skills translate quite well when it comes to podcasts. Kathleen (38:20): Yeah. Totally agree. Well, we are coming up on our time. So a couple of things as we wrap up the conversation the first is, can you give me just some quick examples of clients you've worked with, who've seen amazing from this, whether it's a great launch or great ROI, you've peppered a few in the conversation, any others that you want to mention? Jay (38:43): Yeah. So we worked with a, a different SaaS company. They have multiple verticals that they're going after. We created pretty much think of it like a mini series per vertical, right. So much so that each salesperson responsible for whichever vertical or whoever you're chatting with, they would essentially have once again, these audio assets that they could go back to the client or a prospective client with, or go back to the prospect with and say, Hey, we actually created, if you're in the real estate niche, we created this mini series on how to be able to leverage what we do in the real estate world. Right. So context right away, they were able to get a client on the, like the second day of their launch, because we had launched with three, four different episodes. They had segmented their lists and said, Hey, if you're in this niche, listen to this one. Jay (39:31): Right. Don't just support the launch. But listen to this episode that just created some great conversation starters there. Right. and, and they were able to see an ROI right off the bat. Other of our clients have went on, built the community, built up a bit of audience. They didn't have that email list coming in. And then maybe six months down the line, they opened up a coaching program. Even if it was like a beta version of side coaching program, they opened up their mastermind that they've been wanting to do. Right. So you can kind of pick and choose which product and service you want to be able to go. But yeah, so those are some off the top of my mind. Love it. Kathleen (40:08): All right. Totally changing gears now. So I have two questions I ask all of my guests at the end of the podcast, and now it's your turn. Okay. the first one is this podcast is all about inbound marketing. And I'm curious, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to great inbound marketing these days? Jay (40:31): So it's so funny because like you told me that you're going to ask me this. So the first company that comes to mind is HubSpot for whatever reason. Absolutely. And you know, I know that you, you know, there there's some, you know, affiliation and all that good stuff, but yeah. I mean, look, we're talking about them, so it's, it's working. And you know, I, I think they do a superb job. Kathleen (40:55): Oh they are absolutely amazing. And you would not be the first person who mentioned them, so that's definitely to their credit. Jay (41:03): Yeah. I added another point. Yeah, Kathleen (41:05): Seriously. Second question. Most marketers that I talk to, one of their biggest pain points is that they have a really hard time keeping up with just all the developments in the world of digital marketing. It's changing so quickly. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself, Jay (41:24): Okay. This is a pretty interesting question because I think we're living in a world where it's noisier than ever. And I see this happen to business owners and marketers, all the, where they get so excited about it. It could be anything. It doesn't mean the thing that they're getting super excited about doesn't, you know, is not applicable or, or, or works. Regardless of it's a mini webinar or a quiz funnel, podcasts, a tech talk, right. Like it, all of them work. Right. But I'm a big believer of mastery of platforms. And, you know, I'm not saying that just because we have all these amazing things for podcasting, it doesn't mean that your business like it, it might not be a good fit for your business, right. It's, it's, I'm not a big believer that everybody should have a podcast. Every business should, should, should do that. So the way I actually keep myself up to date with it is I pick one each year, just try to pick one marketing, like initiative and one marketing platform to just truly master. And I find, or at least the last few years I have found it to be more fruitful. Just from my productivity and my focus. Kathleen (42:32): That's really good advice. I suspect a lot of people will struggle with that because we, as marketers also suffer from shiny penny syndrome. Jay (42:42): It's business owners. Right. And I think that the question I ultimately asked myself about a year and a bit ago, which what kind of business and what kind of life do am I going to be happy with? Right. Do I want to, you know, find cool little hacks and things to create a little bit of momentum? Or could I find something to really double, triple, quadruple down on and actually just be able to dominate it. Right. And so it's like, I totally hear you because I think so many entrepreneurs and so many marketers in general, they want to be able to say, Hey, you know what I know about this, I know about this. And all of it is really amazing, I think you just have to choose. Yeah. Kathleen (43:18): Absolutely. All right. Well, we're, we're at our time. So if somebody is listening and they want to reach out and ask you a question, learn more about what you're talking about or connect with you online, what is the best way for them to do that? Jay (43:32): So two different spots. One is, if you want to see our entire podcast process from beginning to end, like we lay out all four stages, we call it the top 100 buyers podcast system. You can go see that whole system at doneforyoupodcast.com. If you want to reach out to me and socially stalk me, probably Instagram is the best way to being able to go do that. We post there pretty much daily and our websites, podcasts, your brand in case you want to dive into some other case studies and you want to see every, you know, all the deliverables and all that good stuff. Kathleen (44:06): All right. I will put the links to all of those places in the show notes. So make sure you head over there to check it out. And as always, if you're listening and you liked what you heard, or you learned something new, head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast, preferably a five star review because that's how other people find us. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass, inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, Jay. This was a lot of fun. Jay (44:36): Yeah. Thank you, Kathleen. This was great.

On this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, I welcome Leigh Hurst on the show to discuss breast cancer awareness.  Leigh Hurst is a breast cancer survivor and the founder of the Feel Your Boobies® Foundation, which she started to educate young women (under 40) by reminding them to "feel their boobies" - a call to action that can save their life. Feel Your Boobies® is one of the largest followed breast cancer awareness foundations on Facebook and has inspired women all over the world to feel for lumps starting before they are formally screened for breast cancer. And, most importantly, it has directly resulted in countless women finding lumps early and giving them a better shot at living a full, meaningful life after their diagnosis. The Feel Your Boobies® Foundation has been featured in The New York Times, New York Daily News, and other national publications. At one point, Feel Your Boobies® was the largest cause on Facebook, with more than 1 million supporters. In this episode, we discuss: -Leigh’s experience advocating for her own breast cancer diagnosis -The story behind the Feel Your Boobies Foundation -Why women need to prioritize self-care -The voices of breast cancer survivors in the book Say Something Big -And so much more! Resources Leigh Hurst Website Say Something Big Book Say Something Big Facebook Say Something Big Instagram Feel Your Boobies Website Feel Your Boobies Facebook Feel Your Boobies Twitter Feel Your Boobies Instagram      A big thank you to Net Health for sponsoring this episode! Learn more about the Redoc Patient Portal here.    For more information Leigh:   LEIGH HURST is a breast cancer survivor and the founder of the Feel Your Boobies® Foundation, which she started educate young women (under 40) by reminding them to feel their boobies - a call to action that can save their life. Feel Your Boobies® is one of the largest followed breast cancer awareness foundations on Facebook and has inspired women all over the world to feel for lumps starting before they are formally screened for breast cancer. And, most importantly, it has directly resulted in countless women finding lumps early and giving them a better shot at living a full, meaningful life after their diagnosis. The Feel Your Boobies® Foundation has been featured in The New York Times, New York Daily News, and other national publications. At one point, Feel Your Boobies® was the largest cause on Facebook, with more than 1 million supporters. Hurst is also the author of the new book, Say Something Big: Feel Your Boobies, Find Your Voice. Stories About Little Lumps Inspiring Big Change (Oct. 2020) Beyond her work with Feel Your Boobies®, Leigh regularly speaks to audiences large and small, sharing her own personal journey and inspiring others to “Say Something Big” amidst life’s hurdles and hardships. She resides in Pennsylvania with her family. Feel Your Boobies® uses innovation around media to reach women across the world with their important message. For more information, visit www.leighhurst.com or www.feelyourboobies.com, and connect with Leigh on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.     Read the full transcript below: Karen Litzy (00:01): Hi, Leigh, welcome to the podcast. I'm happy to have you on. Leigh Hurst (00:05): Thanks for having me, happy to be here. Karen Litzy (00:07): Yeah. And now we're in the month of October. And for those of people who don't know October is breast cancer awareness month. And in the past, I've had shows about breast cancer during the month of October, but this is the first time I am speaking to a breast cancer survivor. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story because I know it's going to be so helpful for other women and men listening to this podcast. So before we kind of get into everything, I'm going to just throw it over to you so that you can just kind of tell your story how old you were when you were diagnosed. How did you find out? So I'll send it over to you. Leigh Hurst (00:51): Okay, cool. Thank you. So I was officially diagnosed when I was 33 that I had felt the lump for some time leading up to the actual diagnosis. So I think I was probably around 30 or 31 when I started to notice the lump. And I was living in New York city at the time and I was a marathon runner. So really health conscious, certainly educated about my health felt very kind of plugged into that kind of thing. And for a little while, I didn't really think much about it. I just thought it was, you know, something no big deal. I really small breasts. So I felt like when I'd go to the doctors, I'd let them sort of do their exam of my breasts and they would never notice it until I would point it out. So I would literally take their hand, put it on my boob and say, this kind of feels a little different to me. Leigh Hurst (01:39): I don't know if you notice it or not. It's like a ridge on the outer side of my left breast and then they would feel it and then they would say, I don't really think that's anything to worry about. I had no family history, so I wasn't exceptionally worried about it. Although, as I know now, that's not necessarily a primary risk factor. It is, but most women diagnosed don't have a family history. So I was pacified about that for a while. You know, that kind of went on for maybe a year or two. I eventually decided to sort of simplify my life and I moved out in New York city. I was in a really kind of super corporate job, traveled a lot for my work on a weekly basis. And I was just trying to find ways to sort of step out of that. Leigh Hurst (02:20): And so I moved back to central PA, which is where I live now. I'm kinda got set up on a house was back near my family and it came time for my annual exam. And I went again to the doctors and again, it wasn't noticed, but I mentioned it and it was the first time someone's like, Oh, she probably should just get a mammogram. It can't hurt to sort of just see if it's something or not. So that's how it started and ended up having the mammogram showed some areas of concern, took me right in and did an ultrasound and eventually at the biopsy a couple of weeks later and it did turn out to be cancer. So that was 2004. And you know, needless to say, I was very concerned because I knew I had had the lump for quite some time, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but it didn't turn out to be stage one, so early stage breast cancer. Leigh Hurst (03:09): And so, yeah, that's kinda how it started with, you know, finding out that I had a lump and went through treatment. I decided to have a lumpectomy, the lump was small stage one had no lymph node involvement. So that was good. And I did do chemotherapy because I was young. So they suggested that because of being premenopausal and being so young at the time, it was some preventative. So I did chemotherapy than I did seven weeks of daily radiation treatment to the lump site. And then I took five years of a pill called Tamoxifen, which is estrogen reducing medicine at the time they were still prescribing it for five years. I believe now the regimen is 10 years. But so the actual treatment itself was about six months start to finish. And then it was the five years of the Tamoxifen following that. Karen Litzy (03:59): And at the age of 33, you must have been kind of shocked. Right. Cause it's not something that we hear a lot of, you know, like even to get a mammogram, they don't suggest getting a mammogram until you're 40. Leigh Hurst (04:15): Correct. Yeah. And you know, it was, you know, looking back on it, I remember thinking, gosh, I never talked about breast cancer, never talked about it. I didn't know anybody who had had it. I'm not even really sure. I knew anybody who’s mother that had had it. So I was really taken aback by that when I was diagnosed and I was single at the time really hadn't thought about having a family quite yet. You know, I was living in the city, it was very common to still be kind of doing your thing. And so there are other issues that came up other than of course the life or death issue with breast cancer. There were the other possibilities of losing your fertility through chemo. Certainly that's a possibility certain decisions that you might be faced with can also, you know, if you decide to remove any of your female organs, ovaries, whatever, to minimize your risk, of course, those are big decisions when you haven't started a family yet. Leigh Hurst (05:08): And I wasn't really sure I was going up, but I didn't want that choice to be taken away from me. I didn't want it to be something that I couldn't do at a later date. So yeah, it was, it was shocking. And you know, out of that, I really started to like, think about why didn't I talk about this? Why didn't I think about this? And so that's kind of how the feel your boobies idea came about is that I just made some t-shirts for friends. Cause I would joke around during my treatment, I was actually still running and I didn't get sick. So I was really happy about that. And I just made sure that said, feel your boobies for fun. I'd always wanted to make t-shirts. I was kinda crafty kind of thing, you know, hobbies on the side. Leigh Hurst (05:47): And so my friend and I mocked up a tee shirt and I got a hundred made, put a website up, my background's in technology based learning. So I was kind of techie and I'm just send it around to my friends that had lived in the cities where I had moved after grad school. And I started selling shirts to people. I didn't know, very quickly, it just kind of went viral. I was getting checks in the mail from people. I had no idea who they were. And so, you know, that whole idea of, of using a message, like feel your boobies, which is lighthearted, but very pointed in terms of what it's trying to get you to do. Made me think about, you know, is this really creating behavior change? Is this creating a meaningful dialogue among a population of women like me that never really talked about it before? Or if they did, it was the third serious town and it was about their mother or it was in the context of a doctor's office. And so to that accidental t-shirt, that was just a hobby sort of evolved in time into something that took over my life quite honestly, and quickly I had to figure out what I was doing with it. So that's how the foundation itself came to be. Karen Litzy (06:53): Yeah. It's amazing. The things that happen to you that can just do a 180 and change your life. Right. So you could have had this diagnosis and then just went on and got a job and just went on your way. Right. But instead you were like, wait a second, like I'm young, I never talked about this. There's gotta be other people out there just like me. So how can I reach them? Leigh Hurst (07:15): Right, right. Sort of back fitting it. Right. Because I didn't create the tee shirt with that in mind, but I watched it happen. And that started to make sense to me with my background in behavior theory and that kind of thing. And so I kind of ran with it and, you know, we were able to support ourselves for quite some time just through t-shirt sales. So fortuitously, unlike other nonprofits that you know, have to submit for grants and you know, really the funding side of it is the tricky part. We were fortunate in those early days the t-shirt sales themselves allowed us to do a lot of creative things through social media before that was a standard way of spreading our message. And so we really tried to leverage the idea of media and the peer to peer sharing because what I saw when somebody would wear the tee shirts, like a happy hour or a cookout was I was watching like a 20 something talk to another 20 something or a guy even who might say your shirt says feel your boobies. Leigh Hurst (08:16): Can I feel your boobies? And then they would say, it's not about that. It's about breast cancer. Or you got to feel your boobs to see if you find a lump. And to me that was a productive conversation. It was somebody articulating something very simple, but in a playful and a more friendly and lighthearted way than trying to impart stats or other types of things that I think a lot of campaigns do, or certainly they have the aesthetic and the sensibility that feels like it's for an older woman. So you may relate to it because you're trying to just be proactive and educate yourself about health. But the messaging itself is not really created for you. It's not created for the younger population, the style of the images, the style of the graphics, and even the use of the channel that you use to spread it. Leigh Hurst (09:01): Right? So a tee shirts, just one way you can not, but you can do that in many other ways. You know, we flew aerial banners up and down the Jersey shore in the summertime on all the very populated beaches. And I'm thinking of these young women that are like dragging themselves out to the beach after going out Friday night. And they see a, you know aerial banner and they say, Oh my God, that says feel your boobies. And I'm like, that's wonderful. That's a great way to kind of intersect with them where they are in a way that they can relate to. And, you know, it's created testimonials from women that say, that's why they found their lumps. So very proud of the campaign. And eventually I went on and left my corporate career and ran the foundation full time. So it really wouldn't do that 180 for me, that you mentioned about changing your life. It was definitely that for me. Karen Litzy (09:50): Yeah. So we can definitely see how your life has changed after diagnosis, but what are the big lessons that you learned? Leigh Hurst (10:00): Well, you know, I definitely learned I'm type A, very much of an ambitious overachiever and, you know, Karen Litzy (10:06): Well, I mean, you were in New York city in a corporate job, we get it, that came across. Leigh Hurst (10:12): Right. And so you kind of like play these scripts out in your head. Like I really should slow down this. Isn't really how I want to spend my time. I'm really too busy. I wish I could make more time for X and part of my move home quite honestly, before breast cancer was in an effort to sort of really operationalize some of that stuff to sort of extract myself out of the environment that wasn't really fueling me anymore. It was draining me. And so, you know, earlier in my career, there's coast to coast flights on a Monday morning to get to a meeting on time. That was exciting. And as I got older, I'm kind of like, I don't really want to do that anymore. I don't care how much money I make. I don't want to be on a plane. I want to be involved in the place that I live. Leigh Hurst (10:55): And so my move was in part to get that going right, to really start to be outside more to, you know, I decided to go part time cause I kept my job in New York city. So I didn't need the amount of money I was making where I lived anymore. But I didn't truly step out like that until breast cancer came. And then I quite honestly, I got depressed at the end of my treatment, I got depressed and I took three months off work. I called it my be nice to me times. So I like got weekly massages. I went to get therapy because I felt like I needed to sort of sort through some things, you know, I felt like I should be getting back to normal, but nothing about my life felt normal. Everything had changed, you know, whether or not. Leigh Hurst (11:39): So I think during that time is when I started to realize what it meant to say no, that you can say no and not give a reason. And that having lots and lots of friends, which I had is great, but having a lot or having fewer really good friends became more important to me. People that I could really keep in touch with and have meaningful conversations. And my family quite honestly, too, was a big part of that. So I would say that that was the biggest thing slowing down. And I still struggle with that because that's not my genetic makeup. My genetic makeup is to, you know, attack a problem, and make a change and go through something like breast cancer, trying to get back to normal is tricky because you really can't change the future. You never know if it's going to come back. Leigh Hurst (12:26): That's just a fact with breast cancer. And so I think learning to live with the ambiguity of not knowing, you know, and accepting that, truly accepting that that kind of translates out into other parts of your life, where you can, if you really allow yourself to sit in that space, you can apply that to other uncomfortable things that come up, right. Things that happen with your job or relationships or other things that make you feel anxious. Like you want to make a change or you want a resolution immediately. I think I have a better sense of pause around that where I trust that in time things will sort themselves out and I will have a greater sense of peace around whatever it is. I'm stressing about things that came out of that period of time in my life. Yeah. That's so powerful. I don't do it well by the way, but I work at it all the time. Karen Litzy (13:19): Well, I mean, I think the fact that you were able to identify that as, Hey, listen, this is something that I know I need to work on. And of course we're all a work in progress. Nothing's perfect. But to just be able to recognize that and say, I need to make a change. Like this is too much, that's so powerful. And then to be able to kind of leave the city, move to central PA and say, I know I'm doing this for me. And that was even before the diagnosis. So you were already, you know, heading in that direction. And I also really appreciate that. You said at the end of treatment that you were depressed, that you were unsure, you know, because I think oftentimes when people see breast cancer survivors or they hear from, or just looking at a picture, let's say, right, it's a person smiling or it's I beat it, or, but you don't really get into the background of that. Leigh Hurst (14:22): I talk about the mental health side all the time, because I think it is something that's not discussed as much as it should be and not everybody gets depressed, but I do think everybody has down days. Of course, I mean, when you're struggling with something that's life or death and that happens at different times for different people. For me, I was fight or flight during the treatment. For me, it was like a project, right. I knew I had a plan and I had to do it. And the tricky part for me was when I entered into that gray space where I was kind of released from all of that care. And I had to make sense of my life on a day to day basis, be my own cheerleader, quiet those voices in my head that would raise all those scary thoughts and realize that this was going to be forever. You know, like you can't let this consume you. And you know, being brave enough to say I'm depressed. I wasn't brave enough to say that right away. You know, I went into therapy, very hesitantly feeling like, what do you have to be upset about? It was stage one, you got through it, shouldn't you be happy with it? Karen Litzy (15:22): That self-defeating language, right? There's someone worse off than you. Leigh Hurst (15:27): Right? So therefore you can't feel any sort of emotion around your own words is not true and very dangerous by the way. And so, you know, I really try to bring that up when I speak to women who are going through it or who have gone through it, who I sense might be struggling with a little bit of that, because there's so much, and it's different for everybody. If you might be balancing kids, I wasn't, but it might be balancing kids, little children and trying to mask what you're going through to keep them from being afraid. And so that you're hiding your own emotions for some period of time, or same thing goes for spouses that can have issues. So finding a place where you can be truly honest with your own feelings and dealing with that is I think really important because it delays your ability to heal. If you don't find your way. Karen Litzy (16:18): You have to say to yourself, okay, this is the situation and I need to live with this. What's the best way I can move forward. Right. We discussed that a lot with people who have like chronic pain. So the pain may never go away, but can you get to a point where you're still doing all the things you want to do, but in order to do that, you kind of have to accept it. Leigh Hurst (16:48): Yeah. And the way you choose to do that, whatever steps you take to make that possible in your life. The biggest thing for me was realizing that other people don't have to get it right. Like if I had a choice, things that make me able to have good days or days that I need to step out for a little bit, I don't have, I shouldn't have to worry, or I can't worry if that makes sense to somebody else, because the only thing I can do is reconcile within myself. What makes me the best version of me, the fullest version of me, for the people that need me. And the way I choose to do that is probably not going to be the same as the way someone else chooses to do that, or should it yeah. Nor should it be. Right. So looking for affirmation about those decisions outside of yourself is a real challenge. You know, if you're a pleaser or you're, you know, sometimes you just gotta bone up and do what you have to do, right. You always just satisfy your needs. But the times when you have choices to flake out on plan that you just don't feel up for, or push something that you thought you should do today to tomorrow those things are okay to do, and you don't need someone else to tell you they're okay. Karen Litzy (18:01): Right, right. It comes down to like giving yourself the permission and the grace and the ability to do what you need. Like you said, to do what you need to do in the moment at that time, that's going to be best for you. That's going to allow you to show up fully as the person you need to be. Leigh Hurst (18:20): Right. Yeah. That makes total sense. I thought it was a great way of putting it as like self care is not the same as selfish. So making those choices, you have to be, you know, polite, honest, a good person when you're doing all of those things, but taking care of yourself, the self care part of it is not being selfish. It's about being in touch with what makes you the good person that you are. Karen Litzy (18:46): Right. And I think also being able to communicate that to someone maybe it's your partner or your spouse or your children or work, I think the way you go about communicating, that makes all the difference, right. Because there's a difference between, listen, right now, maybe you might have felt, you know, I just need to be by myself for a couple of hours, you know, that's what's best for me, but if you don't communicate that properly or if you just flake out and go stout on people like that is not that that's how you, you create a lot of friction. Right. So what advice would you give to people if they do have to make these decisions to do what's best for them? What's the best kind of language? Cause I know you're very good at communication and all that other stuff. Leigh Hurst (19:38): So I have two small children. I had kids after breast cancer and I'm a single mom now. And I was since they were very little good friends with their father and all of that, but still, you know, being I'm 50 now, but I was 40 and 42 when I had them. And so, you know, the loss of independence around raising two children alone when you're used to like literally flying coast to coast, you know, rewind five years. And it was like, the world was at your feet. So I found myself becoming extremely protective of my space when they were not with me. And, you know, so I was very cautious about making plans. And I would just be honest about that if it was a weekend that I didn't have them and somebody invited me to go away for example, Oh, we're having a girl's weekend. Leigh Hurst (20:24): We're going to go to a winery. Do you want to come? And I would say, well, I might, I might want to come if you need a commitment though. I can't commit because a lot of times when the kids go away, I just like to have some quiet time to myself. I don't like to come back from a weekend and be tired. So I would, I mean, that's just being honest, you know, some things, those are, it's not as easy as something like that, but you know, I think with work where there's deadlines and it's a little trickier to push things off I've gotten better at prioritizing where I'll say it has not really in it today. I know I said I would have this by two o'clock is it possible I could have it tomorrow by maybe 10. So I'm not telling them all the inner workings of what's going on in my brain, but I'm floating the idea that I'd like to shift the priority around because I think it would work better for my mental state. You know, so those are just some ideas for how I do it. Karen Litzy (21:20): Yeah. That's great. That's great. Thanks for sharing that. And now what I'd also like to talk about is your book. So you're about to release, well, this will be out the first weekend of October. So the book should hopefully be out by then, right? They will be. Okay. Perfect. So say something big, feel your boobies, find your voice stories about little lumps, inspiring, big change. So first of all, congratulations, because writing a book is no joke. So tell us a little bit about why you wrote the book and what's in it. Leigh Hurst (21:57): So I wanted to write this book for quite some time. You know, I do a lot of speaking and people often say, Oh, your story is so inspiring about how you just created something and then you ran with it and you saved lives. And now you have this big foundation. And I do realize that that's inspirational, but I kind of tire of my own story over time. So every time I would sit down and try to write about it, I was like, Oh my gosh. But what I found inspirational enough to get me going this time. And it was really an honor of our 15th anniversary, which was last year. I was hoping to have it done by them, but that's the 15th anniversary of the foundation. And it was also my anniversary from breast cancer is the same as the foundations university. Leigh Hurst (22:39): So I started writing it back then and the way I got inspired to really get into it was as I started writing about my own story, I was things were coming to mind about these other women that I had met over time through my path, as you know, being very involved in the breast cancer community and quite honestly, their stories while different were very similar. So they were young when they were diagnosed, they found their own lump and they made some sort of change that was remarkable that they hadn't really pivoted from one path to another and really in an effort to give back. And so, as I started seeing that sort of common thread through some other women that I respected, I thought, well, what if I wove their stories into mine? And so, you know, our stories are different. So how I felt it, this part of the journey, you know, when I found the lump, the way I found it is different than the way one of the other women found it and how I felt during chemo is a lot different than the way some other people felt during chemo. Leigh Hurst (23:38): So if I can weave their stories in to mine, then it will relate to so many more people because can kind of say, Oh, I really relate to Leigh. When she was deciding if she wanted to have a mastectomy or lumpectomy, but I really, really related to Holly during chemo, cause I'm really struggling with it. And she struggled with it too. And so there's lots of tidbits of inspiration and advice that come out of all of these stories. And so after each chapter, I write a little piece that's called big lessons from little lumps. And it's basically trying to suss out the things that I felt were common through each of the women's stories at each stage of the breast cancer journey. And then of course at the end, you know, they've all sort of found their voice. They've started their own nonprofits, where they started a company to create underwear, lingerie line that's meant to make you feel sexy, even if you've had your breast removed. Leigh Hurst (24:35): And that was because that particular survivor did not feel sexy after she was diagnosed and had surgery and she was a designer. So she decided to do that. And so I just found great inspiration and listening to their stories and trying to weave them into mine. And, really at the end of the entire book, what I found were basically three ideas that I saw across all the women that I think can relate to anybody that's going through any sort of difficult time, not just breast cancer. And one of them was that I really noticed that each woman found a frame for their situation that really focused on the idea of looking forward into the future versus looking only backwards and only wishing they could redo it differently. Right? Like being sad about what had happened. They all had those emotions, but the way they ultimately framed things was with the idea of looking forward. Leigh Hurst (25:31): Then each of them also talked a lot about finding a passion, something that really, you know, gave them those goosebumps or that feeling you get in your stomach when you're doing something right. And that is what they chose to spend their time on. And they really made an effort to strip anything out of their life that got in the way of them being able to focus on that type of activity. And then the thing that we talked about earlier, but the third thing is that they all recognize that change is continuous, right? It's not like you flip a switch and say, I'm going to make this change, or I'm going to start fuel your movies. And all of a sudden I'm happy because I started a nonprofit and it does good things. I mean, it has all the same challenges that a normal job has. Leigh Hurst (26:11): So change is truly this continuous thing, but because of the passion and they're focused on the future, they were able to realize that, sure, there's going to be some bad days throughout this process, but nothing is going to get in the way of my path to create this change towards the way I really want to live my life. And I found that so powerful when I saw that kind of trend throughout each woman. And I really think a lot of people will benefit from watching how each of them kind of, you know, injected that into their own lives. Karen Litzy (26:44): And isn't it amazing how storytelling creates such great learning moments, right? I think that's the way to do it. People they remember the stories, they think it's digestible, they internalize it. Like you said, what someone may not relate to you, but they may relate to someone else in the book. And it's those stories that weave through that come up with these great themes that anyone can relate to. So I just always think that I'm such a huge fan of storytelling and storytelling makes things real and relatable. Leigh Hurst (27:16): And I think that's an important way. It's one of the things we try to do with the foundation too, is when we do provide messaging or things, we try to really make it relatable. And that we're telling a story about someone who is real, someone who was young when they were diagnosed. So when you say that looks like me, I can relate to that. I also think women who are brave enough to share their story and I, by no means think it's wrong to not share your story. I think you're a private person and that's how you heal, then that's what you should pay attention to. But for those who choose to, and they don't always realize they've chosen to one of the women in the books that she never talked about it. The first time she was diagnosed, she was 26 and she was embarrassed. Leigh Hurst (27:56): And then she unfortunately was rediagnosed nine years later with metastatic cancer at 45, which means it's terminal. And at that point she really became braver to start talking about it and she realized how much strength she got from sharing her story. And so I think when women put their stories out there they have no idea how many people they touch when they do it, because no one's gonna necessarily walk up to you and say, I really respect that. You said that, or I want you to know that that really made a change in my life that day, but it does. It does. And it goes beyond what you will ever actually know. Karen Litzy (28:32): Absolutely. Yeah. And I love that sort of women pushing other women forward and building them up and paying it forward. It's just such a lovely, a lovely lesson for anyone. But as we all know, you know, the power of women in groups is very powerful. Leigh Hurst (28:52): Unstoppable. Exactly. Karen Litzy (28:54): Exactly. That's better unstoppable. Yes, absolutely. And so before we kind of wrap things up, what I would love from you is what would you like the audience to sort of take away from maybe from your experience or from our talk today? Cause I know that you do and you also, I also want to point out that you also talked to a lot of young people, college students, things like that, right? Leigh Hurst (29:18): Yeah, I do. I do. Yeah. So one of the aspects of our campaign in the past has been what we call our college outreach program, which we provided free materials to college health centers nationally through sororities and women's centers and so forth. And that was in an effort to get our message out to the college campuses. And we've also started running a media campaign which we did last year called are you doing it was a minority outreach campaign focused on young African American women in low income areas. African American women have a higher, are diagnosed at an earlier age than white women. And once they're diagnosed, they have a higher mortality rate as well. And so it's a very important audience to target. And so we funded a campaign that leveraged billboards, bus shelters, bus wraps, as well as targeted digital outreach to that demographic of women specifically to spread the message and that incorporated five local survivors, real survivors who were diagnosed at a young age, we did a photo shoot, shot a video with them. Leigh Hurst (30:22): And we shared that through all the channels that I mentioned, but we got over 6.2 million impressions with that campaign. Amazing. Very amazing. So, yeah. So we reach out to that younger population, like you mentioned in a lot of different ways, but I mean, I think if you asked me what the one thing is, I want someone to take away is that, you know, it sounds cliche, but I really do believe that one voice matters. I feel like the ripple effect from one person's passion and when one person's devotion to an idea can really make a difference and they don't have to be big actions. The things that you choose to do, don't have to necessarily change the world, but you can start small. And the actions that you choose, the words that you choose and how you choose to navigate your life, I think affects other people. And this book really showed me that in the smallest of ways, people can have the biggest impact in their communities and in other people's lives. And that's, I think that's a really great lesson for anybody to take away. Karen Litzy (31:24): Absolutely. And now if people want to get in touch with you, where can they find you? Where can they find the book? Leigh Hurst (31:31): So the book will be available on Amazon. Starting October 1st, I believe. You can read more about the book leighhurst.com. You can follow the book on Facebook, which is, say something big as well and Instagram to say something big. So those are all the channels. And then of course, if you're interested in feel your boobies and the work that we do, the Facebook pages you know, at feelyourboobies on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and our website is feelyourboobies.com. Karen Litzy (32:08): Awesome. And we'll get all of those links. So for everyone, if you don't have something to take it down, or you're not right in front of the computer, we'll have all of the links. You can go to podcast.healthywealthysmart.com. And we'll have a quick link to everything that Leigh mentioned today throughout the podcast. So not to worry, everything will be right there. So Leigh, thank you so much for sharing your story. I just know, like you said, even if one person hears this and they say, Oh, well maybe I will feel my boobies, mission accomplished. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story and coming on the podcast. I appreciate it. And everyone out there listening. Thank you so much. Have a great couple of days and stay healthy, wealthy and smart.     Thanks for listening and subscribing to the podcast! Make sure to connect with me on twitter, instagram  and facebook to stay updated on all of the latest!  Show your support for the show by leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts

Meet Brandon Fong Brandon HATED growing up on the free lunch program at school... but growing up without financial resources taught him to be resourceful. Before the age of 25, Brandon wrote a book, ran the marketing for an education company with over 250,000 students, traveled to 23 different countries, and even did a $45,000 launch on his first online product. Today, he's on a mission to help 10,000 entrepreneurs build wealth through the power of connection while prioritizing their health and relationships. What's the number one mistake people make when trying to solve a problem in their life? I got this from Dan Sullivan, who I don't know if you're familiar with his content, but he's a fantastic thinker if you guys haven't heard of him, but he has this concept called who-not-how. And I think what happens as entrepreneurs specifically or in our daily lives to whenever we come up with a new goal, or a new challenge that we're facing, our first inclination is to ask ourselves, how can I solve this, right? Like all the how questions come up like logistics, and it immediately becomes a little bit overwhelming. And so when it comes to solving problems, I love the filter that instead of asking myself how based questions, I asked myself, who questions so if instead of how can I figure this out and get super overwhelmed, who has already figured this out, that I can develop a relationship with in a genuine way, give back to them, and then leverage their skills and experience to solve the problem that I'm looking to solve a lot faster than if I had tried doing it on my own. So I think that that's an approach that can definitely help accelerate the process of solving any problem, whether it be business or in personal life. How can you connect with people in meaningful ways online? I actually recently wrote a book on this topic called The Magic Connection Method. When I open up my LinkedIn profile, I have probably over 100 connection requests of people that have copied and pasted messages without even reading anything about my bio or anything like that. So I think that they're in this world where we kind of like see this fake reality online. It's like we get desensitized to the fact that the people that we're talking to are real human beings. When it comes to connecting with people, when I teach them the magic connection method, I teach a three-part process. So the first part of the email or any, it's not specific to email, but the first part is what I call the hook. And the problem that most people have when they reach out to people is they use the first part of the email to talk about them, right? So instead of doing that, the first part of the outreach, I always teach people to talk about the other person. Then the second part is the irresistible offer. I'm always looking to add value to people. So whether it's an outreach to somebody that I want to do business with, or a networking event or connection that I have, I want to create something that I can do for them, that would add a ton of value to them, and make them actually want to move forward with the connection. The last part is the no-oriented question. I learned this from Chris Voss, who is an ex-FBI hostage negotiator. He told me in the book, “Never Split the Difference”, he talks about how we all have a finite amount of yeses that we have in a day, right? Every single time you say yes to something, you have to give away time, you have to give away energy, you have to give away finances, you're giving away something. So it's hard for people to say yes to things, but it's a lot easier for people to say no to something. So all my emails or all my outreaches they end with instead of a question like are you interested? It ends in a question like would you be opposed to? Or would it be a bad idea if or would it be ridiculous if and when you when you start a question that way it puts the ball back in their court. The real goal of that first email is to show that you're adding value, show that you actually care about them. And then also make sure that at the end, it's just one question so that they're not overwhelmed with all the things that they have to do. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? I found that every single point in my growth, I’ve been able to grow to the next level. And it's been thanks to a relationship with somebody. My favorite story, when it comes to connecting with people is my senior year of college. Going back to the very beginning of the conversation, we're talking about who not how. I tried a bunch of business ventures and nothing was working for me. And I figured, well, why not just find somebody who was exactly where I wanted to be in my career and my health, in my relationships that had already done it, and how can I just find a way to add insane amount of value to them. So I sent an email, I was 21 years old at the time reached out to him. And that turned into that relationship where I ended up running his marketing for three years had experience helping grow the company by over 100,000 students in his online courses. Jonathan helped me to launch my first product, which did really well the first launch, and then also Jonathan got me into a high end mastermind called Genius Network. Genius Network costs $25,000 a year to attend, you need to be making at least seven figures to be in it. And Jonathan just opened the doors and allowed me to help me to get in there. And so that one relationship with that one email that I sent, just open the doors to insane experience, insane connections, and just so grateful. So that would by far be my favorite connection that I had. How do you stay in front of and best nurture your community that you've created? I think like it comes down to at this point, at least I'm having lots of individual conversations with people and so I'm always asking what people are looking for. And I may not have an answer at that time, but I'll have a conversation a little bit down the road and I'm like, oh, this person needs exactly this. So like I think it comes from being proactive and really just getting to know everybody that you are looking to develop a relationship with. Just get to know people, really care, come from a place of giving. And then there will usually be opportunities, at least in my life that have shown up for me to circle back and add value to that person, even if like it was maybe even months or years down the road. What advice do you have for that business professional who's really looking to grow their network? You can go on LinkedIn, and you can search somebody else's connections if you're connected with them. And the thing that is a kind of an awkward question to ask is like, hey, can you refer me to someone? Right? Like, nobody really likes answering that question? Because it's like, it's so vague. And like, even if you do really want to help the person, it doesn't really help to be asked that question, because you have almost nowhere to go. Whereas if you use the LinkedIn advanced search filter, or if you search somebody else's connections, and then you search with their title or whatever, other criteria, then you can go to back to that person and say, hey, can you refer me to somebody? It's like, hey, Lori, I had the opportunity before we had the conversation, I hopped on your LinkedIn profile, and I came across three people that I thought would be really interesting to talk about, would you be offended if I asked you a few questions about them? And then you can ask a very specific question, instead of just being very, very general. So that's helped me a ton. Just because, I believe that if you're connected with good people, then then why wouldn't you ask that question? So I think that's one of my favorites. If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of, less, of or differently with regards to your professional career? I think I would send more magic connection method emails, I actually had the opportunity to speak at my high school the other day, and it's like I've seen so many students in college where it's like you spend all this money on undergrad and then graduate and realize it's not what you want to do. It's like lots of that can be solved by just having conversations with people and reaching out to people. And I think that as a student, I've always taught people this, that you have this magical timeframe where you can use something that I call the “cute student card”, where it's like professionals love to help ambitious students. Now we talked about going back to the magic connection method. We talked about the irresistible offer. Sometimes the offer is you just being ambitious and talking to them and then implementing what they taught you and being super grateful for it. And like it almost is something to be like too hard to comprehend, but that has served me so much. It's just like reaching out to people, having conversations and then responding back and following up with them. With how much they've impacted my life. We've all heard of the six degrees of separation. Who would be the one person that you'd love to connect with? And do you think you can do it within the sixth degree? Because I was in Genius Network. I'm within one degree of many, many connections, like the founder, Joe Polish is like, and I'm not like that, that close with Joe Polish. But I've had the opportunity to meet him and have conversations multiple times, but like he's connected with Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, Peter Diamandis. Also Russell Brunson that you hear a lot about in the in the self-improvement marketing world. I think I answered your question with like, 30 people but those are some of the top people that come to mind. Do you have any final words or advice for our listeners with regards to growing and supporting your network? If you find that you're somebody that might not be 100% confident in reaching out to people, like there's really not much wrong, that can happen. I think the worst thing that can happen is like you end up like somebody that's on LinkedIn that copies and pastes. But if you listen to this episode, you're already not going to do that. So you're already way ahead of people. I think you really are just one connection away and to focus on, on every relationship, like it's something that can have lots of potential for growth in the future, even if you don't see it in the present in the immediate, immediate future. How to connect with Brandon: Website: https://brandon-fong.com/

Fuzzy logic is an approach to computing based on "degrees of truth" rather than the usual "true or false" (1 or 0) Boolean logic on which the modern computer is based.  It is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth values of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1 both inclusive.   Govind's Social:  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gov218/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/govindmohan218/?originalSubdomain=ca   Deep's Social:  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neuronsrcool/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Deepneuron LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepprasad/   Pouya's Social: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pouyalj/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/pouyalj LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pouyalajevardi/   Episode Transcript:----more----   SUMMARY KEYWORDS reality, true, logic, people, thinking, idea, language, point, universe, objective reality, humans, thought, fuzzy, experiment, paradox, nature, question, probability, false, thoughts SPEAKERS Pouya LJ, Govind, Deep   Pouya LJ  00:16 Hey guys, how's it going?   Govind  00:19 Nice, amazing. Toronto. Good weather.   00:23 Yeah, no, it's surprisingly hot. Yeah.   Pouya LJ  00:29 So it's been a while, since we talked. Let's see each of you. What's up with you. Let's start with you guff?   Govind  00:39 Well, for those that don't know, I have a startup called Virtual systems that focuses on network security using information theory, principles, and networking, to have a flat internet that's not built on data centers where data privacy can be controlled by the user, as opposed to any corporate corporation that is controlling your data, which is the case these days. So that's a little bit of my background. I like a lot of things like mathematics, philosophy, computer science, and software development.   Pouya LJ  01:11 Well, that's for philosophy. All right, I bet you the What's up? What's up with you?   Deep  01:18 Um, yes. First of all, I just want to say that just sounds like the life of a polymath, so I can really appreciate that right on COVID. Yeah, so I similar to COVID. I also run my own startup, we do quantum computing. Instead, we are looking to use quantum computers to accelerate the materials discovery timeline. Right. So right now we do a lot of things that are mostly trial and error based plus some compute, for doing materials discovery, let's say you want to discover a new cathode or new electrode material, right? How are you going to do that? We want to automate that process and and speed it up by thousands if not millions. That's our goal. It's pretty ambitious, but that's what we do you everyday, or try to do. Uh huh. Yeah. So that's what I've been up to.   Pouya LJ  02:11 Yeah. Thanks. That's amazing. Are you in Toronto?   Deep  02:14 Yes. Good.   Pouya LJ  02:15 Good. You're enjoying this weather?   Deep  02:17 Totally. Yeah. So nice. weather wise will enjoy it. Well, us.   Pouya LJ  02:21 Yeah. Well, that's true. That's going on soon. Probably next week. Still not that bad? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Anyways, so today, we are tackling a subject that I am very inept in? I have no idea. I mean, I know abstractly what it is, but I don't have any readings on it. I think you guys are more educated on this than me. But let's see how it goes. So we're talking about a bunch of different stuff. Actually, it's not one thing, but it's centered at logic propositions. And quantifiers. Do you want it? So this was the pathway was introduced to this conversation was introduced by golf? Do you want to start it off yourself?   Govind  03:06 Sure. Um, so when we think about logic, what comes to mind? Generally, it's things like, debate, you know, things that logic is associated with, or things like debate, and truth and false, maybe people who are in software development or would think of code. You know, there there are so many of these, these these concepts that come to your mind when you think of the word logic. You know, what, maybe maybe you guys can chime in with like, premium fallacy. When I say the word logic, one of the one of the things you think about,   Pouya LJ  03:35 no, I think I mean, I guess it depends on their perspective, as you were saying, but I think what you're saying it makes sense. I think, generally, people think about logic as reasoning, like step by step thinking. Thinking about, like, it depends, if you're asking a philosopher is a little bit different than a mathematician than a software, regular person going about their lives, not thinking about these things. But I think that just remains for most people.   Govind  04:05 Sure, what am I?   Deep  04:07 Yeah, when I think of logic, I think of two things, the more intuitive idea of logic, which is what I think every human has, right? We like to all believe that we're logical beings, right? What does that mean? We all know that mean something when I say it, but what does so I think, the intuitive idea that humans are logical insofar as they have a set of consistent rules that you can codify that have some sort of basis, right, you can derive next set of actions based on a set of let's say, axiom true principles, right. And they're logical in nature. For example, humans get hungry where you're cutting off I don't is that does that me or?   Govind  04:46 Oh, I can I can hear him fine. I think   Pouya LJ  04:48 that's me.   Deep  04:50 Do you want me to restart for you?   Pouya LJ  04:53 Okay, now that's better. Sorry. Okay. Sure. That's fine. Continue. Sorry.   Deep  04:56 Sure. So I was just saying that like from from the preset preset Something that's logical, or I would consider as logical is the idea of hunger, right? Like when a human is hungry? What would be logical next is that they're going to try to get food. Right? To me that's logical. And that and so that's an intuitive logic or system of systems are sets of logics that we just know from by nature. Then I think of the logic, when when when Govan asked me, What do I think when you know about logic, right? Like what comes to mind? Or how would I define it and whatnot. The second one is the formal, abstract idea of logic that we humans have that I think that maybe other creatures don't have. And and that's the mathematical ability or the mathematical perspective of logic, where you can look at, you can create systems like Boolean logic, you can generalize Boolean logic and look at how you can construct quantum computations in Universal computations. And propositional logic is totally different than what I just talked about. And so that's all these things are abstract logics, and it's different than the intuitive logic, sometimes.   Govind  06:07 Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's a great way of like, you know, describing the entire breadth of what logic? Thanks. Well, I think it comes down to the concept of truth and false, right, because you have to start with things you know, are true. And then you string these things that are true in certain ways that allows you to create certain implications, right? You, you, you start with a few facts, like, as a classic one, all men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal, right? You know, you have these propositions you have you start with these facts, and then you put them together using some inference rules. But what I wanted to discuss in today's topic, as today's topic is this concept of truth and false itself. We really, as humans, we take truth and false kind of for granted as a discrete binary thing, right? You have something that's true, and it's not true, it's false. But is that really the case? And to further grounded discussion, I have a few quotes from this book. It's called fuzzy thinking. And it has it really explores this concept of how truth can be continuous or fuzzy, right? It's it's not it's not truth. It's like an on off switch. But it's actually like, on and goes all the way to off with like, several, maybe infinite steps in the way. So one quote I really like is, there was a mistake, and everyone in science seemed to make it. They said that all things were true or false. They were not always sure which things were true and which were false. But they were sure that all things were either true or false. So I thought that that is a really cool quote, because it points out this fact that this is really taken for granted, we don't really think about, you know, like, What is it? What does it mean for something to be true or false. And another quote, I think, would be interesting not to make this all the quotes I made this last one is a quote from Albert Einstein. So far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they're not certain. And so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. Because, I mean, if you say something is true or false, the universe does not give a shit, you know, universe is going to do whatever it's doing. And we're just we're just creating these models where we say, Okay, these things are true, these things are false. And, and we're going to construct our models of reality based on it. But these models of reality are pretty much mental experiments that we perform across humans right? Now, it just so happens that it happens to be incredibly good at modeling reality, to the point where people can get confused and say that reality works based on the principles that we create, and the facts that we create, the things that we assign as true or false is what is allowing reality to work the way it is. But it's it's always important to know that there's this detachment between what's reality and what's what's, you know, our our collective, our thought experiment, which is, you can call it mathematics, philosophy, whatever any anything that we have, when we come together, we have discussions, even discussions like what we're having right now. They're, they're just, like, there's a separation from this and reality. And this is kind of exemplified by what's known as the law of the excluded middle in, in logic. So where if you have a proposition a, let's say, let's just call it P let's let's work in the realm of the abstracts, if you have a proposition p p could be something like, this is a fruit or a gob is a person, you know, things like that things, something that I can assign a truth value to true or false. So the law of the excluded middle is that for all propositions P, P, or not B, that is something can either be true or not true. Now, this this sounds like stupid, simple, right? It sounds kind of like okay, sure, something can either be true or false. But now, what's crazy is that several mathematicians in over the 20th century, were actually pushing back against including this principle and logic, they were saying, No, I want to construct a mathematics which doesn't have p or not p that is, p or not P is actually not true. According to these people. They were called the intuitionists. And this cause Like a massive, massive debate back in the 20th century. But I'll pause here and I'll get some comments from you guys like what do you think such a mathematics could actually look like?   10:11 So   Deep  10:12 the first thing that comes to mind is the idea of structural realism. Structural realism basically posits that whatever scientific and mathematical understanding that we get of the universe, it does not necessarily reflect on the true structure and nature of the universe, right? So, if you have a quote, of creations that describe gravity at the macroscopic scale, that does not mean that those equations are the true structure and nature of reality. And that's important because when we're, as you sort of alluded to Govan, like when we define something to be true or false, nature doesn't give a shit. Right, so to speak. And that's like, like, interesting enough, there's a philosophical question right there. Because what if it happens that structural realism is false. And ironically, there is some sort of mathematical truism, at least in the physics perspective, that we can define, and that it is actually a true reflection of reality. It is objectively the truth. Right? Like, we may not, it may actually be possible, who knows? So there and because we haven't actually answered that, you know, what I mean, that that philosophical idea yet, whether structural realism, is true or not, is very hard to it. Yeah, extend or resolve the conflicts that have occurred in the 20th century from logic? Because this is just an extension of that. What do you think?   Govind  11:50 Um, well, I think this this, this time in history was very interesting, you know, because, well, maybe, like, some historical context would be that, you know, this is the first time you have like, several extremely smart people from across the world coming together and creating a global, you know, like, hey, let's tackle the biggest questions in, in humanity, like any point in your thinking, right? So like, and I think this kind of resulted in probability, right? probability is something that emerged from the 20th century, I mean, some could argue the roots extend way back, but you know, like the roots for everything, then way back. But the reason I bring up probability in this in this argument is like, as, as humans now in the 21st century, we, our process of science is so fundamentally grounded in probability, right? Like, to the point where our models of reality are the closest models of reality, we have use probability necessarily, right? Think of all the discussions you've had with your friends regarding COVID, or all these other things. Most people tend to make arguments related to probability and case fatality rates, you know, these kind of like, almost baseball statistics, right? Like I say, baseball statistics, just to kind of ground that and make it more like, you know, you see where I'm going with this, right? It's just that probability has created this kind of way that of making seen things our model seems so real, that you can actually see them and you can actually see their measure their impact on them. Right, this in fact, in mathematics, this the, let's call it the backbone of probability is called measure theory. Right. And I think this kind of lends itself to, well, some of the stuff you're working on, right, the quantum models of reality. So I think I think structural realism is something that is extremely effective, because it's, it's, it works on observations of reality, behind the scenes, and it actually kind of gets there. I mean, I'm using structural realism, maybe I'm, I'm conflating it with some mathematical context that are quantitation that it does not come with out of the box. I hope, I hope my point is clear.   Deep  13:51 Yeah, I understand your point completely. Um, quia. What do you think about this idea of an objective truth in nature? Um, do you think that it actually exists? And should we possess it? logic around that idea? Or the, or the rejection of the idea? Yeah. How important should that rule be?   Pouya LJ  14:12 Um, that's a very good question. Actually, I have started this long project, which is in the background for my own sake, I actually came up thought of this question a while back. I mean, everybody thought of thinks about these things, but more seriously started thinking about this insert. Getting onto some avenue to, you know, think about Yes. Is there an objective reality? And then that's literally the question to ask myself that started me on this journey. And you know, I I talk to some people from different walks of life, from psychology to philosophy to physics and what have you, some people who are at the top of their fields. I didn't. I mean, I did ask them this question, which is not the point. But from there our conversation, my conversation with them. What I got is that, no, from, from, from the real essence of the question, like the deepest sense of the question. And what I gather from all of those conversation conversations is that, again, we not the way we understand our world, our universe, maybe there is maybe there is a formalism that will get us there. But at least not with anything we have this, you know, far we've gotten discovery in science and philosophy thought. So. I, I think ultimately there is that's just a guesswork, obviously, like hypothesizing, but not in the sense that. So, let me put it this way. So for example, when GM Govan was saying that there's a spectrum of truth, I think that is, that is, that is true, until you get to the, to the resolution to the, to the, to the pixel of reality, essentially, at some point, it has to be one or the other. But we didn't get there yet. So that's my sense of it. That's my sense is that yes, it will eventually be some sort of objectiveness in reality, but it requires a better understanding of that reality that the fundamental laws of our universe, and that is not just gravity, gravity is, for example, gravity is emergent, from my perspective, and that that sense?   Govind  16:49 Well, I think you're gonna be happy, because initially, you wanted this discussion to be more about the nature of reality. And I think it's creeping into there. So I'll talk a little bit about the nature of reality as examined by Western philosophers. So there's a Descartes, notably, in the in the history of Western philosophy in like, let's say, the early modern period, which is like on 1600s, to like present day, or 1600 to 1800, is about the early modern period, we had these different movements, we started with rationalism, which is that, you know, like, we just, we just say things like, create these elaborate logical models. And then, and then we, we kind of examine, we use this as descriptions of reality. And then this kind of God rejects. And notably, Rene Descartes was kind of like a huge figure in this movement, because he said things like, the mind is its own soft, separate substance. And to tie that back to this discussion, what I was saying earlier about the realm of, of imaginary, thought experiments that we work with, in different fields like mathematics, computer science, and so on. He thought that it was its own separate universe that was completely detached from our, the universe that we live in. And he, I mean, these are the things he's saying, right? Like, I mean, he could be right, he could be wrong, but like, he's like, he's using logic as a means to tie together his his arguments. But at the end of the day, these are just things he's saying. And he's just using logic to create an elaborate story, an elaborate logical model. And this is the criticism that the next movement kind of gave to the rationalists. They were called the empiricist. People like David Hume, and I think mill or Locke, john Locke was in there. But they were like, hey, you're just saying things, you know, you're just you're just creating, you're just like, this is basically a story that I'm reading. And you're just like, Well, God is this and God is that. Savage. Exactly. And they're like David Hume, one of his famous philosophical quotes is like, you know, you can, you can't say for sure that the sun is gonna rise tomorrow, we see it rise every day. And we take it for granted, we have these explanations for it. But at the end of the day, these are just explanations, you know, I mean, at this point, they hadn't invented spacecraft and all that stuff yet, you know, they couldn't just go up there and see the sun.   Deep  19:09 Well, even then, like it did, there's still a philosophical point to that, like, even then we may not, despite everything we know, today, you know, I mean, the sun might not rise like there's   Govind  19:21 exactly that's, that's, that's   Deep  19:22 apparently physical reasons. I'm not even saying like magical reasons. But yeah,   Govind  19:26 So so they completely dismiss these, the rationalist arguments using this, it's like, if I don't see it, you know, it doesn't exist. So, you know, show me the proof, show me the reality of things. Got it. Um, and eventually, this kind of got resolved somewhat by Kant, Emmanuel Kant, who came in the, I believe, late 1700s, early 1800s. And he, he, he's like, Okay, guys, how do we resolve this? Because there's clearly some value in using logic to describe reality. And there's definitely value in talking about things that we can see and perceive and sense right. So his Way of reconciling this was to say that was to bring in the human aspect of things like how we perceive things. And he thought that that played an important role. In fact, what we call space time, were intuitions, he described them as intuitions. So humans have an intuition of space and an intuition of time, which is what allows us to perceive these things in reality. To make that more clear, he's he's telling the Emperor says, Hey, the things that you think you perceive, so clearly, maybe they're not that clear, you know, you are trapped behind your veil of perception at the end of the day. And again, like this is all to talk about the objective nature of reality, right? As humans, we can't help but be stuck behind the fact that everything we're perceiving is just what we're perceiving. There's another quote from Descartes, you know, it's, I think, therefore I am. It's one of like, the most famous quotes from philosophy, I think. But it's, it's basically that, for him thinking was such a rational endeavor, right? He thinks that just because he has this stuff running on in his head, like this voice that goes like, blah, blah, blah, and in his head, that's, that's why he knows for real, that He exists, like, no matter what, I have this thing that allows me to, like, perceive and like, you know, like, I don't know, if you guys are real, I don't know, my computer's I know, there's something going on here. You know, that's kind of his point there. And Kant was saying, you know, there's a human element of things you just can't strip away from, from anything real, right. So that's a little bit of a background in this in, well, let's say Western philosophical thinking about this, this this topic.   Deep  21:27 That's awesome. Um, and, you know, a lot of its circles, it's all circling and tying back in to itself in an interesting way. And here's what I mean by that. So, to your point about how deep you know, probability is in quantum mechanics, right? It plays a huge role, a fundamental role. For literally since the birth of it, you know, physicists both on the quantum computing and sorry, quantum physics side of things, and the classical physics side of things, believed that there should be some sort of a clear description of the wavefunction and information that we can eventually have access to and predict perfectly. So like, just, there's there was this idea that we'll eventually be able to predict the exact nature of the collapse, the wave function will know when it will collapse, and into what outcome it will collapse, rather than just knowing the probability. And you know, fast forward 100 years later, we've made essentially zero progress in making that stochastic process any less stochastic to us. And so it's really like sad react Sony, right? Like for the people who, who believe like, go when you and I've had tons of discussions about determinism and whether the universe is and Buddha unites was actually all three of us. And so quantum mechanics quickly touches on that. And then there's the objective reality question. There's the witness friend paradox. experiments, right that were recently conducted, again, two years ago, where you had two different labs instead, posing as a weakness friend, basically, it's a witness paradox is a paradox that was created in the 60s it was proposed by the famous physicist Wagner, and essentially, what he said was that if there are given the fact that the wavefunction encodes the all the possible measurables and observables, for a given observer, then the wavefunction is going to be different for different observers. And if that's true, then they're going to have eventually conflicting facts about the universe. And so he said, that's a paradox, right? And it turns out that it's true that two years ago, in those days, it is insane, because two years ago, we actually ran these quantum physical experiments where we took a well being split using beamsplitters, we essentially used quantum entangled photons. And we've been into two different labs, and you have people, you have what's called witness friends inside the lab, and then Wagner or like the observers outside the lab. And so all four people in this experiment, none of them can observe each other. We're measuring each other's photons directly, they can perform measurements to see if a measurement hasn't done, but they can't. Yeah, so that so if you want to think about it physically, they're splitting at the end of the experiment, one particle that was turned into four quantum entangled pairs, so through Bell state pairs and beamsplitters you really have these so if you want visualize that, so imagine, like I take a ball of physical ball, and I cut it in four pieces, and I give it right to four different people. Here's a weird thing about the huge We're gonna experiment what ended up happening is that Imagine if I asked those four people to look at, if I to record the color of their ball, right, let's say I cut up a red ball. And and I gave a piece to everybody, everybody has a red ball in theory right? v a piece that's red. What ended up happening is that these people, of course, were quantum mechanics, there's one caveat, right? You can expect the ball to change colors, that's fine, you can, you can expect it to change either red or green. So that's let's say, you can measure spin up, spin down totally fine. What and what what we did was, let's say I did this, I took a red ball, I gave it to four of my friends. And then they did measurements, knowing that it'll change red, green, red, green, sometimes. I, it turns out that when they did those measurements, and they all got back to each other, and they looked at their lists, and the measurements that they did on each individual piece themselves, the colors didn't add up. So So I so imagine this, like, imagine if I looked at my list, and I observed red, green, green, red, green, red, and you observe green, green, green, green, green, red. So you were looking at a different piece of the ball. How's that even possible? When I physically split the same objective ball? It's not it's, well, technically you shouldn't have been, but it is like, in fact, what's happening is that literal conflict and objective facts about reality, where you have people who participated in a physical experiment, use the same physical measurement tools and came up with different conflicting facts   Govind  26:31 that is completely wild. Yeah, no, that's physics anymore. You know, this is like something just so beyond anything.   Deep  26:41 Yeah, I mean, it is very edgy. Yeah. See? What we know, dude.   Govind  26:45 Yeah. Oh, my God. That's, that's insane. Everyone reminds me of the banach tarski paradox, right? Like, I mean, these kind of things happen on mathematics, and we're totally fine with it. Right. So the banach tarski paradox is like, imagine you have a sphere, a sphere that's composed of like, let's, let's call them like, an infinite number of droplets that are holding together this fear, right? It's like this basketball. So the banach tarski paradox says that there is a way to separate out, like, just choose all the points, like a whole bunch of these points that are in here, like these droplets, and then you take them out, and then you move them away. And these are just solely choosing the points, while granted infinite number of points, you're telling them to go somewhere else. And using this, you can actually create a perfect clone of the ball, right? You have two different copies of the ball using the exact same number of particles. So you can do all these weird things with infinity in the world of the abstract, you know, where we're fun things happen, and everyone's everyone's happy and dancing all the time. You know, like, yeah, they're like, we're okay with all kinds of crazy things happening. But man, when this spills over into reality, it's like, we all lose our shit. Because, you know, yeah, literally not believing.   Deep  27:54 That's right. That's right.   Pouya LJ  27:57 Yeah, and so, um, so what, what, what do you do, but especially because you're, you're actually very close to these experience. What does that what does that make you feel? What does that? What? What does that? Do you think it means? What does that say about that objective reality, if you will? What is your thought?   Deep  28:17 Yeah, it will, what it tells me is that there's likely some sort of, clearly a multiverse situation going on, where almost it's like, we're maybe that maybe each agent that can be concerned, considered an observer or anything that can be considered capable of measurement, right? We don't know how far that extends. We just don't know those answers. But I believe that everything that can is on some unique multiverse, and we all just have our own timelines intersecting with each other. That's what that told me. It no longer feels like, we share one objective physical space. It's like, you know, I mean, we just have like, the these rays instead. That intersect. So it, I found, frankly, I found it psychologically disturbing when I read the experiment and the results. And I don't think that there's no way around it. It's just but it's fascinating stuff. So yeah,   Pouya LJ  29:17 yeah, no, I, it does make sense. Yeah, what you're saying like, I mean, obviously, there has to be so that to me, either. There's another explanation such as the multiverse situation, or maybe there is no objective reality. Well, in a sense, at the end of the day, if you're living in a multiverse with different set of facts, and you're building all of your rules based on those axioms that you get from FX x, or whatever, a different set of axioms will say. Then, who's to say which universe is the reference universe, or the main universe or truth? So maybe maybe there isn't any objective reality which, which to me, And then that's my whole thing. That was my whole thing about this objective reality. I asked this question going in thinking, yes, there is, and we can't just find it yet. But let's pose the assumption that Yeah, no, there is no objective reality, then to me, it's a little bit more humanistic again, talk, but it just shows me how arrogant we've become of a thing called, you know, science and discovery. And we're just, we're just going forward thinking that we're supposed to know the answer to, to everything, we have to figure it out. And that and that's fine to try. But also I think it this whole phenomena should should give us some notion of Okay, there is there there should be a little bit a bit a degree of humility, in what in what we do as discoverers of this universe, which is, to me the most beautiful parts. Again, I'm like, this is being poetic as a human thing. But that's at the end of the day. That's who we are. And I think I think we should appreciate that part as well. Sorry, I'm just going to close this loop on this poem that I just composed here. But Okay, back to Golf. How does that make you feel? from someone who's a little bit more distant? Personally,   Govind  31:28 I think it's very interesting to use the word pool there because, well, since since this, this discussion has kind of been underpinned by logic and language and all that kind of stuff. There's this philosopher Martin Heidegger, his his entire take was like, we need to kind of escape from the confines of language and the kind of thinking that is inevitable, just because of language being the way it is, right? Because it's like, realistically, we all have our own personal language. It's like, I have my own language. And when I say that, I don't mean like my own version of English, I mean, my own, let's like, composition of thoughts, experiences, feeling senses, right? Like, if I remember, if I smell a perfume from my past, like, I'm gonna have like, these nostalgic experiences and all that stuff, right? And, and that really, that's part of that's a word or like maybe a phrase in like, personal language. And whenever I'm talking, what I'm doing is I'm converting from my, I'm translating from my personal language to English, right? In this case, and then and then you have to, like convert that back to your personal language. And men composition is really hard, like, how do we do it? Given this this context, but Heidegger, his his attempt to improve language, was by positing that we move to poetry as a way of expressing ourselves purely because he thought poetry had this innate ability to capture our personal language, right? Because when we write poetry, it's such a, like, poetry is a hard thing to understand, right? Like, sometimes you read poetry, and I'm like, What the heck is going on? But it's just because it's, it's the poets like attempt to try to bring out their personal language as much as possible, right. And I would argue that most of art is the same process. So I mean, in, and I want to tie this back to like, the point I made earlier about us trying to escape the confines of our own existence, right, like, the the confines of our of our human infrastructure, the way we do that, I think poetry is a very, very cool way of and it's kind of cool that emerged from this discussion as well. That's kind of a case in point.   Pouya LJ  33:23 Yeah. No, I I think so. Yes, I think I understand. So it's the least amount of filters like art, I suppose, like, closest to you as it gets, I suppose. So, so yes, I, and that's what I've been going back and forth a lot. Like I obviously, as somebody who cares about, you know, methodical thinking, logical thinking, and, you know, rationale, reason, etc. That is very valuable, especially if you if we want resolved in this in this world of ours, because at the end of the day, we can get a lot with the our version of you know, reality that we have in this very pocket that we are living in, in the whole the whole universe and in space and time. But going beyond that, I think there there has and that is where I think they kind of, you know, overlap the the field, let's call it science and art, if you will, I don't, I don't like to make huge distinction, like borderline distinction distinctions, generally personally, but I think in an entirety, society does make it very, like black and white distinction between these two, which I think there is a good amount of overlap, and that is, we're   Govind  34:44 talking fuzziness, right, it's all about being fuzzy and accepting it for what it is as opposed to what we want it to be that maybe seems more perfect to us, right? Like these molds seem more perfect to us. But the reality is, nothing is a mold like everything is fuzzy, right? Like I think the example is like such a mind. looming realization of that.   Pouya LJ  35:02 Yeah, no, that's that's true. And what one way one can raise a question. I suppose that what makes us want the I mean, I have I have one answer. But let's let me just pose the question first. What makes us as who we are humans, again, within this infrastructure, once this clarity of binary of, you know, not being fuzzy, but rather completely distinct or True or false? Well, what are your thoughts on that?   Govind  35:35 Well, I remember we actually think I think we did a podcast on this a little bit ago about like the nature of chaos, right? Some people, most people I think, are very averse to chaos, because they like things being simple and easy to understand. Right? What I mean, the more, let's say, foolhardy among us, for lack of a better word, like kind of naturally as gravitated towards chaos, because I think chaos is just such a good description of reality. But the problem is that chaos, by definition is incredibly, incredibly complex, right? So you don't you don't have the simplicity of like, you know, two plus two equals four, right? You're like, what's two? what's plus? What's four? What's the quality?   Pouya LJ  36:14 That sounds like you checked, you just say, yeah, smoke some weed or something? Like what is to man?   Govind  36:23 I thought this was Joe Rogan.   Pouya LJ  36:27 Oh, it could be anyway. No, I think so. Okay, let me go back to how about you do and don't share my thoughts?   Deep  36:38 Yes. So, first of all, it's super interesting about the nature of fuzziness, especially when we think about Zeno's paradox. Because even that is a great example. You know, I still contend that we have not resolved the paradox of why is it that we can make contact with anything, right? Why is it that I'm even touching the floor right now, despite the poly exclusion principle? And, you know, Zeno's paradox, right?   Govind  37:10 xenos paradox.   Deep  37:11 Sure. So So, so xenos paradox. It's really a family of paradoxes. But it all comes down to the fact that, I'll give you an example. Let's say that you want to reach the end of the hallway. And your rule that you impose on yourself is that you're going to have your distance in order to get to the hallway, and you'll have your distance, every single time until you get to the end of the hallway. And so let's say the, you're 10 feet away from the end of the hallway, then the next time the next move you make you're five feet away, then two and a half, then 1.25, and so on and so forth. And until you go to point 000000125, blah, blah, blah, but it'll never be zero, right? It never touches zero. So at no point, will you ever actually reach the end of the hallway. So Zeno's paradox, what basically asks, Why do you never, why do you touch the end of the hallway? Why is it that in real life, we end up making it to the other side, despite the fact that these infinite distances, you know, taking any slice of an infinite still infinite so so he just had all these questions about it. Yeah, spacetime. Very deep questions to the thousands of years ago on so and we still haven't answered them properly. And yeah,   Govind  38:34 well, I have a point about that. But I know if we are you're you're itching to talk about your, your perspective on it. Go ahead. Oh, you're on mute. Oops, sorry.   Pouya LJ  38:45 First of all, I want to say that I, I sent a photo and chat A while ago, and I think I diverted deeps attention to that kind of concept, which was I don't know if you saw the, the the rabbit or whatever it is. It wants to go get a haircut. I'll put this in the show notes, by the way, but it's a half off haircut. Did you guys see that one?   Deep  39:12 Right now? That is funny. Yeah, I'll put this   Pouya LJ  39:16 in the show notes. So that people who are listening to this, they can just find it out. But I know this is exactly what you're talking about. It'll gonna take forever. So yeah, you're right. But why do we actually get that haircut and the half of haircut eventually? No, I think so. First of all, all of these are exactly to my point that there's there's there is probably a sea of things that we just don't know about the nature of our universe, the one that even forget about objective reality, the one that we even perceive. And maybe one can make an argument that the reason with the fatalities of our of our views are the questions that we cannot answer is because of the fact that our realities are not completely overlapping the objective one, and that's where those those are the the edge cases that are actually creating these problems, perhaps. But true. Beyond that, I think there's a, there's a degree of obsession amongst many, many people, most people probably besides besides the ones who are embracing chaos, I suppose as go and was putting it, that we did a good good amount of like humanity essentially once a clear answer to two things and sometimes takes shortcuts through through, you know, ideologies that might not have, you know, rational rationale behind them. Just to get to those answer, why am I here? Why, like, because I have to be tested here to go to heaven, part of the some of the religious ideologies, or, or what is the nature of our unit? Why is the sun come up? I feel a first of all does is going to come up tomorrow or, and then we come up with these answers, and everybody through their own ways try to answer these definitively. And part of that is I think, now it's a little bit of more philosophical questions, I suppose, or answer rather thoughts, I suppose. But I think part of that is because we understand our own mortality by binary, which is the most did the deepest, probably driver of our existence, and that is either we're dead or alive, there's no, I'm half dead. I was like, well, maybe you're sick a little bit, but you're not half dead. So I and there is there's a degree that we and there's an understanding that when I die, I there's like, there's no coming back from that. I mean, I'm obviously there are exceptions, sometimes. Some people, some people, flatline they come back. But if you're flatlining for a week, you're not coming back from that, right? So so there's, there's a permanency to that experience that and and, and our deepest drive is to avoid that. So to avoid that clear, at least, at least from our mortal, mortal perspective, clear, true or false If true, being your dead and false being your life. That is clear that okay, if I'm, if I'm talking right now, as the card would say that I exist. In a more biological setup, sense, I'm not dead. And, and, and it drives all those questions, I suppose. But again, like, also going back to language as a logical tool, essentially. What do you think there's going to be a funny question, what do you think people before language would think? Would they have similar thoughts to these things? Now? I mean, obviously, in a simpler case, and not thinking like quantum physics, I suppose. But what do you think all of these are fatalities of language that we're carrying with ourselves? Or is it drive by language? Or is it more fundamental? So if we didn't have language for people who didn't invent language yet, back in? I don't know how long ago? Would they have similar thoughts? Do you think?   Govind  43:11 Well, I think we do have animals, right? Like, I mean, when we have these, you have any pets? Do you   Pouya LJ  43:17 mean no? Okay, before, but I know Okay, yeah. No, but I can understand what you're where you're going.   Govind  43:24 But when you have, like interactions with animals, I love animals. It's almost like you have this communication with them. That's that's not like you. I mean, I don't I can see versus and they probably don't understand me, unless all animals know English, and they just choose to ignore us. And they like humans are too stupid. There was a   Pouya LJ  43:43 cabal of animals deciding that this is not a good idea. Yes.   Govind  43:48 Lots of Rick and Morty episodes. But yeah, no, I think I mean, it's just that that awareness that being that's that's just there right? I think that is rooted in language fundamentally. Like I don't I don't know if we can actually get past this. This like our art like the language that we have developed evolved and developed is like it serves a very good purpose which is sharing thoughts with each other sharing these these like awareness experiences with each other right? But at the root of it all like I mean, it's all about that awareness and you brought up such a great point about death right? And how death is that binary which kind of makes us realize like you know, like there is such a thing as a clear like a clear line drawn in the in the northern sand like a line drawn in the concrete You know, this this is it like you know, there's life and then there's not life so so that that is actually such a such a great point about why negations work in this in this sense. I seem to have lost you guys   Pouya LJ  44:47 know, we can hear you. Okay. Oh, yeah, your picture froze, but I can hear you so that's good. Excellent.   Govind  44:53 Yeah. Well, yeah, that's that's the point I wanted to make. You know, it's a it's like these these ideas do exist, but I'm sure Animals have a notion of death as well. Right? And animals. Oh, yeah. Their their experiences and all that.   Pouya LJ  45:05 Yeah, no. And that's true. The notion of death is obviously at least in its more primal sense of obvious. Obviously, they're, they're trying to avoid it. But there are no but my point was, so so the rabbit holes that we go to and get stuck in it, then half of the way to the destination, and then half it, and then half of them and have it is this. My This is what is this? Now? Now this one is not as outside of language, actually, some, I'm kind of negating myself, but is a lot of these problems with language and and how we're communicating with each other. Because honestly, like, there are instances that I think I should have been thinking about this. Do I think with myself, like when there's nobody else, I don't have to communicate with anybody else. I don't need to use language, English, Farsi, whatever, to communicate with other people. But is there any any? Do I communicate with myself with my thoughts, in language or outside of language? And I've been thinking about this for a while and trying to observe it? And part of it is that, yeah, yeah, most of my thoughts are us using language. But yes, there are pockets sometimes that I feel like, there's a thought that I can't even express it to myself, using language. It's that the, maybe that that's the that's for, like, there's a fog. And I'm perceiving it. There's some sort of experience behind it. But I can't even describe that experience for us. Like, I mean, what what is like, so what is it sounds like an impression of a thought, right? Because a thought is a thought when you're able to express it, maybe? Yeah, so i think i think that that becomes super clear. Well, okay, let me let me give you so this is a, this is going to be a little bit of an exaggeration. Like, it's not what I'm thinking about. So the one that I'm thinking about is more of a thought. But think about this, when you're extremely fearful for your life at a very moment notice of, you know, hitting, you know, you have to you have to run there's there's a, there's a specific quality to that fear. And you're thinking, Okay, maybe there's a bear in front of you. And your thought is that we're going to grab this knife, but are you really thinking in terms of wars, I am going to grab this knife, you see a knife, you you want to grab it, you know what I mean? That's a thought that I'm going to grab this knife, but it's not really in any language. And that is really forced when I think I can see myself doing that, at least, when it comes to the precipice of like some sort of when it combines with some sort of very strong emotion such as, okay, I have to grab this knife or gun or whatever, shoot this bear, I'm not thinking to myself, okay, I am going to grab a gun, and I am going to pull the trigger at this. No, that's not it, you just know, right? That's a   Govind  48:01 possibility. It's like you're like, the way I think of it is like, it's almost like a design space of everything that could possibly happen given what's around you. Right? So it's like you're sampling from this design space. Like one of these events, for example, is like you picking up a knife or like, you know, you punching someone in the face. This is around you. Something like it's like these are these are just, I think the mind is really good at generating these kind of things, which is just sampling points from, from this design space of what's around us, right? Yeah. And then and then these are actions or like, these are these are impressions. Yeah. It's like, yeah, we just, we just like, we have all these things around this, like stimulus. And our mind is generating these things. And most of the time, it's like, it's pretty pragmatic. It's like, Oh, you have to put on your shoes to walk. It's like this thing you tell yourself, but you're not really thinking you're doing things. But like, sometimes it's just like random thoughts. Like it's our mind is a pretty interesting random number generator. Deep. What are your thoughts on that?   Deep  49:00 Okay, it really is. I agree with that. I mean, you can always say that, uh, you know, all of our output all of our, I've always wondered, you know, the, what is it the thousand monkey or the infinite monkey experiment or thought experiment where what would happen if you let monkeys play with a typewriter for an infinite amount of time, right? There's the idea that they would eventually create Shakespeare. And it makes me question the idea of creativity and thought, is it a linear combination of what you already know? Or is it truly something that will eventually appear emergent from random fucking monkey? Monkey actions, right? Like, what what is true intelligent creativity? So with that being said, I really had a I was thinking, though, you know, on that note about us looking at death and life is binary. That's true. We are classical creatures, like we observe the universe in classical sense, right? Everything is and so because it's macroscopic to us, I wonder, what if? What does life look like for, let's say, micro organism that doesn't experience the world classically like we do, right? What if there are, there are quantum organisms that are only experiencing the world and quantum mechanics? To them, there would be literally no such thing as a classical I am dead or classical life. What does that mean? What What does death for that organism look like? So yeah, I was just thinking about that. But you guys think,   Pouya LJ  50:34 yeah, no, you're you're dragging us into the pan psychism   Govind  50:41 the movie arrival, right? With the whole concept of like, circular time and all these things, right? Like, this is some I think, innovations of the 21st century like, exploring this, these kind of ideas. I see so many outlets for this in different TV shows and movies and all that stuff. Like this, this like convergence of everything, how everything is one and many at the same time. Right? Well, I guess the fuzziness of everything, right. Like everything is just really fuzzy. And we're, as humanity starting to accept it, which is, you know, really freakin cool.   Pouya LJ  51:12 No, no, it is. And you mentioned an arrival It reminds me of, so I think if I'm not mistaken. Okay, maybe I'm mistaken. But let me let me just make it maybe, you know, I think Stephen Wolfram was an advisor in that movie. I don't know if he really I don't know. That's that I I'm doubting myself now. So anybody out there listening. Please double check for yourselves. Don't quote me on it. But which reminds me he actually I don't know if we're familiar. Actually. I   51:40 don't know why I did a quick Google and   Pouya LJ  51:43 it is like it's okay. Yeah. And he came up with this new What is it? What do you call it? Geez. new stuff. Yeah, he is hypergraph.   Deep  51:56 Physics.   Pouya LJ  51:57 Yes. Yeah. Have you heard about that? Did you look into it?   Deep  52:01 Yeah, I   52:04 I liked it.   Pouya LJ  52:06 So what are your thoughts on that? But super quickly, I don't want to go to a different deep rabbit hole right now. But it reminded me of him when you mentioned arrival.   Deep  52:14 Sure. I mean, various.   Pouya LJ  52:16 I don't know, Dad Galvin. Are you familiar with what it is? Oh, yeah, sure. Sure. Okay. Okay. Cool. Cool. Good.   Deep  52:22 Yeah, just very briefly, I mean, the idea of like, Come complex, physical phenomena from simple rules is nothing new, right. Like that's been talked about for 100 years. What was really interesting was the idea of using causal graphs or attempting to use just like these hyper graphs to encode physical rules. Yeah, I think it's promising. I'd love to see experiments and math and more rigor. But the ideas are cool. Like Stephen Wolfram is really, like he has some fundamental thoughts there that are interesting, unique worth pursuing.   Govind  52:56 These are usually a pioneer of this kind of this kind of funky fuzzy stuff. Right, right. Yeah. Yes, geez theory so much with his work on automata and all that stuff. Well, this release. I mean, I wanted to bring back this point from about 15 minutes ago. We were talking about Zeno's paradoxes. Yeah, a conversation topic for a future podcasts definitely should be the nature of calculus, right? Because, yeah, the way we as humans, resolve Zeno's paradoxes was to create this notion of a limit, we just throw a limit on it. And we say, at some point, it does, it does converge on to this value, right? Like, and I'm like, okay, so you keep cutting the half of your hair. And at some point, you're, you're going to get a full haircut, right? Like, even if you get the convergence now that that notion of convergence, it turns out is not strongly understood by by humans. But I think that's something we need to discuss. And I it stands out for me, because this is one of the first discussions we ever had. Right? Exactly. Yeah.   Deep  53:57 Yeah, absolutely. Talking   Govind  53:58 about limits and how like, that's what I think I first realized I'm like, this doesn't make any sense, does it? It's just, we just put   Deep  54:04 it is it is a great because some that is it all stemmed from some Berkeley kid asking us like, like, about it, right? Like he's like, yeah, this like this. And then yeah,   Govind  54:15 yeah. Yeah. Cool stuff. No, but I think we should explore that in in the next podcast or though sounds good. Sounds good?   Pouya LJ  54:24 No, I think I think okay, well, we made the plan. I don't know about the dates. We'll talk about that later. But next sub subject of the next conversation will be calculus, and its origins, its fundamentals. axioms, I suppose. Okay, I think that's a good. Here's a good stopping point. We almost went full hour here. Is there anything else you want to, you know, close the loop on before we leave this conversation?   Govind  54:54 Well, for me, I think I learned so I mean, I had these thoughts about fuzzy fuzzy thinking and all that stuff. And it was Kind of like in the let's let's see the disk of my, the my external hard disk of my brain is just forgotten there. So it's great to brush the dust off. And I feel like I really kind of added to these models based on this conversation. So yeah, it was very cool. I think we achieved fuzziness today. Yes.   Pouya LJ  55:18 That's great. How about you?   Deep  55:20 Yeah, I would just say that I really appreciated the perspective of the history of history philosophy, with respect to logic, a super neat perspective that you brought to the table or Govind and yeah, just different perspectives that were shared today. Um, it's awesome. It does make things more fuzzy. And yeah, let's keep it going. Guys, I, I think that there's a lot of interesting questions. We post here today. So   Pouya LJ  55:47 okay, and if anybody wants to share their thoughts, feel free you can reach go in and deepen their respective social media, which I'm going to put in the show notes. Don't need to repeat them here. You can you can find them there.   56:01 And comment guys.   Pouya LJ  56:04 Make it make it dirty. No, keep it clean. And all right, stay fuzzy until later episode.   Deep  56:11 Cheers, guys.  

Kevin UrrutiaFounder of Voy Media Notes: Worked with the TSA for approvalPicked from a catalogCost 150k for the moldsThe factory recommended other suppliersFounder factories via Alibaba, AliExpressHow to US port documents -> Panjiva Looking for high barrier to entry productsGet reviews from bloggers and influences Sponsors: Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software Transcript: Charles (00:00): In this episode of a business. E-Commerce I talk with Kevin Urrutia about how to find suppliers in Asia. This is the Business of eCommerce episode 143. Charles (00:17): Welcome to the business of eCommerce the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm always Charles Palleschi I'm here today with Kevin Urrutia. Kevin is the founder of Voy media. We just started several eCommerce companies, his most recent company producing luggage. We probably showed it chat about how he went through the process of finding suppliers in Asia to produce the luggage. Super interesting, just talking to Kevin about his whole background process and how we kind of thought through the process of getting this business started. It's very addressing, I think, helpful for anyone just starting off or even someone experienced right at the very end of the show, he also dropped some really helpful, helpful nuggets on what he would do if he was just starting off today. So I think it's well worth listening right to the end. Let's get into the show. Hey Kevin, how you doing today? Kevin (01:06): Hey, I'm doing good. How are you Charles (01:08): Great to have you on the show. I'm super interested in we're talking about earlier. So about finding suppliers in Asia. But I guess some of your background real quick. So we're talking in 2020. And what do you guys do? So, so luggage currently. Kevin (01:25): Yeah. So for tester, we are sound luggages online when we did, so that's a carry on probably the, one of the most proper sizes, but then we pop like maybe eight months ago we released like the other two sizes. The medium wanted to check one. But yeah, for like almost a good year and a half, we only sold the carry on because we didn't have any cash to make the other ones. Charles (01:44): So you actually, so you started what? A year and a half ago? Or how long has it been around? Kevin (01:49): Oh, now, yeah, like actual selling, but then we were in like product development. We're good. Like six months being up, like the products and stuff. Yeah. Charles (02:00): So when you say product development kind of let's go. So what, at what part did you actually, when you say product development, what part were you developing? What part are you talking to suppliers and like, how did this whole process happened? Kevin (02:10): Yeah, so for the, for the chest of luggage, so this is my second e-commerce company for Chester. Everything on the luggage is actually custom made a supplier that we've worked with, which is great because obviously you probably know e-commerce like, you can say, Hey, like, this is one thing that I'd like to kind of funny. We're like, Hey, we want to make a of agent. And they're like, okay, like, can you make that look just like this corn company? And they're like, nah, like we don't work like that. And we're like, no, cause like we're so used to that. Right? Like you see that align well with them. They wanted us to pretty much pick everything like, and that was pretty exciting and also scary because we'd never done it. But like, I kinda liked that. So we were able to pick the wheels, they send us like a catalog. Kevin (02:48): You find out like a catalog of like wheels, shells interior, interior lining, and then colors. And then we have to just design the whole shape of it. And then they need to be like AutoCAD for that. So then my brother is actually art.

SEO best practices are constantly changing as search engines fine tune the way they determine how to rank content. Here's what's working right now. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, iPullRank founder Mike King shares the SEO strategies that he's using now to get results for his clients. From content and keyword strategies, to natural language generation, internal link generation and technical content optimization, Mike goes into detail with tips about how you can spot SEO issues that might be hurting your rankings, and what you can do to fix existing problems and proactively position your site to rank well. If you love getting into the technical weeds (like I do), this episode is for you! Resources from this episode: Visit the iPullRank website Check out Mike's movie Runtime Follow Mike on Twitter Read Mike's Medium article "This, too, shall pass" Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week I am excited to welcome my guest Mike King, who is the managing director of iPullRank. Welcome Mike Mike (00:32): Kathleen. Thanks for having me. Kathleen (00:34): So excited for you to be here because I heard you speak back in, I think we decided it was 2016. I was attending Wistia Fest, which is not a thing anymore. It was an awesome annual conference that Wistia ran for a few years there. And I went to it and I, I saw you, you speak on the main stage about SEO. And I remember at the time thinking this guy is amazing. His talk is really good. It's packed with incredible substance, which you can't always say for main stage talks. And, and like, wow, I was just so impressed. And it was funny because recently when I was asking people in my network who I should interview for this podcast, your name came up and I kind of connected the dots. And I was like, that's that guy? So I'm so excited that like this has come full circle and now I get to meet you and, and pick your brain. Mike (01:40): Thanks for having me. And yeah, that was a great show. I really enjoyed Wista Fest. I really appreciate them as a company too. Like just their ethos. It kind of reminds me of early Moz. So yeah, I really love those guys. Kathleen (01:54): And they did a very Seinfeld-esque thing where they had a great conference that was growing and they were like, we're not going to do it anymore because we've realized it's not the right thing for us, but they definitely left while they were on top. So that was cool. So before we jump into all things SEO, can you maybe give my audience a little history on yourself and how you came to be doing what you're doing now? And also what iPullRank does. And I should note, as I say that, that this is basically the sixth anniversary of the company, so happy anniversary, that's a huge accomplishment. Mike (02:32): Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I mean, it feels crazy to be here six years and, you know, just because of like the, the weight of everything that's happening in the world. So yeah, I'm very appreciative that we are still around. So yeah, me, my background, I did music for a living for a number of years, but, you know, before that, I grew up a very nerdy kid who learned to code from 12 and all this, and actually got into a bike accident. And and I didn't have health insurance cause you know, I was a rapper and this before Obamacare and I had to get a job to pay my medical bills. So first place to hire me was an SEO agency because of my, my technical skills. And then I ended up working at some bigger agencies and then some search focus firms. Mike (03:25): And then after that, I was just like, I'm pretty sure I can do this myself. And so six years ago I started the agency just put a, put like $5,000 in a bank account and never really looked back. And so what we do is, is digital marketing of course, with a primary focus on SEO and content strategy. And, you know, we work with a lot of clients and we really build that rapport and that trust. And then they allow us to do other things as well. So we've got some expertise in things like analytics and machine learning and so on. And there's just a lot of overlap between those that allows us to be very effective and the things that we do for our clients. Kathleen (04:03): I think it's interesting that you say, you know, your background, you were kind of nerdy and you learned to code because I feel like what marketing has evolved into these days, that is a super power, like people who know, who understand code and who, who are more data driven and, and kind of think like a programmer there's so much you can do with that knowledge, as opposed to the way marketing was taught way back when I studied marketing, which was like a much more about like strategy and creative. And it's just, it's a different discipline today. Mike (04:39): Yeah. And I think that we kind of exist at the confluence of like marketing technology, creative and like media, right? Like, so there's when I worked at some bigger ad agencies, everything was pretty rigid in kind of like what you just described. It's like, okay, you do that. We have a strategy, we do the creative, we run the media and that's it. But because with SEO specifically, you have to like fix the website, you end up like touching a lot of other different areas. And so that's why we ended up getting into machine learning and things like that because all of that supports what we're trying to do. And I kind of look at it as though, you know, the web is a program. You know, the search engine is a program. Your website is a program, that's an input for the search engines program. Mike (05:31): And so if you think of it as just like an ecosystem of program, you can make your website do anything and then you can make it ultimately, you know, work for these other programs. So if you think about something like personalization that is literally turning your marketing mix into a program that reacts to people's you know, their, their features and their behaviors. So yeah, I agree with you. It's definitely a superpower because if you think of, of everything in your marketing in that way, you understand that you just have so much control over what can be done. Kathleen (06:08): Yeah. It's amazing. And, and I know, you know, you have pretty deep SEO knowledge and experience. In fact, you were recently you were, you're going to be speaking at Moz con live, which of course, due to the crazy situation that we're in as a world, you presented at Moz con virtual you did something really different and creative that I want to maybe start with here. So can you talk a little bit about that? Cause it's so cool. Mike (06:38): Yeah. We made a movie. And the way I describe it as it's like Batman, the animated series meets the TV show, mr. Robot. And so they told me like the theme of Moz Con this year was going to be something like circus or carnival related. And I was like, all right, why don't we use a character that's like, kind of like the joker and make it like the three ring circus of technical SEO. And so you've got this protagonist who she's like this hacker type who is when you first meet her. She's just like doing all this SEO stuff, like super fast. So of course you got to present it in like a Hollywood way. Cause otherwise people would get bored. And then she runs into a problem. She meets me. I'm kinda like her coach. And so during the process of me coaching her to beat these different challenges, I'm also teaching the viewer different technical SEO tactics. Mike (07:32): So going into this, you know, like you said, I was excited to speak at Moz con live cause to me it's like the super bowl of SEO conferences. And when they said that they were going to go virtual at first, I was a bit disappointed because I really enjoy the, you know, speaking in front of 2000 people with my newest, coolest tactics and all of that. But then I realized like, no, this is an opportunity because not only is this virtual, but they want to do a prerecorded. And I'm like, alright, let's maximize this media, let's do a movie. And so my, the, the creative folks on my team were super excited about it. And we came up with a few different concepts of how we could do it. And then we just made it happen. You know, we, the, the music in the film is mostly in house. Mike (08:21): Like the person that is the voice actor for both the clown character and the woman, that's a protagonist also sings. The first song that you hear when the wind starts. Yes. Her name is Neferkara, she's our office manager. And she's so talented. And it was really cool to be able to like extract the talents of different people across the team. So like I wrote the script, I'm also a voice actor in it, our senior visual designer, she did the design concepts and then we've got designer who's also an animator who contributed. And then, because the timeline was so compressed, we also brought in a couple of freelancers to help us out. And it was just like, you know, one of those round the clock projects until we turned it in, like we literally turned it in. Like they said, we need it by 3:00 AM. At this point I had sent on the email at two 59 and 48 seconds. But yeah, we made it happen. It was a really fun project. Kathleen (09:23): So I just want to pause for a second. And for anybody who's listening, he made a movie. Like this wasn't just, let's film a video. This is like, you made a movie, you wrote a script, you brought in talent, it had a story. It was animated, which I think is, makes it even harder and more work. That just blew me away when I heard that. And when I saw it, I was blown away too, because it's really good. No, it's really good. And so where I, I'm sure the thing that everybody's thinking as I listened to this is wait, now I need to go online and see this movie. So where is this movie? Where does it live? Mike (10:05): Yeah. You can watch it on our website. You just go to i pull rank dot com slash runtime. Runtime is the name of the film. And it's right there and we watch it. Kathleen (10:16): So cool. So a lot of what that movie was about is what is working right now in SEO. And that's really what I wanted to talk to you about because, you know, SEO is one of those things that like, you can't learn it and be done, right. It's just constantly changing to the point where this week, you know, all I look online and, and I'm seeing like, Oh, there's a core algorithm update with Google. And then, and then two days later, it's no, they just made a mistake. And you know, there's all this craziness happening in the world of SEO, which is why it's so appropriate. So people who are listening to this can't see. But if you check out the show notes, you'll see it. Mike has this awesome zoom background, which is like, it looks like the house is on fire and the Simpsons is my best guess? Mike (11:01): It's from that meme with the dog where everything is on fire. And he's like, this is fine. Kathleen (11:05): Yeah. Everything's fine. It's fine. Literally the world is on fire. I feel like that's SEO half the time. Mike (11:12): Pretty much. Yeah. Kathleen (11:15): So, so yeah, I would love it. If you could just sort of like talk about with what you're seeing. I mean, most of the people listen to this podcast are pretty experienced and they understand content marketing and they get keyword optimization, but there's a whole nother level out there that I think unless you're a specialist, you, you just, you can't keep up with Mike (11:35): Yeah, that's the thing. So, I mean, SEO does change every day. There's algorithm updates regularly lately. And the thing is, people are very reactive to those algorithm updates. That's not the way you should approach it. Like if they roll out a new algorithm update, you got to wait a couple of weeks and see how that settles. Google is a software company, just like any other software company. And so when they roll things out, they may say, okay, we're going to roll out these five things at once. And they may say like, okay, four of those things didn't work. Let's pull those back. And only one of them stays there. So if you're jerking the wheel back and forth in reaction to them, you may end up being caught up in one of those things that wasn't actually a problem for your site. Mike (12:18): So I always tell my clients like, Hey, if you hear about an algorithm update, wait two weeks and then see where you fall from there. And the reality is that, you know, most of the things that you would want to do in reaction to one of those updates anyway, were things that we probably already told you you should do. Right? So it's not, it's not, it's very rare that it's a dramatic change to whatever you thought about doing or whatever your, no, you should have been doing it. And so it's all about prioritization from there, but to your point of it being another level, like most people that are doing content marketing don't necessarily know like how search engines think about content, right? So you may think like, okay, these are my target keywords. I got to talk about these keywords when I'm writing about a thing, that's the top level of it. Mike (13:12): So the way you got to think about it is that your keywords have keywords. And what I mean by that is that there's a context that's built based on what currently ranks for any given keyword. So as an example, if you rank for the, or you want to rank for the keyword basketball, and right now, the things that ranked for basketball also feature, you know, NBA bubble and LeBron James, and, you know, championship. Like if those words are featured on pages that rank, you also have to use those, those words on your page when you're trying to rank for basketball. And that's a simplified version of it. Like there are, you know, you gotta think about as far as like the topics being covered, the current, the people, places and things that are being covered. And we call this whole process of understanding that and using it technical content optimization, and it uses a lot of natural language processing to understand these concepts and so on. Mike (14:10): But the ultimate output from that is a very data-driven brief that we use to inform the content that we create. And these concepts are super powerful. You know, like again, most people are just being like, Hey, I want to rank for basketball. So I'm going to talk about basketball and use that word 49 times, but we will beat you because we're thinking about it the same way the search engine itself is, and we're looking at those topics and incorporating them so strategically, I would say that any content marketer that is, you know, optimizing for SEO, they should look into these concepts, more, plenty of tools out there for it. Search metrics, have a tool called content experience. SEMrush has a tool for optimization like this. There's a tool called phrase. So there's plenty of tools out there that do this level of analysis. Mike (15:02): And there's also a tool called content success by a company called Ryte. And what they do is like, as you're writing something, they'll say, here's my target keywords. It'll say, okay, well, use these words more, talk about these subjects more so you can be more optimized with respect to what search engines expect. So that's, that's one of the bigger ones that I would say that people that, you know, have knowledge about SEO don't know about this, and when they discover it, they see just like these small changes of how their writing would dramatically improve their rankings and so on. Kathleen (15:38): Yeah. It's interesting. Have you also heard, I keep hearing a lot of buzz about a newer tool called market muse. Have you heard about that? Mike (15:45): Yeah, they, yeah. Market Muse. They do a very similar thing. So they they've actually got a lot of different features and functionality to support this type of work. And they're also going into leveraging natural language generation pretty heavily as well. They do something that I can't remember the name of the product, but basically they'll give you a first draft of a piece of content based on what you're trying to target. And that type of technology has dramatically improved in the last couple of years, you know, or even the last few months. And that when people used to try to like generate content, they usually do, what's called content spinning. And that's where you kind of like take an existing article and just like change the words around like use synonyms and things like that. That's always been bad content. Now you have something called GPT two and also GPT three, which was put out by Elon Musk's company, open AI. And it's like really good at writing content. Like as long as you configure it, right. A human cannot tell the difference between a piece of content written by a human and written by this. Kathleen (16:59): It's funny that you say that because I just talked to somebody who rewrote 60% of his website using GPT three, cause he got access to the early beta and he was like, it's performing so much better. It did a better job of saying what we do than I could have done. And, and all these people in the Slack group I'm in, went to look at it and we were all like, that's amazing. It's crazy. It's like a little freaky though, because I don't know, like what does that mean for, for the future of us as marketers? Right. Mike (17:29): I think it means good things. You know, I think it frees us up to write content that's valuable and creative rather than like, imagine your eCommerce site. Right. And you're like, okay, to optimize these pages, I gotta write 200 words on every category page. No one wants to do, wants to do that. No one wants to write the copy that goes on product detail pages. They just want to be able to like take that data and turn it into something. Well, now you can't. And so it frees up actual copywriters and creative content marketers, and so on to think about how do we make interactive content? How do we write things that are like emotional and so on? Like, you know, I don't think we're going to get to a point in the near term that something like GPT three is going to be able to write conversion copy right now. I think he can give us some insights, but I don't think it's going to be able to very much be able to say like, okay, this certain type of person I want to write for them. Kathleen (18:30): Well, I think your key, you said the three key words, which was in the near term, I think eventually it'll figure it out, Mike (18:37): Right? Like we get to enough computing power and, and people are writing the right algorithms. Yes. You can retrain anything. But right now... Kathleen (18:45): Hopefully by that point you and I will be sitting on a beach somewhere and having a pina colada retired. Mike (18:54): But the other thing is that I think that we're going to get to a point where you can say, I want to rank for this keyword. And those types of tools would just ingest what ranks there and then use all those features that I'm talking about that we use as humans and it's going to write the perfectly optimized content for you. So then what is going to, what's gonna make, what's going to be differentiator between you and me and how we create the content. I think it's going to be those creative aspects that are going to be even more valuable. So GPT three does not replace your editorial team because you're still gonna need editors to edit whatever it spits out. And then you're going to need creative people that can create things that don't exist because GBT three learns from what does exist. Kathleen (19:41): Yeah. It's pretty crazy. But it also goes back to that point I was making earlier where, you know, programming and knowledge of code is a super power because you can't just like get access to GPT three and just like, it will know how to write your website. Like you had there's there's you have to understand how to leverage those tools. And there's a certain degree of technical sophistication required for that. At least at this stage, I'm sure at some point someone will build a software interface that will make it easy for anybody to do it, but that doesn't exist yet. Yeah. So that's pretty cool. So, all right. So we have number one, understanding the context around your SEO and that your keywords have keywords. I love that. What else do you got for us? Mike (20:23): Let's see. So I'm a strong believer that for, you know, the last like five or six years, SEO has become more content marketing. And a lot of people that do SEO don't know much about the technical side of it. And I don't think there's necessarily a problem with those people. I just think that the technical stuff needs to be brought back to the forefront because a lot of things have changed about the web in the last couple years. You know, JavaScript is more prominent in the way that search engines can understand that stuff and so on has changed. And so there's been a lot of new tactics that have popped up as a result of that. So one of which is AB testing specifically for SEO. So if you've got a big site and you're like, Hey, we're considering making this change before. Mike (21:20): It's like, well, we make the change and see what happens. Now you can do that as kind of like a step approach by taking a you know, representative sample of URLs, making that change there and validating or invalidating that hypothesis that this will work. And then once you see that it works, you can roll it out at scale. So I think that that's something that every SEO needs to know how to do, because that's a good way to avoid losing money. But you know, again, that goes back to the technical aspects because that is a very technical thing to do. Like you got to know more about CDNs and how sites are set up, or you got to know about Google tag manager and things like that. So my point here is that, you know, we're, we're still going through what I've, I've called for a number of years. Mike (22:07): Now, this technical SEO Renaissance where people that sit at the intersection of like code and, you know, creative marketing sophistication, and, you know, I guess SEO are able to really capitalize on things that others can. And I very much encourage, you know, SEO or content marketers to learn more about these things. So at least they can be aware and discuss with more technical people. Like how can we deploy this in such a way that what I'm doing as a content marketer works even better. So, you know, it used to be that you could just like build a site and put a bunch of great content on it. And the links that you would attract as a result of those, those that content would yield better rankings for you. But because Google has gotten more sophisticated and they have better understanding of the pages that are very rich in that type of content, you've got to understand things like server side rendering and dynamic rendering and, and Google's capabilities like where they end. So you can make sure that that content always has the best chance of ranking. Kathleen (23:22): How much do you think the average marketer needs to learn about technical SEO? Because like, I've always, you know, I've always kind of looked at the landscape of the marketing industry and there are some people who like all they do 24 seven, like their one job is they are a technical SEO expert and they do it really, really well. But I do think, I mean, it seems to me there is some baseline level of technical, technical SEO understanding that every marketer should have. I'm curious where you fall on that. Mike (23:53): Yeah. And I don't think that everyone needs to know how to do like 301 redirects and fix AC access files and so on and so forth. I think they just need to be exposed to those ideas. So if you're someone who read Moz's, you know, beginner's guide to SEO, I think that is a good base layer foundation of understanding technical SEO, because you're exposed to all those problems that you might have. And you can say like, Hey, I don't think the page that we just published is in our site map, that's important. Or I looked at, I looked at this plugin and it showed me that, you know, what is showing up for Google is not what I see in my browser. Like understanding those base level concepts is enough because you can find an awesome technical SEO, like you described, or even just an engineer themselves and be like, Hey, I'm at, I see these problems. I'm not the expert here, but can we look into this so that we can make sure that the content I'm creating is visible to Google? Kathleen (25:01): Yeah. That's kind of what I was going to say is it's like, you need to know enough to be able to recognize that you have a problem so that, you know, when to make that call, right. Like whether it's, I have a feeling, my images are too large. And so my page is loading too slowly or, you know, it might be, I need you know, more structured data on my website. I don't know how to do that, but I know what it is and that it needs to be done. Like there's sort of that level that I think is important for marketers to have. Mike (25:30): Yeah, absolutely. Cause you know, I mean, I personally come from a time back in my day where, you know, doing websites was you had one title and that was webmaster everything from master of all the web. Yeah. You were like a network administrator, you are front end and back end developer, you did Photoshop. Like you did everything. Right. So for me, like I want to know everything because I'm just used to that. But the modern web doesn't work that way. And so people have their, like their separation of concerns and that's fine. But I do believe that having like a general understanding of what someone like that technical SEO or engineer does just makes the end product even better. So I would recommend people just learn that foundational. Kathleen (26:23): Yeah. That's good advice. All right. So other things that you're seeing really kind of move the needle these days from an SEO standpoint. Mike (26:35): Yeah. so I mean, I'm, I'm starting to get super tactical. One of the things that we run with every single website that we pick up, especially because we work with mostly enterprise brands is they always have a bunch of external links pointing to pages that no longer exist. So the worst I've ever seen was, you know, one of the bigger sports organizations had 12 million links pointing to pages that 302 redirected. Now a Googler will tell you, there's no difference from how they handle 302s and 301s. I can definitively tell you that that is not true based on my experience. And this was a case where it was like one of the few things that we were able to push through in the organization was converting those 12 million, 302s and the 301s and their traffic shot up dramatically from organic search. So ever since then, I've, I've made sure that we always look for that. And every time you always find it, that's a problem. And one of the things that we do to make sure that that's not a problem moving forward is is with Ahrefs, which is one of the link index tools. They have a API end point for telling you what pages have broken links. So what you can do is set up a script. And again, this is something that you would work with your engineering team on. Kathleen (28:02): It all comes back to that coding. Mike (28:04): And I have a script that pings that API and says, all right, here's your list of broken links now automatically set up your 301 redirects from now. So then you don't have to worry about that as a problem. One issue though, is that Google and I believe this would be true. I don't have any definitive evidence of this, but it's something that I've like my hypothesis based on things that I've read in patents. They store copies of your site forever. So if you make a change to a page, they're able to look at what the previous version of that page is just like the way back machine. Yeah. And so if you implement a 301 redirect from one page to another, and those pages don't match up, like the content that used to be there, it doesn't match up with the content that is there. Mike (28:51): Now, they won't apply all the value of the link that you're redirecting. So the way that we've gotten around that, and again goes back to code. Google has something that they call the natural language processing API, which will allow you to determine the topics of pages. So what you would want to do is look for an old version of whatever page was there. Again, the way back machine is a good place for that and run it through that NLP API. And then they'll tell you all the topics and were called entities that were on that page. And then you run your other pages through that and find whatever page has the closest match topic. And then that's where you redirect it to. And then you're more likely to get more value out of that. Kathleen (29:39): That's cool. I did not know that. See, this is why I wanted to talk to you. I knew I was going to learn some new things. And by the way you were like, now we're getting tactical, I love this part of the conversation. So let's go into the tactical weeds. Do you guys have anything else like that? Mike (29:55): Absolutely. So another one that again, another commonplace thing that we see when we bring on clients, well, the first thing that we do is our SEO quick hits. So what are the things that are, you know, high value that we can do very quickly to show that, right? And another thing that we find, and this is especially important for big sites, but it's important for all types of sites. And there are links internally to pages that redirect. So 301 redirect is, you know, they're your last resort basically like when you have links pointing from an external site, it is difficult to reach out to a hundred or a thousand sites and say, Hey, can you update? So the 301 is the best thing you can do in that case, but within your own site, you have complete control. So you shouldn't be linking 301s because for every 301, there's a small loss of link equity. So again, whenever we get a site, we'll crawl a site and see what that internal linking structure looks like. And if there's a bunch of links to 301s, we fix those by just linking directly to the final destination URL. And then while I can see improvements from there, and the same is true of links to 404s. So those two things, and, and also with the external links, if you fix those three things, you will always see an improvement in organic search. Kathleen (31:17): That's awesome. And I feel like that's just like good website housekeeping. And it's funny you mentioned that because I was just doing that. We migrated the site at the company I work for, we migrated it from WordPress to HubSpot. And when we did that, it meant that everything basically was on one domain instead of sub domains. And, and it was like, it was a painful few days, but so necessary. I, I spent like three days going through old blogs, like fixing what were section headings and turning them into H2s changing the link so that they went to, they were like internal links and not external links that went to 301s, like the whole process was such a slog, but when it was done, I it's the same feeling I have like when I clean out the junk drawer in my kitchen. I'm like, Oh, I feel so good. Now it's all clean and perfect. Mike (32:06): Yeah. It's tedious, but it's work done. Kathleen (32:08): Yeah, it is. It is awesome. Well, I mean, I literally feel like I could sit here all day and talk to you about SEO and you're this endless fountain of, of incredibly useful knowledge, but we only have so much time. So shifting gears for a minute, I always ask people at the end of my interviews, two questions, the first of which is the podcast is all about inbound marketing and people who are doing it really well. Is there a particular company or individual that you can point to that you think is really setting the standard, what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days? Mike (32:43): Hmm. I mean, I feel like it's a cop out to mention Rand, but Rand is really good at it. Kathleen (32:49): You know what, you know what, I just want to say this came up once before. He's almost never mentioned, which blows my mind because he is the person that I would probably mention. So talk, discuss Rand. Mike (33:03): Rand is, he's like a inbound marketing machine, you know, like if you think back to the things that he was doing with Moz, where it was like he was blogging every night and he created the Fridays, Whiteboard Fridays, which he does, or he was doing every Friday. He had the beginner's guide to SEO, which he did the first iteration of, and then Brittany Mueller has taken over. So yeah, I think if, if you want to point to someone who is doing it and isn't a huge brand, like he's obviously, you know, a big influence in the space, you can watch him do it again right now with his new startup, which is Spark Toro. And so you see him blogging pretty regularly. He's putting out videos on like how to use the product. He is identifying new social channels that work for him. Mike (33:54): Cause you know, Twitter engagement is down pretty dramatically. Linkedin engagement is up and I'm starting to see him pop up there more. He's doing a ton of different, you know, podcasts and webinars and things. So I think Rand is a really good example of how to do it right. And how to really laser focus in on your audience and then like continually know what they need and put it in front of them. So then show like, Hey, I've also got this product. That's very valuable. And then the other thing is that, you know, he's always had like a very empathetic approach to everything that he's done. And what was really striking to me was that they have an email through Spark Toro that goes out right before they're going to charge you like a week or so. And it's like, Hey, you know, this is of course a subscription product, but we don't want to just like lock you into a subscription and make you forget like, Hey, your, your bill is coming up. If you want to cancel. That's okay. You're welcome to come back. So it's like proactively being like, Hey, we're going to bill you just like, no. And I really think that speaks to his approach and why it's a better approach than a lot of other things that you see out there. It's really good in that market. Kathleen (35:13): I could not agree more. And I, a couple things I would add to that. One is that, so it's Rand Fishkin, who was the founder of Moz, who now, as you've mentioned, founded this new company Spark Toro, which has an incredible product. That's a whole nother conversation, but the couple of things I've noticed about him, one, what he did that was so brilliant in Spark Toro is he started producing content before he had a product. Like I was following him before he ever launched that product. And he was building that audience. So that by the time the product was ready, you have this like ready-made group of people who were, who were waiting to just say yes to him, which is so smart. The other thing is that the content he creates is phenomenal. It's very, very high quality. So, you know, some people might hear, Oh, he blogs every day or however often he blogs and think, eh, you know, sure you could do that, but it's checking the box. Kathleen (36:04): He does not check the box. It's very, very good content. And he does a lot of research. Like that's why people follow him so much. And then the other thing that I just love about him, and I think this, you reminded me of this when you talked about the email about billing, is he's so transparent even about the negatives, like what people might perceive to be negatives. So he has this book he wrote called Lost and Founder, which is very transparent accounting of how he wound up leaving Moz and all the lessons he learned. All the mistakes that he says he made and what he would do differently. And it's just like, if you've ever owned a business, which you do, and I have, reading that book, it's so relatable and so refreshing to hear an entrepreneur talk about the things they didn't do right. Cause sometimes you feel like people only talk about their successes and that is so not a true picture of entrepreneurship. Mike (36:55): Yeah. I got an advanced copy of the book you know, at a, at a very challenging point in running my business and it was, and you know, I was like walking out the door to go on vacation. Like I can't see it anymore. And I took a copy of the book and it was so refreshing to read it and feel like, okay, there's someone else out there that understands this? Could you, you've got books. Like The Hard Thing About Hard Things by then, but that book is kind of BS. Cause it's like, Oh, everything got hard. And then I went and raised $60 million. Kathleen (37:27): Thank you for saying that. Cause I thought the same thing I'm like, yeah. Huh. Mike (37:31): Like that's not how this works in real life. So yeah, that book is definitely refreshing in that regard. Kathleen (37:37): Yeah. I totally agree with you. Well, and to add to that, you yourself have just published what I think is an absolutely beautiful article on medium about your experience as an entrepreneur and all the lessons that you had learned. It's like you basically wrote a letter to yourself sort of from the future about the things that you should be doing differently. And I just thought it was so spot on to, I mean, I just, I just know I related to it as somebody who has owned a business and specifically an agency and like been in those shoes. So I will put the link to that in the show notes because it's definitely something everybody should read. It's really great. All right, second question that I hear all the time from marketers is how do you keep up? Because marketing and specifically SEO, as we talked about changes so quickly, how do you personally make sure that you stay educated and kind of on the cutting edge of everything that's happening? Mike (38:31): Yes. Two things. One, following people that are not our industry. So I follow a lot of developers and things. And I just read voraciously, you know, I read all types of stuff and it's, it's very important to me to like have ideas that are not about my day to day. So then I can figure out ways to assimilate them to my day to day. And also it just like keeps me more broadly creative than if I'm just focused in on one thing. So yeah, it's just that, that curiosity and that thirst for knowledge and the way that I action that is my following more people and just keeping stuff coming at me. Kathleen (39:11): Awesome. I love it. Any one or two people you want to mention who you think are worth following? Mike (39:18): I'm putting you on the spot. Yeah, I can't really think of anybody. I would just say, you know, look at me on Twitter and look at who I follow. Kathleen (39:26): That's a good idea. There you go. Mike (39:27): The people, the people that you know are that will pop up first will be the people I've followed most recently. So yeah. Check those out. Kathleen (39:35): That's a good tip. All right. Well, Mike, I'm sure there are people listening who are like, I want to ask this guy a question. I definitely want to see his movie. I want to learn more about this company. What's the best way for them to connect with you online? Mike (39:49): Yeah. Just go to i pull rank dot com or just reach out to me on Twitter, which is just @ipullrank. Kathleen (39:54): Awesome. All right. Again, all of those links will be in the show notes. So head there to check those out. And in the meantime, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast, preferably a five star review. So that, that would help us get found by other listeners. And of course, if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Mike. This was a ton of fun. Mike (40:28): Thanks for having me.

Zach chats with award-winning marketing professional and author Frederick Joseph about marketing, white supremacy, and capitalism in this wide-ranging interview. Frederick speaks a bit about the nuances of white supremacy, particularly its function in the space that he inhabits, touches on his upcoming book The Black Friend, and so much more. Click the links in the show notes to connect with Frederick - you can pre-order The Black Friend on a variety of platforms!Connect with Frederick on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. You can find out more about (and pre-order!) his upcoming book, The Black Friend, on a variety of platforms.Donate to the Justice for Breonna Taylor GoFundMe by clicking here.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Check out our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. You know what we're doing. Every single week we're having a really good conversation, or I would think it's a pretty good conversation--yeah, your feedback says they're pretty good conversations--insightful discussions, real talk in a corporate world, with Black and brown influencers, thought leaders, elected officials, executives, entrepreneurs, social influencers, activists, you know, professors, educators, public servants, and I'm just really proud of this platform. I think we're in a point of time where people are really starved for content that centers and amplifies marginalized or historically oppressed voices and experiences, and Living Corporate has been doing that for over two years, and we've been doing that by having conversations every single week with the aforementioned folks that I just shared, and this week is no different because we actually have an incredible guest, someone actually that I really just met personally, but I've been following his work for a while - Frederick T. Joseph. Frederick is an award-winning marketing professional, activist, philanthropist, and author of an upcoming highly anticipated book "The Black Friend" with over 10 years of marketing experience, and a Forbes Under 30 list maker for Marketing and Advertising. He is also the sole creator of the largest GoFundMe campaign in history, the #BlackPantherChallenge, which ultimately generated over $43 million dollars in earned advertising and media for Disney and raised over $950K and allowed more than 75,000 children worldwide to see 'Black Panther’ for free. So I don't know if y'all remember, like, when the kids, you know, like, he was dancing on the [table], and he was like, "Ayyyyye." Like, that's part of that--you know, that was this person that we're about to talk to. Anyway, so he is also the creator of the largest individual COVID-19 support effort, the #RentRelief campaign, which has raised over $1 million dollars. Frederick has been honored as the 2018 Comic-Con Humanitarian of the Year award and a member of the 2018 Root 100 list of Most Influential African Americans. He was also a national surrogate for the Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders campaigns. Frederick consistently writes about marketing, culture, and politics for the Huffington Post, USA Today, NowThisNews, The Independent, amongst others, and is a current contributor at AdWeek. Fred, welcome to the show, man.Frederick: What's going on, man? It's a pleasure to be here, and I should've definitely sent you a shorter bio, but I appreciate you showing the love though.Zach: Nah, it's cool. I mean, you got, like, a short Iliad. I wanted to make sure I give it just due. Not a simple question - how are you doing these days?Frederick: Man... you know, life is what it is. I think that, you know, I'm Black in America. That's how I'm doing. How about you?Zach: Exactly. I think it's interesting too. I've had folks ask me how I'm doing. "I can't imagine how you feel. And I try to explain to folks, you know, the reality is I don't feel any better or worse than I do on most days, you know what I mean?Frederick: Yeah. I mean, that's the reality of it. I'm in the exact same position as you, man.Zach: You know what I mean? I'm Black in America. I'm conscious of the way that this country and this world is set up to be, largely against me even existing. So it's interesting though that we're in this point I think where we're seeing such massive uprisings, and white people are really leaning in. Like, I just saw--so we're recording this on July 26th, and so just last night I just saw protests in Portland, right, and they're, like, screaming "Black Lives Matter," and it's a lot of people out there, and it's a lot of people that are not us out there.Frederick: Yeah, I mean, I think that's interesting. Definitely in some of the whitest places in the country we're seeing that.Zach: Well, let's do this. Let's get into it, man. Why marketing? Why is marketing the space you chose to engage as a career? Like, I've seen what you're doing in the space, but I'm curious, like, what got you there.Frederick: Um, it was the only space that made sense. I was on the trajectory of becoming an attorney. I think that's, like, kind of, for a lot of Black families if you become an attorney, a doctor, a [?], so on and so forth, you've made it, but for me I was, you know, the first one to go to college really, and when I went I had all these passions and interests from music to writing to art, so on and so forth, and I was trying to actually figure out what could I incorporate all of my interests into, and I realized that marketing, when done well, is really just story-telling, right? And to be a great marketer you have to be multi-faceted. So it just kind of made sense to me.Zach: And to your point about being multi-faceted, as I read your bio, right, you have a lot of things going on. Like, talk to me about how that space lent itself into the book that you're working on.Frederick: Yeah. So that's been interesting because when you're a marketer--like, I'm of the firm belief that every single thing in this world is driven by marketing, driven by branding and advertising, right? Like, you know, whether it be Trump or Obama or some of the worst people in history, it was just a matter of how their story was told and how they branded themselves, right? And that's just the nature of how that works, you know? You go see a movie, you listen to an album, you buy food all based on how somebody was able to make you believe in it. So for me in terms of my book coming out, it's a really interesting thing because all I'm really doing in the book is trying to market to people who are young, like, as to why they should reassess race and, you know, essentially work towards being anti-racist, and now I'm partnering with my publisher to figure out the actual marketing campaign for "How do you make young people be anti-racist?" You know? [laughs] So yeah, it's been interesting.Zach: Let's talk about white supremacy and how it functions in marketing even now. When people talk about white supremacy, often times we think about KKK, burning crosses, hard R 'N' word, but can we talk a little bit about, like, the nuances of white supremacy and its function in, like, the space that you inhabit, which is largely marketing?Frederick: Yeah. So I'm actually happy that's something you want to talk about, because as a matter of fact that's what my book is about, right? People don't understand that white supremacy and racism are so nuanced they exist in every facet of what we do on a daily basis, from something as simple as an interaction on an elevator, right? Like, it's me getting in the elevator in my building where I pay my rent, and people assume that I'm a delivery person, though I've lived here for over a year. In the workplace, and specifically in marketing, I actually think is one of the industries in which racism and white supremacy are most prevalent because it dictates what we see and what we ingest, right, like, as humans. So often times, I mean, marketing as an industry and advertising are extremely white. I think the numbers, if I remember correctly, was, like, 75% white people. So what does that mean for what you end up seeing, right? It's like... let's take Black Panther as a really good example. When I looked at the marketing team for Black Panther, this, like, super pro-Black, afro-futuristic content, the entire marketing team that worked on it from Disney that was, like, on their website was white. [laughs] And while that did do very well obviously, it's like... how is it that we don't even get to craft how we story-tell around narratives, right? And that's the reality. So, like, even if you're watching something like the NBA, most of the ways in which the NBA is pitched to us as people is through a white lens, white gaze, which is why we see something like--right now the marketing team for the NBA said, "Hey, you know what we should do? We should put Black Lives Matter on the courts in the bubble, and we should also put Breonna Taylor and these things, these names, on jerseys," and that's all marketing, but there's never the actual substance of, like, "Hey, actually, maybe if we got some more Black people from different experiences in the room, someone might say, like, "Oh, well, what about making systemic change?" Like, "What about not doing something that's performative? What about us actually using our cache, our narrative, our platform, to actually make change?" Like, if I was in that room I would say, "Well, that's cool and all, but if we actually built our marketing around creating a program where we send scouts to HBCUs, right, and start actually recruiting Black talent from Black schools, which could create systemic change where more young Black people would go play at HBCUs, which puts more dollars in the Black community and brings more cache to those schools. Right? [both laugh]Zach: Right. It was interesting to your point, right. So I'm looking at it, right, and we can talk a little bit about, like, the memeification of Breonna Taylor, and I'd like to get your opinion on that, but when you see these things and, like, it seems like we like to get in this, like, awareness loop. Like, we just talk about awareness over and over and over. So, like, if we just talk about it long enough, things will magically change. But, like, it's interesting because, like, that approach has never shown itself useful in any other endeavor, and when you look at the government and how--like, when we talk about making systemic change in other ways we pass laws. We create policies. Right? Like, we hold trials. There are, like, tangible things that we know that we do to actually move the needle in a real way, and so what I've appreciated is I've been seeing, like, the postgame and, like, LeBron has talked about it and other NBA players have been like, "Look, I'm only talking about Breonna Taylor," which I think is--that's admirable, right, to a degree. Like, I'm not shading that at all, and what I'm looking for, to your point, is like, "Okay, now at what point do we, like, move to, again, tangible solutions?" You know what I mean?Frederick: Yeah. No, that's exactly it. Tangible solutions, systemic change, because as you said, you know, it's not even just--it's a memeification of Breonna Taylor and really a memeification of, like, Black bodies as a whole, right? And that's what I'm saying, right? Like, every day people are posting this witty ways of saying, "Oh, we should have justice for Breonna Taylor." Like, I saw yesterday it was, like, in alphabet soup. I'm like, "Uh..." It's extremely weird, and it would only happen with Black people to be quite frank. I mean, like, let's be real. Let's look at somebody like the case around JonBenet Ramsey, right, the little girl who went missing, right? There was never a singular moment where that was turned into a global pun, right, and they still were looking for that little girl. They did not stop looking, and I think they still have content that comes out about looking for. They reopened the case for, like, the fifth time I think, like, two years ago. You know, we are the only ones where our Black bodies, like, our Black existence is commodified and turned into entertainment and turned into ROI, right? Zach: Right. Like, there are financial reasons, right? It's part of the capitalistic system we live in. It literally pays to talk about Black Lives Matter right now, right? Like, it gives you returns to, like--if I put #BlackLivesMatter in my social media--and it's easy. It's relatively easy for me to do that compared to me really investigating and examining, again, my own organization's policies, practicies, procedures, and institutions that drive or support white supremacy, like, within my own organizational walls. And so then, like, I think about--so there have been some cities that have been painting roads Black Lives Matter and making streets called Black Lives Matter. I'm like, "Y'all's own police forces have open investigations. There's unsolved murders." Like, there's all types of things that are happening, and so it gets to the point where it's almost--not almost, like, it is just gaslighting, you know? 'Cause we're not taking this serious, and we're still somehow, even in this moment, sidestepping the very real problem of the brutalization of Black and brown people.Frederick: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And to the point of, you know, painting Black Lives Matter on things, so on and so forth... in every major city where Black people live there's a Malcolm X Boulevard, there's a Martin Luther King Way, there's a James Baldwin this and a bell hooks that, and those are actually, like, sadly some of the worst streets in the areas of all of those cities, right? So we've already seen that performative isn't actually doing anything, right? Like, we've absolutely seen that, but again, there is a return on investment. It is dollar-making for cities, football teams, individuals to put up something that is aligned with Black Lives Matter? Why? As is often said, Black people and our buying power is, you know, on par with some of the larger countries in the world. So let's just be real here.Zach: I mean, yeah, 100% I mean, we alluded to it a little bit earlier. You know that we're seeing federal and state police forces and harm and murder civilians en masse on camera. We wouldn't even really know about these things without social media. So, you know, you and I, a little bit of tea, we met through an influencer event hosted by Twitter, right? And I would love to hear more about your perspective on how the Twitters, Facebooks and Reddits of the world, the role that they play in protecting basic human dignity and freedoms and, like, what all they could and should be doing in this moment.Frederick: Yeah. Well, you know, one, I'm happy that you called that out because I think that we have gone from a moment or a period of time where these platforms, the Facebooks, the Reddits, the Twitters, are that, right, they're platforms. They're no longer platforms. They're actually worlds now, and that's what these companies wanted them to traject towards. They wanted them to traject towards small worlds where people exist on them, whether as their actual selves or their other selves, whatever, they exist on them in real time. They breathe on them. They sleep on them. They eat on them, right? And therefore you can also be lost on them and be lost because of them, and you can also be saved, right, and I think that we saw that case with Toyin, right? We saw that Toyin was someone who had existed on and off the platform, Twitter, for quite some time, someone who came on Twitter and sought help. Now, Twitter has built itself to have various tools and various rules around how they stifle or amplify certain voices and moments. In terms of stifling, you can say the 'N' word for instance and be suspended from Twitter. I've seen it happen. It's happened to me. But they don't have things in palce to actually help people, right? In our real world, right, you can't try to recreate the real world online for your own capitalistic gain but not have the tools or the resources to support the people who are existing on these spaces. So I think that is one issue that I've seen that these companies and these platforms could do a great deal around. You know, I know the role that these platforms play. I just struggle with what we should expect from them, because at the end of the day, you know, these things are owned by white men for the most part, and white men are gonna be a white men. And that's a long-winded answer, but--Zach: So I think my follow-up to that is, like, we know that Black people specifically, right--like, I could say BIPOC, but I want to say Black people specifically. We know that Black people really make social media what it is, right? Like, we are the engine and the spice and everything else that really makes social media dope, and so I guess my question is, like, do you think the reason why Black voices are promoted and have grown and kind of, like, been the influencer and shaker that we are, do you think that's because of capitalism? Do you think that the ecosystem would be the same without capitalism?Frederick: I don't, and that's because of the history of Black people globally, right? Like, every turn in our history, except for when we were left alone, which was long before most history books can date, we have been leveraged because of some type of capitalistic or imperialistic agenda, right? So right now we are [?], whether that be on Black Twitter or on Instagram or on Facebook, right? I think that the only one we probably don't have that cache on is probably, like, Reddit, 'cause white supremacy owns Reddit for the most part. Like, we are the reason the United States and every facet of it is the United States, from the good, the bad and the ugly, right? We are the reason that most of the world is the way that it is. We are the influencing, driving force behind music, art, just every single thing to do with culture, but we've never reaped any of the benefits of that. So I do think that if capitalism didn't exist though, I don't think that it would be the same. I do think that we'd be much happier in our own space doing the same things amongst each other, but in terms of the influence globally? No, I don't think so, but I don't know if our global influence anyway matters if we haven't been benefiting from it.Zach: I agree with that. Yeah, and I appreciate you answering the question, because I've been thinking about it. I appreciate the fact that we have the influence, but it's like... it gets increasingly exhausting to see us have all this influence just for it to get monetized by everybody else, you know what I mean?Frederick: Right. To the point of the Twitter conversation that you were mentioning, you know, I talked about a lot of things in that conversation, and I think one of the things I mentioned that was a real criticism of capitalism and platforms was when I said, you know, for instance #BlackPantherChallenge, I made a joke, like, "Oh, yeah, Twitter was touting it, but at events I wasn't even invited to." [?] me caring about that, wanting to go to events, as moreso a criticism of how we operate around Black lives and Black work, but in that, you know, hours later you had a Black person from Twitter attacking me saying that, like, I don't care about anything but being invited to parties or something like that.Zach: It's the principle though, and I think it's interesting that you bring that up because I had a colleague, you know, and I had been doing some work around--so, look, Living Corporate has been around for a second, so I do this work in, like, creating digital media, creating different types of thought leadership around what does it really mean to drive diversity, equity and inclusion programs, right? So I had a colleague who was like, "Yeah, you know, I've been taking this and presenting this at Such-and-such," and I'm like, "Wait, wait, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I appreciate the fact that you've been taking it and it speaks to you, but if you're going to speak on work that you didn't create, you should at the very least let me know and give me an opportunity to speak to it myself since I'm the person who created it. And again, it's not about me getting the accolades or me getting paid per se, it's just respect. It's respect and courtesy for the people that, like, honor the creators, honor the people who did the work to lead something and give them the space. Like, don't pick and choose your own token representatives, and certainly don't center and place yourself as a representative. That's not cool. So yeah, that resonates with me, 'cause I think that nuance is often times lost in these moments, and I think that, for whatever reason, it can be hard for people to understand the principle of recognition and what real inclusion means, especially if it means that they have to, like, de-center themselves, you know what I mean?Frederick: Absolutely. It's something that I've had to also learn, right? Like, how do you step back to make sure that people are fully seen or give them the opportunity to be seen, right, if they want to, right? And I think that, again, we do it to ourselves. Like, we do it to other Black people. It's a conditioning thing, and it's absolutely rooted in white supremacy because, you know, white supremacy is at the center of every little thing wrong with society as a whole and always has been, right? Zach: Right. It's a scarcity mindset, man. It's like, you know, I think it's a core function of capitalism as well. It's not only production but consumption too. So it's like, "I gotta just take, take, take, and if I'm not the one taking it, then it's not real," or "If I'm giving it away, that's a loss to me." But, like, that's not an abundance mindset. It's literally the opposite of that.Frederick: Yeah. I mean, that's exactly it. And it's funny, 'cause I'm working on something right now, a second book called Black Under Trump, and, you know, that proposal went out, and I've noticed that you can tell a lot about engagements online. Like, you can tell a lot about who engages with you and how people engage and who shares what and who sees what, because--you know, you've looked at metrics before. You see impressions versus actual engagement, and one of the things that I notice is when I'm talking about my wins, right, when I'm talking about--my first book, when I announced that everyone was like, "Oh, congrats! This, that and the third!" And I'm like, "Well, I'm working on a second and third," and it's kind of like everybody was like, "Oh, no, to hell with that. You've had yours," right? And I'm like, "Oh, where did everybody go?" Right? And I realize--you know, 'cause most of my followers are Black people and people of color, I'm like, "Oh, it's because people think that there can only be one," right? This Highlander idea, the scarcity mindset.Zach: It's scary because it's like, if you would just pause and think about how little content there is out there that really centers and amplifies us, you would not be so--I mean, I hope you wouldn't be so quick to dismiss or, like, fight over crumbs. Like, we take up so little of the narrative, right, we take up so little of the space when it comes to our perspectives, our lived experience, our frustrations, our passions, our joys. I want to pivot that into my next question, which is what role do you imagine independent Black and brown media will take in this new decade, right? So, like, do you think it's gonna increase? Do you think it's gonna decrease? Do you think it's gonna stay the same? And why?Frederick: Now, do you mean media in the traditional sense or media as in, like, if you have a certain following you're also considered media.Zach: That's a good question. I'm thinking media more in the traditional sense, so thinking about platforms. But let's also extend it out to individuals, 'cause I do think that that's gonna continue to be a budding space.Frederick: You know, it's interesting because one of the things that I've learned--I think this year, in 2020, I've become a lot more radical, especially as I was on the campaign trail for these different presidential candidates, and in this year I've realized how different Black people are, right? I've always said Blackness is not a monolith, and I've always meant it, but I just never realized how big that spectrum was, because you have Black people who are from where I'm from--you know, I'm from the projects in Yonkers, New York, and I come from nothing, and I'm happy to have anything that I have now, and that is a lot different from a Black person who is fourth-generation, you know, college and fourth-generation [?], you know, Kappa Alpha Psi, so on and so forth, and in that what I'm struggling with now is when I think of Blackness in terms of, like, that question, right, like, "What role does Black media play?" Like, to be honest, I don't know because I don't know what type of Black people are at these different places, right? I don't know. Like, when I look at The Root, I know some of the people there, and there's a lot of them who, like, I deeply respect, and then there's also some of them I've met and I'm like, "Oh, wow. Oh, okay." Or there's Black outlets like Shade Room, and I'm like, "Oh, wow." You know? So I think that because of that spectrum, because of us not being a monolith, I deeply struggle with knowing what our place should be because sometimes I think some of us should have less of a place on the forefront, to be frank, and that means, like, some of our own platforms that we have currently.Zach: Yes. Well, expound upon that a little bit.Frederick: So I'll just be pretty direct. I think that there are groups, platforms, media outlets, so on and so forth, even individuals, who are highly platformed, highly powerful, and I hope every single day that in the next 10 years that their place amongst the epicenter of Blackness and visible Blackness is reduced, frankly. I hope that if any outlets are getting pushed, anyone, platform, so on and so forth, I hope that it's people with a lens to the more--I wouldn't even call it radical, but the more progressive, inclusive, liberating front.Zach: You know, it's interesting. I've talked about Living Corporate as a platform, and I would say, like, 99.9% of the people are like, "Oh, that's dope," because I come from a similar background as you, right? Like, I'm first-generation in a few different ways, and I'm not, like you said, fourth-generation college and whatever. Like, that's just not my story. That's not my background. My people came up poor, you know what I mean? But then I have met folks whose parents were, you know, a little elitist, and I think about the fact that there's--it's interesting how those voices end up being the representation in, like, major platforms for everybody, you know what I mean?Frederick: Absolutely.Zach: And that's something we don't talk about a lot, like, out loud, but it's true. So you see these people and they're like, "Man, that's a weird take," and I'm not saying that's your perspective, but it's certainly not mine or anybody's in the spaces that I move around in. Again, I am one person. But when I think about, like, kind of how white supremacy works in that way too, how it kind of will gravitate to these Black voices that are not really radical or that are not progressive, who are not much more politically left than they are, or just focused on Black liberation, and it's interesting how, like, you end up kind of just switching faces at the top, but you're not really focused on, like, dismantling anything, you know what I mean?Frederick: Right. White supremacy gravitates towards Black people who will do just enough to make white supremacy to feel like it's coming down when it's actually not. 100%. And that becomes very, like, confusing for me, and it's something that, again, this year I have struggled deeply with. You know, you and I follow each other and we see the things we say and have worked on. I love my people, and I do everything that I can for my people, you know, to exhaustion, and even that night at the Twitter thing or whatever, like, it broke my heart. The next day was Juneteenth, and I cried at one point because I was just like, "I can't believe my own people view me in this way and are doing this to me," right? And that's how I feel on a regular basis, whether it be BlackPantherChallenge or CaptainMarvelChallenge or whatever it is. I often find that my lens being liberation-focused and being very attuned to the movements of white supremacy ends up ostracizing me, and the only people who I end up getting support from are either really radical Black people or, like, to be honest with you white people, and that makes me really, really sad. Even my book cover reveal next week and my pre-order launch, I already know in the back of my head, like, "Oh, I don't think Black people are gonna buy my book." I don't think Black people are gonna support me because, like, I've never really seen Black people support me before. And that's not our fault, that's white supremacy, but it hurts.Zach: Right, 100%. Before we get up out of here, any parting words or shout-outs as we think about where we're at, where we've yet to really arrive to? I think about the fact that we're recording this, like I said, in late July. We have one of the most consequential elections in our lifetimes during a very unique season, like, a weird confluence of events between one of the worst economic crises that we've had for almost 100 years, a global pandemic, and global protests focused on anti-racism. I mean, like, what are some things you'd like to just leave the folks with?Frederick: Well, I think the first thing is something that you said that was a very powerful quote when you and I were talking some weeks ago, when you said, you know, "Black bodies have to be worth something," right? That sat with me and that's real, and it's deep, because I don't think that people understand sometimes that we could pile up the Black bodies lost to the Moon, right, while we've been in this fight for resistance and justice since we were brought over to these shores, right? Another thing is when people are upholding certain things, you're only upholding things that are founded on the bones that you think that they're not, right? You know, people are talking about, "Oh, I'm gonna get this role as VP of this company." Yeah, well, I mean, your ancestor's bones are in those walls, so let's just be real about this, right? You're not actually getting anything that you didn't already die for a million times. So that being said, I guess the last thing I'll leave people with is stop settling. Stop settling for the gaslighting that America has put us through in thinking that not being oppressed in some ways makes up for still being oppressed in others, right? Like, Donald Trump is a symptom of a much larger condition, and getting him out of office, whether it was gonna be Bernie, Elizabeth, or Biden or whoever else, we are still left with those same conditions, so unless we are going to work on the conditions and how we got here we will end up with another Trump in our children's lifetimes or our children's children's lifetimes, and that's the reality of the moment that we're in. Stop settling.Zach: I love it. Frederick, man, I appreciate you taking the time to be on Living Corporate. Y'all know what we're doing, right? This has been another episode of Living Corporate. We have conversations like this every single week - on Tuesdays, just a reminder, 'cause for those who this is their first time listening, every single Tuesday we have conversations like this, one-on-one deep dives with an incredible Black or brown person or an aspirational ally, and then on Thursdays we have Tristan's Tips. Those are, like, quick career tips, and then on Saturdays we either have an extended career conversation with Latesha Byrd or we have See It to Be It with Amy C. Waninger when we talk with a Black or brown person about the technical aspects of their job so that y'all can understand that we exist all over corporate America and we actually operate and do very well when we are given opportunities or we create opportunities for ourselves. Check us out. We're all over Beyonce's internet. Living-corporate, or just type in Living Corporate. We'll pop up, okay? We're on all the browsers. Make sure you share this with your friends. Make sure you check out the links in the show notes. Preorder Frederick Joseph's book and check out his website. Until next time, y'all. Peace.

Do you get nervous about sales calls? I did too as a new freelancer, but now I love them! In this episode, you will learn how to show up to these confidently and effectively. The more you can master sales calls and look forward to them, the better you're going to be in your business overall, because this is where deals are closed.  Here are my top five tips for sales calls: Make it easy for clients to book sales calls with you Don’t get nervous if a client has to cancel or reschedule a call Do your research before the call Do the call standing up Take notes as you go Here are some things we covered in this episode: Learn how to show up confidently How experimenting with mock sales calls can help you show up confidently Why you should put energy into learning the sales call process Why you should think of sales calls as opportunity calls The importance of using a calendar tool The benefits of a CRM tool, such as Dubsado The value of the cold pitching method What to research before the sales call How to listen for clues to put into your proposal After listening to this episode, share your action steps and take-aways with our group: Mastering Your Freelance Life With Laura Connect With Laura: Follow Laura on Facebook Join Laura’s Community Subscribe to the Podcast Subscribe to Laura’s YouTube Channel Read the Transcript: (00:02): It's time for another episode of the advanced freelancing podcast. And what's so exciting about this one today is that it's a discussion about sales calls. This is something that so many freelancers get extremely nervous about and are concerned about how they can show up to these confidently and effectively. And I'll share with you at the outset. And then we'll also mention this at the end that I have a new masterclass all about mastering your sales calls, showing up confidently, how to lead the discussion, how to tell what type of client you have on the call and how much leading you should do versus listening. These are all of my best practices from years of doing sales calls. Now I'll tell you the truth. I actually love sales calls, but I didn't start out that way. I hated them for a long time because I really felt like they were an opportunity for me to screw up. (00:49): Right? So I felt that if I didn't show up confidently if I wasn't clear on the call, I could take a business deal that was already on track to happening and totally derail it during the sales call. And I've heard this from other freelancers as well. Sometimes a client will cancel a sales call with them and they're like, Oh, thank God. Right? Like, or they're just, they get off the call and they don't feel very confident. It's a skill that I work on a lot with my one on one coaching clients. We actually do mock sales calls. I give them feedback at the end of the sales call, we record it. And then they can also go back and listen to the recording. And this has been a really helpful exercise for coaching clients because there are small things that you can do during your sales call that will really impact the outcome of the call and how the client feels as you're speaking as well. And so sometimes it's just making these minor tweaks that you didn't realize you were doing, or you didn't realize were as effective as they could be. (01:46): And those could a (01:47): Big impact on your conversions, right? It can really lead the client to that next step of the process where you are creating a custom proposal and where they are really excited about working with you. So I tell freelancers this all the time, and it is still true. The more you can master your sales calls and look forward to them, the better you're going to be in your business overall, because this is where deals are closed. It is always awesome when we're able to close a freelance deal without having to get on the phone. But I promise you, your numbers will increase significantly because many freelancers are not comfortable on the phone. So if you put that energy into learning more about the sales call process, you can really do yourself a favor and stand out from the competition. I hope you get to the point where you're looking forward to these sales calls rather than dreading them and feeling like, Oh no, you know, this is something I'm going to have to show up for that I could potentially bomb that won't really go very well. (02:42): Now, one reframe I often use with my coaching clients is to think of these as opportunity calls for some people, the word sales feels really slimy to them. Even though as a freelancer, you are definitely selling yourself. If you can view each call as an opportunity and as a two conversation, you'll feel much more comfortable when you're on the line or on the zoom call with your client. Because sales calls do go by both directions. This is certainly the opportunity for the client to ask you questions and to qualify you for the role. But it is also your chance to decide if you like their work style, their industry, the project at hand, and the team you could potentially be joining up with. And so this is a two-way street. And when you think of it that way, like, Hey, we're qualifying each other. (03:30): You can automatically erode some of the anxiety that most freelancers have around doing these calls because you're like, Hey, I'm showing up. This could be a good opportunity for me. It could be a great fit for the client, but I'm not going to stress myself out, forcing myself into that and thinking about this as a call where I have to convert someone. It's one of those things like where you show up and the less desperate you are, and the more confident you are that you're truly just having a conversation. It's almost like the client gets more interested because they feel that confidence radiating from you on the call. And that makes it really exciting for them and for you because you don't feel that pressure and those stakes on you. So in this podcast episode, I'm going to be talking about five tips that are going to make your sales calls as a freelancer better. (04:19): Now I go into great detail of all of these in my sales call masterclass, including questions. You should ask how you should kick off the call if there's an awkward silence at the beginning. So this is really a little bit of a taste test of some of the things that will help you be effective when you're scheduling sales calls, let's dive right in on that subject, make it easy for clients to book sales calls with you. There are so many tools out there that can help you do this. Acuity Calendly, the woven calendar app, which is free. Don't go back and forth with clients. If you don't have to, the only time you should be going back and forth with clients is if there are multiple people who need to be on the call. Now, if that's the case, you're going to throw out several times in the next five days from when they’re interested, said, they're interested in a call, right? (05:09): And that way you can have team members respond and say, okay, that one works for me. Now you can still do this with tools like Calendly. You can also use tools, like the doodle app that will allow people to check when they are available, but that one's usually more complex than what you really need for a freelance sales call. So I encourage you to throw out a couple of options, make it simple for them to be able to well, to view your calendar and the times that you have available, pretty much every software and CRM will enable you to do this. Even Dubsado will help you. And if you haven't used Dubsado, it is my new favorite tool. We will put a link in the show notes to check it out is amazing onboarding invoicing payment program. And they can do scheduling directly through Dubsado, or you can integrate it with something like Calendly, which is what I've done because all my appointments are managed through Calendly. (06:05): So make it easy for clients to book with you. It's far too easy for them to say, Hey, you know what? This is just too difficult to schedule. We're going back and forth. I'm spending a lot of time in my email and I don't want to be, so provide them with a link, provide them with a snapshot to your calendar that makes it that much easier for them to go ahead and book the call and you want it to be, be a program. That's going to send an automatic calendar reminder to them as well. Now, if you are going back and forth over email and are not using a calendar tool, let's say they looked at your calendar and there were no times available. You might kind of revert back to discussing things over email. Please still send them a calendar invitation. It blocks them their schedule from being double booked and it greatly increases the chances that they will show up to the call. (06:53): And that's really important. So we want to make it easy. We want to show them that we're organized, that we have all the tools in place to run an effective freelance business, where it's easy for them to interact with you. Now that gets into the second tip. Know, that people are busy and might have to reschedule. Don't sweat. It. I've worked with a lot of freelancers who get really nervous when someone has to cancel or reschedule a call. Odds are that you're reaching out to people through your pitching process that are very busy. In fact, if they are even open to hiring a freelancer, it's because they recognize they have too many projects going on and might need to outsource something them. So recognize, you know, that you want to show up prepared for the call. You want to plan on the call going ahead as it's scheduled, but if somebody needs, needs to reschedule within reason, you're going to be available and help them do that. (07:43): So again, that goes back to that calendar tool, right? We want to make it easy for them to rebook. So a tool like Calendly has reschedule and cancel options, right? In the email. They can easily, they rebook and set it up for another time. And that takes the pressure off of them of having to say, oh, no, something came up. I need to reschedule. We want to reduce that friction of the back and forth and the difficulty in finding a time. So always make it simple for them to be able to book a time with you. You can connect your Google calendar to tools like Calendly acuity, schedule one, it's those types of things so that it automatically blocks out the times on your calendar that are already booked for other things. So it's very important that when you integrate these things, you make sure that your calendar is up to date. (08:30): What I like to do is if I'm going to take off a Friday, for example, I put that on my calendar as unavailable the whole day, not because I'll forget, but mostly to trigger, Calendly, to not show any appointments during that day. So know that people might not show up for that initial call and you might have to reschedule. Now if they've rescheduled two or more times, there's probably a good chance that they're just too busy. I wouldn't up give up yet unless you're getting a lot of unprofessionalism from them. What I mean by that is maybe they're waiting until five minutes before the meeting to tell you that they can't show up. That would be a red flag, but if you have to keep rescheduling and it keeps getting pushed out, this really isn't a priority for them. It's sort of a subtle way of them saying, you know what? (09:14): This is like the least important thing on my calendar. So I'm going to keep punting the meeting farther into the future because I don't feel like it's that important. And that's something we should definitely listen to. So if you've gone through this multiple times, or if worse, if you showed up on the call and then they're just not there and they forgot about it completely, even with a calendar reminder, that's probably a sign that this isn't the right client to work with. So I always err on the side of giving the client some grace when you can. So give them an opportunity to correct it, to reschedule, to show up the next time. But if it happens multiple times, you should also feel free to walk away from rescheduling. This call yet again, the third tip for your freelance sales calls is do your research before the call. (09:59): Ideally, you've already done some research as you were pitching them, especially if you did the cold pitching method, but you want to do an even deeper dive before you have the phone call, because we want that conversation to flow organically. And you might be able to find extra information in your research process that helps you feel confident on that call. So do some more research about the company about if you can see whether they're already doing things about the type of service that you're offering, if you offer social media management or Facebook ads, go see what ads they're already running, go see what ads their competitors are running. What tweaks would you make to their organic social strategy? For example, I think that's a really good place for you to start and show up. Being able to say more than you've already said in the initial pitch. (10:49): Now the fourth tip for sales calls. I love this one. It's do the call standing up, standing up, completely changes your energy. When you do phone calls and can make you a little bit more comfortable. There's something about sitting in a chair as you're doing a freelance sales call that can make it feel a little stiff. It can really up your nerves. So what I like to do is I use my AirPods to stand up and I go to a place where I have my standing desk so that I can take notes and it's a hands-free call, but I'm really focused on listening and standing up changes your physical energy and can make it seem a little bit more like a less pressurized phone call. So go ahead and try this on one of your sales calls, it really can help you feel a little bit better. (11:36): If you're doing a video call, of course, just make sure you've got, you know, a good solid background. And most of the time, clients don't even need to see that your standings, cause you're not doing video sales calls, but if they are on video, I still encourage you to try this at least once, because as long as you still have that professional background, when you stand up and you can easily move, you know, your camera as well with your laptop, you should be able to do this effectively without a problem. And I just really love how it changes the whole landscape of the conversation. It puts me at ease if I'm on the phone and they're not seeing me at all, I can pace a little bit, you know, I can shift the weight on my feet and it just makes it feel a little bit more comfortable to be talking to them. (12:21): So tip number five is to take notes as you go, do not make this be in a way that is distracting from the phone call. So you don't need to write down every single thing the client says, but I like to have an open Google doc in front of me when I'm doing the call to type things up that I feel are important. So I am listening for specific tidbits from the client. I am listening for clues about things they've done in the past that are a problem for them. I'm listening to those buzzwords or keywords that I can weave back into the proposal. I send them after the fact. So there's a really nice, There's a really nice middle ground to strike here where you can take enough notes so that it is helpful for you to remember this information and write it up after the fact. But you also want to have the ability to speak freely and to listen very clearly to the client. So it might take a little bit of practice to get to this comfortable middle ground, but you'll definitely be glad that you did once you have got there. Those notes, I like to let them sit there. I like to record as much as possible in the client's own words. And then I'm going to come back later to write up the proposal. Once I've had a chance to let everything gel in my mind as well, that is a really great way to, um, stay confident, stay excited about the call, make it clear that I'm still listening and I'm not just typing everything they say and not really hearing it and absorbing it. (14:00): But I'm taking that time. After the fact to write a proposal based on the experience we had on the call, the notes are super helpful for revealing things that maybe they don't want in a proposal or things that they don't necessarily need or something additional that they've requested from me on the call. Um, so I leave that as its own document. I don't like rewrite it to turn it into the proposal. I leave it in the Google drive folder that I've created for that prospective client. And then I go back and revisit it as I am writing the proposal up for them. So these are just a handful of tips to help you feel a little bit more comfortable and excited for your sales calls. We'll put a link in the show notes to the sales call masterclass. It is very affordable. It has some templates and cheat sheets to help you prepare for sales calls and to feel more confident when you show up to them yourself, this is a great course that is less than $50 and it can have a payoff in such a big way in your freelance business. Once you implement the tools. Meet Laura: Laura Briggs is empowering the freelance generation. Through her public speaking, coaching, and writing, she helps freelancers build the business of their dreams without sacrificing all their time, family, or sanity. Laura burned out as an inner-city middle school teacher before becoming an accidental freelancer with a Google search for “how to become a freelance writer.” Since then, she’s become a contributor to Entrepreneur, Business Insider, and Writer’s Weekly. She worked for more than 300 clients around the world including Microsoft, Truecar, and the Mobile Marketing Association. She’s delivered two TEDx talks on the power of the freelance economy for enabling freedom and flexibility and how it’s being used to address the technical skills gap in the U.S. Laura is the host of the Advanced Freelancing podcast, a sought-after public speaker on the gig and digital freelance economy, and a freelance coach focused on aspiring six-figure freelancers. Laura’s books, courses, and coaching have reached over 10,000 people. As a military spouse, Laura is passionate about serving her community and founded Operation Freelance, a nonprofit organization that teaches veterans and military spouses how to become freelancers and start their own business.

Mason is thrilled to welcome Rhonda Chang to the podcast today. Rhonda is a traditional healer who specialises in the art and healing principals of yinyang wuxing. After becoming disillusioned during her studies in Traditional Chinese Medicine, in her native home of China, Rhonda decided to go her own way. Straying from the path of convention to re-educate herself through the exploration and deep analysis of the classical texts. After 30 years of research and practice Rhonda published two books: Chinese Medicine Masquerading As Yi — A Case of Chinese Self-colonisation and Yinyang Wuxing Spirit, Body & Healing, and continues to raise awareness around the true origin and principals of Classical Chinese Medicine. Today's chat is truly eye opening and informative. Rhonda is a rebel with a cause, and it is an absolute delight to have her with us, sharing her wisdom and knowledge with integrity and conviction.   Mason and Rhonda discuss: The difference between Classical Chinese Medicine and Modern Chinese Medicine, which otherwise known as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) The concept of 'Yi'. Wuxing - Five Element Theory. Rhonda's process of "de-colonising" herself from the standardised TCM curriculum she was originally trained in. Symptoms vs diagnoses; how Westernised TCM is still operating within a symptom based ideology. Rhonda's top tips for wellness.   Who is Rhonda Chang? For the past 40 years Rhonda Chang has been involved in the study and practice of traditional healing. The journey has been long and tortuous. Rhonda began her studies at the Beijing College of Traditional Medicine. After graduation Rhonda worked as a physician at a number of hospitals in China. In 1986 she migrated to Australia and opened her own treatment clinic.  Rhonda operated her clinic up until 2012, where she felt that government regulation was overly restricting her practice of healing and that the professionalisation of TCM in Australia had subordinated it to modern medicine. Since then Rhonda has focused her energies on writing books and promoting a return to traditional YinYang Wuxing healing principles.   Resources: Rhonda Website Rhonda Podcast Rhonda Books   Rhonda Facebook Group   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:00) Hey, Rhonda. Thanks so much for joining me.   Rhonda: (00:03) Pleasure. Thank you.   Mason: (00:05) Now, I don't often get nervous when I'm doing podcast interviews, but I'm... like, I didn't really tell you, I showed you that I've got your book sitting here with me. But I'm a real big fan of your work.   Rhonda: (00:20) Thank you.   Mason: (00:20) And ever since I first heard that podcast that you did on Qiological, which I'd stopped listening to Qiological a long time ago. I was still subscribed, but then the Chinese Medicine masquerading As Yi came up, and I was like... It got something awake in me because I had this consistent disappointment with Chinese medicine and I'm studying more of the Daoist path of medicine, but want to interact with Chinese medicine today, as it is, and kept on becoming disappointing and finding something disingenuous about it and you informed me about what that inkling is.   Mason: (01:01) So first, off the bat, thank you so much for that. Can you explain the difference between Chinese medicine and even, like, what the term Yi means?   Rhonda: (01:11) Yi, yeah. I call that an ancient Chinese healing called a Yi. Which, I mean, they translate Yi in English as medicine, but there's so much difference. There's a fundamental difference in theory, the understanding life, everything. So that's why I call them a Yi, I don't like to call them medicine. They're not really equivalent to Western terms of medicine.   Mason: (01:37) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (01:38) Well, what a difference. Yi is... You know, Chinese medicine is created after 1950s. And the Communist Party actually took over China and they want to change everything because... I mean, it's not just Chinese Communist Party did it, it was actually from 1900, early 1900, after Opium War and China defeated and then they also did change in China.   Rhonda: (02:04) I mean, especially, I think, the contribution was America actually started to get all the young Chinese students going to America to study because the theory is these people going back, they will be the leaders of the country. And then they will... You know, kind of favour our country, our philosophy, our beliefs. So they did, and these people, later in... You know, like mid-1900, China was like internal wars and so many parties and the communists and the National Party and all this kind. But they all believe in science.   Rhonda: (02:43) So everyone... When they established the government, they want to ban Chinese medicine. And then when Mao took over and he said, "No, I'm not going to ban it, I'm going to modify them." So that's where they come from, the modern Chinese medicine. What they modified is they got rid of the theory. A lot of people are telling me, they say, "Why hasn't Chinese medicine always talk about Yinyang Wuxing ." But they talk about Yinyang Wuxing, which is completely different to what Yinyang Wuxing was in traditional ancient Chinese healing, the meaning.   Rhonda: (03:20) So what happened is they... What modern Chinese medicine do is that they recognise your body as anatomy and physiology and pathology and disease, exactly everything to Western medicine. And then they try to match the traditional healing technique, like formulas, acupuncture needle points. So then they match this, they say, "Oh, that description, just like a modern disease. What is it?"   Rhonda: (03:49) So then they actually kind of make a little bit of complicated, say. There was a wet disease and there was a... pneumonia, for example. There was a wet pneumonia, there was a dry pneumonia, there's a hot pneumonia, there's a cold pneumonia. And then they made up all different formulas for it, and then people just matching. But for a practitioner, you don't understand how this formula came about and you don't know how to apply them. You're just guessing. And if it doesn't work, you're paralysed because you say, "Oh, well, you know, the ancient people hasn't met this kind of cases."   Rhonda: (04:25) So wanting the traditional yi was, I mean, they don't really... there's no... I mean, the body recognised as the ba gua, if you heard of it. And that's what... what do you call the... Meridians. Meridians is a ba gua. You know, I was calling you before and there was a [inaudible] and Dìqiú. What is [inaudible]? [inaudible] is the sun position to the Earth, and they go square. East to west, isn't it? And north to south. So that's made a square. So then they call the Earth is square.   Rhonda: (04:58) A lot of people say Chinese old people didn't understand, they think the Earth is square. It's not that sense, it's the sun made our sense of direction. If there's no sun, then you don't really know where the west, left, and there's nothing, isn't it?   Mason: (05:13) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (05:14) So that's what is the [kin der 00:05:15] and Dìqiú, which is the time of the Earth rotate themself and around the sun. So that's a time. And these two work together and make a big difference to how your body is and how you actually live. Say like, the sun may be in the right, say mid-day, but on the... you know, it could be summer. It could be winter, isn't it? So that actually make difference, too.   Rhonda: (05:43) So that was what medicine made kind of a understand your body. How you actually responding to the sun position, because a lot of people say, "Oh, we're not really kind of to do with the sun." But you do. You sleep at night because the sun is down, and you wake up in the morning because the sun is up." And even in the cold days, even in the cloudy day. So your body actually responding to the sun, the moon. The reason is the sun give you the heat, the Yang Qi we call it. And the moon, what they do, is the moon waves your Water.   Rhonda: (06:19) So when the Earth and the moon and the sun in the same line and what happen is the tide go high. So that's why your body... Your body's 75% the water, isn't it? So you're responding to that. And according to when you're born and you have different constitution. And then that's why you're waving the external differently. So then we work out how that your body actually responding to the sun, the moon, the so-called Meridians. That's what the time is. And then your internal organ is... What do you call that? We call that direction or wuxing. Well, wuxing is when the sun first rising or in the spring, what happened is that you, the Wood started.   Rhonda: (07:05) Your not is a first thing, isn't it? The Wood start growing. And now we say that's the Wood, that's your Liver, and your Liver responding to that. And then the... You know, like a longest day of the year, which is in that time, summer, and you're body actually responding to your Heart. And you can't help it, you're just responding to that because, you know, that make your hot... make you active, isn't it?   Rhonda: (07:32) Make your Heart desire. Yes. So then the winter, shortest day in the winter, and that was what we call... And your body also responding to that. That's your Water. So the Water actually go downward, and that's when you kind of go down. Yeah. So this is the medicine, traditionally. So how that work with your body is because in different times, because your body responding to the sun, the moon, and the time, so your body actually move around.   Rhonda: (08:07) We recognise that where they go. This is also not imaginary. It's also the sun always come from the East and going down from the west, isn't it? So your body responding the same way, and you're going... so the Meridian, actually running around like this, and the back and the forth. You know, the front. So then we recognise this is the point, and then when you have a problem, that means that you don't respond. Because you're part of our Earth, really. You're living on it. You cannot help it, to be effective.. That what we say. The heavens, Earth, and the people are in the one line. So you can't actually get away from it.   Rhonda: (08:49) But if people actually get in kind of, say, mood problem, so we say your Spirit blocked. So you don't respond, you can't connect to the... What do you call that? The spirits of the Heaven and the Earth. Yeah. So now if you have, like, a physical problem and one that doesn't really connect, you feel the pain. And that's why you feel sick.   Rhonda: (09:12) So what we do is from acupuncture point, you can actually choose your time. So your time, you just have to go slow, so then you choose your time with the acupuncture. And then with the herbs, and somebody just wrote me a email, says, "How do you say Yinyang Wuxing terms? How do you say these plants actually can help your... What do you call it? Like I said, Liver. Animals Liver, and it can help your Liver."   Rhonda: (09:38) So what Yinyang Wuxing terms in that? I said... I haven't replied, but I'm going to write a little blog about it. And you see, your Spleen, we call that, or your stomach, or your... What do you... The Heart, in our terms is all about Yin and Yang. So Yin and Yang in the Heart, which is Fire, you know? The nature of Fire, rise, isn't it? And the nature of the Water sink. So the plants, which have the same nature as your Heart and they also benefit your own Heart. Because they got the same Yin Yang nature. And the Water, the same.   Rhonda: (10:20) So if you have a Kidney problem, and then this plants or anything around you exist which have that same kind of nature, and you can use them either to rise your Water or to kind of increase your Water. And that's how so-called nutrition, but we don't really look at a nutrition point, you see? Everything is Yin Yang, you see. There's no thing says that, you know, you've got to eat vitamins or proteins or sugar to benefit you. It might, but in our terms you got to actually benefit your Yin and Yang. And so if your kidney have a problem, I mean, the Kidney is naturally a Water organ so they're kind of a cold.   Rhonda: (11:07) So for Yin and Yang, they need a heat. So then you need something warm for the Water, and you choose some plants, like cinnamon, and aconite. They're actually very, very hot and warm for the Water. So you add that in there, and then your Water rise in your body. And that's what I treat for edoema. That people have a edoema, and you use that. It's very, very well. Very, very effective, powerful. So that's what difference are. You don't recognise the body as the anatomy. So whatever disease... I wrote a little... what do you call it? E-book on this coronavirus. Because [crosstalk 00:11:45].   Mason: (11:45) Oh, you did? Cool.   Rhonda: (11:45) Yeah. The people say, "You haven't made this disease, how can you treat it?" So what you do is you actually look at a symptom and you interpret it into Yinyang Wuxing because fever comes so quickly, seems develop very fast. What I mean, it's the Fire, isn't it? So how do you put a Fire down? You actually Water control with Fire, isn't it? So you increase Water, and I choose a lot of herbs which are really kind of cool, and the Water, increase Water quality. So then you treat it.   Rhonda: (12:18) I mean, recently, I had a girl actually ask me what to do and she had a very bad fever and I think she tested negative, but she took some packet from my book, she got a formula, and then she took, like, three-packet-in-one in kind of two days. Her fever dropped like within 12 hours. Everything disappeared. 12 hours. Finished.   Rhonda: (12:43) Clear. Sorry?   Mason: (12:47) Did she have a COVID infection? Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (12:48) No, not... she just had a kind of fever, infection. You know, sore throat, runny nose, [crosstalk 00:12:53] maybe. I said, "It doesn't matter, it's COVID or anything because we don't really treat the disease." [crosstalk 00:13:00]   Mason: (13:00) Yeah, right. That's the same as going... you know, when we say "liver," we're not saying liver with a little L talking about the anatomical liver.   Rhonda: (13:09) Yeah, when we talk about Liver, we're not talking about anatomical liver, but we talk about Wood. We talk about our flexibility, and we talk about our strength. That's what a Liver does, what Wood does. Wood actually flexible, and firm.   Mason: (13:24) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (13:24) So that's what we're talking about. So if you actually... You know, somebody kind of timid, you know, very scared for always that it's Liver with the Yang then, it's because they're not straight enough, so they're not firm enough. Isn't it?   Mason: (13:36) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (13:37) So if somebody actually get kind of really angry, you know, very easy hot temper, so what we say, " lose the flexibility," so we say it's your Liver Yin problem. So we don't talk about a disease at all, we talk about a Liver as a Wood. And when we talk about the Heart, we talk as Fire. So the Fire... They're floating, but if they do float above the ground, they're not grounded. It's weird, isn't it? So what you do, you need to ground them. And that's where we work. So we don't really... I mean, like, somebody palpitated, you know, it really is always the Heart rising. And that's Fire in the Heart, it's floating.   Rhonda: (14:17) So what you do, you use a oyster shell and... What do you call it? Abalone shell and what do you call it? A mother of pearl.   Mason: (14:26) Pearl, mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (14:27) You ground them. You ground the Fire. And it works. I mean, people that you listen to and they say, "Use this shell," they don't even dissolve Water, so you drink the tea, what that do? There's the calcium, but the calcium doesn't dissolve in the Water that you use, and you don't use it, absolutely a difference. And I remember that somebody read this somewhere, she read it and she said she got some kind of a cyst in her uterus and as she read some modern Chinese medicine report, said, "Oyster shells can actually dissolve this cyst."   Rhonda: (15:05) So she asked me to give her 90 grams. Normally, I use 30 grams. I did, myself. But anyway, there's no problem. I know that would be too heavy, but she didn't think of it, so I did 90 gram.   Mason: (15:18) Yeah.   Rhonda: (15:19) And then she said she couldn't really... She couldn't move. She just feels sick and doesn't want to move. Lazy, heavy. It's hard to see. So that's what difference. Yeah.   Mason: (15:33) I mean, the difference is so huge. And I think I underestimate how big the difference... And say, for myself, growing up in a Western society, which is fundamentally reductionist and fundamentally compartmentalises things, and then I'm given this Watered-down Chinese medicine and it's kind of like, as you've said in your book, it's like an ornamental Chinese medicine. And the Western approach, the pathology approach, the anatomical approach has this patronising nature due to the self-colonisation of Chinese medicine, right?   Rhonda: (16:14) Yes.   Mason: (16:15) So can you help me with my pronunciation? Is it in the '50s, what really dropped it for me was that there was... it's, this is a new medicine, you know? This is a new experimental type of medicine that's a fusion of some Chinese principles with Western. Is it [inaudible 00:16:31]? [inaudible 00:16:32]?   Rhonda: (16:32) Say it again?   Mason: (16:33) [inaudible 00:16:33]?   Rhonda: (16:33) Oh, [inaudible 00:16:44], yeah. [inaudible 00:16:34] is that right? No?   Mason: (16:42) Yeah. Yeah, the...   Rhonda: (16:43) [inaudible 00:16:44], yes, yes, sorry. Yeah.   Mason: (16:45) My pronunciation is so terrible.   Rhonda: (16:46) That's all right. That's all right.   Rhonda: (16:49) [crosstalk 00:16:49], yeah. [inaudible 00:16:49], yeah. [inaudible 00:16:51]   Mason: (16:52) That's what absolutely blew it out of the water for me, and so the way I kind of... I will use, say... I will refer to TCM, Traditional Chinese medicine, when referring to the [inaudible 00:17:04] [crosstalk 00:17:06].   Rhonda: (17:06) Yeah, [inaudible 00:17:06]. Yeah.   Mason: (17:07) Classical Chinese medicine when talking about Yi, and I don't know whether that's... how useful that is or not, but going in your book you kind of see that there's reference from some experts talking about half-baked Chinese Medicine, and a real Chinese Medicine. So all of a sudden I start realising that all universities here, all universities in China are teaching an experimental 70-year-old medical system that is...   Rhonda: (17:37) 60, yes.   Mason: (17:38) 60, right. 60-year-old medical system that is completely watered down, and...   Rhonda: (17:45) Very much.   Mason: (17:46) The fact you've talked about it, you just nailed on the head, they think it's just harmless that we go, "Look, let's just get the best of both worlds, the best of Western Medicine and the best of Chinese Medicine." But they are completely in... You can't put them together. And you cannot lay them on top of each other in any way, and you said there that they've gone, "Well, let's just start compartmentalising symptoms to make it easier for everybody." [crosstalk 00:18:15]   Rhonda: (18:15) And it's not easy, because it's not reliable. So, I mean in the book I say that there were some Chinese Medicine students says, you know, what do you call it, they knew Chinese ways like a fly bumping into the window. It's bright, but no future. And it's so true, it's so bright but there's no future. Because it's just fake, it doesn't work, because how do you really work on a different philosophy and then you're using a different kind of practise? So they're definitely not matching. And they actually decided to make it the best of two world, but actually they made it a worse of the two worlds. You know.   Mason: (18:56) Right?   Rhonda: (18:56) It's just so terrible.   Mason: (19:00) Well, because they don't actually... as you're saying, that style of medicine, the fake Chinese Medicine, TCM, which is being taught doesn't follow a logical scientific pathology based approach.   Rhonda: (19:10) No, that's right.   Mason: (19:11) Which can work in its own right, and for its intention. And it definitely doesn't follow Yinyang Wuxing principles.   Rhonda: (19:19) No, that's right.   Mason: (19:20) And it doesn't necessarily work. It's kind of flying in the dark. You see these studies come about, going, "We're studying the use of this formula for a cold, headache, due to blah blah blah." So it's like, straightaway we're in a symptom-based approach.   Rhonda: (19:38) Yeah.   Mason: (19:39) And they're basically trying to see what percentage...And some different formulas are going to have a different percentage of effectiveness based on the symptom, but they're like, this formula, what percentage can we accidentally lower the symptoms by using this formula? Right? Like, that's kind of like the only way I can see it, and I'm just like, it's... I get it, because it's so tempting to use anatomy and use pathology.   Rhonda: (20:10) Yes.   Rhonda: (20:11) And the problem is, it's not reliable. I actually trained the same way. I train exactly as... What do you call the modern Chinese Medicine who go through this university, that was the first time when China... You know, after the revolution, they reopened the university. I mean, during the revolution they stopped all the education, university, for nine years, I think. And then they re-opened, that's the time I actually got into university. I learned Chinese Medicine, and I was looking for some kind of traditional arts, you know, like philosophy, and absolutely nothing. And then there's nothing they explain. It's like, it makes sense.   Rhonda: (20:48) And I used to question the teacher and the teacher gave me a dirty look, and everybody look at me dirty, because they think, you know, "What do you know? Why do you really always getting in trouble?" So now I stop listening, and now I start writing stories no matter in the class.   Rhonda: (21:03) So after finish, you become a practitioner. And you're in the hospital. People come in for real sickness, you know? I remember I was in Beijing, a little country... Country... what do you call that? Like, a hospital. And the people... actually, the farmers, are travelling like 100K or 30K and in that time, they didn't have a car, kind of on the horse or on the... You know, so slow and all the track go "boom, boom, boom," and [inaudible 00:21:32].   Rhonda: (21:33) And then they come here 5:00 in the morning and they get a ticket and then they're waiting for you to treat it. And I thought, you know, you can't really just fool these people, you've got to fix them isn't it? So I start to learn myself. I learn actually from... You know, I follow the field of old people who didn't have a degree, you know?   Rhonda: (21:56) But they trained in the... Like, family train. But then they didn't really teach me enough, so I just got some of these formulas, and now I just thought of the formulas. I've got to be able to modify them. I mean, how did they create these formulas? So now I start to kind of try myself, because you're here... Because I read about traditional texts. In those days, not many available. You can't even get a proper whole Neijing publish.   Mason: (22:30) Whoa, that level of suppression.   Rhonda: (22:30) Yeah, it was very bad. And so you don't... I never really heard about Bagua until I came to Australia, you know, believe it or not. And... Yeah, so you couldn't really... you don't get too many sources for that. I kind of from here, there, I guess, here, and I was very... I mean, a good practitioner because I did kind of pay attention to it, and over the years of course I learned more role and now try more, so I get each kind of so-called problems overcome.   Rhonda: (22:57) And now when I'd done all this, I thought I'd better in teaching, we're told that all these disease you can't treat and how did I treat it? So I actually started, I thought there's something wrong with our teaching. I said, "All I did for 30 years I've been kind of training myself. If I was trained in university..." And I, actually, during the training myself, I had to overcome my education, so I called it decolonise myself.   Rhonda: (23:26) Because they colonised me, and then they gave me all this wrong information and you can't get away from it, you know? Like, people come in with a cancer and you go oh, cancer is damp heat. And you've got to use some cooling herbs, you got to really... You know, kind of things are breaking down. It didn't work, really. So what do you do? I mean, I know so many people who have been through all these Chinese doctors.   Rhonda: (23:51) I won't say they killed them, but they definitely not help. So what they did is they give you so much cooling herb, with a cancer what happens, you don't have your own heat. You don't have your own force to fight anymore. You've got to give them warm herbs. Of course you've got to clean up, you know? You've got to have herbs that... Like a rotten tree, you've got to chop them up, you know? Get rid, clean up, but at the same time you've got to nurture them and you've got a renew... What do you call that, leaves, isn't it? New trunks. So you've got to use warm herbs, and with it, with clean Water.   Rhonda: (24:24) But nobody doing that, so I thought, "I might actually get this sorted out and that's why I did a Ph.D. Little bit late and writing this book. So this is a masquerade, this book, it's during my Ph.D. study and eventually I produced this book. And then after that... After that...   Mason: (24:44) The book is amazing. The book is amazing. Every... it's so thorough.   Rhonda: (24:49) It's because, really, it took me eight years to get this delineated because it's so hard to make a clean... You know, everyone know what I write. Actually, my husband's being like my supervisor almost. And he read it, and he says, "What do you mean?" You know, "Why do you use Chinese..." Because he can't help it. You can't simply bring yourself into Chinese Medicine. So then I actually eventually decided not using Chinese Medicine anymore, I've got to use a different term because it was just so different. I don't want to mix up.   Rhonda: (25:20) And I was so angry about this kind of mixing up, because... You know, you waste your life going to university and waiting six years, you know, five years to study and a year in the hospital. And then you come out, and you land a fake thing. And then you have to... I mean, it took me years to just clean myself out and then try to re-learn. So I thought, "I must really write this and let people know about it." And I send to China publish, they wouldn't publish, of course. Yeah.   Rhonda: (25:52) I mean, [inaudible 00:25:53] but maybe in the future better because at the moment everybody who in this field in China who has authority, who has power, they all contribute into [inaudible 00:26:05] in Chinese, right? Of course they wouldn't let my voice out. So but it doesn't matter, so I thought, "I let them out here first and then eventually I'll get them there." Because...   Mason: (26:15) You'll get there.   Rhonda: (26:15) It's so savvy, not to get people learning this fake thing also. I was so angry. I'll write this book really with my patient. People deserve to know this, you know this. It took me, really, eight years, yeah, to get this cleared out and sold it up. And then traced out why they did that. I mean, it's a psychological kind of problem behind that, that was... I call them a self-colonising movement, you know, in China. Yeah. So that's... Yeah, it's very, very important, I think, to get knowing that. And then followed by that, and the people said, "Then what? I mean, how do we learn the tradition?" And so I thought I'll write another book about it, how I did it, you know? What I did. So that's what the second book is about, yeah.   Mason: (26:58) And the second book, the Yinyang Wuxing, Spirit Body and Healing?   Rhonda: (27:03) Yeah, that's right. Now I'm working on the third one, which actually going to talk about how this yinyan was in all this... The term was come about. Because these things, even if you read the traditional Chinese text, and like classical Chinese, it's very difficult to understand those books because of all the things that they take for granted that we know, that we don't. So when you read it, you feel like you go, "What are you reading?"   Mason: (27:31) Yeah.   Rhonda: (27:31) You can read the word, but you don't understand the meaning.   Mason: (27:34) Well, that's why I especially liked that the Yinyang Wuxing book is... I pick up several copies of Neijing and enjoy it and quite often I walk away going, "I read it, and I theoretically get it, but it was... the essence [crosstalk 00:27:51]."   Rhonda: (27:51) How do you apply? You can't apply, because actually, if you really start learning that from beginning, beginning how there's a Yin Yang above, how there's a wuxing what's come from, and then that's all about... Like, we call that, "Looking on the sky." You know, the stars. And then looking on the ground, say, what happens when the star in position or the sun, the moon, and Jupiter, where they're positioned and where we are.   Rhonda: (28:17) So then to actually form, and then the words, a lot of them, I thought about that, and then in the Neijing a lot of numbers, how many [inaudible 00:28:26], how many time.... it's so different time to ask you now to what we're using, so I am writing them, the current book, I'm writing to convert all this, the equivalent of what all that means.   Rhonda: (28:39) And then when you read a traditional textbook, you understand. So that's my first book, in the next one. And I'm actually a series of it, and then another one, which is herbs. How do you recognise herbs? And how the actual Yin Yang okay? So how you choose them when you actually use them. Because at the moment, you're looking at herb books, a lot of them say, "It's for Kidney, for Kidney." But Kidney is rarely... from a Kidney Yin and kidney Yang is completely different. So you've got to actually understand, so in what way it work for Kidney.   Rhonda: (29:13) And like, diagnose a sickness. "Oh, they call that a Kidney deficiency." What is Kidney deficient? That's the only half-words. You've got to make sure, they said, is it a Yin or is it a Yang. You know, and that makes big different, how you practise. Yeah.   Mason: (29:28) Well, let's go into that a little bit. You mentioned how it's sad that people think they're learning something authentic and they're actually learning something fake, which it's then... I like your work because you're providing a solution, because if there's no solution for where to point yourself, if you're an acupuncturist, and you just have to acknowledge that you studied something just new, you know? And it's not what you thought it was, there's a bit of an existential crisis sometimes, you resist knowing because you are an expert and you had these skills and the institution told you you had the ability [crosstalk 00:30:05].   Rhonda: (30:05) Yes, very much.   Mason: (30:05) [crosstalk 00:30:05] this and that, but you don't.   Rhonda: (30:08) Especially if you have a little bit of position, you know?   Mason: (30:09) Oh, yeah. [crosstalk 00:30:10]   Rhonda: (30:10) In that name. [crosstalk 00:30:10]   Mason: (30:10) Yeah, love the name as well.   Rhonda: (30:13) Yeah. [crosstalk 00:30:13]   Mason: (30:13) Love the accolades.   Rhonda: (30:14) Very, very, afraid to change. And that's why you're kind of defensive. Once I actually wrote a little bit and joined one of this internet group which are talking about Chinese Medicine, so I just said a few things. Oh, there were so many people up against it. So angry.   Rhonda: (30:30) And they asked... demand me explain. "No," I thought, "I don't really have time to explain to you all this in here," and then they kick me out of the group, and they said, "If you don't explain, you're better off, this is not a place to show yourself." Oh, all right. So I just dropped it, it didn't really matter. So many people, very defensive. Very defensive.   Mason: (30:51) What I see there is especially, there's something... they are wanting to learn and then stagnate, which is the main difference between a fake TCM and a real yi is I see that.. You said you were a good physician, and that is rare, and also what they want to do is they don't care whether they have someone that's good or not, they want to just be able to, as you said, commodify and pump out these physicians.   Mason: (31:23) Now the difference is, someone who isn't willing to really walk the path, acknowledge the fact that we are in communion with the sun, heaven, moon, the earth, the way it's moving, that's its own path, it takes its own discipline, and requires a certain amount of integrity, because there's... Yunyin is never ending flux. Verse, in the fake style, they want to say, "That's the symptom, and I'm going to fix that symptom." They still use the fancy words, damp, heat, it's still, to a Westerner, you're like, "Ooh, wow, this is so exotic, a damp heat."   Rhonda: (31:56) Yes.   Mason: (31:57) But it's still bullshit. [crosstalk 00:31:59].   Rhonda: (32:00) Yeah, exactly. And that's... Damp heat, it's a... You know, people think that's a diagnosis, it's not. What is damp heat? That's only a symptom. It's like if people say, "I'm actually Blood deficiency." What is Blood deficient? That's a symptom. That's not diagnosis. So you've got to really understand how that happened. All that is wuxing. You know, who created? Who made this?   Rhonda: (32:25) So you got to work on that, then you can treat it. If I say, "I got Blood deficient, no," I've got to say, "Oh, nourish the Blood, and I've got to find it. It's not, because your body actually able to kind of create everything. It's not really nutrition, that's why I'm kind of against this nutrition point, as well. I mean, when you're working in the natural food, you don't say it's because of nutrition.   Rhonda: (32:49) It's because the powerful Yang, or the powerful Yin, and that's how they actually make your body bouncy and make you well, rather than say, "Oh, this got some vitamins, or this got some kind of minerals and all rubbish." Yeah.   Mason: (33:04) It's harder to get ego attached on to it, because it's just a part of the nature of the universe, and the key term in the book that I saw the difference between, say, someone who's going to go to fake Chinese Medicine to someone that has the capacity to walk the authentic path is their understanding of Qihua and that was the biggest distinction.   Mason: (33:29) I realise when you were talking about Qihua and we'll go into what it is to explain to everyone, but a physician who just wants to treat the Blood deficiency and think that that's an actual diagnosis. They are going to treat the Blood, treat the Qi and say, "We've gone about that very holistically in accordance with the tradition."   Mason: (33:52) But they don't understand the transformative cycle of Yin and Yang and it's never ending transformation.   Rhonda: (33:59) That's right. Yes.   Mason: (34:00) Chi qua. Can you explain that? Because it made the difference for me.   Rhonda: (34:04) Yes, well, Qi which means like a force, like... We say things you can't really kind of grab it, that's called a chi, you know? But it's got a energy, but then it's kind of a airy kind of energy. That's called a Qi. Hua It's the transform, transformation. You know? We say, "How does the sun, actually the heat, transform to Water rise?"   Rhonda: (34:30) And that's actually become a Water Qi, isn't it? So then when the rise heat, we call it a Fire, kind of... what do you call it? Qi. And then when they actually turn you to... what do you call that? Growing trees, that's what we call that tree, like a Wood Qi. So that's actually called a Qihua, it's the Five Elements, kind of... oh. People say element, I don't quite comfortable with this word.   Rhonda: (34:56) But anyway, it's the transformation of one thing to the other and the force. So that's why we call it Qihua. So that's why somebody... In that book, I think I gave you an example, somebody at the university, a Ph.D. student, and then they talk about nutrition. I said, "I'll ask him," I said, "What about Qihua?" And then he said, "What are you talking about? What is that?" You know? He didn't understand at all. But Qihua is very important, it's how the changes. And you heard of [inaudible 00:35:25].   Mason: (35:25) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (35:27) [inaudible]. Yeah, that's what I'm writing at the moment in the next book with theory part is also the sun position, and the Earth movement, and how to... That the sun movement, the position... Which you cause, you know, like the sunrise and sundown. We call that the [inaudible], that movement. And the Qi which is the Earth changing, and that create a different atmosphere.   Rhonda: (35:53) And that is what I call the [inaudible]. You know? That now turned into, like, a luck. You know, how your luck is. Because your luck is can't escape from the sun and the moon.   Mason: (36:05) You make your own luck.   Rhonda: (36:09) Yes, yes. Because luck is about a sun position and your time. So that's what it is. It's a time and a position.   Mason: (36:15) And I think the fallacy of the West is looking at that fundamental principle of life, that we are connected, and that our atmospheric positioning is going to effect us and our capacity to... you know, even considering if you're talking about something that in the West has a gravity, like... you know, the word cancer.   Mason: (36:37) And then to talk about it in context of Water Qi, Wood Qi. But because Westerners require drama, I think it's almost intimidating to go into what's seen as something that's just... You know, it's folk medicine, it's not real, that's why they've gone to Commodify Chinese medicine for the West, we need to actually take out all that terminology that has anything esoteric whatsoever and therefore, you know, therefore we're going to be able to sell this to Westerners.   Mason: (37:18) And if you look at where Western Medicine is, the detrimental scalpel, taking the scalpel to medicine and nature and separating them is... It's evident what's happened, and I just want to reiterate that this medicine is very, very effective if you go back to its roots.   Rhonda: (37:42) Very, very effective. In fact, I think I said in the other podcast, I mean, this is kind of a bit of personal, but I've actually been poisoned by formaldehyde and benzine. And I was like a Liver and the Kidney failure. I mean, I didn't go to Western Medicine so I couldn't really get any kind of [inaudible 00:38:00] diagnose, but I didn't really want it because, you know, you're that sick and you mentally kind of weak as well so I didn't want them to curse me, to say, "You're going to die in a few months," or whatever.   Rhonda: (38:11) So I actually totally relied on herbs, and acupuncture, and treating myself. And I'm actually on the mending, yeah.   Mason: (38:20) Wow.   Rhonda: (38:21) So, I mean, I'm still not 100%, like what I used to be, but I'm definitely still alive.   Mason: (38:25) Wow.   Rhonda: (38:26) [crosstalk 00:38:26] to this stage, I lost all my weight, like 42 kilos, and like skeleton. And couldn't eat, and I turned to just black, like a green and blackish. And, oh, I was completely... getting a fever every few days. You just... you're thinking, I mean... I definitely prepared to die, but I thought, "Even when I die, I'm not going to waste the medicine." There's no way I'll let them torture me. But I actually just rely on herbs and acupuncture and treat myself and I'm almost normal now. [crosstalk 00:39:00]   Mason: (38:59) Wow. You were talking about it being sad about practitioners being taught this new style of medicine. What I find sad, as well, is a lot of people listening, and like myself, I have... I'm going my path right now and I'm going to not go down the practitioner path for the moment, but I talk about this... I talk about the Chinese herbs as a fan.   Mason: (39:26) I talk about acupuncture as a patient and as a fan to this medicine and an advocate, but you can't... The problem here, in Australia especially, which I'd like you to talk to the people listening who go and have acupuncture, how to navigate the relationship within acupuncturist and find someone in this current day where you're not really allowed, technically, in Australia, to practise classical Yi. Right?   Rhonda: (39:53) That's right. It's very, very, kind of dangerous to practise. That's why I actually kind of erased myself. Because when you're being a practitioner, you agree that's when we kind of... You know, in 2012, when we become, like, a so-called, a government recognised practise and that's why I erased because by then, we have to sign a paper to say we agree their terms, and the one of the term which I can't agree is you got to actually become a... What do you call that? Assistant. Like, a complimentary to biomedicine. Which means if somebody come to me, I actually got to send them to Western doctors if I think they're serious. I mean, what I do?   Rhonda: (40:39) If I send everybody go to them, what am I doing? But then, when you treat everybody seriously, if anything happen, even when you're treating life and death, isn't it? If somebody happening something really serious or whatever, even to die, and you send yourself to jail, and they bankrupt everything they can fine you everything. So how can you really practise? You couldn't really do it. So most people, I think the best they do is just kind of... You got to lay back and do a little bit. I can help you as much as I can, that's all it is.   Mason: (41:10) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (41:10) You can be serious now, it's kind of political condition. But this medicine, it definitely very powerful. And also a lot of herbs you're not allowed to have. And because this called biomedical kind of terminology, and they say this is poisonous, while the herbs, actually, I was importing and they said, "You can't," they said, "It's poisonous." I said, "Who actually kind of analysed? I want to see the paper says this poison." And they said, "Because this relate to another herb, the name's similar."   Mason: (41:40) Whoa.   Rhonda: (41:40) I mean, that is ridiculous.   Mason: (41:40) Yeah.   Rhonda: (41:40) So they're not... They understand nothing, basically. So you can't argue with them, so you can't really... it's very difficult to practise. I know... Well, I'm teaching, but I also feel sorry for people who want to practise the real thing. But at least you help yourself. They can't stop you help yourself, you know? Like, if I didn't have this knowledge, I'll be dead, long time. You know? Like, I'm still alive, and I'm still working. So it's...   Mason: (42:12) And kicking.   Rhonda: (42:12) It's something really good. You know, very important for yourself, to do this. So and I hope, actually, eventually if there's enough, that's one of my aim to do this course training, eventually we're going to set up association called the Yi Association. And we're going to set up our own kind of way, and like a Chinese Medicine before. They didn't recognise, but they can't stop you because they've not recognised it, we don't want them to recognise it. But they can't stop us.   Rhonda: (42:39) So we're in this kind of form, and enough people we're truly an association and we're going to push that all over the world. We're going to do this real Yi. You have to, because it's such a beautiful knowledge. You know, when you actually learn it, it's powerful and it's beautiful when you learn it. At the moment I'm doing a little bit on my Facebook group, the Yinyang Wuxing Yi Facebook group. Actually, I start teaching language because in my course, if you actually... You got to learn the basic terms, and then you'll be able to kind of follow me.   Rhonda: (43:15) So now I'm training a little bit of this work. I mean, even just the words are beautiful, really, to learn. I'm not teaching modern Chinese word, I'm teaching, like, the sun, how they actually first come, it's like the run, and then with the stroke, and the straight line. The straight line, which means... you know, if you know the bagua the straight line is a Yang , and the broken is like a Yin. And the straight line, what it means it's a sign is a powerful, it's firm. So that's where the words come from. And eventually they make a square, and with the line. And square means the sun actually is east in the west and north and south, going down, going up. And so that cause what they call the position of the Earth. [crosstalk 00:44:03]   Mason: (44:03) Square... I'm sure there's going to be people that want to know whether they can join your Facebook group.   Rhonda: (44:11) Yeah, yeah.   Mason: (44:11) Okay.   Rhonda: (44:11) Facebook group, open to... I mean, you have to ask to join in, but it's a group anybody can learn. So I made it as a group because I thought it concentrated all the things in there, so... yeah.   Mason: (44:23) Oh, yeah, of course.   Mason: (44:26) I mean, I'm really excited to hear that you have a page. And Tahnee my partner, who's a bit jealous that I'm talking to you, [crosstalk 00:44:32] next time, maybe we'll do a podcast with both of us so Tahnee can speak with you as well. She did have six months studying acupuncture at a university.   Rhonda: (44:43) Yeah.   Mason: (44:43) And [crosstalk 00:44:44].   Rhonda: (44:44) Well, acupuncture is good, because acupuncture, you have a little risk. So when you become acupuncturist, you're able to do all the things. And then you don't really have to talk about it. You know, like people come in if they like it, you don't really have to talk about philosophy or disease, whatever, they talk about what their problem, you go your own way, and then you chose point, then you do your way. And then it's less risk than herbs. But then, I mean, herbs and acupuncture are equally important. If you actually learn acu and you don't know herbs, I say it's like you got left arm, you don't have the right arm. You know? Like, you're half, really.   Rhonda: (45:23) So you got to have all of them and you'll be able to do everything. And also, after this new [inaudible 00:45:29] I don't know, if I live that long, I'll want to make the last [inaudible 00:45:34] I want to make is called a [true yo 00:45:36]. I don't know if you heard this [true yo 00:45:38]? Which is like a shaman, which talk about how you actually work on spirit and then to get people... Because we say your body is a spirit in body, that's how your life is. And then there's way, actually, to work on your spirit, to make your body actually live that. This is, in China, like a cure.. 1600 was, like, a government-organised practise and there's a lot of books.   Rhonda: (46:02) And then cure... what do you call it? Qing Dynasty in China, 1600. They didn't quite believe these things, so they didn't really kind of push them down, but the government didn't have this kind of practise anymore. Not in the imperialist kind of government, didn't have this department anymore. So it's become kind of a private and... What do you call it... We call it, like, ordinary people would still kind of practise, but of course, after war and this period and during the communism, of course, that's completely [crosstalk 00:46:34].   Mason: (46:34) Gone. [crosstalk 00:46:34]   Rhonda: (46:35) Recently, actually, there's a lot of book up here, which are hidden in Taiwan, the national library. And they actually started publish online and now I actually got all the copies of them. So I think one day I'm going to work on that. That'd be beautiful, really. I love that.   Mason: (46:52) That would be... I was going to say, like, I think Tahnee is going to absolutely love your course. You know, [crosstalk 00:46:58] the course that you're going to come up with, and then when you come up with that course, she would as well, but I especially want to be in on that one. You can get me in there for the prototype, I [crosstalk 00:47:08].   Rhonda: (47:08) Well, I mean, that's a long for idea, but at the moment, I really want to get these things done. You know, like the theory of [inaudible 00:47:14] and the medicine. Body, about body, how you actually reckon the body as Yin and Yang rather than anatomy.   Mason: (47:19) Absolutely.   Rhonda: (47:20) And all this. And then you got to recognise the herbs, how that actually in Yin Yang rather than chemistry. And then you've got to understand Meridians as, what you call.. Time, rather than, what point make what disease. And especially annoyed with the name in the West and the teaching acupuncture... Bladder number 45, or something, that's just ridiculous.   Mason: (47:41) Boring.   Rhonda: (47:42) You have to know the words, that's why I'm teaching the words, as well. Because all these words actually have meaning. There's meaning about these points, so you've got to learn that and you understand how that work together so that's [crosstalk 00:47:56].   Mason: (47:55) Yeah, well, then, there's life in the true word, there's life, there.   Rhonda: (48:00) Yes, yes, yes, yeah.   Mason: (48:03) For [crosstalk 00:48:03] is... Again, they've taken a scalpel, they've cut it out, and they've plunked it there, and it's not living. It's inanimate.   Rhonda: (48:08) That's right. That's exactly. It's not living. Yeah, everything got a living, you know? That's all we believe. You know? Life. You got to use life to survive, to make a life rather than using fake things, you know? Like chemical... chemical, you can't say they're not working, but then they carry it on with side effect and all the consequences. It gets really ridiculous, but once you're actually on the chemical things, you can't change them. Because it's like... say, if somebody actually had lots of chemotherapy and they come to see me, and that's most value I have, because when you have all this chemicals in there and they manipulate bodies, sometimes you can't even identify this is your own system problem, or is it the drug problem?   Rhonda: (48:48) So you go to actually try to get that... you know, kind of push it away and settle them down before you can really treat the real cases. So it's really difficult, yeah. I know, it's not... We're not in the good time, not in the right timing for this medicine, but maybe it's also good where they're challenging, so I think we probably make a change. Yeah. I mean, slowly, I'm starting. And then eventually more people will have this power, more people will join together, and they will fight.   Mason: (49:18) I think so. I really... I've seen somewhat of a resurgence, I think there's a renaissance, I think that people have realised how bored they are within a system that is basically like a grey piece of cardboard.   Rhonda: (49:32) Very much, very much.   Mason: (49:33) People want to live.   Rhonda: (49:33) Yeah, exactly.   Mason: (49:35) And as a practitioner, they want to live, therefore, help people live themselves.   Rhonda: (49:38) Yeah. I mean, you can't live like that, just... You know, material.   Mason: (49:43) No.   Rhonda: (49:44) It's a... what do you call that? Spirit is more important than... You know, we can live short, but if we live a good spirit and you feel like "I lived," but if you really live long and you're just like... It's terrible, you're just like a vegetable, it's not... No use, no good. Yeah. Definitely.   Mason: (50:01) Well, I'm going to continue to do the... What I'm going to do, I've got a few books that I like keeping around as several copies for when I meet someone, when I meet an acupuncturist, new acupuncturist friend, that I give out the Chinese Medicine Masquerading As Yi is one of those books. So everyone listening, as a SuperFeaster, it is mandatory reading to get both of Rhonda Chang's books. Yinyang Wuxing, Spirit Body and Healing.   Mason: (50:31) It's not actually mandatory. I'm just kind of like, putting it in that terminology. Highly recommended, and Chinese Medicine Masquerading as Yi and once you've read it, it's one of those ones that I think especially, like, Yinyang Wuxing, I'm at that point where I definitely need to read it again. I've read through once, and then jumped to different parts, and now I'm going to need to read again. Same with... Because this isn't something black-and-white to memorise, this is something to feel and experience. So I just wanted to... Before we head off, and I'm definitely going to ask you to come back on the podcast, and I think I'll definitely get Tahnee in there with um..   Rhonda: (51:07) Thank you.   Mason: (51:09) But considering a lot of the people listening here, not practitioners, but they are people who are developing their own personal health culture, wanting to understand their body in a crazy Western health scene that is just confusing at times. Can you talk just from a sense of one's own lifestyle and relationship to their own body without the context of them necessarily healing others, just themselves? What advice have you got in the principles of Yinyang Wuxing? How can they get more into the flow? How can they ensure that their in a preventative space and how to get... You know, bring their spirit, so they can have long-term health?   Rhonda: (51:51) Okay. Well, the very, very first thing is avoid eating chemical, if you can. You know, like a sugar. It's a chemical, but if you're eating this... I think there's another one which called Sri Lanka kind of a sugar and now I think Australia making them, too. It's... Dried the sugar cane juice, and you can use that. That's not really a problem.   Mason: (52:14) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (52:15) And because of chemical, when they get in the system, and they... For a start, they're very fine, and they could attach in your system, and then they become like a blockage. And secondly, a chemical, it doesn't go the same way as the Yinyang Wuxing, you know, in your body transformation. So sugar is, and there's salt. Salt... Which a lot of people say, "I'm eating, like, a table salt." That's a pure chemical, very dangerous. Because the sea salt, if you have, it's 80-something, you know, different minerals. And the ratio is the same as your Blood. So you can't go wrong, and you don't need to eat this table salt and that add a bit of zinc and a little bit of... What do you call that? [crosstalk 00:52:57]   Mason: (52:57) Iodine.   Rhonda: (52:58) Iodine, all the different minerals. You have sea salt, and you actually kind of balance. But the sea salt, a lot of them on the shelf say, "sea salt," it's not real, it's not life. Because real sea salt, you crush them, you make them a fine, and after a few hours, they clap them together again, because they're life. And then if there's rain, you don't put water in there, they absorb the moist and they become kind of moist. And when they dry, they actually evaporate, like a sea. So that's a real life sea salt. And the salt and the sugar, this is two very important... And you've got to avoid eating chemicals.   Rhonda: (53:34) Because chemical, if they get out of your system, all right. But if they don't get out, they block your system, that's what we call cancer. Cancer is a blockage. It's something not flow. You know, if you've ever seen a cancer cell, and I actually... When we were in China practise, I actually... We had to do operation and all these things in the internship and the one guy actually had a leg, got a big cancer on his legs. It was smelly. You walked into that room, and you smell is that stink. Really, really bad. It just wasn't me. So what happened is the cancer, just cause blockage... They're blocked. They can't really move.   Rhonda: (54:17) So chemical really block your system, because they don't change. They're not really kind of... Like other thing. You eat meat, and you can't find any meat, animal meat in your body if you eat... What do you call it? Natural food, apple, you can't find apple in your poop, in your pee. But if you eat sugar, you find it is in there. So if they get out, you're lucky. If they don't get out, they're in your system, they block it, and then you cause the blockage and the Water will stale, and then they'll be rotten, and then mushrooms grow. That's what the cancer is. So if you want to actually be healthy, that's the first advice, no chemical. Yeah.   Mason: (54:56) Beautiful.   Rhonda: (54:56) And also warm things is better, because we're like a refrigerated drink, because we say your life is heat. You know? If somebody lying there, you don't know if they're alive and dead, and you touch them. If they're still warm, you think they still got life in there. If they're cold, you know they're dead. So what happened is your heat reserve, that's where your energy, that's what your force are. So if you drink cold drink, it doesn't go to your Blood straight away, that's why you bubble. You know, your pores all close off, you get goose bubbles.   Rhonda: (55:27) Because... goosebumps. And what happened is, because your stomach also hold out and then your body actually... Your energy, your Kidney reserve the heat, warm them up, and then they [inaudible 00:55:39], then they go into your system. So by then, what happening you lost your reserve. So it's better not to drink too cold drinks. Yeah.   Mason: (55:48) Keep yourself warm.   Rhonda: (55:50) Yeah.   Mason: (55:51) Put your coat on in winter.   Rhonda: (55:51) Yeah, and... I mean, if you're keeping clothes but if you're active, exercise, you don't put a lot of clothes on, it's all right. But internally, you don't want to cool your body down. Yeah.   Rhonda: (56:00) Don't drink too cold drink all the time. Yeah. That's basic.   Mason: (56:04) Beautiful. Well, but the basics are what, over decades, 20, 30, 40, 50, years, that's where the medicine is.   Rhonda: (56:11) Yes. Yes.   Mason: (56:12) [crosstalk 00:56:12].   Rhonda: (56:12) Yeah. [crosstalk 00:56:13]   Mason: (56:13) I love it so much. I've loved this conversation.   Rhonda: (56:16) Thank you very much.   Mason: (56:16) I'm sure you've got a busy day ahead of you. As I said, you're not going to go long without jumping back on the podcast, because I love it too much. I love your message too much.   Mason: (56:25) And I'm excited to join the Facebook group, I'll get the link off you and I'll put it in the show notes for everyone. But what's it called, just in case people want to look it up?   Rhonda: (56:35) Yinyang Wuxing Yi, which is yin, Y-I-N-Y-A-N-G.   Mason: (56:36) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (56:37) And W-U-X-I-N-G and the Y-I. Yinyang Wuxing Yi. Yinyang Wuxing, which is the theory, and yi, which is the healing, and [inaudible 00:56:37] approach. Yinyang Wuxing Yi.   Mason: (56:37) The healing. That's Y-I, everybody.   Rhonda: (56:37) Y-I, yeah.   Mason: (56:37) [crosstalk 00:56:37] yi.   Rhonda: (56:37) Y-I. Yi, yi.   Mason: (56:56) Beautiful, everyone get the books. Where... Best place to get your books? Is that your website?   Rhonda: (57:01) Yeah, my website is rhondachang.com, and get book from there. But at the moment, because I don't have a printed book, I rely on Amazon to print. But Amazon, at the moment, they don't send to Australia. So have to wait a little bit, but you can buy it from Amazon.com.au, but they cost a little bit more than I would for sale.   Rhonda: (57:23) Doesn't matter.   Mason: (57:24) No one minds. No.   Rhonda: (57:25) Yes. It's worth it, they're funny. Because it's... If you're learning about Chinese medicine or if you really feel disappointed about Chinese medicine, and you should read this. And you understand the why, and you got a future, because you know where to go.   Mason: (57:42) And guys, that's it. If you felt disappointment in Chinese medicine, in acupuncture, you know, that Chinese Medicine Masquerading As Yi, that is a book that will... It'll validate.   Rhonda: (57:53) Yeah, open your eyes. Really.   Mason: (57:57) [crosstalk 00:57:57] open your eyes.   Rhonda: (57:57) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Mason: (57:57) I love it.   Rhonda: (57:57) Thank you very much.   Mason: (58:00) I mean, I've got so many things I could go on about, but let's just call it here and I'll see you next time.   Rhonda: (58:03) Okay. No worries.   Mason: (58:03) Have a great, great day.   Rhonda: (58:05) Thank you very much. Yeah. Bye.

In this episode of Leafy Podcast, our hosts sit down with John Vuong. John founded Local SEO Search, where he helps small business owners grow and succeed, giving them a leg-up to compete with more established companies in SEO and being seen on the internet. John also has a podcast Local SEO Today, a tool for business owners and entrepreneurs to help them succeed. John tells us that understanding how Google works and being aware of what customers want and are looking for is how he begins with his customers. He tells us that to start, focus on running a business, the foundational components to operating a successful business and SEO and advertising on the internet is a secondary concern after creating a solid company.   John explains how to utilize certain online platforms for advertising by understanding the mode of communication and the purpose of each platform (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) , understanding what’s going on with the users and capitalizing on what is available.  John believes life is short, so embrace it and take on the adventure. You can run a business the way you want and do it well so that you can spend time with family and friends, which is what really matters. To learn more about John Vuong, visit: localseosearch.ca Episode Transcript: Female Announcer  0:00  Welcome to the leafy podcast, helping real estate investors and entrepreneurs grow. Say hello to your hosts, Jennifer Gilgoric and Brian price founders of Leafy Legal Services,teaching you how to protect your assets for your business and manage your wealth. Let's start the show. Tammy Geerling  0:18  Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Leafy Show. Thank you so much for being with us today. I'm Tammy, the podcast manager. And on the line we have our awesome hosts both Brian Price and Jennifer Gilgoric from Leafy Legal Services. Brian is the CEO of that service and Jennifer is the COO. They have another awesome guests for us today. So let me pass it on to them so that they can get the show started for us. Hey, Jennifer, hey, Brian. How are you guys doing?  Brain Price  0:44  Good, good.  Jennifer Gilgroic  0:45  Great. Great. I'm very excited to be here today. So today's guest has a really awesome backstory. And so his life has been this incredible journey. His parents were Vietnamese immigrants to Canada and then through his life. He as he went, he got a paper route. So he's always been an entrepreneur. So even as young, he had a job, he was an entrepreneur, he went on a paper route. Then he ended up doing finance classes there at the university in London on it, Ontario. So that's still Canada. Then he ends up going to England. Then he comes back to Canada gets involved with yellow pages and red pages, actually, which was a startup that was going to compete and they were going to do an actual written, they're going to print out website addresses, just like you had for the phone book. So yeah, this was back in the day. So it's like so cool. And then he managed to move that forward and move that forward. And now he's an SEO expert. So I want us to give a huge round of applause and welcome John Vuong to our show. And he's with local SEO H O Seo search.ca. So welcome, John. I just love your story. John Vuong  1:57  Thanks a lot, Jennifer. Yeah, that was a great Intro. Yeah, it's been a journey for sure. And I'm excited to share some insights along the way. Unknown Speaker  2:07  Yeah. So how did you kind of get through this? You know, going through these different avenues? How did you finally settle on SEO? And and once you walk us through us and I like to hear more about these red pages, I think that's pretty interesting. John Vuong  2:21  Yeah, definitely. So seven years ago, I started this agency, local SEO search. I had no clue about anything technical. So I'm not an SEO background expert by any means. I started my career actually in sales in advertising sales. And I studied business finance, so it was kind of different. But in order for me to get a real job, that was my first job, and I stuck with it, and over the course of many years, I refined my art of sales and marketing. And I got to really understand what my strengths are what I enjoy doing, and Yellow Pages where I was there for five years. The relationships is what really connected me with local business owners, and really wanting to help them grow and stand out because they were genuinely interested in the community, right, like real people supporting real community leaders, right, like computer people. But even before that read pages, so that was my first job actually, outside of university. It was the, it was a great concept. It was competing with the yellow pages. First directory ever going to every single business home office tower, but printed every website, so it was competing with Google, but Google wasn't like taking off at that time yet. Right? So it was called read to and it also came out with a directory read Toronto, but it didn't last it didn't survive. It was a great concept. So I sold a bunch of it because I was a true believer in it. But it just didn't. survive. Jennifer Gilgroic  4:01  I think it's an absolute scream that you are in finance and that you went into finances school, but you end up in sales and you're like a total sales he kind of, hey, let's talk because usually finance people are like, hey, let's not talk so I can like do this right here with these numbers that I love. And you're like completely opposite of that. So I always love it when the journey switches in in changes, and and that relationships are so important. And it is weird when we look back that there was a day before Google, you know that you had these books and everything like that. I have a house that's over 100 years old, and my son we we were we it still has stuff in it from the the lady who had owned it her entire life. She was like literally in her 90s when I bought that. I think it's always been like their house, you know? And we found the old rotary phones. And I was like, show me how you would make a call. You know when we found them and he was like, I had no idea Like whatsoever, and then he was like, so you had to do that for every single number. And I was like, yeah. And if you got the wrong number, you have to start all over again. He was like, wow, this is fascinating, fascinating to him. So it was really cool. So tell me a little bit about how you went from the Yellow Pages. You're doing all this relationship, marketing and relationship sales, because people you know, the biggest part, if you're in advertising sales is not just to sell one ad, you want the people to constantly, you know, be re re upping their subscriptions. And that's part of your compensation, with many advertising sales. It's why some advertising sales reps make really good money. They're good at keeping their people, you know, they're always checking in with them, you know, so tell us a little bit how you went from that in and where you're at now. John Vuong  5:50  Yeah, so at Yellow Pages, so I was there for five years and relationship sales was more of a I don't know Like, I was genuine, I was really like just authentic raw. So I always had a story. And where I was just letting people in on like my journey, right? Like, what I grew up doing, how I discovered like traveling like I love. I had a exchange experience, like going to school in London, England for a year. And I was amazing. For me that really opened up a lot of opportunity for me to see what's bigger and greater than just my local community of working in a small suburb of Toronto, right? That's where I grew up. So for me, it was more about like, just connecting with people and letting them in. And yes, I was able to not just renew people, but upsell, and then of course, it was all about listening to them asking the right questions and finding out what their true needs and desires were right because ultimately, a lot of people were frustrated. They were getting spending more money than ever but not getting the same sort of return. They used to get 10 1520 years ago. And when I hear that all the time, I'm like, so what is going on? Where are people shopping? How are they pivoting? Like, what is the user behavior, right? And as you know, the internet started to take off, Google started becoming more present. Email started to be the main mode of communication, no longer fax machines, no longer telephones, text messaging, like all these new innovative stuff that you hear today, like social media and content, video content, audio, all that is all new within the last 10 years, right. But before that, it was still traditional media, which was newspapers, flyers, magazines, trade shows, billboards, Radio Television, right. But today, it's now podcast, YouTube videos. There's Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, you name it, right? Like there's so many other new initiatives. that technology has allowed users to change their behavior. Being controlling in a different platform in different way, at their convenience, right? So it's just different. But there's still a lot of people consuming information. And you have to understand the users behavior to then gravitate on what is important for business owners. And that's where I shifted, because a lot of people were just frustrated spending so much money and didn't see a good return.  Jennifer Gilgroic  8:24  It's very frustrating because it's changed so quickly, you know, it was like 100 years ago, it was still well, we have this directory and local and you go to this guy, and he puts up a little sign, you know, and that's how it was for like, ever. And when I say forever generations, yes, just in our lifetime. It's been you know, going from paper to then television and now you have radio now you have internet now the internet's completely changed and you have this is like weariness to have to as soon as like every other year, there is some new hotness and what Did you know six months ago isn't the same? And I think that there's a lot of business owners, but also people who are frustrated, where do I go to get really what I need? And and oh, now I've got to learn a new app. It's just crazy. So it's amazing that you're on the on the edge of that. How do you not get tech weary? I mean, there's a lot that's in your head. Do you just dump it out as you are constantly knowing new stuff? John Vuong  9:28  Yeah, so I specialized now just on SEO because it's already fairly complex. Digital advertising comprises of email, social content creation in various forms. And then understanding like, what these different apps and software and technology can actually do for a business, right like to either scale and understand the process and efficiencies of it. So you have to really just focus on what you do best. And I continue doing that which is building relationships, meaningful ones with business owners that are I'm trying to help them grow and build a digital presence, right. And what we do is focus just on SEO, because I feel it being very similar to what Yellow Pages provided, which is the organic, natural listings on Google where the businesses are not pushing stuff at you, right? That's advertising, you know, trying to disrupt that user behavior to get someone to either click or call you at that given moment with a creative ad, right. But when you're appearing organically or naturally, someone else is seeking you out. So you're pulling people when and during control. And that's what Yellow Pages provide. So that was more directive advertising versus Creative Advertising. And that's why I feel SEO is still the dominant player for that same sort of medium that people used to spend a lot of money and yellow pages with. Unknown Speaker  10:53  Yeah, that's an interesting way of putting it because yeah, I mean, it is it is kind of like the new Yellow Pages is but You have to kind of put yourself out there and find different ways of attracting people. It's not like in one, one book. So how are you helping people to get in front of more people to get to those those folks that are that are searching for you. John Vuong  11:15  So understanding how Google works is very important. And I feel people overcomplicate things. I always tell people like run a really good business. What I mean by that is, take care of your customers, listen to them, provide an amazing product or service. Understand that value prop what unique selling proposition you're offering, like, understand foundationally what makes a really good business because over the course of many years, I've worked with thousands of business owners that operated for generations without technology. So imagine how did they survive? they relied on referrals and word of mouth, right and minimal advertising on maybe yellow pages or print media or flyers. Whatever may be right, so right, how did they survive? And what has dif different right? Like, the challenges? There's a lot going on today technology has advanced so quickly in the last five or 10 years that people are bombarded with this new app, this new software, this new social media feed, and they're looking for quick solutions, fast ways to expedite to make that hundred thousand dollars in a week because they saw an ad there, right? And they forget that well, maybe one in a million person actually receive that benefit. Everyone else is gonna lose a lot of money and get stressed and frustrated. So why not you do what everyone else used to do, which is grind it out, understand how to run a business and focus on the foundations right? So that's what I always boil things down to like SEO can really help advance a business Once they already know how to take care of the customer, and run a good business, but we cannot help someone that doesn't even know how to run a business because their reputations on the line, there's a lot of other foundational things that are missing. Jennifer Gilgroic  13:13  Yeah, well, that's kind of what we do we do the foundational things on the back end structure so that they don't take themselves before they even get started, because everybody wants to sales come in. But there's a lot of other things you have to put in place in order for that to happen. So I get that. And I'm gonna ask you a question. You know, you were all heavy Google, Google Google. But right now, you know, like, as the time we're taping this, Google and Facebook and Amazon are all in this, like, antitrust. People are willing to break them up. I mean, you know, Google is the Yellow Pages, but it is the everything. It's like the new source. It's like the thing. So do you. Do you think now like, Are you already building your plan for what if they break it up? Like what if they actually split up Google and now People have other products that they can do, you know, there's brave, there's DuckDuckGo there's all these other search engines, you know, Yahoo used to be the search engine. But But now I think Yahoo doesn't that piggyback off of Google Now. They're all like together. But do you have a plan? Like how do you think it's gonna go now that there is so much heat on these these mega monopolies? Which, you know, in my opinion, they all need to be broken up. But you know, I'm, that's just my opinion. But yeah. John Vuong  14:33  So, like every generation, always look at where people the users are going to gravitate towards. So understanding what what channel or what purpose Facebook has, right, like, Who do they target and what's the sole purpose when you go to Facebook? What's the sole person is when you go to LinkedIn or Twitter, right understanding that mode of communication and that platform and medium of choice. So think about zoom and Eventbrite and all those online platforms where you can now do presentations since the pandemic, it's really been elevated, where people are now spending more time in front of a computer pitching and doing a lot more conferences that way. So it's just understanding what's going on, right in terms of the users. And if Google is still and yes, Google's always pivoting, they're trying to find ways to monetize. They're trying to own the real estate, trying to alleviate and not get business owners who are ranking users to click on their website, they will either click on Google's properties right around the SERPs, because that's your prime real estate. They make money through ads, right and retargeted ads, I get it. So you have to understand the whole purpose of the medium. And then how do you capitalize on what's available? Right, right. And I still feel SEO is very powerful, because you can control and position yourself and optimize as that local player. On the map below, right? Because that's still free at this time, but you also have to be weary of what's going on. Right? Because same with Facebook. You know, before, once upon a time a couple years ago, you could organically get position, right? But today, every two times every time you scroll down, there's an ad that appears, right? There's always pushing stuff at you. And it's more like, you're bombarded with stuff that you don't really want to, you know, be there for right like, yeah, so you have to understand the channel and the different media's out there and understand what's going on within and I still feel Google is great, like duck, duck go. It's not like in terms of use.  Jennifer Gilgroic  16:45  Yeah, I mean.  John Vuong  16:45  1%. Jennifer Gilgroic  16:46  Put that on every single phone. You see, when you have an agreement that every single phone that comes out, it has to have your voice. Brain Price  16:54  if you own the operating system. Jennifer Gilgroic  16:57  Now it's like you can't infer some people. They do all their work. I mean, I know people who literally work off their phones now, you know, the phones are more expensive in some cases than computers, which is nuts. Right? But you do everything you're doing your banking your you have your password keepers, you've got all your things on your phone. And so, yeah, I mean, it's crazy to have it so embedded like Facebook, I mean, there's entire things you cannot do unless you have a Facebook account where you can log in, that are totally unrelated to Facebook. Right? So it's just interesting because there's so much interconnectivity, it can be confusing for people. Yeah, very much so to compete, you know, but that's good. I really love the fact that you still believe in your in this every single day that you can still use it for local people, because that means that local businesses still have a chance to get the people around them for free. And they have ways that they can utilize this technology. So that actually warms my Heart, a whole bunch for that. John Vuong  18:03  Understanding the space, right? Like it's always evolving, but looking for opportunities to capitalize because people get frustrated, spending too much money not getting good returns. So I want to help the little guys. Unknown Speaker  18:15  Yeah. So are there certain things that you always do know? You know, I know things change for hours, there's kind of some basis that you actually do and maybe some of the new stuff that you're looking into as well. John Vuong  18:26  Yeah. So for us, we always look at foundational stuff like understand your client, creating a content journey mapping, and really positioning yourself as the expert, right. So understanding who your ideal persona client is, and writing every piece of content, your website piece is directly driven to those type of people, right, from everything you produce. From video, podcasts, audio, you know, images or written depending on where they're at in terms of the journey, create that content piece for them, and then making sure that You're up to date in terms of like, what's going on what the users want, like they want fast, secure, easy to use navigation. Like, all these things are now behavior. If you don't have it, someone else is gonna, you're probably losing out right on an alternative because they're bouncing off your page to someone else. Right? So just staying current and what's going on, right? Because technology's moving so fast. And as much as you want to stay on top of it. It's kind of scary too, because there's so much going on, right? Like AI. What's going on there? Like they know too much about you already. Right? Is that Jennifer Gilgroic  19:40  right? Yes. I'm like terrified like I can have a conversation with a friend of mine. And then immediately I'll go on, you know, to look at something and ads for that pickup. And I'm like, How did my phone know I was, you know, talking to somebody you know that. Maybe it's time to get hair extensions. My entire timeline is nothing but a hair extension company. Whatever but yeah, yeah, it's weird man. I don't like it. I'm like stay in as much as I say that. I still have an Alexa. So if I  Brain Price  20:12  Don't say it.  Jennifer Gilgroic  20:16  Oh, yeah, people used to be what was that joke? They used to say, you know, don't say that over the telephone because you never know if the CIA is listening, and then it says 2020 CIA, how do I bake a pie? Like that coming back to? That's cool. Well, so Okay, so what else can you tell people? Right now if they have their own, like website and stuff like that? Is there anything anyone can do besides writing things in the in the tone of the voice for your target client? Like taking it down from I just want to tell everybody in the whole wide world to really knowing who your ideal client is, it's very important. Is there anything else that you can give us on on top of that? John Vuong  20:58  Yeah, so I focused On a lot of service based small, medium sized business owners, like the local dentist or plumber or lawyer or whatnot, Google My Business is a great opportunity. If you haven't verified it, optimize it, make sure you're in the right category, put in all the services that you offer, update it once a week, get good reviews onto the Google My Business Page, because people are checking you out before they call you. And they know so much before they even reach out to you. That's scary, right? They know, they checked out you on LinkedIn, they check out your reviews, case studies, Chapter all your blogs to see if you're credible, right. So as much as you want to put out information, make sure it's consistent along the lines, don't, you know, say one thing and do something else the other channel right? So it's more important than ever to make sure all your assets and all the properties that you own online is consistent has the same tone of voice and has the same good, you know? Good feel authentic feel rawness, right, because end of the day people are gonna check you all. And if Jennifer Gilgroic  22:11  I actually have a really good local thing, so I had a marketing company and I used to help people do this and there was an assisted living facility here in our town, and they did not go out and grab what you say their their property. So when he says that if for anyone who doesn't know what that means, it means like, go to your Yelp and claim your business claim your business on Google, there's actually a little thing when you you put it up, is this your business? You want to claim it because somebody else can claim it. So they had a Facebook page that actually wasn't theirs. It was a it was a well meaning former staff, and so nothing had been updated on it. And there were some like comments that weren't that great, but their Google business showed had a set of pictures, the first pictures that came up That had someone had made a cut is disgusting, but they had messed their bed. That's all I'm gonna say that it was very graphic. And that is the picture that came up for now this is one of the cleanest, nicest facilities. And that picture wasn't even of their facility. Because the flooring was they didn't have that flooring anywhere in any of their rooms. But that was the picture that pulled up. And it was actually a process to pull that listing away, and a verification from the person who had claimed it, who was a competitor of a very small unit to do it. So people wouldn't go to this very large one. I mean, they had hundreds of rooms, a skilled nursing or whatever. And they're like, how can businesses just dropped and we're not getting calls. We're not getting this? Well, as soon as I help them clean that up a little bit just because I knew enough to do that. I'm not an expert like john, who could have probably really maximized that all of a sudden, the phones started ringing. They started getting more residents again, because that false information wasn't out there. So you do want to do that not just for SEO, but also to protect the name and good reputation of your business. So add that to that. Yeah. So I didn't mean to hijack you there. I just had an actual thing I knew about what you were saying worked. Well, we've been talking to john Vong. Am I saying that correctly? I should, yes. Okay. Great. And he's with local SEO search.ca because he's Canadian. Right. So local SEO search.ca. And we're getting to almost getting close to the end. So Brain, did you have any? Some questions? Still? Yeah. Unknown Speaker  24:46  Well, I think that I noticed on your site, you have a free site audit. So why don't you tell us about how what that includes and how people can get and you know, get theirs, their site audited and how you can help? John Vuong  24:58  Yeah, so what we've been trying to do is give and help as many small medium sized businesses as possible. So usually with that someone inputs her website, usually it's a real business that's been in business for a while that is frustrated and need some more of a digital presence, right? Because we need to benchmark you, we need to figure out how we can help. And so we we kind of do a console, a phone conversation first, to see where you're at what you've done, and kind of analyze how we can help. Right? Yeah, because not only do we bring an SEO background and console, we actually go in a little bit deeper because of our business experience. Myself, yes, I have 10 plus years in sales and marketing working with thousands of businesses, but my VP of sales have worked with over you know, a couple thousand clients as well, but he was at Yellow Pages for 35 years. So his experience his insights in how to run a good Business is invaluable for a lot of business owners that are just starting, right. So we try to just help as much as possible. And that's what differentiates us from a lot of other competitors. Brain Price  26:11  Cool. Jennifer Gilgroic  26:12  Yeah, experience like that is really invaluable, especially when they've you've guys have seen it all. And really the best advertising is a good business. You know, you do what you say you're going to do, and you make people happy. And they tell their friends and I know there's the old adage, well, if they're unhappy, they'll tell everybody if they're happy, they're not gonna say word, but that's just being bitter. That's actually not true. People do talk about good experiences, and they do recommend, and even on Facebook, you have local here in Galveston, we have this Galveston is called Galveston gossip or something like that. There's like 60,000 people on it, and people gossip and they talk and they take pictures of things. And they even give shout outs but they also ask questions. Hey, guys, who do you know who can fix this? Or Who's your landscaper? My guys, not doing it anymore. I see that a lot. And people refer to that all the time. And that's just my little town. So you know, there's there's just running a good business and being good people will talk, they will talk and send you stuff. It's which is this. John Vuong  27:15  These are great forums and groups because once you are known and reputable, it's all about like cultivating more opportunity, right? So just do good end of the day, eventually things will come to you and be honest about it. Right? Like don't don't try to you know, do a fast one on people right? Or, you know me like they're so Jennifer Gilgroic  27:38  Basic but yeah. You're right. Don't pull a fast one on me but there's so much click and bead and there's so many people on social just trying to make it or hustle or whatever it is. Yeah, but are they real business owners like really? If you look at any athlete, pro athlete or any successful singer, they don't tell you what they've been doing for the last 20 years. yours. You see them at the pinnacle. So it's the same bit entrepreneurship like, no one sees me doing what I did for the last 20 years. They only see me at now. Right? But how many years of you know the grit and wrongness of hustling and door knocking cold calling and all those other things? sleepless nights and not paying for food? Like all these things, no one sees that, right?  Brain Price  28:26  Yeah, absolutely. Jennifer Gilgroic  28:29  Okay, so, as Connect, I'm going to set one more question before Tammy has to take us away but as Canadian who had to live in England, I want you to tell me what English food does there any English food that you particularly liked? Because, you know, back in the day, England was not known for its food. So I'm curious as what a Vietnamese Canadian living in England like for his food. I know that's off topic, but I just have to ask you. John Vuong  28:55  Know, I still love the chips there, which is fine. Yeah, but they were really greasy. They were like dripped in, you know, after you go to the local pub and uh huh. No, no. I mean, it was great. But because I was drunk, maybe but Jennifer Gilgroic  29:14  Man, you can't you can't beat it. Well, that's awesome. Well guys we've been talking to john von john is with local SEO search.ca. If you're a small or medium sized business owner and you're just racking your head, trying to figure out how to cut through the noise and increase your exposure, but you know, in the way that you need to get in more clients that you can take great care of, then go and see him at local SEO search.ca. And Tammy is going to give you more information about us. Thank you so much, John, for being on the show. It was just great Convo.  Brain Price  29:48  Thanks. I appreciate it  John Vuong  29:49  Thanks a lot Brian and Jennifer. Thank you. Tammy Geerling  29:51  Yeah, thank you, John. And thank you, Brian and Jennifer for hosting today. And we will have all of John's links in our show notes. And you can find us at leafy legal we are across all social media platforms and also podcast platforms. So thank you again so much for listening today. Hope you have a wonderful day and we will see you next time. Bye. Male Announcer  30:22  Attention real estate investors and entrepreneurs. Did you know that real estate investors are a primary target for lawsuits according to the National Survey of the court data 25% of Americans risk being sued in their lifetime. However, if you are a real estate investor, you have a 95% chance of being sued in the next 20 years. Leafy Legal Services helps you protect your assets and strategically grow your business and wealth LiFi legal services our experts at the series LLC and Delaware statutory trust to have the newest and most ideal legal structures for real estate investors leaving legal services at the most personalized and affordable solutions for setting up LLCs property owners are always at risk when it comes to their assets. anonymity is so important. If you own just a rental house and you own your home, you have to protect yourself and your properties from any potential legal issues. Leafy Legal Services have the right solutions to make sure you are happy and feel secure or they offer cost effective documentation that suits their client's needs for a free consultation and ebook visit levy legal services.com They are waiting to hear from you Leafy Legal Services.com. Female Announcer  31:35  Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Don't wait take action now. LiFi legal services calm protect your assets grow your business and manage your wealth.

For All Abilities – The Podcast: A High Acheivier with ADHD with De’Nicea Hilton In this episode, I interview Dr. De’Nicea Hilton. She is a Doctor of Oriental Medicine and creates playful, healing spaces for women. We had a fun, joy filled discussion about life and ADHD. We discuss the challenge of her very unusual diagnosis of ADHD as an adult while working in an adjacent field! We also discussed how she has navigated school and work with her unique brain. To connect with De’Nicea, please go to her website www.deniceahilton.com, follow her on LinkedIn (De’Nicea Hilton) and on Instagram at DeniceaHilton. Please subscribe to For All Abilities – The Podcast! Please follow me on Instagram @forallabilities, LinkedIn (Betsy Furler) and on Facebook (For All Abilities). Go to our website www.forallabilities.com for information on our software that enables employers to support their employees with ADHD, Dyslexia, Learning Differences and Autism. Thanks for listening! Betsy Thanks for listening to For All Abilities today! Share the podcast with your friends, they’ll thank you for it! Get our newsletter and stay up to date! The newsletter link is on our website www.forallabilities.com   Follow me Twitter: @betsyfurler Instagram: @forallabilities Facebook: @forallabilites LinkedIn: @BetsyFurler Website: www.forallabilities.com   Full Transcription by Otter.ai Betsy Furler 0:25 Hi, everybody. Welcome back to for all abilities the podcast. I am so excited that you're here to hear about another professional who is living and thriving and working with neuro diversity. Today we have Denise sia here with us and Denise, could you please introduce yourself to our audience? De’Nicea Hilton 0:49 Yes. Hey, Betsy, thank you so much for having me on your show. I'm so excited because I've not actually talked openly about this. Awesome Yeah, so I'm denisa Hilton, Doctor of Oriental medicine and holistic play activator. So I am in this space where I create these playful healing spaces, typically for women, so that they can embrace, embody and express their perfect, authentic selves. Betsy Furler 1:22 That's awesome. So we'll have to talk more about that as we get on with the show. But I first I want to tell us what you were like as a little girl and what was school like kind of in those early years elementary school years? De’Nicea Hilton 1:36 So let me think Let me think I was definitely one of those kids that I got along with other kids definitely got along with other kids. I would say that I was sensitive in a way that my mom would tell me as an adult, like how some things I might get sad over or I might have wanted. I do Be curious, asking questions, things like that. I definitely was also the one who took her time doing things and take my time doing things and then also exploring, um, there came a time when I was like a third think was third grade, second third grade, where it drew their attention to like me talking in class. And then who I thought I was just having a chat with, I later learned was a psychologist was testing me. And then that's when they found out that I was a perfectionist, and they are like, She's also gifted and advanced. And so basically, she's bored. So like, that's when they learned, okay, they my parents and my teachers, like Alright, well basically that's what it is. And so we gotta like step it up a notch. So my classes changed. So that was I was with I was getting a curriculum that was quote unquote tougher so that I would stay engaged. My mom totally like through me and some other activities and whatnot. I read a lot like reading was one of the things I love doing. And I still have some of my books from when I was little too. Betsy Furler 3:22 So were you a good student? Like were you making good grades? De’Nicea Hilton 3:27 Yeah, I totally was it was just what was causing my mom's attention was that it was taking me forever to do homework or sometimes like classwork. If I was the one who would be like one of the last to be done. And so that's where my mom was, you know, asking them like, what kind of work are y'all giving these kids because it's taking so long, but I would just be so engrossed in it. And I do recall, there are times and I'm like this even now and I have to leave catch myself when I'm doing it. Um, but like even just, you know, you're you're learning, you're in math. And then you're learning all like division and the addition and everything I was the one that I would seriously take my time writing so that all the numbers were lined up that the equal line was like perfectly online with a notebook paper. Unknown Speaker 4:25 Ah, De’Nicea Hilton 4:28 yeah. And so like if it was thrown off, like I was it for some reason, I think like, Oh, well, then my back would be off if, if they're not all perfectly lined up. And so I can see where I do that now. Even just drafting notes and, and whatnot, how I might go into that space of totally critiquing how I'm writing and then I'll have to, like, snap out of it, you know? Betsy Furler 4:53 Yeah. And that can really derail us from getting anything done from our productivity. By doing that, yeah, yeah. So as you went on in school, so then you were in the gifted program and what Where did you grow up? What area of the country? Us? I guess I should start with that. De’Nicea Hilton 5:11 Yeah, I'm in the US in the Tampa Bay, Florida area. Unknown Speaker 5:16 Where you're still are right. Yeah. Betsy Furler 5:19 And so as you, you know, went through elementary school and then middle and high school. How did I get in exchange for you at all? Or do Where did you still like, excel at academics? De’Nicea Hilton 5:32 Yeah, I still. It just got, I don't want to say it got harder because it wasn't really I mean, my mom was on top of it. She was very active in our academics. So she made sure that we were I was in the programs and the classes that I that I would Excel and I didn't really dip as in grades or anything. Like that, you know, a time I really dipped was in behavior in one class for talking. But that was pretty much it. Then I went into a magnet. Like at that time, there was only magnet schools. And then like the IB program, which many would know as the International Baccalaureate program. It wasn't available in middle school. So I ended up being accepted into the program and joining that program in high school. So pretty much from the time that I was tested and they switched over my classes. I was always in the classes that were going to challenge that and my mom made sure that I was and I just stayed on top of it. And you know, with all the projects and whatnot in middle school, I remember I remember one of my teachers even then I asked to be in she offered to that I would come into a different went to her classes because the class that I was slated for was a little bit too easy for me. And it was a language class. So then I would end up going to another one of her classes. So even then I was a little bit more advanced and in that regard, too, so I think like I just kind of in started taking on the like, is this easy way? Is there something else that I could do like because that's that's when I started channeling I guess what, what now I would say is boredom. Is is asking if there was anything more of right Betsy Furler 7:33 yeah. So you just like continually kind of challenged yourself to keep yourself from being bored and it sounds like you when you were young, or maybe your mom helped you with this. You were fairly organized. Unknown Speaker 7:46 I yeah, like De’Nicea Hilton 7:49 I really was actually not I think about it like some Well, well, sometimes depending on who it was. They might look at my room and be like what in the world is going is like otic mess, like you couldn't really like you couldn't be dirty like we just didn't and I wasn't really like that either. But I could see that there are times like, oh, and I got my first desk. I'm trying to organize my desk and put that in. Like, will this organization work for me? Like, I don't know. Like I just keep trying all these different things and even now Yeah, like I've it's, it has its moments and spots of very clear and then other times there's a pile or a few that Betsy Furler 8:39 so and then you went to college, obviously. And it did not go well academically. I guess I should, I guess. I'm glad for you. Well, I don't want to get your way out of order. But I want you to I do want you to tell the audience about your diagnosis because you have what your diagnosis is a little bit different. So, tell us what happened. You know what happened next? And obviously you were already working when you got the diagnosis. But anyway, go on with your story. De’Nicea Hilton 9:08 Yeah, um, did you want me to go into college? Or you want me to go? Betsy Furler 9:12 Yeah, yeah, just Yeah. Tell us how college was. De’Nicea Hilton 9:15 Yeah. Um, so I went to undergrad and I will now that we're talking about it, it's it's really making me think right like, and try to remember a lot of things. Um, during that time, I want to say that now I can appreciate that structure that I actually had that I didn't realize was structure. So I did struggle a little bit in college. Because there was just so much going on, where I was like, Oh, I want to go and do this like and just the different types of people that I met the different activities, the different organizations ended up like prioritizing those and then like I'm going to work now. So a lot of those things that became available is like, Oh, well, school stuff can kind of go by the wayside. And then what I learned towards the end, though, was that I realized just how much it is that I can work in spurts. So one of the tricks was that I learned going to summer school was the best thing for me. Because the classes were typically shorter, like if they were summer a or summer B, for those who may not know, so then it'll be like, instead of the full, like 1516 weeks, you go to classes for like seven weeks, eight weeks. And so then but your class frequency so going into class more often, actually, I realized helped me because it was like I'm going to I may be going to class more often during the week versus like the once or twice a week. During a fall or spring semester, but I mean, it was like the assignments were even like quicker to do, I could just go in there I'm so super focused. And because it was just that short time period and then boom, boom, boom, I'm out. And like, I remember one of my college advisors because I had to get permission to even take more credits during the semester than was actually allowed. Because I just told him I said, I'm just doing better in the summer so I want to maximize how many credits I can take over the summer, just so that I would basically be taking, taking advantage of how it is that I best work and also the timeframe like the time of the year, and this all is something that even now isn't talking about it is reflective of how I work now and like work work. I graduated and I started working on an internship and Then I went to grad school. And during grad school, I mean, that was a program where it was straight through, like, you could have taken breaks, but it was really designed for you to go straight through. And so we went for like 15 weeks, take two weeks off, and then you just came back and you kept going. It was very rigorous. And that it was, I mean, you were there all the time. So I think that even helped me because it was so physically I'm there. And then the classes tended to be more often as well. And then like with the assignments, so I learned that the more leeway I have in things, then it might take me longer to do it. Procrastination, and then all of a sudden, I would have created a way that I would work in spurts. So that's when I'd say okay, well, this is due so I'm just going to do this like within four or five days for us to Betsy Furler 12:56 that's exactly how I am I'm actually not diagnosed with it. The type of neuro diversity but I feel more ADHD day as the days go by, especially with the stay at home order. But it's interesting that you say that about procrastination because I'm the same way and the busier I am, the more organized and productive I am by far. And then my son, my son, he's in college is the same way and he's taking I don't remember how many he's taking a lot of hours for summer school, like I think, maybe 15. And over to summer, you know, over us, you know, half of them are a and half of them are beets. Yeah, term. And I'm like, oh, my goodness, it's so much and he's like, no, I can do it. And I think he's like you were, he actually asked me where we actually do better when we're busier. And, and the timelines are a little bit shorter. So you know, because we aren't we can work productively and we're, you know, smart and quick learners and when we can just get the get the content in and out. Done, it actually works better than than having a prolonged period of time that you can, you can procrastinate over. De’Nicea Hilton 14:09 Yeah, well, and you know what else to I noticed and I don't know if you're if if you were like this or your son's like this. I'm like, so I enjoy volunteering, right? And I ended up learning that, and especially if it's not, then I'm flaky. What it is, is that it actually goes along with the same way that I do I deal with, you know, something to do like projects or when I'm in school, it's actually project based. So like, I realized that I Excel much better when it is projects with these timeframes, like there's a start and an end. And if it's definitely shorter than wonderful, you know, hmm. So like versus the, versus the like, Oh, this you're gonna be here doing this. For so long, it's like, okay, like, if my commitment is like a year or two, and that's looming there, that's fine. But like, if you really want me to, like be of use, man get me in, in the creativity and idea phase. And then basically, I guess, show zoned into that. And then these projects that the time like, goes by so quickly, like, I know, it's already been like a year or two cool, because I would have had all these micro projects Betsy Furler 15:30 in my bed. That's what I I frequently recommend that for accommodations in the workplace is one, you know, more concrete deadlines for things for people, especially people with ADHD. And then also that kind of that traditional accommodation of extended timeline, you know, or extra time is sometimes actually harmful. For people with ADHD rather than helpful. De’Nicea Hilton 15:58 I could see that Because if you tell me Oh, well, you got some time, and I do like it. Unknown Speaker 16:05 Right then you might take it. Yeah, De’Nicea Hilton 16:09 yeah. But I may not have actually needed it in the beginning. Unknown Speaker 16:13 Right. It's right. It's right. De’Nicea Hilton 16:16 Yeah. And I've seen like, I mean, I, I will say like, to really like as an adult like so after, after actually like beginning to work in the, in the workplace, they do my internship. Um, there was, I'll say he's like, my first he was my first CEO, like professional CEO. And this man, like, was amazing in the sense that he was he was just so smart, so very smart. And you could sit in these meetings with him, and he might be very quiet and actually he might end up when he does talk. Like be very Curt into that. Right, like to the point, right? Uh huh. Um, and at first, I was one of those like Dang, like, is he was kind of harsh, like you're, and then I'm going, actually I really wasn't harsh. It was just a huge to the point, right. And then there were all these other little things that he might do. Like he might have something in his hands, and he's playing with it or sometimes even then he would get up and walk into his office because like, sometimes you'd have these meetings and there'd be a conference room that was split by a door that was leading into his office. So even then you might perceive based on his actions, that he's not paying attention, or that he's actually not like engaged in the meeting. But in actuality, I ended up learning and appreciating him doing it because it was really his way of handling his own. Like bouncing his mind possibly bouncing, but he's totally engaged in a meeting and then all of a sudden you He would say something and it'd be like, so profound decisions made. Let's move on. Like, yeah, like you it was like that space to hear people out and whatnot. But then also like what I from that, I even felt encouraged that if that's what I needed to do, then that's what I need to do. And I now might say something to people ahead of time so that they understand that it's not that I'm not paying attention is just, this is how I'm processing like, and I'm, it's like a tactful way to keep me present and engaged. Right. Right. And so then that's where it is that I feel like other people might want to actually do a self assessment. Right? Like, what judgments is it that you might be projecting? Because that's, it's based out of your perceived notion of what engagement looks like? Right? Right. Right, right. And so it's like when you understand that then you can be very mindful of, you know, when it is that you might go into a meeting or when it is you might be with a friend or something like that, and you think that they're totally not in there, but they actually might be. Or even with the kids, right? Like, it's just a matter of like, totally finding something to help keep them actually engaged in a way that's tempered and so ever otherwise, it'd be like, a complete space like I wouldn't even mentally be there totally not even paying attention. Because in that environment that you want me to be you want me to have like this quote, unquote, societally acceptable way of being in a meeting. Right? Like, Betsy Furler 19:46 right, if that doesn't work for your brain De’Nicea Hilton 19:48 at all. Right? Right. So it's like, how can you accommodate and sometimes it's, I literally have a mini container playdough that I keep in my purse, just in case I am somewhere like, our video is off, but I'm talking with my hands a lot like, with. So if I'm in a place where I'm not talking, but I'm predominantly listening in that way, then my hands can still be moving. And I'm still totally there is my hands are moving. Betsy Furler 20:18 Yeah. So you got Yeah, you have that, you know, you know, what your brain and body needs in order to be able to focus and, and be productive and efficient and which i think i think that's so important, you know, the more interviews I do with people and, and think about all sorts of neuro diversity or just, you know, even people who don't have a diagnosis or even a, you know, who, you know, do are quote unquote typical which I don't think there is anybody, but, um, you know, we all we all think so differently, which is The beauty of our world I mean, I really believe if we could embrace everyone's differences, and all different types, that everything works so much better. De’Nicea Hilton 21:11 Yeah. Like, I feel like if it's, if we can just realize and see that what we can all connect on, is in the diversity of thinking that diversity of creativity, like, it's almost like just as much as it is that you want somebody to, to listen and understand and accept you for you. We have to extend that to others. Hmm. And then, you know, go the extra step of actually allowing that to happen like in that space, and detaching from the outcome that you're looking for. Because that's usually where the friction comes is like, well, it's not in the package that you deemed and that you wanted, right? All right. So then that's how we can create like these boxes for people to, that we want them to live in. And really those boxes that end up being created out of one's own fear and fear of something different fear of them possibly having some type of control over you something that is there. And so we tend to create those so that we can try to manage and temper our own. But it ends up putting like other people in these boxes and then ends up, you know, coming back and then hurting you in some way along the way. But really all it is if you strip all that away is that we all really want to be, like celebrated for who we are, like, sometimes even question like, are they differences or are they actually similarities? I believe that right, I just want to be who we are. And then that's it like, Betsy Furler 22:50 yeah, you know, it's the reason that I hate them. I hate the term disability because I think we all have different abilities, and in one shouldn't not be less. Yeah, you know, they're just all different. And, you know, not to get too much into the, into racism and that, you know, huge topic. But I see the similarity there were it's like, you know, if we could just embrace how different every single person is. And, and, and appreciate the difference instead of trying to fit people into those boxes that you were talking about. And I do think fear makes people put people in boxes. Yeah, it's literally De’Nicea Hilton 23:38 how you try to control something. Betsy Furler 23:41 Right. Right. Right. Right fear and then and trying to get trying to control and trying to, you know, fear of yourself as well as fear of other people. Yeah, I think De’Nicea Hilton 23:52 that was one of the biggest things that I will say that I learned when, like one of my favorite books and I mean that one line stuck out To me at that time, and it's still something that lingers as far as like something that I'll think about if I even personally feel like I'm trying to control something. And that was in the seven spiritual laws of success by Deepak Chopra where he that was my first coming across it, where it is control and where it is that we try to control is typically based out of fear. And so you'd have to like, you know, ask yourself, like, where is it that I'm trying to control? And then, you know, for those who might be caregivers, for those who might have all of these different abilities, right, or even the ones that might have it, it's really seeing that this is our way of being in this life. And so we all have these bits and pieces, and it's really us learning how can we use them in a way that's so that's uplifting and powerful and empowering to our own spirits. And then also how it is that we can connect to the greater consciousness and the greater humankind. And so when we might start to control these things, you know, for others, then ask yourself like, what is it that I'm actually really afraid of? Like if I have to go to these lengths to control this? What am I afraid of? Betsy Furler 25:28 Right, right. Yes, that that's so true. So true. It has been so true in my life. You know, I've lived that personally too. So before we went out of time, you got to tell my audience about your diagnosed diagnosis. Yes. Unknown Speaker 25:47 Did you tell people what happened with you? That's what De’Nicea Hilton 25:51 the tangents really Betsy Furler 25:55 are the best. De’Nicea Hilton 25:58 Betsy, I have to tell you, there's something Else to that helped me, but I'll say a promise after the diagnosis thing. So I actually was in I had started my practice. And I ended up being fortunate enough to rent an office space, where I was actually in a psychologist office, and it was a psychologist and other mental health counselors and whatnot. And it was so funny because I'm the only one who's like out there, and I'm like, yeah, I'm doing acupuncture and herbs and all of this greatness in the midst of this office. So it was interesting, but I loved it. Because my training, the school that I chose to go to had a really heavy focus on what it's called contemporary Oriental Medicine, but the founder of the school is a classically trained psychiatrist. And so he founded it after his own apprenticeship really decade's long apprenticeship with Dr. Shin where because of his size Big practice, he just like, he's like there's something missing as far as what I've been taught to help people. And so he ended up with going in and studying as an apprentice and then basically learned all of these this different, completely different way to see the person as a whole, you know, so a lot of my training is even then with heavy like mental emotional background, and I really took to that. So I guess that's why it probably felt like home going into that office space. And talking about these things with these people. So anyways, one of them. Dr. Lauren, like, she and I were talking one day, and then she literally interjects right in the middle of conversation, nothing at all about this. She just goes, You do realize that you have ADHD, right? And I said, you know, and I think I looked at her and I was just like, I wouldn't be surprised. Unknown Speaker 27:56 Like it was almost like De’Nicea Hilton 27:59 I didn't even really need that. I have a diagnosis that I could totally see it. And she's like, I mean, cuz you can really go. You know, she's like describing my behavior and stuff, just having our regular conversations. So I thought that was like, hilarious because I was like, to me, that was my unofficial official diagnosis. Unknown Speaker 28:20 Yes. And I love it because I think it, it really speaks to Betsy Furler 28:27 you got a long way in school, you know, with with a no diagnosis. And when you think about how many kids out there might be and he probably didn't need the diagnosis. I mean, obviously, your mom had it under control. And you also were able to compensate and I think being able to compensate and adapt is so such a such a valuable skill. But, you know, then you think back and you're like, you know, what, if What if little disneysea in when she was eight years old, what if people would have understood this about In your brain, and what might have been different and what you know, like, and, you know, maybe it, maybe it just would have been like, you know, oh, that's why you get bored so easily. And let's just continue feeding your brain because that's what your brain needs, you know, I mean, you kind of figure that out on your own. But it does make you wonder when someone's diagnosed later in life, which I would say, over 50% of my podcast, guests have been diagnosed as adults, rather than as pets, either with ADHD or autism, and it's really, you know, it'll be interesting to see in the next 20 years what the trend is about that, but I do I also do love it. And I had told you this before we did the show, but I'll tell my listeners, I was like, I love it when things like that happen with professionals because we're all you know, like, you know, somebody will tell me they have ADHD and I'm like, a high you do? Or they'll say, Oh, yeah, I was in speech therapy, as I And I'm like, yeah, yeah. Unknown Speaker 30:05 So, yeah, Betsy Furler 30:07 I think it also is like, you know, I want people to embrace all of these differences about themselves as well and not be embarrassed or ashamed to talk about it. And so I love it when people like you will come on my show and, you know, you're successful, you have this amazing career that you've got to tell us a little bit about and how people can reach you. And, and you've, you've obviously really embraced your true self and and I can tell, you know, in your spirit that that has, that's, that's what really makes you successful as embracing yourself. De’Nicea Hilton 30:44 Thank you so much for that. Yeah. And it's where those times where I didn't think that I was and there are definitely some times that I could see where I really wasn't honoring myself in that regard. And you can see I could see the difference, you know, in things that were going on in my life. And like, I think that it's really, I think it's so important to see, you know, even with the kids now, like, where they say that they did get a diagnosis, like sometimes if I if I hadn't gotten a diagnosis like, thank goodness, I didn't Be it just based on what I've been hearing has been happening for the children like, like, Betsy Furler 31:24 it's it's worse because then you're even more than then people are trying harder to put you in a box. De’Nicea Hilton 31:30 Yeah. And I think like, I think the difference and how it comes out, like how it's manifested, also played a role, you know, so like, Sure, it might have taken like what they saw was, and I can see how this could be misconstrued, right? So it's like, Okay, I see that as she's diligently working and it's just taking her longer time to work. But then what really triggered their attention was quote, unquote, behavior like misbehavior, right. And so like, Had but you see was a multi factor, like my mom was like really involved and the teachers like she pushed for things for both my sister and my and myself so right, um, that is a huge difference. I think also in like if your other guests they may not have had as many behavioral issues like it seems like if they behavior isn't sit in a desk in and sit straight up, you know, like but I have been blessed to like that it came out in that way and then the times that I was behavior I wasn't like ostracized or or put in a box. I've even had some teachers that literally and this happened in grad school where she did not take offense to if you were writing or if she saw you were on the computer potentially on something else because she acknowledged that we have different ways of learning. And so the more that we can create those spaces where we don't see it, as problem, but if you just opened up more to learn more about that person, and then seeing, you know what it is that they really need, like who, right? You know, then it's if you actually pay attention, you can see it. And so then just being Welcome to that I think makes a huge difference. One of the things that did help me too is actually getting looking at my human design chart. And in very strong in my human design chart is what somebody might classify as a characteristic of having ADHD, which is like a whole bunch of ideas happening all the time at the same time or jumping around like that actually is a part of even then just that. Part of me that is is like, Oh, that's my that's my sin, my chart and this human design chart. That's pretty awesome. Betsy Furler 33:54 And that is also something a trait that can be considered a problem when You're a child and you're sitting in a classroom, and you're not thinking about the thing you're supposed to be thinking about, right at that point, because you have so many other creative ideas, but then when you get out into the, into the real world, having all of those ideas, you know, especially when you're an entrepreneur or, you know, within, you know, trying building your own business of whatever type it is, then all of a sudden, that's like, the skill you need to have. Yeah, isn't it? It's like, how, De’Nicea Hilton 34:30 how, like, you can throw somebody's show off when it's like, oh, Shut, shut this down, shut this down, just because you're at this age, just because it's not seen. It's not, you know, well, it's not as welcomed. Because at that time frame, what it is, is as a culture, we're saying to children, like no, you just kind of do what I say. And then instead, it's so it's kind of like squashing a bit like have that idea that creativity And then now as adults what now we got to hire people to do workshops on bringing in your creativity. Unknown Speaker 35:05 Exactly. De’Nicea Hilton 35:06 Something like that. Betsy Furler 35:08 I say that to be an entrepreneur, I've had to unlearn so many of the skills that served me very well as a child in school. Yeah. So you know, so so how can my listeners find you if they want to connect with you? De’Nicea Hilton 35:25 Oh, yeah, so definitely I'm connected me anybody if you would like to. You can totally see that I work with some the things that Betsy pointed out as far as embracing like, really who I am and then how it is that I can translate that into my life, but then also in business where it is that I do work with these women and helping them to come into really allowing themselves to be who they are. And sometimes we might need that guidance, to help get through those layers that we've got examples of coming from family or coming from society where we do feel like we're lost you it may not sometimes even seem like we are lost. But it might come out in ways such as I digestive issues, or anxiety or depression or menstrual cycle disorders like that kind of thing. Those are the physical things that I look for, that's letting me know, they're in herself and their higher self is not actually showing and it's screaming at them, calling your attention. And so that's where it is that I've created this, this business in a way of being able to guide women and being able to see who she is and then being confident and expressing that. So if that is you and you're like, I'm driving, I'm digging her. Totally Come on in. My website is Denise dia hilton.com says D and I see EAA Hilton h l t o n.com. That's my main spot. And it's also a denisa Hilton on Facebook and LinkedIn. That's where I'm most active. Betsy Furler 37:01 Awesome. And do you see patients via tele medicine or only in person? De’Nicea Hilton 37:07 And do telemedicine? Definitely Yes. And I actually have completely separate programs where it's not like you would have to be a patient to quote unquote, but you can totally be a member and be someone that I consult with. So that's how I do my holistic play consulting. And I just bring in the knowledge and the skills from practicing as a doctor of oriental medicine and applying it in this way. Betsy Furler 37:33 Awesome. Yay. So that is great information that will be in the show notes. And it has been a pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you so much for being willing to do this. Hey, thank you so much for holding the space for people like us. Yes, and to my listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in today and please share the episode please rate review, subscribe. To the podcast on whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on and I will see you all soon.

The alcohol industry is worth more than $250 billion in the United States, but the bulk of that money is being raked in by the biggest corporations and distributors with very little room for independents to break in. But Haus has found a way to be a disruptor. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Haus founder Helena Price Hambrecht hopped into her recording studio (AKA her car outside the Haus warehouse) to explain how her small aperitif company has taken advantage of deep industry knowledge, organic growth, and the complete ownership of the supply chain to build an Ecommerce-based alcohol experience that the younger generation is embracing.  3 Takeaways: Adding educational elements to every touchpoint is key to helping customers get the most out of products  Now is the time to invest heavily in the product because it is only with a good product that you can have truly excellent organic growth There are risks involved with being a fully vertical company, but the reward is the ability to be nimble, have a laser-focus on product development, and allow the ability to adjust to supply chain curveballs with ease For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Stephanie: Welcome everyone to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles. And today we're joined by Helena Price Hambrecht founder at Haus. Helena, should we call this a happy hour episode even though it's only 11:00 AM. Helena: Every hour it can be a happy hour. Stephanie: I think so too. So tell us a little bit about Haus. I was looking into it and it looks like a really fun brand and it already was getting me excited with some of the new products you were launching. I think one of them was called Lemon Lavender that, like I said, I was ready to order at 11:00 AM. So I'd love for you to detail a bit about your company, and your background, and how you started it. Helena: Yeah, so Haus is an alcohol company. We launched with me and my husband. We co-founded it together. His name's Woody. We live on a farm in Sonoma County and we joke that it's very much the product of a techie marrying a wine maker. And our goal is to create the next portfolio of alcohol products that reflect how our generation drinks and what they care about in food and beverage. Stephanie: Very cool. And how is Haus different from other spirits brands or liquor brands or wine? Helena: Oh God, where do I begin? I think it's interesting because most people don't realize that alcohol can be better than it is. Right? I think alcohol has gotten a pass for a long time because it's a vice. And I think people can just assume, "Well, it's bad for me. So doesn't ultimately matter what's in it because it's just bad." And corporate alcohol has kind of run with that for a long time. So a lot of the products that you're drinking are worse than you think. You're feeling bad, you're feeling hung over when you drink and you think it's just because it's alcohol, but alcohol is only a tiny piece of that puzzle. Helena: In reality, corporate alcohol is made with things that you just wouldn't believe, take wine for instance. You can intervene in your wine production with milk, and eggs, and clay, and fish bladders, and artificial flavors, and tubs of processed sugar. You can engineer it to taste good, but it's going to make you feel horrible. It can be made with grapes that are full of pesticides. Your favorite whiskey might be full of petroleum-based, caramel coloring. It's kind of a racket. And we're a generation that's cared about where our food comes from, where our beauty products come from, is it organic? Is it locally processed? Is it responsibly made? For some reason, alcohol has gotten a pass and we wanted to raise the bar. So we approach things very, very differently. Stephanie: Very cool. So it seems it'd be very difficult getting into the alcohol industry. I was reading a little bit about the three tier system where distributors and bartenders are the gatekeepers and they tell you what to drink. How did you have the courage to get into that industry? And then how were you actually able to become the only direct consumer spirits brand? Helena: Yeah, so I mean, it's really Woody, right? I used to work in alcohol industry, but as a bartender. I wasn't really deep in the production side of it until I met Woody. And Woody is a great farmer. He's been running the family's grape farm for the last decade and he also makes wine, and was making aperitifs when I met him before Haus. And he was doing everything right as a independent wine and spirits guy. His products were in the best bars and restaurants in America. They were in the best cocktails in America. Helena: But because of the three tier system, which is pretty much controlled by corporations, you don't have a lot of leverage as an independent brand. So you don't really have control over how your product is used and Woody would just find that he was a little sprinkle in a fancy 10 ingredient cocktail. So while he could name drop his full accounts, he wasn't moving any product, the drinker had no idea who he was. I was observing this and thinking, "Man, this is not a great way to build an independent brand." And the more and more I got to know the industry, the more I got to know the three tier system, which it's a hundred year old prohibition era laws. Helena: For those who don't know the tiers, which I would assume you don't, it's just distributors, producers, and retailers. So if you're a producer, you have to go through a distributor to get your product into bars and restaurants. And then bars, and restaurants, and retailers then sell to the drinker. Unfortunately, the way the laws have been designed, it's actually allowed corporations to just be in cahoots with distributors. So corporations ultimately decide what you're drinking and it's why you're still drinking Jack Daniels, and Gregger's, and Absolut and you've not really heard of any other brands that are playing in the liquor space. Helena: So for us, we didn't know that there was a way to go around the system. And I started doing research because I was curious about just how our generation was drinking, what were we looking for out of alcohol? Because I was certainly looking for a better alcohol experience. And I saw a huge opportunity. Like I said earlier, millennials are looking for better made products. They care about their health, and their image, and authenticity, and transparency, and convenience. And when you looked at what alcohol was doing, it was almost nothing. So I was really complaining to Woody about this, saying, "Gosh, what a shame that you can't build independent brand, like a Glossier or an Everlane of alcohol because of the three tier system and you have to go through the distributors." And that's when I said, "Actually, there's a loophole that I never thought about until this moment." Stephanie: Dun, dun, dnn. Helena: Yeah. If you're an aperitif, you're typically in the liquor category. You're federally regulated like a liquor. You can't sell direct to consumer. You can't go online, but if you're under 24% alcohol and you're made mostly of grapes, which is a loophole you would only know about if you're a great farmer who makes great base aperitifs, you can go around the loss, you can go direct to consumer, you can sell online. And it just had never occurred to anyone to use that loophole to build a direct to consumer alcohol company. Stephanie: So no one else in the industry found that out until you guys did and you're the first ones to actually be able to sell to consumers directly because you leveraged that loophole? Helena: Yeah. And you know what? We thought that we'd stumbled upon a treasure and that, "Oh my gosh, when other people find out about this loophole, we're going to have competition, which would be fine." But when we were pitching it to folks in the alcohol industry, they thought it was a stupid idea. They could not understand why we would want to go direct and why we would sell online. People are so used to doing things the way that they've been done forever and they just couldn't process that we thought that we could just go on the internet and create a brand and sell something to the drinker because it had never been done before. Over and over and over again people were just like, "Why would you do that? That's stupid." Stephanie: Yeah. That's awesome. And this loophole also lets you guys have a brick and mortar store, right? Whereas you would never see a Jack Daniels store on the streets of New York. But you all could open one if you wanted it to, correct? Helena: Exactly. Yeah. We could open two different brick and mortars in California today. It's state by state. Every state has different laws and it's still kind of a nightmare to navigate. But yeah, we can do so many things that other brands and liquor space can't do. We can be sold without a liquor license. We can sell online, we can do a wine club style subscription service. There's just this whole world that opens up to us. And we were the only people that decided to try it. Stephanie: That's amazing. So what was the first steps looking like when you started Haus and you were thinking about building the website and the experience, like the buyer experience? How do you think through designing that process for consumers who have never done that before? Helena: Yeah, and that was the challenge, right? It's like as a brand, one thing we had going for us was we weren't just two people in class who had an idea and had to create a backstory. The backstory was there, right? We were people trying to solve our own problem and a problem that everyone we knew was having and that was great. And we live on the farm and we make it ourselves, and all of that's hopeful as a brand. But the real challenge that we had was how do we take this type of liquor aperitifs, which has been in Europe for over a century ... it's a style of drinking that's very common in other parts of the world, but is relatively unknown in America. How do we take this type of liquor and make it mainstream? Without having to pitch people in person just through the internet, how do we very quickly educate people on what this is, the problem it's solving, convince them to buy it, get them to get their friends together and drink it together? So that was a challenge. Helena: But for us, our goal was to just approach it as education, right? And bake education into as many touch points as possible, not just through copy on the website, but through photography, through editorial, through different touch points post-purchase, in the packaging. It was really about how can we make the most of every single touch point that this customer has with our product so that by the time that they receive it, they deeply understand it and where it lives in their life. Stephanie: Yeah. I could definitely see the difference from your photography versus a lot of other e-commerce companies. I could see that you were teaching the buyer how to enjoy Haus. I think one thing I saw was as you went from page to page, you had a couple images flash showing how it's being enjoyed at the table, sitting on the table with a bunch of friends. It was very different than the typical product images with the white background and no one really having a good time with it. How did you know to utilize that imagery to encourage that buyer behavior to then hopefully spread the word about Haus? Helena: Yeah, that was a very conscious decision. So my background's in brand. Before Haus, I had a production company that did everything from visual brand strategy to producing commercial campaigns including photography. So when we thought about photography for Haus, first things first, I didn't want to do what every other direct to consumer company at the time was doing, which was product on a plain colored backdrop, very simple, very polished, very digital looking. It didn't feel right for us because there was no context, right? Haus isn't supposed to live on a seamless backdrop in a photo studio, Haus is supposed to live at your dinner table. And it just felt like a missed opportunity to show the customer where Haus belongs. Helena: And that type of photography of the product on a plain backdrop, that exists for a reason, right? It performs well in paid. It's very straightforward. People can physically see what they're buying. And, in an era prior to now where paid drove most direct to consumer growth, it makes sense that people use what performs well. But for us wanting to grow organically as much as possible, we didn't care so much about that sort of metric and for us the priority was way more about how can we use this opportunity to just show people exactly what they should be doing with the product. And that's really how we approached it. Stephanie: That's awesome. And are there certain metrics or data and analytics that you look at to see what's performing well and what's not or how do you think about success when it comes to utilizing a different kind of buyer experience? Helena: Yeah, I mean, in the beginning up until December we were 100% growth. And that's hard to measure, right? There's no real way to examine where those customers are coming from. There's not a whole lot you can do with that data, which makes it very daunting for most companies to pursue. Right? Stephanie: And you said a 100% organic growth, right? You cut out there for a second. Helena: Yes. Stephanie: Okay. Got it. Helena: And now we're experimenting with paid and now about 20% of our customers come from paid. But for us, we're still a primarily organic company. So I think for us it was more of a philosophy and some hypothesis around our product and how it could spread, right? Our product is something that is inherently shared, right? If you're having a drink, you're very likely having it with another person, you may be having it with a group of people and that's certainly the customer that we were going before. So for us, we wanted to make sure that the product and the customer experience was so stellar, which sounds common sense, but it's not necessarily, especially when you have limited resources that you have to put into certain buckets. We put everything into product and everything in the customer experience so that when people received that product, they gathered their friends together, they shared it with their friends, they all had an amazing experience together, and then all of those friends went to buy a Haus. So that was this organic flywheel that started taking off. And our growth was through word of mouth. Helena: We also prioritized press quite a bit. My first career was in PR, running comms for startups. So I'm a big fan of working with press to tell your story because, you can tell people what to do all day, but people are going to really listen when someone else tells them to go buy your product and that it's great. And press is also hard to quantify, right? A lot of press doesn't actually tie to purchases. It's more of a long game of having this validation and the customer being able to come to your website and see that the New York Times, or GQ, or Vogue said that you were good. So it's one of those things where a lot of what we pursued in the beginning birthwise was really hard to quantify and it was also kind of long game. So I think it rests outside of the comfort zone of a lot of founders and a lot of growth managers because of that. But it worked so well for us and it continues to work well for us. Stephanie: Yeah, it definitely sounds like it. How do you think about leveraging press? Because when I think about that, it seems like there's a lot of agencies and companies who are ready to do a PR release and tell you that they're going to get you press. But then afterwards you're like, "Oh, what did it really get me?" And a lot of people maybe can't get on the Vogues and the bigger name brand sites like that. How did you pick out strategic places to be seen and found? And how did you even get those relationships to get that press? Helena: Yeah, I mean, it takes time, right? There's plenty of people that I wish were writing about us and they still haven't. But for us, my philosophy since my early '20s when I was doing comms is like you can't expect anything from anybody immediately, right? Because even if the person writes about your beat, even if it's obvious that they would find your product interesting. You just don't know what they're going to be writing about for the next year. And maybe they're not going to be writing about anything where you're particularly relevant and maybe they don't break news, maybe they're writing trend pieces. A lot of the media relationship building that I've done over the last decade and that we continue to do with Haus is about just getting on people's radar and not wanting anything upfront, not being so transactional about it, and just saying hello, sending them some information about Haus or your company, sending them samples of it, any new products as you release them. Helena: There's a lot of parallels I think between media relations, and fundraising for those who have fundraised where building relationships with investors is similar, where a lot of times it's just reaching out over and over, being like, "Hey, hope you're well, remember that thing that we said we were going to do, we did it. Check it out. It's pretty cool." And not expecting anyone to immediately do something about it, whether it's write you a check or write a piece about you. If you have news to share, you can always pitch it and formally ask if they're interested in writing about it. Helena: But I think approaching it more casually and again, really thinking about the long game, helps forge a more authentic relationship as well, where they are people and if they're interested in your space, you probably actually have a lot in common, you could probably be friends. And if you just treat them as a person who's interested in a space that's similar to you, then it's just going to be a much healthier relationship versus only reaching out last minute when you want them to write about you right now. It's just not going to happen. Stephanie: Yeah, that's such great advice. Be persistent, but don't be annoying. So how do you think about selling something on a website that a lot of people want to experience? I know you just mentioned samples. Do you see samples working well to get people to come back and buy? Because I've heard mixed experiences with that from a few of the guests we've had on the show. Some people completely took samples away because it wasn't working. Other people said it worked well. What's your experience with having the buyer be able to try before they go too deep into the buying experience? Helena: Yeah, well, we don't actually do samples for our customers. We have a starter kit that are two smaller bottles of two of our flavors that people can buy. And that's definitely a popular first purchase. I think for us there was a risk to selling smaller form factors direct to consumer, right? Like the margin is lower, it's just not a productive purchase from a business standpoint. But we released those smaller sizes because we saw a behavior where when people would buy even one larger bottle of Haus, they would come back and they'd buy more. Their next purchase would be two bottles or six bottles. So for us, there was that confidence because we had the data that showed that people that bought that first smaller size, they would come back and they would buy something bigger. So that's worked for us. I think if we were losing money on it, we wouldn't do it. But we still make a decent margin on our small sizes. So for us, really the challenge was how can we give people the best idea of what they're going to experience? Helena: And part of that was us being really thorough on the site, just explaining the kind of flavor components, what they can expect, showing the ingredient list, showing the nutrition facts. And then reviews have also been really useful for us where we work with Yoko. And for that it's been great for someone who's on the fence to go and read from 50 people who tried the product and liked it and talk a little bit about their experience. But ultimately, it's still a challenge for us. We're exclusively an online company. This is kind of a great problem to have. It's a problem that most companies want. But when we last looked at our newsletter, 70% of our newsletter subscribers who open our emails, and read our emails, and love the brand, they haven't bought yet a Haus yet. So it's an interesting phenomenon where people like the brand, and they're interested in it, and they're thinking about trying it one day, but they just haven't pulled the trigger. Though what we've seen with COVID, a lot of those people are starting to pull the trigger. Stephanie: Got it. And what are you including in your newsletter because that's unheard of to have a newsletter for a brand where people love the newsletter, but maybe haven't tried it yet. What kind of content are you putting out there that's pulling people in so much and how are you thinking about converting them in the future? Helena: Yeah, I mean, it's nothing crazy, right? It's not like we've built some robust editorial platform. But we share recipes, we share behind the scenes, we share occasionally elaborations that we do with other brands or people in the food and beverage space. It's nothing that's too robust. We haven't put a ton of resources into the editorial side of our business yet, but we are very careful to not be too promotional or too self serving and really make it something that people are going to enjoy looking at and enjoy reading even if they aren't actually drinking Haus right now. Stephanie: Got it. That's awesome. Are there other brands in the e-commerce space that you look to, to either learn from? I know I read that you've described Haus like the Warby Parker of booze, so are there people that you are inspired by, that you test out maybe different website models or AB tests or what are your content that you're releasing that helps iterate that? Helena: Yeah. Oh my gosh, it's so many, right? Like the Warby Parker analogy came from Luxottica outright who Warby ultimately disrupted and Luxottica feels very similar structurally to what you see in the alcohol industry. I mean, Away is one of the kind of OG brand branded did such an incredible job of building a movement and building a community around something that wasn't considered very sexy prior to Away. And they did such a great job with curating content and working with their community on photography and they did such an incredible job. Glossier does an incredible job. I love that they started editorial first and they really focused on building a community that was very, very different than what you saw in the beauty community. And they utilize channels in a very different way than other beauty brands did. And that really came to help them. I think the bottom line is really focusing on creating content that serves the customer and makes them really excited to participate with your brand. And for every brand, that's different. But it's finding that thing that gets your customers really, really energized and engaged. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. Are you focused on a certain demographic or are you trying to pull maybe a demographic who's always been used to going after the name brands, are you trying to also pull them away and try something new? Helena: Yeah, I mean, our initial demographic was a hunch based on us, on our own personal use case and how we came up with Haus. We made it for people who drink quite a bit, and they're out and about, and they're building their careers, and they're networking, and they're at events, and they're catching up with friends, and they're going on dates, and they're around alcohol a lot. Right? Like we're not going for the kiddo person. We're not going for the super, super health nut, we're not going for sugar-free people, we're not going for people who are trying to get sober. We're going for people who love to drink, but they have certain values that they apply to other industries like food, and beauty, and their clothes and they just didn't know that they could have those same standards for alcohol. Right? Helena: And those people, our hunch was that they lived in urban areas, large and midsize cities, they were career focused, they were probably millennial though the age range extends beyond that. Gen Z also exhibits the same kind of behavioral demographics and they're starting to turn 21, definitely early adopter types have some sort of aesthetic sensibility. And we had a hunch that there would be overlaps between us and other direct to consumer brands. And so far that seems to be correct. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. So something else that's really interesting about your company is that you guys are a fully vertical company, so you own everything from the production to the distribution. Can you speak a little bit towards how that gives you an advantage when it comes to launching new products and how you even came about thinking like, "I'm going to do everything." Instead of going with a more traditional model of sourcing things. And I mean, you said stuff came from your farm, like the ingredients and whatnot. That's insane from thinking about how other alcohol companies do things. So I'd love to hear a little bit about that. Helena: Yeah. It's not normal for alcohol and it's not normal for direct to consumer, right? Take Warby Parker for instance, who's like the OG in the direct to consumer space. I mean, take most direct to consumer companies. The advantage to being direct to consumer in the beginning was not owning your supply chain and being able to go and work with vendors that you own the brand experience and the purchasing experience and you're able to take a brand and make it a thing. And, and so for us, we wanted to take a very different approach for the most part because we knew how to do it, right? Like we're good at it. We make aperitifs already, we have the warehouse, we have the farm, we have the infrastructure. So we didn't want to outsource that to anybody else. Helena: But we also had a hunch that being fully vertical would give us a huge advantage from a product development standpoint. We could super nimble, we could iterate every day if we wanted to based on customer feedback. We could launch new products quickly, we can kill them quickly. We had a lot of abilities that other companies wouldn't have. And then we would also be prepared for any sort of supply chain curveball that comes our way. Right? The only thing that we don't personally own is making physical bottles. So we always have to make sure that we're prepared and have inventory for an inflection point. But everything else we do ourselves, right? We make it, we bottle it, we ship it. Helena: And so for us, we of course never expected a pandemic sized curve ball, but it was the ultimate test, right? And we're one of the few companies that haven't been impacted at all by the pandemic and we were even able to release a ton of new products during the pandemic. So it's one of these moments where we made some philosophical bets early and we didn't know how exactly it would benefit us, but we had a feeling that it would longterm and it's benefited us in a massive way now. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. It seems like it's very opposite from what a lot of brands and companies and e-commerce companies are doing right now where everything's about outsource that and only take care of the front end part of it. So it's really nice hearing about someone jumping in and doing the whole process. Are there any learnings, or best practices, or failures you've experienced when setting that up? Helena: Yeah, for sure. I mean we've definitely made some mistakes on the production side, but the beauty of it is if you accidentally leave a hose open and the product pours out all over the floor, you just start over and you make it again. I think for us, the biggest learning curve was the one part of our supply chain that we didn't own, which was bottles. And again, this industry has its own politics. It's pay-to-play, it helps to be owned by a corporation. And so it took us some effort to be taken seriously by a bottle vendor because we were a new brand. We didn't have the backing of Diageo or Pernod. What were they to expect us to do? Right? Even if we were like, "We're going to be big." How are they supposed to believe us? Helena: So we were sold out for most of the first two months of our existence because we just couldn't get bottles. They just wouldn't take us that seriously. And it got to a point where we had to say, "How big of a check do we have to write for you to believe us?" So the downside of that is you have to buy more bottles upfront than you may have wanted to. But again, in a time like this, during a pandemic, we're really happy to have made that. Stephanie: That's great. So when it comes to the pandemic, I saw that you were able to quickly shift where I think your profits were going. Do you want to speak a bit about the initiative that you have going on and how you were able to quickly pivot because you own the entire process and supply chain? Helena: Yeah, the pandemic has been a roller coaster for everybody, us included. In February, we saw that it was calming and potentially already here, which it was. So we had to do worst case scenario planning, right? Like, "Okay, what if the economy bottoms out? What if nobody's buying anything? What if like every direct to consumer company burns to the ground?" So we did a deep dive in our P&L and we cut a lot of costs that kind of felt more like nice to have versus must haves. We luckily didn't have to fire anybody, but we wanted to just make our business very core, very nimble and that ended up being a good decision regardless. Helena: But pretty soon after, our business started growing and that's due in a large part to e-commerce growing, it's due in a large part to alcohol growing. We happened to be the one alcohol company that directly delivers to your door and the press started writing about us because of that. So there were a lot of domino effects from being in this space. And we were also starting to see a lot of efficiencies around paid, so we were putting more money into that. There are a lot of things factoring in, but long story short, we were growing, like our business right now it's up more than 500% than it was in January. Stephanie: Congratulations. It's amazing. Helena: It's crazy. And so for us, obviously that was a huge relief knowing that we didn't have to let anybody go. We could continue building the business. But there was definitely a question of this pandemic is way bigger than us, right? It's something that we're all going through as a society and it feels a little strange to be wholly focused on yourself, especially if you're doing well. And so for us it was really thinking about the rest of our industry, right? We're in food and beverage and not everybody is faring as well. Restaurants in particular, they are in huge trouble. They're a very low margin business. They're a labor of love. They are a beautiful industry, but largely they're traditional, right? And they don't have alternative revenue streams. They're serving only local walk-in patrons, so they're in huge trouble. Helena: And we took a step back to really think about like, "Okay, we could just launch a campaign or something like that." But that didn't feel right. There was too many of those already out in the world and it just felt overwhelming. So we thought like, "We have infrastructure, we have a warehouse, we have a production facility, we have resources, physical resources. How could we use the tools that we have to help others in our industry?" And pretty quickly we realized if we ... obviously we had to test it with them and see if they were into it, but if we made a product for restaurants, like if we made booze with these restaurants, use the chef's vision, the chef could direct it because that's very important to a restaurant. They don't want to promote someone else's group product. Helena: We could make and ship booze for them that's their recipe and we could donate the profits to the restaurant, which is a healthy margin. We could make a significant impact on their business. So we tried it and we got signed on from a bunch of the best chefs in the country, partially because of our connections and connections of our investors and our friends. And now we're making 13 new products this month. And we're sending a lot of money to restaurants. I think at this point, we've probably sent like $80,000 to restaurants and we're still in the preorder phase. So it feels good. Stephanie: That's great. Is this the first time that you've had someone help influence the ingredients to create a new product? Like you're mentioning how the chefs are creating their own. Is this the first time you're trying out this model or have you always had help from the industry when it comes to new products? Helena: No, Woody's done everything himself. So what is this magical man who is such an artist and he has a vision and he's really, really good at making wine and aperitifs. So all the products were his vision and then this is still very much a collaboration, right? It's like these chefs don't have experience making alcohol, so they talk to Woody, they share their vision, right? Like what they would love for it to taste like and ingredients that they would like to feature. It's a very similar collaboration between a chef and their kitchen, right? They give the vision, the kitchen executes it, and it's similar here where Woody can take that vision and then he can play around with the recipe and different combinations of ingredients to get somewhere that he thinks is up to par. Then he sends those samples to the chefs, the chefs give some feedback, whether that's like, "Oh, it could use some more acid." Or, "Maybe a little sweeter." Or, "I'd like to taste more of this particular fruit." And then and then it's done. Stephanie: That's great. Do you see that kind of partnership continuing even after the pandemics done? Because it seems like a really nice way to have like UGC content or alcohol created for you and then creating those partnerships could only help scale all the different products that you have with the help of other people who have a specific idea in mind. And then you have a buyer from the start. Helena: Oh yeah. It's a win-win for everybody, right? It's like these restaurants have a new form of revenue, which is great. It allows them to monetize their audience, which is for the most part national or international. They're just collect revenue from a much, much bigger group than they could four. And we've made these products, they're so good. These are incredible aperitifs. It feels like a new frontier for alcohol in America. It's really exciting. And so for us it's great that we can collaborate with these chefs to make these really unique recipes. So I wouldn't be surprised if we added most of them to our permanent store after the project is over because they're just awesome and this makes sense. It's a win-win. Stephanie: That's really fun. So to zoom out a little bit, go a little higher level, what kind of trends do you see coming to the e-commerce industry or what are you most excited about right now? Helena: Yeah, I mean, I have a feeling that there's going to be a new level of scrutiny applied to direct to consumer, right? This is a real moment of reckoning for a lot of companies where if you can't do business for a month, you have to shut down or you have to lay off a majority of your workforce. It's probably not great that supply chain is so fragmented right now. And I think there's also at the same time a bit of brand fatigue that was already happening prior to the pandemic where there's so many direct to consumer companies being made right now where the founders don't actually have much expertise in the space. Right? They just had the idea, they were able to get venture capital because they're connected in that world, and they were able to launch a company. And they can put all that money into pay it, and they can acquire a bunch of customers. Helena: But the problem with not knowing your space is that you're not able to iterate quickly. And it seems like we're about to enter a world where we just don't know what curve balls we're going to see. Right? Like international trade is a bit testy right now. We may see people become a little bit more nationalistic in terms of supply chain. We don't know. So I think at the very least we're going to see more money going to founder teams that have at least one founder with deep, deep industry experience, whether that's a generational family heritage or whether it's a decade plus of experience in the industry because you at the very least need the connections on that side of things to have leverage, right? You may not have to own it all yourself, but if you don't have any real leverage in that world, then you're toast. So I think that's going to impact a lot of what brands, not just survive right now, but what brands get funded in the future. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. It definitely feels like we have been in an environment where it's like just try and create a quick MVP and see if it works and if not, go on to the next one and keep trying until you find one that maybe works. And I think that's a really great point of you should probably have some kind of deep expertise in whatever you're going into. Because one, you have to love it for a long time if you're going to actually follow through with it and being good at something probably means you're going to have a good business as well. Helena: Totally. Yeah. I mean, it's like, of course it goes good when it's good, right? But at the end of the day, it's not just about product market fit. If you don't have real control over your life business and how your product is made, then as soon as a curve ball hits, you realize you're just as fragile as any other business. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah, completely agree. When it comes to someone either launching a new product or building a whole new business, what's one thing that you would suggest for them to try out based on the success that you've had from your store? Helena: I mean, again, it sounds like obvious, but it's not, I would put so much more effort into product than you may feel comfortable with. It's riskier. It takes more resources. But in consumer, I just don't think that MVP is going to cut it anymore. So in a time where paid right now is performing well, but ultimately we're in a postpaid world. We're in a post soft bank high growth venture capital world. People have to start taking organic growth more seriously. And the easiest way to do that is to have a product that's good, and tastes good, and feels good, and looks good. It's one of those things where it feels easy to cut corners up front, but you really only have one chance to make a first impression. And those first impressions, they carry the weight of viral growth. So I would really put more resources into that than you're comfortable with and it'll pay off. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. And I saw you all doing that in your unboxing experience. Do you want to talk a little bit about that buying experience and how you thought about creating something that would ... you would make something that would be socially shared potentially, like a pretty box, a pretty bottle? I think you were putting different pamphlets and stuff inside that people actually wanted to share. How did you think about creating an experience that would go viral like that? Helena: Yeah, I mean, it's pretty amazing to watch how much the bottle and the box is shared because we haven't asked anyone to share it ever, and it just keeps getting shared. But again, I think for us it was about like, "Okay, all of these touch points are important to the person." Right? Like they're not just buying an aperitif, they're buying an experience. They're buying even a good website experience. They're buying a good post purchase flow. They're buying a good unboxing experience. They're buying a good bottle. All of those things are just as important in direct to consumer as the actual liquid in the bottle. So for us, we put a lot of effort into the glass bottle. We wanted it to look beautiful in your home. We wanted it to feel good. We wanted it to look really tight. Helena: And we wanted the same with the box, right? Woody has a great relationship with a box maker from his many years in the industry. And we were able to do custom boxes really easily with him. And we just wanted to make something that was very simple that fit into as many homes as possible. And just the point where it was looking beautiful, right? The point wasn't to sell the product because they already bought the product, [inaudible] doesn't need to do that. It really was about looking good and making the customer feel good. Helena: And then with every package there's an editorial that comes in and that's more of that educational component that I was talking about where that's another opportunity. Yes, it costs money to make an editorial pamphlet, but in that pamphlet, the customer can learn about me and Woody, they can learn about the farm, they can learn about what appetites are, the history of them, where they belong in the world, why they exist, they can learn a few ways to make a cocktail with Haus. It's this kind of deep wham bam education right in their face. They didn't have to pursue it. It's just there for them. And by the time that they're done reading it, they have a deep understanding of how to use the product and they feel like they know me and Woody, they feel like they deeply understand where it comes from, and we didn't have to do anything. Right? We just did all the work upfront. Stephanie: Yep. Do you personalize that experience after the first time they buy they might get one type of editorial and then when they come back, do you send a different one and do you keep track of how they're doing like how each editorial or unboxing is performing? Helena: Well, we've started only sending editorials with the first order that people make. But we've found that actually people like, "Oh wait, no, I was going to give this as a gift. I want the editorial." So we're still trying to figure that out. Because there's so many people that gift Haus to other people that we've realized that the first order or the second word doesn't necessarily mean that it's that person's second bottle. It might be someone else's first bottle. Stephanie: Yeah. That's a really good point not to make assumptions like that and also just really great developing that relationship. I mean, if I were to see a picture of you and Woody, and the whole background and history, I would feel like I have a personal connection with you where I would want to come back and buy from you all instead of going to a liquor store to buy something from someone that I don't know. So yeah, that all sounds really smart. Helena: Yeah. I mean, it's me and Woody like Haus is me and Woody and it's a competitive advantage, right? There's very few companies where the founders are physically making the product. So we want you to know us because this is our life's work and we're really proud of what we made. And we want you to know where it comes from because that's important to us, so it works out. Stephanie: Completely agree. All right, and these last few minutes, we do something called a lightning round where you answer the question in a minute or less. Let me know if you're ready and I will start firing them off. Helena: Ready. All right. Stephanie: What's up next for the next product that you're going to be enjoying from Haus? Helena: A summer flavor that was around last year and it's coming back for this year. Stephanie: Ooh. Any hints to the ingredients or what that could be? Helena: It's Rose Rosé. People know. Stephanie: Yeah. I didn't know that sounds delicious. Helena: It's amazing. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Helena: Ooh, probably more cooking documentaries. I can't watch a lot of TV. It stresses me out, but I love cooking shows. Stephanie: Yeah, those are very relaxing. What's up next on your Workday? We heard Woody outside your recording studio, AKA your car that's outside the warehouse. So what's he doing today? Why was he trying to get you to move your car? Helena: Woody is trying to move a bunch of pallets of product. They're making a new batch of Ginger Yuzu right now and they're finishing up some prototypes for the restaurant project. I am going to get off this podcast, answer like a hundred more emails and write a bunch of gift cards for people gifting Haus, and then I'm going to do another interview this afternoon. Stephanie: Very cool. All right. In a slightly harder one, what's up next for e-commerce pros? Helena: Ooh. I think it's taking a big step back and reflecting. That is the most important thing you can do right now. Stephanie: Completely agree. All right, Helena this has been a blast. I can't wait to try Haus. Where can we find you and buy some of your amazing beverages? Helena: You can buy them online at drink.haus. And you can follow along with us on the internet @drinkhaus on Twitter and Instagram. And yeah, we hope to send you some booze soon. It's great for breastfeeding, by the way. Stephanie: Yum, I will have to indulge in that. It sounds perfect for me right now. Helena: Yep. Stephanie: All right. Thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been a blast. Helena: Thank you again. Talk soon.

For All Abilities – The Podcast - Adult ADHD and Then Diagnosed with Autism with Sarah Worthy   In this episode, I interview Sarah Worthy. We discuss her life as a child with ADHD and then her diagnosis of autism in adulthood. She discusses how has navigated life and work with the diagnoses and her love of running and video games. To connect with Sarah, please  follow her on LinkedIn (Sarah Worthy).  Please subscribe to For All Abilities – The Podcast! Please follow me on Instagram @forallabilities, LinkedIn (Betsy Furler) and on Facebook (For All Abilities). Go to our website www.forallabilities.com for information on our consulting services and software that enables employers to support their employees with ADHD, Dyslexia, Learning Differences and Autism. Thanks for listening!  Betsy     Thanks for listening to For All Abilities today!    Share the podcast with your friends, they’ll thank you for it!   Get our newsletter and stay up to date! The newsletter link is on our website www.forallabilities.com   Follow me   Twitter: @betsyfurler   Instagram: @forallabilities   Facebook: @forallabilites   LinkedIn: @BetsyFurler   Website: www.forallabilities.com   Full Transcript from Otter.ai    Betsy Furler  0:04   Hi, everybody, welcome back to for all abilities the podcast. This podcast is meant to inform the world of the amazing things people with neuro diverse brains are doing for our world. This is Betsy Furler. I'm your host, and I'm so excited to have my friend Sarah worthy with me today.   Sarah Worthy  0:24   Hi, Sarah. How are you? I'm great, Betsy. Thanks for having me here today.   Betsy Furler  0:28   Yes. So Sarah is also a female entrepreneur. She's founded a SaaS software company, and she's going to tell you all about that. But first, Sara, tell us a little bit about yourself. Give us a little intro.   Sarah Worthy  0:45   It's always tough to do an intro for me. I have been had a really exciting career over the past 15 plus years. Most of its been working inside growth stage technology startups across telecommunications hardware software. You know, the internet is has come out. So I've really gotten a chance to see the inner workings of everything that makes you know today's world possible. You know, I guess that's the nutshell of what I am. I'm also a mom, and a runner, avid, and an avid ADHD spectrum person.   Betsy Furler  1:21   So, tell us a little bit about how you What were you like as a little girl,   Sarah Worthy  1:26   I was everything you would typically expect from somebody who is later diagnosed with ADHD. But nobody ever caught it back then. But I was I was also very smart and incredibly smart. I was in gifted and talented programs. From the time I was in fourth grade. And I guess even third grade I was in a small group in that classroom of two other kids. They did all the accelerated math and things like that. You know, I was also really hyper getting outside running around. I was out catching tadpoles in springs. You know, getting dirty and making mud pies was one of the funniest stories I like to tell from my childhood that kind of segues into how I became an entrepreneur. I was always trying to sell things on street corners, not just the lemonade stand like I did the lemonade stand once I was like, oh, but all the other kids are doing that. So I had been I had a toy sale a cop stopped by and said I couldn't sell toys on my curb without a permit so i'd shipped really nice about it. And so then I had an earthworm fish he said, You know cuz I watch cartoons. I don't know. I was like eight maybe at this time. And I thought well, there's there's people go fishing so and we have a bunch of earthworms in our yard. So I dug up a bunch of earthworms and was trying to sell them not one of them sold by the way. I did put them all back because I was grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and there's no place to go fishing and you don't use earthworms for bait I found out that's just in cartoons. But I was always doing little things like that, that I think were kind of interesting. I definitely had a non traditional childhood and now way. I also grew up with a computer, which you know, for most kids is something today, they're starting to have the, you know, you're not that much different from me. You know, growing up, the internet didn't exist, but I had computers, computer games, dial up modem, that kind of thing. So I was always out there getting into things, really curious about things and exploring them. And I offer all my memories of my childhood are kind of mixed because I also had a lot of trauma, that result that was there from my and not being diagnosed as a kid and I was called a tomboy. I was called a difficult child. As I became a teenager, the meltdown started, and I didn't get a lot of support and that end, but I had my running. I had I was really great at sports. I was really great at school, and I took solace in that and just just plugged away. And then I went off to college at 16 at a early, gifted, talented program up at the Texas Academy, math and science and moved out of the house and from there I Guess I just was an adult and college started. And so there I don't know, is that a good initial story of my childhood I get into?   Betsy Furler  4:07   Yeah. So when did you start running? So you so you know what, I'll just keep the listeners in that. And before we started recording, Sarah and I were talking about running because I've been a person who has literally never run and my wife and I decided that I need to start running now. Because I'm walking a lot during this COVID-19 stay at home and I realized as life becomes more normal, I'm probably not going to have enough time so I need to start running. And I really started walking so much because I was getting so restless being in the house and I do not have diagnoseable ADHD but I am a very active person as far as I love to get out and talk to people do things. I'm always multitasking and doing stuff. So anyway, so how old were you when you started running?   Sarah Worthy  4:56   So well as my mom would tell. It is Running before I was walking   Betsy Furler  5:03   you're one of those you just went straight to the running.   Sarah Worthy  5:05   Yeah. And I was doing that by like nine months of age and and I have some pretty early childhood memories. One of them I was maybe four, and they hit so this is what I was like they had to install these special locks on all the doors to the house that were really up high so that I couldn't leave the house I learned very quickly how to get a broomstick and pop them off. And so again, I was like four and and because I wasn't in preschool in preschool yet and so it's right before then, but I decided to take my dog for a walk to the grocery store one day and you know I grew up in San Antonio nice little area. It was maybe a mile from there wasn't a mile mile and a half. It wasn't that far. But But I walked with a dog I went into the store let the dog tied up outside. I got some gum and a binder I got a kite one of this disposable plastic kites and stuff. And I just walked out of the store I put all five pieces of this chewing gum in my mouth at once. Like I remember this clear as day and got the dog and I was walking away and a police officer in the parking lot stopped me. Because here's this little kid. I just did all this effort. I had no concept of any of that none of this was intentional. It was just   Betsy Furler  6:20   go to the store and you get stuff and then you leave.   Sarah Worthy  6:22   Yeah, and luckily I was really cute as a little girl so I could get away with murder practically I never have murdered anybody. But I could have probably gotten away with it how to try. But But he so he pulled me in the car. And it was so funny. Looking back on it now because I was really like was like, I was a little scared and intimidated, but not like super bright. I still didn't think I'd done anything wrong. I had no concept of that. But he said he's like asking me questions. But he said I'm going to give you a lie detector test and I'm going to know if you're lying and I guess he's used to kids like this or something. But looking back, I realized a few years later, a little older. All he was doing was doing this switchboard thing because he had coffee Cars if you've never seen me inside of them even back then they were all gadget ended up as he's just flipping a switch to this light that would turn red or turned off depending on what he thought I was doing. So he obviously does not lie. That's funny. Yeah, of course, I told him all the truth because I, what did I know better? And so he taught took me in my dog band at home and my parents at this point, were frantic. My grandmother and grandfather were raising me and my grandmother had gone to water the Golan or he was on the phone with I don't know what it happened when I slipped out. But these these things happen all the time for me. But besides always leaving the house running around, the energy had to be going somewhere. And I was very lucky. I lived in a neighborhood where you could go out and do these things. Our cross country team ran the neighborhoods after schools together for training. So I'd remember my childhood mostly being outside running around the neighborhoods and like you and I were talking about, I mean, sometimes I walk it's no big deal. Right? Right. I didn't learn to ride a bike until I was 12. And so, which was a little odd in my neighborhood, all my friends, kids had bicycles. And I actually never had one until one of my friends got a new bike for Christmas. And she sold me her old one for, like, $10. And then she taught she taught me how to ride my bike. And so Wow, so I've ridden a bike every now and then, but I never really became that comfortable with it. So you know, there's always trade offs, I guess, if you spend all your life running.   Betsy Furler  8:26   Yeah, yeah. So So you went off to college at a really early age. And what were you like in college? Were you a more academic time of college kid more social kind of college kids? Like what? What was the college experience like for you?   Sarah Worthy  8:42   Oh, so it was a little bit. So when I was with Tam's, it was a little different at first. So the first two years the Texas Academy math and science is a program that takes in high school juniors through their junior and senior year and you get college AP credit, while simultaneously getting high school credit for the same class. So like I would take biology, hp, with, you know, other college students, but I would get high school credit as well. And during that time you lived in the dorms but every once a month you had to go home to your parents and they had curfews and all of that. So I think it would have been probably a little bit more like boarding school might have been I never went to school, but a little bit like that. And it's really funny because I kept in touch and I've seen old yearbook photos. I was never really you know, I look back I've always felt I I consider myself an extrovert and I really like people. But I really, especially as a teenager was not comfortable with myself. I was dealing with an eating disorder at that time. And I had a boyfriend and I had a few friends but it was a small group of people where I felt accepted no matter what I did. And I was very lucky to have that group of people there because there were a lot of moments during my teenage years when I was suicidal. I never, I never attempted it. But I got really close a couple of times and And so, you know it again it goes. I think a lot of it comes back when I look back. I feel very lucky to have come through that, obviously. But it was certain people incidents like getting into tamps really helped when I was back in a regular school, I was bullied all the time by the kids at school. The teachers all adored me. So it was that I got the teacher's pet. But I didn't understand, especially the teacher, I had no clue about all of these things that apparently everybody else knows. And everybody just thought there was that I wasn't trying or that I was intentionally rebellious or something like that. And not I was like, I just never I felt like I went through that period in a fog. When I got off to regular college after I was an additional department was living on my own. I was actually one of those people. I went to my classes, but then I also had a full time job to pay for things. And so school was almost like my part time activity. You know,   Betsy Furler  10:57   like, Yeah, I was   Sarah Worthy  10:58   I was doing 15 days. Our course loads, but I was scheduling my classes, you know, as much as I could just, you know, two days or three days a week. So I wasn't on campus except for those times. And in the rest of time I was at work. And so at that point, I it, it was more, I think, if you were someone going back to school in your 30s or 40s, you probably have found that college experience, I wasn't drinking, I wasn't part of a fraternity. You know, like, I was going to a lot of therapy at that point to get my eating disorder issues resolved. I got married. So all of those kinds of things that are kind of a little bit different. And I don't regret it at all. I look at a lot of the damage that some of my friends have done in college to their bodies, and I'm like I lucked out.   Betsy Furler  11:44   Yeah, when I was in college, I was hanging out with my three or 400 closest friends and my my best friend from college just found her old calendar from college the other day and it's like she was like Betsy, we went to a lot of parties because so On this calendar, she wrote down like, you know, this party on this day and, you know this party on Monday. Well, now we had our sorority meeting on Monday. So, Tuesday, this party Wednesday, that party Thursday, this party, Friday, that party Saturday, another party Sunday study for whatever tests that and I went to a real academic, academically focused college and obviously, I did attend classes too. But, um, yeah, we, we spent a lot of time like I say, with our closest three to 400 friends, and it's so it's so interesting to me when I hear about other people's college experiences. And, you know, it's another way where people are so different and can kind of still, like, get to the same end point through a really, really different experience. Yeah, well,   Sarah Worthy  12:52   it's funny you say that, I mean, the first, the first year and a half or so after Tam's. I was pre med and just work in school was everything I was focused on, I don't think I went to a single party of any kind during that time. And that was also around the time my grandfather passed away. So it was a really hard time. And I really, I don't think I have any friends from that time in school. And then when I changed my major to philosophy, and in fact, part of like, when I took an intro to philosophy class, which was required for my degree, I just fell in love. And I just I was, like I said, I'm changing my major, I got a business major as well, because I knew with a philosophy degree, I'd never get a job. I was like, I will get a job with this. And so I've got to be practical as well. So I got the business degree as well. But the philosophy classes that was probably one of the best parts of my college years was being in those classes, and debating with other people. And philosophical debate is not like a political debate, and a lot of people don't know right, and I wish they did. I really wish they did. Because a lot of times they think that when I'm, I'm talking about an issue and it becomes You know what, I think As a bloodless philosophical debate, they start to feel like oh, it's conflict or something. But in those classes again, I felt like I was with a group of people that they enjoyed talking about really deep subjects. They enjoyed that back and forth. We were there to learn if you made them if you weren't correct, if the other person had a better argument or made a good point, it was actually very validating to me to be in that environment, because it helped me be challenged and to grow my business classes. Meanwhile, like my economics classes, one of my professors put all of this old tests in the library. So I just went and looked at it. I never I went to none of my classes that semester, just for tests. And I got, like, 100 kids in the class, but I ended up he because he had an attendance policy. I was like, I'll take a B because my time right, you're not ever elsewhere. Right? Because it was it wasn't challenging to me, and I really needed to be in so like with Tam's with philosophy. Like I have always had to be in environments like that where they push me to be better all the time, or I just get bored and I give up and I just, I find something else to do. I played a lot of video games in college, I still do. And a lot of people think of that as a frivolous thing. For me, I've really been able to utilize a lot of my experiences, from video games to make better user experiences in my software, which is something I think we sorely need today in business. It's something that's fun to use, not just, you know, a spreadsheet.   It's not a waste of my time, I guess. I don't know.   Betsy Furler  15:28   So back to the philosophy classes and all of that, and then I want to talk about gaming. And so my small private liberal arts college, all of our classes were pretty much like that. So we would have I mean, I had classes with six people. And, and we would, we would discuss all sorts of issues and very controversial issues at times and I took a lot of religion classes and, and I would say, Well, you know, like to some people in the class very well. rageous statements about religion because I, I believe God loves us all. And so and you know, there be like a kid who grew up Southern Baptist too has a different opinion on that and, and but it was so amazing to be able to sit in those classes and for me to listen to their opinion and then to listen to my opinion, and, and not have a feeling at all if I've got to change you, um, but just kind of learning from each other and taking in all of those different worldviews on all sorts of different topics. And I think it's something that, you know, you and I and other people who had that experience in college or earlier in life can now really take to this climate that we're in now and be able to take in information, synthesize that ourselves and make up our own opinion, and you know, come up with our own opinion on what's happening, but also be able to understand that just because somebody doesn't agree with us It's okay. It's, you know, oh yeah, that that happens in the world.   Sarah Worthy  17:04   And you actually went to the same college my mom and my stepdad went to because you went to Stephen F. Austin, right?   Betsy Furler  17:11   No, I went to Austin college and Sherman.   Sarah Worthy  17:13   Yeah, that's one. Sorry. I used to think I didn't go there. My parents did. But But yeah, no, I didn't know that when Way up north of in the North Texas, right. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's where they went to. I visited their campus once because my mom was taking me up to Tam's, which is in Denton, Texas. And she was like, I want to go visit so we drove up there as part of it. And that was my first trip to Oklahoma. We cross the border at some river lake or something. Yeah, yeah. So I I'm sure that that's partly where I get some of this because I was raised at home. And there was a lot of fighting between my mom and stepdad but my grandparents, not at all. But my mom was very open minded, very liberal, very much willing to sit down and have that kind of discussion with you on something thing is she always called herself a Christian Buddhist kind of, you know, so yeah, I just I just want to throw that in. I think that that's one of the reasons why you and I get each other. So it is exactly what we need today. You're You're very much correct there. I think too much of today's political environment is being right. And in your opinion, rather than understanding reality, and this is why I love philosophy, philosophy is something that allows you to see that there are, there's one reality that we all share and connect to it. And we perceive it differently from one another. And it is in learning about the bigger picture and my my favorite parable in the world is the story of the blind men and the elephant. I don't know if you're familiar with that. You can do blind men and the elephant and there's like a Wikipedia page and all that. But it's this ancient parable and there's slight variations of it. But effectively this elephant is brought to this village in like rural India a long, long time ago. These three wise men, elders who are blind, are brought to see this elephant and experienced the elephant for the first time ever. And one of them's at the trunk. And it's like, oh, it's long and skinny with some moves around. It must be like a snake. And so you hear like, how he's taking the story away. I'm really abbreviating this because we have 30 minutes. One of them's on the leg of the elephant. And he's like, oh, an elephant must be like, a giant tree trunk. And so an elephant must be a tree or something. And then another one is a year and feels how wispy and thinks of it like a fan or something. And, And that, to me, is what we really we need people to be understanding. We're all blind men. And we're trying to discuss one reality that none of us can can see. And that's something that throughout my life has really helped carry my mentality. And it's so important, not just politically but just in my life as an innovator, as somebody who's supposed to go in and meet her in technology. You're not a computer programmer per se. And a lot of my job has been helping get designers and business people and customers and executives and programmers and everything all in a room to agree on something. And I don't think you can do that. If you go in with the idea that you're you're the only way that That's right.   Betsy Furler  20:16   Yeah. And it kind of leads back to the topic of neuro diversity of all of our brains really are different. You know, some of us have brains that fit a little more into the box of norm, but nobody's quote unquote, normal, and by the definition of the norm, and so we all have brains that work differently, and it's so vital to understand that and to honor the different ways people think I mean, I have through this COVID-19 thing, I've had people unfriend me on Facebook, because they don't agree. And I'm not even posting anything political really, I mean, super moderate, but   Sarah Worthy  20:55   you post stuff.   Betsy Furler  20:58   Right? And it's like Okay, like that. That's not about me, them unfriending me isn't about me. It's about how they view the world and that's okay. It's like, that is absolutely fine with me. We all have to see the world in our own way, but I would love it if we could all you know, try to understand the other person's point of view as well, which I think I do think that's what Austin college taught me. And it sounds like then Austin college taught her mom that and then she raised you in that way, which makes me feel good about my parenting as well.   Sarah Worthy  21:35   So it's so important and we need we need more of that we need less black and white in the world because if you look around the world is never been in black and white. Although just I was thinking about this. In the middle of the night I woke up and I was like, I have this thing tomorrow before I fall back asleep. And but and I've seen but black and white. I was like, oh, but except at night. Isn't that weird? And I'm looking around my room in the dark. There's a little light from outside and everything is like great night. Have you ever noticed that?   Betsy Furler  22:01   Oh, yeah. And it's really not not Stark black and white even at night. We have Shades of Grey.   Sarah Worthy  22:08   Yeah, but but the thing is everything is still colored. But at night we don't have enough light to see it. And that's what I was thinking. I was like that that a lot of times and that's really where I think when we talk about neuro diversity, there's there's this thing of like, well, just us you can't see it. Like maybe for you The world is Shades of Grey all the time, in your daily life. Like maybe you don't have all these other things like you know, you're not transgender, for example, you just don't know what that's like. And like, you know, and so that's a that's a dark place that doesn't have light on it in your perception of reality. But somebody else has a light shining brightly on that spot and understands it and can see it in full color. Again, this is just where it goes back to the elephant parable. I just think that that's one of the most amazing things about my brain. And it's why I think it's it's really changed my perception have so I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was 20. On.   Betsy Furler  23:01   Oh yeah, let's talk about your diagnosis. And then don't forget to talk about gaming and how you kind of use that. And to cope with the world. So I've talked about, tell us a little bit about your diagnosis. I'm putting the elephant and the blind man story in the show notes.   Sarah Worthy  23:16   Yeah, you'll, you'll love that parable. It's awesome. It's so applicable. And then you can make segues into let's talk about the elephant in the room. It's so funny anyway. So So yeah, I'm, you know, it's funny. I don't know how I didn't struggle as much with my ADHD in college. But I did. I mean, I changed my major three times. It took me five and a half years to get through college. Thank goodness, I started young. And I took a semester off at one point because I was also dealing with an eating disorder at the time, and I ended up hospitalized for a little while and just totally like regular hospital for a week from dehydration and stuff. But then, wow. But then I needed to take some time off and I think I cut a semester down to like the minimum number of hours. So I'll let you take it. Because I was on financial aid and stuff, and I didn't want to lose it. But But I so it was a struggle to deal with it. But I want to hear other people. It's just the worst. But then I was 29 and pregnant with my son. And it was I had a friend at the time that I knew through work, who also had died. She been formally diagnosed. And this was the first woman I think I've ever met, that I probably had met others, but she this is what he knew and was diagnosed and everything and she was diagnosed ADHD with so much in common. And she just suggested one day she's like, have you thought about this? And so I went home and took some because we had quizzes. So I took a quiz online and it was like, Yeah, you're ADHD you should see a doctor. So I took an and I took it, I went to see a doctor, I got a formal diagnosis at 29. And they said it's actually really common for women who are pregnant to get that diagnosis because something about all the pregnancy hormones and chemicals just makes it where we can no longer cope. It All of the abilities are now gone. And so that's when we can't mask anymore. We can't hide it anymore. And that diagnosis was really crucial. I've been guiding said, I mean, I've been misdiagnosed with so many things starting at 16 I was diagnosed with depression. And I was put on like, back to back at least six different antidepressant medications. None of them worked. Some of them made me sleep a lot. It was just really tear it what made me have these hallucinating dreams when I was falling asleep.   Betsy Furler  25:29   Oh, my goodness. Yeah, it was terrible.   Sarah Worthy  25:32   I mean, they were kind of cool. I've never done acid, but I feel like that that drug was basically like,   so So I mean, they weren't traumatized or anything, but they were not helpful. And then it's an after that, you know, I was diagnosed with social anxiety and in a number of other things. The ADHD diagnosis Finally, I think got me on that path. And suddenly I don't talk about too much What about but I'm trying to because it's really important I do this. But then last question. I was formally diagnosed with autism, or one a few months ago. Uh huh. Or a few years ago, COVID time, but   Betsy Furler  26:09   yeah, really. But   Sarah Worthy  26:11   But and I've actually suspected for because of going through this entrepreneur journey, it's real clear that there's something that I don't perceive this happening around other people. And it's never been more clear than during this time as a founder when you're trying to build a team and fundraise and get early customers. There's if you find out every weakness that you have every bad habit, it's all Yeah, you're going through this so true, right? It's all highlighted. And and he's like, I can read. You know, I have Dale Carnegie's book on my nightstand, How to Win Friends and Influence People. The thing is so worn, I've had that thing for 10 years. Most of it still doesn't make sense to me. And everyone loves to read and I'm like, I don't think I understand. And so I and then I saw a movie with Claire Danes about Temple Grandin. Research and then I started reading about actual Temple Grandin and Temple Grandin has this white paper or whatever you want to call it out there about Visual Thinking. And I started reading I was like, that's my brain right there because I live inside my my head. And I, I hate to say this, but I feel bad for the people who can't you know, there's trade offs, but I don't know how I would live without my imagination. I can I can close my eyes and I can create a universe in my mind, I can manipulate models, I can follow all of these different details and in very clear color and sound. And that's how I function and of course social stuff with between people. I'm still trying to figure out that kind of thing. I look for people like you to be my friends because you guys tolerate my missteps and   Betsy Furler  27:52   we have fascinating conversations about like, how you perceive the world and how I perceive the world and what I contact Just like for you and what eye contact is like for me like it's really good so it's really fascinating.   Sarah Worthy  28:07   It will To me it is because all How can you get through three plus decades of your life? Not knowing this? So yeah dancin imagine like, I thought I was just like everybody else and I thought and perceived and sense everything like normal people. But it turns out I don't you know, I don't even know what that means. So it's I'm still in a very overwhelmed like state like even though it's been something where I felt pretty confident in the past couple of years. even getting the formal diagnosis, it wasn't so much a shock to me, it was more of like, Well, how do I tell people because they're not gonna write. And it's been reassuring. I live in data data, my best friend. And I say that because when you are in a position where you're so different from everyone else around you, you need that that internet and that data to see Oh, I'm not The only person there's not something wrong with me I'm just different and I grew up left handed so that might also help because already I was in that small minority oftentimes as the only left handed person in class I got the one beat I got all through grade school was in handwriting and I still to this day protest that grade because not one was left handed. So not one of them knows how to do a left handed   Betsy Furler  29:23   kid. And you know, that was when I my dad is left handed too so I did have some understanding until the lefties but he was old enough that he was forced to write with his right hand and early on a school and then his mother was like, absolutely not. He's writing with his left hand you know, and but then when I have Sam and he was it was apparent from like 18 months old that he was a lefty, and right away, and then you start realizing like everything is like we need left hand as little kids scissors because even though they say they're for both left and right, they are 12 paper and you Get final   Sarah Worthy  30:01   scissors because they stopped like five of them and there's more than five looking people in the city.   Betsy Furler  30:07   Right and then I'm writing his name all over them because they'll steal them right? Yeah. Do not take the left handed scissors and just all sorts of lefty you know baseball golf tennis like you know then you're using like the coach's left is right handed and oh my goodness. Yeah. So yeah, that is it's so different. Being a lefty is so much different than I perceived as a righty. Until I was parenting one. Yeah,   Sarah Worthy  30:34   and that's exactly I feel like right now, the best analogy when we talk about neurodiversity, is that you have right handed people and that's like 80% of the population. But then you saw that 20% of people that are neuro diverse are left handed or that are ambidextrous and in some way and and I think the world of righties doesn't realize it until they have to because and that's like any minority majority relationship. Till the majority is faced with the problem, like personally, they just don't. They just don't have any idea about what the struggle is. But meanwhile the people are in that minority are like struggling every single day. I mean, can openers for God's sakes like, come on. And she has left handed person, you're more likely to die by using a power tool, then as a right handed person. Oh, wow. Yeah, they're curious because they're not designed for us. But it being left handed i think is one of the things that has helped and kind of for me, I think having about 10 years between ADHD and the autism diagnosis, like like having that gap there to adjust, I think helped a little bit. But honestly, I really wish is like, I look at kids today who are getting especially the girls when a girl like Greta Thornburg, I am in all inspired by her story, because look at what she's done, but she had support and she struggled. I mean, they don't go into too many of the details, but you hear the interviews with the parents talking about Yeah, her childhood isn't that easy? Right, but I just think Wow, amazing. If I've done all of this, and I'm able to do so much right now, just imagine if I'd had that support at a young age instead of the struggles, as battles as being disruptive and all that.   Betsy Furler  32:11   And in the support, I think also the support   Sarah Worthy  32:14   of   Betsy Furler  32:16   parents who have that, who know their child has that diagnosis, but know that they can still do anything that they want to in their life, but they might take a different path and having to understand and, and support their child in that. I'm sorry, but if Trump can be our president, an autistic kid is certainly capable of doing anything.   Sarah Worthy  32:38   I mean, look at the world we live in today. Like there's so many people out there and one of the Richard Branson's dyslexic, and he's somebody else I'd greatly admire in the entrepreneur community of what he's done. And it's, you know, it's one of those things where I just look at what what people have done already. There's there's always other knowing that but there's this this cognitive dissonance that people have about Go. Einstein was probably autistic and blah all these you know, Newton or what have all these other people who are geniuses are supposedly like that. But then they're these parents are like, but my kid, he doesn't talk until you seven. He's never gonna make it. I mean, like that's like the most weird thing. Right? Right? I got C's and D's and F's, right until right?   Betsy Furler  33:21   I just went, you don't do well with academic school, and really has no impact. Like, it really doesn't matter. And I have said this on the podcast in the past. So this is a bit of a repeat for my listeners. But I've especially as an entrepreneur, I have had to undo things that I learned that made me a really good student. Yeah. Because a lot of what made me a really good student and just a really easy child to raise. And, you know, I don't mean good students, and with the academic part as much as just, you know, following the rules and responsible and doing what's expected. have me a lot of that. I've had to change my narrative about that in order to be a good entrepreneur. Because once you become an entrepreneur, and like you were saying, first of all, you find out all your faults, because we're none of us are good at everything and, and it suddenly becomes very glaring that, you know, you have, you don't do well in this one area. And but you also have to be able to really stand up for yourself in a way that you've never had to before. I've never had to before and, and really go against the grain of what a lot of people are expecting of you.   Sarah Worthy  34:36   Yeah. And to your point, I think that's exactly why we see I don't I don't think people who are on the spectrum or who are dyslexic or any of the nerd, I don't think we're better entrepreneurs. Compared to other people, I think there's more of us who become entrepreneurs because like you said, We grew up having to go against the grain by just existing like, right There, there was no fitting into the level that that someone who isn't on the spectrum could do. And so it just comes more naturally. I don't want to say now it comes. We're more used to having to do that to get home. So we just do it. And I know a lot of times I've just been very bold and people call me aggressive. I hate that, by the way, because when I'm aggressive, you'll know it, I'll become a weapon and teeth will be there. I mean, like, I say, like, there's a big difference between aggressive and being bold and assertive. Huge difference. So is it but but it hurts when I get called those things, because it's coming from a place where I think, you know, it's those social things. I don't know what to do with them. And it's great. And the best thing about my diagnosis has been knowing that knowing that I don't know that and I have to step more carefully. Yeah, sometimes you walk into, you know, the bull in the china shop thing that's, that would describe you as a child. Perfectly Yeah,   Betsy Furler  36:00   yeah. Well let's you know, so we're getting close on time. Yeah, I'm being going too long but I want you to talk really briefly about video games because so many kids who are on the spectrum love video games and I think they get so much out of it and it's such a positive thing but it's frequently thought of is so negative. So I would love for you to just touch briefly on video games and then tell my audience how they can find you if they want to connect with you.   Sarah Worthy  36:29   Yeah, yeah, so I mean my entire life I've played video games starting to the ones where you're just typing to a terminal go north go west anyone listening who's played this understands these type of games, the rest you know, you can look this up it's, they're long gone. But you know, they're classics. But Nintendo's have been my favorite The Legend of Zelda. I tell this story to everybody. So I'm sure you've heard it too. But like playing the game Zelda growing up and even though I am playing Breath of the Wild right now and I just cannot emit like video games with So far, but the game is Zelda, you know, it's so it's so much easier because in the real world, if you're someone on the spectrum, there's all of these invisible things that you don't know, between people. But in video games, that component has been removed, you know, and so you could go and you you get you talk to a villager and they say, Well, I can't help you save the princess. But I can give you some rubies to help you by a sword. If you find my cow that got lost, you go find the cow and then you talk to another villager and they do something else, you get a sword. And it's this step by step process. And that's exactly what entrepreneurship is like, you have no idea you're suddenly waking up in this world of I'm an entrepreneur on with with nothing and you have to like go talk to people to find out. So I think that it helps when when you are confused about what to do it at least tells you here's just do these things and trust the process, kind of like go talk to people even if you don't know what to say or do. So I think that that helps. But another component of video games I think a lot of people miss is that you know, when you're autistic, you need structure to a level that other people don't because the world is amazingly bright and loud. And it's like being at a rave 24 seven. And that's not exactly an app that's more I'm trying to think of like maybe being in a horse race stadium wall array this going on and there's a football game on or something Oh, just a dog. It just, there's so much and so having that structure, like the quest log, going in order, it really helps you figure out how to move through things. It gives me a sense of count like some days like I'm like, Well, if you know I do all of this maddening things, but then I spend two hours playing this game and I could relax because I I now no longer have to sort out all of these unknowns that I'm going to get wrong. Because being on the spectrum is about making you know way more mistakes every day. Then you ever understood you even made because nobody wants to tell you Everyone wants to Be nice, stop being nice to people on the spectrum Be kind, do not be nice. We hate it. I'm in a group right now write about this all the time. Like, why do they ask us how things are going if they don't really want   Betsy Furler  39:11   to know the answer?   Sarah Worthy  39:14   Right? Like don't ask us those questions.   And so video games provide that kind of thing. But what I love about them in terms of work, since we're wrapping up to is is the way I've seen them progress and you can go in and play these games and explore world. It provides an experience where it's catering to you and what you what you need to do to get to the next step. And we don't do that in today's world, we leave everything completely ambiguous. And I think there are a ton of people who are, you know, quote, neurotypical who could really benefit from a life not not this like completely structured but when you go to work every day, expectations are very unclear and videos. You hear this all the time when we talk about employee engagement managers don't really know what they want. They just want Money and success and so forth. But they don't really know how to lay this out. And when you when you play a lot of games, you start to understand then how to build those mechanics and build game that I haven't made any famous games or anything but of course in my computer classes, I've developed small games and I've thought about how I would do it differently. And it really gives you a perspective on where the world could be much better for everyone if we brought more of those elements in and people are thinking about video games as some sort of negative but you know, they used to when books first came out way long before any of us were alive. They thought books were dangerous, okay, and they frivolous and all of that when television or radio came out people think that and the same person who will spend all day on Sunday just watching football is gonna then in most people watch football also play video games. I'm sure this isn't exactly true, but but you know that the parents are thinking this is going to ruin my kid but it's not that I think some of the gains Like Grand Theft Auto that kind of thing. I think you know, certainly those are for adults. I just and honestly I'm of the mindset that you're you what you feed into your brain just like your body like if you eat junk if you watch junk if you play garbage violent games, then that's that's what's gonna come out of you right? Right and that's that's what you become so it's for me it's more of just I like this was all this one my favorite more I like that. I've always been a Nintendo fan. I'm not plugging Nintendo but I am in right now. I just add to this animal crossing, I just started playing that this last week with my son, and they have something I think everyone on the spectrum should will enjoy this especially the kids because they have these emotion things that you can do with your village neighbors. And so you can express a greeting or delight or laughter or so forth. And so it's it's a I feel like I'm like this game is teaching social skills between people without even like making it an obvious thing. I do get to The villagers all had personalities. And he talked to them too much. They get annoyed things like that. So it's almost like, like, perfect for people like me.   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Connect with Samantha Ruberto:https://www.samantharuberto.com/https://www.instagram.com/hellobeyoutifulpodcast/Join Hello BeYOUtiful's Community:https://www.facebook.com/groups/518783975450354/ Connect with Deidre:https://www.instagram.com/deidresirianni/https://www.radicallyaligned.com/Transcript:I love your brand. I love everything you stand for the radically aligned life. What does that mean to be radically aligned? Ooh, that's a great question. I was feeling into this the other day. So first of all, everything happens in the exact moment it's supposed to. And before we jumped on here, we were talking about birthing something into the world.And so when you're pregnant with something like a baby, you can't push it out at six months or five months or rush it and everything. Great takes time. And so I remember being under this tree in San Diego, um, about a year and a half ago, and I was meditating. I don't remember what I was meditating at, but I was at a Brendon Burchard seminar and a bird pooped on my shoulder.And as the bird pooped on my shoulder, I got the name radically aligned. And so I love it when that happens to me. And it happened to me recently too. So I'm feeling really good about myself. I'm like, something good's about to happen. I love that. Well, they say it's good luck, but I mean, just to love it when you get a bird poops on your shoulders, just like, that's hilarious.Totally. So when I think of radical alignment, there's different stages of it, and I actually have this. This graph that I've been creating to really map it out on our journey and how to really awaken to our highest self and our full potential, but essentially radical alignment is you are radically aligned.It's like the center of. Across, you know, not being religious that the center across, like it's the dead center of the core of who you are. And there's no being off path. There's no compromising. There's no, I'm not sure. There's no maybes. There is no, um, Oh. Um, if this happens, then that will happen. It's a strong knowing that, well, you are.And being radically honest with your path and not compromising and going off path because of distractions, because of old programming, because of what people think you should do because of self-sabotaging behavior when you're radically aligned. You are unstoppable. And these are the people in the world that I think of that are the, I work a lot with up and coming thought leaders and those who have a message inside of them that they know, like they're not quite where they're supposed to be yet.And there's a gap because they're not radically aligned from the outside looking in though they look like they have their life together. They seem aligned, but they know they're playing small. They know that there's something bigger and this is where radical alignment comes into place because the more aligned we are.The quicker we can manifest what we want and the less distracted that we get and the more confident we are. But it's not even a doing. It's the being ness that attracts what it is that we want to have in there. Certain rituals, practices, tools, and um, processes that I take people through to make sure that they've cleaned up trauma, that they've worked through, pieces that are still like the dust that hasn't quite settled in their life to clean that up.So it's like having a. Like a diamond that has dust on it. You know? It's about the polishing. So it's the polishing. It's like you're already amazing. You're already great, you're already rocking, you're doing all the things that you love. But the polishing is in the radical alignment. So I would compare it to maybe a, um, I'm a Lamborghini.Okay. So there's a lot of people who are Lamborghinis, so they're super sensitive. They're super dialed in when they are radically aligned with who they are and who they're meant to be in the world as far as influence, impact, and all of that. But they're operating, they're giving themselves the fuel. Of a Honda.And the truth is if you bring a Lamborghini up to a regular pump, and I don't have a Lamborghini, but I'm pretty sure that you need different fuel, you need different services. And the truth is when you're a Lamborghini and you're in the car and you're out of alignment just a little bit, there's something that's not quite right in, in the system.It throws the whole thing off, it throws the whole path off, and it can actually take you off track with your full potential. So it's about getting people to know that they have six cylinders, 10 cylinders, whatever, instead of two that they're operating on and it opens up the doors for everything. I love that.I love the idea of radical alignment. I want to know the tools, the different things that you would use to get people aligned. The first. I'm going to assume that you haven't always been this passionate and this like aligned even yourself. Like there's obviously a story that sort of got you there. So I'd love for you to share your journey of getting into radical alignment.Wow. So that's a big question. Everything starts at a young age and it's called soul school, right? So we go through all these obstacles. We have these moments of this is who I am when it's not the truth of who we are. And for me, at a young age, when I was probably six or seven years old, I started to live a dual life.So I would go to school and I was a happy go lucky girl, like friends with everyone. I'm had a hard time learning and staying focused in school. Um, and then I would go home and I had a family member that had an addiction. And because of that addiction, it was this space of lack of certainty when I would come home.There was a space of lack of knowing how things would be and also deep concern for that person in my life. And it was a part of my life that I categorized. And we do this as humans. We categorize moments in time. We categorize parts of our life to disconnect from it because we don't know how to process it.So at around the age of six or so that was happening. So I'd go home and I'd have a totally different experience. I wasn't able to speak my truth. I wasn't able to be a little girl. I had to be my own, you know, my own best friend, my own parents in a lot of ways. And so there was this dual personality, do a life.And so this pattern continued into high school. I was the popular girl, I was friends with everyone at school. But I didn't really get too close to any groups. I was the one that was friends with all the groups because I didn't want to let anyone get too close to me because I didn't want them to see the truth that I had something to hide.And then I was taking on someone else's addiction, someone else's behaviors as my own. There's a lot of deep shame and a lot of deep separation from both of those lives. And so naturally, um, when you live with someone who has an addiction or anything like that, or you know, you're in a relationship with someone who has an addiction, um, you can become codependent, which is trying to fix everyone else's problems or trying to support everyone else too.Avoid dealing and feeling what's going on on a deeper level. And also with that, there's also the people pleaser that comes up. I see this all the time with people, and a lot of that comes back to codependency and also having a family member or somebody in your world that has an addiction and addiction, that behaviors as far as how they act is very different than maybe how addicted or how often they go to whatever that is for them.So again, I was the happy go lucky girl. I had one emotion. And it was, I'm happy all of the time. So that continued into my adult hood and essentially I had more trauma in when I was 19 I was raped and didn't know how to process that. So I categorize that again. And I got really good at checking things off of the list, that list of get married, um, buy a new car, buy a house, go traveling together.All of the things. And again, from the outside looking in, it looked like I was the happiest person. Everyone knew I had the perfect life, the perfect marriage. I had a business that was doing well in a lot of external validation for it, but. I was not connected to myself. I was not connected to my truth.And because of that, I was avoiding dealing with the voice that was trying to come up. That was saying, first of all, every time I've reached a goal, I was saying is this it? Like looking around like, is this really what success is? Is this really what love is? Is this really what life is? And that continued to push me to chase new goals.But I never quite felt like it was, it always felt empty. It's like you're chasing these things. You get there and it's like, now what. Yeah. Right. And so I was chasing these pieces of external validation and essentially I was running away from myself as I was running towards a goal. So I kept feeling that way.And of course it led to burnout and other symptoms. But then there was another voice that was coming up and the voice was saying, there's so much more. Yeah, you are so much more capable and powerful. And you know, and I knew deep down that there was something that I was supposed to step into that because of all of the programming, because of all of the disconnect, the dual life, the categorization.It felt like impossible to even bring it into my conscious reality. And so with that, I started to get a lot of symptoms, a lot of manifestations of disease. Because as you noticed, and I know we've Jan about this before, is anytime our soul is not being honored, it speaks to us through symptoms of disease.And. I manifested depression, massive social anxiety, even though I was in front of about a hundred people a day. I have panic attacks. I manifested auto immune disease and what else? And food sensitivities. Stomach pain. Yeah, totally. And so it's like all of these were the universe or my universe, my body saying pay attention.But the thing is. And, and if you're listening right now, and I'm sure you can relate to Sam, it's like when things come up in our body, it's so easy to be like, Oh, well my mom has this, or it runs in my family, or, Oh, I should take a pill for it. Or, Oh, it's just a part of me. There's like this acceptance of the bullshit in our life.You know what I'm saying? 10. And it's like NSC acceptance of the symptoms and the symptoms is a sign that you were so out of alignment with your soul's calling. And I knew this, I was like teaching wellness. Like I knew you back then too, like I was in that wellness space. I own a yoga business and it was, I was like living and teaching a lot of these things, but I wasn't really owning it and embodying it.So I finally had my wake up call. It wasn't any of the things I said before. But was it like an Elizabeth Gilbert moment? Like, did you have a moment where it's like you hit rock bottom with it and you were just like, the universe just wasn't going to let you keep going? Exactly. That's exactly what happened.And so I, so I had all those symptoms. I pushed him away cause I was like runs in my family, whatever, whatever stories as we do, accepting the bullshit of our symptoms and our life. And um, I remember one day, Sam, and like at that time in my life I had mermaid hair. It was down in my hips and it was kind of my thing.And I was going through my hair one day as us girls do, and I noticed, Oh my gosh, I am missing a huge chunk of hair. And it was like on the top of my head, I had a massive bald spot. It was like the size of the toony. Whoa. Yeah. Completely bald. Completely bald. Like right on the top of my head right there.And I just woke up one day and it was like that. And it wasn't like, you know, when you shave something and you can see like, there's like, there's still hair growth, but you know, maybe it was ripped out or something happens. Like your hair was stressed out. It wasn't breakage. It was totally bald. And, and I remember, I remember the moment getting out my smartphone and, you know, um, having the camera on and going in the mirror.I'm like, what the heck is going on here? And it was this massive bull spot. And this was the moment when the universe was like, okay, Dee, we gave you this, we gave you that. We tried to whisper. We try to take it easy on you. Yeah, there were a million yellow flags, but it's going to take this one bread one.And that's usually what happens. Like yellow flag, yellow flag, yellow flag. And we just keep on driving poorly. So I, um, I was super stubborn, so I had to learn things the hard way. And, um, and then so that happened. And naturally natural instinct go to the doctor, what the heck's going on? Fix me? And the doctor said, Oh, well, it looks like you've developed another autoimmune disease.And I was like, huh? And she's like, yeah, like we can give you some steroids or, you know, some shots in that area of your head. But, um, she's like, you're probably gonna lose all your hair. Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's pretty scary. Yes. And they say also like, just going back to, um, people who go through cancer. Um, one of the biggest fears for women apparently isn't necessarily losing their breasts.It's actually losing their hair. It was like a, it was a big fear of mine. I'm like, Oh my gosh. And then I went home. I got the prescription because I was like, just in case I get home. And I was like, this is not going to be my story. This is not it. And I am going to listen. And I thought of Louise Hay's, I thought of her affirmations.I thought of what our body is trying to tell us. And I don't remember exactly what it said in the book about, you know, a bald spot. But I remember being like, it was like self hatred or something. And I chose to be with that, which is the truth, because my entire life. Based on past trauma and you know, living a dual life and checking things off the list.It was self hatred because I was not connected. To my soul. And so I remember talking to my husband at the time and he was like, so not woo, like black and white, like thought crystals were weird. Right. And I like owned that moment. Wow. In that moment was the moment I changed my entire life and my hair grew back. I started studying Mashama's. I've actually been working with shamans for almost a decade now. I started doing the inner work meditation, and what I learned through that journey is that. First of all, I believe, and I can see it in people.Most people are not even living in their truth. So radical alignment feels like what the F is that? And I get it. I was very disconnected and it took, it took me having that moment. To change it. And I know because my soul told me around this time too, that if I did not change my life, I was going to die of cancer in a year and I didn't have cancer, but my body, my soul was like, you are here to do work and you are not listening to your one and we're going to go after your vanity because you like to pretend that everything is great and you can't hide this.So wake up. Wow. But at that said, you probably look back at that moment and you're so grateful, so much gratitude, because I know that this is like what, six or seven years later, I wouldn't be alive. I would not be on this having this conversation with you if I didn't actually have that wake up call and change because I was so deep in it.And when we're so in something, whether it's a relationship or an area of our life where we have created all of these. You know, um, this checklist and we're, we're so in the role, it's difficult to even know that we're in the role because we've been playing the role our entire life. So. I had to wake up. I had to do the deeper work.It was not always comfortable, but it led me down the path of really understanding universal laws.  what our soul's telling us, as well as a bunch of other things, which has led me down this path of radical alignment and and seeing those symptoms in people and helping them break through really quickly.And on that note, I'm heal trauma. As we were talking a little bit about that earlier. Before we jumped on was unhealed trauma, I believe is the root cause of all suffering. Because what happens when we have a trauma? And so I had trauma when I was younger, like coming home and having a, um, a family member, not sure if they were alive and then having to like, not know how to deal with that and, you know, continue just showing up at school and in life and shoving it down.We do that all the time and we don't necessarily need to say we as a whole with humans right. We don't know how to, first of all, identify trauma and essentially it's anything in our life, any imprint that we haven't been able to process. And when we have a trauma, it actually takes us out of our body.Because it's not safe to be in our body. So when we're not in our body, we actually can't be aligned because it's like we're outside of our body. We're not connected to the symptoms. We're not connected to our heart, and we're constantly being triggered by our subconscious from any images, thoughts, body sensations, emotions, and then the energetics of anything that even slightly reminds of us of any of those imprints in our past of the trauma that we haven't fully.Completed because it's like a moment that's frozen in time. So I was triggered all the time, didn't know it, didn't mean that I was upset. It just means I kept taking steps away from my soul. And then I had my big wake up call and had to change my entire life. And in my marriage of eight years, I starting a new business.I started saying yes to adventures all the time. I had a lot of deep work to do and in the realization was the first step. Of course, it's healing trauma. You know, but it's, it's also like what is not me. And when I started to go through that, most of the things, most of the rules that I was living in plane and weren't me.It's not about finding or creating who you are. I like the idea of it, but it's more about who are you not and how is that showing up in your life? That's a really good way to look at it. I feel like it's easy to say, Oh yeah, everything's good, I'm great. Right? But then if you look at the back way, that way, it's like you can get other information about yourself and your situation and your, the people who are in your life or whatever it is, and it's easier to be like, well, is this really me?Is it serving me? Yes or no? And it's easier to let it go. Totally. Yeah. And it's, it's scary too, and, and that's why it's really important. Like, I know for me, when I was going through the process, it took me a few years to actually really take some of those outward steps of creating change. Because first it starts internally and it can be a little messy.But it's like finding the right community, the right support, being around people who get you right. And um, and so that's what led me down this path. And, and I see it in other people and I know that like, we're all here to do something, to create something to experience, love to bring love. And it comes through the foundational piece of being radically aligned.And there's different stages of that. So long story short, I mean. Phones are long. That's good though. Cause you're here, you're living here, you know your radical line life now and you're really holding the torch for other people to do the same. What are a couple of grounded things someone could do and implement in their life that would be really effective in terms of like achieving some alignment, like something that they could do today.I'm just thinking of, first of all, uh, I have a program that's running right now and we're on module two and I want to talk about this because this is exactly what we're sorting out. So I'm, one of the things that I love to do in my life, I do this probably once a year, is I like to create my obligation list.And then also the things that bring me joy. So two lists, and this is a very simple way to see the things that maybe you said yes to that aren't quite aligned. And you go through the obligation list. These are all the things that you feel like you have to do. They have the, I shouldn't be doing this. I have to be doing it, and you do it.You show up for it. But the thing is, because we're so on autopilot all of the time, we don't even know how they feel. So we just do it. And then if we feel like should at the end of the day or we don't feel the way we want to feel or we're not doing the work that we want to do, it's because we haven't taken the time and the space to assess where we're putting our time, energy, and space.So going through the obligation list and saying, okay, who was I when I said yes to this? Who was, I wasn't the person I was a year ago. Is that still aligned with who I am today? Because you know, like we're all evolving all the time, and if we're saying yes and doing things out of obligation based on old version of ourselves, well, it could be actually leaking our energy.It can be pulling us down. So it'd be outdated. Exactly right. And like, I know you sound like you're changing so much every day. So am I. I think about who I was a couple months ago. I'm like, Whoa, I've changed a lot. So it's like it's good to reassess, right? Totally. I love that. Going into the list and looking through them and asking yourself some questions, so number one, when did I say yes to this thing?Who was I like? What were my core belief systems at this time? Because it's important to notice your core belief systems around why you said yes to that thing. And then the next piece is, is it still serving me today? Is it aligned with my values today? And if you don't know what your values are, I highly, highly recommend asking yourself what your top three values are.Because anything that you're saying yes to and you are, is on your obligation list. And I just want to say, having things on the obligation list is not a bad thing. We're all going to have responsibilities and things we show up for, but it's important to know. Is aligned with my values. Does it make me feel the way that I want to feel?And is it supporting my longterm vision goals of who I am and who I meant to be in the world? And if the answer is no, well my friend, it's time to cross that obligation on the list. Maybe have a conversation with someone and say, you know what? I know I said yes to this. Back when and moving forward, um, I have to release my obligation to this and let's sort it out.And that's going to free up so much energy and awareness right there. So what would you say to somebody who's at that point who sees something that they want to cross off, but then there's that fear of actually having that conversation? Because for a lot of people, that conversation. It's like they don't want to hurt feelings, so they don't want to like, you know, it's an uncomfortable thing.So what would you say suggest to do? That's a great question. I was actually thinking about it like, Mmm, people want to, you know what? What do I do with it? Okay. First of all, I think it's really important. Anytime we have anything that we've committed to or bought into of our own, whether it's a belief system, an obligation, or anything else in her life, what is the cost?Okay. What is the cost of not having that conversation? What is the cost of continuing to, um, maybe it's self sabotaging behavior of feeling resentment towards that person or that thing that you're doing. What is the longterm cost. Of continuing to show up in authentically within that relationship or that obligation and the longterm cost for yourself, number one.So what's the longterm cost on your health? On your relationship maybe with that person on, um, you know, the longterm relationship with what you're creating. Like what is the cost? Is it the time? Is it money? Is it your health? Is it your relationships? Because the truth is when we're saying yes to something that doesn't feel good, and we're doing that people pleasing thing, like walking on eggshells with, guess what?We have resentment. And that resentment is showing up in our physical body, our liver, right? Our di, our organs. There's a cost on our health. Our mental health or emotional health, and also we're bringing that negative energy into some of our closest relationships. That could be time that works, stepping away from the things that we love most in, we're probably not showing up as the best version of ourselves.So when you, when you get radically clear and honest and aligned with the costs. I'm saying yes, in that obligation, it's going to be like, Oh my gosh, like I need to have that conversation and there's frameworks to it. It's just like, Hey, so and so like Sam, Hey, Sam. You know, let's play that. Hey, Sam, I know that I'm pro.Let's pretend you're my sister. So, um, let's say that I had an obligation to you and I would, and I've heard this before, you know, I pick up, you know, Sam's kids every and every week, and I hang out with her kids, and that's the time that she gets to spend time with her husband, right? I've heard this before and it's just something I've been doing for years.But you know what? Now I don't have time for this, this, this, this, so perfect example. Hey Sam. I just want to talk to you about, I mean, is that okay? Sure. What's up? Um, well, I really love, uh, taking care of your kids every week. It's been such an honor to do that. They're so much fun. And, um, I said yes to that, you know, a few years ago when I had a lot more time.And I want you to know that I really appreciate the time that we've had together and moving forward. Um, I won't be able to continue to do that. So I'd love to find a way for us to. Shift this to support you, but also for me to have my time back cause I really need my Wednesday nights for this project.So how can we move forward and create that together? Like how much time do you think that you need? Like a few more weeks to sort of a babysitter or something else that's so easy. It just makes it so easy to say yes. Yeah, that's really good. Cause it's really appreciating and seen appreciating the person, but then like looking at coming at it from like a win-win perspective.Totally. And it's the framework of, you know. Brain. It was love. Like, can I speak to you about something? Yeah, of course. Like everyone's open and then the acknowledging of who you were and what you were able to do in the past. So honoring the past, right, and then talking about how moving forward it needs to be different.And that's a very easy framework. But acknowledging the past and who you were when you said yes is really important. Because if you're just like, I can't do it anymore. People were like, well, like I thought you liked doing it. And there's all of these like. Gaps in communication or their stories. Yeah, exactly.So that's what I like to do. And, and um, is that helpful? Does that answer it? Totally. Okay, cool. Totally. And what I love about that too is like even asking the question, cause like you were just saying like if I was just like, Hey Dee, I can't pick up your kids anymore. All of a sudden it's like the defense is up.It's like, well why? Like a million reasons go up there. Whereas if you're like, Hey, can I talk to you for a second? And you come and you're like. Yeah, sure. What's up? It's already like creating a safer container to have that combo. So I love that you just walked us through that entire scenario. Thank you.No problem. And like for you to, like you said, you completely like let go of so many things in order to live radically aligned. Do you struggle with that on a basis, like day to day basis now? Or is it easy for you to just like drop things that aren't serving you. Well at the beginning it was very difficult.It started with really my marriage. That was, that was a big one. And, and it's never easy to end a relationship, especially when there's love there and, and time and all of that. So that was not easy to do, but I knew that it was for my highest good. And. For myself and also for that person, because I know that in the relationship, and this is another thing, I'm going back to the obligation list and that conversation.So let's say that we're going back to me picking up your kids every weekend, hanging out with them every week. Well, if I'm continuing to honor or show up for you, even though I don't feel good about it, it's going to create. Tension in our relationship and it's not going to feel good. You're not going to know why, and I'm going to end up being passive aggressive.That's actually a natural thing with people pleasers. They don't know that they're doing it, but they have passive aggressive tendencies. So when you think about the cost and honoring other people that are involved in these obligations and things that you're letting go of, it's really important to think of what's the cost for them longterm view, playing a role that isn't yours.It's expired. And I really had to look at that with my husband and I was like, you know what? Like. I'm costing him the opportunity to, for him to be with someone who really, really, um, wants to be in it. And it has radically line with him. And I, I'm not that. We didn't have the same values. And so that's why it's so important to your values.So when I left, I knew, yes it was for me, but I also had to really feel into, I want the best for him. And what's the cost longterm for him? Cause he's not getting any younger either. He wants kids and all of those things. And when I could get into that space, it was a selfless releasing. Hmm. To answer your question as far as letting go of things, you know, at first it can be difficult, but every time I do the internal work on myself that I take my clients and people through, I always feel good about it.And the people and the places and the environments that I released, they normally do too. And yeah, there are some people, um, that I've released in the last year, even that I'm like, Oh, this is, this is awkward or difficult because there were people that were close to me. But I will not dishonor my soul.And sometimes that means walking away from things and, and sometimes not having the kind of conversations that, you know, in a perfect situation you would have, but it's about, I will not allow myself to dishonor my soul. And I love that. And that's like where the radical part really comes into it because so many people like will be like 99% in, but then just keep the 1% back.And it doesn't necessarily work that way. It's like you have to be a hundred percent an FPS or an F. No. And that's like essentially what you're saying, you're like. If it's not a hundred percent FES ain't doing it. And, and so with that, with friendships, with relationships, with environments, I have a really tight filtering system of who I let into my inner circle, outer circle, outer, outer circle, et cetera.And it's not saying any one's bad or less than, that's not what I'm saying. It's just about alignment based. People in my inner circle have the same values as me. Um, they can teach me something, I can learn something from them. It doesn't mean that they're like actually my teacher. It means that maybe they're a mirror for me and my bullshit's coming up and I have to clear it.So that's, that's a sole person that I would want in my circle. But there's certain qualities, values, and things that I hold really true to myself in the people that I keep closely and I'm very aware of. Um, what belongs where in my life. And it makes things really easy. Actually. And I love that you keep on bringing up values.I was actually on a call this morning with my friend, my good friend, glow, and we were talking about values in a relationship and I'm like, I had never actually done that with my partner, like asked, what are your three values? Or even like really told him what mine are. So we're actually going to do this exercise where he doesn't know it yet.I told glow and now I'm telling you. And all the ladies who were listening, you should do this with your partners, but like find out, write down what your three values are, find out what your three values are, but then also guests to see what your partner three values would be and then have him do the same or them do the same for you.And then kind of like compare and see even I see the same situation or the same, you know, the same core list of values. I love that. And it's interesting, I was in conversation with a colleague the other day and. And she's been married for a long time and she's like, you know, I was at someone's wedding and, and this man said, you know, the key to happiness longterm is compromise.And, and for me and my being, I was like, Ooh, I don't like that word. I don't like that word. Right? Like by being kind of like tightened. But she's like, no, but I get it. And this woman's been married for a long time and, and she said, you know, it's compromising on the small things but never compromising on your values.And she's like, that's why I've been married for so long. She's like, because we have the same values and we've made an, we've made an agreement, like there might be one or two that are off. She's like, but we never compromise on our values. And that's like why they are so happy in their marriage. Because they can compromise on the small things, but they never compromise on their values.And I feel like a lot of us in our dating relationships or um, our friendships, it's like there's a clash in values and that's where the chaos, that's where the maybe drama or whatever else comes in and it's because values are the foundation of a healthy relationship. Totally agree. Some guys are going to do that.I will see how it goes. Like I'm actually interested, I'm going to make them do it later today. So posted. I wanted to sort of turn the conversation a little bit. We met three years ago at a Tony Robbins fence. The first night we met, we walked on fire together, like legit across hot coals. So fun. And then while I was in New York city, we were in New York city.I went shopping and bought a bunch of really crazy wild outfits because I was going to my first burning man, you know, in a few weeks. And you were like looking and you're like, you know, at the outfits and you're like, I think I'm going to come, and we put it out in the universe. You ended up manifesting a ticket and lo and behold, we had our first burn together.I can't even say it without laughing because it was like honestly one of the most fun experiences of my life, because your first burn is always so memorable. I've been three times, I guess now. But like, it's just like nothing beats the, like the, like sizzle of the first. And so how would you describe Bernie man to anybody curious about it?So first they have to share the whole story. Okay. I mean, not the whole story cause we'd be here for days. So I always ask the universe for signs. And at this point I was getting all these signs to go to burning man, but I was, I was in my bubble a little bit, just got out of my longterm relationship of eight years.And you know, it wasn't super liberated in some ways, and self-express and so Sam, my wild new friend is like, girl, you've got to come to burning man, showing me all the things, and, and then I manifest all these tickets. So I got the ticket in the mail. I said yes. And then I drove down to burning man on my own, and that was an adventure and it's, I'm didn't even know what I was going to wear.I had a bag of like random costumes that my friends gave me, um, got lost in the, uh, on the desert on the way there had a Holy S moments when there was a, a T in the road. There's no. No signs in the middle of the desert, there's a broken gas station to my left. I don't have a map. I'm out of water. Um, prepared spontaneity.You, my friends post-weld on therapist, no cell phone service. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to die in the desert. Like this is not good. It's like a left and it's wrong way. I might be in trouble. I have half a gas, a tank left if I go right. You know, like all the things were coming up and as soon as I felt the feelings.This police car came up and showed me the way, and it was like this universal sign, like D and like, this is for all of us when we say yes to the not just to the poles, um, things figure themselves out and it's cool to be spontaneous and, and so I get to burning in, don't know where my camp is, and it's in the middle of the night that get you to roll in the Playa desk, which seriously took me two years to get out of my car, by the way.Like, like bro, my haunted Elementor right. I'm like, I had it professionally cleaned. Nope, there's still there. Still apply a desk in there. So you roll in the desk to like get over yourself cause you're going to have dust everywhere for the next two years. And I get there and it's like this massive city, but it's, um, it's just like pops out of nowhere and I can't find my camp.And I get there and I look around and there's people on floating bikes, it looks like, cause there's just, all you see is lights. And I just was like, Oh my gosh, everyone's on drugs. Like, what did I sign up for? And I remember the Lance my trunk grabbing a bottle of wine and my sleeping bag reclining my chair in my car, have you a sip of wine and putting my blanket over my head and be like, what did I, what am I doing?Like, why am I here? Right? Like, this is just, I don't know what I signed up for. My friends sounds crazy. And then the next morning I get up and I realize I'm actually parked outside of the camp that we were at. And I'm like, Hey, is Sam here? And one of the guys is like, Oh, she's in that pod. And I remember opening the pod maybe like 10 inches max.Okay. Sam's sleeping right sparkles all over her face, like in her own, like you know, world. And all of a sudden she goes from lying down like she's dead to full on, standing up doing circles around like this pot. Oh my gosh, Deidre, like the Playa dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And I remember just being like, what. Is going on here like this is wild.Like what? What is she talking about? She's talking, you were talking so fast had sparkles all over the place. Probably lipstick on different parts of your face from like just sleeping funny. And I remember just being like, what is this? And then you're like, we have to go to the center. We have to go out on the Playa.I'm like, okay. So we got a bike, and the moment we just started rolling out on the Playa, it was like I got high, this wave of being high from the Playa desk, and I just entered into the magic of it all. And so many synchronicities, so many moments of just pure joy, magic, um, burning. All I can say is that burning man is everything that you could ever imagine.It's all of the lessons at once and all of the magic, and it's just, it's just a beautiful community of, of everything. And, and it was the most spiritual experience I've ever had in my life at that point in my life. And it really broke me open to. So many things from that one experience. I can't even get into the stories of it because it's like, it's not even going to do it justice.It's just pure magic and it's not what you think it is. It's what whatever you need, you're going to get from the Playa. And that's what they say. It's like you go to the place of wanting to have an experience, but you're really going to get what you need and the synchronicities that happen there. It's just like there's so many people that go to burning man that are so open and elevated and just like they just.Go into this vortex of like possibility, and there really is no place like it. There is no place like it, and it's so fun to dress up too, and you're just, it's just magic. And it was so fun to share that with you and for you to show me the way. Oh yeah. We had, we had a way, that's for sure. It was fun. But it kind of even goes back to the thing that you were talking about before, like all of the things that don't serve us.It's like letting go and shedding and like burning. Even like it's symbolic cause like the, they, they burned stuff there. They built these beautiful different like monuments and different places and then you celebrate it, you enjoy it. But at the end they burn it down. And it's like the, the, the idea of impermanence, how things are constantly changing.Like enjoy the moment. But there's a moment when everything is going to be dust. So it just like, it's really symbolic on such deep levels of life. I love that. It actually, um, yeah, I almost feel emotional about that because any time that we cling on to something, and this is human behavior, when we cling onto something and we're like, I identify as this, this is me, and, and you know, we could talk about my marriage or whatever's going on in my life or your life or anyone's life, but anytime we hold on to something.We're not actually in the moment anymore. And so I love that. If the burden, it's also the purification of, of the soul, it's the letting go, right? And it's just a beautiful way of honoring your past. So, um, I think there's a lot, probably why we burn, you know, letters that we never, I ended up giving to people.And it's about honoring, releasing, and, and being in that moment. And I remember peeing at the burn with you, Sam, and us just being dressed like, I don't know, you were like a mermaid or something with your purple hair. I love way cause like for me it's like that's my thing. I'd love wearing crazy color hair.It's just so fun. Yeah. I could see you having permanent purple hair, by the way. I think I'm like bad ass just putting it out there. I support it if you choose to do it or the wig. But I remember just watching the burn with you, like the big burn on the last night and just eyes wide open. Whoa, Whoa. Oh my gosh.It's such a immersive experience and it's something like that. I've always been experiential person, and so I say yes to things based on what feels right in the moment I'm like, okay, I have a pull. I'm going to go talk. That person do that thing. It's all of the magic in life can only be experienced. It can't be thought about.And so it's about saying yes rather than saying, well, trying to figure it out. So every time that I've said yes to something, based on a feeling, it's all turned into magic. And burning man was a huge piece of that. So everyone should go to burning man. Everyone should go to Bernie. Man. I remember when we were there, actually, I was like one of the night exhibits, and I guess I was like putting like my bike chain on, or I was doing something to my bike and I was looking down.I looked up and I saw your face. It was just like, like almost like a deer in headlights staring out, and then I'm like, what is that? You're like, Oh my gosh, Gerard Butler was just there and he smiled at you. And then I turned around to see him, but then he was gone. Was it George Butler? Yeah. You were like, you're like deep, go talk to him.Go talk to him. He was looking over it. I was like, I was too cool. I was like, no, I didn't even though, no, I didn't. Yeah. I'm like, when I looked, he was already gone and then I was like, so tell us, cause he like smiled at you. Yeah. I was like, I'm not going to go talk to him. I'm too cool anyways that everyone should go to burning man.It is like a once in a lifetime experience. It's like another world. And if you are curious, Google it right now and be like amazed by, it's like mad, mad max almost meets, I don't even know what else. A different planet. It's not earth. It's definitely not earth. Four texts into another dimension. We're just going to leave it at that.On that note, is there anything else that you want to share? I could share like a message? Is that what you'd like me to share? Sam? Yeah. So the message is, is that if you are going through anything right now that isn't feeling good, definitely I invite you to do that. You know, assessment, the joy and not the joy, but the obligation assessment, cause that's super bad ass can change your life.And the next piece is if you're looking to do more of that and find out what the gap is, what is in the way of you having and being and living the life that you deep down want to experience. I have a freebie on my website that I'm happy to and you over to. It's 24 categories of life. Oh, where you are now, where you want to be, and really identifying exactly what's in the way so that you can show up more powerfully for that.And I believe there's also a video series with it that can help you move through that. So you can go run over to my website, we can drop the link below it radically aligned.com and. It's one of the most powerful tools that I've used on myself and that a lot of the people that I work with do, and, and, and yeah.Just the question. This is, this is the quote that I love. The question is not whether or not you are here to do great things. We're all here to do great things. The question is, are you ready to wake up to the truth of who you are and who you're meant to be? Because your soul is infinite. It's joy, it's love, it's abundance, it's connection.It's all of the things that you could ever imagine. Anything or anyone that tells you you are not that. Is not like is not playing in your magic. It's not honoring you. And it's important for you to remember who you are by plugging in to people, to podcasts like this, hanging out with Sam, Sam's amazing and plugging into the magic of life, because that's where everything great happens and it cannot be process.It has to be experienced. So. Jumping into those experiences saying, yes, and I know that you have a Morocco trip coming up sometime soon, and I think that's pure magic. So, um, that would be an experience. If you feel the pull to say yes to, I want to be there, you'll be there. We'll be there in Morocco some point soon, once this pool.Pandemics over. Yes, totally. But on that note, thank you so much my dear. I thank you for doing this. Thanks for having me. This is so fun. And, and going back to memory Lane's fun with you, Sam.ar. I love, I love your brand. I love everything you stand for the radically aligned life. What does that mean to be radically aligned? Ooh, that's a great question. I was feeling into this the other day. So first of all, everything happens in the exact moment it's supposed to. And before we jumped on here, we were talking about birthing something into the world.And so when you're pregnant with something like a baby, you can't push it out at six months or five months or rush it and everything. Great takes time. And so I remember being under this tree in San Diego, um, about a year and a half ago, and I was meditating. I don't remember what I was meditating at, but I was at a friend and Rashard seminar and a bird pooped on my shoulder.And as the bird pooped on my shoulder, I got the name radically aligned. And so I love it when that happens to me. And it happened to me recently too. So I'm feeling really good about myself. I'm like, something good's about to happen. I love that. Well, they say it's good luck, but I mean, just to love it when you get a bird poops on your shoulders, just like, that's hilarious.Totally. So when I think of radical alignment, there's different stages of it, and I actually have this. This graph that I've been creating to really map it out on our journey and how to really awaken to our highest self and our full potential, but essentially radical alignment is you are radically aligned.It's like the center of. Across, you know, not being religious that the center across, like it's the dead center of the core of who you are. And there's no being off path. There's no compromising. There's no, I'm not sure. There's no maybes. There is no, um, Oh. Um, if this happens, then that will happen. It's a strong knowing that, well, you are.And being radically honest with your path and not compromising and going off path because of distractions, because of old programming, because of what people think you should do because of self-sabotaging behavior when you're radically aligned. You are unstoppable. And these are the people in the world that I think of that are the, I work a lot with up and coming thought leaders and those who have a message inside of them that they know, like they're not quite where they're supposed to be yet.And there's a gap because they're not radically aligned from the outside looking in though they look like they have their life together. They seem aligned, but they know they're playing small. They know that there's something bigger and this is where radical alignment comes into place because the more aligned we are.The quicker we can manifest what we want and the less distracted that we get and the more confident we are. But it's not even a doing. It's the being ness that attracts what it is that we want to have in there. Certain rituals, practices, tools, and um, processes that I take people through to make sure that they've cleaned up trauma, that they've worked through, pieces that are still like the dust that hasn't quite settled in their life to clean that up.So it's like having a. Like a diamond that has dust on it. You know? It's about the polishing. So it's the polishing. It's like you're already amazing. You're already great, you're already rocking, you're doing all the things that you love. But the polishing is in the radical alignment. So I would compare it to maybe a, um, I'm a Lamborghini.Okay. So there's a lot of people who are Lamborghinis, so they're super sensitive. They're super dialed in when they are radically aligned with who they are and who they're meant to be in the world as far as influence, impact, and all of that. But they're operating, they're giving themselves the fuel. Of a Honda.And the truth is if you bring a Lamborghini up to a regular pump, and I don't have a Lamborghini, but I'm pretty sure that you need different fuel, you need different services. And the truth is when you're a Lamborghini and you're in the car and you're out of alignment just a little bit, there's something that's not quite right in, in the system.It throws the whole thing off, it throws the whole path off, and it can actually take you off track with your full potential. So it's about getting people to know that they have six cylinders, 10 cylinders, whatever, instead of two that they're operating on and it opens up the doors for everything. I love that.I love the idea of radical alignment. I want to know the tools, the different things that you would use to get people aligned. The first. I'm going to assume that you haven't always been this passionate and this like aligned even yourself. Like there's obviously a story that sort of got you there. So I'd love for you to share your journey of getting into radical alignment.Wow. So that's a big question. Everything starts at a young age and it's called soul school, right? So we go through all these obstacles. We have these moments of this is who I am when it's not the truth of who we are. And for me, at a young age, when I was probably six or seven years old, I started to live a dual life.So I would go to school and I was a happy go lucky girl, like friends with everyone. I'm had a hard time learning and staying focused in school. Um, and then I would go home and I had a family member that had an addiction. And because of that addiction, it was this space of lack of certainty when I would come home.There was a space of lack of knowing how things would be and also deep concern for that person in my life. And it was a part of my life that I categorized. And we do this as humans. We categorize moments in time. We categorize parts of our life to disconnect from it because we don't know how to process it.So at around the age of six or so that was happening. So I'd go home and I'd have a totally different experience. I wasn't able to speak my truth. I wasn't able to be a little girl. I had to be my own, you know, my own best friend, my own parents in a lot of ways. And so there was this dual personality, do a life.And so this pattern continued into high school. I was the popular girl, I was friends with everyone at school. But I didn't really get too close to any groups. I was the one that was friends with all the groups because I didn't want to let anyone get too close to me because I didn't want them to see the truth that I had something to hide.And then I was taking on someone else's addiction, someone else's behaviors as my own. There's a lot of deep shame and a lot of deep separation from both of those lives. And so naturally, um, when you live with someone who has an addiction or anything like that, or you know, you're in a relationship with someone who has an addiction, um, you can become codependent, which is trying to fix everyone else's problems or trying to support everyone else too.Avoid dealing and feeling what's going on on a deeper level. And also with that, there's also the people pleaser that comes up. I see this all the time with people, and a lot of that comes back to codependency and also having a family member or somebody in your world that has an addiction and addiction, that behaviors as far as how they act is very different than maybe how addicted or how often they go to whatever that is for them.So again, I was the happy go lucky girl. I had one emotion. And it was, I'm happy all of the time. So that continued into my adult hood and essentially I had more trauma in when I was 19 I was raped and didn't know how to process that. So I categorize that again. And I got really good at checking things off of the list, that list of get married, um, buy a new car, buy a house, go traveling together.All of the things. And again, from the outside looking in, it looked like I was the happiest person. Everyone knew I had the perfect life, the perfect marriage. I had a business that was doing well in a lot of external validation for it, but. I was not connected to myself. I was not connected to my truth.And because of that, I was avoiding dealing with the voice that was trying to come up. That was saying, first of all, every time I've reached a goal, I was saying is this it? Like looking around like, is this really what success is? Is this really what love is? Is this really what life is? And that continued to push me to chase new goals.But I never quite felt like it was, it always felt empty. It's like you're chasing these things. You get there and it's like, now what. Yeah. Right. And so I was chasing these pieces of external validation and essentially I was running away from myself as I was running towards a goal. So I kept feeling that way.And of course it led to burnout and other symptoms. But then there was another voice that was coming up and the voice was saying, there's so much more. Yeah, you are so much more capable and powerful. And you know, and I knew deep down that there was something that I was supposed to step into that because of all of the programming, because of all of the disconnect, the dual life, the categorization.It felt like impossible to even bring it into my conscious reality. And so with that, I started to get a lot of symptoms, a lot of manifestations of disease. Because as you noticed, and I know we've Jan about this before, is anytime our soul is not being honored, it speaks to us through symptoms of disease.And. I manifested depression, massive social anxiety, even though I was in front of about a hundred people a day. I have panic attacks. I manifested auto immune disease and what else? And food sensitivities. Stomach pain. Yeah, totally. And so it's like all of these were the universe or my universe, my body saying pay attention.But the thing is. And, and if you're listening right now, and I'm sure you can relate to Sam, it's like when things come up in our body, it's so easy to be like, Oh, well my mom has this, or it runs in my family, or, Oh, I should take a pill for it. Or, Oh, it's just a part of me. There's like this acceptance of the bullshit in our life.You know what I'm saying? 10. And it's like NSC acceptance of the symptoms and the symptoms is a sign that you were so out of alignment with your soul's calling. And I knew this, I was like teaching wellness. Like I knew you back then too, like I was in that wellness space. I own a yoga business and it was, I was like living and teaching a lot of these things, but I wasn't really owning it and embodying it.So I finally had my wake up call. It wasn't any of the things I said before. But was it like an Elizabeth Gilbert moment? Like, did you have a moment where it's like you hit rock bottom with it and you were just like, the universe just wasn't going to let you keep going? Exactly. That's exactly what happened.And so I, so I had all those symptoms. I pushed him away cause I was like runs in my family, whatever, whatever stories as we do, accepting the bullshit of our symptoms and our life. And um, I remember one day, Sam, and like at that time in my life I had mermaid hair. It was down in my hips and it was kind of my thing.And I was going through my hair one day as us girls do, and I noticed, Oh my gosh, I am missing a huge chunk of hair. And it was like on the top of my head, I had a massive bald spot. It was like the size of the toony. Whoa. Yeah. Completely bald. Completely bald. Like right on the top of my head right there.And I just woke up one day and it was like that. And it wasn't like, you know, when you shave something and you can see like, there's like, there's still hair growth, but you know, maybe it was ripped out or something happens. Like your hair was stressed out. It wasn't breakage. It was totally bald. And, and I remember, I remember the moment getting out my smartphone and, you know, um, having the camera on and going in the mirror.I'm like, what the heck is going on here? And it was this massive bull spot. And this was the moment when the universe was like, okay, Dee, we gave you this, we gave you that. We tried to whisper. We try to take it easy on you. Yeah, there were a million yellow flags, but it's going to take this one bread one.And that's usually what happens. Like yellow flag, yellow flag, yellow flag. And we just keep on driving poorly. So I, um, I was super stubborn, so I had to learn things the hard way. And, um, and then so that happened. And naturally natural instinct go to the doctor, what the heck's going on? Fix me? And the doctor said, Oh, well, it looks like you've developed another autoimmune disease.And I was like, huh? And she's like, yeah, like we can give you some steroids or, you know, some shots in that area of your head. But, um, she's like, you're probably gonna lose all your hair. Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's pretty scary. Yes. And they say also like, just going back to, um, people who go through cancer. Um, one of the biggest fears for women apparently isn't necessarily losing their breasts.It's actually losing their hair. It was like a, it was a big fear of mine. I'm like, Oh my gosh. And then I went home. I got the prescription because I was like, just in case I get home. And I was like, this is not going to be my story. This is not it. And I am going to listen. And I thought of Louise Hay's, I thought of her affirmations.I thought of what our body is trying to tell us. And I don't remember exactly what it said in the book about, you know, a bald spot. But I remember being like, it was like self hatred or something. And I chose to be with that, which is the truth, because my entire life. Based on past trauma and you know, living a dual life and checking things off the list.It was self hatred because I was not connected. To my soul. And so I remember talking to my husband at the time and he was like, so not woo, like black and white, like thought crystals were weird. Right. And I like owned that moment. Wow. In that moment was the moment I changed my entire life and my hair grew back. I started studying Mashama's. I've actually been working with shamans for almost a decade now. I started doing the inner work meditation, and what I learned through that journey is that. First of all, I believe, and I can see it in people.Most people are not even living in their truth. So radical alignment feels like what the F is that? And I get it. I was very disconnected and it took, it took me having that moment. To change it. And I know because my soul told me around this time too, that if I did not change my life, I was going to die of cancer in a year and I didn't have cancer, but my body, my soul was like, you are here to do work and you are not listening to your one and we're going to go after your vanity because you like to pretend that everything is great and you can't hide this.So wake up. Wow. But at that said, you probably look back at that moment and you're so grateful, so much gratitude, because I know that this is like what, six or seven years later, I wouldn't be alive. I would not be on this having this conversation with you if I didn't actually have that wake up call and change because I was so deep in it.And when we're so in something, whether it's a relationship or an area of our life where we have created all of these. You know, um, this checklist and we're, we're so in the role, it's difficult to even know that we're in the role because we've been playing the role our entire life. So. I had to wake up. I had to do the deeper work.It was not always comfortable, but it led me down the path of really understanding universal laws.  what our soul's telling us, as well as a bunch of other things, which has led me down this path of radical alignment and and seeing those symptoms in people and helping them break through really quickly.And on that note, I'm heal trauma. As we were talking a little bit about that earlier. Before we jumped on was unhealed trauma, I believe is the root cause of all suffering. Because what happens when we have a trauma? And so I had trauma when I was younger, like coming home and having a, um, a family member, not sure if they were alive and then having to like, not know how to deal with that and, you know, continue just showing up at school and in life and shoving it down.We do that all the time and we don't necessarily need to say we as a whole with humans right. We don't know how to, first of all, identify trauma and essentially it's anything in our life, any imprint that we haven't been able to process. And when we have a trauma, it actually takes us out of our body.Because it's not safe to be in our body. So when we're not in our body, we actually can't be aligned because it's like we're outside of our body. We're not connected to the symptoms. We're not connected to our heart, and we're constantly being triggered by our subconscious from any images, thoughts, body sensations, emotions, and then the energetics of anything that even slightly reminds of us of any of those imprints in our past of the trauma that we haven't fully.Completed because it's like a moment that's frozen in time. So I was triggered all the time, didn't know it, didn't mean that I was upset. It just means I kept taking steps away from my soul. And then I had my big wake up call and had to change my entire life. And in my marriage of eight years, I starting a new business.I started saying yes to adventures all the time. I had a lot of deep work to do and in the realization was the first step. Of course, it's healing trauma. You know, but it's, it's also like what is not me. And when I started to go through that, most of the things, most of the rules that I was living in plane and weren't me.It's not about finding or creating who you are. I like the idea of it, but it's more about who are you not and how is that showing up in your life? That's a really good way to look at it. I feel like it's easy to say, Oh yeah, everything's good, I'm great. Right? But then if you look at the back way, that way, it's like you can get other information about yourself and your situation and your, the people who are in your life or whatever it is, and it's easier to be like, well, is this really me?Is it serving me? Yes or no? And it's easier to let it go. Totally. Yeah. And it's, it's scary too, and, and that's why it's really important. Like, I know for me, when I was going through the process, it took me a few years to actually really take some of those outward steps of creating change. Because first it starts internally and it can be a little messy.But it's like finding the right community, the right support, being around people who get you right. And um, and so that's what led me down this path. And, and I see it in other people and I know that like, we're all here to do something, to create something to experience, love to bring love. And it comes through the foundational piece of being radically aligned.And there's different stages of that. So long story short, I mean. Phones are long. That's good though. Cause you're here, you're living here, you know your radical line life now and you're really holding the torch for other people to do the same. What are a couple of grounded things someone could do and implement in their life that would be really effective in terms of like achieving some alignment, like something that they could do today.I'm just thinking of, first of all, uh, I have a program that's running right now and we're on module two and I want to talk about this because this is exactly what we're sorting out. So I'm, one of the things that I love to do in my life, I do th

Zach has the honor of having a conversation with Dr. Erin L. Thomas, Head of Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Upwork, about organizational equity during the COVID-19 pandemic. She graciously shares some advice regarding what organizations can do during this time to at the very least reduce harm for their black and brown employees and talks a bit about how her perspective and focuses at work have shifted as this pandemic has continued. Check the links in the show notes to connect with Dr. Thomas!Link up with Dr. Thomas on Twitter! She's also on LinkedIn. Links in order:https://bit.ly/3c0BXKhhttps://bit.ly/3c7qhFELearn more about Upwork on their website. You can view their open positions by clicking here. Links in order:https://bit.ly/2TEC8Vnhttps://bit.ly/2A5X00WFind out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here or below.https://bit.ly/2Ug4l5KHelp food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.https://bit.ly/2WD73UkCheck out our website.https://bit.ly/living-corporateTRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, everybody? It's Zach, and you know what? I'ma just go ahead and say it right now. It's also Emory. Emory, say something. [Emory breathes] That's just her breathing. Emory is, at the time of this recording, six weeks old. So we're here because I'm on daddy duty and my wife has to get some sleep. That's right. Husbands, help your wives, or partners rather, excuse me - not to be overly gendered on a podcast all focused on inclusion, equity and diversity. Help your partners, you know what I'm saying? Everybody, you know, they--one person can't do it all. Sometimes you gotta step in, and this podcast is great, and I love y'all, but of course I love my daughter the most. Well, I love my wife also. Let me not do any type of weird hierarchy right now live, like, a live-streaming conscience of thought on the podcast, but the point is you have responsibilities. There are things that take precedent. And look, we're in a new normal, so I'm just here. Where was I? Right, Living Corporate. So look, Living Corporate amplifies and centers black and brown voices at work. Why do I say black and brown and not, like, people of color? Because I want to be very explicit, we want to be very explicit, with what our mission is. So we aim to center and amplify black and brown identities, marginalized folks, folks on the periphery, in the workplace, and we do that how? We do that by having real talk in a corporate world. Now how do we do that? We do that by interviewing incredible leaders cut from all type of cloth. And, you know, we've had executives. We've had professors, entrepreneurs, public servants, activists, civil leaders, elected officials. We've had all types of people, artists, and today is no different. Today we have Dr. Erin L. Thomas. Dr. Thomas is the head of diversity, inclusion and belonging at Upwork where she leads diversity, inclusion and belonging, or DIBs. She leads the strategy implementation and coaching for all of Upwork. Prior to Upwork though, Dr. Thomas was a managing director at Paradigm, a diversity and inclusion strategy firm where she partnered with companies to embed DIBs into organizations through culture transformation and people development. Prior to Paradigm, Erin held positions at Grant Thornton LLP, Argonne National Laboratory developing D&I strategies, programming and metrics. Her work has been featured in Fast Company and the New York Times and recognized by Forbes, Human Rights Campaign, the National Association for Female Executives and the Equal Opportunity Magazine. She holds a PhD in social psychology, a Master of Philosophy in social psychology; a Master of Science in social psychology; and a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and international studies from Yale University. She is accredited, y'all. Okay? Don't question us, okay? We're coming to y'all. We bring y'all heat rock every single week, and the heat rock we bring is because we have guests that have heat rock. I'ma say heat rock again just so y'all get the point. Yes, I'm turnt up. Yes, it's a Tuesday. Who cares? Erin, what's up? Welcome to the show. How are you doing?Erin: I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Hi, little baby Emory. I am so excited to be here, and I want to give you a number. So I'm really into, during COVID times, anchoring, you know, "How are you doing?" on a scale. 1 is, you know, "We've got to get out of here and get some more support." Like, "We're not doing well." 10 is, you know, "COVID what? COVID who?" But I think, like, if you're a 10, you also probably need some external support. Zach: Facts. [laughs]Erin: And I think today I am... I'm, like, a 7, 8. I'm very excited to be chatting with you. What's your number?Zach: That's a really good question. You know, I don't know. So it's interesting because your scale, I don't know how it accounts for, like, other things, right? So, like, I'm also here with, like, a six-week-old baby. So maybe I'm, like, a--so, like, coronavirus is not, like, at the top of my mind because I'm trying to focus on keeping this thing that looks like me alive. Maybe I'm, like, a--I'd probably say I'm, like, a 7, 8. Like, I'm pretty good. I'm happy, right? Like, I mean, life is good. The new Drake album--well, not the album, but a little collection of loosies came out recently that was very good, that I enjoyed. You know, my favorite shows are still coming on. I've caught up on some anime. So I'm keeping myself well-distracted.Erin: [laughs] That's good. I think distracted is good. I think--I don't know, I think in the beginning days of all of this it felt, for me at least, a little weird to compartmentalize, or I felt a little guilty, but I actually think that's incredibly healthy, you know, to find moments of just pleasure and delight. That's all we got, right? That's all we got.Zach: I mean, this--the reality is that before this pandemic, like, I was already a homebody. Now, people at work--like, people who know me from work would--they may not know that, because, like, in person, like, I'm a fairly gregarious guy. But, like, you know, people are complex, right? I think, like, we create a lot of these terms and things that aren't really academic or scientific just to kind of better compartmentalize people, like, "You're an extrovert, you're an introvert." It's like, "I mean, I enjoy people, but I also enjoy being alone." Like, I enjoy being at home, being with my wife and now my kid. Like, I'm fine with that. But I'm glad, I'm glad that you're excited. I'm excited and in a good place as well. You know, this would be interesting to do again, like, if our numbers were wildly different, right? So, like, you're a 7, 8, I'm a 7, 8, but if I was, like, a 2, then, like, I wonder how the dynamics of this discussion would look, especially considering what we're talking about.Dr. Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I think then--and this has happened to me at work, right? Like, I come in low and someone else is high or vice versa. I think then that's the--I mean, that's the point of it, right? It's a moment of pause to figure out what do you need to put aside or do you need to get off this call or how can I support you and give that person who's lower an opportunity to either just share or not or articulate more. I just think it's a great window into "How can we work together towards whatever it is that we need to achieve?" And if now's not the time, fair. You know? We gotta go and come back together when we're both in the right space. I think that happens all the time, we just don't often put numbers to it, right?Zach: I agree, I agree. So look, that actually is a really good segue for us to get into this. Like, this pandemic, it continues to expose and exacerbate all types of inequities, from social to governmental and of course workplace, just all across the board, and I'll tell you, frankly it just feels overwhelming for me to think about holistically, let alone try to address, and so I'm really curious about just, like, considering your role with Upwork, I'd love to hear how your perspective and focuses have shifted as this pandemic has continued, and considering your level within Upwork and, like, the organizational power that you wield by way of your level, I'd love to hear about how power and influence has shaped your praxis.Dr. Thomas: Yeah. Whoo, this could take the whole hour, which, you know, happy, happy to unpack it for that long, 'cause it's deep. It's deep and very real. Like, the quickest answer for me is not that much has actually changed about the objectives that we set out to achieve for this year. How we go about them certainly has had to stay agile and nimble, but in the work that I do that's always the case. I always like to be super responsive to context and not get so [prescriptive?] about how we execute but to kind of keep our eyes on the prize, and so from my personal vantage point, I--especially during the beginning days of this--have never felt more critical than I do right now. You know, I think there's so many external conversations and great thought leaders who have articulated this better, what this crisis has really done, like most crises, is magnify fractures, gaps, inequities, that already existed, and so I've used this really as an opening to accelerate my platform and the work that I'm doing for marginalized folks at our company. So just to dig into it, you know, I did a couple of tactical things once it became clear to me that, you know, "This is serious. This is not the flu. This is gonna change everyone's lives forever," and I don't think that's an overstatement. So once that reality sort of set in, the first thing I did was I revisited these operating principles that I had crafted when I started at Upwork. So I joined the company in December of 2019. I'm only about weeks in, and there's been a lot of change since then, internally and obviously externally, but as a team of one and as the first DIB leader in our organization, I thought it was really important for me to just get anchored on what [?] and, you know, use that decision framework for really [advertising?] how I [fell?] in my role. I think, especially when a role like this is new or especially when someone comes in with a multi-disciplinary background [or] a very strategic lens, folks don't necessarily know what the role is and they kind of fill in their own blanks and make their own stories. So that was important to me, and I revisited those once we started quarantining just to make sure that they were evergreen and [stood up?] in this crisis, and they did, thankfully, and I can put [?] on my name. There's only four, and everything we do is, you know, it's systemic, so #1 is account for the systems and structures we're operating in, and that's, you know, systems and structures within our company and certainly externally as well. So that's #1, definitely holds true today. #2 is everything we do is tailored to the most specific population or the most specific point in the employee experience as possible, and so it kind of goes back to how you introduce the podcast, which is it's basically about centering. We have to get specific. We have to get articulate and discrete about what problem we're trying to solve or what opportunity we're trying to seize, and certainly during public times that's been really critical, and I think that principle holds up. The third is active. So I really wanted to mark that for myself and for others. You know, there's no passive way to do this work. Like, we're gonna have to change some things, and, you know, I think that's intuitive, but also [?] to declare. And then the fourth thing which is super critical for me, and this is where I see a lot of DIBs or DEI, whatever acronym you want to use, professionals flounder a little bit, is being pragmatic and being compelling and cohesive and telling, you know, one story that folks can get behind that also makes sense in the context of the day-to-day decisions and work that they're doing, and I think too often DIBs work kind of exists in a bit of a vacuum, right? It's a little bit of a tag-along or an extra-curricular, and I think that's the piece, you know, during corona times, that I've had to really get critical, even more so with myself, about "[?]," right? Like, do people have the capacity for this new thing or this new structure or this new effort and just really kind of giving grace to the folks who have to carry forward on the strategies, who have to, you know, change their behaviors, because it's a lot to ask even in the best of times, and I want to push and, again, lean into this comfort, but also be gracious with the fact that folks are dealing with a lot right now. So that's one of the things I did, was just, like, double-check on the way that we're going about this work. So relevant during this time. Another thing was just re-prioritizing some of those actual objectives. There were just, like, a couple that, even before corona, were nicer to have, but now it's clear that this is not the year to be working on the frills. It's really--we gotta stick to the essentials in terms of our strategic goals. And then the last thing I'll quickly say is I actually really leveraged the fact that it seems like most folks are becoming kind of armchair experts in academiology these days, right? Like, I'm learning more, more about viruses and how they spread, and I think there's some really interesting--and if I thought about it hard enough there could be a poem out of this, but, you know, I think there's some really interesting overlays between what we're seeing with the virus [Emory makes some noise] and how I think about people and the fact that--hey, Emory! The fact that we are all connected, we're all inter-dependent, and we need to center the most vulnerable. I think, as a society, that's becoming more and more clear, just with the true facts that are coming out from COVID, but it also I think has been what activists and DIBs practitioners have been saying for, you know, decades, and so I think, at least in my company, it sort of seems like there's this window of opportunity to seize on this understanding of centering and equity and disproportionate impact that folks are getting externally and [?] that same framework and understanding through the work that I do internally. I just think folks are grasping it a little bit more easily now than they might have been before this. So that, for me, has been exciting.Zach: That's awesome. And yes, hello, Emory. But no, you're absolutely right. [laughs] You know, what I find curious about this time, or intriguing even, is that because of the real impacts that this pandemic is having with folks that look like us and that don't look like us and the frustrations that come along with that, it's creating avenues for people to have even more frank conversations and to really kind of, like, get past some of the jargon and, like, these super long monologues about whatever and really get into, "No, how can we actually create impact and change and help? Because there are people who actively need help," and I think that's--and I try to be, like, a silver lining type of person, so, like, that's--so I would say that is something that is a positive out of all of this. I do think also, to your point around DEI practitioners, I do think that there's a bit of a gap when it comes to, "Okay, how do we transition from--" And I've talked about this with some other folks in the past. I think we're now doing a decent job of, like, talking about the historicity of oppression, or we'll talk about systemic inequities in, like, these very, like, high level systems that almost seem--like, we speak about them almost, like, in the abstract, right? So we'll say, like, "Well, you know, black men, they have disproportionate--they're targeted by police and da-da-da," and it's like, "Okay, that's true," and I'm not being dismissive of that. "Let's talk a little bit more about the systemic inequities in your workplace though," right? Like, "How can we transition these conversations to be a bit more practical and targeted to the reality of your employees?" And, like, that's--and I get why, you know, there's a variety of reasons why we don't necessarily have those conversations when I don't think we necessarily know how, but then two, like, it's increasingly uncomfortable to have conversations about actual power in your workplace, because then we start looking at individuals, right?Dr. Thomas: Yeah. I mean, it's hard, or maybe impossible, not to take, you know, a conversation about power and privilege personally, but at the same time I think where I've seen the most effective work, where I've done the most effective work, is where we actually sort of meet somewhere in the middle. It's about what roles or positions do we hold, how are those products of a greater societal system, and given the seat we're in--it's not really about us. I think it's really about the position. But given that we fill it, you know, what is our responsibility? To disrupt things that before now we weren't aware, you know, we were products of, or now that we are we realize we have a bit of an urgency to leave a legacy or leave things better than where we found them, and I think that's where the activation can happen. That's where we can get [?] without guilting people, right? Without making them defensive. I think it's just the reality of, "Oh, this is all by design, and we're sort of products of this greater architecture. So now what are we gonna do about it?" And if we're not gonna do anything, that's fine too, but then we should stop talking about it. Right? So, like, that's fine. I don't--[laughs] I want to be clear that I don't judge or begrudge that. It's fine. You know, companies and leaders can make those choices, but then stop talking about it. That's where--right?Zach: Yes. That's my rub too. At a certain point it's like, "Look, I'm tired of us talking about diversity being our strength and there not being anybody that looks like me that actually has any type of authority or power." You know, "I'm tired of us always--" Like, not shoehorning in, because no disrespect. We talk about gender in these very, like, binary, exclusionary ways without being intersectional at all with race or sexual identity. We talk about sexual identity in these binary ways without including race. We ignore any race trans identities, particularly trans black female identities. So, like, if we're gonna do this, let's do it. If we're not gonna do it, let's not. It's 2020. Rona or no rona, let's just--let's just be honest. [both laugh]Dr. Thomas: I agree. I mean, you know, that's where folks get disillusioned. That's where, you know, when the word doesn't match the deed, it reads as inauthentic because it frankly is, and I think most companies or leaders within them would be honestly better served to talk a little less about diversity, about inclusion, about equity, [then keep on?], or to raise--you know, raise the bar for themselves, but this weird in-between is just not working, right? It's not working. It's frustrating the folks who are most impacted. And then we see the results, which is very minimal quantitative gains when it comes to actual representation within the workforce. So these things all [?] together. They all relate, so yeah.Zach: They do. Now this is me going off the chart, but it just popped in my--not popped in my head, 'cause I think about it a lot, but we didn't talk about it for this interview. We gotta have you back, Erin, 'cause I really want to talk about in group, out group dynamics and the pressures that marginalized people in positions of authority have to, like, toe the line in that regard or how much they push against to then create inclusive workplaces for people who look like them. 'Cause, like--no, and I recognize that's a big topic, but, like, I just want to say this 'cause it's on the top of my heart and my mind. Like, I've noticed--and I've had these conversations, like, with black folks, like, off the record, right? So, like, in consulting, you know, there's all these different tracks of leadership, and, you know, the highest up is typically managing director or partner, and I've talked to some black partners who I really respect and everything, and I'm like, "Look, how many of you do you meet?" 'Cause the people that I talk to, like, they're with it. Like, they're conscious. They genuinely care. They try to use their access, power and privilege, relative power and privilege, to help other folks that look like them--and I'm talking, like, two people, right? [both laugh] And I asked them like, "Yo, what's going on? Like, why are the rest of y'all a bunch of Clarence Thomases up here? Like, what is this?" And so we had this whole frank discussion about it, but I really want to have you back on, because, like--I don't know. I feel like you and I could have that conversation, but I want to have it because, like--and I had this very... it was not uncomfortable. Wait, let's pause. Everybody stop, everybody. Y'all should know by now. This is, like--we're a couple hundred episodes in, hundreds of episodes in actually of Living Corporate. Y'all know I enjoy awkward conversations, so this exchange I'm about to explain to y'all was not awkward for me. It was awkward for them, okay? It was not awkward for me. So, you know, I had this conversation, and--[Emory makes noise] Oh, goodness, my daughter is loud. Hey, y'all. Y'all, check it out. Y'all hear these vocals by Emory. Don't play. No labels, but, you know, we'll make a SoundCloud soon. So anyway, I was talking to this person and I was like, "Look, the reality is the folks in power only let a certain amount of us in these spaces, okay, and when you see us in these spaces high up, like, to find somebody that looks like us in those spaces who genuinely care, who are not closing doors behind and who are speaking truth to power--" Again, I'm not asking you to come show up in a Kunta Kinte shirt. I'm just saying if you could just--[Dr. Thomas laughs] Okay? If you could just, you know, act like you're black, act like you recognize, you know, experiences. To find those types of people, it's like finding a unicorn with gold teeth, you know what I mean? It's crazy. Dr. Thomas: Yeah, and it's hard for me to speak to personally simply because my role is diversity, right? [both laugh] I'm not here as a [?] professional, I am a diversity expert and researcher. So that's, I guess, a privilege if you will that I hold as a leader in my company, and I recognize that. It was true in my last role too. I was in a consulting firm, and I was on the leadership team, but we were a diversity consulting firm, right? And so even in there you see some of that where, yeah, I had to really reconcile with the fact that I was doing this work and certainly had more latitude to, you know, speak that truth to power than I would if I were in another profession, and at the same time even I find myself vigilant, of course, and protective, of course, of how much is too much, you know? Where do I strike that balance of advocating in ways that people can hear versus that active, you know, operating principle that I called out earlier, you know, [?] folks that healthy discomfort. It's tough. It's a whole level of calculus that I have become I think decent at. I think also though I always--and, you know, we should talk about this another time because we can go real deep into this, right? I always view this dance of, like, on the one hand, any professional--especially any leader--is context switching and code switching all the time, right? Like, that is effective leadership, right? That's effective, but yet when you're a person of color, when you are black--which I can speak to--when you're brown, I think it creates some compunction of, like, "How much of this is playing the game that anyone would play and how much of this is selling out?" And I don't have an answer. I think everyone has their own barometer for that, but it's something I challenge myself on all the time. Like, "What of this feels like me and what of this feels like I'm becoming complicit in something that I don't subscribe to?" And, you know, sometimes I can't really codify when I'm feeling uncomfortable, but I know what I'm feeling, and that's when I have to really check myself and really examine if how I'm showing up or what I'm sharing or advocating is really serving my key audience, which is our marginalized folks at our company.Zach: Yo, so thank you for real. Sound Man, put a little round of applause in here for Erin answering this question off the fly, 'cause we did a pre-production. This was not part of the questions, but it was just something on top of my mind. Thank you so much. Now, look, let's get into this though, because we're just now really at the top of the conversation we planned on having. So look, at the time of us recording this, over 32 million folks have applied for unemployment benefits. At the same time, many companies are trying to retain their employees and keep them engaged in new working environments. I mean, there's even a lot of unofficial conversations happening on companies having pressure to not let go of too many minority employees in the name of just optics and potential legal ramifications. I'm curious, can we talk about this dynamic [?] where tensions may be, particularly for black and brown employees.Dr. Thomas: Sure. I mean, when I hear this question I'm really thinking about it as what are black and brown workers maybe thinking, feeling, [?] with individually if they are still employed, and I think I've seen both--at Upwork it's certainly [?] as well, 'cause obviously I consume research, I consume, you know, thought leadership externally, and I think there's a picture that's sort of forming for me in my head, which is there's a range I think of emotional reactions for folks who are still employed, and I think at its best folks are feeling really grateful of course. Right? It's sort of--going back to operating on a scale of 1 to 10, it's, like, yeah, a very compartmentalized 1 to 10, but, like, we're grateful for the blessings we have, and I think certainly that is true for folks who are in jobs with fair pay and fair benefits. They want to give their all to their employers because their circumstances could be so much worse. And I think especially in, you know, people work, in mission-driven organizations and purposeful organizations, that's incredibly true, you know? I'm seeing more and more come out, for instance, among mental health professionals who are burning out 'cause they're just giving it all. And I think, you know, in normal times it's hard to strike that balance of taking care of others versus yourself, and I think especially now, if folks are lucky to still have some semblance of job security, they're giving a lot, and they're very grateful. I think, towards the more extreme ends of this spectrum of reactions, I'm also seeing certainly some guilt, some comparative guilt, you know, around--there are folks out there who are on the front lines, who are essential workers, who have lost their jobs, and so "Maybe I'm not feeling great about what I'm doing or where I am, but, like, how could I complain?" Right? Like, "How can I explain when--maybe things aren't ideal, but I have so much," and so that's where I start to get--yeah, I get a little nervous about that, but I understand it, right? Like, you won't want to rock the boat right now when employment is so precarious. I think there is, you know, on this extreme end of the spectrum, a bit of grief happening, just--obviously black and brown folks are more likely to have people around them succumbing to this virus, falling ill, being unemployed themselves, and so, you know, folks are at work but breathing different losses that some of their counterparts may not be breathing as directly. And then there's backdrop of fear. Like, even if you feel secure in your job for now, this whole situation is obviously unprecedented. We don't know what will happen to the economy, we don't know what will happen to our companies. And again, the research shows that black and brown folks, and women, are the first to get furloughed, to get laid off, to your point, and we know in secure times black and brown folks are more heavily scrutinized, and I think folks who are still working feel a microscope that may or may not be on them, but it's impossible not to be vigilant about if you're gonna make it out of here with the job you went into this crisis with and if that job is actually the right job for you or if you're feeling beholden to, you know, a vulnerable time in your life. I think it's a very confusing time, but it all goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is that it's just magnifying some of the sentiments that folks are always feeling. I think there's an overlay of, like, true uncertainty that is pressing, but I think folks are really trying to just get through the day, trying to keep the jobs they have, and, you know, trying not to encounter some of the secondary traumas that come when you lose that job, that security that you have in place. So I'm seeing a whole swirl of things, and the way they look to me basically is people are tired. They are exhausted. They are burning out and, you know, I think they're taking care of themselves a little less than they used to because it feels a little risky to do that.Zach: You segued really well into my next question about, like, black and brown employees and their experience, and it's funny because I was talking to a colleague about this, talking to a workplace colleague about, like, my own experiences, and I was telling him about, like, you know, "I've had some stresses because I've had some friends who almost fell victim to COVID-19," and, you know, they recovered, you know, but I also have acquaintances whose family members have passed, right? So you're right, like, what's on my mind and the stresses and the drama is--just what's on my mind is different throughout the day, or maybe it's just a little more real. Let me not say that other folks--'cause there have been white folks dying from the coronavirus too. So it's like, you know, not about trying to dismiss one to uplift the other. It's just like, "Okay, this is real for you, and it's even more real for me." And so I'm curious, like, you know, can we talk a little bit about what organizations can do during this time to at the very least reduce harm for their black and brown employees?Dr. Thomas: For sure. I think, you know, first I want to say 1. thank goodness for your friends who have recovered, and 2. I'm very sorry for the losses that are close to you, and to your point, I'm sorry for that for everybody. This is--you know, the backdrop to all of this is just... it's really hard to fathom honestly. It's hard for me to, like, wrap my head around the devastation this has caused, and it's just--it's so painful, and I'm sorry that everyone is going through this in some way, 'cause everyone is affected and is going to be in some way by the physical toll that this is taking on people. To that point, you know, I think there's a few things that orgs can do kind of from the top down. I think there's also things certainly that any individual colleague or manager can do for the folks around them, but I'll talk about this on a couple of levels. Sidebar, I always think of the Nick Jonas song "Levels" whenever I'm thinking about how to approach this work. Zach: Now, hold on, what is the Nick Jonas song--'cause see, the only song I know by Nick Jonas is that "I still get jealous--" You know what I'm saying? "[continues singing]."Dr. Thomas: It's about--I'm trying to think of how it goes. It's about "love has levels." "Levels, levels." I don't know the words.Zach: Come on, Erin. Come on. I hear you with the vocals.Dr. Thomas: I know. I gotta find it, but I like him, and I know he has a song called Levels, and I always think about it. It's like, "Oh, levels, take me higher--" I don't know. Levels take me higher. I don't know. It's a terrible song.Zach: It's a terrible song? Okay. Did he have a black choir in the background? [both laugh] Yo, when Nick Jonas came out there, boy, he came out there and they was like, "I still get jealoous." I was like, "What is going on? Jesus ain't got nothing to do with this." I mean, he's a jealous guy. Anyway, moving forward... [both laughing] Dr. Thomas: I'm gonna have to find it, I'm gonna have to sing it and just send you a little audio clip, 'cause I can't even remember the tune, 'cause it's not a memorable song. Love you, Nick.Zach: Okay. [laughs]Dr. Thomas: You know? From the top down, companies, and really I'm talking about leaders, people leaders, diversity leaders, can take care to do a few things. One is--and I saw this during the earlier days of people sheltering in place. I think it's leveled out maybe a bit, at least from my vantage point, but in the beginning there was a lot of corporate messaging--and I think you even see this still in commercials--of, you know, "We're all in this together," and on its face, cool, cool, cool. Like, right, you want to build camaraderie, you want to cohere folks around a shared sense of community, but if you beat that drum a little too long, especially within your company, I think it can kind of err to the side of being colorblind, right, and really minimizing the disproportionate strain that there actually is on employees of color and on black and brown folks. So I think striking that balance of certainly we're all in this together, and also there are distinct experiences that we know folks are grappling with. It's an important sort of dual approach to make sure that your folks who are black and brown know that they're seen, know that they're recognized for their unique experiences through this and the unique impacts that they're encountering. So that's one thing, just sort of take that multicultural lens to those company communications that you're sending out. I think another thing is, you know, wherever you can creating space for employees to uncover and share more about their specific experiences. So, you know, we did this back in April at Upwork. We partnered with Michelle Kim, who I know is a friend of the pod.Zach: Come on. What's up, Michelle J. Kim? Shout-out to Awaken Co. What's up? [imitating air horns]Dr. Thomas: [joins in, Zach laughs] She's awesome, and we sort of co-facilitated I think a 75-minute conversation with leaders of our Asian ERG(s)--and this is before the data about [?] were coming out with regards to black and brown folks, and the conversation was mostly around--in terms of the media--anti-Asian bias and discrimination and racism, so we seized on the timeliness of that conversation and built out, you know, a virtual forum for our employees to share what they were concerned about, what they were hearing in their day-to-day lives and interactions, and to scale out from that, from those stories to give more context to, you know, why are we seeing this, what is this. This is not unique to this moment in time. This is, you know, a pattern repeating, and really come from a place of urgency to educate our folks a little bit more about historical context and why it matters now and certainly what they can do to disrupt and call out bias in themselves and discriminations they're seeing externally. A third thing is certainly around mental health and benefits and resources to aid folks, you know, who are experiencing trauma and grief. And I don't think this just has to be if you've lost someone close to me. I think in general folks are really struggling obviously with anxiety and insomnia, and there's data coming in on that, and so making sure that your company has the right level and amount of bereavement and [leave?] policies, but also just coaching and support with your EAP if you have one or your [?] and getting them at least to a basic level [?] of providing that 1:1 support for folks and hopefully referring them out to medical providers if they need, you know, more professional coaching. And then the last thing, you know, is related to what you were saying about terminations and lay-offs and all that. Every company should be auditing the decisions they're making this time when it comes to furloughs and risks, making sure that they're looking at that through an equity lens, making sure that they're not just focusing on people's kind of positions in the company or tenure, because black and brown folks tend to sit lower in the org and tend to be earlier in their tenure, so really taking a performance-based approach to that analysis can be helpful in getting out of that sort of hamster wheel of, you know, first in first out when it comes to black and brown folks. So those are, you know, top-down, structural considerations that companies can be taking every day. I think on the ground, peers and managers can be doing some of what we've already role modeled in this conversation. Check in with people, my goodness. Just think about who you haven't spoken to in a while. Think about who you might normally pass at, you know, the water cooler or the coffee station, and if you haven't chatted with that person 1:1 in a minute, you know, Slack them, ping them, whatever you've got in terms of internal messaging systems, call them, pick up the phone and check in. Just see how people are doing, and make sure you create, you know, space to actually hear their answer and to actually respond. So, you know, as opposed to the normal "How's it going?" Like, really ask the question and really wait for the answer and be with that person with whatever they share, you know? I think it's really about those personal connections that we probably took for granted when we were back in an office setting, for those of us who were in offices, and that are harder to actualize now, right? Like, we're all home. We're all behind screens, and so there is no organic water cooler conversation. That means we have to make a little bit more effort to reach out to folks and to show them that we care about them, that we're connected to them and that we're a resource, or that the company has resources, for them whenever they need.Zach: I love it, I love it. Now, Erin, you know that we're about real talk in a corporate world like I said at the top of the show. For the executive leader to this and perhaps rolling their eyes or maybe, like, speed listening and being like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this. Yeah, yeah, yeah," like, you know, just kind of being dismissive as to the gravity of this and why this matters. Why should folks have an inclusive and equitable lens during this time, and then what's the potential fallout in your mind if they don't?Dr. Thomas: I have so many reactions to this question. I think, first, if someone's rolling their eyes to this, which... yeah, could be true, I'll just, like, emphatically say that's not my key audience. Like, I'm just not--you know, I'm really not, and I'm just not. That's not my sweet spot. There were times earlier in my career where that was, where I found it fun to really push the business case for equity, business case for diversity. I am not interested in that anymore, and thankfully I'm in an org where I don't have to do that. Like, kudos to those of you who are doing that. Frankly, for me personally, that's ineffective, right? You know, people do not make decisions based on facts or data. So, you know, I could stand here and talk about the research that's been done. You know, Great Place to Work just did a study around [?], right, and they showed that those who focused on inclusion did better during the recession and saw more returns. So, like, I could share all those stats and all that, but it doesn't matter. Like, if you're rolling your eyes, if you are asking why or if, like, it's probably not gonna happen for you. Just call it, you know--because you can Google it, you can ask Siri, you can ask Jeeves, you can do whatever you want to do, but, like--Zach: [laughing] Not ask Jeeves.Dr. Thomas: [laughing] You can go back to Jeeves if you have to, but my point is that this is not how people make decisions. People make decisions emotionally. They do what they want to do and then they rationalize it later. That is a fact. Zach: That is a fact.Dr. Thomas: You know, it is. And that's science. [laughs] And so if you're not in any way emotionally inclined to care, nothing I say, no data point is gonna make you care. So I think that's one thing. Like, I am impatient and frankly, especially with, you know, decades of research that I think has really caught on in industry, we're just past the point of denying the value proposition of diversity. I think it wastes calories. I think it distracts from the meaningful question, which is, like, how we can go about it during this time or, you know, what we should be prioritizing. I think those are fair questions, but if you're, for whatever strange reason, listening to this podcast and rolling your eyes, like, I don't have time for it. I just don't. I don't. And already that was too much time explaining how I don't have time for it. So that's my quick reaction to that. [both laughing] I think those who are kind of, you know, struggling with how to go about this or where to maybe invest less or more, that's incredibly fair. I think that is incredibly challenging. So what I would say there is just--it goes back to what we talking about earlier. I mean, this is life and death, right? It does not get more real in terms of a call to action than this moment in time, and I think every leader should sit themselves down and critically examine what legacy they want to leave, you know? This is the time for companies to demonstrate what living values, living their values actually looks like. It's their time to pressure test, you know, different mantras that companies love to share around, you know, authentic selves at work, or "Bring your whole selves to work," because you saying--it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You're saying those things... well, here's your moment. Here's your moment to [know?] what it really means, and that's true at the company level, it's true at that personal level. Hopefully you're inclined to want to dig more deeply into what actualizing on your commitments actually could mean right now, and I think that's the place to get really serious about where are the potential gaps between what you're saying and doing. And as we said earlier, you know, if you realize "Huh, even in these most dire circumstances, we're maybe not really ready to make the investment that we might need to actually move the needle or create the environment that our people need." Okay. That's a tough conclusion to come to, but okay.Zach: That's responsible though, right?Dr. Thomas: Right. Yeah. I mean, and then okay, well, then you have to communicate that back, but if you have been talking a game for a while and are realizing you want to step it up, that's amazing, and I think from there what you can be doing is really leveraging external leaders--I mean, there's a lot of information, tools that are free. You could certainly and should be always leveraging your internal employees or workers however they want to be leveraged to help you reveal your blind spots. But this is it. Like, this is the moment, and hopefully orgs will really step it up and leave a footprint that I think can last for generations. You know, what companies do now I think is going to reset how people see them in the public light, how people see them as an employer of choice or not, and so it's a critical kind of come to Jesus moment hopefully for leaders and orgs to double down or to de-emphasize the things that we've been talking about for a while.Zach: Yo. Man, I mean this has just been an incredible conversation. I would be remiss not to drop a Flex bomb right here, and then also some air horns, put 'em in right here. Okay, there we go. Erin, before we let you go--before Emory and I, excuse me, let you go, any parting words or shout-outs? I know you've been dropping wild gems this entire time, but I just want to give you one last--you know, where they can find you, what you're excited about with Upwork, anything. Give you time to plug.Dr. Thomas: Oh, goodness. Okay, I did not prepare for this. I have so many people to thank. I would say find me on Twitter. That's it. Please don't try to find me on LinkedIn. I don't respond on LinkedIn. Real talk. It's just too cluttered. So ErinLThomasPhD is my Twitter handle. I would say check out Upwork. I have been a lot of places. I have led diversity within two other organizations before now. I've been an expert consultant. I've seen a lot of what companies are doing, and I wouldn't be at Upwork if I weren't rabidly passionate about what we're doing and about all of the magic ingredients that attracted me to our company. So I'd love for folks to check us out. Come work with us. We're a great, amazing, purposeful company doing great work, with cool leaders like me, so come on through.Zach: I mean, this is the best ad I could imagine. [both laugh] All right, y'all, you know what it is. We're having real talk in a corporate world. I'm saying it, like, three times this time, but you know we amplify and center marginalized, underappreciated, underrepresented, undersupported, underestimated voices at work, and look, you can check us out anywhere, okay? Look, we're all over Barack Obama's internet. You just Google Living Corporate, okay? We're gonna pop up. We're there, okay? We're all over. Check us out on Twitter @LivingCorp_Pod, @LivingCorporate on Instagram. Shoot, if you old school and you're like, "Nah, Zach. I gotta go in the browser and type in the domain like a true OG," then I'ma say, "Okay, cool," and I'ma tell you www.living-corporate.com, please say the dash, or livingcorporate.co, livingcorporate.us, livingcorporate.tv, livingcorporate.org, livingcorporate.net. We got all of the Living Corporates except livingcorporate.com, so if you type in livingcorporate.com and Living Corporate does not pop up do not be mad at me, 'cause I told you already we don't got that one. We got all the other livingcorporates, or living-corporate.com--please say the dash, all right? You can also email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. You can also DM us, okay? DMs are wide open. We are not afraid of the random DM. Just hit us up. We'll make sure we hit you back. If you have a listener letter, you know, you could submit it right there. We'll answer it on the show. We got a decent number. We try to get to a critical mass so we can answer a few, and then we kind of make that an episode. Just so y'all you know. It's, like, a peek behind the curtain. Until next time, y'all. This has been Zach, and you've been listenimg to Dr. Erin Thomas of Upwork. Me and Emory are gonna catch y'all later. Emory, you got anything to say? [Emory's silent] Nope? All right, y'all. Peace.

Religion has a lot to say about modesty - from clothing to behavior to even thoughts. Much of it is misunderstood from the outside perspective. The concept central to the idea of "modesty" is one of boundaries. In tech, we also have to set boundaries: from who has access to certain types of data to what "work hours" mean to which deliverables are in or out of scope to the tasks are considered part of our regular job.  In this episode, we'll hear from an entirely new set of voices: Alex Navarro, Faria Akram, and Yum Darling - who will explore the nature of those limitations and how our religious/moral/ethical POV can inform our tech life - and vice versa. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon (00:32):welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our careers it professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious.Alex (00:53):Religion has a lot to say about modesty from clothing to behavior to even thoughts. Much of it is misunderstood from the outside perspective. The concept central to the idea of modesty is one of boundaries. In tech, we also have to set boundaries; from who has access to certain types of data, to what work hours mean, to which deliverables are in or out of scope to the tasks are considered part of our regular job. In this episode we'll explore the nature of those limitations and how our religious, moral, ethical point of view can inform our tech life and vice versa. I'm Alex Navarro and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my guests. Faria Akram.Faria (01:38):Hi,Alex (01:39):and Yum Darling.Yum (01:40):Hello.Alex (01:41):Thank you ladies.Alex (01:43):All right. So if you are new to the podcast, we start each episode with a moment for everyone to be able to introduce themselves, have a shameless plug, or basically engage with you in some other form. Uh, so Faria why don't you go first?Faria (01:57):Hi, I'm Faria. I'm a mental health advocate, storyteller, dancer, and cohost of a podcast called vulnerable views. You can keep up with what I'm doing in all those areas on my instagram @followingfaria and my website followingfaria.com in terms of religion, I was raised as a Muslim and still identify as such.Alex (02:15):and Yum.Yum (02:16):Okay. Uh, my name is Yum Darling. I am a community manager by day and by night, which is very long. I am a mom to two children. Um, which is why I'm hiding today at my parents' house so that you don't have to hear it. My dog, my cats, my children, and my husband yelled at me all at the same time. I don't really do as much on social media, so don't bother following me. I was born in Israel. So culturally I'm Jewish and I have gone to Jewish schools pretty much my entire life. So that is where the bulk of my, um, religious education is. But, um, spiritually and religiously, you know, I just like learning about religions. So I have a little bit of Buddhist knowledge, which isn't really religion if you're but whatever. And Judaism paganism. So ask why I will be happy to, you know, answer your questions.Alex (03:06):And just to round out today's podcast, my name is Alex Nevaro. Again, I am the founder of a creative agency called running their production house. You can find us on Instagram at that same handle. You can also find us on our website, which is that same name or any of your production house.com. And I was actually raised as a Catholic by a Catholic mother and a father who was a Jehovah's witness at the time. I didn't stay that way. We'll probably get into that later on in podcasts, but now I identify as a nondenominational Christian. So if you were not able to keep up with those amazingly, uh, short introductions, relax. It's okay. We're going to have everything posted in the show notes for you so you can just sit back and enjoy the conversation and let the amazing ideas flow over you. So, moving on to our first topic of discussion, when you hear the word modesty, what ideas or reactions does that conjure up for you in a religious context?Faria (04:08):So when I heard the word modesty, one thing that comes to mind in a religious context is a story of the prophet Muhammad. Peace be upon him. Um, and to those who know the story better than I do, I might mess up some details, I apologize. Uh, but there's a story that he was traveling with another man and they saw a woman who was quote unquote immodestly dressed in some sort of way, right? Um, but the prophet, instead of telling the woman, you know, Oh, you shouldn't be wearing that, or you need to change or whatever. Um, because his friend was just staring at the woman, he, I think took his hand and like moved his friend's face or covered his eyes, um, or averted his gaze in some sort of way. And that's always struck me as really powerful. Cause I think a lot of times when I hear the word modesty, even absent from religion, it's talked a lot about women and what they should or should not be doing. Um, so that story when I heard it as a kid always really, uh, struck a chord with me because it just reminded me that it's modesty is so much more than clothing, right? Which I think we'll talk about as well, but it's also on men to be modest and to do their part on all people.Yum (05:16):It's pretty much the same in Judaism. Um, modesty is, uh, how, how did an old friend put it? Uh, it's about women being a team player. And the whole, the whole interaction between men and women and modesty is that modesty equals privacy. Snoot or modesty and Hebrew is about how much you respect herself and how private you would like to be. So it really is the woman, the woman's decision. Now, of course, there are guidelines, if you will, if you would like to, how you could, you could dress modestly. Um, and everyone will have a different opinion on that. I'm sure we'll get into that later. But um, yes, pretty much, pretty much the same story there as Faria. You know, we, we tell our our men, if you don't want to pray in front of this woman who is distracting you, um, go somewhere else.Alex (06:10):Well, it's, it's interesting that when we hear the word modesty, it seems like the first thing that comes to mind is, is how we dress or how others are dressed. And that's definitely something that was drilled into my mentality when I was growing up as a Catholic because there are definitely certain rules that you had to abide by when you were entering into the house of God. And so that I feel like what people can relate to whether they were brought up in that religion or not. But um, it's an interesting concept also when we're talking about the workplace because we're talking about modesty. A lot of people sometimes associate that with not being braggadocious. But if you're a woman in the workplace, particularly in the tech industry and the workplace, could it sometimes be a disadvantage for you because you are quote unquote being too modest and you're not speaking up for yourself. Whether it be something like a good idea that you have in a large group meeting or speaking up about a great accomplishment that you've done for the organization.Yum (07:12):Sometimes modesty is um, equated with humility and submission and women that are um, more covered up or more modest or even just more quiet are seen as more submissive at home in the workplace, in their religion. And yeah, it can definitely work against you. Women that are that way sometimes get put in that bucket at work, whether people don't listen to them as much or don't take their voices seriously or um, don't give them the opportunity to say something. Sometimes you have to pause and let someone who might not be as loud as you are, come forth and say something meaningful from their perspective. And a lot of time we tend to take people who are more modest, a step next to us and just put them in that bucket of silence and submission and oppression and, and their views kind of go away. And that's sad in religion and in life and in the workplace,Alex (08:10):I think it's really easy for people to get an impression of you before you open your mouth. Right? So what are they going to go off of? They're going to go off of how we look and a lot of times for women, how we're dressed, how much we're covered up, how much makeup we have on, you know, if we decided to do our hair that day or night. I mean there's just, there's so many ways for people to sort of misinterpret who we are as a person. And I feel like if we're not mindful of how quote unquote modest we are in the workplace, then are we sort of doing that to ourselves. And then I also think there's a very fine line of that level of modesty because very easily, like you mentioned, young, if we're just naturally loud and we naturally just have this sort of emphatic tone, all too often it can be misinterpreted in a negative way. And I feel like that is something that is very specific to women. So what do we do? Do we need to be less modest?Faria (09:20):Heck no.Yum (09:23):Um, I do think there's this, there's a place for women to stand up for other women in this context. Um, I definitely think men allies are awesome, but sometimes that permission from a man to speak is just really patronizing. Um, so what, what I would say is if you work with a woman who is more modest or even a woman who is on the opposite and is loud and vivacious and does not dress modestly, um, perhaps bringing their voice into a conversation or just pausing and letting them speak. Um, and as a woman, of course, definitely inviting those women to the conversation and into outside life as well, especially in the tech industry. I find you make really close friendships and you, you do things outside of work and sometimes the women who are seen as more religious, I am doing air quotes, uh, are, aren't invited because they're seen as, they would not enjoy this simply because of the way they dress and what we think their religion is.Alex (10:22):That's a very good point. I completely agree with that and I feel like that's something that probably both men and women are, are guilty of. Take the time, I guess take the time to get to know someone instead of sort of making an assumption based on how they look or how they appear. So. Okay. Do you, do either of you kind of find yourselves being mindful of this in your own workplace? You know, especially when we're talking about, you know, in the world of it, is there a balance that you try to find for yourself that you're trying to create when it comes to being modest, whether it's, you know, how you're dressed or just, you know, how you are being interpreted by others in the workplace.Faria (10:59):I don't think I really take that into consideration to be honest. Yes. I had a great conversation this week where someone told me I should enter every room with the confidence of a white man. And so that's something I'm working on that thing.Alex (11:16):Oh my g... that is gold. that needs to be on bumper stickers. I want a tshirt that says that.Faria (11:31):Yeah, no, it was very eyeopening. Right. And I think, and we can have probably a whole nother podcast episode on just confidence in itself. Um, you know, right. But I think it relates to modesty, to your point of how you carry yourself. Right. Um, and going back to actually Yum when you were talking about, you know, someone who's loud and vivacious and who, uh, dresses less modesty though modestly, that was interesting to, because I think I know a lot in a lot of loud and vivacious people. So I come, I come from a more conservative Muslim background. My family is pretty conservative Muslims. And I was raised in a small town in a small Muslim community that was pretty conservative. Uh, but I know a lot of loud, vivacious Muslim women who are like that with their personality. But then in terms of dress, they wear the hijab, which is the head covering or the niqab, which covers everything but your eyes. So it's funny cause it's like there. What would you be defining Montessori as, right. So as someone who is more of a voracious, who is more loud and more outgoing, I try to be more quiet and listen to other people I'm working on not interrupting others has been something I've been really trying, actively trying to work on. Because by nature I love talking and I will talk over other people. Um, which is not the right thing to do. So giving others a space to converse and also active listening. So not, I'll admit it, I did the listening where it's like, okay, I'm listening to you because I'm waiting for you to finish. So I can say what I have to say. Cause I have three thoughts in my head right now, but active listening, of holding a space for this person to communicate with my full attention because that is what they deserve.Alex (13:07):So, okay. What about,you know, this kind of is making me thinking about just kind of how I was supposed to or not supposed to, I guess maybe how it was expected to behave when I was, you know, at Sunday school or when I was at mass or you know, when I was even, let's say around a certain group of people that maybe only interacted with me when we were at, you know, church gatherings. Um, I feel like for me personally, it was a certain Alex that people interacted with when I was at Catholic functions and at Catholic mass and so on and so forth versus the openness I guess that I found when I started going to Bible groups and Bible studies and, um, functions for the nondenominational church, which for me, that journey started happening when I was in college. And I don't know if you know, that is a Testament to those two religions or if it was just my experience personally, but I definitely would say that I felt like I had to be a certain level of modest when I was being brought up in the Catholic faith versus when I switched over to being nondenominational. Christian. Did either of you have some kind of experience similar to that?Faria (14:28):I feel like I kind of did. Um, so yeah, I grew up coming from a more conservative Muslim background I think. And I know not only am I less modest when it comes to talking a lot, but also in, um, kind of my habits of dress. So I was the first woman in my immediate family who did not wear the hijab, the head covering, um, every, almost everyone I knew more for at least some period of time. Some took it off. Um, so from just the very get go, um, it wasn't something I wanted to partake in. And I'm more the type of person who it's hot outside, like I'm gonna wear short sleeves instead of committing to something like that. Um, that's not saying anything about me as a person, good or bad. That's not saying anything about people who choose to dress that way. It's just, I noticed very early on I was different in a sense. So yeah, the Faria that went to the mosque, uh, obviously I wore a hijab there. I covered my hair cause it was a place of God. Uh, I interacted a little differently because, uh, it, it was, it just was a little bit more of a conservative setting and toned down my mannerisms. You know, a lot of it was for Sunday school, so you can't get all my monks just there. I mean you can, but that's how you get Sunday school detention. Your parents aren't happy. Um, so yeah, it was in college actually because I was in the same town for the first 18 years of my life, which I didn't. I thought that was everyone's normal. And then I realized it wasn't, I went to a bigger university with more people and um, not just more people and more Muslims, but a more diverse group of Muslims too. So my family is Pakistani. Um, so I met Muslims from all different kinds of countries and who, you know, different, um, sects too. My family is Sunni Muslim. Um, and I didn't even know about some of the sex cause there wasn't that, uh, open-mindedness I feel like taught to me and my faith journey growing up. And that's where I really kind of started to see how there are so many different levels and how you can be modest in so many different ways. And that's something I started gravitating to. I started to lean more towards, I don't have to cover every inch of my skin to be modest. And that became my personal choice.Yum (16:34):Confession time, baby. I'm only went to shool slash synagogue, slash tempo, whatever you wanna call it. Um, for school purposes. My parents lived and I obviously, um, our family lived on a little Hilltop in Israel, in the North of Israel, just South of Lebanon, surrounded by other little Hilltop villages, um, surrounded by, um, hilltops of Arab villages. And I went to school with, um, most of the people in the surrounding areas. And the schools in Israel are Jewish. It's a Jewish state. And we do, you know, celebrate every, every, uh, Friday. I almost said Yoshi, but that would not make sense to most of your listeners. So every Friday we would have a couple of Shabbat at school where you would welcome a Shabbat. We welcome, um, the day of rest Saturday for Jews. Um, and that was my normal at school, at home. Never ever, ever. My mom, I don't, I love my mom dearly and if you're listening, I'm sorry, but she, um, she doesn't cook much or at all. She is a grandma now, but not your stereotypical Jewish grandma because I make all the chicken soup. So we, I had a very different upbringing, what you would call a religious Jew. I would, I was more of a, of a secular Jew with a lot of Jewish history. But my understanding of modesty, um, came so much later, like way into college. You guys like were into college. I went to NC state, go Wolfpack and um, we had this NC state is made up of red bricks. They signed this, I don't know if actually this is a rumor, maybe someone out there can validate, but uh, apparently they signed a contract and got a lot of their bricks for super cheap because they bought so friggin many. Um, so the entire campus is RedBrick including the well known brick yard, which is, you know, made a brick and very slippery in the winter or when it's raining, which is, you know, full time in North Carolina and you can't walk without slipping. So you have to be real careful what you wear because when you slip on brick, it's not just going down, you're going down, legs up. And we had the lovely Brickyard preacher who used to stand on his little, I don't know what it's called, a box. Um, I'm sure there's another name for it. It was, it's, it's just a little, it's a cute little box with a little, um, podium. And he used to yell at people walking by about, um, the, how much they are sitting and where he thinks they should go and isn't it lovely? Great. I feel like I feel like they're pretty universal. And I was walking by wearing my normal young clothes, um, which at the time was probably like gym shorts and a tee shirt on my way to biology class, thinking about what I'm going to dissect today. And he like yells at me when I walked past whore and I'm just like, I'm 18, I don't know what you're talking about. Oh no, you guys, that was, it was hurtful. I don't, I w you know, totally not what I was expecting. Of course it was raining that day and I slipped and fell legs up right in front of him. Luckily there were, there were some very burly, um, football players that were walking right behind me who like pulled me up and started walking me away. And there's two things you should probably know about me. One is I can control my temper and two is I have no filter. So, um, something like this could be really bad for all parties. So thank you. Burly football man that I never met again for, um, you know, probably rescuing me from being arrested. Um, but yeah, Brickyard preacher dude taught me about modesty and taught me about how modesty sometimes is in the eye of the beholder and sometimes it's in the eye of the be the bearer, if you will. Yeah. So, so that was really an eye opener for me.Alex (20:40):That's really interesting. I think maybe you bring up about, you know, when, when we're talking about modesty in terms of our appearance and more specifically what we're wearing or not wearing. You know, that's an interesting question is it's the person's responsibility who is wearing the clothing or is it the person's responsibility? Who is Ewing the clothing? And then, you know, to take that a step further, if we're going back to the story that Aria shared earlier about, you know, sort of averting your eyes, if you will. Um, and I'm going to attempt to say this correctly, so young helped me if I, if I bought this, but when it comes to the ha ha that says, thank you that says don't pray in front of an in, modestly dressed woman and we have to divine define those terms. Right? So is it, are those terms in the IBD holder or the terms in, you know, the person who's wearing the clothing and then to take that even further, maybe go cry somewhere else?Faria (21:38):Um, yeah, so I think I'll go, I don't know too much about Judaism, so not speaking to these specific rules or trying to offend anyone. But when you say that Alex actually reminds me of my favorite Bollywood movie or one of my favorite Bollywood movies, there's a line where, um, the, the lead actress or whatever is talking to her sister and she's like, why did you wear that to the tumble? Everyone at the temple was staring at you and her sister's like, well, if everybody in the temple was staring at me instead of God, that's their problem, not mine. Um, and I was just like, yes, cause I love that scene. Um, and I recognize that not everybody has an opinion. Uh, but I do, I, you know, with that, I think it opened up that I lean more towards, it's, uh, on the responsibility of not the person who is dressing her appearing that way. But the other, because I think yes, modesty is, is very, can be very physical, right, in terms of dress, in terms of makeup, things like that. But my take is you don't know that person's intention behind it. Right? Like I, my mother, I think the first time Yama was really bonding with your story because, um, I mean, I love my mother a lot more than I'm sure you'd like that preacher, but she called me like a whore once I was 16 and I wore red lipstick for the first time and she said, uh, she said I looked like a streetwalker. Uh, but she said it in ODU, so to add some color to this podcast, her exact words were [inaudible], which means you look like a woman of the night, which meant hooker. And I was like, thanks mom. I'm 16 and you and dad said I could wear this and now that I've worn it, you're mad. I'm so sorry.Alex (23:09):Insult.Faria (23:10):Yeah, I know. Yeah. She was like, why do you look at woman on the street? I was like, I didn't even know what meant like hooker. Like that part came later. By the way, I was like, I am a woman and we're about to start one of the night. Yeah. I was like, I am a woman and it's night and we are about to go somewhere. Like it didn't click till later bless my baby Faria heart. Um, cause I was like, where are you mad? Yeah, man. I'm just like, it's fine. It's fine. I was like, wait, but she seems upset. So I lean more to the side. That is, it's the responsibility of the person who is seeing or witnessing any other type of dress or the person who is dressing quote unquote modestly or modestly. Because I think intention plays a big role in that. And we don't know people's intentions, right? We don't know what's going on in their head, but what we do know is ours, our thoughts and feelings and what we can control is our actions and how we choose to react or handle a situation that we feel is in modest or too modest or however you'd put it.Yum (24:05):I'm just going to say that once I was the, the on the side of the be-wearer, it is in the eye of the bearer. What he or she thinks is modest. Um, but I think I've switched to the camp of both.Alex (24:18):Oh, interesting.Yum (24:19):Yes. And it's been a very recent switch you guys because of this very last 2020 Superbowl that I have switched.Alex (24:29):Are you referencing J-Lo and Shakira?Yum (24:32):I am. In fact, yes. First of all, let me preface this by saying that I have a huge amount of respect for them and for Adam Levine who was, you know, the year before shirtless, the energy that my Facebook stream had that night and probably for a week afterwards commenting on what they were wearing, how they were dancing, what they were doing, what they were saying really kind of struck me as, you know, it doesn't really matter what they were thinking they were wearing. Everybody else is hating on them except for not because those women are in their forties and fifties and they look better than I do right now. So really I wasn't hitting on you, Shakira and J-Lo. I love you and just going to share a little tidbit with you. Part of my fitness routine is pole fitness. So seeing J-Lo up on that pole is like my life's goal. Really? Yeah. Do you see her in hustlers? I did. In fact here in hustlers, I've done one of my classes before. It is not easy girl. It is what got me in shape after two babies. Um, the core strength that it takes and the arm strength and the back strength don't even get me started. This is way, way, way, not what we were talking about before this podcast. I asked, um, my mom's group who are very varied in their beliefs and in their personalities and I respect all of them a whole lot. What they thought about modesty in general because we did have a thread talking about whether we covered our children's eyes during the halftime show and kind of what we landed on was, you know, what was really to blame was camera angles. And I'm going to bet that the person behind the camera who's deciding where the camera's going to go and what it's going to look like was not a woman. So at the end of the day, at the end of the day when they're saying, well she shouldn't have jello, shouldn't have done that. Like widespread slide. Excuse me, how are you going to slide without whites, without like widespread legs? People who have never tried to slide are saying this, but people who are saying that because, Oh my gosh, the camera was right there. Who put the camera right there? Ladies and gentlemen, not the ladies. So I think, I think there is a something to be said for the people who are watching to bring it back to Israel. There was a situation in the military where um, Israel wanted religious men to serve in the military and Israel. Everyone at 18 serves and religious men often get exempt to go study. And Israel said, nah, actually you're going to go in and be part of part of the military. You're going to serve as well for your three years. And they said, we can't serve or we can't. So they have their, they have, um, the more religious men have their own little, um, segment in the Israeli military. So we do try to accommodate. But they said they couldn't come to a, uh, event because there was a choir at the beginning and that had women in it who were wearing skirts that did not reach their knees and that would, that would give them inappropriate thoughts and they therefore they could not go and then they wanted to get out of the military altogether. Pretty much what I'm saying here is I do think that it, I think sometimes it gets mangled, but it is both who is wearing it and what we feel about it and whether we feel modest in what we're wearing versus what, um, Faria you can look at me when, you know, when we're together in a room and be like, Holy crap, that shirt is a low cut and that's, you know, your prerogative and I can't stop you from thinking that. And it's fine if you think that I'm still gonna wear the shirt.Alex (27:51):So taking, taking this concept back into the workplace, if we're talking about let's say the it version of modesty, is that really just boundary setting and then, you know, is it, are we sort of setting these boundaries to sort of protect people from themselves, whether that be, you know, security risks or whether it be potentially preventing you from getting eyed for a promotion because your direct supervisor is getting the wrong impression from either your low cut shirt or maybe the fact that you wear ripped up tee shirts and jeans to work every day. When is it okay to have boundaries setting in the workplace when it comes to modesty?Yum (28:35):So I think IT is a really interesting, um, subsection of people. Uh, especially. So I come from a, um, small business SaaS background and the people I worked with came to work in leggings and ripped up jeans. And, um, every time the company wanted to give us a gift, it was a hoodie. Like this is the kind of people that I worked with. And they were, they were expecting the same for me. There was never an expectation that I get very, very dressed up to come to work. In fact, some of the women who did come to work more dressed up, and I'm not talking like more modestly because those t-shirts come up to your neck. So it's not, it's not that kind of a problem. I'm just talking about like, you know, sharper. I'm more sharply dressed. They were seen as the ones that were trying too hard. Yes, they were most of the time busy, uh, sales women and they needed to feel the part in order to speak the part. You know, nobody sees them, um, where we do most of our sales by phone, but it was important for them to feel that way. And I do think that more and more we are coming to a place, work and life are intersecting in a way that it hasn't before. And I think boundary setting is probably one of the most important things that we can do for ourselves. Um, I don't know about you too, but I'm a millennial and what we, what we kind of grew up on was a work life balance. But I heard on a radio talk show that gen Z is actually talking about work life blending where they want, um, they want businesses to be more okay with their life and their work really being one thing. If you expect me to answer an email at 7:00 PM, it's okay for me to go to the doctor at 10:00 AM and for you not to know about it. See what I'm saying? Like it's, it's more of a blending than it is a separation, which is what, which is what we were taught to want. Right. They were like, you're going to find a nine to five and then you're going to leave your work at work and go home and do your thing. Um, as a community manager, that's impossible. I answer emails all the time. I answer emails on PTO. Not that I should, but I do. Am I inviting people to treat me a certain way? Probably and I should probably stop. That's kind of, it's kind of expected of me at this point. At what point do I say I have this amount of self-respect, which is related to modesty, because modesty is having enough self-respect to dress in a way that shows that you are not trying to be overtly sexual or overtly whatever, or maybe you are good for you.Alex (30:58):So is it maybe because your boundaries are, have become less modest that now this is sort of what's expected of you because this is the impression that you've given to people and that's what they've perceived in terms of your availability, in terms of, you know, your work life blend or balance or lack thereof. You know, is it sort of we're setting these boundaries by determining how modest we are with our time, with our words, with our actions, with our dress. So kind of like what you were saying earlier, I think that it does fall back on us a little bit, but it's still also in the eye of the beholder. So I would agree actually. I think it's bothYum (31:49):Welcome to my "both" camp. Population 2: you and me.Alex (31:52):but when it comes to it, you know, there are definitely certain scenarios where being more modest is without a doubt. A plus. Right? Like if we're talking about security measures, if we're talking about, um, just really kind of helping people to protect them from themselves, cause you may not be a malicious user, but you may just be a user who's too busy and trying to do too many things at one time and then you become a security risk to the organization and you should have been a little bit more modest about your passwords.Yum (32:21):Yeah, I think you're right Alex. I think, um, companies need to be very modest with the access they're giving their users. And I think users need to be, um, respectful of the boundaries that they're setting and the boundaries that their work is setting. I know a lot of times we get, um, for laptops from the companies that we, that we work for. Um, and perhaps, um, being respectful to yourself and being respectful to the company and not using that laptop as your personal machine and inviting in, um, security risks that way. Or even just, you know, at the end of the day it can go in and take a look, see and see everything you've Googled for the past. You know, however long you've been working for the company and do you really want that? Cause I don't,Alex (33:05):right, right. In case in case anyone was unaware that that is going on at their workplace, it's definitely happening. And you should, uh, adjust accordingly.Faria (33:16):Okay. I'm going to be honest, I have a lot of Buzzfeed articles, the ones that are like incentivizing you to buy this thing under $15 because you need it in your life and it's because they pop up and I'm like, bookmark, save, go look and buy all the things later. So yes, sorry. Office peopleYum (33:32):Faria that is, that is the least of their worries. Um, as a, as a side gig, I am a writer slash, editor and um, my biggest issue is I'm Googling how to murder people, but we can talk about this some other day.Alex (33:47):So would you say that, just to kind of bring this back and kind of round it out, is there something from your faith or your religion that maybe I think IT could learn from or maybe even that you've taken that principle or that idea and it's carried over into your professional life?Faria (34:11):Yeah, I would, I would say don't be afraid to be open-minded and challenge what you've been taught because I feel like this is like, you know, take a dog or take a drink every time she says she came from a conservative background. But yeah, like I didn't question things for 18 years. Right. Um, and just kind of accepted what I heard and believed, which was all great and wonderful. Uh, then maybe not the best fit for me. Right. So I think also as someone in her early career, um, I'm at just my second company right now out of college. So, uh, being new, kind of in that early career stage, there was a lot of, uh, maybe X, Y, Z is exactly what I need to do to advance or to meet the goals or to do the things. And I get afraid to challenge or to speak my mind or to say something different because that's not the way it's always been done. Um, and so yeah, just kind of learning to be open and to trust myself I think is something that resonates with me in modesty or in faith. And also in the workplace.Yum (35:13):I'm actually going to draw from my, um, educational experience about theology in general. Um, and, and across many, um, the many religions that I've learned about both pretty in depth and just surface level, almost every single religion way of life. Um, anything, whatever you want to call it, spirituality has, um, some sort of need either privacy or or sneeze or modesty or whatever you can call it. And I think, um, companies can learn from that as well, especially in it. Every company should have their proper use of computer bylaws and rules of engagement within their company and an understanding that people come from different backgrounds and it's not always easy and it's not always comfortable. Um, and sometimes it gets real awkward if you meet, for example, uh, a Jewish man who will not high five or will not shake hands or a Jewish woman who won't, um, give you a hug, which is apparently, you know, accepted or expected of, of women. Nowadays, I think that's, that's this generation's you should smile more. But I do think that, uh, every company should understand modesty, understand self-respect, understand boundaries. Um, we'll see when we get there.Destiny (36:33):Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media.  

Functional Naturopath Dan Sipple is back on the show with Mason today to discuss the intricaces of gut health. The pair explore the methods you can use to optimise your health and build a rocking microbiome.  "You're the custodian of your microbiome. Look after it, learn how to nurture it, learn what affects it.. You want to pass that on to your kiddies. So do right by it and live long and prosper." Dan Sipple (inspired by Dr. Jason Hawrelak) Mason and Dan discuss: The origins of your personal gut bacteria and the critical life stages in which your microbiome is influenced. Gut health and pregnancy preparation. What to look out for when purchasing a probiotic supplement. Preboitics and botanical dietary variation as long term strategies for sustainable microbiome health. The lifestyle factors that damage health. The danger of restrictive diets, particularly those deficient in dietary fibre. The types of prebiotic fibre and what foods contain them (see resource section below for specifics) The benefits of short chain fatty acids (SCFA's) such as butyrate. The pros and cons of fermented foods. Soluble and insoluble fibre. How to create a gut friendly plate. Colonics and enemas. The various microbiomes within the body as a whole e.g. the scalp, the mouth, skin etc. Essential oils and the disastrous antimicrobial action they can have on the microbiome.   Who is Dan Sipple? Dan is a also known as The Functional Naturopath who uses cutting-edge evidence-based medicine. Experienced in modalities such as herbal nutritional medicine, with a strong focus on environmental health and longevity, Dan has a wealth of knowledge in root-dysfunction health.    Resources: Dan Website Dan Instagram   Gut Health Podcast 1 Gut Health Podcast 2 Candida And Medicinal Mushrooms Podcast  Vaginal Steaming Podcast Microbia Lab Testing Missing Microbes Book Prebiotic Foods: Inulin/Fructooligosaccharides (FOS) – asparagus, dandelion, onion, garlic, leek , chicory, burdock, artichoke. Galactooligosaccharides (GOS) – legumes, beans, beets, lentils, etc. Pectin - apples, bananas, potatoes, berries. Resistant Starch - green bananas, cooked cooled potatoes, plantains, sorghum, sweet potatoes.  Polyphenols - the skins of dark fruits/veg best e.g. pomegranate, blackberries etc. Partially Hydrolyzed Guar Gum (PHGG). Polysaccharides/beta glucans - medicinal mushrooms, oats etc Strain Specific Probiotics - What Strain For What Condition:   Leaky Gut/Strengthing The Ingregrity Of Gut Lining Saccharomyces boularrdii Lactobacillus rhamnonsus GG Lactobacillus reuteri DSM 1224 Bifidobacterium longum BB536   Establishing A Healthy Microbiome - Mums and Bubs Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG Bifidobacterium breve M-16v Bifidobacterium longum BB536 Bifidobacterium animalis BB-12 Maintaining General Gut Health - Kids and Adults L.rhamnosus LGG Lactobacillus acidophilus NCFM Bifidobacterium lactis Bi-07 Lactobacillus rhamnosus HN001 Bifidobacterium animalis ssp. lactis HN019 Rebuilding Microbiome Post Antibiotics Bifidobacterium animalis ssp. lactis BB-12 Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG Saccharomyces cerevisiae (boulardii) (SB) Allergies / Autoimmunity Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG Lactobacillus paracasei LP33 Poor Immunity / Recurrent infections Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG Lactobacillus acidophilus NCFM Bifidobacterium lactis Bi-07 Lactobacillus plantarum HEAL9 Lactobacillus paracasei 8700:2 Lactobacillus fermentum CECT5716 Lactobacillus reuteri DSM 17938 IBS Lactobacillus plantarum 299V   Candida / Dysbiosis Saccharomyces cerevisiae (boulardii) (SB) Bifidobacterium lactis Bi-07   Metabolic health/Weight Loss Bifidobacterium animalis spp. lactis B420 Bifidobacterium animalis ssp. lactis HN019   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason:   (00:01) Hey everybody, welcoming SuperFeast podcast, favourite special friend Dan Sipple. Hey man.   Dan Sipple:   (00:09) Hi buddy. How you doing?   Mason:  (00:10) Yeah, really good. Really stoked to be having this conversation with you. It's been a little bit since we've had a podcast. You guys are cooking a baby? You know that happend since...   Dan Sipple:  (00:20) It's been a while.   Mason:  (00:21) Since our last chat. Yeah, that makes it a long while. Maybe we didn't realise you're in the early stages of baking.   Dan Sipple:  (00:27) Yeah baking again. It's good. It's nice and timely but with a good microbiome rehash because it's all so fresh in the mind.   Mason:  (00:36) Yeah. Sweet. So guys, we get a lot of people asking around gut health and Dan and I did a two part like a mega dive into gut health. We'll put the links to that in the show notes. We also did a real good conversation with Sage around candida and fungal infection, which crossed over a lot with a lot of big gut information and seemed like the missing piece was coming out of the FAQ we get around.   Mason:  (01:07) Which probiotic should I be taking? Should I be doing sauerkrauts and fermented foods? What's the best diet to support a microbiome, so on and so forth. And Dan and I got jamming about it a little bit when we realised we had a pretty mega podcasts that we could probably hash out. And so that's what we want to talk about.   Mason:  (01:23) We want to dance around the microbiome, the clinical setting of getting your gut health back into balance. What does that look like? And then what does that look like after the clinical setting, clinical probiotics perhaps. Diets and extreme diets and how they cross over into being for and against a long term strong microbiome, and when it's time to cruise over into more of a lifestyle diet, that's generally going to support many areas of the body, like our cellular metabolism and various organs.   Mason:  (01:58) But as well as that a microbiome and see some of the pitfalls that can come about when we over identify and go a little bit too long in a diet that's a little bit extreme. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to it because it's brought it up for me as well. Just like, all right, what's my long, because I think I'm doing really well in myself to not be overly identified with a dietary system. It's taken a lot for me over the years and just really just setting in, nestling into the home and the home cooking vibe and just making sure I've got all my little principles and while maintaining my particular healthy foods that I like, romance in the kitchen, creating a diet, which I think is going to be sustainable over decades and decades, but what are those little principles and distinctions to ensure that I'm really rocking my microbiome as I go along. But it doesn't need to be an extremism in doing one thing or another. So, yeah, any thoughts for you going into this podcast in the beginning before we dive into the first topic?   Dan Sipple:  (03:09) I think it'd just be a good opportunity, like you say, just to really look at it over the course of a lifestyle as we spoke about designing a lifestyle that supports a healthy microbiome from basically mum's gut health from our infancy as kids and then right through the teenage years and early adulthood and into the older years and having a longevity plan because there's definitely challenging time periods I feel like throughout the course of a human's life where for instance, like mode of birth, that's one of the biggest ones, whether the baby is a C-section or a natural birth.   Dan Sipple:  (03:51) And then as the immune system is developing in childhood, all that exposure to different microbes and lots of chance to pick up different bugs and whatnot. So, the chances of going on things as a child like antibiotics from say two years of age to eight years of age is another critical point. And then I feel like again, in the teenage years when people tend to throw caution to the wind and really tests their microbiome. Test their gut barrier function. The insults that get thrown at it, that's another critical time point that I guess as a clinician you see those patterns emerge quite often in people's stories. It's like you'd be doing a case history with someone. First question I usually lead with and all my patients will know this is birth mode.   Dan Sipple:  (04:40) How are we birthed? Was it a C-section, was it natural? What was mum's health like? Does mum have gut issues, et cetera. And the reason we ask around that is because every human's microbiome on the planet is their mum's. That's how it gets passed down. And essentially if you're vaginally birth, then you're seeded through that process. That's where your microbiome in your gut is seeded for life. So that's very, very critical. Hence why with birth modes that differ to that. So C-section for example, which is medically necessary in a lot of cases, don't get me wrong, but that can be a very initiating disturbance to long term gut issues or long term risk in terms of inflammatory conditions.   Dan Sipple:  (05:28) So in a nutshell, vaginal birth, lower risk of inflammatory conditions, gut conditions, skin conditions, et cetera, C-section higher risk. And then that flows over to whether you're bottle fed or breastfed. Same deal.   Dan Sipple:  (05:45) So yeah, going back to what I was saying, the infancy period, the teenage period. I feel like once you're in adulthood and life slows down a little bit, that's probably less... There's always going to be exceptions to the rule but there's probably less risk factors there. But it's generally speaking, anytime there's those big quantum leaps in development I reckon, you might want to be mindful.   Mason:  (06:09) They create little forks in the road and you can go down a particular trajectory with your health, and as you said, teenage years, it's when you are there to test yourself. You've got a lot of Jing and Kidney Essence in the system. But sometimes we don't have a conversation in our culture about just how far past the barrier we go a lot of the time. And respecting that you really... It's not a moral conversation. I don't have to feel bad and we can always do what we can to get back into balance. But it's very hard to heal something when we've gone into a real extreme. We've really tested ourselves too far and we've literally gone down a trajectory with our health from say that a critical period when we're teenagers. We've set ourselves down a path because we've tested too far.   Mason:  (06:54) The barrier in the gut's been, we've smashed through it, right? And therefore we are leaving ourselves susceptible to lowering the good bacteria and basically heading down an inflammatory. Just an Inferno. You just can't stop it. And it takes a lot to cool it at that point. So, all right, sweet.   Mason:  (07:16) So I like the fact that we've started off with that pregnancy preparation. So, although we start there and of course it's going to be the best to make sure that guts absolutely rocking in that preparation period, that everything that we're going to be talking about in this podcast is getting a little bit contributing to that conversation. What to do if you're preparing to get pregnant. And something we always say is regardless of your situation, you should be preparing to be as fertile as possible because that shows you've got fertile ground and you've got the JIng and the microbiome regardless of whether you're going to get pregnant.   Mason:  (07:52) So that's relevant for everyone. So that's going to come and then anything you want to say a little bit more about the birth mode and just the intricacies of a vaginal birth and how that can set you up for success bacterially?   Dan Sipple:  (08:04) Yeah, I think like you touched on preconception is a big one. So making sure mum's microbiome is as optimised as possible is always a great idea. And that concept is becoming really, really prominent and important. But like even 10 years ago, people just weren't necessarily having those conversations. But you talk to naturopaths that have been practising for 20 years and it's like they'll all tell you a lot of couples come in now for preconception. It's awesome.   Dan Sipple:  (08:36) I've got one couple down in Tilba. They're living off grid and doing so many good things to support the birth of the next baby. I remember a couple of weeks ago, I said, "How long have we got? Basically, when do you want to start trying?" And they were like, "Six months, nine months or something like that." I'm like, "Awesome. That's great. No pressure. We've got six months to do that." That's ample time versus when you see a patient who's had three or four miscarriages for example, and mum's 35 and she's under pressure.   Dan Sipple:  (09:10) So yeah, the longer the better. And that allows us to really, really look at the things that might be impacting that person's gut health. So for example, diet, environment, stress, medication, et cetera, et cetera. For the people that are interested, I always, as a clinician, love to see actually what bugs are in their gut and run a full microbiome assessment.   Mason:  (09:37) Who do you do that with these days?   Dan Sipple:  (09:40) I'm using microba which are an Australian based company up in Queensland and they're using technology called shotgun metagenomics, which is still DNA based assessments rather than culture.   Dan Sipple:  (09:53) We used to culture the stool years and years ago, but they worked out at some time point that you can only see about 30% of gut microbes using that culture. So the majority of even mainstream gastroenterologists are all in agreeance now that DNA testing is where it's at. That allows you to see, don't get me wrong, there's still bugs that come up that are unidentified, basically. We know they're there and we know what percentage of their in, but we just don't know what roles they play. But the science is catching up with them. So with this particular company, you'll get a section of the results say CAG 1456 or whatever it's like that means nothing. But if you check that in six months time, they'll probably know what that does. And I'll continually update the reports. That's really funky. It's cool.   Mason:  (10:38) Do you need to go through a clinician to get that test or is that available to the public as well?   Dan Sipple:  (10:43) Good question. I have a feeling it's available to all because I know that when you do order it and you log in to check your results, there's a general overview section, which is for the user. And then there's the practitioner section, which really dives deep into detail. So, yeah, I'm fairly certain that it's across the board for everyone.   Mason:  (11:03) Yeah sweet. So then getting to a vaginal birth, I feel like a lot of people are going to be, I've heard this. The mucosal lining through the whole vaginal canal is basically swabbing, seeding, all that bacterial complexity through the mouth, through the nose. Is there anything going on via, if there is a C- section, is there any recreating all of that? Is there-   Dan Sipple:  (11:35) Yeah.   Mason:  (11:35) ... enough going in through. There is? Through the vaginal canal? I mean of course it's all there?   Dan Sipple:  (11:40) Yeah, some still gets through. A small portion gets through. So, there is-   Mason:  (11:43) But I mean going and taking what's in the vaginal canal if possible. Even if there's a C-section and then running that along the orifices of the baby.   Dan Sipple:  (11:52) Ah, okay. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's what I always recommend patients to try for. Get a good doula who can advocate. In mainstream hospital settings, it's still looked upon as a bit on the fringe and a bit odd by mainstream practitioners, but absolutely. The name of that actual, escapes me at this time point. But yeah, essentially by swabbing that area and then applying it to bub's skin and orifices and that sort of thing, you do mitigate a lot of that loss. So yeah, absolutely. I'd definitely recommend that.   Mason:  (12:32) This might be a bit fringe, this is just like an experimental kind of thing. What's the benefit of that when we get a little bit older as well?   Dan Sipple:  (12:42) Yeah, yeah. We don't know.   Mason:  (12:46) I guess that's what they say when all those, the sexologist blogs came out about it being really good for guys going down on girls and so on and so forth and really advocating for it it's like a really healthy treat.   Dan Sipple:  (13:01) Yeah. I have no doubt that it's going to increase diversity of bugs, which is always a good thing. Just want to make sure-   Mason:  (13:08) There's no dysbiosis in the first place.   Dan Sipple:  (13:09) Exactly.   Mason:  (13:11) Yeah, yeah. There's a good podcast there about vaginal steaming in that and we'll put that in the show notes as well. Not making any claims but always a fun little conversation there. So, moving on from birth mode, we get to breastfeeding. I feel like this is one, if you find a crone in the medical system that's saying that there's no difference between bottle feeding and breastfeeding, I feel like even a majority of the institution will disagree, which is a really nice thing to see. Institutionalised dieticians are probably still the fossils that aren't going to... So just in case you come across someone that's like, "Look, there's no difference." Good red flag.   Dan Sipple:  (13:57) Massive red flag.   Mason:  (13:58) Yeah, red flag should be like out with you. So I mean naturally, breast milk is just loaded, right? Just loaded with immunological factors and bacteria.   Dan Sipple:  (14:09) Oh, to the thousandth degree. You cannot match what that contains and the spectrum of what they call HMOs. Human Milk Oligosaccharides, prebiotics essentially. They are trying now of course to start trying to mimic and throw into formulas to add some prebiotic action in there. Which you know-   Mason:  (14:31) It's not a bad thing.   Dan Sipple:  (14:32) It's not a bad thing. Of course. That's right.   Mason:  (14:34) Because there's instances where we know it's not possible. Milk dries up, so on and so forth. You might as well make the best of an unfortunate situation.   Dan Sipple:  (14:45) Yeah, that's right.   Mason:  (14:46) Especially if there's no, is it wet nurse, especially if you can't get access to a wet nurse,, which is very difficult in this current setting.   Dan Sipple:  (14:55) Exactly. Exactly. And then of course there's things a mum can do dietarily to help influence the composition of the breastfeeding mum's that is to improve, flow and the composition of that breast milk such as pre and probiotics, which are beneficial particularly for babies that are young and they might have, say for example a baby that is birthed vaginally and is getting breastfed but for whatever reason picked up an infection and had to have antibiotics in the first week of life.   Dan Sipple:  (15:25) The good thing is that whilst you might not necessarily be able to get a capsule down that baby's throat, a mum can take a probiotic capsule or prebiotic capsule or powder or whatever and you'll get maternal transfer essentially through that milk.   Mason:  (15:40) We're going to go through and talk about all the different prebiotics and probiotics. Dietary and supplement based that you can be using if that's the question. Because it is always that question which probiotic do I take and which prebiotic do I take?   Mason:  (15:55) And I guess there's a sliding scale between all right, is there something clinically that we're actually trying to do to counter a dysbiosis or an infection? Or are we just trying to upkeep for general, the mum might be perfectly fine and just want to make sure that the breast milk is absolutely optimised. So we'll go down that wrung. And along that sliding scale and I guess in that instance it's going to fall more again into the diet, more of a general throw a wide net supplementation if they want to do it for pre and pros. So we'll just say anyone's listening in going, just tell me which one to take it if I'm in that situation. That's coming. So anything else you need to say on that?   Dan Sipple:  (16:35) I just wanted to add there to your point that yeah, I really want to just get the message across that probiotics are just probiotics and we'll talk about strain specificity and stuff like that. But I think it really pays to see a clinician that knows what they're doing with particular strains. And so for anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about with the probiotic, you've got a genus a species and then a strain.   Dan Sipple:  (17:01) So take lactobacillus acidophilus for example. Lactobacillus is the genus, acidophilus is the species, and then what comes after that, which isn't always written on probiotic labels, actually carries all the weight. So that's your first red flag. If you're taking a probiotic or you're thinking about taking probiotics, you're looking at different products and whatnot, and then not mentioning that third component, you're just seeing the first two words essentially, that's a bit of a red flag because two strains within the same species can have completely different actions.   Dan Sipple:  (17:35) And a good example there is like E. coli. So Escherichia coli, Nissle 1917, the strain, great for colitis and a whole range of conditions. Escherichia coli in another strain can cause watery, bloody diarrhoea and make you really sick. So strain absolutely matters. I think there's a lot of companies out there that will probably skimp on that a little bit. And might be paying for inferior strains and then extrapolating research that's been done on good strains. And when you look at a label, unless the strain is written down there, you don't know what you're getting.   Mason:  (18:13) How's it going to be written? So is it going to be in a third in bracket, they're going to say what the actual strain is after the bacteria?   Dan Sipple:  (18:19) Exactly. Exactly. So a common one. Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG. So GG, that's the strain. That's the one with the research. If you pick up a product and it says Lactobacillus rhamnosus and nothing else after that, red flag. Yeah.   Mason:  (18:34) So in that instance you want to be able to talk to the... I'm sure maybe you can get a good health food store owner that's really onboard and has naturopathic skills or something like that or then if not, you can go to the actual company and start asking them what their actual strains are.   Dan Sipple:  (18:50) Yes, yes.   Mason:  (18:51) And is that the difference between you go for one that's actually super specific and you know for you particularly from all the research and just how you feel you want particular strains. Therefore you have a particular company that you don't like to buy your probiotic supplementation from because if you are not really... Look, I don't really mind, I just want lots of different strains in this. A bit more like a wild fermentation going on, where rather than just them buying a specific cheap strain of bacteria and putting that in versus them going, "Look, there's a huge variety of bacteria and strains that are going in." but I guess that's going to be then determined by what starter they are they're using in their fermentation process.   Mason:  (19:36) Is there validity of going, "Right. I don't want that specificity, but I want something that's a more of a wild ferment, but I want it supplemented I don't want to be having that in fermented foods as much. Can't rely on it."   Dan Sipple:  (19:50) Yeah, so if I'm honest, it is a little bit of a myth that taking a multi-strain probiotic is going to confer more health benefits. People seem to, I guess have a bit of a, what am I trying to say here? When someone looks at a strain that is just literally a unique strain in a probiotic, I think there's a potential for some people to think that that does very little when that couldn't be further from the truth. Sometimes literally just one strain can have extremely pivotal actions and benefits in the gut.   Dan Sipple:  (20:26) So more isn't always better. Having said that, you do want to make sure that if you are just doing one single strain that the number of colony forming units does meet the minimum requirement. But yeah, back to your point, I would get nervous of any company that isn't writing any of the strains down.   Dan Sipple:  (20:45) And then if you get in touch with and they're cagey about that information, that's another sure sign. And that happens all the time. Using a company like Metagenics, I use a few different companies and clinic here, but Metagenics are a good example of a company that do list the strain always and they've only got a handful of strains that they use probably around 10 or 12 at the most. And within that range they've got maybe eight or nine different types of probiotics. And so some contain two or three strains only, one of their multi strains is only five strains. And then they've got some just single rockstar strains with really good research. So yeah, more species, not necessarily better.   Mason:  (21:27) [crosstalk 00:21:28].   Dan Sipple:  (21:29) Yeah, go on, sorry.   Mason:  (21:31) I was going to say they're all refrigerated, are they?   Dan Sipple:  (21:35) Yeah, yeah. You can get shelf stable probiotics and again, you just want to make sure that the strains listed in that strain has good evidence, but there's no issue around if a probiotic is shelf stable, that it's any less beneficial.   Mason:  (21:53) Is Metagenics... They're available to the public. Right, I'm not crazy?   Dan Sipple:  (21:55) No, it is a practitioner only.   Mason:  (21:58) It is a practitioner only?   Dan Sipple:  (21:59) Yeah.   Mason:  (22:00) All right. It's really alluding me what those...   Mason:  (22:03) It's really eluding me that practitioner quality that I'm seeing when I go into the health food stores. I'll have to check it out because there's a few that I've had some good results with that have been available to the public. I'll have to check it out. And I'm sure everyone listening, I'm sure has gone about and they have their fav's, but it's a good little basis to make sure that they were actually able to get the species specific when we're looking at the [crosstalk 00:22:25]   Dan Sipple:  (22:25) Well that's it. And I should say too that there is definitely brands, over the counter brands, non practitioner brands that are very efficacious and that do list their strains down for sure. Yeah.   Mason:  (22:40) Are you taking one preventatively yourself?   Dan Sipple:  (22:45) Look, when everything is in good shape, I tend to just focus on prebiotics and dietary diversity. So I think that needs to be the core thing that people focus on always. So generally speaking, the more diversity in your diet of plant species, so aiming for 40 to 60 different plants species a week, exposes your microbiome to various different shapes and sizes of fibre, mucilage, pectin, polyphenols, et cetera, which then grows the diversity of our microbiome. So you want a very rich microbiome in terms of species diversity. That's correlated with better health outcomes versus, like we touched on earlier, starting life with the C-section. Unfortunately, you're going to start life with a very dwindled down, poor diversity of microbes, which can be improved, of course, but yeah. So as I say, the core thing I want people to focus on is getting everything from their diet because probiotics; although, they're great.   Dan Sipple:  (23:45) I use them every day in clinical practice. They don't permanently colonise. Still, a lot of people I find are under that kind of idea, I think from the blogosphere basically and yeah, it's a bit of a myth that one. Some of the probiotics do hang around longer than others, two to three weeks. And in others only three or four days. They will always confer a positive action when they go through, such as modulating the immune system, compete for space or out-compete pathobionts and other pathogens along the gut wall, down regulate inflammation, et cetera. So they'll always do those sorts of things, but they don't permanently colonise whereas if you use prebiotics that is fertiliser for your own probiotics. The ones you were born with. So the better long-term strategy I find is to grow them.   Mason:  (24:31) You're talking about a drifter or a bit of a nomad that's still good. It has great intentions. They're coming along. They're contributing a little bit, but they're not the ones that are actually going to consistently be coming back and being the custodian of the land, setting up a little bit of a civilization in [crosstalk 00:24:48] alignment with the rest of the body that's thinking it will be continuing to pour back resources into the environment and just set up shop.   Dan Sipple:  (24:56) Good analogy.   Mason:  (24:59) I did. I try. I'm feeling it. I need that. It feels nice for me going into that imagining of that reality helps me get out of my head a little bit with it and get into my Heart and that will leave my lower dantian to feel what's going on.   Mason:  (25:17) I feel that storytelling is always what's necessary for me to go from a short term outcomes mentality to really making sure that when I'm 80 and 90 years old that I've had a real serious trot building this. People talk about creating a legacy in business and yet that external projection, which is noble and good, but that external projection of wanting to create a legacy out here in the world. Often, you know that it's going to be unsustainable or an element of martyrdom if that takes away from your capacity to create a legacy through your microbiome internally.   Dan Sipple:  (25:59) Yeah.   Mason:  (25:59) Yeah. I've got a little skit that I'm brewing called Bacterial Master Chef and I'd always think about you really prepare and I don't know if we've talked about it before, that legacy that microbiome that you've developed such a supple, beautiful environment. Eventually, you're going to be passing that down through your kids and through your offspring as well.   Mason:  (26:26) Through the sperm health is going to be directly correlated. I assume through what's going on in the microbiome and then you've got a healthy microbiome and that's really creating this solid rooting within your own household. And then just via whether its physical transfer or whether it's just transfer of your habitual internal development of that beautiful complex ecosystem that's an old growth forest. Those habits that are leading to that are going to be passed down through your own personal culture to your kids, through your friends, everyone around you and far out. That's a legacy. And then I feel like you're also preparing yourself for when you go back. Your body goes back to the earth. You're serving up that bacteria in your body in that.. Go to the Master chef kitchen and when it's all done and dusted and your bacteria reflecting with the judges of other bacteria in the world of how [crosstalk 00:27:21] that human body was prepared and it was off its back. You want to really win that contest.   Dan Sipple:  (27:27) Yeah. Yeah. And my mentor, Dr. Jason Hawrelak down in Tasmania says pretty much just that, we are custodians of our microbiome. You got to really think of that in that context and it's up to us to nurture it and protect it because it does get passed down. And what are we now, four or five generations or more antibiotics. So with each generation that pool of diversity is dwindling, if anyone gets a chance to read Missing Microbes. Really good book. It talks all about that.   Mason:  (28:00) It's like a sourdough starter. It gets passed down from generation. For me, you just feel what lights up internally. I went to a pizza joint right in Aguascalientes at the base of Machu Picchu and they had a 300 year old starter, sourdough starter for their pizzas or something like that and they had a three day ferment process for their pizzas and there's something kind of like lights up internally and you get out of that upper dantian of the head and I really got me into my Heart and the romance, something sprung up and it brings up more of a song and dance to the food and to life and that's the same internally just as who you are. You can really create some proud family tradition and something that lights you up internally by seeing that you do have something precious like a starter that gets passed down from generation to generation.   Mason:  (29:12) Missing Microbes. All right, that's a book we've got to get. So, I'm sure everyone knows that you've heard it to death things that are going to alter and damage microbiome, intestinal epithelial barrier and all that.   Dan Sipple:  (29:26) Yeah and it's a good, nice bridge to talk about how the leaky gut thing interfaces with the microbiome. So essentially, that's just the protective mucosal, thick jelly like layer that just coats the whole digestive tract. The intestinal barrier really just being our protective layer against the outside wall and then between our bloodstream. People have to think about it like that from mouth to backside, it's a hollow tube. It's still technically outside your body. So you want to make sure that the integrity and the quality of that lumen is tip-top. So, essentially the microbes throughout that entire tract do hang out in that mucosal lining and you've got about five different layers from outer to inner that comprise that and so you've got the mucosal layer and then I think by memory the last layer is the immune layer where all the immune phagocytes and interleukins and they do their dance there.   Mason:  (30:32) Hmm, [crosstalk 00:30:33] but that were like the macrophage, like the gut-associated lymph tissue almost.   Dan Sipple:  (30:37) GALT and yes, lymph tissue and whatnot.   Mason:  (30:40) It's why the macrophages as well are sitting there with their receptors waiting for the beta glucans from the mushies.   Dan Sipple:  (30:47) Exactly. You have the TLRs, the toll-like receptors waiting to get turned on, which we'll go into, but I've lost my train of thought.   Mason:  (30:54) Well, we were talking about that mucosal lining there being something pressured that's sitting on that skin of the gut, the epithelial barrier and so that's got a lot to do with protecting against leaky gut. Right and therefore, degenerating the physical structure that ensures that we have the potential to grow and maintain a microbiome within that mucosal lining.   Dan Sipple:  (31:18) That's right. Yeah. So the things that damage it we were going to lead into, so antibiotics being the biggest one. Followed by probably, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Proton pump inhibitors, which is a big one that is coming up hugely in the research at the mument in terms of antacids, basically or reflux and those sorts of conditions.   Mason:  (31:41) Are they going in because they're destroying directly the bacterial colony and therefore, the bacterial colony is what is maintaining and producing that healthy mucosal lining? Or is it destroying the actual mucus? Therefore, the bacteria don't have somewhere to live.   Dan Sipple:  (31:56) I think it would be both, but essentially it's down-regulating your acids and therefore, bacteria that you do ingest have an easier go. Basically, they get an easier pass at getting into that layer, so whereas your acids in the stomach, which precede the small and large intestine would normally take care of that. That's a free pass straight through because your acids are suppressed.   Mason:  (32:18) That's something I'd probably throw out there. This whole alkaline water thing. I know we've discussed it. You're on board with that as well. That's where I'll never get on board and a long-term alkaline water that there's maybe some validity, maybe and this is where all the data and the preaching around alkaline water comes from these short-term healing protocols, which you can see validity in extreme we're going to talk about ketogenic diets, short term ketogenic diet, right, maybe. Short term alkaline water ingesting for a healing protocol, maybe, but then when you get long-term, the antacids, the alkaline water are going to start, I assume. That's the pathway in the stomach that's going to contribute to the stripping of the microbiome.   Dan Sipple:  (33:00) I mean we could probably do a whole podcast just on that.   Mason:  (33:05) Oh, we should. All right, we'll I'll put that in there. We'll put that out there. We'll get Sage on as well and we'll talk about alkaline water. That'd be good.   Dan Sipple:  (33:15) So other than that we've got diet, alcohol, lack of fibre, lack of plants in the diet. Stress is a huge one. So stress and medications and alcohol probably the biggest, but yeah, essentially, I guess that's a good segway into what you and I have talked about briefly in the past on other shows is that diets that do overly emphasise protein and saturated fat and meat and that do become devoid of fibre, soluble fibre, specifically in different plant polyphenols. They happen to increase the growth of bacteria in the gut that degrade mucus, so they degrade that mucosal protective lining.   Dan Sipple:  (33:58) So let me just repeat that. When you're on those diets for too long. High protein, high fat without sufficient fibre to offset it. Different bugs in the gut use those as fuel. They proliferate, they start out crowding more protective types of species and they feed off mucus. So, they're going to start eating mucus in our gut and burrowing down through that layer and making that more cryptic and making that more accessible to the bloodstream and the immune system start invoking a proinflammatory response. I think people can can tell where I'm getting with that. So if that goes on for too long, then you are looking at a massive pro inflammatory response coming from the gut.   Mason:  (34:38) Yeah, I mean everyone can see that there's always Yin Yang and a pendulum swinging within the dietary system and so we've seen an excessive amount of industrial food over such a long time and therefore, we saw the cleansing, catabolic vegan diets, raw diets, no fat diets real void of animal proteins come into dominance. And then that went to extreme. Therefore, the universe and life will always balance itself out. The trick is not going back to the pendulum swinging too far and then we see that more of the high protein, the Atkins, ketogenesis, carnivore now, bulletproof diet being that balanced up and start really dominating what's been recommended out there in the blogosphere, so on and so forth. I think that's what you're talking about. Right?   Dan Sipple:  (35:32) Totally and like you said it, the pendulum can swing too far the other way. And you see that, I always say to patients, the microbes don't lie. When we look at the gut microbiome, we know what you've been eating. We can base what foods you've been eating by the look of where the bugs are at and we know what roles they play and what percentage they're representing in that person's microbiome. And so with that sort of dietary approach and I'm not against meat at all. I'm flexitarian as I like to say, but too much for too long without that fibre can lead to those dysbiotic changes and we're really starting to see saturated fat play a big role in increasing what are called pathobionts and these pathobionts produce something called lipopolysaccharide and I'll break all these terms down, but LPS, lipopolysaccharide, this is something that's on the outer shell of these gram-negative bacteria that when they get fed in sufficient amounts they produce more of and its absolute chaos for our immune system.   Dan Sipple:  (36:35) For whatever reason, our immune system just hates this lipopolysaccharide and launches really pro-inflammatory interleukins at them into interleukin 17 and interleukin 6 causes that pro-inflammatory response. So, to break that down, high fat, high protein, you're encouraging the growth of certain bugs in the gut that are more likely to produce these endotoxins.   Dan Sipple:  (36:58) The endotoxins are what damage the gut. So we used to think it was just like with leaky gut what I said before, just the medications and just the diet and just the stress and that sort of stuff, which cause the tight junctions to separate, but there's a whole new body of research which is really, really becoming super accepted right across the board about the actual bugs in the gut being responsible for all that too. Particularly, the ones that produce these endotoxins and these hydrogen sulphide gases and that's been connected to anything from gut issues themselves. Anything from Celiac to Crohn's, Ulcerative Colitis, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, all the way over to anxiety, depression, Parkinson's, Dementia because we think what can potentially happen down in that gut microbiome can also then be affected in the blood brain barrier and affect the blood brain barrier the same way because that in itself is a very similar set up with that epithelial lining which can get damaged.   Mason:  (37:57) Because the microbiome in itself.   Dan Sipple:  (37:58) Pretty much. Exactly.   Mason:  (38:00) Oh man. Alright, so let's just start breaking it down a little bit because I feel like this is where the boring over-identifying with diet and what macronutrients are defining who you are and defining your diet at all. It's something I know we've hit a lot. We definitely hit in the past, the boring nature of identifying on being like low fat and low protein from animal sources and then we've seen that busting of the bubble around the saturated fat is bad coming especially out of the institutionalised dietitians so we've busted that and so then it's like you see fat-fueled, hashtag fat-fueled coming up. Completely living off saturated fat because all of a sudden we've almost been given this free pass to go and eat those things and do those things that we enjoy, but yet then you start identifying with the macronutrient of my diet, saturated fat, fats.   Mason:  (39:11) That's my fuel and I only talk about this from personal experience because you're internally too boring to develop your own innate identity through who you are and your true nature is you have to go and look at your macronutrients in order to create an identity for yourself that you can therefore go out and create in a career and a brand or just a bit of personality so you have something to talk about and it is boring and I think that's what we're talking about here. Right and it's not going down a short route because you're interested in creating some balancing for yourself through the endocrine system. I know we've talked about ketogenesis for a short amount of time, whether it's through water fasting, which isn't a very easily accessible way to get to ketogenesis.   Mason:  (39:57) But you know, living off fats and ketones and bulletproofing or maybe you go down that route because you want to get your insulin receptors and your leptin receptors back to a point where they're quite healthy. You've got an intention and you go full bolt into that intention, but then what happens when you don't find a sweet spot and you over-identify. I think that's what we're talking about at all points here.   Mason:  (40:21) You've gone too far. You haven't realised that what goes up must come down and find a sweet spot that's sustainable for decades and so we're talking about, there's a sliding scale of the damage that you can do to yourself verse.. I know I've gone really down like that fat route for a while. It gets to a point where I can just feel sluggish and you want to talk about what we're actually going to physiologically feel. If we're rocking the fats too hard, we're creating too much bile. Therefore, we're going to be having to lead to those bacteria growing that are going to start eating more of that mucus. What are we feeling?   Dan Sipple:  (41:02) The things that I think of straight away from a gut perspective, oily stools so if you're wiping lots that's a pretty sure sign that your intake of fats is exceeding your gallbladder's attempt to up regulate bile to the point to where it's affecting your stool.   Mason:  (41:22) That's such a good little distinction then. Lots of wiping, too oily.   Dan Sipple:  (41:28) Totally and then the flow on from that, I guess if it is done in excess for too long, you're talking about brain fog, lethargy, just overall increased body inflammation because if we strip it back down it is going to increase our leaky gut. So then all the symptoms that you can expect to find in someone with a leaky gut, you can carry over to that. Brain fog, just general digestive disturbance, lots of gas, lots of odorous gases and always check the stool. Look at what the stool is doing. I think that's the biggest marker of whether a diet is working for you or working against you.   Mason:  (42:10) Okay. So it's basically about ensuring we're not consuming so much fat that we're creating an excess of bile. Basically creating a different [crosstalk 00:42:19]   Dan Sipple:  (42:19) The other one is nausea, which I forgot to mention too. Nausea is a classic sign of poor fat breakdown.   Mason:  (42:26) I can get into immediately, a lot of my fats I enjoy my tonic. Having a bit of grass fed butter is my fat and just due to all the fat solubles that I'm going to be able to get going in through there especially with such a focus on bone health and teeth health and a little bit of EMU oil is also a big favourite of mine, but I can feel if I go for that second tonic and I'm relying on a saturated fat and it's been a hard one for me to chew the fat on actually over the years is I do feel a little bit nauseous afterwards. It's very immediate for me and [crosstalk 00:43:04] I feel like...   Dan Sipple:  (43:04) It's saturated fats? Or do you find you would get that, say if you slay five avocados in a row as well.   Mason:  (43:11) Avocados. I used to have that same experience when I was a raw foodie and I was relying on the macadamia butter and the avocados to really sustain me through the day. I'd get to that feeling. I get to that point where I'd eat my salads and it'd be heaps of olive oil and heaps of avocados and say olives, but mainly that avocado factor that would kind of get in there. And I just said, I'd be feeling it. It's an oily, stagnant feeling and it's a good one to kind of get on top of because it's not like that's a bad thing to feel. It's just that it's a good thing to be able to realise so you can, so I can adjust. I mean for me it's been an interesting one because I had so many years of so much roughage and so many plants, but I was having them in more of that raw form that it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth to an extent.   Mason:  (44:03) I did enjoy needing to balance out and getting a little bit more of that animal fat and animal protein. And now I really feel that they're settling in to their sweet spot and their little place and I'm acknowledging that I'm going to have to be responsible enough and go be the custodian of my microbiome to find that sweet spot, where I'm actually going to be able to create some mumentum in the development of that ecosystem.   Dan Sipple:  (44:28) And that's the thing, man, like that's what's so good about testing is because when you do that and you can see where these guys are at and their percentages. There's ideal percentages and don't get me wrong, we don't know what the exact perfect microbiome looks like yet.   Mason:  (44:41) Well it probably doesn't exist. I mean, that's like [crosstalk 00:44:45]   Dan Sipple:  (44:45) That's right. It's the horses for courses. That's right, but we do have a pretty good idea based on databases of healthy donors where these healthy species are meant to fall within, and you can design your diet around that. That's what's awesome about doing the gut microbiome testing is that you are going to get particular foods which we know feed up Akkermansia muciniphila and Bifidobacterium and different species in the gut that do produce these amazing substances called butyrate and other short chain fatty acids. Butyrate. We should talk about that too actually.   Mason:  (45:20) Well, let's get into it. I just want to kind of end on the fact that it's excessiveness and finding sweet spots, so you can kind of set and forget things in your diet and you can get on to enjoying life and celebrating life and developing your virtuous nature without taking your health down a dysbiosis route that will sneak up on you over years. And it's nice to get out of the good and bad kind of aspect of foods and just find there's always, you know, with most indigenous diets of course we've got the extreme instances with like Eskimos that are just basically all blubber and protein.   Dan Sipple:  (45:51) Right.   Mason:  (45:52) And that's a particular like fringe instance. And I think we've chatted about it before being like there's a phase of adaptation for that microbiome to find its harmony. But when you look at generally in the middle of the bell curve, which is where most of us can kind of like aim for. If we want them, by all means go and explore the fringes, just don't project it onto others until you have generational data for yourself and currently. But it's mostly like all the successful indigenous cultures, blue zone cultures, there's like that appropriate amount of saturated fat, plant in some places, most of the time it's coming, from animals that appropriate amount of protein, a lot of plant diversity, soluble, insoluble, right? And fibre.   Dan Sipple:  (46:39) That's exactly where I try and now more so than ever shoot my patients long-term towards that Mediterranean diet in terms of the actual research, comparing different diets. Mediterranean diet always trumps the others still. And I think exactly what you said, just because it is such a flexible approach where you're just getting a bit of everything and you're getting so much diversity and polyphenols and you're still getting your saturated fats and your proteins and whatnot. It's just that you're not relying on the same basic five foods to get them in.   Mason:  (47:13) Yeah, I mean that's so huge. And I also want to trump people who take that example, whether it's blue zones and say they pretty much eat nothing animal and try and use it to justify their other extreme vegan diet. I'm not getting away with that today sonny, not on my watch. I mean it is finding that sweet spot and also almost creating that legacy with how in harmony your diet can be and I'm respectful of what works and what doesn't work man. So good. It's so rad. Hey everyone, don't be so boring that you need to overly identify with your macro nutrients. If you find yourself at that point, please don't go spurting all that self-righteousness over everyone else. Chickity check yourself before you wreck yourself, because you will brand yourself in a particular way. And then it denies you the fact of getting very real. And it also denies you with being curious because what you do when you identify externally with your diet, extreme diet, even if you're over identifying with like the name of the Mediterranean diet, whatever it is, it means that when you go about and try and get testing done on yourself and you're looking for generational data, it makes you biassed and it makes you go and search for justification.   Mason:  (48:34) You know, misery loves company and you want to create company and basically create data that justifies your position, which is very boring. It's very boring to be around. I know that I've talked about that for myself. I've found that blandness in myself and then I've had to kind of shut up for a couple of years and really just go about that nature of that route of building something for myself, which I feel is in harmony and let the cup floweth over through curious conversations like this. Not saying I'm doing it right. Just sharing my little path and my opinion.   Dan Sipple:  (49:10) Hmm. And being open-minded and flexible.   Mason:  (49:13) Being open-minded and flexible. Hey, so did you want to go and break down any of those terms anymore? Do you feel like you've, you know, the lipopolysaccharide and that, I mean, I feel like we've dived into that, but just even going further down into diet and some of your faves, the places you're kind of like looking at to make sure that you've got like a wide variety of prebiotics getting in there?   Dan Sipple:  (49:39) Yeah, good point. Yeah. So I guess just to sort of preface by saying that old concept of fibre is fibre is nonsense and it comes in all different shapes and sizes.   Mason:  (49:52) You mean like have your bowl of all bran in the morning and your sweet?   Dan Sipple:  (49:55) Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. Yeah. Very dietician, very old hat, 80's, 90's mentality. There's soluble-   Mason:  (50:03) Dieticians are getting a flogging this podcast.   Dan Sipple:  (50:07) Well they will, unless they're willing to adapt to the research. You know?   Mason:  (50:12) I'll say there's a couple of dietitians out there I like and they're adaptive, but gosh, not many. Nope, not many. I've got a chip on my shoulder from when I had to butt heads with the dieticians that were trying to tell when my mum had her aneurysm, like nearly 10 years ago now, nine years ago.   Dan Sipple:  (50:32) Custard. Wasn't a custard.   Mason:  (50:33) Yeah, it was custard. They were basically, they were just ripping it to me about trying to go against the grain of their recommendations, giving her the golden circle orange juice.   Dan Sipple:  (50:43) [crosstalk 00:50:43] brain.   Mason:  (50:44) Yeah. Literally when it was literally custard, stock standard, golden circle, sugar infused, synthetic vitamin infused juices, which were just going to be putting in pressure through refined sugar on her system. Ra-ra. And I sat there with like the head of dietetics in the Royal North Shore. My mum's dietician and then a student, this like ratty little student right out of the institutionalised dogma, who was just trying to have a go at me because she thought I didn't know a thing or two. And then I just let her have it and ripped her into the biological healing process of the brain inflammatory processes, so on and so forth.   Mason:  (51:27) And I was like, I'm feel really beautifully smug about, because I was so highly charged and so traumatised and going through so much grief at that time and during those times I think for someone like that to not have tact and be projecting onto the stupid son who's just distraught and not being able to have a conversation because you're so rigid. I'm like that's where my chip on my shoulder of dieticians comes from. And yeah, as you said, I've changed my opinion and adapted so much over the years and when someone else doesn't have the capacity to do that, I'm just like "Sorry. You have ejected yourself from the conversation of relevance. So you go, I don't want to talk to you right now." So yeah, take that dietitians.   Dan Sipple:  (52:20) Well said. Yeah. So prebiotics and the different shapes and sizes. So look, we've got these long chain sugars and fibres. Inulin is one of them. One of my favourites. We've got fructose oligosaccharides, or FOS, we've got galactooligosaccharides, GOS, and then there's-   Mason:  (52:42) Galactose. What's the probiotic as well that goes by like, maybe it's just galacticose or so something like in, in that, anyway, sorry, I'm thinking about some of the names of bacteria or over the years you hear and I'm just like, Oh wow [crosstalk 00:52:59]   Dan Sipple:  (53:01) The names aren't forgiving. They're horrendous.   Mason:  (53:04) Like galactose is great. I've always, where's the dietary source of...   Dan Sipple:  (53:13) Galactose?   Mason:  (53:13) Was it galactose, am I making it?   Dan Sipple:  (53:15) So we've got galacto-oligo-saccharides and it's abbreviated as GOS for short.   Mason:  (53:21) GOS. Yeah.   Dan Sipple:  (53:22) And you're going to find that in legumes and beans and lentils and beets and stuff. So in the Mediterranean diet, they're getting a lot of GOS.   Mason:  (53:30) Where are you at with beans and the presence of lectins and that? Beans being like a peasant food, something like grain that's not necessarily natural, it's going to go against like an indigenous diet kind of style of things. I feel like there's a nice middle ground there to talk about taking advantage of the access we do have to like agriculture and realisation that some of these like prebiotic rich foods are going to be good. Maybe again it's, maybe is it just like a little bit, you know, where are you at?   Dan Sipple:  (53:59) I always go back to the blue zones and I just think if you know, you can't just compare the legumes consumed 500-1000 years ago to what's being produced now and say they're the same. So it's going to come back to quality at the end of the day and if they're being soaked and sprouted and cooked properly, because the reality is all that nasty crap like phytates and oxalates and lectins and a lot of that gets removed when you do those things, versus when they're picked, canned and then you heat the can of soup up for 30 seconds or whatever, different story, that's when you're going to end up with more likely chance of bloating and gastrointestinal issues.   Mason:  (54:38) So you can say that it's like a kitchari is not going to be a kitchari, is a kitchari, is a kitchari, is a kitchari. You look at preparation and again you've got to put time and effort into these things. If you want to go the convenience model it really is when you're going to be eligible to be in that legume, bean and lentil eating kind of category, where you might be actually doing some detrimental stuff to yourself over the time, versus I mean an almost like the preparation that you do, which I know is hard for everyone but the preparation time and the sprouting and the soaking, it kind of almost like limits the amount that you're going to be able to be having naturally and therefore you're going to have more diversity, because it takes so much effort. Right? There's like magic just in, it's the same as like a flavour of the food is, of garlic is going to limit the amount of garlic a lot of the time that you're going to be able to take, or like the flavour of Reishi is going to affect how much you're actually going to be able to dose. And so to the preparation time of foods is going to affect how much you're actually going to be able to reasonably include your diet. Therefore,. it's going to put a natural cap and help you find the sweet spot.   Dan Sipple:  (55:50) Totally, totally. And look, it's slow going for some people. Quite often when we do a microbiome assessment, take John Smith who's been on a paleo or a carnivore diet or whatever it is, a diet that focuses on the removal of legumes and that sort of thing and has been quite meat heavy for quite some time, 99% of the time the bugs that feed off legumes and resistant starches and whatnot and produce these beneficial compounds for us like butyrate, that heal the gut and lower inflammation, they're starved. Sometimes they're extinct totally. And that's because they've had such an over reliance on other foods and they've been on such a restricted diet that these bugs just dwindle and dwindle because they're waiting to get fed.   Mason:  (56:37) And what is butyrate do for the barriers again?   Dan Sipple:  (56:43) Sure. So when you feed your gut these types of fibres, so GOS, FOS, inulin and resistant starch, et cetera, et cetera, you're feeding beneficial microbes in the gut that when they get fed in sufficient amounts, they produce this awesome compound called short chain fatty acids. And there's different types of short chain fatty acids. One of the major ones is butyrate, which is probably the most favoured because it does have such good healing benefits for blood brain barrier function, for lowering lipopolysaccharide, healing a damaged leaky gut wall and just lowering colonic inflammation and systemic inflammation. So you want as much butyrate as you can get. So you want to feed those bugs up, you want to give them the fuel from those foods so they can produce that for you.   Dan Sipple:  (57:26) And yeah, sometimes it's a real hard slug to get those bugs fed up again, because those foods have been out of that person's diet for a while, reintroducing them does cause issues and it is like going, so for instance, sometimes it's like, all right I want you to go to bulk health foods or whatever it is, grab yourself a bag of black beans, go home, soak them when you're ready on a day where your gut's okay and you know, pick a Saturday or whatever, usually a day you're not at work, get literally like half a palm size and cook them over a long period of time and just start there. And I want you to do that again in three days from then and then again in three days from then and just slowly, slowly build it up. And you know when they're able to handle appreciable amounts of that. Cool. Go on to lentils, do it with lentils now and you just build them up slowly and slow and slow. And sometimes it takes like literally months, but it's good when you can show them their microbiome again in six months and say now look at that guy now. He was almost extinct in the first report, look where he is now and look how much butyrate you're producing now.   Mason:  (58:31) And so you're saying do that because you're going to have to go through a process of being farty and having a bit of a reaction to it or what?   Dan Sipple:  (58:37) You're always going to get gas. Yeah. You're always going to get gas with legumes and lentils, it's normal. I always say to folks when you're producing really odorous stinky, ridiculous amounts of gas and you know it's wrong, that is 99% of the time protein putrefaction so that is actually more from high protein and lots of saturated fats. When you're getting lots of gas from plants you'll get gas definitely, but it's usually more volume and less odour.   Mason:  (59:08) Well you probably also kind of talk to the fact that that gaseousness, because I've kind of opened a little bit more up to legumes and lentils and beans based on this preparation model because I've had a bit of a problem with them and with the anti-nutrients for some time. So I'm kind of trying to find my balanced approach. And again, even with those, with artichokes and you know is a big one, we call them fartichokes.   Dan Sipple:  (59:35) Fartichokes. Yeah.   Mason:  (59:35) I think it's probably also just a good gauge for where the sweet spot in your diet is long-term as well. Right? Like if it's making you noticeably, if it affects your day because you're noticeably farty, it's even just like lower the dose and don't necessarily use it as a staple of a meal. Right?   Dan Sipple:  (59:52) Hundred percent. And that's sometimes where I'll go in with an actual supplement, like a stripped down, like galactooligosaccharides as a fibre powder and they start on literally a pinch in their water a day, because you're doing some feeding, but it's different than say having four tablespoons of black beans or lentils and you just do it super, super slow. Yeah.   Mason:  (01:00:16) Man. A lot to learnings and just going through my processes on these podcasts. But yeah, I think you're right. I think there is still the presence of these legumes and even grains in traditional diets. They're just prepared and the thing is they we're just limited by what was possible to forage and procure and so you just had a reasonable amount in the diet. It's just the fact that we can get such high amounts and such easy access to these things that we just blow it out of the water and create a sometimes an unnatural reliance and to be honest, sometimes we can, I know this is speculative, but we can build upon what we've learned from our ancestors and those generationally tested diets that are actually generationally tested and just I guess try and slowly potentiate it without the ego to think that we're like necessarily improving, just honing it in based on the availability we have of things.   Dan Sipple:  (01:01:22) Yeah. I always think about, it's kind of like make your diet about your microbiome. Don't make it about your Instagram profile.   Mason:  (01:01:31) So tough. I get so many followers no, I mean like I'm vibing man. I just haven't been talking about my diet for so long. I just feel like I haven't it a right to. Appreciate the journey for sure.   Dan Sipple:  (01:01:42) Do you get that a lot still Mase? Like people will say, what are you eating? What have you found works for you? What are your vibing at the moment?   Mason:

Tahnee is joined by Erin Lovell Verinder on the podcast today. Erin is a fully qualified Herbalist, Nutritionist and Energetic Healer who has worked in the healing realms for twenty-one years. Erin is deeply passionate about individualised treatment approaches, empowering others to reconnect to their innate ability to heal and rediscover the primal foundations of thriving health. Working deeply in one on one sessions, Erin enables her clients to unfold profound change in their health and wellbeing by bridging together herbal medicine, nutritional medicine, energetics and lifestyle change. We're thrilled to have Erin on the show today, sharing her experience as an intuitive Western Herbalist. “There's medicine everywhere.. There really is” - Erin Lovell Verinder Tahnee and Erin discuss: Erin's journey into energetics and herbalism. Embodied healing, physical, mental, spiritual. The medicinal powers of culinary herbs. The beauty and strength of medicinal weeds. Wildcrafting and plant identification. The restorative powers of time in nature and adequate nutrition. Herbalism as activism. Herbalism in Australia - how the institutionalised regulation of the craft has stolen some of the magic. The lack of knowledge and understanding that surrounds our native Australian herbal medicine. Folk medicine in America.   Who is Erin Lovell Verinder ? Erin is a fully qualified Herbalist, Nutritionist and Energetic Healer who has worked in the healing realms for twenty-one years. Erin holds a Bachelor of Western Herbal Medicine, an Advanced Diploma of Nutritional Medicine and a Diploma of Energetic Healing and is a member of the (ATMS) Australian Traditional Medicine Society. Walking the plant path, Erin is a woman in tune with the natural world. On a full hearted mission to educate, assist and up-level how we can all heal with the rhythms of nature, through the bounty of plant medicine and gentle innate interventions to unearth thriving health and wellbeing. Marrying the wisdom and philosophy of naturopathic medicine as the golden compass, to treat the whole- not just the symptom is the pure guiding force in Erin’s practice. Getting to the roots of ill health is the solid intention and directive, addressing the drivers and encouraging the body gently to return to balance and harmony with food as medicine, medicinal plants, lifestyle changes, functional testing and energetic medicine to deliver a wholesome high vibrational experience and to ultimately promote healing. Resources: Erin's Website Erin's Instagram Erin's Book - Plants For The People   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Tahnee: (00:00) Hi everybody, and welcome to the SuperFeast Podcast. Today I am here with Erin Lovell Verinder, I hope I'm saying that correctly.   Erin: (00:09) That was very fancy.   Tahnee: (00:12) She's a beautiful herbalist and naturopath that I was fortunate to meet a little while ago, and she does Western Herbalism, so I'm really excited to have her perspective on the podcast today. She also has a really great and interesting background as an energetic healer as well, so I'm really excited to weave that into our conversation today, because I think your journey, Erin, from coming from energetics to herbalism is a really exciting one. She is just kind of an all-around, on the ground, herbal earth lady wise woman. She lives out here in Byron. She has a really beautiful hubby and puppies and lives in a church, which is kind of my dream. I'm really excited to have you here today, thanks for joining us.   Erin: (01:02) Thanks so much for having me. I'm so stoked to be here.   Tahnee: (01:05) Yeah, and I have a copy of your book here. Plants for the People. I really want to talk about that today, because I think, given what's going on in the world, it's such an empowering read, and it makes herbalism seem really easy and kind of accessible, but I really wanted to get back to your roots, because you say, in the book, that you had an uncle who gardened and fostered a love of plants in you, so I was wondering if you could kind of tell us about your childhood and your special uncle, and any other little seeds that might have been planted at that early stage for you, as to why you are now the wise woman that you are.   Erin: (01:41) Thank you, yeah. Definitely, he was such a beautiful force in my life. He was really like my adopted grandfather. Both my grandfathers passed when I was quite young, so I didn't have that sort of figure in my life when I was growing up. He was our neighbour, actually, started as our neighbour, and just like dear friends over the fence, and as it all evolved, he ended up moving in with us when his wife passed away. We lived with him for years, he just became a part of the family so I call him, he was my Uncle Les, but he really was like my grandfather and I just adored him.   Erin: (02:21) My parents, there was not a green thumb in the household, really. My dad's a structural engineer, very very, super cerebral, dad particularly. Earthy mum, but not in the way of translation into connection to nature. Uncle Les just, he was an old Englishman and he just adored his garden and had this kind of relationship and magic with his garden that really inspired me. His roses were always the best in the neighbourhood. He had so much fruit growing on his trees, his veggies were always bumping. I was so impressed that he could plant something and it would just take off. That seemed magical to me, because the only place we got roses was at the corner store. You know what I mean? Get your veggies at the veggie shop.   Erin: (03:10) I learnt a lot from him, and he introduced me to growing and getting my hands in the dirt, and just all these really simple tips that totally inspired me as a child. I really was just so drawn to that. That definitely was early-day seeds of how I thought plants were magical. My mum reminded me the other day of also my connections to nature, but my entrepreneurial side, of I used to go around, it's so funny. I used to go around the neighbourhood cutting people's flowers from their garden, making arrangements, like making them beautiful, and then I would literally knock on their doors and sell them back to them.   Tahnee: (03:52) That's hilarious.   Erin: (03:58) [Crosstalk 00:03:58] though. I would come home with gold coins, which is major when you're little, gold coins, and she would just be like, "How did you do that?" I think I just thought it was cute. I just noticed, even when I went and picked their flowers, I just was really enamoured by nature, and in the suburbs in the '80s and '90s, growing up in the suburbs of Western Sydney, everybody had gardens. It was very tame though, but I was still deeply connected to the gardens, and I was always seeking as much wildness as I could. There was a reserve up the road with lots of eucalyptus and kookaburras laughing, and I was just so deeply in love with being outside always.   Tahnee: (04:41) I think we're super blessed in Australia, because even if you do grow up in a city, you typically have access to more nature. Like I've been in Sydney and seen lorikeets flying around and parks and trees, so I think it breeds a little bit of, I don't know, that kind of connection to the natural world. Even if we do grow up around white picket fences.   Erin: (05:05) Totally, yeah.   Tahnee: (05:08) But also what I think people probably don't appreciate in their suburban area, and I'm sure you probably do now, but as a little girl, you weren't aware, maybe, of how many of those kind of things that we might have once piled Roundup onto, and hopefully people aren't doing that anymore, are actually really useful medicinals.   Erin: (05:28) Surely.   Tahnee: (05:30) This time right now where we're all kind of at home more, and kind of in our natural suburban habitats, there are so many accessible plants for us to get to.   Erin: (05:41) Absolutely.   Tahnee: (05:41) At what point did you kind of realise, "I can actually start to create medicine from this natural world," as opposed to just being kind of obsessed with it?   Erin: (05:52) A novice. A young, obsessed novice. Even when I was small, with Uncle Les, he would point out things that were medicinal. Although he didn't, he wouldn't really make remedies or things like that, but he would sort of point out what he knew about them. So I think that definitely planted seeds to me. He would point out something about dandelion, and how dandelion had lots of nutrition in it. It's very nutritious. He would say things like, "When spring springs, spring awakens, and the dandelions really wake up." He'd say, "The medicine, or the nutrition of the leaf is at its highest." He'd say things like that. Even though I wouldn't really see him eat any dandelions, I think this is just knowledge that were passed down through his family as well.   Erin: (06:53) Little seeds like that. My grandmas also used herbs to heal, so I think, for me, it wasn't like someone was actively teaching me herbalism back in the day, but there were these real little nuggets that were planted that I was quite enamoured with and it just stayed with me.   Tahnee: (07:12) So you actually started more in the esoteric realm, which is kind of, I feel like normally people would go for the more tangible things and then end up [crosstalk 00:07:24] certainly that's my experience, so it's interesting to me that you went kind of backwards in some ways. Can you explain how a 16 year old from Western Sydney gets into the woowoo... [Inaudible 00:07:37]?   Erin: (07:37) Totally. Especially with, again, coming from my family, where it wasn't really, it was so foreign to where they were at, but really inherent in me. My grandma's, both of them were really intuitive in different ways. One of my grandma's, who I was closest with, her lineage was Russian, Romanian, gypsy. It was kind of known in the family that there was this alarmingly psychic line that had gone through the family, aunt's and even her half sister. She had a lot of skills, my nan. I only got to spend three, four years with her. I was tiny when she passed away, but she really imprinted on me. My mum always says to me it's just insane how similar you are to her, even though you really didn't get to spend that much time with her. So I do feel like that was inherent in my cells, in my blood and my bones, and in my lineage.   Erin: (08:42) I just was always fascinated with anything mystical, from a really young age. And my Uncle Les's wife, who I always named Auntie Maureen, so cute, she was the first person to introduce me to crystals. I was probably like 10, very little. She had a little bowl of crystals, and she would always talk me through them. Even then I was like, "Wow, what are those?" When I was 16 I was really into tarot, and I was really into runes, those Celtic runes. Anything divination-based, I loved it. Palm reading, I'd have all these books on palmistry, and I got a few books on aromatherapy and herbalism, so I was just starting to read about all these kind of things and learn about them myself.   Erin: (09:31) I actually came up north here when I was around 16, 17. I was visiting a friend in the hills out here, who'd moved up here, and it was, she was living with this beautiful woman who was just so intuitive and was absolutely a medicine woman, is a medicine woman in her own right, and they introduced me to reiki, and they introduced me to sitting in circles, and sitting in circles with women, and healing circles and holding space, and I was 16, 17, and that's just where it all began for me, in a deeper sense. That's when I went and learnt reiki. That's when I sort of did all the levels. I started just doing different courses and learning things outside of my schooling, and that's when I was about 18, I went and did the two year energetic healing, just solid two year energetic healing diploma as an 18 year old.   Tahnee: (10:28) Good times.   Erin: (10:30) Totally, so kooky, but it was great.   Tahnee: (10:32) Did you actually do that as a career, then, until-   Erin: (10:36) Yeah. Yeah, no I didn't go solid into practise. I dabbled, and went and really cultivated and studied other things as well, over the years, and then went and retrained as a herbalist and nutritionist, so I did dabble, but I got out, Tahnee and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm like literally," I think I was 20 when I got out, and I was like, "This is nuts. I need to go live. I don't really know what to do with this." All this auric healing and kinesiology and sound healing, I didn't really feel ready to hold space for people in that way as a permanent thing, and also I was trying to figure out how you even do that. Back then-   Tahnee: (11:19) I know, it wasn't an option.   Erin: (11:20) That was so different.   Tahnee: (11:22) Yeah.   Erin: (11:22) No. That was like 18 years ago, guys. It was really weird back then.   Tahnee: (11:27) I remember wanting to be a yoga teacher when I was 16 and being like, "There isn't such a thing." Like seriously, there were two yoga places in the entire city I lived in, and I was like, "Well." And now it's like-   Erin: (11:37) Everywhere.   Tahnee: (11:41) You can throw a rock and hit a yoga teacher. That's a pretty huge jump in such a short period of time. How did you get drawn to a career in herbalism, though, if you're kind of in this more esoteric realm and still finding out who you are as a 20 year old you know?   Erin: (12:00) Yeah, totally. A few things happened. Lots of big things happened to me around the age of 20, 21, 22, those few early, formative years. I met my husband when I was 21, so we've been together for 17 years, which is a long time. Growing together through those years. I met him, I lived in the States, I lost my partner before him, he passed away from cancer. I just learnt so much in those few years. It was huge. When my ex-partner passed away from cancer, and it was really an aggressive cancer, and within five months he was gone. It was so intense, really. I watched him do all of these things to help his spiritual bodies, because at that point, his physical body was, he was really advised to not do treatment. There was really nothing they could do at that point, because it was a reoccurrence and super aggressive. I watched him do all of these things to shift his spiritual body.   Erin: (13:13) Now, here I am sitting there, an energetic healer. Young, novice energetic healer, but still, having studied for years, three years, let's say. Watching him go through this, do all of these things to shift his body spiritually, to try to shift his body on the spiritual levels to try to make a physical effect, and he died.   Erin: (13:34) I understand now that the work that he did was absolutely healing, and he was able to let go of his life by doing that work. He was just so brave, truly. Such a brave person, so courageous. I look back and I'm so impressed that a 21-year-old could do all of those things to let go of his life like that, but he didn't heal his body, and I was just broken man. I was so broken about it, because I was like, "Why didn't those things help him heal his body?" Because he was doing all the things, and when we work on ourselves, on those more etheric, energetic emotional levels, in my brain, at that time in my training, I understood that technically should actually impact your physical body, and that didn't happen. I was just broken about it.   Erin: (14:30) Fast forward some years later, where I had processed a lot more, I realised that I just wanted to know so much more about the body, and I wanted to know how to heal the body, because we're these spiritual beings having this physical experience. How can I impact and support people having the physical experience, not just supporting them on a spiritual, etheric level, because we're here, you know? In that way in our bodies.   Tahnee: (14:54) What's actually changed for you. This is a tricky question. I have thoughts around this, I'm curious to hear yours. If you're trying to affect change that way, spirit-down, what are your thoughts now on the effectiveness of that process to shift a physical, especially a really deep physical, let's say, process that's maybe negative for the body. Do you have-   Erin: (15:27) I think now my understanding of the body and the being is that all parts of the being need to come onboard. I actually believe that that can be so powerful as working on the spiritual level, but of course coming at it, as well, from a physical level, is just as important. That's my understanding of it now. People absolutely might have different opinions, and I respect all of them and honour all of them, but my understanding is that we need to come from both sides and all parts to come on board to really heal a physical issue.   Tahnee: (16:01) Yeah. My experience is also it's such a subtle form of energy and the energy required to transform that kind of, I see it as more dispersed, subtle. To actually concentrate it and bring it into a physical expression requires a lot more, we would say Jing, a lot more of your strength to really be able to kind of do that, and if someone's really suffering, I think it can ease their transitions, obviously. I think that's probably the gift that your ex got out of that process, but yeah, I think often the more gross effects can be easier for people to then cultivate that spiritual awareness, and that spiritual kind of healing, but you kind of need to have a bit of capacity in the physical body, sometimes, I think, for those things to all integrate. I guess my teacher talks about it as they all knit together through the chakra system-   Erin: (17:04) Yeah, totally.   Tahnee: (17:06) So if we're weak in, let's say we have a stomach cancer and we can't fully integrate on that level, it's just going to be tricky for us to do that. It's definitely something I think is interesting and worth talking about more, because, especially in this area, I'm sure, we have so many people proposing their way as "the way", and I think we have to be really conscious. We are physical beings having a physical experience, and we have to treat the physical body. It's such an essential part of our healing journey, I think, is to integrate and fully land here.   Erin: (17:43) It really is.   Tahnee: (17:45) Was that kind of what you feel like happened in your 20s? You became more at home in your physical and in the physical?   Erin: (17:51) Totally. I think journeying through so much in my early 20s, I realised I had gone so far out of my body to learn about healing that I was almost a little uncomfortable in just being in my body. I think I'm actually a naturally very grounded person, so being out of my body actually felt more challenging for me. I'm not very sort of Vata, I'm quite like Pitta/Kalpha, kind of more in my body in that way, and I think just coming more into it, I found my power more as I grounded more into my body, not out of my body.   Erin: (18:33) Really, with my ex-partner, it really inspired me to want to understand more about health, and that's actually, that was a long answer to how I got to herbalism, but it really kind of brought me to I know that plants have powers, and I know they impact the body. I really just want to know all about their mysteries and really learn more about them, and I became a nutritionist as well, really learning about food as medicine and how to heal the body with food.   Tahnee: (19:01) Yeah. I think when we talk about these things that we ingest, that we transform and alchemize through our internal processes, we are talking about physical, energetic, it's on both levels. Herbs don't just work on the physical body. They work on the energetic body and the subtle body, and they give us that strength, I think, for these spiritual processes and practises. That's what I love so much about your work, I think, is there's that intersection where there's still a really intuitive kind of feminine knowing and relationship with the plants. It's not just, oh, they're full of, I'm looking at a reishi right now, triterpenes.   Erin: (19:42) Right, right.   Tahnee: (19:43) You know? To me, to look at that and think of, I'm holding up a red reishi right now, if you're listening, to think of that as a triterpene pod has no romance for me, but if I think of that as a Heart tonic or a Liver tonic, and on the energetic level, a Shen tonic and a Blood tonic, then I'm starting to get a little bit more in romance with the kind of relationship I'm going to have with that plant when I ingest it. I think that's what you've done so beautifully in the book, Plants For The People. There's stuff in there to appease the western mind, and I read that, you were like, "We're all educated, we need that little bit of reassurance that these things are actually researched and safe," and all that stuff.   Tahnee: (20:27) But on another level, there's this kind of relationship that we develop with herbs when we take them and when we work with them and when we harvest them and forage them and when we learn to see them. I think it's actually a really fun line to walk, so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that, in practise and in clinic, like how you, I read in your book that you were saying you learned all the western herbal stuff when you were studying at uni, but when you're actually in clinics, you had to develop that more intuitive relationship with the herbs. How did that work for you? What was that process like?   Erin: (21:05) It is interesting, because herbalism now, particularly in Australia, naturopathic studies and herbal medicine studies, western herbal medicine studies, it's very clinical. It's gotten more and more clinical, so it's heavy sciences. You get a, I remember back in the day, I don't even know if they do it now, but you get a tiny portion of making medicines and also identifying medicines. I remember we went, for one, a weed walk, into the botanical gardens or something, into the herb garden in Sydney. It was like, "That's it." Which is to me, totally, my whole degree. It was incredibly cerebral, all through books. Through books, through clinical studies, through sort of evidence-based, clinical-based knowledge, and a lot of the teachers were great.   Erin: (22:09) I think what actually got me through something like that was the inspiration of these amazing herbalists and naturopaths giving you all their experiences of having relationships with the plants over the years, and working with them and seeing them work their magic and alchemy. It was still very inspiring, but gosh, it could be dry. It was so dry, some of the studies, and I know people listening are probably going through that right now. It's a lot. It's a lot to go through.   Erin: (22:38) Also, you get all the knowledge and then you've got to figure out how you want to then actually take that knowledge and mix it with your unique offering, and offer it out. So whether you are going to be a practitioner, you're going to write, you're going to research, you're going to create products, whatever it might be, it's a huge learning curve and commitment. For me, I just felt like there was a lot lacking. I did feel I'd got a great education, but for my individual spirit and what I know I have to offer and what I am drawn to, it was much more about really bringing the plants to life in a deeper way, so I had to do a lot more study outside of my studies to actually get to know the plants, to be able to identify, to be able to learn how they like to grow. What is the energy of them? How do they feel? And sit with them and get to know them, and I've done that for years and continue to do that.   Erin: (23:42) A lot of it actually has been self-taught, self-directed, or learning from older herbalists who I've been lucky enough to cross paths with, but a lot of it is you actually have to step outside of that traditional training now, because it's so clinical.   Tahnee: (23:59) Yeah. I speak to a lot of my acupuncturist friends about this, because you go through this degree and then you come out and you actually don't know how to take pulse properly, and that's the foundation of Chinese Medicine. Things like that.   Erin: (24:13) Totally.   Tahnee: (24:16) I mean I even know, with naturopathy friends, you don't learn, often, a lot of the more subtle aspects of the herbs and how to treat the energetics and all that kind of stuff I don't believe is really covered. I think they talk about it, but they don't really teach it. So it is a tricky, we did the, and I know you're a big fan of Tierra, Michael Tierra's program.   Erin: (24:37) Yeah.   Tahnee: (24:39) I found he was really big on the practical stuff, and I really felt, for people who were kind of learning, it's like to really do it and touch it with your hands and make mistakes and have everything go mouldy and do all of those dumb things.   Erin: (24:57) Totally.. Just learn, really experience.   Tahnee: (25:01) It's part of the process. It's like learning to cook. Some of the cakes just flop.   Erin: (25:05) Don't rise. Totally.   Tahnee: (25:06) It's like I've got a brick. But yeah, I think that's part of it. People are so afraid, we have this fear around plants and weeds and that they're dangerous or poisonous. We went to an event you hosted with Kate and Jasmine at the Church Farm, and you were talking about how so many of our culinary herbs are medicinal and we don't even think about that. What are some herbs people would regularly encounter in their daily lives that they might not realise are actually medicinal allies?   Erin: (25:36) Medicinal. Just the most basic ones come to mind. Oregano, thyme, turmeric, cinnamon, ginger. All of these herbs that you cook with most days, or you have them in some food in your life, in your cupboard, they're all highly medicinal. They've so smart, because they've masked themselves as these culinary herbs and worked their path into your everyday life, but they're actually really potent medicinals. Also most of those are super easy to grow, especially your weed herbs, like your oregano, your thyme, your rosemary, your sage, so easy to grow, and can actually be used for so many different medicines, and I use them a lot in the book. You'll see them repeated a lot, because they're just very easy to come by and accessible and approachable for people as well.   Tahnee: (26:27) Yeah, and even if people don't have fresh ones, right, they can use dried herbs.   Erin: (26:31) Dried, totally. To be fair, a lot of medicines are actually easier to make from dried herbs, because again, you won't get that mouldy spoilage as much you mentioned as well. In the book, I use a lot of dried herbs, and it's also easy for people to find them or order them online, access them without having to cultivate a whole garden or wildcraft...   Tahnee: (26:53) Yeah, buy expensive weird herbs.   Erin: (26:56) Exactly. Totally.   Tahnee: (26:57) That's what I think, we do, obviously, the Taoist Tonic herbs, and some of them are expensive, but I think you don't have to take fancy herbs. Really a lot of herbs are super cheap. We just harvested a whole bunch of dandi from our yard, and the roots were huge, and it's like, you know, dry those up, eat the leaves. We've got a great Liver herb there now, to sit in the cupboard and boil up whenever we want it. Yeah, but that took all of two seconds. My toddler loved it, because she was, you know, destroying the lawn.   Erin: (27:28) Digging them up. Yep, totally.   Tahnee: (27:31) It's like, yeah, that's great. There's lots of beautiful, potent medicine around that's free or very accessible. So people are kind of, if they are interested and feel the call to plants, but they're not really confident, and obviously get the book everybody. It's called Plants for the People. Is it teas that you recommend people starting with, or just learning to identify edible leaves? What are your favourite starting points for people?   Erin: (27:59) Teas are so great because they are just such an accessible way to take your medicine. Again, all cultures are really, all of our ancestors, that's the way that they utilised their medicines. They were boiling them, infusing them. I think getting the added hydration is really positive for your health as well. Tea is super easy. You seriously can't go wrong with making a tea, you know what I mean? Even if you forget about it and brew it for a long time, then you've just got a strong tea.   Tahnee: (28:28) Dilute it and drink it.   Erin: (28:30) Exactly. Dilute it and drink it. It's just an easy way, and also it gives people the chance to play with dried herbs or fresh herbs, but understand flavour combinations and what feels good and what works for their body. I do think tea is a great place to start. I am encouraging people to really go out and look at what's in their yard, and it's something that I say in the book a lot. I give some little golden tips on wildcrafting which, first and foremost, is about identification, because we all want to be safe, right? So you need to practise identification and really be sure. But there are many things growing in your yard, like my yard, you mentioned we live in a church, it's an old, flat churchyard. We've lived here for a year and a half, but it's interesting for me because it's such a different landscape than I'm used to, because I lived in the Blue Mountains for 12 years, and I had all these English gardens that were just so grandiose and beautiful, and this is a flat churchyard.   Erin: (29:35) But we've been growing a lot on this land. It's very fertile land. We've got a great medicinal herb garden growing now, but because I never planted proper grass, I think, on this block, it's just full of weeds, really. I've watched them over the seasons, and what I have on my block is I've got a lot of gotu kola, I've got plantago, I've got dandelion, and I've got chickweed coming up now, because it's cooler. We eat a lot of our chickweed, we eat our dandelion leaves. I'll eat a few gotu kola a day as well. A bunch of those are edible, super nutritious. They're free. They're weeds, so the energy and the might of weeds, they persist, you know? They're strong. They're such good tonics for our bodies, so nutritive, and also you can make medicines from them, and that's just growing in my backyard.   Erin: (30:37) I know some people will be living in the city, so we've got to be mindful of sprays and, for sure, pesticides. You've got to find some wildness where you don't think it's sprayed, so a park where you don't think it's sprayed, do a bit of research. Even in parks around cities, there's medicine everywhere. There really is.   Tahnee: (30:57) [inaudible 00:30:57].   Erin: (30:57) I just encourage people that, yeah.   Tahnee: (31:02) I often, I have personal rules about thievery. I won't go into someone's property, but if it's over the fence it's fair [crosstalk 00:31:11]. Mason's mum used to live in Gladesville, which is kind of inner west of Sydney, and I would go for walks with a green bag and come home with kumquats and lemons and rosemary and sage and thyme and we'd brew up things. There's actually quite a lot of medicine out there if you [inaudible 00:31:28].   Erin: (31:28) There seriously is.   Tahnee: (31:31) Just obviously don't steal from inside people's yards.   Erin: (31:34) Don't do what I used to do as a child and go and trespass and pick from someone's garden. You can get away with it when you're like eight.   Tahnee: (31:44) Oh yeah [crosstalk 00:31:44] story. It's a great story.   Erin: (31:46) You can get away with it when you're little, but maybe not now. This morning we just went for a big walk, and we just walked through the paddocks and just the edges, there's a school here, and just the edge of the school had this giant rosemary bush. It was insane, it was so huge. Then I also found a whole lot of lemon myrtle trees.   Tahnee: (32:05) I love lemon myrtle.   Erin: (32:06) Because I walked past and I was like, "Oh my God, the smell," and I touched the leaf and I was like, "It's lemon myrtle." So I picked a few leaves just to make up a cup of tea this morning. It was beautiful.   Tahnee: (32:15) Yeah. Medicine is all around.   Erin: (32:17) It really is.   Tahnee: (32:19) And so, if people I guess if they're learning identification, I typically say if you're not sure, don't eat it.   Erin: (32:31) Don't eat it.   Tahnee: (32:31) If you have a friend who's better at identifying, share it with them. For a lot of the ones we're talking about now, like dandy and stuff, even the ones that look like they aren't toxic, and gotu kola, there's that violet that looks like gotu kola.   Erin: (32:46) It is.   Tahnee: (32:47) I've eaten that. It tastes bad, but it's fine. I've done that. If you eat, there's a native yellow-flowered plant that looks like dandy, it's the same thing. It's just like-   Erin: (32:58) Like cats ears?   Tahnee: (32:59) Yeah, cats ears.   Erin: (33:01) Yeah, they're fuzzy. No, they don't taste good. The difference is dandy is smooth and it's more serrated on the edge, so there's no hairs on it. Cats ears are a little rounded on the edge, and they've got hairs all over them. If you're thinking what that is, is it hairy? If it's hairy, it's not dandelion.   Tahnee: (33:22) Yeah, people can start to work that stuff out.   Erin: (33:24) But totally, if you don't know what it is don't eat, yeah definitely don't eat it, there are actually a lot of great Facebook group identification, garden identification things that you can join as well, and you get a lot of expert gardeners coming on there and giving you tips or giving you a link to a YouTube video to watch for identification. It's very helpful, but yeah, you've got to practise. A lot of the things you can't, like rosemary and sage, you can't really get those too wrong. But they're cultivated, obviously, in someone's garden.   Erin: (34:01) Just get to know them. That's why, in the book, when I taught the 40 plants, I really tried to teach 40 most common or relevant plants. A lot of them are super common kinds of kitchen herbs. We shot a beautiful photo of all of them.   Tahnee: (34:20) They're gorgeous.   Erin: (34:22) Thank you.   Tahnee: (34:22) Just gorgeous. Oh, I've got chickweed.   Erin: (34:26) Yeah, look at that.   Tahnee: (34:26) They're just stunning. I was just going to ask, because I think, one of the things we try and help people kind of get their heads around, it's a tricky conversation because yes, these things are medicinal, but they're also, we consider herbs as part of our diet, and that's something Mason and I are really passionate about. We don't just take them when we're sick. We're not taking them even, always, for medicinal reasons. I love eating chickweed in a salad, and yeah, it's mucilaginous and high in vitamin C and great in all these, blah blah, but it's just a delicious salad green and same with dandy. Yes, it's cleansing for the Liver and the Blood, but it's also bitter and it stimulates your appetite, it's great to have before a pasta or something. It's a yummy herb.   Tahnee: (35:16) When you work with people one on one and when you're talking about that, is that something you encourage and foster, relating to plants as more than that kind of, I think that's that allopathic, it's a chemical constituent that's good for this and good for that.   Erin: (35:32) Yeah, totally.   Tahnee: (35:32) Is that something you teach people and get them to think about?   Erin: (35:36) For sure. It's funny, I think, for me, I work on lots of different levels with different people, and being a practitioner, it's so interesting, because as I've learned over the years, the art of being a practitioner is being a good shape shifter, and being able to shape shift to people's needs and to people's energies, because if I'm seeing six, ten people in a day, they're going to have completely different stories, completely different needs, and the way that I need to come at them is all really different. For some people, I will keep it more on a, I wouldn't say clinical, but there's a little bit more, I'll keep it on that level. For other people, so we'll do more diagnostics and testing and we'll get to the roots of things in those ways. With other people, I might be just using drop doses of herbs and totally tiny energetic doses, because they're very sensitive and I can feel that they just need very gentle interventions, and I'll be talking in that way as well.   Erin: (36:38) And then for other people, I'll be talking more about nutrition and how to eat those wild foods, and how to change your nutrition to support what's going on. It just really changes, honestly, and that's working on all those different levels with different people. I would love, one day, to be able to have a place where people can come and experience with me how to heal with the plants in a more tangible sense. I think that's the next few chapters away, maybe, for us, which would be beautiful, but yeah, for now, I just merge all of those skills together of how to inspire people to connect back to plants and connect back to how simple it can be as well, because I think wellness and wellbeing has gotten really complicated for a lot of people.   Tahnee: (37:28) Totally.   Erin: (37:29) Yeah, and it's intimidating for a lot of people, so my job is to try to really demystify that, support people through very complex health issues and help them shift and get better. So I really just try to meet them wherever they need me to meet them.   Tahnee: (37:43) Yeah. So which herbs do you work, I imagine you're fairly intuitive with what you work with for yourself, but are you working with anything in particular, any herbs you're really drawn to at the moment? What's your process for selecting and working with them?   Erin: (38:01) Totally, yeah. What am I doing right now? It changes everyday, because I am just like, like probably you guys too, it's kind of like, "What do I feel like? How am I? Where am I at today?"   Tahnee: (38:13) [inaudible 00:38:13]. I don't even know what I'm taking.   Erin: (38:14) Mase just makes them for you?   Tahnee: (38:17) Right.   Erin: (38:18) I'm sure. So it changes with what I'm feeling, but just also, I know we're in the time of corona, but for me, knowing that the autumn shift is coming, we're starting to go into that cooler inward cycle, so I will support my immunity more. I've just been doing a lot of nice hydration and mucous membrane support for my throat as well. I do long days where I talk and talk and talk, so I'll do a thyme, lemon and manuka, just tea, yesterday, that I was sipping all day with clients, that felt really nice. A little elecampane sometimes in there as well, but I actually am using a lot of medicinal mushrooms right now, and that's really going into all my tonics and smoothies. I don't really drink a lot of smoothies, but into my warming tonics more. I make a really nice dandy root cinnamon tonic base, with coconut, almond milk, or whatever milk we make, and then I will put in some mushrooms with that, so right now, very much so doing my Reishi, my little bitter Reishi, my Chaga, sometimes I do Mason's Mushrooms as well, just as the combo, or I've got a seven shrooms mix that I use as well from Orchard Street. I just mix up what I feel like, all the different things.   Tahnee: (39:45) That's what I think I so [inaudible 00:39:47] about having an abundant apothecary. You get to be able to really feel into what you need.   Erin: (39:52) Play.   Tahnee: (39:52) Yeah.   Erin: (39:54) Yeah, totally. For me, I do work with a bunch of adaptogens, because historically I have a sensitive adrenal system, though I'm in such a better place than a few years ago, when I was quite burnt out, I really do need to lean into the medicine of the adaptogens and sort of pulse dose those. Some days I'll go a lot stronger on them. Other days, I'll feel like I really don't need to bring them into my body. I am quite intuitive with them. I'm not prescriptive with something being an everyday thing with herbs. I'm at a point where I'm not on an actual prescription with anything. I just kind of go in and out with them and dance with them a little.   Tahnee: (40:35) When you had that healing crisis a while ago, when you were going through that whole adrenal thing. Was that when you lived in the mountains, as well? You kind of had to get out of that flow?   Erin: (40:46) It was.   Tahnee: (40:47) Yeah. You were just burning yourself out through work, right? Is that kind of-   Erin: (40:53) Totally. Not so much, it was a lot of different elements. I think, for me, I had some really intense tender fertility interventions and just went through a lot of experiences there. One of my best relationships was breaking down, this whole life we'd cultivated in the mountains I was like, we were about to build a house, then we were like, "We don't want to do that. We want to leave. We're ready to go." So we worked so hard at something and then it was just telling us that it was complete, really. The next chapters of our lives, my husband and I, were not going to be there. We'd worked so hard, we were holding on really tight to this life that we thought we should be having, and this life that we cultivated all this space, even to have a baby, and there was no baby. Which was okay, and we're in a very different place about it now, but it was like, "This is meant to happen," and then I think I was holding on so tightly was causing me so much emotional stress.   Erin: (41:51) I was also holding so much space for other people's healing process, and doing these huge long days in Sydney from the mountains. It was just a lot, and I think it became really a loud storm, and my body just told me I needed to rest, and it was really intense, the way it told me I needed to rest, and I just had to listen to that. Yeah, totally slammed me down on the ground.   Tahnee: (42:16) Thanks body.   Erin: (42:18) Like full on darkest days, in the bathroom crying, thinking, "Oh my God, is this ever going to get better," because I couldn't control my stress response, and I was just getting cortisol panic rashes all over my body constantly, yet my mind was totally calm.   Tahnee: (42:35) Your body was really-   Erin: (42:36) It was really scary. Wigged out.   Tahnee: (42:38) Do you [crosstalk 00:42:39]. Do you pull up your bootstraps and sort it out yourself, or do you go and have someone you work with in times like that?   Erin: (42:47) I actually went straight to my most wonderful naturopath. I did a bunch of things, actually. I did the herbs and the nutrition and testing to see what was going on a little bit more, and I went and saw, I actually could only do acupuncture right at the end when I was a little bit more robust, because I was almost too sensitive to even have needles in me. I was too sensitive. I did that, and I also did a lot of kinesiology, so a lot of energetic work from that, sort of more etheric, but coming into the body as well with kinesiology. I have to say, the food, for me, nutrition, my nutrition changes, and time in nature, so balancing my blood sugar with nutrition and the time that I spent under the oak trees swinging in my hammock, honestly, was the most healing thing for me, truly, because my blood sugar was so wigged out.   Tahnee: (43:47) Yeah, and I don't think, that's probably, to me, the most poisonous aspect of this wellness thing, is how food has become demonised. Just people living on liquids. We need substance and it grounds us. It nourishes us, especially if we are stressed or we have things going on like what you're describing. You were doing all those drives from the mountains to Sydney, that's a long time in the car and your energy [crosstalk 00:44:15].   Erin: (44:15) A long time.   Tahnee: (44:17) -By that. It's a lot. There's a lot there [crosstalk 00:44:23] hearty meal and a lie-down.   Erin: (44:24) Totally. And I just did that. I did that, and it really, really helped, and of course I did all the herbs, I did a lot of supplementation to support my body. I was in a crisis, so I needed to be supported in quite a major way. It wasn't a few things that came on board, it was a lot of things. Even coming back to the beginning of our conversation where I said I feel like all parts of the being need to come on board. That was truly one of the biggest experiences that for me, where I had to actually come on all levels to really work on healing my body, and I got better really quick. I know people struggle with this for years and years, and within a few months I was really able to turn around my picture of adrenal fatigue and dysfunction, which is amazing.   Tahnee: (45:12) Did it change, for you, though, how you worked? Because I think, often, certainly some of the people we work with, they want us to help them find the solution that they can go back to how things are, and it's one of the hardest things to communicate, but it's the reason this is happening is unfortunately due to this kind of lack of resonance between the way you're living and what you need. Was that a big shift for you in how you did things?   Erin: (45:40) Everything changed. Everything changed, yeah. My husband and I both acknowledged we were done with the mountains and we needed to let go of this concept of the house and everything we'd worked with. The mountains are beautiful, but it's also a very potent place, and traditionally, from an indigenous perspective, what I know of it, is that it was somewhere you'd come to do deep healing and then you'd leave. You really wouldn't need to, don't outstay your welcome, it's time to go. I think for years, actually, there were messages of we were complete, and we didn't really listen to that.   Erin: (46:15) Yeah, so for me, in that time I knew that we needed to let go of that, and I also needed to totally transform the way I was working, for sure. Only maybe a year before that I had sold my multi-modality wellness space that I'd started, so I'd sold that in the mountains, and I was heading up the Orchard Street Clinic in Sydney, and loved it so much and had been there for nearly five, six years, I think, towards the end six years, from the beginnings of Orchard Street. I just knew I had to let it go. I knew that I needed to go digital and give myself a whole lot of room to breathe and really change the way I practised, and in that moment, we sort of realised, okay, well if I go digital, I've sold my business, we've let go of the land, my husband leaves his job, we don't actually need to be, like we can let go of being here.   Tahnee: (47:03) Be wherever you want to be.   Erin: (47:03) Yeah, be wherever we want to be. And then honestly, the next day, we talked about moving up here, and the next day a friend of mine posted that she was leaving this beautiful church house.   Tahnee: (47:14) Ellie.   Erin: (47:15) Yeah, Ellie posted, bless Ellie. She posted on Instagram and I saw it, and I was like, "That's it. Let's move to the church." We got it very quickly. We'd moved in about two, three weeks.   Tahnee: (47:27) Wow.   Erin: (47:28) And that changed everything.   Tahnee: (47:29) Was Plants for the People born in the church or up in the Blue Mountains?   Erin: (47:33) Plants for the People was born in the Blue Mountains. I signed the book deal in the church, so I suppose it was really anchored in the church and I wrote it in the church, but it came to me when I was in the peak of the adrenal dysfunction and I was just laying there, surrendering to the universe, and just going, "Oh my God, what am I meant to do now? I can't keep up my practise like this," and then boom. The book just dropped in. In the absolute breakdown of the space, I had the hugest breakthrough, which was amazing.   Tahnee: (48:07) [inaudible 00:48:07].   Erin: (48:07) As always.   Tahnee: (48:07) Yeah, such a classic story, isn't it? But you have to create space for those things to be born. It's a lot like the process of birth. There's that moment where you're like, don't know if this is going to happen.   Erin: (48:21) Really.   Tahnee: (48:22) That's the strength. You dig deep and find the strength to transcend it.   Erin: (48:27) To bring it through, totally. Yeah, so I did change. I changed to a completely digital platform. Over the last year and a half I've been seeing clients digitally, so kept a lot of my beautiful clients from Sydney, which was wonderful, but I've just expanded into different spaces, working with people worldwide, all over, and it's been so wonderful, from this beautiful place that I get to call home. It's just been so grounding and nourishing for me. In that way, then I can show up, and I can really hold that space for other people so much more, in a more fortified light for all of us, which feels really good.   Tahnee: (49:03) Yeah, that's such a tricky line to walk as someone in a healing kind of industry, because it can drain you so much if you don't have a strong sense of what you need to stay supported and grounded. It's amazing that you've had that journey, because I think you can help other people then navigate it for themselves.   Erin: (49:24) Yeah.   Tahnee: (49:25) The final thing I really wanted to talk to you about, especially at the moment, it's just this idea of herbalism, this kind of activism. Something that, I've spoke to Sarah Wilson recently, and we were kind of discussing that activism doesn't have to be these grand, because I think a lot of us are devastated by what's going on in the world and we feel disempowered and kind of lost sometimes and it's often these grassroots traditions like gardening and herbalism and learning to build and cook, they kind of bring us back to what it means to be human, I think, in a lot of ways. I think especially what's going on in the world right now, there's this opportunity where people maybe do have a bit more time to jump online, order a book, or get on YouTube or Facebook and start to actually dive deep into the herbal practise and empowering themselves to treat their families and themselves when things go awry, but I know you do know a lot about the kind of historical origins of herbalism. For me, I was really into witch books when I was a kid, so [crosstalk 00:50:34], all the ones about the Salem Witch Trials and all that.   Erin: (50:38) Yeah.   Tahnee: (50:38) European witch tradition and stregas in Italy and all of that stuff.   Erin: (50:43) Amazing.   Tahnee: (50:43) Yeah, I don't know-   Erin: (50:45) I wish we knew each other when we were little. We would have been awesome.   Tahnee: (50:50) It's funny, because what you said about, all those things, when I was little, I was really into them, and then I got with this guy who was really scientific and for like.. I was with him for 11 years, and that was a really important time for me, because I actually learned how to think that way. I think I would have been pretty woowoo, I think, if I hadn't have had those years with him, but it also killed me a little bit, my spirit. I got depressed for the first time and I had eating disorders and I went through, and it's not just, obviously, but just that kind of reductionist way of thinking about things, for me, was really painful. So yeah, it's been interesting for me to come back full circle to a more holistic way of being and to reintegrate a lot of the things that I was really passionate about as a younger person, so it's interesting talking to you.   Erin: (51:41) I'm so glad you did. We would have missed out on so much gold if you didn't.   Tahnee: (51:45) Well, I think with all of us, I think we have these, and even those dark nights of the soul kind of times, the kind of a potent force for igniting [crosstalk 00:51:56] in us.   Erin: (51:55) They're important.   Tahnee: (51:56) Yeah, like pushing us to go back to what's true and real for us. So yeah, a lot of what we've talked about still really resonates. But yeah, I guess what I really got out of reading a lot of those books as a young woman was how much fear and power, when people were empowered, how the institutions and the structures were really threatened and challenged by that. In those days it was the Church and all that kind of thing, and now we've got all this crazy stuff going on in the world. I wondered if you could share some thoughts. You've got such an interesting background with your Italian and Romanian ancestry, and where you kind of see herbalism as almost a subversive, how it holds that [crosstalk 00:52:36].   Erin: (52:35) Yeah, totally. I wrote in the book, there's a sentence that is coming to me. I really wanted this to be a bold page of typography in the book, but it's a subtle line, when you guys read it. But it says, "We are activists reclaiming the right to know the medicine of self and soil." Right? Like, oh man. It gives me goosebumps too, because just that little message coming through me when I was writing, I was like, this is just bullshit that we are told that we have to go see somebody to access this information. In Australia, it is so highly regulated to be a herbalist and a naturopath. We've talked about my four years of study. I did seven years all up of study, but with the energetic healing, nutritional medicine, it's so much structured study. But four years of structured study, I understand, I totally respect and understand that study because it absolutely has its place. You definitely should see, if you're able and you have the means and you have things you want to work on with your health, it is so lovely to be supported by someone who knows, really, they really speak the fluent language of the herbs and they can really, really helpful.   Erin: (53:56) Yes, of course, that's me, right? But I also think that everybody should have access to working with the plants and healing with the plants. There are so many different layers and levels of how you can do that. It is the people's medicine. Plants medicine has been and always will be the people's medicine. I say that in the book as well. It's like, traditionally, all of our lineages have utilised plant medicine to heal. Every single one of them, I'd say. That is the oldest form of the ancient practice of healing with plants. My Romanian Russian lines, my Italian Arabic grandmother, my dad's side, they're English, so traditional folk medicine coming through Europe, coming through those Arabic bloodlines, even those Celtic bloodlines. There's so much power in those bloodlines that we have as well, and really we're just waking up and remembering.   Erin: (54:58) What's been taken away from us has been, particularly in Australia, it's like in the '80s, and I was talking to these beautiful old herbalists that live round the corner from me. They're just such gorgeous elders for me, and they both have these beautiful medicinal gardens, and they helped me out with a few herbs I couldn't find in the book that had been photographed. One of my favourite photographs is the big, gnarly chunk of turmeric. Yeah, I love it. It's got the dirt all over it.   Tahnee: (55:26) I was just looking at.   Erin: (55:28) It's so pretty, and the ginger as well, and they were grown in their garden, because I wasn't growing those at that time. Being welcomed into their garden was so healing for me, because they were just such lovely women, and they were telling me about their experience as herbalists back in the '60s and '70s, and how in the '80s, basically, all the legislation changed in Australia, and we were no longer able to make our own medicines for our clients, and all the bigger companies came in to make the medicines for the practitioners and it all became regulated, so the right to actually make the medicines for the clients were taken away.   Erin: (56:05) Now the flow on effect that that's had as well, it has been enormously disruptive for herbalism in Australia, because that hands-on approach has been taken away, even from the practitioners, you know? I think what's been lost is a lot, in that sense of making. I also think that generation of our grandmas, I know your mum was a trained herbalist and she was amazing and onto it, but for most of us, our mothers and fathers kind of lost that traditional folk knowledge, but our grandmothers and the generations before, so grandmothers, great-grandmothers, they were still quite in tune with that traditional folk knowledge. My grandmothers were, because they were, like my grandmothers were immigrants, right? They immigrated, and they had lived that immigrant life where they lived their way of life from where they came here.   Tahnee: (57:02) Old country.   Erin: (57:03) The old country, right? But my mum and my dad, who were, sorry, they actually immigrated here as small children as well, but they were just told to fit in and lose their roots, because they were new to this place. My mum had a thick Russian accent, my dad had a Liverpudlian accent, and they were weird, you know? They were just like, "Fit in, get in line. Be as Australian as possible," so they lost a lot of that. They didn't want to know about the traditions of their parents. I've talked to my mum about this, and that's been lost, that wasn't handed to me. We've lost a bit of that because we were all told to fit in, which is so sad, you know? It's sad. For me, I'm honouring my bloodlines by remembering.   Tahnee: (57:50) [inaudible 00:57:50] feeling, isn't it?   Erin: (57:52) Right. That's it. So yeah, I do think that a lot of this is about, it is almost an act of activism to remember. To reconnect, and to honour where you came from, and to honour where you are now. It's an act of activism to honour the land and to say, "I honour you," and I want to have a relationship with you. Even if it's this little patch of whatever it might, it doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter. The little patch is a microcosm of alchemy and universal energy. We're getting cosmic here, but it's like, just tune in, wherever you are. You're actually fighting the system by tuning in and taking that into your own hands in a lot of ways, and you're creating waves of healing by doing that as well.   Tahnee: (58:43) I think when we have people around us and children, those things, they become, they sort of, like viruses, move through communities and they change people. Look at this area, we have such a strong culture of health and healing around here because people have persisted with that culture in the Byron area. It serves all of us so strongly.   Tahnee: (59:10) I wonder, though, something I'm really sad about and still trying to solve, is my relationship with the actual endemic plants of this land, because I grew up with Western Herbalism, so it was plants that don't really naturally grow here. [inaudible 00:59:27] here, but they don't grow here on their own. Then we obviously work with Chinese herbs which, again, I'm really passionate about. I've been told I was a Chinese person once upon a time, so maybe that's-   Erin: (59:41) I believe that.   Tahnee: (59:42) Yeah, possibly. Part of me is really devastated that I, apart from lemon myrtle and some of the really obvious famous ones, I don't really know much about, I can't walk through the bush here and go, "Oh, that's medicine." Have you had any experience with our native plants?   Erin: (01:00:02) You know, I'm getting asked this all the time, which I really appreciate the question, but I'm getting asked this all the time, and I was just saying to my husband, "Wow, this is really coming up strong in conversations with me." The truth of it is, is no. I wish I did. My training is so classical Western Herbalism, which, as you said, it's really plants of Europe and North America. That's sort of traditional Western Medicine, and now we've got, it's interesting, the more Eastern plants are also coming into our training as well.   Tahnee: (01:00:38) Yeah. Using a lot of Ayurvedic and Chinese herbs.   Erin: (01:00:42) Yeah, a lot of Ayurvedic and Chinese herbs have come in as well, but traditionally it's those folk medicines of North America and Europe, and I feel so fluent in them, which is such a weird thing when you don't live on a land where they totally grow. Obviously we grow a lot of them ourselves, but I'm not walking in the fields of yarrow. I was in the States shooting the book, we shot a lot of the book in the States, so that wildness that you see with the fields of valerian and yarrow is in the States. I'm not walking in those fields. I spent a lot of time in America, so I feel very connected to those plants as well, with my experience of them and the land there, because my husband's American, but I really honour that that is a bit of a debacle. Also, how then do we practise bioregional herbalism?   Tahnee: (01:01:34) Yep, totally.   Erin: (01:01:35) Right? As Australian herbalists, when we don't know the plants of our land intimately? Now a lot of the weeds grow, like we talked about, the weeds in my garden grow here and that's great, but I don't know the medicine, the indigenous medicines. Because a lot of the indigenous medicines are cloaked in a lot of mystery [crosstalk 01:02:00].   Tahnee: (01:01:59) -Everybody, really, that a lot of wisdom has just been-   Erin: (01:02:01) Right, a lot of the wisdom has been lost-   Tahnee: (01:02:06) [inaudible 01:02:06], yeah.   Erin: (01:02:07) Is either held really dear, which is totally understandable. It's hard to access it, even as a herbalist. There was no training, actually, at all for me in my course on indigenous medicine. That might be something they're doing more now, but I see there's a bunch of courses up here where there's a little bit more knowledge being shared up here. I've been seeing those and thinking, "Oh, I'd actually like to start to feel into it." You know, Tahnee it's funny. My husband's American, we're very drawn there. Given what's been happening in America and whose governing it, we haven't been drawn to move back, but I feel such a big call back to the land there, and I think the plants are calling me. I feel like they're calling me really loud over there. For me here in Australia, I'm a firstborn Australian, but my lineage is so different. I feel like I'm so new here.   Tahnee: (01:03:05) I think America has such a strong folk herbal tradition.   Erin: (01:03:12) Oh my gosh, it really does, yeah.   Tahnee: (01:03:14) Yeah. We're members of the American Herbalist Guild and we go-   Erin: (01:03:17) Guild, awesome.   Tahnee: (01:03:18) Yeah, we've been over to the Oregon-   Erin: (01:03:19) That's awesome.   Tahnee: (01:03:24) Just how much knowledge and wisdom is held there. I don't know, for me, how free they are, really, to practise, and how free the sharing of information is. It might just the culture of the event that we attended, but I think it was a week-long or five day immersion [inaudible 01:03:47] basically, with talks from early morning to night time. I was going to herbal medicine for abortion clinics, and there just these beautiful women who had been working with women to-   Erin: (01:03:58) And supporting people.   Tahnee: (01:03:59) Yes. Through miscarriage, abortion, and here people are terrified to even speak about that. The stigma around using a herb in that case, I don't know. It was such an open-hearted, free conversation around how herbs can help. We went to a clinic on using herbs for AIDS patients. It was just a beautiful [inaudible 01:04:23] dialogue.   Erin: (01:04:23) It's amazing.   Tahnee: (01:04:26) People like Christopher Hobbs are there and Tierra.   Erin: (01:04:28) So cool.   Tahnee: (01:04:31) I'm like being part of their wisdom.   Erin: (01:04:32) Totally, yeah.   Tahnee: (01:04:34) I think that sort of makes me sad, I think, here, that it has become so clinical and so regimented and controlled. Every naturopathy clinic is using the same brand of [inaudible 01:04:44]. Kind of like that.   Erin: (01:04:44) Yeah, really true. Honestly, this is why I wrote Plants for the People, truly, because I was like, "This just needs to come back into people's homes and hearts." We all need to feel free to practise kitchen herbalism. Seriously, because it's like, this is what a lot of traditional folk medicine in America is. It's kitchen herbalism. It's things that you can make in your kitchen from your garden or from your surrounds that are super easy and accessible. I'm so grateful that the book got a UK and USA release as well, because that feels so good to know that that's also spreading into those spaces, but I was just so stoked that it's all over Australia and New Zealand, because I do feel that we really have lost that connection here. There are no rules about those things. These are things that you can bring into your everyday life. That is the spirit of activism around it.   Erin: (01:05:44) America is different, I think, in their sense and the way that fol

[00:01:12] So today I'm talking with Sarah. Sarah, where are you out in the world?[00:01:16] sarah: [00:01:16] I am in Colorado Springs, Colorado.[00:01:18] dane: [00:01:18] Nice. Okay. So what's your big goal today?[00:01:20] sarah: [00:01:20] My big goal is to talk with you about an idea I have for my overarching goals to help people and via the Avenue I'm thinking is life coaching essentially.[00:01:32] dane: [00:01:32] Wonderful. Are people paying you for anything right now? No. Oh, great. So you're starting from zero.[00:01:38] sarah: [00:01:38] I am starting.[00:01:39] dane: [00:01:39] Have you ever worked with anybody in a coaching capacity?[00:01:41] sarah: [00:01:41] My therapist is also a certified life coach. So in that capacity, yes.[00:01:46] dane: [00:01:46] Have you ever coached[00:01:46] sarah: [00:01:46] anyone. No, not formally.[00:01:49] dane: [00:01:49] Are you called to any specific group of people?[00:01:52] sarah: [00:01:52] You know, I'm trying to nail, like hone in on that a little bit, but I'm kind of really drawn to identify as an HSP. Do [00:02:00] you know what that is? It kind of along with,[00:02:03] dane: [00:02:03] I certainly do.[00:02:04] sarah: [00:02:04] Highly sensitive person.[00:02:05] dane: [00:02:05] I've even heard of that book. I'd probably do good to read[00:02:07] sarah: [00:02:07] it. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's a huge, huge bent for me and very much just the way that I am.[00:02:13] So I feel like I could reach people where they are in that.[00:02:16] dane: [00:02:16] Okay, great. So let's cover the basics of business to see how rapidly we can build this thing for you. Okay. So the spinal cord of a business, the fundamental soul of a business is a customer and a mechanism and the result. Okay. And this is so critical to understand because.[00:02:33] This is the meta pattern for just about any and every business in the world. So sure, most people that come to me are really good at mechanism's, not very good at finding customers and not very good about talking about results.[00:02:44] sarah: [00:02:44] Okay,[00:02:45] dane: [00:02:45] so let's use an example. Let's take a computer repair shop. As a customer, what results do you think computer repair shops might want?[00:02:54] sarah: [00:02:54] That computers are fixed?[00:02:56] dane: [00:02:56] So let's say you own a computer repair shop. What would you want as a computer repair shop owner[00:03:02] sarah: [00:03:02] customers to come in and bring their broken computers?[00:03:05] dane: [00:03:05] Yes. Any particular kind of customer, if you're being super, super specific?[00:03:10] sarah: [00:03:10] Hmm. I don't know.[00:03:12] dane: [00:03:12] Let's think about it for a second, and you're like, what would be a great kind of customer?[00:03:15] Someone's got a broken computer. Who[00:03:18] sarah: [00:03:18] does that want to go to? Like the big stores?[00:03:20] dane: [00:03:20] That's pretty good. Yes.[00:03:23] sarah: [00:03:23] You know, might be intimidated by like Mac and I don't know.[00:03:26] dane: [00:03:26] Yeah, this is very good. What else may be,[00:03:31] sarah: [00:03:31] I think it would be tough to find repeat clients. You know, as a computer repair shop, you fix their computer.[00:03:36] It's like buy forever.[00:03:38] dane: [00:03:38] Unless.[00:03:40] sarah: [00:03:40] Unless I don't know. They know how to get their customers to share what they do and tell their friends, you know,[00:03:48] dane: [00:03:48] I'm making you think so that you remember more longterm, unless you install viruses that make them keep coming back. Okay. How about a customer that's a [00:04:00] small and medium sized business with 500 employees.[00:04:02] That needs fast turnaround when stuff breaks, I think that customer might keep coming back. Yeah. Why?[00:04:09] sarah: [00:04:09] Because then they know that they'll have the results that they need.[00:04:13] dane: [00:04:13] Yep. And they've got 500 chances for a computer to break cause they've got 500 employees and a simply by targeting a customer. And by shifting from say a 75 year old grandma who needs her computer to turn on, which could be a good customer, you've now switched to customer.[00:04:30] To small, medium sized businesses with 500 employees or less or more, and making sure that their computers are fixed within 24 hours to 48 hours. If a problem arising. Which business do you think makes more money just based on those customers?[00:04:44] sarah: [00:04:44] I mean, definitely with the 500 employees.[00:04:48] dane: [00:04:48] Yep. And how many business owners do you think take time to try to clarify this?[00:04:52] Out of a hundred business owners.[00:04:54] sarah: [00:04:54] Barely any. I can tell you because my husband's in marketing and I can tell you that that's not common. That's crazy. It is crazy. Like who is your target audience? Who do you want to help[00:05:09] dane: [00:05:09] you take someone who's spent four years learning how to design websites. And giving them zero days and marketing training. They are going to have a deer in the headlights. So it's really a matter of training. So customer, computer repair shop, and you got customer is a business with 500 or so employees.[00:05:27] What result do they want? What result does your customer[00:05:30] sarah: [00:05:30] want? Sorry as to who? My brain's a little fuzzy today. Sorry.[00:05:34] dane: [00:05:34] That's okay. This has a tendency to fuzzy people's brains. Pretty normal.[00:05:39] sarah: [00:05:39] I can't usually hang because of what my husband does, but I'm going off not much sleep for a few days. So that sign, like trying to put all the pieces together as you're talking.[00:05:48] dane: [00:05:48] Well, this is good because you want to be able to mumble this drunk pass out face in a gutter.[00:05:53] sarah: [00:05:53] Yes.[00:05:56] dane: [00:05:56] The other night and like my girlfriend said, you know, you were talking about finding [00:06:00] painful problems in your seat. I was like, fine, fine, fine. Pretty great. I'll live in it in my sleep folks. So drunk and passed out.[00:06:12] Mumbled in a gutter. Yeah. Let's go back to the spine for a soul of a business[00:06:17] sarah: [00:06:17] customer mechanism results.[00:06:19] dane: [00:06:19] Yup. So you own a computer repair shop and we've decided on your customer being in a business with at least 500 employees. Yes. As the owner of a computer repair shop, let's keep it simple and say a profitable and thriving business.[00:06:34] Yeah. Say that out loud.[00:06:36] sarah: [00:06:36] Okay. Profitable and thriving business. Alright.[00:06:40] dane: [00:06:40] With a good lifestyle. Good quality of life.[00:06:43] sarah: [00:06:43] Yeah. It's a good balance. They're not the businesses and owning you.[00:06:47] dane: [00:06:47] Yes. So now there are many mechanisms that guy could do to get there. Yes, we're going to spin this around and it'll all Andrew nicely.[00:06:58] Okay, so let's say that you are selling to a computer repair shop owner. Okay? So that's the customer. Okay. Computer repair shop owner. The result that they want is a thriving, profitable business with a great quality of life. You could be even more specific. A business that makes 300 grand a year that they work at four hours a day.[00:07:20] Okay. So the mechanism to get there would probably be high quality clients, high quality repeat business. Does that sound clear so far?[00:07:29] sarah: [00:07:29] Yes, absolutely.[00:07:31] dane: [00:07:31] So now let's look at a whole different segment. The customer is now a business with 500 or more employees. Okay? You're the owner of a business with 500 or more employees in regards to the technology and computers.[00:07:44] What result do you want[00:07:45] sarah: [00:07:45] to the technology and computers?[00:07:47] dane: [00:07:47] Yeah. That they work.[00:07:49] sarah: [00:07:49] Yeah, basically. And that there's a fast resolution if something does go awry.[00:07:54] dane: [00:07:54] Yes. So your mechanism to make sure that happens is the computer repair shop [00:08:00] owner. Now let's make the customer a highly sensitive person. Okay. What result do they want?[00:08:07] sarah: [00:08:07] They want to feel. Heard and understood for whatever their frustrations and problems are.[00:08:13] dane: [00:08:13] That sounds more like what you might want. Okay. And it's okay. Yeah. Let's think about a highly sensitive person. Think about a hundred of them. Okay. What do they all universally want more than anything as a result?[00:08:28] And would they understand that language? If you talk to a highly sensitive person, would they say, I just want to feel safe? What would they say in their own language? As a result that they a dream result. Hmm. To be around people without losing themselves. To be around people without getting drained.[00:08:47] sarah: [00:08:47] Yes.[00:08:47] That's a huge part of it. Absolutely.[00:08:50] dane: [00:08:50] We're getting somewhere, so a highly sensitive person is to be around other people without being drained[00:08:56] sarah: [00:08:56] over stimulation in general is challenging for HSPs. Do you relate with that?[00:09:02] dane: [00:09:02] Oh, absolutely.[00:09:03] sarah: [00:09:03] I'm like, you have to, I'd be shocked because I know you're highly empathic, so they seem to go hand in hand a lot.[00:09:10] dane: [00:09:10] Very, very difficult. I'm only just now coming to like. Realizing that what I'm feeling isn't mine, man. I had a girlfriend back in the day once and I was like looking at myself in the mirror and checking out my hairline and I was just so insecure and I was how I had it all and it was feeling this terrible.[00:09:27] And then my girlfriend at the time, she calls a friend of mine and the guy says something like magical words to her and she just clears up. And all of a sudden I didn't feel worthless anymore. I didn't feel inadequate anymore. She passes the phone over to me and the guy's like, Hey man, you feel better. I was like, yeah.[00:09:46] And he's like, yeah dude, you don't really struggle with worthlessness like you think you do. Wow. You're just feeling her worthlessness cause she's around her family and has all these issues triggered. And what he said to her on the phone was, just give me your worthlessness. I'll hold it for [00:10:00] you. If you'd like to get a free one on one with me and beyond this show, you can find out details@startfromzero.com forward slash podcast and then, so that's what she did.[00:10:12] She cried and gave him the worthlessness and I[00:10:14] sarah: [00:10:14] felt better.[00:10:15] dane: [00:10:15] My hair didn't matter anymore, my face anymore. So I mean, I'm so sensitive to the point where if I'm in love with someone or with someone that I'll take on their feelings as my own and even act them out.[00:10:29] sarah: [00:10:29] Yep. That's the real struggle.[00:10:31] dane: [00:10:31] That's what?[00:10:31] Unhealthy.[00:10:33] sarah: [00:10:33] Yeah. It's, it takes, you gotta be aware and like you're saying.[00:10:37] dane: [00:10:37] Yeah. And I think I must probably have some issue with feeling worthless if I'm actually picking that up. So long story short. Yeah. Yes. Highly sensitive. And it's. So we've got being around other people without being coming drained.[00:10:52] We've also got overstimulation in general. They probably wouldn't say, I feel overstimulated. What result would they say.[00:11:00] sarah: [00:11:00] I think I'm having a little bit of a hard time connecting the HSP thing to like a computer repair shop. I don't want to like undo all this, but I think that's where I'm having a hard time.[00:11:09] dane: [00:11:09] Well, then forget about it.[00:11:10] sarah: [00:11:10] Okay.[00:11:13] dane: [00:11:13] Customer mechanism result. We'll do one that's very common. Okay. A newly pregnant woman that wants to lose weight. Okay. The result is they want their pre-baby body back mechanism is WeightWatchers. Okay. Mechanism is yoga mechanism is curves for women. Mechanism is keto diet, right?[00:11:34] Mechanism is whatever the ever, so now let's go to customer mechanism result for highly sensitive person. Okay. The extremity of computer repair shop to this is to show you that business spine is fundamentally the same. No matter what business and what category are you going to. Okay. And if you're actually able to think of this highly sensitive person niche as [00:12:00] customer mechanism result, you're going to be very far ahead of most coaches.[00:12:03] I like the idea. So customer is highly sensitive person. The result they want is what in their own words.[00:12:12] sarah: [00:12:12] Their own words,[00:12:13] dane: [00:12:13] because see, they don't even really understand. The problem is that they're highly sensitive. Right? They're just subject to very difficult experiences[00:12:22] sarah: [00:12:22] and a lot of outside influence telling them what they should look like even after having[00:12:27] dane: [00:12:27] children.[00:12:28] Well, that's if we're doing the women who,[00:12:31] sarah: [00:12:31] Oh,[00:12:32] dane: [00:12:32] no, we're on highly sensitive people.[00:12:35] sarah: [00:12:35] Oh, I see. Just in general.[00:12:38] dane: [00:12:38] Okay. This is a lot of information. Let's have your brain just relax for like 30 seconds. Take a few good breaths.[00:12:53] So what's the spine of business[00:12:56] sarah: [00:12:56] customer mechanism result?[00:12:58] dane: [00:12:58] Yes. So the Stu and other random example, pick a random customer niche.[00:13:05] sarah: [00:13:05] Relationships. What[00:13:07] dane: [00:13:07] kind of,[00:13:08] sarah: [00:13:08] let's say, boundaries in relationships.[00:13:11] dane: [00:13:11] So that's not, not quite a customer. Boundaries and relationships for a highly sensitive person is[00:13:21] sarah: [00:13:21] beautiful.[00:13:23] dane: [00:13:23] Okay. Relationships and boundaries by itself puts you in a sea of a million other people and no one's going to hear you screaming no matter how loud. Yes. But if you do boundaries and relationships for highly sensitive people, now you're pretty sweet. So a business owner. So general, highly general, what result does a business owner want?[00:13:42] Every business owner,[00:13:43] sarah: [00:13:43] they want business and repeat business.[00:13:47] dane: [00:13:47] Good. So the mechanism could be[00:13:50] sarah: [00:13:50] what could be advertising, I guess, in whatever platform marketing.[00:13:55] dane: [00:13:55] Could be. What else? I mean[00:13:57] sarah: [00:13:57] sales like direct sales.[00:13:59] dane: [00:13:59] Very [00:14:00] good. What else?[00:14:01] sarah: [00:14:01] Different kinds of networking events. Just to meet[00:14:04] dane: [00:14:04] people. Yes. This is a really good a referral system.[00:14:08] Yes. So here's where our business gets really exciting. I outsource the mechanisms. All I do is find customers, figure out the results they want, and then I hire the experts that understand the mechanisms.[00:14:24] sarah: [00:14:24] And that's why you're smart[00:14:26] dane: [00:14:26] probably,[00:14:27] sarah: [00:14:27] and why you're teaching us. Yeah.[00:14:30] dane: [00:14:30] I would say there's something within my brain that is automatically seeking complete liberation and freedom.[00:14:39] And so if I'm not feeling liberated or free, my brain turns into the highest level of RPM to figure out that freedom is very clear to me. That if I'm an expert at something that I'll be limited. So I didn't choose to be an expert because my, one of my biggest goals was that as I became more successful, I would have more freedom.[00:15:00] Yeah. So if I'm an expert or a technician, the more successful I become, generally the less free I am because the more needed I am. Right? So when I was like 21 or something, I said, the more successful I am, the more free I want to become. So that's sort of what gives birth and rise to the stuff that's taught.[00:15:17] Yeah. So I really do appreciate the compliment, and it's more about being very clear about a standard and then not bending to it. You know, when I started, when I set out in business, I said, I do not want to exchange time for money. Yes. So I just never did anything that would exchange time for money within like a 95% so not never, but 95% of the time I was like, it was so in my bones.[00:15:41] I was like, you could be a speaker, you could be this. I was like, no, I'm not going to fly to make three grand to speak or 10 grand to speak or 50 grand to speak. I'm not going to fly to do that because that's still exchanging time for money. So I got so good at passive and automated and asset based income that I [00:16:00] got so bored, so I was so free that I started teaching people.[00:16:04] That's why I started teaching people and I like teaching, so, or I feel it's almost like a karmic responsibility to teach like[00:16:11] sarah: [00:16:11] very much suits you and I think you help a lot of people. So I'm glad that you do.[00:16:16] dane: [00:16:16] Well. Thank you. Yes, it started from the standard. I will not exchange time for money and I did it so well that I got so bored money.[00:16:22] I was still making all this money. It came from a standard, it didn't come from intelligence. It came from a standard. So you sit down and you resolve. I will not exchange time for money. And then the wimpier part of the brain, he's like, well, how do you do[00:16:36] sarah: [00:16:36] it? I can't do, I don't know how to[00:16:37] dane: [00:16:37] do it at school.[00:16:38] Then just quit whining and do the pushup. Yeah, so that's clear. Just so people like just set your standard customer mechanism result. So you're a business owner now, and as a business owner, you definitely belong here. You belong here because you say you want to belong here. And I have a business owner friend of mine, he makes 250 grand a year and he's a consultant and I let him listen to one of our groups where I'm around.[00:17:05] Some business owners, you know, they'll do like a hundred grand a month. The guy that created it like maids, like $10 million a year or whatever, and he's in there and he's like, I can't be around these people. I don't belong here. And he's a business owner making a quarter million a year. He's like, I can't be around these people.[00:17:20] Day is just too much for me. And I was like, suck it up and we'll process that later. Stay here by the end of the call. He's like, I'm fine now.[00:17:29] sarah: [00:17:29] Wow.[00:17:30] dane: [00:17:30] But it's like, you know, if something's difficult, they'll give it up. Like there's times of process and like, listen, we can't process your feelings right now cause the call is going on right now, so suck it up and do the pushup.[00:17:39] We'll process it later.[00:17:40] sarah: [00:17:40] Exactly. It's like shelf it for later. Yes.[00:17:44] dane: [00:17:44] And then I was like, so if it's things are difficult and you bail, don't bail. Yeah. What I want to say is you're worthy of what you want and it's not even a matter of worth. Really. I'd made millions of dollars and I still struggled with self worth.[00:17:55] It wasn't until I loved my level of self worth that it resolved [00:18:00] and had I loved my level of self worth at the beginning, I would have built everything, having a lot more fun.[00:18:06] sarah: [00:18:06] That's good perspective. That is the kind of comes the hard way, you know? But yeah, it's invaluable. And I appreciate you sharing that too, because that's very much just where I'm.[00:18:16] Just now coming into, I've dealt with that my entire life, very much. Playing small, hiding, not thinking I had any gifts at all, or talents to share with the world and really believing that life or most of my life. So I'm just kind of, yeah. Coming to a place where I'm like, well, if I really want to help people, then I need to get out of my own way a little bit in the process and just show up and the rest of it will come together in the process.[00:18:42] dane: [00:18:42] You know? You know, when you said I have gifts, what I wanted to say initially is, no, you don't, and you don't need them. But if it's true, you do have any gifts. But the part of me wanted to say for some reason, no, you don't. Yeah. And you don't need gifts to do this.[00:18:59] sarah: [00:18:59] Interesting.[00:19:00] dane: [00:19:00] And I would say, would you say I have gifts?[00:19:02] I would say no. Yes. What I would say is I've acquired skills through reading books. I've acquired experience, and those could be now perceived as gifts that I have some innate intuitions and I have some innate inclination to business and I've seen the people and people, but what I want to say is you don't need gifts and you don't need to be gifted.[00:19:22] What you need is a heart for serving people. If you have a heart for serving people. Then you sit with them and you listen to them. Let's say you're dyslexic. Let's say you're even, you dropped out of high school, but you sit with someone with a heart to serve them with a pen and paper and you listen to their deepest pain and you ask them what the results they want for their life are, and you have no skill to speak of yourself other than a pen and paper and listening, and let's say it's a woman that wants to start her own business.[00:19:51] And I don't know anything about starting a business, but I know how to listen and I have a heart for serving people.[00:20:01] [00:20:00] If you'd like to hang out with people reading the star from zero book, listening to the start from zero podcast, listening to the book on tape and build businesses with them and do it with people together, visit start from zero.com forward slash starters.[00:20:19] And I'm not gifted other than I want to listen and I have a heart for serving. So, okay, you want to start a business? How long have you wanted to do that for 10 years. Okay. 10 years. Have you ever had any ideas. Oh, I tried this. Do those work out? No, I'm so sorry to hear that. What is it that you're wanting now with a business?[00:20:39] Well, you know, I want to be able to provide for my kids, send them to college, have free time to spend and play with them. Not have to look at the price of gas, be able to buy organic food. And then you sit there, you write all this down and you know nothing about how to start a business. But you're sitting there and listening, and then you sit there, you say, listen, you know, I don't consider myself particularly gifted.[00:20:59] I don't even consider myself to know how to solve this problem for you. But if I went out and found the foremost experts on how to start a business, and they were actually women who had done it themselves, and I interviewed those women, and I put third tips and strategies into a book and in a course for you.[00:21:16] And so you could learn from the horses mouth. Other women and how they built their businesses. And that could be your mentor, your support, your loving companion, your guide, your friend on this journey. Would you pay for that? Now? Tell me what you heard in that, or even what you felt in that.[00:21:32] sarah: [00:21:32] I mean, I heard a very considerate tuned in person asking really good questions.[00:21:39] Mostly questions. So you weren't like giving a lot. You were asking most questions, very much active listening, you know, repeating back to her and empathizing or whoever you were talking to.[00:21:50] dane: [00:21:50] Did you feel love.[00:21:51] sarah: [00:21:51] Yes, definitely[00:21:52] dane: [00:21:52] feel compassion. Definitely that you feel ego. No,[00:21:57] sarah: [00:21:57] not at all.[00:21:57] dane: [00:21:57] Did you feel pride? No.[00:21:59] The [00:22:00] heart of entrepreneurship is so beautiful.[00:22:04] sarah: [00:22:04] I believe that it's kind of the thing that keeps pushing me this direction. I mean. I mean, I literally used to tell people as a child, like they would ask me, what do you want to do when you're older? You know, when you grow up. And I would just say, I have no idea.[00:22:17] I don't know. I don't have any skills, talents, gifts, nothing. And there's lots of things that played into that. But these would be adults that would be talking to me and confiding in me, and I would just be sitting there listening. And then I recall this conversation at like 10 years old and this adult saying like, I don't usually.[00:22:33] Talk to people your age, but I just kind of feel comfortable with you and like you can handle it, you know? So I've very much always held space for people and it's where I'm most comfortable. It's what I do naturally. I love listening to people. I love really, really like going deep on what they're saying and asking them more questions.[00:22:51] And I do that without thinking. So that part is there. I've just always too much focused on the other parts. I think. You know, like that's not enough is what I've, essentially, the message has been, you know, that if I have a heart for people or just because I want to listen, like what does that really do?[00:23:09] dane: [00:23:09] You know? So the top two skills you need to build are selling. And what I was doing with that woman at the table was selling. Yeah. Asking her what she wants, asking her what her problems were, connecting to her experience. Offering a solution. I didn't come up with this solution. I'm going to have experts who are women who started a business.[00:23:29] Now I'm going to go out to a successful female business owners on Google, and I'm going to reach out to them and say, I am so inspired by your business. I have a group of women that have really wanting to start a business, but I'm not a woman who's done it. I was wondering if you would like to contribute and help other women achieve financial independence.[00:23:47] You think a woman's going to say no to that?[00:23:49] sarah: [00:23:49] Yeah, hopefully not. I don't think so.[00:23:52] dane: [00:23:52] No.[00:23:53] sarah: [00:23:53] Especially at stain age,[00:23:54] dane: [00:23:54] especially a successful female woman. Yeah, because a successful female woman is going to just [00:24:00] look out to the world. It'd be like, how do I reach more women to let them know they could have what I have.[00:24:04] Yeah. Because the heart of this is so simple and okay, so top skills selling other skill is outsourcing. And then you listen, you sell, you outsource, and you listen. Don't know how to make a website overwhelmed with some tech thing. Outsource, don't know how to make a product outsource to an expert. Let's say you go to the skate park and you sit down with skateboarders.[00:24:27] And you say, Hey, I've got candy. You want some[00:24:32] sarah: [00:24:32] creepy at all?[00:24:34] dane: [00:24:34] Yeah. You try to escape, or you say, you know, Hey, would you mind if I ask you some questions about skateboarding? Sure. Why do you do it? Well, you know, my dad's at home and he's an alcoholic and he's kind of abusive. And so I just like to be out of the house and skateboarding's really fun and it gives me a sense of purpose.[00:24:51] I know not every skateboarder's got an alcoholic. Sure. And so then you say, Oh cool, and what's the next big trick that you're learning? Oh, I want to learn this kick flip over the ramp. That's XYZ. How long have you been trying to practice that kickflip how do you go about trying to learn that trick right now?[00:25:06] Oh, you learned it by watching your friends. Oh, is there like a skateboarders portal online where other skateboarders are just showing off their tricks. Oh yeah, dude. It's called YouTube. Oh, okay. Is there anything you don't like about your skateboard? No. Skateboard is good, man. Do the wheels roll long enough, like as the level of friction?[00:25:25] Good. Does the skateboard slow down too fast or anything? Nope. Skateboards. Good. How long do you usually go before you buy a new skateboard? Oh, I know. I keep skateboard for like three years. All right. Skateboard ideas are out. What's your biggest challenge as a skateboarder? Actually? Well, you know, my biggest challenge is actually getting over the fear to do a trick when I know I might break my arm.[00:25:45] Oh. And now you probably have the basis of a product idea and you create an illustrated guide, an iPhone app, something that's a way to learn tricks to keep your body safe from injury. So you say you test it out, you [00:26:00] say, so if I had like an iPhone app. And it was a specially designed training that would teach you skateboard tricks and a safe, incremental way.[00:26:10] So you don't actually have to injure yourself and stop skateboarding. Because I know you're tough and I know you're not so afraid of injuring yourself. It would suck not to skateboard. Right. Cause then you're playing into there. Right. Machismo[00:26:21] sarah: [00:26:21] persona.[00:26:22] dane: [00:26:22] Yeah. And they say, yeah, you know, that'd be great. Now is that something that would be worth paying for?[00:26:27] They might be like, eh, you know, cause I can just watch on YouTube and you say, well, YouTube is good, but this would actually incrementally show you small steps, so you're really safe from injury. Oh yeah. You know, then I'd probably pay for that. And so now you have this unique training program that shows them how to incrementally practice a trick to be extra safe with injury.[00:26:44] Yeah. Now if they say, no, I still wouldn't pay for it. You still put it together. It proliferates amongst a million skateboarders, and now you have skateboard suppliers, skateboard wheels, skateboard shoes, skateboard gear, skateboard hats. And they're all paying for advertising to be in front of your product.[00:27:02] So they're in the iPhone app at the top. It's like the best skateboards online. Below it is like the top gear for skateboarders. And they click on that and now you've got like now you go to the top skateboarding eCommerce store and you send them a message and you say, Hey, I've got an app that half a million skateboarders are looking at every month.[00:27:19] Half a million every month looking at to learn tricks safely, and I'm looking for the best products to advertise to them. Would you like to advertise here? So what's happening is the heart of entrepreneurship is not forceful. It's curious. It doesn't have an agenda that it forces on someone. It is. The heart of entrepreneurship is so beautiful because it says, I'm here to serve.[00:27:42] So you see, we fumble the skateboarders. Okay. Nope. Skateboard is not right. Oh, okay. Breaking their arm when they're doing it. Okay. And it took a little while to get there, but we're there to serve. Right? So we risk looking like a fool because we're actually caring and asking questions, potentially a skateboard, you know, and you risk rejection when you mentioned ideas.[00:27:59] Skateboarder. [00:28:00] That's stupid. Get outta here. Yeah, she come back the next day and ask another skateboarder. But then you end up helping skateboarders not break their arms. So what's the spine of business?[00:28:11] sarah: [00:28:11] It is customer mechanism results.[00:28:13] dane: [00:28:13] So let's do the customer. As a skateboarder, what was the result they were wanting in this example?[00:28:19] sarah: [00:28:19] To help them with learning new tricks? Not be so scared.[00:28:22] dane: [00:28:22] So that they don't, they don't fall and hurt themselves and then they can't.[00:28:25] sarah: [00:28:25] Oh yeah. Then they can't skateboarding.[00:28:28] dane: [00:28:28] That's a pretty specific articulation. That's probably very resonant with skateboarders. Would you like to learn tricks in a way that's safe and injury free so you don't have to give up skateboarding?[00:28:38] If you get hurt, then the mechanism we are allowed to unfold by finding the path of least resistance.[00:28:46] sarah: [00:28:46] What do you mean by that?[00:28:47] dane: [00:28:47] Well, they don't want to buy it, so we're not going to force them to buy it. Oh, gotcha. They do want to buy it, so then we sell it to them. They don't want to buy it, but they definitely use it.[00:28:54] Right. Okay. So then we'll get it free. Build up all these skateboarders eyeballs, and then they pretty good money selling advertisements to other products. This is the heart of entrepreneurship and why it's so easy to start. Tell me what you're thinking. I[00:29:06] sarah: [00:29:06] was just gonna say, that's crazy to hear you say it and I believe it 100% coming from you because you've done it.[00:29:13] And you've shown that, and I think he very much done it authentically based on these principles you're talking about. I'm just kind of laughing out loud because for so many years in my mind, all the reasons why it's not so easy to start.[00:29:28] dane: [00:29:28] What you're talking about. Oh, okay. So tell me more.[00:29:31] sarah: [00:29:31] Well, I guess all I'm saying is like, I've just told myself it's not enough this whole time.[00:29:37] You know, like even in my mind as we're talking, I'm thinking like, but how could you, like, I still have a major hang up at the certified life coach thing cause I'm like, why would people pay someone to coach them who's not, you know, like maybe trained or certified or has these certain accolades or. You know what I mean?[00:29:52] But you're sitting here telling me like, you just seemed to have a heart and listen and care and want to serve people, and that's why it's so [00:30:00] easy, which is very contradictive to how I lived.[00:30:07] dane: [00:30:07] If you'd like to learn how to make money and you need a path to do it, visit start from zero.com and you'll see a whole context of how you can actually get started. There's a three phase process that you can go through. If you're a beginner, intermediate, or advanced, go there. It'll tell you exactly what to do, where to go, and how to get started, and you don't need money for some of the options.[00:30:28] And if you do have money, you can buy some of the other options. It's all laid out for you with crystal. Clear clarity@startfromzero.com where do you go and what do you do? You'll find out there.[00:30:44] Yeah, and you don't want to operate in a place you're not qualified to operate in. Right. So maybe you have great coaches that are experts at working with highly sensitive people and you hire out that mechanism. I'm not going to be the one creating the skateboarding training videos. Right, right. So then they, Oh, well, how would you build the skateboard videos?[00:31:02] Well, there's probably a lot of cool ways you could figure it out. You could run Facebook ads. You could reach out to every pro skateboarder and tell them the mission, ask if they want to be a part of that kind of mission, making skateboard injury free by doing learning tricks in an incremental way. I bet skateboarders want to be a part of that.[00:31:18] Yeah. So you talked about that not being enough and now you're starting to see that it is enough. Yeah. Why? Why are you starting to see that it's enough?[00:31:26] sarah: [00:31:26] That's a great question. I think it always helps to step outside and then go from the other side, which you do a lot and are doing, but, and I think I finally did kind of just start asking myself some questions, I guess, and say, you know, like, are there that many good listeners in the world?[00:31:42] No, not really. Do I feel valued in end scene? When I am in a conversation where somebody is looking at me and not, you know, their eyes aren't fleeting all over the place, behind my head or down to their phone or you know, and not just, and maybe pass that like, are [00:32:00] they, you know, replying to what I'm saying in such a way that I know they are actually hearing what I'm saying.[00:32:05] And you know, I can't expect everybody to do this just because maybe I do or enjoy it or it's natural to me. But. I don't know. And my husband is a huge, huge, just encourage her in general, and so he's been for years, just trying to encourage me and say the same thing you're saying really in a lot of ways.[00:32:22] But yeah, I don't know. I've just always felt like it was not enough. But like you're saying, like you can have, the other pieces of business can be successful. They can know how to get their results, they know how to get and keep their customers, but if they don't have a heart to actually serve through what their business is for.[00:32:40] You know, or really meet their customers where they are. It's kind of empty in my mind and[00:32:44] dane: [00:32:44] pointless.[00:32:44] sarah: [00:32:44] So I don't know. I can't get to the end of my life and not have tried to do something to help, you know, that's just always my thing that pushes me forward, is that I want to help people. So[00:32:55] dane: [00:32:55] there's a transformation that I think is gonna need to happen in your brain.[00:33:00] Okay. Do you feel that as well? What transformation would that be?[00:33:06] sarah: [00:33:06] Well, I mean, it's funny you said the very beginning. I don't think worth has anything to do with it, but that is something that I do struggle with. I[00:33:12] dane: [00:33:12] think a lot. That doesn't mean it's not a struggle. Yeah. Have you ever met any sociopathic people that are successful?[00:33:18] sarah: [00:33:18] I mean, how do you know they're sociopathic? You don't always know that upfront.[00:33:22] dane: [00:33:22] Have you ever seen anybody that's really successful, but they're like[00:33:25] sarah: [00:33:25] not that great of a person? Yeah.[00:33:28] dane: [00:33:28] So then we do know that so forth has nothing to do with it.[00:33:32] sarah: [00:33:32] Yeah,[00:33:33] dane: [00:33:33] sure. But the thing is it does. If you're a sensitive person and you're connected to your experience, you can't just, what these persons generally do is they dissociate from their sense of self and they build it anyway.[00:33:45] Yeah, I'm worthless. I'll dissociate from that and build it anyway. But the rest of us that are really connected to our bodies and don't want to dissociate from our sense of self to build a company worth very important. But when I say worth. It doesn't matter. What I mean is that if you follow [00:34:00] the mechanics successfully, you've built something successful because it's really about the mechanics.[00:34:05] Listen, find a pain, find an expert, sell it. It's mechanical. Yeah, so let's give space for the the worst thing because it's a specific quality of worth, I think you're talking about. What would you say it is? What kind of a worth do you feel worthy as a mother?[00:34:19] sarah: [00:34:19] That's very much in process as well.[00:34:21] dane: [00:34:21] Do you feel worthy as a woman?[00:34:23] Same answer. So[00:34:24] sarah: [00:34:24] was very much a self thing. Yeah.[00:34:26] dane: [00:34:26] Great. So this is very exciting because, and it keeps it very simple. Yeah. So you said, I didn't think what I knew or what I had would be enough. I think that comes from the same place. So can you feel very gently this character inside of you that he wrestles with worth and just feel it?[00:34:49] Can you feel how real it is? Yeah, absolutely. Can you also feel whether it's who you really are or not? Or does it seem like it's definitely who you are? I think[00:35:00] sarah: [00:35:00] just up until recently it has felt that way, but I think that's kind of what I'm just finally starting to push through and out of is believing and yeah, mostly just believing that, that it's not who I am.[00:35:12] It's not all of me.[00:35:13] dane: [00:35:13] It is simply said, it is an identity and that identity is fundamentally a thought and that thought can be held. So when you get that, what you've been believing about yourself and what you've been thinking about yourself is a thought that can be held and there's something underneath, and then you're like, okay, well my personality was kind of built on this.[00:35:39] My thought patterns were built on[00:35:41] sarah: [00:35:41] this very complex[00:35:45] dane: [00:35:45] and not so, when I say it's a thought, the root thought is only a thought and it can be held. That is the place you start. If we're struggling to take action as generally routes down to one thing, what we're [00:36:00] thinking of ourselves unconsciously or consciously.[00:36:03] Yeah. When you get that, while you're thinking of yourself consciously or unconsciously as only a thought and what we actually are and what I'm on the precipice of feeling here is we are infinite potential, and when you operate from that place worth actually loses its entire meaning. Because, and you'll start to get to this place as you build the awareness to start seeing that that self worth while.[00:36:25] So real indeed sympathy and compassion is a thought. Yeah. And it's not who you are. It's only a thought. Then you're like, okay, son of it, what the heck? You start noticing these things as real but not true. Real, but not true. Real, but not true. Held and loved and felt, but not really true to who you are. Not dismissed, not, Oh, it's not true, but it's real.[00:36:48] It's not true. So I'm going to dismiss it in a sort of way. No. Embraced and held like you, you, you'll be good at this when you are completely okay with holding the most worthless aspect of yourself. If you make friends with the worst part of your mind, if you make friends with the worst part of this worst and you're okay with, it sums up full steam ahead, but when you're not okay with low self worth, then you identify with it, then you become it.[00:37:17] As soon as you're okay, like, Ooh, there's worth, there's low self worth coming. I know that one. Yeah. And then it doesn't stop you if you are just identified with it. Dis identified with it. Okay, so here's how this works. When that child that just cried when they were born, they came into earth as a contraction and they formed their sense of self, the primary contraction of her sense of self.[00:37:43] That itself is not who they are. That itself is a thought that can be held. And that sense of self is like the trunk of the tree. There's an awareness underneath the trunk of the tree. That's the place of the infinite potential. This is what I'm on the precipice of understanding based on my mentors and [00:38:00] stuff.[00:38:00] So when you see that your infinite potential, you start to see how addicted you are to these identities because they're so rooted. So what you want to understand and what you want to do very gently, is start building your capacity to be okay with feeling worthless. Meet the worst part of your mind, like a friend.[00:38:15] Okay. And hold it. When I say we're infinite potential, are you able to connect with that at all? Yeah. Wow. That person that just said, yeah. Was that from the place of your infinite potential? So from the place where we see where infinite potential now we see the identity of even entrepreneur is limiting.[00:38:33] I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to think I'm an entrepreneur. That's the thought I want. Sure. And even that's limiting compared to infinite potential. It's like, well, even though, I mean I'm like a hundred things or 50 things, and those are all just identities. I'm infinite potential. So when you sink the concept of like your self worth.[00:38:51] When you're in the contract, that sense of self, that feels unworthy, that contract, that sense of self will try to feel worthy at once worth. Sure. You can just wake up from that game all together. You will wake up from the sense of self into infinite potential and then you see, or you could work on it to feel worthy as an identity.[00:39:08] Because I'm experimenting with this, I'm more inclined as to wake up from the game altogether. So when you go into infinite potential. The concept of actually feeling worthy in and of itself doesn't make any sense because it's a story. And any description of yourself just does it even hold in the realm of infinite potential.[00:39:24] And then from this place you're like, well, yeah, I need to start a business because it seems really fun. Or. I want to serve people. Tell me what's going on for you right now.[00:39:32] sarah: [00:39:32] I'm just kind of internally reflecting on, I think I used to live in this space or found it for a short time, but I don't know. I've just, I think my eyes, my perspective has gotten too bogged down in all of this.[00:39:44] You know, like all of my inadequacies or perceived inadequacies or whatever shortcomings.[00:39:50] dane: [00:39:50] All the senses of self that have those, which is not who you are, but they are very real. You have aspects of yourself that identify as inadequate. You have aspects of yourself that identify as [00:40:00] worthless, right? Your greatest fear is not real.[00:40:03] Right? Like if you were here in my arms, you were crying in my arms about how inadequate you felt. It's not really. You go ahead and feel it and then you'll find out like maybe part of you actually wants to feel inadequate,[00:40:14] sarah: [00:40:14] and I think that's also a different level I'm coming to is being aware of. Gosh, why do I so strongly need to identify with this or this or this?[00:40:23] You know, in order to, I don't know,[00:40:25] dane: [00:40:25] probably cause your personality was built around it,[00:40:27] sarah: [00:40:27] right? Like he said, very layered[00:40:30] dane: [00:40:30] way of life. So you gently do that by shooting to the root, shooting to the sense of self. Hold that with love and compassion. As soon as you can hold the worst aspect of yourself as a best friend, free.[00:40:41] sarah: [00:40:41] That's what I've done for everyone else, but myself. It almost broke me just recently to a point where I was telling my husband like, I'm done. I don't want to do any of it. I don't want to help people like what has been there for people or listening to people or Holy space for people, like where has it gotten me?[00:40:58] I feel very empty and like, I don't know, used up in some way, but[00:41:02] dane: [00:41:02] I'm not expressing who I am and it's killing me.[00:41:06] sarah: [00:41:06] Yes.[00:41:07] dane: [00:41:07] Yes. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will kill and destroy you as leave that quote from the great work of your life.[00:41:16] sarah: [00:41:16] I believe that 100%[00:41:18] dane: [00:41:18] so what's the spine of a business[00:41:19] sarah: [00:41:19] customer mechanism results[00:41:22] dane: [00:41:22] and as a customer for a highly sensitive person.[00:41:26] Do you know any highly sensitive people outside of like you and I, and you could sit down and ask them what it's like to be them and what they desire when they're around people and what they desire when they're around stimulating environments. And you can find out the results that they want and then you can figure out the mechanism later.[00:41:44] And since you're not a certified coach, right? You just work with them for free and see if you can generate a result. Like you work with them for free and say, Hey, I'm not certified. I don't even know what I'm doing. Would you want to do some experiments with me and see if we could solve this together?[00:41:59] You [00:42:00] say, sure. You start generating results and you don't need a certification. Really at that point, if you're able to reliably generate a result, you might want one, but I've been generally certification avoidance because I'm just more like, can we get a result or not? I think there's something to be said for.[00:42:14] Learning how to be with someone, but you've been doing that your whole life. So you sit down with highly sensitive people. You ask them the result they want, then you ask them if they're willing to experiment with you to try to get there. You're in business. How many people do you know that are highly sensitive?[00:42:27] I'd say like six or seven. So talk to all of them. Schedule a call with one of them a day. From Friday to next Friday. Hey, can I talk to you? I've been thinking about something. Send him a text. Send him a message. Talk to one person a day and ask them questions about results they're looking for in their life because they're HSP.[00:42:45] Okay. Then invite them and do. A possible experiment where you help them for free and see if you're able to get them a result and make sure you have fun.[00:42:53] sarah: [00:42:53] Yes,[00:42:53] dane: [00:42:53] that's key. Do you have any questions for me?[00:42:55] sarah: [00:42:55] I'm sure I will after, but not off the top of my head at this moment.[00:42:59] dane: [00:42:59] Okay. If you ever get stuck, which is very likely, but make sure you visit, start from zero.com forward slash.[00:43:06] DJP. Okay. And that's a free process that you can use to rapidly get yourself unstuck. It helps you shoot straight to the identity and hold it.[00:43:15] sarah: [00:43:15] Okay. I appreciate that very much.[00:43:17] dane: [00:43:17] Yeah, you're welcome. And you're definitely worthy of serving another human, and you're definitely worthy of being able to help someone.[00:43:25] You appreciate that you've been doing it your whole life. Yeah. Yeah, they can do it for you. Good job. So for years, people have been asking me, what's the big secret? How do I do this? And the answer is simple. My life took off when I had mentors. Too many people try to do this stuff alone and get stuck and give up.[00:43:44] Listen, if you haven't succeeded in business or entrepreneurship yet, it's simple. You haven't failed enough yet. You haven't been around enough mentors yet. If you combine failure with mentorship, you will fly. I had someone say, why. They people so more successful than me. How come I [00:44:00] can't get this right?[00:44:00] And they said, well, how many times have you failed? He's like, wow. A lot of times I'm like, have you failed more than 10 times? He said, no. I was like, you haven't failed enough yet. You haven't been around mentors enough yet. Failure is how you learn. Michael Jordan has missed so many game winning shots.[00:44:13] You've got to get out there and fail, and how are you going to do that if you're all by yourself, all alone, beating yourself up in your own thoughts? Listen, I'm going to give you access to my board of advisors, my board of advisors that I talked to sometimes every day. I'm gonna get you. You access to them every month, live for you to ask questions and get your mindset on straight.[00:44:32] They're going to ask you questions that are hard for you to answer. Those are the kinds of people you want in your life. You're also going to get access to not only the board of advisors, but my entire community, the start from zero community, all the entrepreneurs that are practicing these things, building these businesses.[00:44:47] You'll get access to this community and this board of advisors and much more with the new program we launched called start from zero.com forward slash. Starters. And you can see how you can get access to my board of advisors and ask them anything you want. Monthly, you'll get automated accountability to stay focused.[00:45:05] You get a community of other people, all building businesses with the start from zero methodology. And guess what? You get kicked out of this community if you do not take action. So it is serious people. So if you'd like access to that information about that, go to start from zero.com forward slash starters and it's about time that we get together and strengthen each other and fail.[00:45:26] Together and pick each other back up together and show each other each other's blind spots and ask the hard questions and drive each other to that golden finish line of a business that you don't have to work in a business that provides freedom. So you can sit around on a Tuesday and watch HBO if you want.[00:45:43] All right, start from zero.com forward slash starters. [00:46:00]

so often we start with the solution that we've created, the product, the course, a service, whatever, but the best way to get people to buy is to focus on the problem that our product solves and then help them see it as the logical solution. That's what we'll be discussing in step three of the beta launch method. [00:00:25] If you're new here, you've started in the middle of my series on how I'm beta launching my new course. I highly recommend you go back and listen to episode 12 of season two first, which is an overview of the entire process. You can see how this fits into the big picture. So now that we're here on step three, we know who we want to sell to, but why should they buy our stuff? [00:01:04] What problem does it solve for them? The more painful the problem is, the more they're going to want the solution and be willing to pay for it. For example, if you find out you have a rare form of aggressive cancer, you'll do anything you can to find the best doctor to help you cure it, cure it as fast as possible. [00:01:26] Even if it costs you your entire life savings. But if the problem is just that they're bored, there's lots of things that they already own that might serve to fill that problem, and they'll have a lot less urgency about purchasing your product now. So you have to ask yourself, what problem does my potential client have and how badly do they want to solve it? [00:01:50] So for example, this new beta course that I'm launching, here's some of my first thoughts on the problems. And I'm going to be really honest with you. I feel like I still need to work on these a little bit, but Hey, we're beta launching done is better than perfect, and so we're just gonna roll with it right now, right? [00:02:06] That's kind of how I do things. All right. So first, I'm looking to work with people who are doing all this work and just are not being heard. Like they put out all this content and they just hear crickets. No one responds, no one engages. No one comments. Things like that. They have little to no engagement. [00:02:26] They have to work harder than they should to get new sales. They just feel like there's gotta be an easier way. They don't feel like they have a lot of loyal clients. They have very few testimonials and pretty much no word of mouth marketing, and there's just no real community. In their business. They're just not standing out from the crowd. [00:02:49] They're kind of blending in with all the other businesses serving their same market, but they know they're doing all the right things, yet something is still missing and they just don't know what that thing is now. All of these things are valid problems, but I'm going to be honest, they're a little bit weak on the urgency side, like none of them require immediate action, like getting audited by the IRS would require. [00:03:15] Right? Like if you got that note and they said, Hey, we're going to audit you. You need to get us this stuff. You're going to be talking to your accountant and making that stuff happen right away because that's, you know, kind of a big deal. These aren't nearly as. Urgent is that is, but they're still problems that keep a business from growing. [00:03:35] And when you solve them, your results start to amplify. So it's easy to forget. [00:03:44] Now. I know this might seem basic, but it's really easy to forget to identify the problem when you're thinking about creating a new product and what it does, but truly understanding what the problem is and how your product solves it will help you have a stronger offer, which we're going to talk about in an upcoming episode. [00:04:05] When you paint a picture of what the problem is and then clearly contrast that with a detailed picture of the solution your product brings them and you explain how that's going to change their life and their business, then the real magic happens. That's when people really want to buy. So we're going to be talking about the quick wins and all of the longterm benefits that people get from using our product in the next episode. [00:04:33]. So I can't wait to see you there. Now, if you want to make sure you hear it, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. [00:04:40] And if you want to get the entire 12 step checklist that I'm using, and get all these questions that I'm asking myself as I'm preparing to beta launch my new course, you can go to personal brand journey.com and enter your email address and I will send it right over to you. [00:04:57] Now, if you found this helpful or if you've enjoyed the podcast, one of the best ways to say thank you would be to tell someone you know why they should be listening and what value they would get from it. It's a great way to say thank you and I appreciate it so much. [00:05:11] If you post it on Instagram, definitely tag me at Jamie M Swanson and yeah, I just appreciate you and I will see you in the next step. So. [00:05:19]

What can startup founders learn from the marketing strategies of high growth, silicon valley tech companies? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Traction Hero founder Kate Walling talks about her experience helping VC-backed tech startups develop marketing and business strategies, and the specific things she recommends they focus on to achieve exponential growth. Highlights from my conversation with Kate include: Kate advises early stage tech companies on their marketing and business growth strategies. When she starts working with a new company, the first thing Kate looks at is the product and business model to determine whether there are opportunities to use product-led growth. After that, she evaluates the company's brand and positioning within the industry, and then focused on the sales team. One strategy that Kate has seen several companies use successfully to drive growth is community, and specifically building a community of their customers, users and fans and allowing that community to mostly self-moderate. To be successful, Kate says marketers need to be a part of the larger corporate strategy conversations around what the product is, how it will be positioned, what the tech stack is, and how sales will go to market. Another effective way to raise your brand profile is to work with industry influencers. Kate says that these do not always have to be paid relationships, and that its important for your marketing team to be aggressive in building relationships. If you have a small budget, one of the best ways to gain early traction as a founder is through a personal email newsletter. This is a strategy employed by many of the accelerators. Send it to friends, family, former colleagues, etc., but NOT clients, and share your journey as a startup founder. You can also use this to ask your audience for help and introductions. PR is another good way to get the word out at a low cost. While you can always hire a PR agency, there are plenty of opportunities for you to directly pitch yourself to local media, and you can subscribe to HARO and respond to those pitches at no cost. Tools like Canva are handy for making marketing collateral that looks like it was created by a designer but really uses templates to look professionally made. Kate's advice to founders is not to try and take on too many things. Find a few channels and platforms that are a good fit with your audience, do them well, test and iterate. Resources from this episode: Visit Kate's personal website Check out the Traction Hero site Email kate at kate[at]katewalling.com Following Kate on Twitter @katewalling Listen to the podcast to get specific strategies you can use as a startup founder (whether you have a big budget or a small one) to hit your growth goals. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Kate Walling, who's the founder and CEO of traction hero. Welcome Kate. Kate Walling (Guest): Hello Kathleen. I love your podcast. Kate and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Thank you. I'm excited to have you here. I am going to do a little bit of an announcement for my listeners before we dig in. Um, if you have listened to my last few episodes, you might've heard this, but it's late March, the coronavirus pandemic is happening. We are recording on Zoom and Zoom is having some bandwidth issues. So just saying, if you're listening, be patient with us. If the audio gets a little funky from time to time, we're going to do our best and hope that Zoom holds up for us as we go. But, these are interesting times we're living in. Lots of people working remotely, lots of people using video conferencing software. So it is what it is. But with that said, welcome Kate. Can you please tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and Traction Hero? About Kate Walling and Traction Hero Kate: Absolutely. So let me try to make this the short version of the story. I've been an entrepreneur since a really young age. I started my first startup at 23, which was a consumer facing startup. I've kind of been an entrepreneur since then, although I've had a corporate stint. I'm in the middle because at one point I realized that being an entrepreneur from a young age means that you don't understand corporate structure and you just hit some walls because you have a lack of understanding. So I've also worked in a public tech company here in Silicon Valley and now I'm back with Traction Hero, which is a marketing agency for startup companies where right now we provide a lot of tech companies with on demand services just as they need it. So basically they can email with a quick project they need done and we turn it around in a couple of hours. So it's really good for companies that have large budgets, but not enough team. Basically there's a lot of those. And then we're also slowly building out services that are really focused on the deliverable so that startups can say, "I need a market research study done" or "I need a new identity." Everything is focused toward what needs to happen to get that done. So as you know, when you're doing a lot of projects, you've got to have a writer, a designer, a printer, all these different people, and it's very stressful for marketers. There's not really been a solution so far where they can just cross that thing off the list and know that the whole thing is getting done. So that's what we're working toward, is really solutions that help marketers get stuff done as they need it.  Kathleen: I love that you personally have been a startup founder and that you've done a lot of work with startup founders because I'm personally passionate about that. I have been a business owner. I've started a couple of different businesses. Having walked in the shoes of the founder, I think you described it so well where there's so many things that need to get done. And that's just from a marketing standpoint, right? You're wearing all the hats when you're in a startup. You could be the owner, the chief salesperson and the marketer as well as other things. And in those early days it can be really hard to zero in on, what are the most important things I should be doing in order to gain traction? That is one of the reasons, FYI, that I love your company name. You stay focused without falling victim to shiny object syndrome or you know, working so much in the business and not on the business, et cetera. It's a challenging, challenging time. Kate: It is. And I think, you know, marketing's been already challenging for a number of years because the MarTech stack keeps getting larger and, and Silicon Valley, the budgets keep getting larger, but your team size doesn't. But marketing is getting more and more responsibility for profit and loss. So there's a lot of pressure and I think what I hear from clients is, what you're saying, is that this was a different style with Traction Hero. And that's because I've personally been through the technology accelerator programs. I am on my fourth startup. I really know what it's like. The interesting thing is that I started this agency model in Seattle. I built an agency in Seattle before I came down to Mountainview California and the model works so well, so it's called scrappy face and it was scrappy, right? And we just went in and we helped these funded tech companies and we just moved as fast as we could. And we had a great team. I closed the agency because I went through a divorce and growing a company really quickly in the middle of a divorce in a city that was always raining is brutal to say the least. But the model was so interesting and when I went into corporate tech, what I realized is that I kind of thought their needs would be different. What I saw was just maybe limited, but it really wasn't, it was pretty much the same concerns of "I've got money, I don't have enough people to spend it." You know, "I don't have enough hands." And then marketing has gotten so specialized that you can't possibly hire enough people to do all these things well, like they can't be experts at everything. So, you know, I'm a big proponent now of having smaller marketing teams, but knowing how to get more done quickly and having whatever workforce you need, that's really fluid. Kathleen: I love that.  should take a step back because this topic, when you talk about startups, I feel like it's a Rorschach test because the word "startup" can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. And for some people, they hear "startup" and they think little, you know, two or three person company. And yes, of course every startup has to start somewhere. But then there are startups that are incredibly well funded, VC funded, that go from being one or two people to 20 to 30 people within a span of a month. When I think the conversation we're having, it's more around that high growth startup, not that little company that's gonna slog along for five years. We're talking about, you know, startups that have a lot of potential that need to move fast. I think that's really key here. That's the experience I've had working in startups, is that it's all about speed, especially if you're looking for investment. Because as soon as you bring on investors, there are high expectations. There are benchmarks you have to hit. There are thresholds that you need to get to. And all of that needs to happen really quickly. And you're right, you know, you couldn't possibly hire enough people to do that and you can't have a team that includes the world's best in everything, right? Because you'd need to segment out each little thing you do and hire a different person for it. So what's the best way to move ahead? And the other element of that that, I think, is so interesting is this need to balance brand with demand generation because those are two really important components. And especially if you're in a high growth startup, you absolutely need demand generation. There is no company that doesn't, but brand is really important these days. How early stage startups can quickly gain traction Kate: So like, yeah, how do you do all the things? It's so hard and I mean, you bring up a great point first. Defining "startup" is important. I think right now I do tend to concentrate on the tech startups that are scaling and have money. I also tend to help entrepreneurs that are somehow very well resourced and there's an opportunity that needs to move quickly. Those were the fun ones. That can be anywhere. It's like there's been a regulatory or legal change and so it's presented this opportunity and you've got to go fast to take advantage of that opportunity. So that looks different different ways, but it's typically those two categories in terms of entrepreneurs who are working on a smaller project or evolving it. There's so many tools now that they can use that would save them so much money that I think just having that right tool stack is a better situation. But back to your question about balancing brand and demand gen. It's super hard and I think what I used to do is go month by month, quarter by quarter in my corporate role and say "What are the business objectives here? And so what does what makes the most sense?" So if all of a sudden the sales team is growing from 40 to 90, right? I've got to get the demand gen up and going. I've got to get tools in place to deal with that. And that evolves into other things like what type of sellers are they? How are these tools going to work together? Whereas if the brand is newer or there's been a change in the industry or there's some kind of potential in terms of content or positioning, you go on the brand side. I think you just have to kind of reevaluate it every several weeks when you're, when you're at scale, when you're trying to work with scale. Kathleen: Yeah. It's funny that you say that because I think the last month or two have been the best example of why it's important to reevaluate every few weeks because I can speak for myself. I had a beautiful 90 day marketing strategy that I finished at the end of January. I'm a big believer in planning in quarters and adjusting in months. And so I had the strategy put together and I was starting along my merry way, implementing my strategy and then coronavirus hit and blew it all up. I feel like I, I, you know, I want to do air quotes, "go into work every week." You know, I'm not going anywhere. I'm working out of my house right now. And the priority is constantly changing based on the current fire. And I say that not meaning that like, the house is on fire and the company's in jeopardy. That's not our case. In fact, oddly we have an increase in demand because of what our product does. But, it's about pivoting and shifting and recognizing now it's all about remote work and you know, that sort of thing. And that's different than what I had planned out, but when things are moving fast, you gotta be able to go with it. Kate: You do. And I think, you know, in terms of the virus, it's the emotional roller coaster for us personally. It's the same with business. And I think it's that way with most parts of businesses, right? It's like, "Oh, I don't know if I have enough toilet paper. I don't know if I have enough this or the National Guard is moving in," you know? So it's like, every day, assessing where things are and what your needs are. And I'm seeing that with my clients. The first week was about "What should we be doing? Should we do a campaign?" So we do an email and alert people of what services we're changing. Now it's moved to, "Okay, competitively, what do we need to do? What's going on in the industry? What's the overall campaign, you know, with our overall strategy here?" And that strategy ends up being not just marketing, that's the whole business offering. We need to move products. But marketing from my observation right now, which is, you know, limited in the grand scheme of things, marketing is driving some of those business questions, right? Because you can't go to a marketer right now and say, "I need you to do something about this virus." The marketer has to say, "Well wait, what are we, what are we offering here?" You can't just throw together some kind of campaign or ad without meaning. I mean, this is not a, um, you know, "throw a graphic on it" type of problem. How do VC-backed startups approach marketing? Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. So let's put the pandemic aside for a minute because I feel like we could have an entire episode on that and I may need to do that at some point soon. My curiosity has been peaked by what you said about how you tend to work with these well-resourced, need-to-move quickly, but potentially bandwidth-constrained companies. I think what is really interesting about that is that a lot of marketers see those kinds of companies that do grow really fast and they think, "What are they doing? What is the secret sauce? What's happening behind the scenes that's enabling them to go so quickly?" Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect it's not that they're just throwing money at the problem. It has to be more of, yes, you need money, but what are you going to do with that money that supports a really high growth kind of scenario? So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and pull back the curtain on, if somebody does come to you and say, you know, we just got VC funding, we've got to triple the size of this company in a year. We've got the budget to do it. As a marketer, what kinds of things are you doing and looking at for them? Kate: The first thing I look at is, is there anything in their model that should be evaluated overall for marketing in terms of distribution or influence? For scalability, like you said, it's demand gen and brand. However, for a lot of things it's, is there something that needs to be built into the product from a marketing positioning standpoint or differentiation to make sure that that scale can happen with the brand and demand gen tools? That's one of my favorite parts and that's where your puzzles come in. So if you're a SaaS company, do you need to be offering some kind of certification program because you need more people using the software? What are the different channels? How is that working? I think getting a grasp on, is there something from a business model perspective that needs to happen? The other thing is, a lot of companies at that point have some juggernauts, right? Like, we're seeing churn is hitting here and it's too high, or we're seeing these little scenarios happen with customers, or our lifetime value is off. So we start trying to troubleshoot some of those things so that, that first step is really about marketing and the product and the operations of the business, and then also what needs to be worked out before you scale. There are usually some major learnings there. Once those kinks have been ironed out, we start looking at where are we positioned in the industry? Where is brand awareness? And then what is the plan with the sales team? So if you've got two sellers and you're going to hire maybe one more, that's a pretty basic stack because you don't want to build anything too complicated until you understand, are these relationship-based sellers, are these more tech savvy sellers? There's a difference in the tools required. So you can do something more basic in the meantime, just getting them basic collateral, making sure they have that stuff on the brand side. You start wanting to do more PR, more on positioning and really claiming your spot in the industry landscape. Then, as your sales team picks up, so when you start getting to like 20, 40, 50 up and up sellers, you're looking at a lot more sophisticated systems. You're usually looking at a change of how sales works. So if you have inside sales reps, how are they working, how are they using your marketing software? You get into really complex software decisions, and that's usually driven by marketing. How can startups use product-led growth? Kathleen: There's so much there. I have so many questions I want to ask you. Let's go back to one of the first things you said, which is that you actually begin in many cases by looking at product. So it sounds like what you're talking about is product led growth, and really going in and looking at what are the opportunities to bake something in -- the product that we have that can itself be a growth driver. I would love it if you could just talk a little bit more about that. Kate: It's both from a positioning standpoint, and distribution comes up. That comes up with SaaS companies a lot. And positioning can come up with B2C, right, of like what is this particular opportunity here? With direct to consumer you see it because you'll see, like, consumer products that are extremely well designed or they're really hip or something like that. So that's where you'll see that brand move play in really big. And, and usually with D2C, that's part of the initial product development. But sometimes that can come in as like, how do we do that? Sometimes it can be, with B2C, how do we build a community around the product, right? So some companies are doing a really good job of using Facebook groups. I think Facebook groups are amazing for marketers right now of, we're going to liberate our whole community and let them build with one another. But what are the rules of that? So I think there's just a lot there in terms of B2C, it depends. If it's a commodity-based business, it's harder. A lot harder, right? You're looking at, how do we feel different to the buyer? How do we provide a different experience? If we're not really offering something different, can we deliver it different? Is there really strong brand value that can go throughout the whole company and how would that be protected? So it really has a lot of different shapes. Think of channel partners or technology partners who are taking our API and installing it. But is there something more? Is there a way to even scale it bigger than that? Right? Like get like a whole group of individuals selling this thing for you. So I think it's really out of the box type thinking. And generally at this point, you know, the startup's been going for awhile, they've had some success, they're ready to, you know, commit, and they're ready to scale. They're leaning that way. So it's a really good time to do this work. How marketers can play a role in the broader business strategy? Kathleen: You're coming in as a marketing advisor. At the same time though, it goes to the core of the business strategy. It's not just a marketing strategy. If you're talking about putting an evangelist program in place or changing elements of the product or building a certification program, some of these are business strategies. So how do you navigate that conversation? Because I think often marketers are really challenged with, we're really comfortable staying in our marketing lane. But a lot of the times, when we get out of that lane -- and sometimes it manifests as, you know, we're starting to make recommendations about sales software, other times it's like the things you're talking about that can get rocky if you don't do it right -- how do you approach that? Kate: Yeah, that's a great statement. It's so true with this early stage stuff that I'm talking about. It's typically before a startup has hired a CFO or a senior level marketer. And so you're working directly with the CEO and they have some marketing resources. They'll have a small agency, they'll have a couple freelancers, right? Part of their problem is that they don't know who to hire. And most of the time what I tell them is you can't make that hiring decision yet. We don't know what the marketing is, so we don't know what type of marketer to hire, you know? So I'm a huge proponent of fractional CMOs because I think it's just too early and you don't want to get the wrong person. There's a lot at stake. And I think a lot of startups at that base, they've got revenue coming in, hire a CMO to come in four hours a week and figure this out slowly. And who realizes that you're going to hire for that position when you know what the direction is? So that's more early stage. And the company usually has maybe five to 10 employees, but marketing's not built out yet at all. Later on is where you get really more tricky. You've got someone in charge of sales and they have a particular way that they're hiring. Then as a marketer, you're supposed to bring in demand gen, right? And the demand gen you need to bring in is a different skillset than the sellers have. And the sellers were not aware of the software that you have to do. In my corporate role, it was a rollout plan. I started with HubSpot and got people used to this idea, this is what's going on and why. Then I moved into Marketo, which is super hard. Kathleen: I just went in the opposite direction. I went from a company with Marketo to a company with HubSpot and I'm like, "Thank God. It's so much easier." Kate: And then with Marketo, the sales team was growing. We had to do much more sophisticated type rules and stuff too, because all of a sudden you can have a sales team and you start bringing in all these leads and a sales team does not care. They don't care. And they're not gonna answer them. And you've got a cultural problem of you have to educate them toward how do you deal with these leads, what it means, their job and that it is, and you have to have support from the management team that this is going to be required. There's a whole lot and it just really depends on who you're working with and what their background is. You have to take it one step, one day at a time. So I think it just depends on the team. It depends on where people are. You have to be pretty fluid marketer. You have to be able to say, "This is what I need and it's going to be a process and I'm going to have to get buy in. And so how do I do that?" So you have to be patient. Kathleen: I think you raised something really important, which is, when you're coming into the job, you're at an advantage because you're working with a CEO. But just one thing I've learned is that when you, when you're in those hiring conversations, you have to, you have to have a conversation about that. I might be making some recommendations that are outside of what you might think of as marketing. How are you going to feel about that? Are you open to it? Are you willing to keep an open mind? You know, really, really figuring out that the personality type of the founder, the CEO, and whether they're willing to listen and, and consider other things I think is so important at that stage of a company. Kate: Critical. Specific strategies that startups can use to drive exponential growth Kathleen: Moving onto something else. You said you started talking about community and I love that topic. I could talk about it forever. And I guess this is, this is part of a bigger question I have, which is, I'd love it if you could share some examples of what you have seen work really well to fuel fast growth in some of the companies you've worked with. And maybe we could start with community because I came from a company a few jobs ago where we built a very large community and it was huge for us and it was a Facebook community. Through that experience I became really passionate about that. So that's just one example but, but there may be others. So, specific things that you have seen really deliver for the companies you've worked with. Kate: It's different for B2B and B2C. So I'll start with B2C because it's the easy, fun one. What I'm seeing right now that I love are these Facebook groups around certain products. This is not a client of mine, but it's actually a product I use. There was, what's it called, the meal delivery company that I was using for awhile when I had really busy days. It was all plant-based food and then they had this Facebook group and you could join it and people were just sitting there and they let people post whatever they want. They can sit there and post like "I really hate this smoothie. How am I going to get through this or am I supposed to do this later or not?" And it's super interesting to watch how that worked because the community moderated the community members for the brand. Brilliant. People will say, you know, "I did lose weight, I did not lose weight. This is really more about health." And so you start seeing these advocates come up and then they would use those advocates for their Instagram stories and other things. So that organic way of building a community that moderates itself is really interesting. Now initially, you have those questions about when do we step in and when do we not, and how do we moderate? I think if you can get by with moderating lightly, but you know, the feel of the brand is so positive, right? So that's a brand value that you have less of those issues but they're going to come up. But I think you have to have a very careful strategy about how to moderate that. The other thing that people are using a lot on B2B is obviously these micro influencers. There's some startups paying a lot of money for this and it's all over the place. Traction on that sort of slowed down the end of last year and now I'm starting to see clients pick back up on interest in that because everybody's at home and online, right? So we're starting to feel like there's opportunity there. I'd say if you can build your own organic community, that would be ideal, right? If you can't, you can use these micro influencers and that's great content as well. I talked to someone last week and their product's working and they're sold out, and they've gotten all this influencer marketing and that helped. But then all of a sudden years later, they don't have brand values. And so when you're needing to do more, you're needing to build content, you're needing to build demand and you're needing to build, you know, other parts of marketing, if you don't have those brand values built out, then all of a sudden you're like, well, who are we? We were using everyone else for the voice. So you'll run into that for B2B. It's true here. I think some of this comes to hiring. So what I've seen work really well is that you become friends with all the influencers in the industry and you sponsor their podcast and you appear on their podcasts and you go to their events and you just kind of make sure the team knows who the influencers are. And then you do everything you can to get involved with people at every level. You'll have local events and you'll bring the people in that you know, in that city and have them share their stories. And so it's a constant kind of industry networking. I've seen that work really, really well on the B2B side. But it's definitely different. Kathleen: It's so interesting that you say that because I've seen that work really well too, where people have formed strategic relationships with industry influencers and sometimes, not paid as you say. It doesn't always have to be paid. It could just be really showering them with love in the form of, you know, having them on your podcast or going on theirs or commenting and sharing and making introductions. I worked for a marketing agency for awhile and they did this exact thing and their way of forming those relationships was by offering to make personal branding websites for influencers. That was a great way to get to know them. Then you've done them a favor. So there are a lot of different ways that that that can be done. I think that's really smart. How to hit big growth goals on a small budget Kathleen: You work with well-resourced companies that are able to do a lot of these things. Any lessons learned or suggestions for companies that don't have those giant budgets? What are some things they can do in the early days? Kate: Oh yeah. I love the scrappy brands and helping startup founders. So I advise a lot of startup companies. I love this part of the work cause I obviously identify with it a lot. Being an entrepreneur for so long, I think, you know, when founders are trying to grow a brand unlimited budget, one thing I always bring up is never forget about email, because if you create an email list of your friends and family and colleagues and anyone that you meet with, those people become very loyal to your process. If you share with them where you are and what you're going through and what you need help with, they will help. It will absolutely help. I've seen that be really successful. Now your tone has to be right because nobody owes you anything and you want to be entertaining and kind of make them feel a part of it. And that's part of the email structure, right? Of like, "Here's what's happening and you know, these exciting things are happening, these challenges are happening. Here's how you can help." That is the basic format that does incredibly well. And that is one of the main marketing tricks that comes out of the Silicon Valley tech accelerators. They have all their founders do a weekly email and it works. I, on my own, I've had open rates of like 90% or higher, very high. Kathleen: I want to talk about that for a second because I'm fascinated by this. I also believe strongly in email. I also think that people think of email as this old, tired, dead strategy, but there's some really interesting things being done in the world of email right now. So you're talking about founders doing a weekly email. Can you peel the layers of that back a little bit for me? What does that look like? Who does it go to? Kate: Sure. So this is not client facing or customer facing. My personal list is maybe 200 people and it's my closest friends, my family members, colleagues I've worked with for years, people that I've met with on this journey. So it's people that know what you're up to and what you're striving for basically. But not clients. Clients and customers would get something different. They don't need to understand the process. So that email list is specific for friends and family colleagues. And what you do is, every time you send, you add more people that you've met along the way. I usually start it with like "Hi friends" or something like that. And then I usually say something seasonal about what's happening in the world and that I'm thinking about them because I am. All these people, they're cheering you on. And then I'll typically say, if you're new to the list, here's a link to the previous email, right? So that there's some sort of context in there drawn into the story correctly. And then I'll put some kind of update about where I am or what challenges are happening. And it's usually interesting stuff because when you're building a business, you hit all kinds of things in the world that are happening. So for example, with Traction Hero, there've been changes in California privacy law, changes in California employment law that have really changed the model. And that stuff is interesting. If you're not in it all day long, it's pretty interesting. So share the challenges you have. And then I usually say, "Here's the ways you can help. So if you just open your social accounts, we're now on Instagram. Would love if you would follow," and people will, they'll do it. Or "If you happen to know a friend who knows anything about X, Y, or Z, would you mind connecting me?" They will. This technique is straight from accelerator programs and it is a good one. Kathleen: Do you add these people to the list or do you ask them if they want to opt in? How does that work? Kate: I add them. I often will mention it to them. Like, "I'm going to add you to my newsletter. Let me know if it's okay." You're not doing it for a business so the rules are different. This is actually a question I'm curious to know. I mean I still send, so my recommendation is, I send it through MailChimp, their most basic template. And the reason why is people can unsubscribe. It does hurt your feelings a little bit more when someone does that you know. It's also interesting because if sometimes there'll be like a vendor or somebody and if they offer, I've actually had this happen, someone unsubscribed and I was like, then you're not interested enough in my story for me to pay you. Kathleen: Yeah. Right. Kate: Like, if you're not interested enough in this email because this is just basically what's happening with my business, if you're not interested in that, then I mean, I don't think that we'd be a good fit in terms of working together. I mean, I'm not bothering you. It's like once every six months, I mean slow, but I used to try to do them once a month. MailChimp's most basic template is perfect. And just text. I mean I throw in, maybe, you know, if I done a new logo design or something, throw it in. But keep it pretty simple. And that way people can unsubscribe. Kathleen: I'm a big fan of not overly designing emails. I mean these days, most people have the images in their emails turned off by default. And so if you've got a lot of design in there, it just doesn't get seen half the time anyway. And it looks crappy to have a lot of those image boxes. Like, "Turn your image on," you know, it just doesn't look good. So simpler is better all around with email in my opinion. Kate: Yeah, I know, I totally agree. And that MailChimp basic template's nice. The fonts big, it works well on mobile. It's, it's a nice one. These emails still take, I'm going to say it like if I'm fast, two hours. They still take time. You don't want to bother anybody and you want it to be entertaining and you want it to be, you know, uplifting, even if you're talking about your challenges. The most important thing is tone. I've seen some of these founder emails and if you use the wrong tone, people are like, "No thanks." Kathleen: So what is the right tone? Kate: I think it's friendly and I think it's engaging. You know, I don't think it's like, "Hi friends, hope you're enjoying this day. Please like my Facebook page, please sign up, please send me people who should be customers." It's not about a million asks. People have a lot going on in their lives. It's more of like, "Here's what's going on with building this startup right now. Here's what I'm trying to do. Here are the challenges I'm having. And that's interesting to people, because a lot of people haven't gone through it or want to go through it. And you know, entrepreneurship is never a straight line at all.  Kathleen: I love that idea. I mean, that's something that really any founder in any industry can do. I think for some it's going to put them in a place of discomfort because a lot of the founders I've met don't like talking about themselves that much, which is kind of funny because you're going to have to at some point as a founder.  But I think that's neat because that's something you can do that doesn't take really any money, that just takes your time. Kate: I'd say founders who have marketing backgrounds definitely have a hand up on this one. In tech accelerators, what would happen is I would send in mine first and then whoever in my batch would typically take mine and copy it. So people need examples of this. Email me and I'll send you one of my past ones because it does help to see some kind of, you know, formula that's worked for people and it's so much easier for marketers. Kathleen: I love that. So maybe we'll put Kate's email in the show notes and you can email her and say, Hey, I need your newsletter so you can see what it looks like. So you had, you said you had some other things to be on that and I took you on a tangent with that one.  Kate: So other things on my list. Definitely write industry articles on LinkedIn so that you're showing industry expertise and what you're learning. I think that's very important just to start showing industry expertise and that you're connected to the industry. The other thing I'll say is look for media stories where you might fit in and ping the journalists. So a quick side story, do we have time for that? Kathleen: Yeah, go for it. Kate: When I started my Seattle agency, I had just been through this issue of what's called domain front running, which is when you go in and you're buying a domain and before you can hit checkout, someone takes it from you. So they're capturing it on the domain register thing. Well, King Five, the big news station in Seattle ran a story about how these guys were making all this money on domain names and how it was such an innovative business. Well, I got the journalist name and I sent them an email and I said, "I totally disagree with you. This is really bad for entrepreneurs. It's, you know, it's not right. There's some negative things happening that are just unfair." So they came to the office and filmed me talking about the story about how someone stole my domain name and then sold it back to me for a lot more money than if I'd just been able to push the button. And that was a great opportunity. I've had a lot of luck. You know, my first startup was around printing cookbooks and I had a lot of luck just calling local news stations and cooking on air. Free PR. I've gotten a lot of clients placed, um, if you have a consumer based business, there are a lot of news stations that their lunchtime, they'll have like a third hour, they have a third hour. It's usually lifestyle and you can get pretty easily placed on it if you have some sort of presence and something to talk about. They need people for that lifestyle hour. So always look for PR and media opportunities. Kathleen: Yeah. And I would say a great resource for that also is help a reporter out -- HARO. I mean that's a no brainer. It doesn't cost anything. You subscribe to it, you get an email, however many times a day with reporters looking for sources for stories. It can be overwhelming, but it also is full of opportunity. Kate: Yeah, if you have gmail, you can put on a label and then go in and look when you have time. But yeah, that's an awesome recommendation. Podcast interviews are great. You find people like yourself and you have similar topics and interests. There are websites like Canva that make building marketing collateral so easy and you look like you know what you're doing design-wise and it doesn't cost you extra money. So by all means, make your decks, make your one pagers, make collateral for all these different use cases. Think about collateral. Kathleen: Oh my God, I have to stop you and just say, I am the biggest Canva fan girl on the planet. I am not a designer. I do not know how to use the Adobe suite to design anything. That's the one thing I've just realized. I'm not, I don't have the aptitude for it, but I can go into Canva and make the most beautiful things and I do it probably four times a day. I love it. Yes. It's amazing. Kate: Yeah. Canva, huge. When you get later on in your startup and you have to have brand differentiation and you know, you don't want to use simple stuff, that's different. Early on, use Canva, print this stuff, have leave behinds for customers. It doesn't cost that much money to just really work on your marketing collateral. I think also when you're on the topic of press, look at your local press opportunities, where can you talk at local events, whatever works locally. We'll end up working in different geographies and at larger scale. So learn locally first and that stuff is free. It just takes time. And also work on your industry. So look, so look at this stuff in terms of, are you being, are you B2B or B2C? So where does that fall in? Then look at your media, look at it local and look at an industry as well. And then you want to start growing your community in terms of media. I see entrepreneurs, it's kind of painful to see that they're trying to do all the platforms and it's terrible on all of them. Just choose the ones that are most relevant and a couple to start and just start figuring it out. There's some great tools. A lot of people are saying, "Well, I don't want Twitter because it's not working." Okay. But the thing about it, the people who are on Twitter right now are really passionate and they stay on it. They're a very, very, very passionate bunch. My favorite Twitter tool for growing a Twitter audience is called Jooicer, which is J. O. O. I. C. E. R. Have you seen it? It's awesome. It's like 30, 40 bucks and will grow your Twitter audience for you beautifully. So you know, find tools like that. And again, like we were saying with Canva, you can make beautiful social media posts in Canva since you now have to have more designed content. Use Canva for that.  Kathleen: Yeah, I love this and I will tell you right now as the head of marketing at a startup, I use Canva, I use helper a reporter out. I totally, totally agree with you on those suggestions. Those are great. Kate's advice for startup founders Kathleen: Well we are running low on time. So any last words of advice for startup founders out there who really want to take that fast path to growth? Kate: Yeah, I think the important thing is to try to not get overwhelmed. And so what I recommend doing is, do a list of 10 to 15 different things. You can try figure out a small test for that, that's feasible. Like, if it's an ad unit, put enough money so it's actually worth the test and go through and test them and concentrate on one thing, like one thing a week, step by step by step. If you try to do it all at one time, you get really overwhelmed and it ends up not diluting the quality of it. So, one foot in front of the other is what I always tell people. Kathleen: Yeah. That's good. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Now changing gears because I have two questions I always ask all of my guests. We're all about inbound marketing on this podcast. So when you think about inbound, is there a particular company or individual that you can point to that you think is really doing it well? Kate: The first thing that popped in my mind was not what you asked. It was a company that helps people do it well. I really like Unbounce for landing pages. I think you can get a very beautiful landing page up quickly. I would have to think on that. I think, sorry, I was not prepared for this one. Kathleen: That's okay. Unbounce is a good suggestion actually. I can just keep that. Kate: Okay. I'm a huge proponent of Unbounce. There are other cheaper tools, but I really like the quality of Unbounce. Kathleen: Yeah, they're a great company. Second question, the biggest pain point I hear from marketers is that they can't keep pace with all of the different ways that digital marketing is changing. So how do you personally stay up to date with all of it? Kate: Being an agency owner, I've spent a lot of time and resources going through MarTech tools and organizing them. If anybody wants these reports, just please email me. And that helped organize my brain a lot and help me understand if I was doing the right thing or not. So we've done reports where we analyze CRM tools. There's one on website development tools. We've got one on email marketing and one on marketing automation. What those reports did, because in my head I just couldn't keep it all straight, was say here are the solutions, here are all the features that they all have comparatively. And then here are the integrations they have. Because I think what's so hard about MarTech right now is it's not only like I like this product, so I've got 20 products I have to put together. And when you're going out to buy, it's, it's not a great way for marketers to have to spend time of like, which tool, and having to analyze this themselves. So one of my goals to help marketers is to say, here's some reports. Go through everything that you need to know and hopefully you can pick a tool or at least narrow it down to two or three that you should get a free trial on before you commit to it. So I think any website like that, save yourself time on evaluating tools. Find people who've done the research for you. I think that that is really overwhelming. Kathleen: That's so true. It is. It's a lot. There's so many MarTech tools now. How to connect with Kate Kathleen: All right, well we're just about out of time. So Kate, if somebody's listening and they want to learn more about you or traction hero or they want to reach out and ask a question, what's the best way for them to connect with you? Kate: Katewalling.com is my personal website and Tractionhero.com is for the agency. It's a very landing page type website. Right now we're kind of building, um, by doing the work first. You can always reach out to me on my email, which is kate[at]katewalling.com or Twitter, which my handle is @Katewalling. You know what to do next... Kathleen: All right, fantastic. If you're listening and you liked what you've heard or you learned something new, please head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcasts a five star review so we can get in front of some more folks just like you. And of course, if you know anybody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Kate. Stay healthy. Kate: Thank you so much for having me.

As we’ve seen with the impacts of COVID-19, it’s now become necessary for the spirits industry to adopt technology and delivery services to stay alive. Cory Rellas, the CEO of Drizly, was on the forefront of this years ago. This podcast dives into their business model and how they are helping stores build a digital infrastructure to sell their goods online and get it into the hands of consumers faster. We hit on all kinds of topics such as their competitors in the market, what shipping laws could mean for Drizly, and if there is an opportunity to extend this business model into cannabis. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Barrell Craft Spirits works with distilleries from all over the world to source and blend the best ingredients into America’s most curious cask strength whiskies. Learn more at BarrellBourbon.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about the power of packaging. What is Drizly? How did you come up with this idea? What's the timeline? What was the state of the industry when you got started? What were the challenges? Why did you go through New York early on? What is your big selling point to retail locations? Any pricing restrictions to prevent gouging? Talk about pricing transparency. How are you using the data you are acquiring? Are you sharing the data? Do you have a CRM? How are the products delivered to the consumer? How are you dealing with competition? Are you all interested in getting bought out? What's the end game? What happens if shipping laws change? What is your best selling bourbon? What are the top 5 selling spirit categories? What's your favorite bourbon? How do you work with brands? What needs to change to get more people buy alcohol online? Are you lobbying at all? Is there an opportunity with cannabis? What would the perfect alcohol market look like? What's the latest trend? 0:00 To be the best, you have to learn from the best. Louisville and the surrounding regions are home to many of the most storied companies and innovative startups in the distilled spirits industry. And there's no better place to learn the business of the distilled spirits industry than from a university located in its epicenter. The University of Louisville has partnered with industry experts to offer the distilled spirits business certificate, a six course program designed to accelerate your success in this booming industry. Oh, it's all online. get signed up to make your next career move at U of l.me slash bourbon pursuit. 0:36 I'd go with vodka. I'd actually go with bourbon, rum, tequila, although I think our tequila selection has been incredibly high end and what we're actually selling which is kind of interesting. And then I'll check for you here in a second on a fifth. I don't think I know the fifth off the top of my head. 0:54 You said it wrong. It goes bourbon bourbon, bourbon, bourbon bourbon 0:58 right brown, brown, brown brown. At 1:01 least that's what we want to hear. 1:03 I heard there the his mic cut out there when he said another word I don't. 1:21 What's going on everybody? It's Episode 248 of bourbon pursuit. I'm one of your hosts Kenny. We just got just a little bit of news to run through. And as you can guess most of it relates to COVID-19. Pennsylvania State run liquor stores are reopening, but only with online and shipped to home orders. Until further notice. Customers can purchase up to six bottles per transaction from a reduced catalog from thousand top selling wines and spirits from the website. All orders must be shipped to home or non store addresses, and only one order per address will be fulfilled per day. This is possibly in reaction to the losses now being seen by the government in an article Hosted by Trib live.com. For the two weeks of not operating, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board has lost an estimated $91 million in revenue, or around six and a half million dollars per day. quite staggering numbers. And the Virginia ABC has announced that for a limited period of time Virginia distilleries are authorized to ship their spirits to consumers and licensees in Virginia. Now, there's some legal mumbo jumbo about addendums to these distillery store agreements, but it's another big win for consumers and for these distilleries to help everyone get through this period, you can get more information on shipping, including a full list of all 45 Virginia distilleries on the Virginia ABC website. figures released by data analysts IWA ASR have found that for the week ending in March 22 of 2020, that total beverage alcohol sales grew by 40% in value and 33% volume compared to the same period in 2019. And this is to account for the stockpiling that we've seen during COVID-19 Spirits available in one liter one and a half and 1.75 formats have outpaced smaller variants, and the Ws are noted that the larger size formats and value brands tend to benefit from panic buying, as people look to stock their home with as much as possible in the light of a lockdown. According to IWC, or whiskey brands like wild turkey Crown Royal jack daniels bullet and Maker's Mark have been the ones that have seen this most increased purchasing. Alright, now on to something not about the Coronavirus Buffalo Trace distillery continues its exploration into oak tree varietals with the release of its old charter oak Tinker PIN code. This species of oak is native to the Midwest United States. These large Chica Pin Oak trees are often found in parks and larger States after the Chica pin barrels were filled with Buffalo Trace mash number one they were then aged for nine years before being bottled at 93 proof of a suggested retail price is going to be a $70 MSRP and like all other releases in this series, supplies will be limited. And the chicken folk bourbon will be available in limited quantities starting in April. Now today's episode is one that I'm personally really excited about. I'm like a broken record on here preaching how the spirits industry needs a digital revolution. As we've seen with the impacts of COVID-19, it's now become a necessity for this industry to even stay alive. And Cory rellis, the CEO of drizzly, he was on the forefront of this years ago. And this podcast dives into how he even thought of the idea into their business model and how they're how they're actually helping stores build a digital infrastructure to sell their goods online, and get it into the hands of consumers faster. We hit on all kinds of topics such as their competitors in the market, what shipping laws could actually mean for drizzly. And is there an opportunity to even extend this business model into cannabis. Now if you haven't noticed yet, we are doing lots of impromptu live streams that help give you some more entertainment during this time. We've done virtual happy hours with our patrons Our community, late night blind tastings and more. So make sure that you're subscribed to our YouTube channel to get the notifications and also, consider joining Patreon. We're doing zoom meetings to help connect our community. And we'd love to have you there. Check it out. patreon.com slash bourbon pursuit. Also, don't forget to catch Fred MiniK on his live streams every single day at one o'clock and nine o'clock pm eastern time. They've been highly entertaining and educational. enjoy today's episode. Stay safe. Stay inside. Here's Joe from barrel bourbon. And then you've got Fred minich with above the char. 5:36 Hey everyone, Joe here again. We work with distilleries from all over the world to source and blend the best ingredients into America's most curious cask strength whiskies. lift your spirits with barrel bourbon. 5:50 I'm Fred minich. And this is above the char this past week. I'm just telling you, my brain has been suffering. I've been working so hard on I've been doing two live streams a day on YouTube. I've been writing a lot for Forbes, I've been blogging as much as I possibly can. And I hit a wall I hit a wall where I had no ideas left me none in the tank. And I want to thank every single one of you who responded to my query on Twitter, where I simply asked Can you please give me some ideas for above the char? I got so many great ones. I'm going to start with this one from the whiskey stop. It's at the whiskey stop on Twitter. And he wants me to talk about the power of packaging. A unique shape of the bottle. Does it have a twist top a synthetic cork, maybe natural cork a great or unusual label? Did it influence your purchase was a good did it suck? Did the packaging work? its magic on you. What a brilliant question and what a time Hundred like truth is that packaging matters. Oh my God does packaging matter. And let me tell you if you overthink packaging, you will fail and that is where you fail. Most of all when it comes to packaging, what I have noticed is is that many people try to target women and they do it with like a like a fluffy pink or they've got some kind of like special dressing on there and they have like rainbow colors, and women rejected every single time. Another one is when someone tries to be overly fancy, they get like a crystal, a major crystal top, a really fancy label, and then they fill it with like two year old MGP whiskey 7:49 adds a big fail. 7:51 So the packaging always has to match what's inside the bottle and the packaging cannot overstate Something so the overselling is the case of a brand that went too far with trying to attract women. And the whiskey not matching would be the decanter or the bottle that had shit whiskey in it. And the bottle was just stunning. And I've always believed that to me, you can measure a bottle by what is fascinating it or the closure. I am such a fan of natural cork you can read my cover story and bourbon plus magazine to get an idea of like, what goes into making court but I am really connected to the earth and I love I love the sustainability aspect of cork. And when I hear that pop when I pull the bottle next to my ears and I go that is an undeniable sound that makes my mouth water and makes me want a sip. A screw top doesn't do that. Lot of the synthetic corks are like stuck in there like they don't make that same sound. And the glass tops that are starting to become more popular. I could never get those things off. I have to pry them off with the damn, you know, butter knife. To me it all starts with with a good cork on the top. Now people can argue all day long of the merits of cork, but I'm just here to tell you I know what I like. And I like hearing this sound every time I open a bottle. And that's this week's above the char. Hey, listen, I'm bound to continue to run out of ideas with this Coronavirus stuff going on. Because I'm not stopping. I am driving content every single day. So hit me up on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube and give me some ideas for above the char I'll select my favorite and read it in the next episode. Next week, cheers. 10:05 Welcome back to another episode of bourbon pursuit, the official podcast of bourbon, Kenny Ryan and Fred in our virtual hangout space. And today we are talking about a topic that we know far or should say, we know all too well, you know, when we talked about this on the roundtables, we talked about it, you know, with distributors, we talked about what is the future consumption and delivery of alcohol really going to look like for the the mass market and we look at, you know, coming from a tech industry myself, we try to figure out, like, how can we get, you know, our product into the hands of consumers faster than anyone else. And what we're gonna be talking about today is really talking to a company that's on the forefront of all this. And when we look at this, it's not only just being able to get in the hands of consumers, but you can get it in less than an hour sometimes. So I think it's gonna be a really cool conversation of how we really dive into this. So Fred, and Ryan I mean, you know, we've we've talked about shipping before, but have you all have y'all ever had a service delivered bottles to you yet? 11:08 No, not yet. But I'm super excited to learn about it. I'm fortunate I live like a half mile from a liquor store so we can get it pretty easy. But yeah, I mean, the liquor industry moves at a snail's pace. So you know, there's a lot of friction points and getting bottles delivered to your house and I've had plenty of bottles delivered to my house just not legally. But I would like to make it legal so yeah, I'm really excited to talk to them about this today. 11:36 Yeah, I've had I've had quite a bit sent to me I also you know, being being a personality on the spirits network, they regularly send me stuff and they you know, that's part of their, their whole thing is that you join and you get to be become a Club member, and they ship barrel pics and stuff to you. 11:56 And so let's go ahead introduce our guests today. So today, we Have Cory rellis Cory is the CEO of drizzly, you might have seen him or the app, you've seen probably their logo and a lot of liquor stores are the ones that deliver bottles from liquor stores to your doorstep. So Cory, welcome to the show. 12:15 Thanks for having me, guys. 12:16 So was that a decent elevator pitch? Or do you have a better one? That's usually us. 12:21 It's a common misconception. So I would actually like to give you my elevator pitch. 12:25 Please do please do. Yes. 12:27 Yeah. So So actually, drizzly was formed a lot with a lot of knowledge around the regulations that you guys have been discussing. I know we're going to talk about that further. So I'll put that in the back for a minute now, but the model is actually different than people think we don't do delivery. And really what drizzly prides itself on is digitizing the inventory of local liquor stores, so that a consumer can come online, shop across their stores and find a larger selection, comparison pricing and ultimately get that delivered to them. But the delivery is done by either the retailer themselves or Third parties, that door dashes Postmates shifts to the world. And so we're really a tech middleman empowering the three tiers, but not necessarily changing the status quo. 13:10 Cool. So it's kind of like a an Open Table kind of concept for liquor stores, maybe you're kind of looking at what's available and can then kind of pick and choose that way. 13:20 Yeah, that's not a bad comparison. And Ryan, you were saying you live next to a liquor store. And I think that's really drizzly, his opportunity is not necessarily to replace the liquor store, but to provide an experience you couldn't get by going to any one liquor store. And that goes again, back to selection, to transparency of pricing to the surface and multiple stores being able to get to you when and where you want it. 13:40 And so I kind of want to roll back the hands of time here and kind of learn more about you so kind of talk us through, you know, where did Where did spirits become or is this just like an idea you had and you said, like, Hey, this is fun. Like, this is a this is an opportunity that's, that's basically ripe for disruption. Like, what What got to the point of like you getting here and saying like, okay, cool, like this is gonna be a good venture to kind of go through. 14:07 Yeah, it's a it's a less sexy story than you might imagine. And it started with regulation. So going all the way back to my cousin Nick, Nick rellis, and then co founder, Justin Robinson. And it was born out of trying to figure out why alcohol was only 2% online, or even one and a half percent online. When you saw grocery, when you saw a restaurant, we saw electronics and clothing, all these other verticals are coming online at a rapid rate. And we started to think about why that is with alcohol. And regulation became the clear component of this whole piece. And so we started digging into the legal code. I mean, truthfully, looking not only at the repeal and the prohibition, but also state by state liquor codes and trying to understand how does this model need to work for alcohol? How can a tech platform both empower the industry but not be a part of the industry and still be an unlicensed entity within it? And then the third piece is, how do you carve your moat? How do you be more than deliberate because you know, when we start projecting the 10 years down the road, that's a commodity at the end of the day and so we need to be better than going to the liquor store and elevate the status or I'm sorry, elevate the physical liquor stores to do something that couldn't do in the physical world. 15:11 Alright, so I don't know if he really answered my question there because I really want to figure out more about you right like Matt 15:17 Boyd. All of those Kenny. 15:19 Bad we want to get to know a little about you, right? I mean, like, like, we're like so where'd you go to school? Like Where'd it Where'd this really kind of like, really spawn from? 15:27 sure my road was a little bit sideways. I grew up in Texas. And I would say that I'm a big bourbon fan for that reason grew up loving bourbon actually, but was a soccer player at Notre Dame spent five years there had a fifth year for soccer and wanted to play professionally after school. But a couple ACLs later, had to give up that dream and ultimately had done an internship after my first injury, kind of preparing just in case it didn't work out in the long run, and took a job out here in Boston at Bain Capital. They're credited affiliates, sanctity advisors. And that's when I started to get to know businesses a little bit better. I started to get to know regulated industries incredibly well, I was dealing with coal and steel and some pretty, pretty old industries at the end of the day. And then the three of us that I was mentioning, started just kicking around ideas. And so this was a big jump for me, I was in, you know, kind of the standard finance track at that point, thinking about what the next couple of years looked like, whether it be business school, or continuing doing what I was doing. And it felt like the right time to jump it felt like the right collection of folks to try something new with and a little bit of naivete got us to the final to the finish line and push us over the edge 16:40 to like your own little incubator, if you will. 16:43 We had a bunch of ideas. They were all terrible. So 16:47 we struck out on a few. This one became, I mean, really, the passion of the other two guys is what got me to believe and then the more we dug in, the more we really peel back the onion, the more we knew something was here, not just as a small thing. company but something that could really turn into something as a larger platform. 17:03 Give us a timeline behind this what was you know, when when did the light bulb light bulb go off? 17:10 Yeah, so 2012 the light bulb was starting to go off with the text of why can't you get alcohol delivered? And the response was you can you idiot. And so that started down the rabbit hole of when you get called out to some extent, what do you have to do? You have to take the next step and figure it out. And so that's when we started researching the liquor code. And it's funny how things work in Boston being a good microcosm of this project. One question you get and put in touch with the next guy who you can then ask the next question to and it starts to unfold unto itself. And it's not necessarily we saw some grand vision of what alcohol e commerce would look like and what drizzly has now become, but the next step was always apparent if you're willing to take the time. So 2012 was the idea. 2013 was the very first iteration and we've evolved since then. But bringing one liquor store online. Learning about consumers and what they're looking for what e commerce was. And then in the last three years, our models really accelerated. 18:07 So walk us through like the state of the industry, then when you guys are getting like what it were liquor stores doing as far as inventory or trying to do online sales, what was kind of the State of the Union when you guys got it started? 18:19 I wouldn't say it's too different now. We're moving it forward, but begrudgingly, I'd say for some of them. So what was fascinating about the current landscape delivery did happen, but it didn't happen in the paradigm in which we have now moved it towards which you could call liquor store. You didn't necessarily know it was on their shelves, but you could say, you know, I'm having 10 people over for a party, I'd like to place a $500 order split between a couple things, can you make some recommendations, so there wasn't transparency into what you could buy nor the price behind it. And you had to have big orders at the store is going to take the time, but delivery did happen to some extent. On the other side. Ecommerce within this space was just like not even on the radar for regulators or legislators. So you're talking about prohibition being repealed, that is still a lot of the framework and the intent behind the laws that are written. And so there was nothing to comment on e commerce at that point. And one of the first things we did I mean, this is the time of Uber, right? The cars are moving around you at the touch of a button, the world's changing because you have a phone in your pocket. And we're sitting here thinking, Okay, well, how does it need to look for alcohol? And unlike Uber, we couldn't just get into a city try to stoke up consumer demand, and then ask the regulations to be changed. That's just not the way this industry works. We had to go the other way. And so one of the first things we did was go to New York State, the Liquor Authority, they're the SLS. And we asked for a declaratory ruling relative to our model to basically say, not only we elite, not only are we legal, but we're three tier compliant, and we're doing things so aboveboard, that the SLA is willing to bless our model going forward and so that was actually the first moment where became not just a hobby, but very real and something that we thought we could then Take a run with. 20:01 So you you kind of said, All right, we need to sit down, look at the laws and figure out how we can sort of navigate these choppy waters. I would imagine when we've we've talked about all the time, anytime you try to put any kind of disruption into this marketplace that there is you're going to be hit hard with a lot of people that are lobbying against you. What were some of those like early conversations, you remember having people that are like this will never work like you're not going to get it to fly. 20:29 I have a hard time remembering ones that weren't like that, to be honest. So I can speak to the other side easier. Most of it was doubt that this is a very slow industry to change. And you have pretty significant entities that control pieces of the supply chain, and if they're not on board, you're not going to have success on a macro scale and other slices of it. That can work. You could do direct to consumer wine, you could do shipping, there's different pieces of it. But on a macro scale of trying to bring the physical footprint of alcohol online. We needed a few things to go right one was New York. And Funny enough, the the woman, Jackie flute, who blessed our model, as the general counsel for the New York State Liquor Authority is now on our team. And she was kind of the veteran in the space when she put her stamp of approval that meant a lot to the industry. The second one was the wholesalers, the wine and spirits, wholesalers of America and powerful group of people and in terms of their lobbying prowess in their space within the industry, and we got them on board as a three tier compliant model that can move forward the consumer experience in a way that they could get behind. So that was that was a big piece of it as well. 21:33 So you talked about being going above and beyond what the authorities there were, what were some of those things that kind of helps sell New Yorker where they were like gave you that that blessing? 21:44 Well, I think transparency is the first thing and not only transparency, communication, but transparency of the supply chain and what consumers purchasing what bottles from what retailer and if you can track all of that which obviously tech can do and can really enable that process. That is a leg up for many Anything that's happening in delivery today, connect. The second one was, we came with an offering for ID verification through delivery. That was again, not only transparent, but did it in such a way that they could have confidence that under age was not going to be a problem within this business model. And then I think the third part was just being very descriptive on how the flow of funds work. And then also what drizzly is and what just isn't, I think there's a line that needs to get drawn as to what is a retailer's job and competencies. And when you encroach on those too far, you start to erode the license that they have worked hard and in need to live up to, relative to what a software platform is doing on the other side. So it was more just a lot of learning and explaining who we are and how we do it. 22:45 So I know that the liquor laws are they're different everywhere. I mean, every state is different. You've got to navigate that everywhere you're trying to launch. And so when I think of New York, one of the things that I know of at least in New York, and who knows if at least There's plenty of stores that actually have websites in New York. And they can deliver within New York as well, like they can run through UPS, FedEx or whatever it is. So what was the idea of going through something like New York first, that might already have some sort of system set up like this versus something like Texas, right, which is a huge market, but has a lot more regulation versus something like DC, which is really like the Wild West? 23:26 Yeah, there's a few things to pick apart there. So we actually got off the ground in terms of our model in Boston. And then we went to New York to get the model blessed one because of their size and then to the regulatory credibility when they put their stamp on something. But what was unique about Massachusetts in one of those fortuitous things that happens. It is a an incredibly regulatory driven market for alcohol. So if you're compliant here, you've almost kind of fit the lowest common denominator for the rest of the states. And you can roll it out from there. So I think that was a big fortuitous bounce in our direction at the beginning. The second thing We learned from a consumer side of things, every state is so different, and how consumers buy alcohol. Because of the regulations in New York, as you're mentioning, you have a wine and spirits store and a beer store, you have a license cap so that you don't have chains. But you have a ton of independence, which is obviously very different than Texas or California, where you have a bevmo or some of these larger chains out there. So the consumer experience really needed to adapt on where you are, and who you're going to be working with on the retail side, the East Coast was set up pretty pretty darn effectively for us because we could work with independence, learn how to bring on a smaller shop make a real difference in their business. And then as we rolled out to larger cities and states, we were more ready. We were more ready to have conversations with some of the bigger retailers. 24:45 Yeah, I think that's one of the things that we should most most people that are in the retail market should really start looking at is how do you become a little bit more competitive in today's market and just being on the corner and relying on your neighbors to kind of keep you in business might not be able to thing that's gonna keep you floating for much longer. So when you go and you have these conversations, or at least in the very beginning, I'm sure you have a whole team that have these conversations now with liquor stores around the country, what's your what's your big selling point to them to say like, hey, like we can bring your inventory online? Do you integrate with like their existing POS? Or does it say like, Hey, you need to have a new POS system that that we we run and manage, like, how does all that work? 25:28 There's a lot to it. But you appeal to them first as a consumer, and you start to think about other industries and how they've come online. And where do you buy airline tickets? Where do you buy hotels? How do you buy or how do you shop? for clothes online aggregator model and starting to get them thinking about this is going to happen in the space. It's not a matter of if it's a matter of when and so you appeal to them on a consumer level to start. The next thing you're really dealing with is fear. You're dealing with fear of competition, you're dealing with fear of transparency of pricing, and that's how far back this industry goes. As you know, they still believe That people can't get their prices if they wanted to walk in, it gets a little irrational. But then you can speak to them around numbers now. And this is obviously changed over seven years. But you can talk to him about incremental consumers that they wouldn't have been able to serve otherwise. And we have data behind that. You can talk to him about how a marketplace actually elevates to the experience to the point where multiple stores are able to succeed at a level that if you were the only one doing delivery in this area, we wouldn't be able to get those consumers to not only come and check out the site, but also come back and shop from you in the future. And then the last thing is, is we need to be more than just the consumer marketplace. And so when you're talking about point of sale systems, we need to be to elevate and help them generate more profit from their in store business, that things there's things like the catalog and the accuracy of what's on their shelves and how they actually think about that there's data on consumer trends and what they want to put on their shelves at what price at what time. So there's a lot of things as a tech company that we have access to the can really elevate their entire business and it's a whole package that when you work with drizzly makes you a better retailer. 27:01 So you brought up up pricing. One thing that we've noticed a trend in liquor retailers is there's a lot of price gouging. Do you have any restrictions or anything like that with the retailers you work with that you set them within like a 27:18 close to the MSRP or anything like that? 27:21 And it's a good question. So in some states, the price in store is legally mandated to be the price online. And I could give it's a couple states, it's not the majority by any means. So that one takes care of itself. But our job is really to bring their in store experience online and the way they want to do it. Our approach to price gouging is not necessarily to give them mandates on what to price it or to keep it in certain things is to insert competition. It's to have a marketplace to keep them honest to the point where if you are going to try to price things 40 50% up because they're rare and Other people that have that same item, they're obviously not going to purchase yours. And so it really just gets back to an efficient marketplace idea and making sure that consumers are the arbiter of what's successful and not regulations or drizzly or someone else. 28:14 And so to kind of like tackle or shall I say, like, tack onto that one a little bit. When we think about pricing, we've actually had KL we've had a spirits on the show, because we kind of talked about like, what does it look like to be in an online first kind of market? Right? Like, like, that's gonna be the new consumer drive. That's the new demand. If If Amazon's next whatever's coming next, if it's drizzly next, whatever, it's going to be like that online marketplaces really where people are going to go for. And so the other thing about the pricing aspect is this is like when you put your prices online, you're creating this level transparency, because you know exactly like what somebody's charging for a 750 ml in early times versus what somebody else is charging. Does that ever like Upset any retailers? And they're like, Wait a second, like, how are they able to charge less than I can like, what's their? What's their distributor? charging them versus what they're charging me? Do you get caught any of those kind of situations? 29:12 There's definitely yes, I mean, transparency introduces more knowledge into the marketplace for sure. Are we introduced to that conversation? Not necessarily. But I'll tell you one of the biggest learnings from early days it drizzly from switching from a single store experience. I am shopping from the store across the street, who I've been brought online through drizzly to a marketplace where I'm shopping by brand first and then drizzle is telling you the best way to access that product, whether it be selection, you can only get it at one place, price delivery, all those different things. And so what's come out of that though, one store may price something as a margin builder. Another one actually may price price it as a loss leader, and the various strategies within those retailers really come to fruition when you break down those physical barriers and put all of those things on one page together, so it's not necessarily that, hey, I'm getting a worse deal from my distributor. But it starts to highlight what someone does in store online in a much, much more transparent way. And you compete a little differently online. And so it started to me an education of this is how I went in store helped me win online. And there's usually an avenue to do that. That's the bigger conversation more so than I'm getting gouged by my distributor. 30:24 Yeah, that was 30:25 actually going to be my question how, as a liquor store, do you compete online, it kind of reminds me of the car business, you know, like the car industry used to have to rely on a salesman and try to whittle them down and beat them down to get the you know, the most fair price but now everybody knows the price What can a store do to compete? You know, if if you guys are and what parameters are you kind of determining that makes a store better or worse for someone? 30:50 Sure. And it's one of those things when you when you come on a jersey you're going to see a bunch of information and that's really where where I think we can win in the long run. Is asymmetric access to information and that includes price. That includes delivery times, that includes your selection, whether it be longtail wines, or high end and rare Bourbons. And so highlighting that is a big piece of it. And then you start to think about other people that are starting to focus in this industry. I mean, grocery, for example, is starting to come online for alcohol in a bigger way, total wine is being very aggressive. They are feeling independence or feeling that distinctly in the cities that we're seeing that, but there are advantages to being an independent liquor store location, for example, you have access to consumers within 2030 or 40 minutes that a total one could never get to in that timeframe. Not necessarily selling private label. Private Label online is a little bit more difficult. And so what of your selection, do you want to highlight? What are your higher margin products? And how do we highlight those to the consumers you're willing to speak to, and then also providing them tools. Again, going back to this data conversation, there's not a whole lot informing what they put on their shelves except for that stuff. salesmen walking in drizzly can bring transparency to that as well. What are consumers in this area buying? What are the trends? How should you think about pricing it? And how do you build that into an overall larger strategy to have a successful business and in a rapidly changing environment, which we're seeing, depending on which city different rates, but it's happening. 32:17 So you brought up data, you bring in a datum, and we are in the age of big data where we are dominated by it. Tell talk, walk us through, like how you use that data? Do you sell it to the to the suppliers? Do you feed it into like a market research hub? How are you using the data you're acquiring at point of sale? 32:40 Almost all of the data we acquire, we are using to inform our own offering. And so it's simply commerce things like how do we construct a better flow to increase conversion your likelihood to hit checkout? How do we start moving shelves around in what is effectively a digital liquor store to be more personalized to you So that the next time you come back in, we're more apt to show you the right product at the right time at the right price. That's really what we use the data for. Going back to retailers and brands, we can aggregate it and anonymize it and give them larger trends that could be cut down by geography, but never anything that's highlighting a particular store or a particular consumer more. So just highlighting a different slice of the market. And one of the interesting things about the alcohol industry is you have your Nielsen's and your IR eyes and some of the bigger data providers who have a interesting offering within the alcohol space. But they're big gaps, the independent liquor store market where you don't have receipt data, or you don't have consistency of point of sale systems. Those are not places so New York has an entire market. Those are not places that people have great insight to and drizzly through its 350 retailers that we partner with in New York City can start to really build transparency into a market that is otherwise been only aggregated into depletion data. So Other things. So there's an aggregated view for the external partners. For us internally, it's how do we create a better ecommerce experience? 34:06 Because that thread can be 34:07 actually, you know, it's fascinating. 34:09 There's a lot to take in, right. 34:11 I used to cover retail, I used to be the tech writer for the National Retail Federation's magazine stores, and I felt myself going back to the old days. Listen to you talk there. And follow up on that data is that, you know, we don't really a lot of the a lot of the numbers that are that are out there that are public. They kind of like you're saying, like the Nielsen numbers. They're not really complete. So my question to you is like, why don't you guys release these numbers? Why don't you make them public? Since you probably do have the best database of sales numbers of anybody out there? 34:54 There are more craft distilleries popping up around the country now, more than ever before. So how do you find The best stories and the best flavors will rack house whiskey club is a whiskey of the Month Club and they're on a mission to uncover the best flavors and stories that craft distilleries across the US have to offer rack houses box ship out every two months to 39 states across the US and rack houses April box, they're featuring a distillery that makes us Seattle craft, Texas heritage and Scottish know how rack house whiskey club is shipping out to whiskies from two bar spirits located near downtown Seattle, including their straight bourbon, go to rack house whiskey club calm to check it out and try some for yourself. Use code pursuit for $25 off your first box. 35:42 My question to you is like, why don't you guys release these numbers? Why don't you make them public and you probably do have the best database of sales numbers of anybody out there. 35:53 You're hitting on a great thing. And we actually do believe in the democratization of our data just because we think it's going to make all of us Better, including the consumer experience. So we released something a long time ago called the data distillery. We are thinking about how to do this in a larger way, not only for trend data, but again, how do we create something that becomes a backbone for the industry so that we are sharing data? Not because I think some people think you by holding on to it, you're more valuable. Our view is by using it to make the industry more effective, the consumers will win, which is ultimately what we're all about. One, one quick anecdote. I mean, we see trends earlier, our average consumer is millennial, older millennial 30 to 34 years old, 5050, male, female, and these are folks who are trendsetters. These are social people. And so, Rosie a couple of years ago, I mean, seltzer took off about eight months online before it did on, you know, in the physical world. So it's just one of those things where we can really inform based on the trendsetters that purchase on our platform brands and how they should be thinking about the world and then a larger play as to what you're saying Fred around, using data to benefit the industry. 36:59 Fred, you Actually, you know, and you kind of cover my question, but I guess as a liquor store owner, do I have, you know, do I have the same access to that data? Is every single store within your system? Or is it store specific or regional specific? And like, from a CR is do you have a CRM base as well with drizzly for the retailer? 37:20 We do we do. So if you're a drizzly retailer, we have a tool that's actually just culturally retailer and that gives you access to all of your sales data, all of the customers that are purchasing from you. And then also an aggregated view on some of these consumer trends and thoughts around the inventory, you should be stocking. So that is absolutely part of being a partner with drizzly and a CRM side. We're obviously aggregating eyeballs on our site. We're aggregating consumers and want to speak to them in an intelligent way. A piece of what we're doing in 2020 is starting to take our technology and utilizing that to allow retailers to do this themselves. So you can imagine white labeled websites that Allow them to merchandise their own products more effectively and almost have control of their own website by utilizing drizzly assets. And you can start to see where that would go in terms of CRM capability, the ability to talk to their consumers in a more discreet way versus the aggregator marketplace that is drizzly. So there's a lot within that, but yes, I can see us more and more powering some of their ecommerce needs, not only to benefit us, but I think it's a necessity for the market to benefit consumers. 38:26 I also think it's a necessity to because of course it for me, it always comes back to tech. And, you know, you go and you look at some websites, and I mean, some of them are just they're just archaic, right? You know, a lot of liquor stores, these mom and pop shops that try to build a website, there's a flash banner on it, you know, whatever it is. And, you know, that's why, you know, at least not in this particular segment, but this is why a lot of people that are creating their own businesses, they look at things like Shopify because it makes their you know their system a lot easier. I mean, or is that like one of the big selling points that you have for just lead a lot of these retailers is like, let's Let's take you at least to the 2020. Now, 39:03 yeah, that's a great point. So it wasn't when we started, to be honest, we thought more about how to aggregate consumer demand in our marketplace. And so that's a little bit different. That's almost like the Amazon side of things of will collect the eyeballs, we'll build the technology. And we're going to utilize your physical shelf space. On the other side, the selling point there is just incremental consumers incremental profit, so that that works. On the other side, there's so much we can do to look like Shopify to be a platform, which is an entirely different business model, but one that we really think we can enable the hundred thousand independent retailers out there to serve customers, and I keep saying customers because despite everything else that goes on within our business, we talk a lot about internally, the reason for our existence, our purpose behind everything is to to be there for the moments that matter and the people who create them and yes, we sell alcohol and help people transact online. But we're there to actually provide a better consumer experience and allow them the time and the freedom and To find that right bottle at the right price, I mean, we all know how cool that can be. So, it all comes back to democratizing what we do to the benefit of the end consumer. 40:10 Well, first off, hats off for trying to make change, positive change in this world. That's always outdated. That's we know, it's we know, it's insanely difficult to actually do. But I think there's one aspect that you know, we kind of want to touch on as well because it is a it is a part of the drizzly system and no, it's not just you know, basically creating the catalog for for what the consumer sees, but there there is a component of actually how it is delivered to the end consumer. So kind of touched on a little bit about you know, you said the post mates the, that sort of model of like, how does it once once a transaction happens online, at what point is drizzly done with it, and it's either on the retailer, it's on whomever, to get that into the hands of the consumer. 40:57 So when someone hits check out What we have done is send that order through a gateway to the merchant of record, which is the retailer itself. So just one data point there. If you're shopping from ABC liquors, that is the merchant of record on your credit card drizzly is not within that flow of funds at any point. What we do do on the other side is build the technology so that if the retailer wants to do the delivery, they have the ability to do that it almost is like the Uber driver app to some extent for this space. And that's about 92% of our orders. So most of this is retailer delivery using our technology, and we are providing the customer support throughout the entire experience until the bottle has received at its location. The third parties are interesting just because delivery is such a inexpensive piece of this whole thing and they've added scale and efficiency in a way that you almost need multiple categories, multiple verticals to do and you can imagine a mom and pop getting frustrated on a seven 7pm Friday. Too many orders coming from drizzly too many people internally It would be nice to be able to have a courier of some sort. So that's what we built in. They're all tech based, we have full visibility into when it reaches the consumers hands inclusive of ID verification. So we're always a part of it. And at the same time, we're not the ones physically handing the bottle off. 42:16 So you're like a almost like a marketplace, right? As for getting those together? I mean, is I mean, is it really like you're popping out? And it's like saying, like, okay, like Uber Eats, post mates doordash, like, whoever is going to answer this, like, come and pick this thing up. 42:29 We don't put it out to bid per se but we do work with most of the partners you just said. But that was also an idea to be honest. And there's people who have created that, we found that having one option per store is a little bit better just because you get used to who they are and do things in a in a bit simpler way. 42:44 And so I guess a another question that I kind of want to actually go ahead and because it's I'm sure it's a the business side of this. So go ahead and answer it is 42:51 actually a business side. So you talked about how you kind of laid the framework for this whole really, for what is an is an new category that's kind of changing the space and now you got competition. You got all kinds of people coming on board, minibar and a few others. So how do you? How do you how do you deal with that? How do you, you you have to compete with him at individual retailers? Do you guys share retailers? How does that work with your competition? 43:21 Well, Fred, I mean, going back to 2013 when we Magneto got back in the stone age's. Exactly. I felt like I got some grit. Now, that was pretty good. In 2013, when we kind of announced the model, there were about 50 meters out there, minibar absolutely being one of them and have a lot of respect for what they've done. That phase isn't necessarily over at any time, but the big boys are now here. And so we're actually thinking about competition, not necessarily for just alcohol specific, but the logistics firms. I mean, Uber Eats has tried to do alcohol delivery. 10 different times instacart has prioritized alcohol and e commerce. Why Walmart and grocers are starting to think about how to do this in a bigger way, total wine. So you can imagine that there's, we almost need to find a way to succeed. And this is what we talked about a lot internally. In 567 years, every bottle on every shelf could be transacted online and sent to a consumer, whether it be delivery pickup or shipping. And in that world, how does your business model succeed? And that's really where it just has been built for. Not necessarily the me twos today that are, you know, predominantly just about delivery and convenience, within that 44:32 value proposition. At what point do you stop, you know, you're talking about some pretty big names and they're trying to get in the space? what point do you stop competing and just start? You can't beat them join them in that regard, is that the end goal? Seems like with most tech companies, they want to get absorbed or bought out, you know, at some point have an exit strategy. 44:51 Yeah, I mean, there's always there's always thoughts on the next strategy, but to be honest, we're being built for the long haul and alcohol is a bit a bit you I mean, there is a moat, from regulation that comes from embracing them, rather than trying to knock down these laws. Now, if tomorrow, the Three cheers went away, and it looked a lot more like selling electronics online, I might have a different tune as to about where we fit in the long run. But I do think we can stick out a place here for the long term. And a lot of that comes back to kind of this underpinning of how do you take regulation and code that into your technology? And then also, how do you take a mom and pop an entirely fragmented retail base, and then aggregate that in such a way using your catalog, your tech that we know where every bottle is in the country, its price and how to get it to a consumer, what you build on top of that within your product experience? Just kind of opens up the world to you and I just think that's something entirely differentiated and difficult to replicate. All that being said, not looking to sell by any means today, but it's obviously something you sit up a little straighter when Amazon gets into your space. 45:58 Yeah, I would imagine so. Yeah, I mean, I think I think Amazon might have been one of the big names that, you know, people are gonna recognize and you know, they're they're definitely trying to get into the space as well. And so, you know, another question that that kind of follows along with that is the when we start looking at, you know, Amazon, you start looking at instacart, and all these different kinds of companies that are trying to get into it. And if you kind of said something like, if the three tier system is goes down tomorrow, like what what would that really mean for you all? And if basically, this gets democratized to the point that it is just like, buying and you know, buying an electronic off Amazon like, What? What is that? Is that truly like gaming or a game over? I mean, are you really reliant on the three tier system to to make this happen? 46:47 At this point? No, but I think two things become obvious. Right now brands are about as far away that you can be from a consumer when you're a big CPG right. So they are unbelievable storytellers and brand builders from The awareness message side of things. But it's not like Procter and Gamble and Walmart, where you have co located offices and you're trying to figure out where to put things on shelves and incentive basis. And you know, you're buying shelf space and tap space and the rest. That doesn't happen well, at least not legally, at least today. And if that goes away, then the way brands work with retailers changes overnight. And drizzly has a value proposition there, but it does need to shift pretty significantly. The other side of the coin though, is we almost need to plan for the three tiers to go away because drizzly successful, when the product experience, the consumer experience is so good that they no longer need to go to the store. And that goes back to not just the selection and the availability and the transparency of price, but then packaging it in such a way that again, almost guided shopping or personalization to where you almost feel like you're missing out if you're not going to Jersey because you've learned so much about your product. There's a crazy stat we just learned that you know 40 45% of our consumers Unless you're using Drupal as a discovery tool, and not necessarily transacting on the platform, I think that's fascinating. I think that's something that we can really lean into to drive value for the consumers at the end of the day. And again, I think that's one of those unique things that regulation be damned, we can do better than anyone else. 48:16 And how does your game change if shipping laws are broken down? Now, let's say the three tier system still there, and it's great. However, now that you know, New York and shipped to California, Wisconsin, you can go to Florida, and liquor stores can now compete, you know, across state lines, like what is that? What does that do for your business? 48:37 I think it'd be a little bit of the Wild West to start, I think you're going to start to see the macro or the larger chains, assert price dominance because they can then start to think of their business on a national scale versus distributor, distributor and state by state. I think we could really take advantage of that world to be honest again, I keep beating on the same point but if we know what's in 40,000 stores We should be able to surface all of the items at the best price possible for you almost kind of this notion of tell us what you want, we'll figure out the best way for you to get it. And I think that's one in which we would really succeed. Shipping is not a huge piece of our business today. But that speaks to the use case, we're going after more so than the consumer demand inherent within shipping. So I think we could really take advantage of it. It would, it would require a little bit of adaptation and how we do things. 49:24 All right, I want to jump back into some data stuff. This is I think this is some fun. This will be fun for you. What is your best selling bourbon based on your data? 49:36 It's a little different than you might think. It's a brand that we've done a lot of work with, to try to figure out how it resonates with the millennial consumer but bullet bourbon was our largest brand in 2019. 49:48 Bigger than it's a 49:49 popular brand, 49:50 but it's you know, it's not it's not necessarily makers, or Jim are some of these other ones. So yeah, 49:55 still a top 10 bourbon from a sales perspective. Now what are The top five selling spirits so like from a categorical perspective 50:06 category spirits are the spirit themselves. 50:09 The so the know the category spirits so like tequila ROM bourbon like what what's your top five there? 50:16 I might get this wrong but we'll see here I'd go with vodka. I'd actually go with bourbon, rum, tequila, although I think our tequila selections been incredibly high end and what we're actually selling which is kind of interesting. And then I'll check for you here in a second on a fifth. I don't think I know the fifth off the top of my head. 50:37 You said it wrong. It's goes bourbon, bourbon, bourbon, bourbon, bourbon, 50:41 right. brown brown, brown brown. 50:44 At least that's what we want to hear. 50:45 Well, I didn't I heard there the his mic cut out there when he said another word I don't 50:53 bleep me out but it's funny I've I've sworn on this and I didn't hear any negative reaction. Now I say anything other than bourbon. And there we go. 51:00 Yeah you get around Fred that's that's the type of banter you're gonna get out of it and so you know as we kind of want to like ask a question because we really didn't ask it in the very top of this because you said you were a bourbon fan like what's what's what's kind of like your go to you got some favorites cuz I see behind you you got a Coors Light came behind there I figured figured we could I mean you're in the you're in the spirits business like let's let's get some bourbon on those shelves back there. 51:25 Oh don't worry we do have that this is just one of the rooms 51:29 well so I like to play nice because we work with a bunch of different brands in their businesses. I'm a big Booker's fan I love 100 proof Booker's over a glass device when I go home. I'd say that's more of a Friday night drink than anything else. But that's probably my go to if I'm if I'm opening something on the regular. 51:47 What do you mean by by working with brands? Like what is what does that mean to you? Well, 51:52 I think there's two things. The first would be on the data side. So these are folks who are looking to learn about consumer trends, figure out how their business brands are resonating with consumers. And it's less even about the online spend. It's taking those learnings and apply it to the offline. And again, massive media budgets and trying to make them even 1% more efficient by learning about the online consumer in depth. That's a big piece of it. The second piece is, shirtsleeves, the fastest growing company in the fastest growing channel for alcohol. So to that extent, they are trying to figure out how they're going to win online. Knowing that in five years 10 12% of all alcohol is going to be sold online. So drizzly can be almost a test and learn area for them. You can speak to consumers in a personalized way. You could sell advertising, we haven't done much of that to date. But all of these things are basically a lab for them to figure out how their brands can come online, and either keep or grow their market share versus the physical world. 52:49 So what was that you say? 10 to 12% is what it's going to be in the future. 52:53 Yeah, if you look at some of the larger data providers, they're projecting 13 $14 billion in 2023. Slightly less ambitious than that. But you're seeing this industry come online at 40 50% year over year, which is significant, we do think it's gonna be the fastest growing CPG over the next three to five years. 53:11 So what what do you all need to do to try to position yourselves to say like, we can grow this beyond 10 to 12%? Like how, how do we change the minds of the consumer to say, like, Oh, we can we can get this to 20 to 25%? Like, what do you think has to change in the culture to try and get people to start buying more online? 53:32 I think you're actually hitting at it pretty good there, which is awareness. Not many people know that you're allowed to buy alcohol online. And even if you do, there hasn't been a way to do so that should take away from going to the local liquor store. I mean, that's, that's a behavior that's worked for decades and decades. And so to break that behavior, you need to build something that is not one or two times more effective than going to the store but 10 X and really, that's where the product offering needs. to elevate the purchasing to where I don't need to leave my home, or if I did, I need to at least see what's online to really inform my experience in a way that I could never get on store. So it's a combination of awareness, and then a product offering that is just so superior going to the store, that they're going to order it online. Again, utilizing that store, though, 54:18 for sure. And I don't know, I mean, I guess there is there is also something about, you know, being a consumer going to the store, looking at it holding in your hand. And maybe, maybe that'll just become a thing of the past. Like, what do you what do you try to do to try to like counteract, like, some arguments like that? I mean, but then again, there's also like, Alright, well, you know, people used to love to have the feel of holding a newspaper in their hand, but nobody really does that a lot anymore, either. Can I still read the newspaper? I gotta be honest, physical core. You're killing me, man. Like you're young. You're young and hip, man. You shouldn't be reading a newspaper. 54:54 no and no one I know we call me hip, but that's all right. I wrote for newspapers for a long time. DDS. to bash on them, I mean, for God's sake, 55:03 there isn't. There's a key word in there that was it was wrong. 55:08 Yeah, but to your to your larger point, I don't want to necessarily be in a world where you can't feel a physical bottle where you can't go look at it, I want to lean into that. And so while the physical store might need to change, I hope it still exists. And I do think it should exist, but in a little bit different format. Instead of trying to have 5000 or 10,000 items on your shelves, and trying to have that inventory in that working capital and play that game. I'd love to see a world where you can almost have a retailer that has an e commerce DNA from day one. And then they have the experiential side of going in being able to taste products being an elevated experience knowing that on the back end, you can get any of those products delivered to you shipped to you or walk away with them from a warehouse around the corner. So they almost become showrooms informed by the DNA of e commerce versus having to compete in the current way of doing things today. 56:00 So So drizzly has been very active on the, you know, on the on the trade front. Where what do you do from a legislative perspective? Dr. You do you guys have a lobby firm that you're spending time in DC Do you do lobby in every state that you're in? Talk us through that particular process from the government perspective. 56:23 It's a core competency of ours. It's really what we were built on. So we have an internal team composed of General Counsel who has industry affairs experience, and then also the woman I mentioned Jackie fluke, who was on the New York State Liquor Authority, and they're really quarterbacking state by state, both almost legal protection side of things, and then an advocacy side for what we believe to be the best way to bring this industry online. We have lobbyists in every state that there is legislation moving we're in those rooms and our real thesis here is the engagement is important because I mean, we spend all day thinking about content tumors and the intersection of their needs and desires with a controlled and regulated substance. We want to be a part of that. And we think we can actually help doing so. So that actually speaks to something else we're doing, which is taking our platform into the cannabis world in the near future as well. 57:16 Oh, that's I think you hit on a pretty good topic there because we've we've actually covered on the podcast before what's the effect of cannabis and the, the, you know, this the distilled spirits market? What do you kind of see is the cannabis market kind of being an opportunity? 57:30 Well, I think it's a massive opportunity. And we started, you know, talking about market size. Alcohol is 130 billion dollars sold off premise each year 2% online. So you can do that math. We think cannabis is going to be a 30, maybe $35 billion legal market within five to seven years. But you're talking 40%, maybe even 50% online. It's a different consumer behavior, and there's no ingrained I know how to go to a store and there's no kind of behavior you need to break off, there's actually a stigma from going to a store. So all of that coming together, we think is a great opportunity. We do think it needs to be informed by alcohol legislation and the know how behind bringing alcohol online, it's just it needs to be treated with respect as a category. And that's one of the things we think we can really bring to that conversation. 58:22 Okay, so I have a request for your cannabis stuff, your delivery, you need to have guys on with backpacks on bicycles. Doing the deliveries through through town. 58:35 You mean like the movie half 58:36 but yeah, exactly. 58:40 Yeah, that's not gonna. 58:43 That wouldn't make it right. A legal team. 58:45 Yeah, no, you definitely wouldn't. But you could absolutely work beside me because I come up with these ideas all day long and get shot down. So it's good. I mean, it 58:54 is another thing that you know, even with the cannabis market, I mean, if you're, if you're always engrained in these legal discussions. Do you find it like fascinating that the legalization of cannabis and the l

Getting into corporate training and running workshops is for many of us a big goal. The problem is not many people are out there showing you how. In this episode Anthony Kirby breaks down how to get a foot in the door, how to price your self and create a no brainer decision for the company, the unknown risk-reversal technique that Anthony has used to add an extra 0 to his contracts. We also go deep into what actually makes an effective and engaging workshop particularly for those who have been forced to attend. I have never heard anyone share this insight into the behind the scenes of a successful corporate trainer. Connect with Anthony Kirby Website Email Victor Ahipene: Speaking Nation what’s happening? Welcome to another episode of the public speaking secrets podcast I’m Victor your host today. As always, and super excited to introduce you to one of my friends who is doing cool things in a multitude of different areas that I think will benefit a lot of you out there. He’s helping a lot of coaches out there in the online space, but he also helps a lot of businesses increase, the sales and their productivity, with workshops. And I know a lot of the listeners out there are looking to get into the corporate space or the workshop space, uh, or even to up the coaching abilities. Anthony Kirby: And I know that my friend Anthony Kirby has, uh, been there and done that and has got the runs on the board. So welcome to the show mate. Please should have. Yeah, thanks. It’s nice to have this opportunity to, um, interact with a human. Yeah. COBIT 19 environment we find ourselves in at the time of recording. Yeah. So if you’re listening to this at the moment, we’re both currently in covert studios, uh, which is a very socially distance device, zoom. And, uh, I know a lot of people have just figured out and found out about zoom, which is a pretty funny, all the people just go, Oh my God, there’s this thing called zoom. You should jump on it. It’s like, come on. And you know what, there’s a lesson straightaway. There’s a lesson than that for every person who wants to speak around the world is that like the market is not a city sophisticated as you potentially think it is. Victor Ahipene: So what we, what we think is like very basic is actually in fact not very basic to the people who need our message. And that’s the reason why she keeps turning up. Because, you know, we, we, we take it for granted what we learn and what we, what we teach. And, uh, yeah, this is the classic example of it right now with people moving into a digital format of life. Yes. Well that’s, yeah, 100%. Like, because I had three people messaged me last week asking if I could help them sisett up telehealth for their prey, the health healthcare practitioner based things because they didn’t know how to take payments. I said, just sit up Stripe. How do you sit up Stripe? Yeah, yeah. And use zoom, what soon? And it’s a, yeah. So definitely don’t under it, don’t underestimate your expertise because they were all super stoked that I could help them. And um, yeah, it was literally pretty easy for me. Uh, but on you, on what you do, you obviously do a little bit more than teach people how to use zoom and Stripe. Yes. Can we run out there like a little bit of a, you know, from your work site, workshop side of things, how did you kind of get into it and what do you do when you go into businesses? Anthony Kirby: All right. So I’m in the background of all of this is that, um, when I moved to Australia, which is what, 16, 17 years ago, something like that, I got into sales and I quickly discovered I could do really good job of teaching people how to sell. So I ended up doing a lot of sales training through my career, if you want to call it that. And then I decided about five and a half years ago now, um, that I could probably help a lot more people if I went out on my own. I left my kind of corporate job jumping out into the crazy world of entrepreneurship, um, with bright eyes and, uh, all the dreams and all, you know, all the, all the things that people promise you out there, all the guru’s promise and started to, to teach sales teams essentially and go into businesses and run workshops and speak at conferences and events around the world on the topic, basically upsells and all sort of self branding or marketing. Um, and what was really good about that was the exact thing that we opened the show with is the fact that I remember the first time I spoke, I was thinking shit, like these people are gonna know more than me. I was super nervous. I had a slide for everything I wanted to say. You know, it was super like rehearsed, very, very kind of sterile. And I realized that at the end of that that the very basic stuff that I taught at the very start of the day was the stuff I could have talked about for eight hours and if I would have still worked. So, um, the, the transition to workshops was almost, well actually to tell you the truth, it was bye. Bye. Absolutely need. So I started the business with this grand hope of working on a beach somewhere in Vanuatu, sipping on a pina colada all day. You know, I live in the dream but it didn’t work like that and I needed to make some money quick cause I had a six month old baby and I um, I called up 300 people and there’s a good lesson in this I want to share. Um, I call up 300 people in this specific industry and said, hi, I’m thinking of running this workshop to teach you, you know, IB and see about sales in this specific niche. Would you be interested in the ticket? And I, every time I, every time I would call someone, I would get the feedback from that call and I’d say, all right, I need to pivot my next call, a slot, you know, I need to make the offer slightly different. I learn all about risk reversal, all these like fundamentals of making a great offer. And that’s how I feel the first event. And we’ve got, I think 43 tickets we sold at $300 for that event. I remember that. So that was pretty pretty. Yeah. I mean you’d remember that. We’ve known each other since those days. Victor Ahipene: Now our, I literally remember we were jumping on a four way call, like an accountability call. Yay. And you’re like, Oh my God, I’ve got to by 300 calls today cause it’s do or die. Like I, my relationship’s on the rocks, my businesses on the rocks, my finances are on the rocks because I’ve not, because the business fundamentals weren’t there, but because of jumped out at without a pedal and my boat’s thinking I’ve got to quickly learn how to swim. And I literally remember that because I, I’ve referenced it to other people before, like, you know, jump out there and do that. So yeah, no, sorry, carry on. Anthony Kirby: It was massive. And I think, you know, the biggest lesson from that for everyone is, you know, it’s easy to fall in love with the concept of just a landing page, build a click funnels funnel. Like, you know, Russell Brunson will save the day. You’re one funnel away from magic life. You’ve got to do the work as well, right? Like, if you want to be out there and you want to be precedent in the market and you want people to respect you on a stage or in a room for a workshop, if that’s five people or 20 people or a thousand people, you know, you’ve to, you’ve got to make the calls, you’ve got to tell people the benefit. You’ve got to learn how to sell first. Mmm. You know, once you learn that, then you can fill any room. The, it’s easy after that and then you’ll get invited to other rooms and it just snowballs from there. Victor Ahipene: And so, yeah, I mean I talk about that the kind of one should equal one at least, you know, you speak one place and then it should open a door to another place and another place in that, in that space. Um, so you went from like the paid, you know, market to people to try and get into workshops. Um, I can’t remember back then. Did you have, was it an up sell from there or was it just get people in a room and just vomit some knowledge on them? Well, let me share the strategy because I think this is going to be really helpful for a lot of listeners. Um, the strategy was I knew that if I could get these individuals into the room that they had, so these were business, um, sales teams essentially, and I knew that if I could get them to go back to their respective businesses and do something different, it would open up the eyes of their management and the management would say, hang on a second. That’s probably because of Kirby’s event. Yeah. And so the plan was if I could get them in the room, teach them for the day, buy them some drinks at the end. So I built a heap of rapport and trust, which I did. Then what followed was I followed up their businesses, their bosses, and I said, Hey, you know, such and such kind of lump to my event two weeks ago. I just wanted to check, are you seeing any differences? And what happened was they were saying, absolutely yes. We actually have seen people go from the bottom of the sales leader board to the top of the sales leader board already. What is it that you do? What is it that you teach? And it was basically my way of getting to the door for corporate business, corporate training and coaching without having a knock on the door and be the guy saying, Hey, I’m the best corporate trainer in Australia. Yeah. And it worked. So then I got a whole raft of corporate clients and start to then work individually for those businesses. So rather than having an event where I was kind of pushing the ticket sales, they were just paying me a fee or a retainer, monthly retainer in most cases to come along and do quarterly workshops. Um, you know, fortnightly zoom calls twice monthly zoom calls and try and people in workshop style settings, either digitally or, or in a live environment. Victor Ahipene: And my big question from that is I think a lot of people can potentially, before we get into, I want to get into the fundamentals of running a workshop for people as well. But before we get into there, I think people can understand all right, like your household, there’s multiple ways to I guess, sell tickets. Like yeah, you can do your online marketing and you can pick up the phone and hustle, whatever. Um, when it comes to that area where you can’t pick up a Russell Brunson book or a podcast or listen to a Facebook person to sell tickets and you’re actually going to these corporate organizations. Is it the, how do you, I mean, I think you gave a bit of it away by following up with your bosses, which was a cool strategy. But moving forward, like for these other companies that you’ve gone on to work for, how did you find the decision maker and then how did you decide on a price? Because that’s the big like, Oh my God. Like am I undercharging myself? Am I overcharging myself and I’m going to lose it? Like, yeah, we’re, did you be able to, you know, figure out, um, their price, their price 0.2 Anthony Kirby: to two great questions right there. So in terms of, let’s start with the first bit, which is how do you get in the door with the, and I passed the gatekeeper to the desk of the person or to the phone of the person that you want to deal with. Honestly, the answer is not one that most people like, but it’s write a book. Yeah. Um, it doesn’t have to be. Now let’s just be clear here. It doesn’t have to be the 300 page bestselling, you know, thing. It could be like a 20 page guide that solves their big problems. So if you know that, let’s just use an example here, Victor. Let’s say it’s physiotherapists. Yup. Right. I know nothing about physios, but let’s just roll with that. Cause I know that you know that that world if I think about like a physio therapy business owner, their big problem is probably one getting skilled people, but from a sales and marketing perspective is getting people to show up for their appointments and making sure the lifetime value of the clients improved hundred percent so they don’t have to go out and get more, more clients. Right. So then I would just write like a small, a 10 page, 20 page document about, Hey, here’s the three things I would recommend you do in your business to to encourage client retention or to improve LTV, lifetime value, whatever it is that the problem is the main problem for your business owner. Then literally get it professionally printed. Don’t just send them a word document cause that looks rubbish like it costs nothing to go on and get it edited on Fiverr or Upwork. Get it made into a nice document. Send it to even if it’s office works or your similar office store that would print your office materials or even Ingram spark in Australia or Amazon direct Kindle direct publishing. If you’re in the U S or you can pay three bucks or four bucks a copy, get it printed professionally. Pop it in and this is the key. This is the real part of the strategy. Most people would just post it to the business. The problem with that is it’s going to land on a PA’s desk or receptionist and it’s going to go to the mail room. It’s going to get sorted. It’s going to end up just in this giant pile of junk. When you FedEx someone and you put it so that the signatory is the person that you want to speak to, so they have to sign for it. So they, they get this thing delivered to them and the FedEx guys at the front reception saying, no, John Smith has to sign this. This is a, this is for John Smith. It’s not for the receptionist. So then John Smith has to come and sign the thing. So now what does John Smith think? Wow, this must be important. I’ve had to sign for it. So now he goes back to his desk. He or she goes back to their respective desk. They sit down with their cup of coffee. They, they pull up in the FedEx envelope and they pull out your thing and then they start going, wow, that looks interesting. That’s exactly, that’s the exact problem I’ve got. Now you’ve got their interest. Now what happens is, this is the part that most people fail, is that people expect John Smith or Jane Smith to pick up the phone and say, Hey KB, hi Victor, I’d really like your guide. Thanks for sending it. I’d love to book you. That’s not how it works. The fortune is in the followup. So then you follow up a week later and you say you get through the, you know, Jane on the front desk or Bob on the front desk. He was going to be the gatekeeper and you say, Hey Jane, I know that I can’t speak to John Smith right now cause he’s very busy.But can I just ask one question? Can you just go and double check with him just for a second, uh, and just check whether he’s had a chance to read my guide or read my book. And then you get the followup from there. So generally what happens then is then they would go to John Smith and say, yep, John’s received it. He said, it’ll give you a call back. Then you want to email John. Then you want to follow up John on LinkedIn. You want to get like Hungary for the followup if they don’t follow up. This is, this is a method that I learned from Frank Kern and it’s the craziest thing ever. But for some bizarre reason it just works because it’s really memorable for me. So I was teaching sales training, so I would send like a bottle of champagne, like really nice French champagne. And so, Hey put this in your, in your fridge, you’re going to need it when your souls of records are broken. Like something like that. Right? Or you could send them a baseball bat with their name engraved on it and say, Hey, you’re going to need this cause we’re going to hit some home runs when you work with me. You know, like just something really out there where people are like, what the hell is this guy all about? Right. And that’s how you get past the gatekeeper. So that’s like kind of part one of that. Yep. So let’s say you’re now at the table, you’re in the boardroom, you’re talking to the board, you’re presenting to their people and sort of giving them a pitch. So the next part of that is how do you price the service? Most people go in there and they, they massively undervalue what it means for this business. So the why that I do it, the one that I recommend you do it is to break your sales and break your sales process in a two part first, popping in like more of a discovery phase and then not the intention be on clothes in the boardroom.The intent should be to sit there and say, Hey, as a professional, my job here today is to get to know what you need. Then I’m going to go and put something together and come back and present it to you again. they love that because it means that you’re listening to their needs, sells one-on-one. So the question I always like to ask is you know, well, I’ll give you the exact question. I work in 90 day blocks with businesses, so I work in a 90 day period and we do a 90 day growth plan. You might work differently, it might be six months, 12 months, one month, whatever. So I would ask the question, look for you to be absolutely just blown away by the results we get. What needs to happen in the next 90 days? What are the tangible outcomes you’re looking for as a business in the next 90 days? And they will tell you. So they’ll say, you know, we want more sales, more this, more that, better retention at a turnover, et cetera. You want to then get specific about how much, so if a business owner says to me, a Kirby get me $1 million in sales, million dollars extra sales in the next 90 days, then I would say, if I get you $1 million in extra sales, what is that worth to you? What do you think it’s worth for you as a business? Like net profits or, or end outcome? My experience tells me from doing this a few hundred times, now that is generally 10 times what you’re gonna create and turn over. So if you divided by 10 that should be your fee. Yeah. Okay. So if you’re gone in there and you’re saying $2 million of extra sales, you, you can easily charge $100,000 now, there’s a caveat to this though, because most people will be like, Holy shit KV. I couldn’t go in there and charge $100,000 no one, no one would take it. You’ve got to have a, well, this is my take anyway. You need to make, get a results guarantee. It can’t be all about you going and taking the money out of their pocket. This is what gets you the business. If you go in there and say, look, there’s no guarantee that we can get this. So here’s what I’m going to do. This is a, this is a 100% 100% relationship. I’ve got to put in as much as you do. I’ve got to come and deliver to your guys. I’ve got to come and speak. Well, I’ve got to come and make sure they implement. So here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to pay me $10,000 for the next 90 days. If I get you that result, I want you to pay me the balance. And that really works. Now, it might not be that you go in there at 100,000 it might be that you say, do you know what 30 grand a good number. Yeah, but so when I was doing this, I was generally ending up charging a client $86,000 per quarter. It was what I was charging and I’ve never had anyone push back and say, Kirby, that’s ridiculous. Like every client that I had that conversation with, and there’s more to that whole sales process. Of course I’m giving you the real, yeah, yeah. Kind of very basic aspect of this. But there was never a situation where I was sitting there and the client’s signed to me. Now it’s not worth $86,000 because I demonstrated the path that we were going to go on. I had a proven system, I had great results already, and I was able to go in there and say, Hey, if I don’t hit this result, I’ll work with your team until we do. Yeah. And yeah. Then there was, there was massive buy in from me too. And I mean, I understand as well as you do that if you get them $1 million increase in it next 90 days, it doesn’t stop for the business after that. It’s not like they’re just sitting there guy. Yeah. Even Victor Ahipene: if they made nothing from you, increasing them $1 million in sales over the 90 days, they’re going, awesome. Well that should mean we should get an extra 4 million or 8 million over the year or whatever it may be. Um, and I mean, you know, businesses that can afford that, you know, the corporate industry, they understand it. They’re like, okay, cool. We’ll run the setter cost neutral and then we’ll, um, we’ll come out. So that’s, that’s, that’s such awesome insight because I think that’s the biggest thing. And you know, you’ve, you’ve obviously fine tuned it and learned it from experience. And if you haven’t been necessarily at the decision making level within a corporation, it’s just this like guessing game that you go, Oh, how about $3,300 plus $150 a month? Um, and then that just, yeah, I know I spoken to a guy who, you know, he was just lucky when he put his first Tinder and to accompany that his friend was on the decision thing and said you need to make this 10 times the amount or they won’t even look at it. Anthony Kirby: Same word. Just 10 times the amount. Yeah. Cause it was a fortune 500 company. There’s this, there’s a level of, there’s a level of seriousness that comes at that level. Um, incidentally, another good point to make here as well. When you’re selling to these people, you’ve got to think how they think no one wants to like there’s a great sign that I got from one of my early mentors in the corporate world when I was working in corporate and he said to me, Kevin, you have to put more people between you and the gun. You can’t be always the person that takes the bullet. Now that’s a bit self serving. Of course it’s a bit cruel. But in a corporation that’s how they think. So I knew that’s how they thought. So I said, look, don’t take this out of your sales budget for my fee. Take it out of your marketing budget cause you’re going to spend it on advertising and what we’re going to do is improve your conversion so you’re not going to need to spend that money on ads. And then they were like, Oh that makes total sense. So you’ve got to know how they think as well. You’ve got to think about how they think get inside their head. Victor Ahipene: Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s really good. So because we’re obviously we’ve got, you know, time constraints and we’ll probably end up having another episode on this end, you know, the more your your life into the online space as well. But in regards to running an effective workshop, cause we’ve all been to a lot of them and you know what, I try and teach a lot of people, which I see is one of the most common mistakes with speakers. But obviously I think with, uh, with worked people running workshops as well is just trying to spew knowledge onto people and give them too much too soon. Um, is that as, yeah. How, how do you find that you overcome that? Like how when you’re going into these corporations, how do you find, Hey, this is the point that I need to be at to be able to go in and this is how much I need to be able to give them so they don’t leave and have 28 different things on the to do list and, and to make that effective? Anthony Kirby: Yeah, great question. So I’m going to give you the exact way to do this and and also the way that you pre-frame next steps as well. So it’s kind of like book ending a workshop, we’ll call this. So when you start, obviously you’re going to have a brief from whoever’s hired you to do the workshop. So there’s an overarching theme that they’re going to want it to run with, whether that’s, you know, service sales, whatever. Now when I start a workshop, and you can do this, whether there’s three people or 3000 people, if there was, if there’s less than 10, 15 people, I would go around the room at the start and this is a really good pre-frame and it’s, I’d say, Hey, look, what is the outcome that I could give you by the end of today that would make it worthwhile for you to be here? Because engagement is the biggest thing in a workshop, especially if they’re being paid to be there and they’re not paying to be there. Hmm. If they’d been forced to go essentially by their employer, um, then you know, most, you’re going to have half the room who are just like, this is just another workshop. I’m just going to type my notes and forget them and put them in the drawer. So use all of that language and pre-frame it and say, look, I know that most workshops you go to, you know, you’d get there and you’d be thinking, Oh, this is just going to be another workshop. I don’t want it to be like that for you today. So what I want to know is I’m going to write it on a, on a piece of pipe and put it up on the wall so we can look at it all day. What’s the outcome you want to lie? And then go around the room if it’s a small room and ask the question. So they’ll tell you what they need to to have you deliver that day if it’s the larger room. So obviously it’s not possible to go around one by one, get give him a piece of paper and write it on a piece of paper and say, Hey, there’s a piece of paper in front of you. I want you to write on that piece of paper. The one thing that I could give you today that would make this day worthwhile. Now, what you do during the day is you looking at these, that these sort of outcomes on the wall or on the whiteboard or if it’s a big bigger room, you’re looking at the outcomes on pieces of paper and you keep the money and or on your pie, on your presentation table and during the day you start to go to the people who’ve given to the answer they need and you say, Hey Victor, you mentioned you needed to know how to run a great workshop. Have I delivered on that yet today? And then Victor would go, yeah, actually you have Kirby. And I’d say, is there anything else I can cover for you on that before I cross it off the list? And what you’re doing is you’re closing the psychological loop in their brain. So they go, wow, that was good. I actually got the thing I came for. Now the backend of that is you get to the end of the workshop, you make sure you’ve covered off everything on the list. Anything that you haven’t covered off for time constraints or for whatever reason you say, Hey, can I set up a call with you one on one to go through this? Or can I set up a group call with the whole business to go through this? And then that gets you the foot in the door for the next step. But also what you then do is you want to say, um, I wanted to give me a piece of paper and I want you to write on that piece of paper on a scale of one to ten one being the worst conference, worst workshop you’ve ever been to, 10 being absolutely unbelievable metal of your needs. And you’d love to know more about how we could do things together so I can help you go further. Where would you score me? And if it’s less than a 10 I want to know what I could have to make it a 10 and that’s how I finished every workshop. And the answers you get from that are great because you get feedback and here’s the power of it. Someone who wards you eight or above, you call them and you say, Hey, thank you so much. I really appreciate that feedback. If it’s below that, you call them. You say, Hey, I noticed that I didn’t deliver for you. What did I miss? And, and you touched, what do you want to do is you want to make sure you leave everyone better than you find them, right? You want everyone in that place the leave sign. That was the best speaker I’ve seen and I’ve never heard of that person before, but they just nailed that workshop. And you’ll do that if you know what they want to achieve, not what you want to achieve. And I think I like just hearing that. I’m thinking, yeah, even if you’re running your own workshops, not for corporations, you start a free workshop or at a cheap workshop that’s a lead magnet and to know half day or a full day into something bigger and you get everyone to write that off right on the board. And you go, Hey, I have, we ticked us off. Have we ticked this up? Or this is actually what, you know, these other things. I know we haven’t ticked everything off, but here’s what we’re actually going to be doing in this next workshop because some of these, you know, these things are going to be in it, but we’re also going to be doing this as well. Um, and then yeah, people leave, they leave satisfied. Yeah. Yeah. They leave thinking, wow, that was worth my time. Not, not like, ah, you know, it didn’t really get anything from that cause the guy just spewed out all this crap that I didn’t need to know about. And I also realized that we got it like exactly that there’s the big salad because if you finish with a point that’s not for them, but they got everything they needed before lunch. It’s not until you say, Hey, did you get everything you needed or you say, I did. Yeah. Thank you very much. Yeah, exactly. And, and it’s, and it just works so well. I mean, I, I that’s something that I just, I came to that conclusion that that’s what I needed to do after I did a few workshops where it literally was me delivering on the message or the theme purely that that had been told to deliver on um, that way by switching it up, I knew that I was appealing to 100% of the room instead of 50% or 40% or 30% and that was a game changer in terms of the feedback. It was the game changer in terms of the testimonials and it meant that they were then going out into their respective markets, talking about the guy that no one’s ever heard of, which is, which is what you want because then you become her the name of the game with the other thing as well mate. Like you go through that whole day and you tick off 20 items on their list, they’re going to say like, this guy was able to answer everything we asked. I’ll be mean. He or she is the expert. It’s instant credibility. Like there’s no way they can, they can’t. One thing you can’t argue with, there’s three ways to, to teach the people. You can tell people how good you are, you’re gonna have other people tell you how good you are or you can go and show them how good you are. And the showing bit is that you can’t dispute the facts. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. And that’s, that’s what I yeah, I think is, is really, really interesting. And I, you know, I haven’t heard that before in the sense of, you know, be adding it to my toolkit as well. But the,being able for people to just know that they’re going to leave, you know, ideally with a 10 out of 10 and if they’re not, yeah. What is it to bring somebody up and get them from an eight to a teen and spend half an hour on the phone to them because what’s that going to do? Like you’re unsatisfied or you know, not 100% satisfied customers that you turn into a satisfied one are going to be your raving fans because yeah, they go back and again, that person was actually like, yeah, it wasn’t that they couldn’t answer my question. They just didn’t have time or fit into the fit, fit into all of that. Um, yeah, no, those are, those are amazing tips. And like I say, a lot of people don’t, you know, there’s, there’s no one really out there showing people how to get into this corporate space or being able to position themselves. And I know that’s a lot of what you do and what you’re helping coaches and people do with the, you know, cause part of it, which we haven’t even delved into is positioning yourself. I’ve got an episode further back where we talk about the other different ways that you can, uh, you can position yourself, but all of that kind of ties up. It’s not like you just ring up somebody and you’re like, Hey, let me come and pitch you. Yeah. You’ve still got to have that level that, what I always say to people is the event organizer or the decision maker within a business is taking a risk and it’s on them. If you come in and under deliver, it’s a reflection on them. If you come in and overdeliver, it’s a reflection on them. So they want the letter. And so the more things that you can do to diffuse that, uh, and so that, yeah, you’re like, Oh, okay, Oh, you’ve got a book or cool, you’ve spoken know all around the world or you’ve worked at companies bigger than us or whatever it may be. You’ve been in the media, I’ve seen you on TV, you’ve got a podcast. What are all of these, these kind of positioning markers. Yeah, they help you get in that door. But then all of this other stuff, you know, I haven’t met anybody who’s even shared what you’ve shared about this kind of behind closed doors on what happens in the corporate realm because yeah, I think, I think a lot of people were out there doing it as well. And um, yeah. Then there’s other people wanting to do it and they’re doing so many things wrong. Anthony Kirby: And let me leave you with one last tip because this is super important too. And I know, I’m like, I know I’m probably going over time, but it’s worth knowing this. If I want you to split your market into three, like whoever it is that you serve, whether it’s corporates, individuals, whatever, split into three the top of the market, let’s use technology companies. That’s a good example because everyone knows them. The top of the market, the top third of the market would be Google, Facebook, and all those kinds of companies. Then that’d be like there’d be an app, a low third, bottom third would be my spice for example. Right? Like no one uses anymore, but it’s still around kind of. It’s in the shadows and then you’ve got that middle third. Now the middle thirds, the powerful third because they want to be in the top third and they’ve been in the bottom third and they know it feels like to be there. So they’ve got the most hunger to change. You go after your market like that, you split it into three and you’re so right. Who are the third of the market who want change? Not the people who are already at the top because they’re the hardest to sell to and everyone’s chasing them. Go after the people who no one really knows or no one really cares about and go in and promise, promise and deliver on the expectations that you set for them and they will love you for life. They will pay anything you want to be paid. They will send you to places that you could never imagine. And that’s, that’s how you approach your market. It’s brilliant. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. Cause I mean it’s kind of even a few take it from the smaller side of things. It’s like, you know, do you go chasing after the solo preneur insurance broker or do you cha chase the guy with a company of 20 or do you chase ING? Well yeah, the company with a hundred or do you chase the company with 100,000 and you get the one with a hundred and you take them to a thousand staff and you’re still going to be there for a long for the ride if they, if you get down to a thousand so brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah. Brilliant points. Dab. Oh, there was one, one other question that I wanted to, to delve into your Trojan horse. A lot of other speakers, a lot of trainers that I speak to kind of have a Trojan horse in the sense that yes, you can go in there and run a workshop. What do you like? A lot of people might use their workshop as the Trojan horse to then be able to offer other services afterwards or package on with them. What are some of yours that you would suggest that are easy? Things that you can add on to or pitch after the fact? Anthony Kirby: The easiest thing to pitch is followup training. Yep. If you’re doing it like assuming that we’re taught in workshops, workshops are very much outcome-based generally, so let’s say the outcome is more revenue. You want to say to the owners of the business or the individuals, hi, look the workshops one day. The habits build over time, so let me come and give you the habits. Let me instill the habits, but more important than the habits. Just the accountability. You’re too busy running the business. Let me run your people that we could come in and be that voice. Let me be the white coat on the, on the Colgate toothpaste advert to use the uh, the example. Um, you know, cause in most cases the bosses told them everything that you’re going to teach them at the workshop, but they’re just not listening anymore cause they’ve heard it every week at the sales meeting. You going in there with the white coat on as the expert, you blow their mind and then you follow them up every week or every month, every two weeks for three months. And suddenly you’ve instilled the habit and you’ve instilled the accountability and you can’t file the result then. Victor Ahipene: Is that how you say the easiest thing to answer? That’s exactly how I do it. Is that how you package it into a 90 day rather than a two day yeah. Offering. Anthony Kirby: Yeah. And that’s where you get the value and also gives you continuity of work. It’s much easier to, and at the end of the 90 days they would see results too. So it’s easy conversation to say, Hey, do you want to keep going for another 90? With accountability coaching or accountability training?Hmm. And it’s super easy for them to say yes because you’re already doing it. Yeah. Victor Ahipene: And now you people getting results. That’s, that’s absolutely awesome. So I know I’ve known Kirby for for a while now and I know that, you know, all the knowledge is just shared is just kind of the tip of the iceberg and what he knows in the online realm and the online spaces probably even deeper than what you’ve just, you’ve just heard here and I know that you’ve just recently launched a mastermind, a, an online mastermind for people who, you know, may have found this valuable, they’re gonna and you know, if they’re wanting to either do more of the workshop space or you know, add another leg to their business or develop their online branding and things like that, they can, they can do that. Do you want to tell people completely about that and where they can go to find out a little bit more? Anthony Kirby: Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, let me say that the starting point for that in a circle I call it, which is like coaching and training with me. The starting point for that is an online program called the expert blueprint. Um, and that is actually free of charge. So you can go to the expert blueprint.com and get the whole online course for free. This, uh, 50 something lessons in there now, this Facebook ads training, webinar training, event training, positioning, training, um, social media content training. Like everything you need to take yourself from where you are now as an unknown quantity to someone who’s fully booked and has a calendar full of awesome clients is in that online course and that’s completely free. So you can grab that right now. Um, no need to talk to me about that. You don’t need to spend a cent. So people who go through that though, generally some of them would say, you know what, I want more support. And if you do, then the inner circle is probably the right, the right call. Um, and that’s just a, an annual membership to, uh, uh, online. Most of the wines, I suppose we’d call it, where we meet twice a week and talk about what’s going to be business and we keep you accountable and keep you on the right track and moving in the right direction with your sales funnels and your automation and everything that’s attached to sales. And Mark gets thrown in the mix there for a discussion every week. Well that’s awesome. Victor Ahipene: So I will link that plus some other links to find Kirby or over the interwebs at a public speaking blueprint. We’re all about blueprints here, um, dot com and where you can find that you can find the show notes, everything we’ve talked about. Cause I’m sure there’ll be some things that you want to go back if you’re on the move and John, a lot of those things down. So there’ll be in the show notes. Kirby always awesome catching up with you and chatting and it’s awesome that we can even record it and share it out to the world to offer a better value. Thanks mate. Really appreciate it. Yeah, no worries. Thanks for having me.

Atrium Health doctor Mark Vanderwel answers questions on the minds of many parents these days. We will be adding a transcription later today. Quick turn around on this episode! If you saw the original Facebook live, skip ahead 17 minutes - it dropped out after some audio issues but Stacey & Mark picked it back up again, off of FB. You can watch the full interview here Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! Sign up for our newsletter here ----- 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 by Dexcom take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with Dexcom.   Announcer  0:19 This is diabetes connections with Stacey Sims.   Stacey Simms  0:24 Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the show. So glad to have you here. I hope these episodes are helping. Today we are talking with a pediatric endocrinologist starting off by talking about Covid 19, of course, and things that people with diabetes specifically type one needs to keep in mind but then going down the line of listener questions things that my local Facebook group chimed in with things that the diabetes connections group chimed in with. Because if you're not seeing your endocrinologist for longer than expected, which is the case for a lot of us kids and adults, what should you You'll be doing and that's a lot of what we talked about what to do in between how to make sure that you are taking care of what you need to take care of some things you might not have thought about. And just a great chat with Dr. Mark Vanderwel, this was originally done as a Facebook Live Alright, that's only half the truth. This was originally done as a stream yard which is a an audio and video hosting system hosted Facebook Live, which crapped out halfway through and then mark and I jumped onto zoom and record it that way. So the whole video I kind of stitched it together. The whole video is up on YouTube, on diabetes connections there. It is also on our Facebook page. And here is the audio. That's what we're running is the audio of the initial Facebook Live and then everything that you didn't hear. So if you watch the Facebook Live already, the new stuff is about 17 minutes in from the beginning of the interview. If you want to skip ahead, I'm not coming back at the end of the interview. I do want to say, though, that I appreciate all of the messages I'm getting about, you know, putting out episodes. Look, we're all looking for things to do at our homes. We're all looking for good, reliable information. I am hoping to do more episodes like this more zoom Facebook stuff. So let me know what you'd like to hear. I've also been collecting audio from you from people in the audience. And I'm going to be releasing that episode and kind of figuring out how to use that great audio people just keep me posted on what's happening in their homes and what's on their minds. So I'm not really sticking to a schedule. And I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm sorry, if you were expecting every episode on Tuesday, and sometimes on Thursdays like we normally do, but I don't know about you. I've already lost all track of days of the week. So we're just gonna put out episodes when they're ready to go. And if you want to still listen on Tuesdays, that's awesome. If you want to let me know that that is or isn't working for you. That's great, too. I just think we all need to be here for each other in these wild times. Thank you so much. All right, so here is my talk with atrium health Dr. Mark Vanderwel, welcome to everybody who is watching. I'm so glad to have you with me for this little bit of an unusual circumstances bear with us. This is the first time I've done something like this. I am Stacey Simms, the host of diabetes connections and with me is Dr. Mark Vanderwel, a pediatric endocrinologist here in the Charlotte, North Carolina area with atrium Health. Dr. Vanderwel. Thanks for joining me,   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  3:26 Stacey. It's an honor as always,   Stacey Simms  3:29 well, we should say before we get going, we do have some disclaimers. But the very first thing in full disclosure that people need to know is that this is my son's endocrinologist and I've known Dr. V, as I've called him many times on the show and in my book for more than 13 years now. So we've never done an interview.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  3:48 Yeah. At least recorded interview for for diabetes connections. We did some back in your radio days. Oh, that's right.   Stacey Simms  3:56 Yeah, I thought you were implying that I like interviewed you when I All right.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  4:02 So it has been a long time since we've communicated it never on this platform.   Stacey Simms  4:05 Well, I really appreciate you jumping in because as you know, people have a lot of questions nervous times right now. So the The first thing we need to do is is do some disclaimers, obviously, while Dr. Vanderwel is our pediatric endocrinologist, he is not yours. So please, any comments questions that you may have addressed them to your own physician as well? Nothing I will put words in your mouth here, nothing that Dr. Vanderwel says today should be taken as your own personal medical advice. We're here to get general answers to general questions. And that's really about it. So I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit, I think. But as you listen and watch at home, just you know, let's use some common sense here.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  4:43 Yes, I'm not speaking for the pediatric endocrinology community in general. I'm speaking for myself and different physicians have different perspectives on how they take care of kids with diabetes. Different physicians will have different perspectives on Covid 19. And what I am saying is my perspective And it will not even apply universally to all of the patients I take care of because we know you are all different. Similarly, I am not a pediatric infectious disease specialist. I'm not I am not an epidemiologist, and I'm not a fortune teller. And I think we're all worried and we do not know what's going to happen in the future. And a lot of what we're talking about is just predictive, then we don't know.   Stacey Simms  5:21 All right, so good things to keep in mind. Also, this is first being broadcast live on Facebook. If for some reason as you're watching it, just bonks out or something crazy happens. We're recording the audio, this will be rebroadcast as a podcast, it may be broadcast in video in some other forms. If you have questions or comments. We're using technology called stream yard, and I can see your comments on Facebook, but we're not actually on Facebook. So there's a big delay, most likely, so bear with us. And I do have a lot of questions that I took in advance. So if we don't get to your question today, I promise it may not be with Dr. Vanderwel schedules permitting, but we are going to be addressing Senior questions going forward. And you know, we're just here to see what we can do. So we want to just jump right in. Sure. Let's go. All right. So my first question is really just about what you're hearing these days because I'm talking to you at home, you're not in the office offices is closed, but are you still getting close? Okay, so what are people asking?   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  6:16 Yeah, so, you know, I think the the primary things are, will we still have appointments? And the answer is we will eventually have virtual appointments. Although a lot of people will also need to be rescheduled, we don't only take care of kids with diabetes, and there are some conditions that we do need to see face to face. In general though, I think most of our kids with Type One Diabetes will be able to seen by a virtual visit, and we'll talk a little bit about that in just a minute. We do still have nurses answering phone calls in our office, I'm not sure what other offices are doing. So we have nurses answering phone calls. We have a physician that's on call 24 seven for hospital based medicine. And so we will we are creating a schedule. That's why our office is closed. We're working on developing virtual visits. And we've never done this before the platform that atrium uses was originally designed for perhaps five, six pediatricians to use to handle only general pediatric calls. And now this platform is being spread out to be used by pediatric specialists, as well as general pediatricians. And I think more than 100 physicians and, uh, and other providers are going to be on this platform. So we're still learning how to do it. And that's why we canceled appointments for a few weeks, but we will have virtual visits up and running hopefully, by next week, Tuesday,   Stacey Simms  7:34 because we're going to be in that soup, right? Yeah.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  7:38 Your name on my schedule when I was telling everyone that exactly.   Stacey Simms  7:43 Alright, well, I won't call your office and ask what you're doing with me. I will let them reach out to us. When you're talking about virtual and again, this is kind of specific to your office. I don't even know yet. Do we on the other side have to do anything yet or you'll read? Yeah, we'll watch. No,   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  7:58 we we Will for our type one diabetes patients will likely have a medical assistant call you first maybe on the day of the appointment maybe beforehand to review any changes in medications, any new allergies, the types of things they usually ask you while they were checking you back in. And then in preparation for the phone call with a physician, we are going to ask you to gather diabetes data for us whether it's a pump, download a CGM, download a meter download, and that'll be the main thing that we as physicians will review. So we'll tell you more. We'll try to talk through a little bit more about how to do that. Although hopefully you all know how to do that. The physician will also will hopefully again, this is all new. We'll have all that information online.   Stacey Simms  8:42 If you're watching, you kind of saw me roll my eyes there. Dr. Vanderwel knows this but it's a little embarrassing to admit, I never upload anything in advance. I tell them please don't be mad at me. I think the only time I ever logged into T Connect is to upgrade the pump. So   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  8:57 well you know, I think the thing is, we We'll be able to get that data without, without advanced uploading, I don't want to come that 100%. But I think if your data is there, we should be able to access it. But we're gonna learn that over the next three to five days.   Stacey Simms  9:12 That's what we're all be learning it, I am sure. Um, in terms of questions that people have in between these appointments, you know, one that came to mind this morning was, you know, if I, if I need refills, if I'm worried about supplies, are you here? I know most people just call their physician pharmacies are open, but are you hearing anything about issues, shortages, that sort of thing with supplies   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  9:35 whatsoever, and I hope we don't, um, you know, Covid 19 is going to affect people in every sector. And I hope we don't get to a stage where there's problems with pharmaceutical production at this point, there is no anticipated problem with production of insulin production of test strips production with any other diabetes related spies. And so No, I do not foresee that as a problem. I know there's the temptation to stockpile And that's one of the things that we've seen in the general public, obviously, with toilet paper, hand sanitizer, etc. And there's that desire Should I stockpile my insulin? Well, we can't commit insurance fraud. And so as physicians, I cannot write a prescription to your pharmacy saying suddenly that a child who used to use 20 units of insulin a day is all of a sudden requiring 200 units of insulin per day, so that your insurance will cover additional insulin, I can't do that. That's illegal. And so we will be honest with the pharmacies. I'm not sure how you can get extra insulin just in case that might be something better to work with your pharmacy in terms of what they will cover or what they will allow your insurance to cover. But I do not foresee a deficiency in any diabetes related supplies.   Stacey Simms  10:45 Let's jump in and talk about Covid 19 best that we can. One of the questions that seems to be coming up over and over again is you know, we've all seen in the early days of this at least, the charts that came in from China and Italy saying they're the comorbidities and diabetes Sure, can you do you know what that means? Because one of the questions was, is it all type two is it you know, work?   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  11:06 Right so earlier this morning I saw some data recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine related to the children 10 and under. And the only fatality in the Chinese data that was published was a 10 month old, who had had intussusception, which is basically when your intestines telescope on each other. And so the child was already previously ill because of that, and there were no other fatalities in that population under age 10. I do not have the data for other age groups stratified out but that was what I saw on the New England Journal of Medicine earlier today. When the word diabetes is used, obviously, that is a big word and often refers to both type one and type two diabetes. And so as far as I can tell from all the Chinese data, when it says diabetes is referring to the big group of both and everyone's worried at greater risk, because I have type one diabetes, or let's face it type two diabetes? And the answer is, we do not think that people with type one or type two diabetes are at any greater risk of contracting Covid 19 than the general population. So there's no increased risk of picking up this virus as far as we know. Now data changes every day. That's the caveat here. We are still learning but at this point, there's no reason to think that people with diabetes type one or two are more likely to get Covid 19. Just like any virus, whether it's the flu, whether it's the cold, being sick, when you have diabetes makes taking care of diabetes more difficult, and we see that frequently during flu season, that when people are feeling sick, and they may not be eating or drinking quite as well, they have the predisposition to go into diabetic ketoacidosis. And so my answer to how do people with type one diabetes are people who have children who have type one diabetes, better take care of their children, either if They have been exposed to the virus or if they are already showing symptoms of a viral infection. And the answer is us you're sick. And by Sick Day protocol, I mean check for ketones. Even if your child's blood sugar is 124, you can still get ketones if they are not eating or drinking very well. So remember, ketones are what happened, or what happens when your muscles become desperate for energy. And usually with people with diabetes that happens when you don't have enough insulin in your system to help your body take the sugar out of the bloodstream and get it into the muscle cell to be used for energy. But sometimes ketones can happen if you're just not eating or drinking very well. And so ketones can happen even with a blood sugar 124 if your child has been sick, or if she is vomiting or if he is not eating very well because he feels sick. ketones also can be happening more often in the presence of fever. So although as far as we know right now, nausea and vomiting are not necessarily symptoms of Covid 19 like they are the flu. For example, fever is When you develop fever, that can also cause greater metabolic need, your muscles become more desperate for energy that can lead to the production of ketones and cause an increased risk of diabetic ketoacidosis. So my summary is related to kovat, 19 and diabetes, your child is not at greater risk, their immune system should still work just fine to fight off the virus However, they are at greater risk for developing diabetic ketoacidosis in the context of a viral illness.   Stacey Simms  14:29 A couple of follow up questions on that with keep checking for ketones. Do you recommend a keto blood meter? Are you comfortable with sticks and easily?   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  14:40 Yeah, I mean, most people check urine for ketones a blood ketone meter can give you more up to date information, for example, that tells you what's in your blood sugar level. That's what's in your blood right now. Whereas your urine is often saying, well, we made this urine an hour ago and it's been sitting in the bladder for an hour so it's not as up to date as before. glucometer as a blood ketone meter is, but still I think you can get the information you need from, from urine, ketosis, I don't feel you have to rush out and get a blood ketone checker just because of our current situation. I mean,   Stacey Simms  15:13 I'll be honest with you, and I don't know if this is true confessions time, we've never we've never purchased a blood ketones. This was the time I thought maybe, you know, the back of my head was like, should I get on Amazon? And then I got on Amazon, and there were so many and I thought, oh my god, I'm gonna buy a terrible one. So, um, stick with what we know maybe for me?   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  15:31 Yeah, I mean, there are many other things to worry about. And if you felt comfortable checking your child's urine for ketones, there's no need to suddenly change to use a blood glucose blood ketone meter.   Stacey Simms  15:42 Well, he's 15. So maybe,   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  15:43   Stacey Simms  15:46 I'm sorry, this if you're just joining us, we did have a bunch of disclaimers that this is not medical advice you should be taking personally, but this is my son's pediatric endocrinologist. So I might sneak in some personal questions. We'll see. But the follow up question. fever. And then I'm going to ask you that question about repro fantasy. Before I even get to that one, do you recommend? I've heard that sometimes it's better to let the fever go, you know, not to 104 but to 101, things like that.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  16:17 That is a great question Stacy and I am no longer a general I should say this. I am board certified in general pediatrics, but I have not practiced general pediatrics for 15 years. However, that all being said, fevers makes you uncomfortable. When your temperature is high, you don't feel good, but many people are excessively afraid of fever as something that can hurt you, either in the short term or the long term and in general fever just makes you uncomfortable. So when we're sick, and we have a fever, we often for other illnesses have taken an antibiotic whether it's acetaminophen, whether it's ibuprofen, and what some, some French suggested Scientists have suggested is that ibuprofen and other anti inflammatories may blunt your immune response as of right now that information what's the exact word I had it pulled up is still up for debate. It is not necessarily something that is. That is a stocking answer that we say you must not use ibuprofen in the case of a fever related to Covid 19 unproven was the word I was looking for unproven so let's let's get the elephant out of the bag. What is killing people with Covid 19 is not fever. What is killing people with Covid 19 is respiratory distress is the inability to get breath in and children with diabetes are at no greater risk for developing that than children who don't have diabetes when it comes terms in terms of managing fever. Yes, ibuprofen is a anti inflammatory, ibuprofen at this point. We don't know if it's safe or not. My recommendation, though, is is to say, you know, we want to make sure you're drinking. We want to make sure you can keep fluids down. And if you are so uncomfortable that you can't drink or keep fluids down because of the high fever, then yes, we probably should treat the fever and at first maybe you treat with IV or with acetaminophen. But if all you have is ibuprofen, and you're you're miserable, at this point, it's still unproven that ibuprofen will make Covid 19 worse or prevent you to impair your ability to fight it off.   Stacey Simms  18:27 Well, and will continue to follow that obviously,   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  18:29 just new information.   Stacey Simms  18:31 It's unproven, but I mean, I can't lie. I still you know, I take ibuprofen here and there I immediately was like, No, because it's it's scary.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  18:39 Sure. Yeah.   Stacey Simms  18:41 I went and checked everything in the house. How much acetaminophen do we have? What What else? Oh, because acetaminophen isn't so many cold medicines, sir. Let me ask you that people with type one and type two people with diabetes. Let's just say that who use CGM know that with Tylenol acetaminophen come warnings with death. calm. Now my understanding is Dexcom je six you can take 1000 milligrams of Tylenol safely by safely means it's not going to burn out your sensor you can is nothing to do with them anything beyond the sensor we're talking about here is that what you were understanding?   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  19:15 My understanding and just for clarification even in previous versions of Dexcom if you're using g five if you're using g four acetaminophen does not prevent it from working. It just may mean the readings it gives you are not as accurate as they might be without acetaminophen in your system. But that's also my understanding for the for the Dexcom g six,   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  19:35 just think or stick. Agreed?   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  19:37 Yeah, if you feel your ducks comm isn't accurate whether you have acetaminophen on board or whether you don't have acetaminophen on board, poke your finger.   Stacey Simms  19:46 Right? Which means that a lot of people need to make sure that not only do we have a meter and test strips, but that we have the batteries or that our stuff is plugged in because um I know A lot of us are very reliant on CGM. Let's just put it that way. And I'm looking at my phone, not to be rude, but to look at the next few questions. So as you're watching,   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  20:10 I know you go Okay, fair enough.   Stacey Simms  20:15 That was more for these guys. But seriously, um, I'm curious too, with, with not knowing when many of us will see our children's, endo next, or if we're adults are watching. Are there things that we should be doing? To check in between? I mean, I know that I'll give you an example. You always check penny for you know, scar tissue.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  20:40 Right? Like lipohypertrophy. Exactly. Okay,   Stacey Simms  20:42 so go for it. Tell us what we do. Yeah,   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  20:43 so, so lipohypertrophy is when you will put your infusion side in the same place too often, or you give yourself insulin injections in the same place too often. And the downside of that is not only does it look funny, but it can prevent the insulin that you give yourself from getting into The bloodstream, and then it doesn't get from the bloodstream to the eventual target tissues of liver and muscle. So if you are thinking you're giving yourself a bolus, but you're giving it giving it into an area of life or hypertrophy, then perhaps the insulin isn't doing what it needs to do. And that can obviously be dangerous and increase your risk of decay. So, yes, I do think that parents should be checking your child for life or hypertrophy in the same way that their endocrinologist probably does regularly. And the thing that I would probably say is, the easiest way to do is just make sure it doesn't feel like a tricep, you know, flex your tricep right here. And you can feel a little bit of muscle tissue right there. And light by hypertrophy feels a lot like that. It feels kind of clumpy. It doesn't hurt the child, but it feels it like oh, it seems like there's a big clump of subcutaneous tissue here. You can even see like oh hypertrophy a lot of times and I might wind up doing that when I'm doing virtual visits is just have the kid in the room and say, Show me where you Put your palm but just look to make sure it's not looking clumpy now, I'm not going to do anything. Like make them show me their family or anything like that. But you know, their arms, their belly, that sort of stuff. Yeah, I might do that at the opposite.   Stacey Simms  22:13 That makes a lot of sense, though. You know. And another thing I was looking at my list of questions when we were talking about supplies, one of the interesting things is people seem to be posting quite a bit about not being able to get those little alcohol wipes. Yeah, we haven't used those in a very   religiously for years. Sure, sure. Is that something people need to be concerned about? Should I be getting out the rubbing alcohol and checking to make sure as a pediatric   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  22:36 endocrinologist I should say the standard line Yes, the proper protocol for either giving an insulin injection or putting a new infusion site in or putting a new Dexcom in or poking a finger is to wipe that area with alcohol first. That being said, You are probably not the only family. I take care of Stacy where your child does not use rubbing out Color an alcohol swab every time. So yes, we want clean skin. We know that giving an injection or anything that punctures the skin. without alcohol, there is a slightly increased risk of getting an infected site. There's bacteria everywhere. Obviously there are viruses everywhere. But when we're thinking about using alcohol swabs, we're thinking about killing the bacteria on the skin or removing the bacteria from the skin so that you can give a cleaner injection, or a cleaner infusion site or a cleaning Dexcom or cleaner Dexcom site etc. So if you can't get alcohol swabs, you still need to give your child insulin and you still need to figure out what her blood sugar is. So all in all, what's better to give a shot with alcohol to give a shot without alcohol swabs or to give no shot at all. They go in that order best is with second best is without third best is no insulin at all in that's not best. That's bad news. So   Stacey Simms  24:00 So, you know, another thing, that I have a whole bunch of questions here that I'm trying to get to the right order to go in,   when, when we're talking about these in between visits for a long time, and again, I know that you may be limited as what you can say, because we are talking in official capacity. So some of this is on, you know, I don't say on the record off the record, but you'll understand. So there are a lot of people who are very comfortable adjusting pump settings. Sure. There are a lot of people who aren't, you know, what's your advice for a family? And this was a question that came up in our group. I'll say, Michelle asked this, how do you advise or empower, newer diagnose parents on taking pump settings into their own hands? You know, are there ways to tell when something is a basal issue or a QRP? Sure.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  24:46 Yeah, so first of all, I'm speaking for myself, I'm not speaking for every pediatric endocrinologist out there. I feel comfortable with my patients adjusting insulin settings without my permission, you do not need my permission to adjust your pump settings or your insulin dose. Is, however other pediatric endocrinologist may feel differently. I'm not speaking for all of us. In general, if your basal rate needs adjustment, that means that your child has been going a long time without eating. And her blood sugar either goes up, or her blood sugar goes down in the absence of all other factors. Best time is overnight. So if your kids waking up with a high blood sugar in the morning or higher than it was when he went to bed, that probably means he needs more basal. If he's waking up with a lower blood sugar than it was when he went to bed in the absence of the correction dose at nighttime, then chances are he needs less basal insulin. And kind of the same thing goes for carb coverage, if you notice every time after a meal, and I'm not talking about just that postprandial spike on a Dexcom because that is related not to the insulin quantity but to the timing of the insulin absorption. But let's say two hours, three hours, three and a half hours after every meal. If your kids blood sugar is going up that means That she needs a stronger carbohydrate factor. And remember, Stacy, I know you've written about this in your book, the factor is the denominator, right. So of insulin to carb ratio of one to 10 is stronger than insulin to carb ratio of one to 15. It's the denominator of the fraction. Similarly, for the instant correction factor, if you're giving a dose of insulin through the pump, or through the sliding scale that you've written down, and your child's blood sugar doesn't come far enough, universally, don't make adjustments based on just one thing, let her wait for a pattern to develop. But if you're noticing that you're that your child's blood sugar never comes down far enough after you give them a correction dose. That means let's make the correction factor stronger. And by that I mean maybe change it from 60 to 50, or from 50 to 40 or from 40 to 35, etc. Vice versa, if you are scared to to give a correction dose because your child's blood sugar because it doesn't come in or comes down too far after for extra dose that make it a little weaker. And by doing that I've seen baby move it from 50 to 60 From 60 to 75, or 75 to 90, etc.   Stacey Simms  27:04 So if you're watching this, and I covered my face and kind of made a joke, the reason is because in the book, I do talk about this, but I have definitely made the mistake of thinking that a smaller number meant less insulin.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  27:18 So it is confusing. It is it, just think about it in terms of the denominator of the fraction, a half a pizza is bigger than a quarter of a pizza, even though two is smaller than four.   Stacey Simms  27:30 You know, and that brings, I know this, this interview is getting a little bit away from Covid 19. But we've got plenty of time to talk about that. The just a follow up on the calling your physician and you know, there are a lot of wonderful presenters like yourself, who will take a call every day for a month from a nervous mom of a newly diagnosed kid. But there are a lot of parents who worry that they're bothering the doctor for things like that. Obviously, it never bothered me. But all kidding aside, can you assure people that if they're calling for instance adjustments that   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  28:00 it's okay. Yeah, it is absolutely. Okay. Like I said, I want you to feel empowered to do that on your own. But if you need help, we are there to help. And my office still has CDs answering the phone during daytime hours, you can take blood sugars and help make adjustments. The physician on call over the night or weekend can also do that, although it's probably easier to do that during office hours while we have CDs answering the phone because they can pull up the child's chart whereas if you call me on a Saturday afternoon, I'm not going to have your child's chart at my fingertips to make those adjustments. So yes, but please don't feel you are on your own. And please don't feel you are bothering us. Yes, when we take call. We also are seeing patients in the hospital and we are usually seeing patients in the office although now we may be doing more virtual visits. We are doing other things. It's not like all we do is just feel phone calls. We are doing other things and so we appreciate that one. If it's not an emergency, if it can wait until morning. That'd be great to wait until more But there are emergencies. And we also understand that when people have a child with diabetes, they worry at three o'clock in the morning, and if they're worried enough, please call us. Yes, that's what we're there for. But remember, we also are not general pediatricians. And so when it comes to Covid 19, if you are worried that potentially your child may have been 19, that is a better question for your primary care provider rather than us. We are not your general pediatricians. However, if you're feeling like your child was getting sick, and you're having trouble managing their blood sugar's because they're sick. That's a question for us.   Stacey Simms  29:32 Well, and that was what I was just going to ask if someone says, Oh my gosh, I think my child has Covid 19 and they have type one diabetes, what would you advise them to do?   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  29:43 I think we're still learning more and more, you know, testing is not really readily available and everything that I've heard about testing to this point, it's been difficult to get a test now hopefully, that'll change soon. Um, and However, our primary care providers are at the frontline of giving of getting people coded testing. figuring out who needs to be tested? So I would defer that question to your primary care office because they will have the most up to date answers about whether you should simply, well, we should all be quarantined ourselves, right, we should all be practicing social isolation, but especially if you have any suspicion that you or your child has Covid 19 you need to stay in your house. And you do not need to expose any other people to this. So in that situation, though, whether do you bring your kid for a Covid 19 test? Or do you just try to isolate them and pray that they get better and again, they should I mean, kids with type one diabetes are not at greater risk for developing Covid 19 or having the respiratory complications, it just makes them more likely to get ketones. So anyway, um, if your kids healthy enough to just stay at home and continue that quarantine. Right now, that's probably what we're recommending, although things may change anytime,   Stacey Simms  30:57 and I guess you've answered this, but I'm going to ask them Again, just in a different way, to be perfectly clear the evidence as we're speaking right now, would say that if a child comes down with Covid 19 has type one diabetes, there is nothing different   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  31:11 to ground at home. Just Just differently from a diabetes management perspective perspective, make sure they're hydrated check for ketones if they're actually acting sick, even if their blood sugar seems fine. Um, follow your sick day protocol. But yes, nothing different compared to your other children who might not have type one diabetes.   Stacey Simms  31:32 Um, something else I wanted to ask. Gosh, I should have closed the blinds. Whoo. It's getting hot in here. One of the things I meant to ask when you talked about the time in between visits because I had a lot of questions on this in our Facebook group. People are saying like me, Benny's appointment was supposed to be in two weeks, we'll do a virtual visit, but I assume we're not going to get that a one. See that? We usually get quarterly.   Do you? Look we have a CGM so I can see what it probably is. But do you ever recommend a homemade one T tests.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  32:01 Okay, you and I, about a one says yes, yes. So again, I'm not speaking for every pediatric endocrinologist out there, but people definitely overrate the importance of A1C, and so many people come into my office on pins and needles because they're so nervous about what that number is going to be in. As we've said before, you've heard me say it. And I think that's one of the reasons you and I get along so well is because we have a similar perspective, and everyone has different perspectives. But my perspective is, the ANC is just a number. And it's right now the best number we can get in a six minute turnaround test, tell us to summarize blood sugars, but it's just that it's just a number. And as we have more CGM data available, I think we're going to learn that time and range, maybe an even better predictor of avoidance of long term complications, because that's what we're talking about, right? We're talking about not necessarily trying to get your kids A1C to be less than x. We We are talking about trying to help your child be as healthy as she can be when she is 85 or 90 years old, right? And so it's not about the agency, there are plenty of kids I take care of where I'm worried. This kids having way too many low blood sugars, it's affecting their lifestyle. And I'd be much happier if they're a once you jumped up a half point or a full point if they had fewer low blood sugars. So my perspective on it once you may be different than many of my colleagues, I don't think it's worth it for you to check anyone see in the middle of between office visits, especially if you have the capability of looking at a continuous glucose monitoring system that can tell you time and rich.   Stacey Simms  33:38 Is it homey? Once the test even accurate? I've always wondered about   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  33:41 Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, I have not seen I'm sure there are studies out there comparing the home a woman c test to a serum drawn that means coming from your arm type of A1C test versus a finger poke A1C test, which we do in our office. Um, I honestly have not looked at those studies, so I can't answer your question. But my guess is yes, it's probably pretty close. Okay, so   Stacey Simms  34:04 I have another one. You know, all these people in my group know you very well. And the question, I've lost the question, Where did I put it? Ah, here it is. Okay. So it's a two parter. The first part is all about technology. Have you mentioned time and range? You mentioned CGM advice for parents. This is a question who says, Are we overly reliant on technology? Or is that a thing? Does she need to worry about being isolated? If something doesn't work?   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  34:35 Yeah, I mean, you use what you have. I mean, we didn't have dex comes when Benny was first diagnosed. We didn't have insulin pumps, when I was, you know, or there were they were out there, but they were not commonly used when I was a resident. Um, when my senior partner Dr. Parker was doing his medical school, they didn't even have finger stick blood sugars, right. And so diabetes management is changing and we not relying on technology, but the technology has been good. And it's helped make diabetes easier, not a cure, but a little easier unless you become a slave to that technology. And you can definitely overreact to the readings on a Dexcom. I know plenty of people who will not put their phone away because they always want to know what every second what their child's blood sugar is. And that's not healthy either.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  35:22 I know what you're talking about.   Stacey Simms  35:26 I'm only half kidding. But yeah, nothing really can be a problem. I think the bottom line for that too, is if as you're listening, you think, gosh, I don't even know where our meter is. Or do I have test strips? You know, that's the kind of thing that you'll definitely want   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  35:40 to check but you do need to have a beat. You need to have a meter even when your child wears a Dexcom or a Libra or Medtronic CGM. You will need a backup way to check blood sugar. So yes, please have a meter and strips and lancets that's the finger poker available.   Stacey Simms  35:55 lancets we all have 5000 of those.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  35:57 Yes.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  35:59 Last question was Do bow ties help you in your practice?   Stacey Simms  36:03 choice only.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  36:04 So, my grandfather always wear bow ties, you actually might be able to see him right over here at Grand Prix right over there over my shoulder. Always wear bow ties. Um, and so I got that from him. Um, and someone said, I looked smarter when I bought a bow tie. And I was like, you know, great. I like looking smart, even though I so, but to be honest, yes, um, especially in this age of viral transmission, you're probably not going to see me wear a tie when we do a virtual visit. And you may not see me wear a tie as much in the office in the near future. The reason that many of the pediatricians through Boston Children's Hospital other of the older pediatricians wear bow ties rather than long straight ties is because there's less germs from this than there are from something dangling and so I will for virtual visits, I probably will not I almost certainly will not have a bow tie on and for the for visiting the office, I probably won't either just to have one less thing on mice around me that can collect your   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  37:06 which is your grandfather in the medical field or, you   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  37:09 know, furniture industry.   Stacey Simms  37:13 All right. So before I let you go, because this is the first time I've ever had you on the podcast, hopefully not the last. But you know, it was in the interest of kind of feeling a little strange about, you know, that kind of relationship, my son's endocrinologist and that sort of thing. But now, I this has been great.   I'm curious, you know, you've been in practice for us at 15 years. I finished   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  37:34 my fellowship in 2005. So this is this will be my 15th. year as of July one or the end of my 15th year.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  37:42 Yeah, we caught you   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  37:44 right at the beginning. Right, exactly. You were one of my may not my very first but one of my first patients now, I shouldn't say that. But yeah,   Stacey Simms  37:51 I mean, in the first couple of years,   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  37:52 right, exactly in the first few years. Exactly. So   Stacey Simms  37:54 I'm curious, you know, it's hard to sum up in just a few minutes, but from then to now. already mentioned the technology have things. It's kind of a pet question. I was gonna say, Have you seen things change, but I really want to know, like, how is it to be a pediatric endocrinologist from then to now? I mean, it's got to be difficult with insurance things and all that sort of stuff. But are you still happy? This is a field you chose?   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  38:20 Yes. I love my job. I love taking care of kids with diabetes. I kids with diabetes are only about 30 to 35% of my patient volume. And so I take care of 60% of other kids that I also love taking care of. It's the dream job. And yeah, I did not grow up thinking I wanted to be a pediatric endocrinology. I didn't know I really wanted to be a doctor. When I was in high school. I mean, there are some people that say they knew it from age two for me, that was not the case. But every step along the way, I've kind of thought yeah, maybe I do want to be a doctor. And then I go to medical school and yeah, maybe I do want to be a pediatrician and then I do my pediatric rescue. See and yeah maybe I do want to become a pediatric specialist etc so each step has kind of led me along the way and it's been a great choice I love taking care of your own as well as the all the other kids that I take care of. It's a dream job except for the paperwork.   Stacey Simms  39:15 Alright, so I'll check in with you again if I can during this time who knows how long we're going to be at home you guys doing? Okay, you can have your own everybody   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  39:22 do everyone's healthy. You know? I mean I I'm worried I mean, not about my kids not necessarily about my health I mean when one of those middle age brackets right but I'm worried about my parents, my grandparents who are still alive, you know, I'm, I am worried about I'm worried about the economy of not only our country, but the world I'm worried about, about the financial well being of my patients, even though I'm you can kind of get the sense I'm not really all that worried about the health of my patients with Covid 19 as long as they Following Sick Day protocols and but that doesn't mean go out and get exposed because obviously we need to contain this virus. I am worried about our world. But I'm not necessarily worried about the children that I take care of related to cope with it and I just don't want them spreading this terms to their grandparents.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  40:17 I think you're absolutely right on that. Well, we will leave it there. And hopefully we can check back in and I will see you for a virtual visit. I'm sure we'll be hearing from   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  40:28 that.   Stacey Simms  40:31 But I do appreciate it. Thank you so much.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  40:33 Yes, thanks for getting the word out states you remember, wash your hands stay inside socially distinct yourselves.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  40:41 But don't forget to call your parents all the people you love.   Dr. Mark Vanderwel  40:50 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Sims media. All Rights Reserved or wrongs avenged   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Zach sits down with former StubHub and Facebook alum Bärí A. Williams to chat about intersectional identities. Bärí also talks about her upcoming book "Diversity in the Workplace: Eye-Opening Interviews to Jumpstart Conversations about Identity, Privilege, and Bias" dropping March 31st. She shares what inspired her to write it and talks a bit about the challenge she faced in efficiently categorizing so many intersectional identities when it came to the 25 people she interviewed for the book.Pre-order Bärí's book on Amazon.Connect with Bärí on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Check out her personal website by clicking here.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? This is Zach with Living Corporate, and, you know, you know what we do, right? It's a Tuesday. Hopefully you're bunkered in somewhere, not panicked--what's the word? Oh, using an abundance of caution and, you know, keeping away from folks that don't wash they hands. You already--okay, anyway, we're not gonna talk about that. The point is you're taking care of yourself. Maybe you're listening to some smooth jazz and you realize, "Oh, snap, I need to listen to the Living Corporate podcast," and here we are, so what's up? You know that we are centereing black and brown voices at work, and we do that by having authentic conversations with folks across a wide array of industries, okay? I'm talking about energy to transportation to telecommunications. I'm talking about lawyers and doctors and professors and, shoot, hourly employees, activists, influencers. I mean, anybody really, as long as they're willing and ready to really talk about the folks that are most impacted, most marginalized, in this world that we live in, and today is no different. We have Bärí Williams on the show. Bärí Williams, you know, she's a lot of different things to a lot of different people. You know, for me to try to, you know, wrap that up in a quick little intro would be inappropriate, so we're gonna get to know Bärí in this conversation and talk a little bit about what she has going on, and we hope you enjoy it. And with that being said, Bärí, what's up? Bärí: How are you doing?Zach: I'm doing really good, I'm doing really good. I know we were talking off-mic about, you know, staying rona free. Bärí: Man... that rona.Zach: That rona. [both laugh] It's not playing doe. They said Chuck got the rona?Bärí: Yeah. Yeah.Zach: Chuck got that rona... When Tom Hanks--Bärí: Tom Hanks got the rona.Zach: When Tom Hanks--when Tom Ladarius Hanks got the rona I said, "Okay, we need to slow down."Bärí: Fire yourself. [both laugh] Tom Ladarius. But also yes, because he's from Oakland.Zach: He's from Oakland. And this is the thing, when he called [?] I said, "Oh, okay."Bärí: Oh, no. So here's the thing. The funny part about that is Tom Hanks was in my uncle's graduating class, in the same high school and all that. So that's a real thing. Like, Tom Hanks knew about [?].Zach: Man. Well, see, I knew--so, you know, the apple don't fall far from the tree.Bärí: That doesn't explain Chet Hanks though.Zach: We not gonna talk about Chet? [laughs]Bärí: I don't have anything for Chet.Zach: Man. Boy, that blackness went away when he realized his parents was sick doe.Bärí: Right. That patois was gone.Zach: That patois was--I didn't hear--no patois ting--[laughs]Bärí: "Mom and Dad are sick, guys. Thanks for your prayers."Zach: Snap. He was tatted up doe. But yeah, [laughs]--Bärí: He tried.Zach: He did, he did. But yeah, okay, okay, okay. Look, there's a variety of things we could talk about, right? Like, a lot of stuff is going on. This is not typically a current events podcast. I do want to talk a little bit about the book that you have.Bärí: Yeah, yeah. Out March 31st. Diversity in the Workplace: Eye-Opening Interviews to Get Your Conversations Poppin'. I interviewed 25 different people, and what was super interesting about it was it was 25 people that I picked, and I got probably five or six interviews deep and I told the editor, "Hey, I know we want to segment these into five different categories, but all of these people are intersectional. So you can figure out where you want to put 'em. I'm not gonna make that determination." Because who am I to say that somebody being LGBTQ and Christian outweighs, you know, maybe how they're genderfluid or express themselves? I'm not gonna--Zach: Yeah, you're not gonna rank that.Bärí: Yeah, or how when I talk to two black women in the spirits industry I'm not gonna rank whether they feel that they're black first or a woman first. "So you put them where you want them, but here they are."Zach: You're absolutely right. I mean, I think when you force--I think about, like, Feminista Jones. Like, she talks about this from time to time. It's, like, this idea that you make black women choose between their femininity, their womanhood or their blackness, and, like, that's violence, right? Like, you need to let people be all of who they are.Bärí: I totally agree. I would say what's hard for me with that though is that I can only speak for my experience, but I have always been black first, and the reason being is that all of the experiences in my life would not be different if I were still black and a man, and that's, like, wow.Zach: Let's talk about that. Break down that down a little bit for me.Bärí: Child, we can talk about it. My mama literally just texted me and said "I feel asleep reading your book. This is really good. I didn't know people were out here living like this." [both laugh] But yeah, I feel like--and I've been told this before, and it probably isn't a secret to you. I can have a bit of a dominant personality. [laughs] And that is--but I feel like that is not abnormal for black women. Period. Zach: It's not. My mom is like that.Bärí: Exactly, and my mom was like that, and my son's mom is like that. Which means me. [both laugh] So... I mean, if you're used to it you know how to deal with it, but the harder part, at least for me, is working within that framework in a corporate environment. What does that mean, to be a strong black woman in a white, predominantly male, sort of passive aggressive environment? And the answer is I still don't know, 'cause they say they want one thing, and then when they get it they're like, "Ooh... this is a little-- This is more than I thought."Zach: Well, I think a lot of folks do say that they want certain things, but it's like--you know, when you finally experience this, particularly when it comes to--you know, people say they want diversity, they want inclusion, and it's like, "Yeah, but until you're--"Bärí: Until it makes you uncomfortable.Zach: "You're in a room and you're doing a presentation and then three people who don't look like you raise their hand asking you a bunch of questions that you weren't prepared for. Then all of a sudden you ain't really like that," right?Bärí: Yeah, that's exactly it. And, like, I touch on that a lot in the book. So, in the book, it's segmented into five different categories. So it's Race, Gender, Age and Ability, Religion and Culture, and LGBTQ. And when I say that there were only--I interviewed 25 people. I actually interviewed more than 25 and let the editor decide what she thought--the editor was also a black woman, which was, like, fantastic. So, like, she got me, and that's very rare, particularly in publishing. And she read it and she was like, "Yeah, these are really, really good, and this is hard to figure out where to put folks," because you have people who are, you know, dealing with issues around culture and race, and then you have issues dealing with, you know, sexuality and race, and then you have people dealing with gender and religion, and so yeah, where do you put them? So out of the 25 people that we ended up selecting, in the end, only two sit cleanly in one bucket, and what was interesting about that is they were both Asian men. Zach: Okay, yeah. Bärí: Everyone else, you know, fit into multiple categories, and that's one thing we talk about is, like, how do you navigate being in multiple categories and fitting into a predominantly straight white male able-bodied world?Zach: And, you know, I think also, like, it pushes up against this narrative of, or just this binary mindset that we have about everything, right? You're either this or you're that or it's this or it's that, and it's like, that's just not the way the world works, and, like, people are really complex, but I think, like, part of, like, this decentering of whiteness, particularly white male straight able-bodiedness, is forcing people to realize that not only--like, these concepts are not new. It's just that certain things are happening now where you can't ignore those non-white male groups anymore.Bärí: Yeah, and I think people are very, very uncomfortable with that, very, and so part of it is in the book there are takeaways from each chapter. There are key--it starts with definitions in terms of, like, what are some things you're gonna see in here that people have said in their interviews that's gonna be prevalent and super relevant? Like white saviors, okay? And I didn't feel afraid to go there. Like, I know some people are gonna be like, "Ooh, white savior? So you're insulting--" No, I'm not, but you also think you're wearing a cape and you can save us all, and that's now what we're asking you to do, and also, like, you need to know that you're doing this. It's white saviors, it's understanding the difference between, you know, being cis and--like, people just--just terms and things that people may not be familiar with and to get them comfortable with the idea of that terminology and then how to use it.Zach: I think that's really important too, right? So, you know, we talk about white fragility. There are different types of fragility too. Black men can exhibit a certain level of fragility. I think, like, people who are in any position of relative privilege--relative privilege, now. Relative privilege. Have a potential to exhibit fragility, and I think folks don't necessarily like being educated when they're wrong. So, like, having something, a resource... and, like, Google is free, y'all, so don't... but anyway.Bärí: Child, I tell people that all the time.Zach: [laughs] Even if, like, getting corrected in public or by another human makes you uncomfortable, I mean, you could at least--I mean, you could engage with your own fragility in prviate. But anyway, the point is, having a book--Bärí: I will tell you, my husband is a product manager for Google, and he works on the Android wearables team, so he doesn't even actually work for the search engine, but when I ask him a question and he thinks it's dumb, he'll just send me the link--I'm trying to remember the acronym, but basically the acronym stands for "Let me Google that for you." Zach: Yeah, somebody sent that to me one time and--like, but this is the thing about that... and that's cute, and that's your husband and stuff, but let me tell you something. I remember one time I was at work and I asked somebody a legitimate question--Bärí: If somebody did that to me at work though I would want to fight.Zach: I said, "Wait a second. Let me tell you what it's not gonna be. You gonna answer my question, okay?" Don't play. Don't play with me. [laughs] Bärí: Like, there is a whole song out here in the Bay that was made that's called "What You Ain't Gon' Do," so... [Zach laughs]Zach: That's 'cause if I didn't have to talk to you I wouldn't, so don't--Bärí: Go YouTube that, and you might want to make that the outro music, 'cause--[laughs] 'Cause yeah, it's fine for Jamie to do that to me, but if somebody else did that to me I would probably roll up on your desk. Zach: [laughs] "So explain this. Why did you send this?"Bärí: Right? "So let's talk, Bob. Let me tell you what you ain't gon' do."Zach: And what ain't gon' be. Okay, so no, that's--let me ask you this. So, like, what was the inspiration to write the book?Bärí: Many things. I think--and this is gonna be long-winded and, but I remember being five years old--and my mom is a retired teacher from the Oakland [Unified?] School District, and she and a couple of colleagues sat around our dining room table in our apartment and they created what ended up being the oratorical festival, which to our surprise was made into a documentary on HBO last month. And she didn't know and I didn't know, and she was like, "Oh, look at this!" And I was like, "Yeah! Also, why are you not in it?" But I let that go. I let that go. I'ma let that go and let God. [both laugh] And she actually--what's funny about it is she was like, "I don't care." Like, if somebody's talking about this and it still exists, like, that's enough. Like, that was her goal. And so I remember sitting there looking at that, and I remember participating in the first year, and I won in the first grade for, like, my category, and I was like, "Did you rig this?" And she was like, "No," but what it did was it gave me a voice, and she cultivated that throughout my entire life when I wasn't, you know, doing debate time in high school and junior UN League. Like, all of that. So I always felt like I had something to say and, you know, everything doesn't deserve a response. I mean, I'm still learning that at 40. [laughs] But she taught me, like, when something does deserve a response, make sure you have a very calculated thing to say about it, and so I started to do that, and then I decided to write, and it was writing articles and op-eds in New York Times and Fast Company and Fortune and Forbes, and it made me think, "There's a [?] there, and there are things that people are not discussing in these tech companies that I see because I'm in them, and we can't fix it if more people don't know it's a problem." So that's what led to it, but it was more than that. It was like, there are other people going through different struggles and different departments in other companies, in other industries, and what does that look like? And that's why I ended up talking to, you know, two black women in the spirits industry. The spirits industry is dominated by older white men. And these are two, you know, 30-something-year-old black women with their own spirits, and they're Christian, and so that was one of the things where I told the editor, "I don't know where you want to put them. Do you want to put them in race or gender or religion?" But yeah, they've had people ask them in their church, like, "What are you doing? This is wrong" They've had people talk to them in the spirits industry, like, "Hey, girl, do you know what you're doing?" You know, they get it on all levels, and then I was talking to [Rabya?]. She's fantastic. She's the woman who did the defense for [?] in... what is the name of the podcast? I'm blanking now. That's terrible. Serial, and she talked about being, you know, a woman, being Muslim, wearing a hijab, and people--she knows she's a good attorney, but people would want her to write the briefs and do the background work but not show up in court. Zach: It's interesting, 'cause that's the kind of stuff--there's a pattern of that, right? Of exploiting black labor or using black folks' thought capital, wringing them dry for it, only for you to then take center strage and publicity and really interface, right? like, you see it--I'm sure that you've--'cause you've [?] in tech. Like, you've been with StubHub and Facebook. Like, you've been all over the place, right? Like, you've seen where, like, a lot of times black folks will come from, like, these HBCUs or, like, with these engineering degrees and then, like, work in the back in security. Security, y'all, is not--like, not tech security. Securing the building. Anyway. [?, both laugh]Bärí: I will tell you the funniest thing to me when I got to Facebook was it was 2014--Facebook started in 2004, so it was 10 years afterward. I was the first black woman in legal. There weren't black people in legal, so I was the first black person and the first black woman. There were no AKAs at all in the company, so I was the first AKA in the company. They had no Links in the company. I was the first Link in the company. Like, what are you doing? Like, if you want a highly qualified workforce, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated will get that done for you, The Links, Incorporated will get that done for you. And there were only, like, three Deltas in the entire company.Zach: Shout-out to my sorority sisters. What's up, y'all? You know, and my mom is also an AKA, but you're really repping. Like, you really got on this podcast and, like, inserted that plug. I respect that. I like that a lot. Bärí: You know, plug plug plug, but that's the thing that I wanted people to understand too was, like, if you want a highly qualified workforce--and yes, they may not have direct, on-point experience, but we all have analogous experience from doing this non-profit work, and that's the thing that people discount or don't see. So, like, you want to hire Brad in accounting and he, like, did an internship for two months at his dad's firm. Like, what do you value?Zach: Right? Well, when you start holding them accountable--so when you hold them accountable to the standards that they give you, right? So if you say, well, "You know, you don't really have X, Y and Z. Show me somebody else who does have X, Y and Z experience." Bärí: Yeah, show me what's comparable. Zach: Yeah, and they pull 'em up and it's like, "Yo, this person was... he was, like, a DJ, or he worked at a GNC. Like, what are you talking about?" And so then things just crumble because it's like, "This is not about this." Like, you're creating rules--Bärí: Yeah. Like, that's not really what you want, and that's fine, but, like, let's call a thing a thing.Zach: I think, again, it just fits the meta narrative of white people, like, creating new rules for marginalized people. Bärí: Well, it's something that I actually told a long bost and said, like, every time I hit the benchmark, you move the goal posts. Are you aware of that? And he was like, "What are you saying?" And I said, "What I'm saying is what I said." Zach: I just said it, first of all.Bärí: Yeah. Like, child, when I tell--and that's the thing, like, my mom should've never told me I should advocate, because I literally said, I was like, "No. I hit this benchmark, and you told me if I did this it would be that. If I did X, it would be Y, but now you're saying, "Hm, but in order to get to Y you really need to do--" And I was like, "Nah, bruh. You said this, and I have it in writing." And I did that. So now what are we doing? And he was like, "Why are you so angry?"Zach: What do you mean?Bärí: I was like, "What do you mean? I'm not angry. I'm just telling you this is what you said and now you're going back on it," and he's like, "But you're angry," and I said, "I'm not angry. I'm just holding you accountable, and maybe you're not used to that, but that's also not my job. Like, that, you should go home and talk to your mom or your wife about that."Zach: But you know what though? Like, just as a thought exercise, let's just say I am angry. Okay. Bärí: Then what?Zach: Then what? I am angry, because you said you were gonna do something and you didn't, or you said it was gonna be one way and it isn't, or I have written documentation and you're gaslighting me by acting like this isn't real. So yeah, maybe I am angry. Does that make my point less valid?Bärí: And it doesn't. Like, these are stories that people go through in the book about how people gaslight them in the same way, whether it's about them being a woman or about them being black or about them being LGBTQ. There is such a powerful story in there from a woman who's Asian who talks about, like, how her family essentialy made her feel like she had to whitewash herself to be successful, and then when she got to college it was like, "I don't know how to relate to Asian people now." And then when she got in the workplace she's like, "Now I have to relate to both, and how does that work?" I mean, that's real. Like, you know, how you're socialized is how you end up projecting yourself to the world.Zach: That's right, unknowingly or unknowingly, and that's the scary part, right? Like, you end up doing this thing, like, where you're raised. You're just growing up. Like, you're raised a certain way, and then you hit the real world and you realize like, "Dang, I have a lot of internalized depression and, like, I didn't even know that." Bärí: Mm-hmm, and that is--that honestly is one of the--it's funny, 'cause my son, he's now 9-and-a-half, but when I had to finish this book towards the middle of October, I was so tired. When I tell you, child, on the last day before I had to hit the bit I was like, "Ugh." I stopped to watch, like, a Real Housewives marathon, and he came to me. He was like, "What are you doing?" And I was like, "Excuse you?" And he said, "Mommy, what are you doing?" And I said, "I'm taking a break." And he's like, "Are you done yet?" And I said, "Do you understand what break means?" And he was like, "Well, you let me take a break, but you give me a time. Like, you've been watching this for, like, three hours. Have you hit Send?" And I was like, "No, I haven't," and he's like, "Okay, so then you get one more hour and then you need to finish." But to me, what I took that as was, like, he wasn't being defiant, he was actually imposing the rules that I put on him, which I was like, "Oh, so my parenting isn't totally failing."Zach: No, he has internalized that level of accountability and he is giving you that same energy back.Bärí: Yeah, but the same energy I had to give him was, like--I listen to so many stories about, you know, marginalized communities, interviewing these folks, particularly black men and their experiences, and you don't get to mess up, and I've told him that, and so he's like, "Why are you sitting here watching a Real Housewives marathon for three hours? You haven't pressed Send. Like, girl, get it done." And I was like, "Okay, yeah. You're right." But it's that same energy. Like, you have to be twice as good to get half as far, and that story was all of these people in the book, which was crazy, because it cuts across everything. It cuts across disability. It cuts across sexuality. It's like you have to make up for who you are by doing more work.Zach: You know, I think about a conversation we just had with Ruchika Tulshyan, and we were talking about how black men are often times left ot of the corporate D&I initiatives, right? So now, sometimes people think they're being really radical when they talk about "the angry black man." It's like, okay, I get it. That is a thing, and that's real, but, like, just the larger conversation about how black men are treated, and like you said, we don't have opportunities to mess up, and the same thing could be said for black women of course, for sure. It's just this idea of labor and, like, having to do more just to--Bärí: And you're not getting farther. It's just--Zach: Oh, my gosh. Thank you. It's like, "I'm not doing more to get further or to get farther ahead. I'm doing more just to be equal. I'm doing more just to receive what I've earned," right?Bärí: I can tell you, my husband, he interviewed at a former employer of mine. My husband is 6'6" and, like, 235 pounds on a good day.Zach: Oh, he's lean lean.Bärí: Eh... I said on a good day. [laughs] But the way that he's built though is, like, very Michael Phelps. So he's broad. So he looks bigger than he is, and the feedback that they had is--and also, because of his size and because he is black, he has been socialized--and also he's light as hell. Like, I've had people ask me multiple times, "Oh, so your husband's biracial?" No, he isn't, but people just assume that he is. And so based off of his profile, he's very light-skinned, he's 6'6", he's built like a swimmer, and people--so he has been socially conditioned to basically... I don't want to say tamp down who he would be, but he's more docile. Super reserved, which is why our dynamic works, because I'll be, like, the person in your face, and he'll--Zach: Yeah, it's tough to be big when--yeah, I've learned that in a variety of different ways, but yeah. I keep that--I would say I'm probably more like you, Bärí. I'm like, "Ayo," but I'm like, 6'2", like, 280, so I'm like, a big dude. [laughs]Bärí: And you know that scares people.Zach: And I'm not that--and I'm lighter-skinned, but I'm not, like, light-skinned, right? So it's like, you know.Bärí: And that is so scary for me with our son, because our son is--he is darker than I am, and I'm brown-skinned, and he's already 5 feet and he's 9. Zach: Yeah, he's gonna be a big boy.Bärí: Yeah, he will be. And I believe he'll be taller than his dad, and even if he isn't, it's like, if you are 6'6" and you're a brown-skinned boy and you're in Oakland, I have to keep you safe. And so everything I do is about "How do we keep you safe?" And that sucks, 'cause, like, I wish you could just be free, but--Zach: And it's not... and not even to be a super downer, but I say this as someone who, shoot, maybe by the time of this podcast my daughter's gonna be here, but, like, I think about having black kids in this world and, like, there's the physical safety, but then there's a certain level of, like, psychological safety that you really can't protect them from, and, like, there's certain things they're gonna just have to--again, I'm not trying to be fatalist or, like, super down or whatever, but they just have to go. They're just going to have to experience. And it's, like, the feeling of being isolated or alone or otherized or not quite fitting in spaces. Like, that's a thing, right? That's a thing, and somebody that I really admire--like, there are a bunch of folks I really admire, but I think about, like, Bomani Jones, right? Like, he's somebody I see, like, in these spaces, and he never, like--on his platforms, like, ever talks about being one of the onlys or whatever. And some people are just built like that. He's just like, "I don't really whatever." He doesn't come across, like, really vulnerable in that way, and I don't know--and this is not about Bo specifically, but I think about, like, other black men in media or, like, in these really big profile spaces, and I wonder, like, to be successful in these hyper-white spaces, do you just have to have, like, a certain level of just, like armor, and just almost be really calloused?Bärí: I think you do. That's one of the things also that I learned from doing interviews in the book, and that's not even unique to us. Like, the folks who are dealing with LGBTQ gender issues and gender expression, they had to deal with that in terms of, like, people questioning them and, like, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? Like, all of that stuff. And full discretion, like, I know Bo. Like, Bo and I are cool, and we've had that conversation, and part of it is like--to your point, it's not intentional. He doesn't mean to not say that. He just is like, "I am who I am, and you're gonna take it or you're not." And honestly, I've talked to him and have said, like, I want that energy for my son. I don't want him to feel like you have to have the burden of all black people ever on your back. Like, [?] does Bo, but he still reps us, and that's what I want, and that's what I want. Even, like, that I see with my husband. It's funny because I look at him--we're very, very different. He has had probably every advantage you can have in life. Like, he has gone to private school since he was born until he graduated. Like, he literally went to private pre-school, then he went to a private elementary school, private high school, he went to Harvard and then he went to Stanford, and I was like, "Bruh. You do not know, like, what it's like to live in, like, a real dorm." But he still came to--like, and he's from here too. He's from Oakland and came back and, like, tried to get in the valley and couldn't beat down the door. [Zach: Hm.] Right. And this is what everybody says that they want, right? These credentials. [Zach: Yeah, you know, he's checked every box.] And also, this is a light-skinned dude, right? So he's less-threatening. Zach: Right, and I'm sure he talks very proper. He enunciates his words well.Bärí: Child, I call him MC Carlton.Zach: So, like, literally his only knock is that he's black, and light black at that. Diet. [laughs]Bärí: Well, not even that. Also that was one of the things--so when I said my former... I had an employer who interviewed him. He got to the end of the round, and they decided that they didn't want him. They cut him. Like, they were hiring between him and one other person. They cut him because they said, "Oh, he didn't show enough passion. He wasn't willing to bang on tables." So when they gave me that--no, no, no, when they gave ME that feedback, I said, "Okay, so let's stop and envision this. Do you want a 6'6" 235-pound black man banging on tables? You're gonna be comfortable with that?" [Zach: And they said what?] They were like, "Well, what are you implying?" And I said, "I said what I said."Zach: Yeah, don't play with me. I'm not implying anything.Bärí: I said what I said. I didn't imply anything, I just said what I said. So if you saw that, you would feel safe? You would be cool? Zach: I mean, real talk. Would you? Answer the question.Bärí: They were like, "I mean, he just didn't show passion," and I was like, "That's not what I asked. What I asked was that if you saw a 6'6" bald black man banging a table to motivate engineers, you're cool with that?" And nobody could answer it definitively, and I was like, "And that's why you didn't hire him, so thank you, and I'ma go catch the shuttle." Like, I'm not gonna participate in this. This is bull. Zach: Yeah, this is ridiculous. It's super ridiculous.Bärí: 'Cause he's super reserved, and he's super reserved because he knows that he is a large black man and he can't do that. Zach: I remember I applied to--this is when I was first getting into consulting and it was between a few different firms, and one of the firms--and they were all, like, Big 4, right? So one of the firms I applied to, I went through the process and they said, "Oh, he was too passionate. He was too excited about the job. He smiled too much." So I'm just laughing at you, laughing at this situation, because it's like, okay, so you can't win for losing, right? I literally was the one smiling talking about how excited I was, and they said, "Well, he looked like he knew what he was doing, but he just seemed a little too smiley, a little too excited. He was a little too passionate for us." Bärí: But if he had been extra excited y'all would have been like, "Oh, my god. The black guy scared me because he's so big." [Zach: Exactly. [laughs]] And what I hate about this is, like, having to teach my son these rules of the road, because it's different in certain ways. He has my complex--actually he's darker than my complexion and he has his daddy's stature, and so you're gonna be extra targeted because you are a super brown boy and you're gonna be very tall, so you have to be on your P's and Q's at all times. Zach: Yeah, you're not wrong.Bärí: And he's so mad, because he does Kumon in addition to his regular schoolwork, and he's like, "Ugh, Mommy, I'm tired all the time," and I was like, "What do you think my life is? What do you think your daddy's life is? What do you think brown people's life is? Like, that's what it is, and like, I hate to tell you that, but you have to do more and do it faster and do it better, and you're gonna have to do it even faster and even better than your dad, because your dad gets some sort of benefit from having been, you know, a Harvard legacy, and he's light-skinned. Like, when you're light-skinned--light-skinnned [?] go farther, I'm sorry. It's true.Zach: We have yet to talk about colorism on the podcast, like, explicitly, but we need to talk about it because--Bärí: Let's talk about it. We can do it right now. [both laugh]Zach: I want to respect your time 'cause we went over, but nah, it's a global phenomenon, right? And I think, like, it goes beyond just, like, the African diaspora.Bärí: That's true. That's so true for our Indian comrades. That is very true for our Latinx comrades. Like, that's just the truth.Zach: I was in the HEB. HEB, for the folks who are not in Houston, is a huge grocer. So I was in HEB and I was getting some different, like, sauces and stuff, and I was in, like, the cultural food aisle and walked right on by some lightening cream. You know what I mean? So it's super common, and I think, like, even when you look at, like, these corporatized D&I groups, the Latinx folks are typically European--like, white-presenting, you know what I mean? Like, they're not, like--you don't see a lot of... again, it's common, but because it's so pervasive and--I don't want to say subtle, 'cause it's not subtle if you're paying attention, but it's just common, right? Like, the lighter-skinned people... it's hard to be dark and in power, you know? Bärí: Yeah, and that is for me just a personal thing that I want my son to embrace, and the reason being is, like, you know, everybody--my mom is light-skinned, and my dad was not, and they got divorced when I was three, so I don't even remember--like, I have no memory of living with them together, and so it was really my mom and her family, and everybody in her family is light-skinned and I'm the only brown person, and I was like, "What's going on here?" Yeah. But what's interesting here is my husband is light-skinned and I'm brown. Our daughter is lighter than my husband and our son is darker than me, so it's like... they don't match at all. [laughs] Zach: I love that y'all have, like, a whole kaleidoscope going though. Bärí: We do, and we actually have shirts. I have a whole shirt. Like, I need to send you one. It's real--it's ghetto. [laughs] It's a unicorn throwing money [?], and there are different shades of the unicorn, and I picked the different shades off the people in our family. So yeah, but I mean, like, get this money. Do this work. You can do it whatever shade you are. That's my point. But for him, I want him to understand there's gonna be different restrictions for you, because you're likely to walk out of here one day when you're sixteen and you're gonna be 6'6" and you're gonna be super brown, and you're really fine, and people need, you need, to be aware of the danger. And then opposite is like, "Your sister is light-skinned. She has very loose, curly hair, and so people are gonna treat her in a completely different manner and think she's fine even though she may not be, and--" Not that I'm saying she's not cute, she is, but I'm like, "You know, people--" Zach: Yeah, there's biases that come with being [?]. Yeah, there's a certain aesthetic that she could fit into that then makes it easier.Bärí: And she does, and I want to make sure that she doesn't buy into that and, you know, that's what we're dealing with her, and that's what I deal with in the book, like, how do you handle this? You have people in multiple categories. What are the proper terms? What are the issues that are around them? How do you deal with it? Like, even something as simple as the fact that I literally have never had braids or crochets or anything in my entire life, and I decided to get it last summer because I was tired of doing my hair and then my daughter's hair. And my daughter has a looser curl than I do, but her hair is thick. Like, I'm not spending three hours on a Sunday doing this, so I took her to the salon so that they could do it, and then I started getting crochets, but now she's like, "I want to go to the salon!" So now it's like, okay, now we have to reset in terms of privilege, right? Because everybody doesn't get to go to the salon. Like, my momma did my hair until I was 13, so holla at Grandma. [both laugh]Zach: So let's get back to this book, right? It's coming out March 31st. Eye-opening interviews. The goal is to help jumpstart conversations about identity, privilege and bias, y'all. The book is called Diversity in the Workplace. Listen, y'all, make sure you check it out. Right now, maybe because of that rona we might be having these conversations on Zoom or Skype. I don't--Bärí: Now, I think you're gonna be quarantined 'cause of that rona anyway, so you might as well read this while--Zach: You definitely should. You know what, why don't you challenge yourself?Bärí: And there's an audiobook version too if you don't even want to read it. Somebody can just read it to you. Zach: Come on, now. Like, challenge yourself to read the group, and then that way when you go back to work--Lord say the same, the rona won't be here forever, okay? So you eventually will have to go see people, right?Bärí: I mean, the rona won't. It will be replaced by something else.Zach: Oh, goodness. You're right though.Bärí: I mean... it's Trump, so...Zach: Yeah, that's true. [laughs] Bärí: Something else might kill us in the meantime, I don't know.Zach: Who knows? I don't know. They said they got all these locusts over in Africa. There's, like, hundreds of billions of them over there. I don't know.Bärí: I saw that too, and I was like, "What disease are they carrying?"Zach: Listen. Bärí: Okay, I'ma let that go. Zach: Shutter the thought. [laughs] So look, y'all, this has been Living Corporate. We do this, right? We have conversations. We're really excited and we're thankful--you know, all jokes aside, please make sure you're washing your hands, okay? We have information from the CDC in the show notes. You know, hopefully you're washing your hands as you listen to this podcast. Like, wash your hands, okay? Soap is important also. Now--Bärí: Very. Water is not--Zach: Water is not soap. I want to--hold on. Sound Man, put that little record scratch in here. [record scratch] Water is not soap, okay? So you want to use some--you know, use the hard, industrial stuff. Use that Irish Spring if you need to. I personally use [?] because I am bougie, but you can use--Bärí: I use Olay, but, you know, whatever.Zach: Use something that is frankly a little abrasive, okay? Get that first, like, half-layer off your skin. Like, wash your hands, y'all. And then, you know, just take care of yourself, you know? Fist bumps and head nods only. You know, this would actually be a good opportunity for allyship and learning.Bärí: Well, here's the thing. So even with the fist bumps... so with the social distancing blah-blah-blah, it's supposed to be six feet. If you bump into someone, no, you're not within the six feet.Zach: You know what, you're right, no fist bumps. So this would be a good time actually for those--Bärí: Head nod at people and wave.Zach: So we all know how to do a head nod, but this may be the time for my less-melanated folks, my aspiring allies, to learn how to effectively head nod. Don't throw your neck out of your body when you do it. Bärí: Oh, I didn't know that was a thing.Zach: Just nodding too hard, right? Like, the head nod is supposed to be subtle, nuanced. Right? Like, maybe it's a cultural thing. I feel like in the South, like, our head nod is different, and I definitely believe, between the various melanin levels, head nods can be various levels of aggression. That's all. That's all I mean. Maybe a little salute also, with two fingers at the head. Just "Hello, I see you over there." But just be careful. Take care of yourselves, and we'll get through this together. In the meantime, make sure y'all check out the links in the show notes as well for Diversity in the Workplace: Eye-Opening Interviews to Jumpstart Conversations about Identity, Privilege and Bias written by Bärí A. Williams. Until next time, y'all, this has been Zach. Peace.

Robert Farrington is a Millennial Money Expert and Founder of TheCollegeInvestor.com. He is on a mission to help millennials get out of student loan debt and start building wealth for their future. He also helps parents make smart choices about college financing options and navigating the complex world of paying for school. Through his work at TheCollegeInvestor.com, Robert Farrington has emerged as one of the nation's leading student loan debt experts.​ Show Transcription: Episode 26 Reducing Student Loan Debt with Robert Farrington.mp3   [00:00:00] And so that's really what we've been talking about for the last decade, is how you can start building wealth and investing early while conquering your seed loans and getting out of debt at the same time.   [00:00:09] Welcome to the Real Estate Marathon podcast, your guide in the Race to Financial Freedom. The Real Estate Investing in Sound Financial Practices. This podcast is for anyone interested in learning more about real estate, investing, personal finances and a new take on traditional retirement. Now here are your host, Larry B0 and Mike Moe.   [00:00:34] What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the Real Estate Marathon podcast, your guide on the race to financial freedom through real estate investing in sound financial practices.   [00:00:43] My name is Mike Moe, one of the hosts the show joined today with my partner in crime, the credit score king. Mr Fiero, What's up, man?   [00:00:51] You know, Mike, I'm never going to get tired. You call me the credit score king. That's just phenomenal. I'm actually going to have that put out my business cards. I think.   [00:00:59] Heck, yeah. You should win. I'm going to. But now doing well tonight. Doing well tonight.   [00:01:03] Very excited about the interview that we had earlier in the week that we're getting rated a show, everybody.   [00:01:09] Yes. And I am pumped about this one as well as we were discussing before we hit that record button. This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart and a lot of people can relate to. And it's student loans and student debt and kind of having to dig your way out of that that that hole that a lot of people find themselves and notice.   [00:01:30] And will the student loan the amount of school loans in the country today is turned into epidemic proportions. I mean, you've got got kids coming out of college this year in more debt than I think they've ever seen in previous years. So that's just one of those things that that this guest came on. The podcast is going to try and help you figure out and get a handle on.   [00:01:53] Yeah. For sure, man.   [00:01:54] And honestly, it's a it's a crime that we you know, the kids nowadays, they're 18, 19 years old, signing for six figures of debt. They don't even know what that means.   [00:02:02] So it's you know, we got to do as much as we can to give them as many tools as possible to get themselves out of this. Essentially 17 loans of six figures plus with with no collateral to it other than the ability to make money in the future. Right. So, yeah, I mean, it's it's it's crazy out there. So hopefully this will help people maybe assess their financial situation a little bit as it comes in student loans and maybe get out of it a little bit quicker.   [00:02:27] Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I've got, though, the warm up cued up here. And you know what? The warm up we're doing today is student loan consolidation. And Mike, what student loan consolidation is it? It's the process through which you take out a new loan, which is then used to pay off all your other existing student loans instead of having multiple loans and multiple loan payments. You have only one. You can consolidate all federal student loans and most private student loans into one more.   [00:02:56] Yeah. Yep. So like Robert said on the show, like when you have six figures and student loan debt, you don't have just one loan.   [00:03:02] You typically have eight, nine, 10 or 11 different, you know, different loan providers who have give you this money over the course of that year. Your education. Right. So would that amounts to is a lot of times that's 7, 8, 9, 10 different payments for, you know, a certain amount per month at different interest rates. So that consolidation allows you to scrap all of that and get it into one payment with one interest rate. So one, it's easier to handle it, too. Typically, loans lowers your your monthly payment as well. So definitely something to look into, especially if you get so many when somebody like you.   [00:03:35] And if you're doing a four year degree, you generally have multiple loans. So you want to shoot it all under one umbrella.   [00:03:41] Well, and so like you said, you want to reduce your student loan payment and you want to consolidate it all into just one payment. That's one of the steps. And Robert talks about many other steps that you can use to get a handle on on your student loan debt.   [00:03:55] Yes, sir. All right. Anything else?   [00:03:58] No. Let's jump into the Robert Ferrington interview and and we'll see you guys on the other side.   [00:04:05] All right. Robert Ferrington, welcome to the Real Estate Marathon podcast, man. How you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me, guys.   [00:04:12] Oh, thank you for coming on and sharing your knowledge with everybody. That's. This is great show. Thank you.   [00:04:17] I mean, I definitely got to tell you, I'm super pumped about this one. This is a really important topic near and dear to my heart, so I can't wait to get into it. You might start by telling the audience a little bit about yourselves.   [00:04:29] Yeah. So I am the founder of the college investor and we talk all about getting out of student loan debt, starting to invest in building wealth.   [00:04:37] And I've been helping people get a student loan debt and navigate the complex world of student loans for over a decade now. And you know, as much as you hear about it in the media and everything else, like, I mean, it's so complex and there's no one size fits all for anybody. And, you know, the more you go down the rabbit hole, the harder it gets to figure out which way's out. It's kind of crazy. So, yeah, that's kind of my story and help people online for a while now.   [00:05:02] Sounds nice. What prompted you to to start the college investor? Was that they were you in a lot of student debt? Did you see the way it was going? Yes.   [00:05:13] So I started in college because I wanted to talk to people about investing. Right. Like, that's a lot funner, the talking about getting out of debt.   [00:05:20] So I want to talk about how to make money and investing in the stock market and even a little bit investing in real estate. But yes, I did have student loan debt. I graduate with over forty two thousand dollars in student loan debt. And my sight just kind of started with like nobody reading it until I wrote about my struggle with my loans and my loan servicer. And that was like one of my first articles that kind of went viral. And I talked about how my loan servicer was applying my payments incorrectly. And I had to go battle with customer service and everything, you know, super annoying. I wrote this whole thing and oh, my gosh, all these people were like, me, too. And I'm struggling with this, too. And, you know, I heard the best piece of advice was like, dude, we love all the stuff you're talking about with investing, but we're not there yet. We have all this loan debt. We're trying to figure this out. Like, how can we do both? And so that's really what we've been talking about for the last decade, is how you can start building wealth and investing early while conquer you see loans getting out of debt at the same time.   [00:06:18] Yeah, those student loan companies don't have a tendency to listen to the little guy, do they? It's like David and Goliath situation. So totally.   [00:06:25] I mean, it's just it's so complex, convoluted.   [00:06:27] You're talking to a call center, right, with just some, you know, $12 an hour person that really doesn't care about you or your financial needs. You know, like if you don't do it yourself, like nobody's gonna care about you except for yourself, right?   [00:06:40] Absolutely. Nice. So I got to imagine there's there's probably a couple different ways to look at this. You know, you got the college grad who is in a ton of debt.   [00:06:49] You got the person just going into college who we might build, educate a little bit on how to, you know, leave without a ton of debt. But maybe if we can start with, you know, people who have maybe graduated recently and have a ton of student loan debt, they're looking at maybe this six figure plus pile of this problem that that they tackle.   [00:07:08] Where do they start? So the number one thing I recommend for anyone is get organized. So I can't tell you the I would tell you actually ninety nine percent of everybody I speak to that is struggling with their student loan debt also can't tell you how much to loan debt they have.   [00:07:22] They can't tell you how many loans they have. They can't tell you what your interest rate is. They can't tell you what individual payments are on each loan. Because when you're talking to six figures to loan debt, you don't have one loan. Right. You have probably six to 10 different loans with different interest rates, maybe even different types of loans. And so it really starts with just getting organized, like whatever that style is for you. Like go on to your loan servicers Web site, find your credit report, see what debt you owe. Put it on a list. Put it in some software. Right. There's a lot of free software options out there. Print a notebook like I don't know what your style is for, you know, getting organized, but you've got to get organized. You got a list out your loans. You've got to make sure that your loan servicers have your correct address on file. You're not missing notices in payments. Right. Is none of us live in the same place? We went to freshman year of college.   [00:08:11] Right. Like we probably lived somewhere freshman year and took out loans. We lived somewhere sophomore year. Junior senior. Heck, we might have used our parents address for some of that stuff. Right. And so, like, if your loan servicer doesn't even have your info, you could totally be in default and not even know I'd been missing these letters. And then like getting yourself into a world of financial hurts. And so that's where it starts. Like we can even have a conversation about what's the best course of action is if you don't know what you got listed out and then talk about the rest of your budget to like what income is coming in. What are your job prospects like? What's all that look like? Then we can formulate a plan.   [00:08:48] I see. That's so true. And I think a lot of people just take the mentality of, well, I owe them money. They'll find me. Right. But it's all they have to do is send to whatever assets they have on file. And if that's wrong. Well, you still go to collections either way and then you've going to deal with a credit score, which Larry loved so much, you know, and if it goes in the tank.   [00:09:04] It's a fine line between 800 and 300.   [00:09:07] Even that like so it's we're recording this a tax time, right. And I think a lot of people don't realize that. You know, the I know the collateral of a student loan is your income.   [00:09:17] Right. So like you get a how do you buy it? You buy a home, right. The collateral of the mortgage is the home. You don't pay your mortgage. Well, they just, you know, foreclose on your house. Right. Well, the collateral of your student loan is your ability to earn money. And if you don't pay your student loan, they take your earnings. And the government has this crazy administrative power where if you get a government payment, they don't even have to go to court or do anything. They could just take all your government payments. So it's tax season. And if you're in default on your loans, they will just take your tax return.   [00:09:48] That's it. There's no like ands or buts about it. And so I see this whole world of her people are saying like, oh, I never heard. I never heard what's like one you knew you had two loans to. Is your address updated on file? It's like all they had to do was send a letter to whatever address they had on your student loans. This was probably months ago or even years ago. And now they're just taking your tax refund. They're going to take your garnish, your wages. They're going to take your Social Security. If you kick the can down that far right leg, you've got to realize that that is the problem. And that's the collateral. And then as you make these decisions, you can figure out which way to navigate it.   [00:10:21] And you have ignorance is not bliss when it comes to your student loans.   [00:10:25] No, no, no. One of the questions that we have is when a student can't pay their qoute, loan payments, what what did they do in that instance? I mean, obviously, they don't want to ignore it. What do they do, this process? Yeah.   [00:10:38] And so that's the scary part, right? Like, what if I can't pay my debt? Or even more so when you get that first bill after you graduate.   [00:10:45] What happens is, is you default into what is known as the 10 year standard repayment plan. And that payment plan is actually the highest monthly payment that you will ever face with your student loans. If you can pay it, great. But if you can't pay it, don't ignore it. That's actually like the highest monthly payment. There's a lot of other options out there. But if you don't ask, if you don't call, you don't do your research. You know, that's where you get in trouble. So for most people that can't afford their loans. Income driven repayment plans are the key. These are amazing plans that cap your monthly payment at either 10 percent or 15 percent of your monthly discretionary income. And what that means is if you really have zero income, once you say that you'd never got a job like the job market was struggling for what you want to do if you have zero income while you're still loan, payment is also zero. And if you're low income and maybe you have some children, your income, your monthly payment could also be zero. Or it could be very low. We're talking, you know, ten eighty dollars like something that's cap to your income. So if you don't make a lot of money, these repayment plans can help you stay current on your loan debt and they can also keep you out of default. And they all come with loan forgiveness down the road. It's not sexy. Takes 20 years. But, you know, if you really struggle to earn a solid income over 20 years, any remaining balance on your loan is forgiven.   [00:12:05] And that's I mean, that was going to be my follow up question is the loan forgiveness programs. How exactly do you qualify for that? Next, you have to make a payment. For how long?   [00:12:15] Well, it depends. So that's the other thing is right now, with no changes to the laws, like, let's just say none of these pullet politicians that are out there talking all these changes, if nothing changes, 50 percent of all borrowers today qualify for something, maybe not total loan forgiveness, but something.   [00:12:33] And there's so many repayment plans, forgiveness programs out there. I've found over 80 different loan forgiveness programs, depending on where you do what kind of loans you have, where you live. So the most popular one is the one that you hear about in the news all the time. Public service, loan forgiveness. And it's popular because there's a lot of public servants out there, teachers, government officials, you know, state, local, federal members of the military. You know, that's very broad. And so a lot of people qualify for it. The other thing is, is it takes 10 years or 120 payments and you get tax free loan forgiveness at the end. And so that's one the most popular ones. But there's so many other loan forgiveness programs out there that you just you a few minutes of research, you might qualify for something and not even realize it.   [00:13:21] Very nice. If there's somebody who, you know, is looking at this massive student loan debt and doesn't want to drag it out for 20 years to maybe qualify for something like that, what are the. Are there strategies that work specifically to maybe accelerate getting that debt paid off or what are some quick wins for them?   [00:13:39] Yeah, I mean, it all comes down to your income, right? If you can afford to pay more, it's just a math game, right? Do you want to eliminate your debt, pay less interest and get it done with?   [00:13:47] Or can you afford to not to do that? If you can. I mean, you can definitely look at refinancing. You do loans, getting a lower interest rate and paying it off. But refinancing is what everyone here is. Because. Right, it's driven by the banks and banks advertise and they have a lot of money to throw at advertize. Right. And so everyone's share refinance to save interest on my loans. Well, the sweet spot for refinancing and saving on interest on your loans is are you going to pay off your student loan debt in three to five years? If the answer to that question is yes. Well, refinance. Go for it. If the answer to that is no, don't refinance. Look at other programs. But maybe in a year from now, your situation changes. Maybe you got to raise it work. Maybe you got a new job. Nothing that we're talking about also has to be permanent. Right. I think that mostly we'll need to look at their do loans reassessed annually and see if they're on the right path because life changes, your income changes, everything can change. Right.   [00:14:41] And you've got to just continue to monitor it and see if you're on the best path for yourself today when you get ready to go to college. Win. Win is the best time to start planning this out.   [00:14:52] Is this something you should do before you even decide to go to college? Is this something that you can do during college? I mean, what's your opinion on the best, best time to start this?   [00:15:02] Oh, I mean, like when they're 8. Like when your children are in there, like, you know, single digits, you need to have these conversations. And it actually isn't even the college conversation, really. It's the money conversation.   [00:15:12] Like, I can't tell you how many parents just don't share any type of money with their kids. Like not giving them money, but like giving them transparency into their finances. And then, you know, this 16 year old thinks that they're going to have their college paid for and then mom and dad's like, no, there's no money. And it turns into really nasty things. So let's start with your kids early. Share with them money. Tell them what your budget looks like. Tell them what the plans are to save for college and then just continue to evolve these conversations all throughout their life until they're in high school. And then you need to sit down, have the real conversation about how you can pay for college. What do you want to do? Where you want to go? Well, this is how much it costs. This is how much mom and dad have. This is how much we put aside for you. You know, this is what we could do to support you while you're in school. But like, you know, here's what it looks like. And we have to have these conversations with children early because college is more than money. Right? It's hopes, dreams, aspirations, but it also involves money and taxes and the government and all kinds of other nasty stuff that we don't talk about as much. So if you don't combine these two early, you just set up really bad conversations when it comes to paying for college. And that's where also people don't realize what college all about. College isn't about necessarily education. It is. But you can get educated anywhere you get as you listen to a podcast. You can get educated going to Harvard. Got you. And they put all their lectures online. So if you want really world class education, you can find that you go to college because you're looking for an hour away on your investment. And that's what we need to talk about. Just like you would in real estate or in the stock market, you want a return on your investment. So if you're going to invest $40000 in college while you're doing so, because you expect to earn more after college and you're expecting to get skills, networking, career, other things besides just the classes because like English one, a one you can get anywhere, you could read some books and you've literally learned what your English class going to teach you in college.   [00:17:17] So like you're going for more than just that education. You've got to keep that in mind. It's an investment and it's an expensive investment. And statistically, college graduates do earn more than high school graduates over time. But, you know, there's definitely people that don't need to go to college and can earn very good sums of money, you know, with their skills. Maybe it's a trade, maybe it's joining. The military is college isn't for anyone. And it's really expensive to find yourself if you don't know what to do.   [00:17:46] There is so much going back in that last couple minutes.   [00:17:51] I think you're underspent percent spot on that. I think that is hopefully it's a generational thing and we're getting away with it. But, you know, as you know, when I was growing up, it's pretty common here in young people my age, just, you know, their parents intolerable money to teach me about money. But then when they got to 17, 18 years old, you had to go to college. Why? Because that's what you do and that's what you have to do. But. Oh, yeah. We can't pay for it. So go get student loans. And, you know, you can't you can't yet get a legal drink, but you can sign for a hundred thousand dollars in student loans without knowing what you're going to get for it. And I think you the way that you look at college from an ROIC standpoint is the way people need to look at college, because you're a hundred percent. Right. You can get educated anywhere. And nowadays there's so much stuff out there that if you don't need a college degree for what you're your goals are, it's might not be worth the money, you know?   [00:18:40] Right. I mean, there's still just like that political aspect to it. Like, let's say you want to be a teacher, right? Like, you have to get that credential or they don't let you teach, you know?   [00:18:49] You know, there's real smart pass to get there. You go to community college, knock out your undergrad, transfer to a state school, live at home, and you could probably be dollar college for like 10 grand and have that credential and go teach like you don't need to borrow one hundred thousand dollars. A teacher. And it's just hard, though, because people think down on community college. But you know what? It's free and half the states. You know, college like no one cares where you. Yeah. You know, whatever calculus or whatever the classes you take, like that's all the same. If you're just going for your teaching credential, get your teaching credential. Same thing applies to anything. But that's where I think I'd like the tech world. They have all these vocational programing schools now that are popping up because you know what? Like Microsoft doesn't care. They just might know be in code. And if you can learn how to code wherever, do it and go get working. And you know, it just we have a whole world of possibilities now and it's really expensive to overlook why you're going to school.   [00:19:47] Yeah. And it'll be interesting to see what people and companies do in the next 10 years as lowering some of their college degree requirements from these jobs that don't necessarily need it, you know, making it through it.   [00:19:59] My wife worked at a car rentals place right out of college and it required a four year degree to rent cars.   [00:20:05] That's ridiculous. There's a lot of that. It's so silly that, like, you need a college degree to become like a manager and assistant manager.   [00:20:13] And it's like really like, you know, there's people that have really great skill sets that don't need to do that. But, you know, you've put this arbitrary. I call up politics and workplace politics. And it's the same like I see people going back to school for like a master's degree or a graduate degree, because graduate programs in general are the worst are. Why? That's where, you know, when you see the million dollars in student loan debt, there's over 100 people in this country with a million dollars in loan debt and they're all graduate degree programs. Right. Because the problem is, his graduate degree programs don't have a cap. So undergraduate borrowing, there's a federal cap on how much you can borrow, not for graduate degrees. So like they can borrow one hundred fifty two thousand dollars a year and then, you know, interest and all that stuff builds and you're a million bucks. And that's where there's no growth, especially with like MBA programs, things like that. It might be the workplace politics game that you need to play. But in that case, make your employer pay for it. Like I'm not necessarily dismissing the value of the degree, but at the cost in the R-N.Y might not be there. But if you're not, the payer will go for it. Right. But if your company is going to demand that that you have an MBA to get promoted into some kind of management position, well, they should put up the money and pay for it.   [00:21:24] Yeah. Nice tazers. Sorry.   [00:21:26] Let's just just say one of the things that I like that you said you were mentioning the tech program, which I kind of wanted to dove into just a little bit because I am fans of Mike Rowe who does Mike Rowe works and he's a lover of the tech world. And, you know, I actually had told my son, who just graduated from college with a two year degree in and building building trades and went right into making a job into a job, making more money than I make. So and I've got a four year college degree in business administration and my own real estate portfolio. So, you know, I definitely didn't want to discount that, you know, kind of touch on that a little bit more than the tech world was a great, great return of investment. Like you said.   [00:22:05] So, I mean, even the trades are a great return on investment. And, you know, it's very cyclical. And I think it's also important to take a long term view on this. Right.   [00:22:14] So when the economy does really well and this is in history, if you look back over the last hundred fifty years, the better the job market is, the less the value of colleges. But then it reverses, the worse the job market is, the higher the value colleges. Right. And so, like, you know, micro is amazing. I think going to the trades is great. You know, I know these construction guys that, you know, are making tons of money these days, but they know everything flips and then they don't. Right. It's very cyclical. But the same thing can happen. The tech world, you know, things can flip. Things can change. So you just got to be mindful of that. But if you build some skill sets and you set yourself apart and you network, you can usually weather those storms regardless of what you get into.   [00:22:54] So since we're on the subject of our why, what are some things that people need to consider when they're maybe they're trying to shift their mindset of looking at college just because you've got to go to get a piece of paper or looking at it from an hour away. How do they start that?   [00:23:05] Well, the mindset is so psychological because it's your own aspirations and dreams of what you want to do. It is so much family pressure, so much friend pressure.   [00:23:17] And you're talking to someone that's 17, 18 years old and you're like, you need to overcome what everyone's telling you to do this.   [00:23:24] And that's the hard part is that's where if you start these conversations earlier becomes easier. There's no right or wrong here. But like, you know, we got to judge kids less. We got to let them explore and try things. But we've got to teach them fiscal responsibility as well and help them understand that, like you borrow eighty thousand. That is, you know, fifteen hundred dollars a month every month afterwards. So if you're not making X, you got to live somewhere and rent somewhere and you to feed yourself and have a car and all these other things. Right. Like so we've got to help them understand that. And really do that the better. But it's so much just interpersonal family dynamics that there's just no right or wrong way. We got to just continue to talk to parents, really, and kids and say it's OK, like there's alternatives. I think 30 percent of people to 40 percent should go to college. I think 30 percent of people should go into a trade type scale or the military. And I think a 30 percent of people should become kind of entreprenuers or something else along those lines and just not go that route. I mean, I think everyone's so different and we can't just box everybody in and what's right or wrong or, you know, dad did this. So you should do this. Yadayada, right?   [00:24:34] Yeah.   [00:24:34] We've all heard the story about Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard, and that might have Bill Gates, you know, like so many of these people have. And it's you know, that's very rare exception. But like, there's also plenty of people that didn't go to college and started a local, you know, trade job or, you know, run a small business that provides for them and their families and does really well. Like, you don't need to have a billion dollar company to support yourself. You can have a nice job. And the cool thing is in this online world is that you can do so much of it online in the comfort of your own home. Being a freelancer, something like that as well.   [00:25:15] Now, taking a quote directly off of your Web site says The number one dilemma holding black millennials from investing and building real wealth. Wealth is student debt. To loan debt. Do you feel that that's that's changing now that people are being made more aware of it? Do you think it's getting worse in the economy the way it is now? Do you think we're making progress towards not having crushing student debt?   [00:25:42] Not at all. And that's the sad part, is, you know, it's leveled off a little bit over the last couple of years. But I mean, we're still seeing, you know, 30 plus thousand dollars, an average student loan debt when they graduate.   [00:25:53] And, you know, wait. The problem is, too, is it's compounded with stagnant wage growth. Right. So like you do, loan debt is increased, but wage growth has stayed stagnant. And so it's just eating up more and more of people's monthly budgets because the end of the day, that's what really matters. It's not about the no amount of loan debt you have if your income increased proportionally to the debt. Who cares? You could still have a portion to buy a house and you could still have a portion that you could have be comfortable having children with and things like that. But that's the dilemma here, is it just eats away at monthly income, which eats away at GDP, which eats away at potential dollars being deployed to any other aspect of life. And it takes years to build the top line so that you could service that debt comfortably so that you feel comfortable buying a house or having children. It targets kids are expensive and people literally the studies show that people are waiting longer to buy a house. They're waiting longer to have kids because they need that top line earnings to grow to a point where they feel comfortable servicing their debt. And that's the problem, is it? It's a delaying factor. It's a it's a drag like student loan debt, not a bubble like the housing market. You know, these bubbles, pop. Right. So people can't afford their houses. The bank forecloses, bank sells that house at a discount, gets it off their books. The whole thing kind of resolves itself in a year per property. And so like when you have a lot of up, takes a couple of years, but it pops, it resolves itself. Problem is, it's like we talked about earlier, student loan debt. You don't pay your loans. It's just a garnishment takes fifteen percent of your paycheck. It just drags and drags and drags. It eats away at income until we hit that twenty twenty five year point. So there's no popping of this new loan bubble. There's just this constant dragging down of people's expendable income. And that's the real problem with this. And that's why it's not getting better, because people clearly can't afford it. We're at the highest default rates we've seen in a decade. And it's not popping because it just drags on income just eats away more of the income. And when people start getting ahead a little bit. Well, that garnishment wraps up at 15 percent and it takes a little more. And that's the hard part.   [00:28:05] I feel like, you know, encouraging people to make more if you're you know, regardless of what you're making, you're taking 15 percent off the top of it for these garnishments.   [00:28:12] Well, you can get out of it. You can get a default. But, you know, it's this benefit cliff thing, too.   [00:28:17] Like, I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of benefit class where, you know, you earn a little bit more, but you lose so much for this gap period. And we see a lot of the lower income jobs where, you know, someone might make $15 an hour and they get a raise to eighteen dollars an hour, but their net is less because they lost benefits. They've lost maybe free childcare. It's the same thing with loan debt because the best ways to get a garnish are you sue loan garnishments is to rehabilitate your school loans. But that requires nine monthly payments first. So you have this nine month period of time where people are still subject to their garnishment, but they have to make a payment too. And so it's like you've got to really have a significant jump in income before they're able to like get out of the. Vicious cycle. It's like all we're doing is punishing these people that are down. And it's not easy. And so, yeah, making a little bit more isn't necessarily helpful. You have to have a sizeable job. And that's the hard part.   [00:29:15] And I did a lot of research so I could sound knowledgeable when you came on the podcast. So I was doing some research last few days and nights. I'm not sure a lot of people understand that when things go south, if they get out of college and things in your personal life go south, you you've always got the option to declare bankruptcy. That sort of thing. We've had you know, we've had podcast episodes on that. Student loan debt is one of those things that the government says is not included in a bankruptcy. So the government's always going to get their money. And I'm sure a lot of people understand that. Is that something is that an accurate statement on my part that does not get wiped away by bankruptcy?   [00:29:52] Well, it's rare. Let's not say that you can't wipe it away in bankruptcy. It's it's very rare to get it wiped away because once again, what's the collateral? The collateral is earnings.   [00:30:01] So when you go to a bankruptcy judge and they have all your debts there and they're looking at your student loans, particularly that you include them and the judge is looking at it and they're like, well, you make no money. Why aren't you on an income driven repayment plan paying zero dollars a month? Why would I eliminate this debt when your monthly payment is zero? There's no reason to. And that's the problem that people don't realize is why you're not getting a discharge in bankruptcy. It's rare because if you actually are disabled, well, there's disability discharge on your loans. They get forgiven. And if you don't have any income, your monthly payment is zero. So the judge looks at you like, why would I forget discharge if it's just you have to have a very rare circumstance of, you know, maybe it's private loans and there's some health care issues and you make just above the poverty line. Things like that, that there are some cases. It just it's so rare to get them forgiven because there's so many options. And as long as you have a potential to earn money in the future, the judge is going to make you pay him or set it as an income driven repayment amount. And you're going to pay if you earn more, it's going to pay more. That's just that's the problem. It's people don't realize that collateral piece.   [00:31:09] And the reason I brought that up is I just wanted to, you know, like you and Mike had said earlier, you just can't ignore the situation. They're not going. It's not going to go away. You got you got a head head on and try and figure it out. And that's where your Web sites come in. That's kind of leading me up to, you know, you've got another company called Loan Buddy that I was doing some research on. Could you talk to us a little bit about the student loan counseling and things that you've got going? How long, buddy?   [00:31:35] Yes, we created loan buddy to be a DIY solution to help you navigate your C loan debt.   [00:31:40] So we've talked in this short period of time of so many options and forgiveness programs and repayment plans. It's confusing. So what loan buddy does for free as you put in all your information? I'll tell you the best repayment plan. And you can take that. You go do it yourself. I'm not here to try to like Damu or anything like that, but we do have some paid upgrades. If you want your paperwork done, if you want some tracking tools, if you want to know if you're qualified for PSL. And the government actually says you're qualified. Like we track all that within loan, buddy. You can upgrade and get those paid services. But the promise of loans is there's a lot of options. There's over one hundred and fifty different options for your loans. Believe it or not. And that's where you get analysis paralysis. There's just so many options. Am I doing the right thing? And I, you know, getting the best payment I can do. I qualify for loan forgiveness. That's what loan buddy seeks to solve. And, you know, there's also a bunch of financial advisors that use it. So we have two parts. The business one part is the direct to consumer, but one part is financial advisors that use it to advise their clients. But these are financial advisors that are extremely knowledgeable, wants to loans as well. They use our software and you can connect with those advisors. If you're looking for someone, help you navigate it. We recommend that for high earners, people with complex situations like doctors and professionals like that that are married, that there's a lot of leverage. You can put your student loans. But it requires so much planning and different things. So you know, something to consider as well.   [00:33:06] Would that be a good place to start? If you think you're thinking about this person who just graduated with a ton of student loan debt and you know, people are you've talked about how people are putting things off till later in life. You know, people aren't getting married or having kids. So they're late 20s now when he used to be average age twenty. You know, that gets a go, right? Somebody who graduated but doesn't want to put that off five years.   [00:33:25] Do you recommend is there. You recommend them to maybe put some things on hold and take this to loan debt or to manage the payments on to income driven so they can start maybe doing other things like buying a house, having a family and things like that, or how you kind of help them decide which way is best for them?   [00:33:40] Yeah, I'm a huge believer in financial balance. Make sure you're servicing the loans for as you know what you need to don't don't go into default, get your monthly payment that you can afford, but start investing.   [00:33:51] Because the other thing is you can the biggest thing when it comes to investing is time. It doesn't matter how much you throw at it, it's time. So you're never going to get twenty two back, you know, like. You can only put one hundred dollars a month in. And even if that's just like a or one K match from your employer, do it, because if you wait until you're 30, like you've lost eight years of time, that you're just never gonna get back at all. That means for your future is you're gonna have to throw so much more money at it to make up for lost time. And so I'm a big believer in taking advantage of free money, especially if you can't afford it. So we set for a one K match, maybe HSA match. A lot of employers are doing that now. If you guys are familiar with the health savings accounts and some of those aren't even matches, like a lot of those are like we'll give you a thousand dollars, you'll get your annual physical. You're even better. You have to throw your own money and you can just get free money from your employer. Right. You can invest that and you just do that every year until you start getting a little more cushion in your budget and then you can reassess. But don't dismiss the free money early on and finding that balance of saving and investing and paying off your debt because it's a matter of time to you.   [00:35:01] That's awesome. You have time in the market is better than time in the market. And that's why I get kind of not going to say concern.   [00:35:07] But, you know, you hear the Dave RAMSI's of the world and they say don't, don't invest a dollar until you have every cent paid off. And, you know, I think there's a lot of concern with that advice, especially. You said you never gonna get twenty two back in those eight years, 20 to 30. Man, from the time pounding standpoint that can do it. Just wonders when you're ready to use it 20, 30 years later down the road.   [00:35:29] One hundred percent. I'm with you. Like, that's one piece of advice. I do disagree with Dave on because, you know, like, let's just say your employer matches you 5 percent like one. You're right.   [00:35:38] I notice the 5 percent out of your budget, but 2, you're giving up a 5 percent bonus on your money. It's like why are you leaving free money on the table that like literally could be going towards your future? And that's crazy because, you know, like it's a pretax deduction. You're barely gonna notice. Like, put the money away. You might not have anything outside of, like, that kind of thing early on to invest and save, like take advantage of what you can and you won't regret it. I've never heard anyone say, man, I regretted putting all that money in my foro okay. When I was younger, like no one says that.   [00:36:14] Nice. Now, you've talked about addressing the debt side of it. You have some some information on your Web site about the income side of it. How would a person go about taking care of both sides, you know, getting an extra $800 a month or creating multiple streams of income? What are your recommendations for these new students coming out of college for building up their income?   [00:36:39] Well, that's what I'm most bullish on, and that's my story, right? So I had forty two thousand dollars in debt. I paid it off in about three and a half years, but I did it by side hustling.   [00:36:47] So I got my job and I was working. But then I was also selling stuff and flipping it on eBay to the tune of about two thousand bucks a month. I started a blog like you can make so much money today on the side and it's like, what are you doing? Nobody's really working 80 to 100 hours a week. That's very rare, especially when you're a new entry level employee. You're maybe working 40 to 50 hours a week. And when you're young, like in your 20s, you probably don't have kids yet, probably don't have a significant other yet like you have this time in your day. So when you get off work, what are you doing with your hours? Are you just sitting and watching Netflix? Are you, you know, playing video games and spending money versus earning it? So I'm just a big fan of going out and earning it, because for most people, one hundred dollars a month can be game changing and you can earn one hundred dollars a month like driving for rideshare for like eight to 10 hours. And so, you know, you do that for an hour a day for two weeks. Boom, you have it. It's not sexy. Your friends are gonna judge you and think you're really weird and your family might be worried about your safety. But you know what? They're also going to judge you in five years when you're debt free, you're achieving your financial goals. And then like like, how did he get there? I don't understand. Like, you know, but because they're all going to forget that you were driving for Uber for two years. Right? Like, it's just funny how people do that. But it's it's so much mental like psychology that you think that people are going to think of you weirdly. But like, you know, they also will judge you when you're successful. So just go earn more money when you have the time and ability to care.   [00:38:21] Some are millennials not investing because of student loan debt, loan debt. Are you seeing them not get in the market and wait until, you know, late 20th to even think about investing? And if so, why do you think that it is? I mean, education.   [00:38:37] Yeah, they were so like they are investing much more these days. But yeah, there was a significant delay because, you know, millennials now like they're in their late 20s and early 30s like they are.   [00:38:48] And I you know, I saw millennials, you know, over 100 green net networth when that wasn't thought of five years ago on average.   [00:38:56] Right. So they definitely delayed investing. But there's a couple of things. They don't also trust financial planners. So they don't invest in.   [00:39:03] Traditional ways that I think a lot of people thought of and the rise of all these apps have actually made it easier for millennials to invest. But, you know, they're not investing smart. I don't think, you know, when you see the Robin Hoods in the stash and the acorns, like it's great that they're putting some money in, but they're also trading and doing things they shouldn't. And maybe that's OK, because they're going to learn some lessons early on in life and maybe change their ways. But they need to invest. They need to invest more. And they're starting to. They really are. But we also have enjoyed a 10 year bull market that may be changing. And, you know, so when they invested less, they got outsized returns that they might not see going forward. And so it's hard like you. They just got to do more of it and continue it. And then it's going to be a really interesting year, I think, and how they handle changes, because, you know, statistically it was inevitable that we were going to see a change in the course of the market. And, you know, it's probably a lot of millennials first experiences in a potential downturn. Right. They grew up in 2007/2008. They don't really have any money to see it. Maybe they saw their parents and stuff and now they're experiencing it themselves for the first time.   [00:40:20] Thanks a lot. Corona virus, everything.   [00:40:23] I mean, it's just a couple statistic. You can blame it on one thing or the other thing. But like when we're at it historically, the second longest bull market in history.   [00:40:32] Yeah, like just stats.   [00:40:34] I don't know what's to blame. It's just it's just going anyways. It's going to. Yeah. You know, like literally you can it's like roulette. Right. You can keep spinning and hitting it, hitting it, hitting it. You're going to miss at some point which is EXELL against you.   [00:40:46] You know, now you've got the long buddy that you DNP basically with the upgraded version of it. Does that offer a one on one coaching program where you actually help them. So the paperwork out form to do that sort of thing. Programs for coaching?   [00:41:01] No. So the system actually takes care of all that for. So it's a DIY handles that I've actually gone away from one on one coaching. But we also connect you with the financial planners because that's the thing with student loan debt is the enemy as loan debt is the scam.   [00:41:15] Companies are so many scam companies that prey on them and robo calls and things. And, you know, we don't want to be I don't want to be a coach for you and know your financial life. That's why we have financial planners that are literally CFD and CFA and they are licensed professionals. That is fiduciary responsibility to you or we have the DIY approach where you can get all your information, put it in and do it yourself. Or you could just use our tool, validate what you're doing and go do it yourself 100 percent without upgrading. And so I've gone away from the coaching, but we definitely have a range of offerings, kind of whatever suits your needs.   [00:41:53] Simon, one more for you actually is people hear a lot about not wanting to get their kids in the same debt that they that they got in in 529 plans are thrown around a lot.   [00:42:04] And you think that's an effective way to save for future college generations? Are there better ways to do it?   [00:42:09] No, I think the 529 plan is one of the best ways to save for college. But this is what I also say is the airplane analogy. Right. You got to put the mask on yourself before you put on your kids.   [00:42:20] And for a lot of parents, they see this with their student loans. Now they're struggling and they they're also taking care of their parents. Right. And they're like, I don't want to be a burden to my kids. Well, the best way you could not burden your kids is to handle your own financial house, like literally save for your own retirements. First, make sure your debts paid off so that when your kids are in their 30s and having kids, you're not having to move back in with them and be a burden. Right. And so that's number one. Number two is between nines are great. But how I think that most people should be leveraging is asking people instead of a gift give to my kids 529 plan. And we saw this in our family and it's worked out really well because I don't know if you guys have kids. I have to. And my gosh, they have a birthday or Christmas. It's like Santa gives them a gift. We give my gift. Their sibling gives them a gift. And then it's like grandma shows up with two other grandma shows up with two. It's like the kid has 40 presents. By the time Christmas is over. But then literally on December 26, they're playing with two of them. The rest of them are literally not even touched. And so one of the things we changed is that we've asked all the extended family, like, stop buying crap. No one needs the crap. Like, if you want to, you don't have to, but like, send the money into their 529 plan. And that's worked really well. They usually get, you know, every grandparents giving them 50 bucks into their 529 plan. But here you are six years later, they each have a few thousand bucks. And that's just continuing to grow. And we get the added win of the kids now getting five just six presents for Christmas instead of 40. And they're still just as happy like no one's any less. So win, win, win right there. Hundred percent. And you know, now instead of them throwing away 50 bucks at Target or Wal-Mart. Buying a toy, they're giving it to somebody that's going to actually be very valuable. And so I'm a huge believer of that fusilli ramified joint and gifting. And of course if you do have any extra money, you can throw it in there. But that's after you've saved for yourself. First, as a parent, take care of yourself, your retirement, your needs. Then look at a 529 save for college directly.   [00:44:24] Awesome.   [00:44:26] Oh, this has been a lot of information for the people and I appreciate you.   [00:44:31] And given this and also the fun, we could talk for hours on this man. I think it's such a such an important subject today. And yeah, there's where we can people go to find out more about this and connect with you more if they need to.   [00:44:45] Yes. And go to the college investor dot com. And we have all this information there, if you want to look at it.   [00:44:50] Lombardi, a trade deal is do loans, you get a loan, but you got us and you can enter your info and get started for free and see if you're doing the right things with your loans. Perfect.   [00:45:00] Excellent. Great information. Thank you for helping our listeners get a hand on their student debt.   [00:45:06] Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me, guys. That was great. Thank you, guys.   [00:45:10] All right, Larry. That was Robert Var. in man. How good was that man?   [00:45:15] I didn't know a lot of the stuff that he was talking about. It's just, you know, expand your knowledge base a little bit when you start finding out some of the different methods and and some of the the size of the problem in the country today. You know, the epidemic of student loan debt, people coming out of the college with record amounts of student debt, that's just phenomenally bad for everyone. So, yeah. And bad for you.   [00:45:41] Bad for everyone. Like you said, the economy. People are doing things that way later than they used to historically because because of this student loan debt.   [00:45:48] People aren't buying houses. People aren't starting families and having kids. Those are really generation. Really. Those are big things for what spur the economy. You know, down the road when those kids, you know, start entering the workforce. So, yeah, this is like large, large implications to our future economic outlook. So, yeah, definitely a big problem. And we teed up their intro. It's such a crazy problem and, you know, such a large problem to tackle when people are looking at such a large amount of student loans. So it's really, truly awesome that Robert was able to come through and give some advice and give some resources for people who might tap this.   [00:46:23] Yeah. And, you know, I've got my my kids are twenty three and twenty one and they both just graduated from college.   [00:46:29] And you know, they they can really afford to take on all their own bills right now. You know, it's tragic. They're still on her cell phone bills, our car insurance, things like that. And the pay her basically my wife and I are trying to help them as best you can, but you got to try and give them a leg up. Robert is one of those ones that I'm actually going to send this this, I guess, on to them and say, listen up.   [00:46:52] Yep.   [00:46:53] And actually, since we're on the subject, man, on a future episode, we will want to dove a little bit deeper into maybe how to do college a little bit cheaper without leaving. It was with, you know, this massive amount of debt. Well, to find an expert in that space around college hacking and, you know, getting as much financial aid and financial grants and things like that as possible. So we can, you know, maybe instead of worrying over how to pay off the debt, how to I get in debt in the first place through college.   [00:47:19] But again, as I mentioned on the podcast. Well, Mike Rowe works. Mike Rowe is a big proponent of the tech schools. And that's where we sent my son.   [00:47:27] And I'm a huge proponent of the tech schools. You know, you have to go to college for something that's just, you know, educational. You can go with educational tech and then get a job right out of college, making probably more than I did. More than I do, like my son did. And jealous of him.   [00:47:46] You mean I shouldn't spend 60 grand or 80 grand on a philosophy degree? I'm not saying you shouldn't.   [00:47:53] I'm just saying if that's what you choose to do, you may you may have a difficult time finding a job after that. You never know. But don't discount the tech schools. You know, you shouldn't feel bad about going to a tech school at all.   [00:48:07] It's. Yeah. No, I love Robert's view around looking at college from the a wide lens like, yes, I'm going to get this degree. But what is my return on this investment going to be? And I think that is nobody. I never thought about college and in that sense before. And I think that that's kind of that mental shift that needs to happen when we're looking at college. Yes, it can be a useful tool, but what am I going to get out of it in return? Is it going to have the R.O. either return on investment to make it worth the six figures? It might cost you to get that college degree.   [00:48:39] Yeah, absolutely. So start thinking about all your options and and make sure that make sure you pick wisely for the return on your investment. So what's the wants to call the action we've got tonight?   [00:48:51] Like I called action from Robert was just get organized. If you're working through a starting trend to tackle this, this kind of a massive problem in.   [00:49:03] I'm kind of this David and Goliath type situation where you're dealing with such a massive debt. You know, just get organized. We. We had a show back, I don't know, four or five now I think was assessing your financial situation where we talked about how you can organize your debts in a way that makes sense and you can tap them efficiently. Kind of the same thing here. Get all of your student loans. Figure out who you owe money to, to what amount in the interest rates. And then I'll just give you a starting point for the for the game plan. Right. You needed epic Inclan for this debt. And if you don't know where you're at, you're not going to be able to make that game plan. So once you have that, there is a couple resources that Mr. Ferrington mentioned that you can go out to, which was, Larry, if I'm remembering correctly, it was loan buddy dot com.   [00:49:45] Lombardi wasn't one of them. It wasn't at that us, wasn't it?   [00:49:50] I think loan buddy dot us loan body dot org and assessing your financial situation while you're looking that up on Google I believe was episode 3 or 4. So that was more like thirty seven, thirty eight episodes ago because you can believe we're almost up to the fiftieth episode. We need to have something special for our 50th episode.   [00:50:11] You know we said a long buddy that. Yes you are correct sir.   [00:50:19] So, so long buddy. That U.S. is the no go in there and it's a free service that he offers and it helps you get to the point where you can get a handle on your your student loan debt.   [00:50:33] Yeah. All right. Any anything else?   [00:50:36] No, that's everything I've got. Read listen to it. If you need to go back to listen to Episode 3 or 4, assessing your financial situation and, you know, just get a handle on it.   [00:50:46] Awesome. Cool. Thank you guys for tuning into another episode of the Real Estate Marathon podcast. See you next time.   [00:50:51] Thank you everyone for listening to the real estate marathon. I guess if you found value in any of the content from this show, consider supporting us in the following ways. Subscribe to the Real Estate Marathon podcast. Leave a rating and review. Continue the conversation with like minded individuals on social media by heading over to the Real Estate Marathon Gas Facebook Group or follow us on Instagram and Twitter. Add real estate marathon. Buy gas.   Farrington launched TheCollegeInvestor.com from his home in 2009​, while finishing his MBA at the UC San Diego Rady School of Management. Being passionate about investing and personal finance, he wanted to connect with others who shared his passion. Not finding what he was looking for on campus, he created TheCollegeInvestor.com as a resource for young adults about money, covering topics from paying for college and escaping student loan debt, to investing their first dollars after graduation. Since then, Robert Farrington has shared his successful student loan and wealth building expertise with thousands of ​young adults, both online, in person, and as a contributor to major publications such as Forbes and Huffington Post. The San Diego native's drive to help others and "geekiness" have fueled his work as a blogger, journalist, entrepreneur, and family man. Farrington earned a Bachelor's of Arts in Political Science from UC San Diego, and an MBA from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego. Passionate about his family, FinTech, and watching the latest Marvel movie, Farrington resides in San Diego with his wife and son.

Hello and welcome to warrior divas real talk for real women. Our show is specifically designed for divas. divas is an acronym for Destin inspired victorious accountable sisters. And we will be bringing guests on our show who will help in our mission to equip and empower a global community of women change agents as we make a positive impact on the world we live in. When we started doing this impact about four years ago, we quipped that we wanted to change the way women think and speak about themselves and others. And as we progress that was our thinking and our intentions and we want to talk about things that are impacting women. So that means we will talk about faith, family, fitness, finance, dude, and a lot of other words that don't even begin with that. So today I'm excited to bring on the show Lucy Mitchell are fierce in beautiful wellness, and I met Lucy through her husband I've been watching her for a little while and have fallen in love with her beautiful outlook on life. Lucy is a mindset and wellness coach site. Colin fitness fanatic food lover look, we got some of those f words in there. And all around personal development junkie she helps women break free from their inner mindset demons and create healthy relationships with food and fitness and define their self worth and find the confidence to live a life of purpose on their own terms. Welcome to the show, Lucy. Thank you, thank you. Well, I am so thankful to have you on the show and you know, it's a little bit of one of those things that I'm listening to what you're talking about and and what your mission is and, and it lines up so much with what we wanted to do and what we are hoping to accomplish with empowering and equipping women. I think it's it's just beautiful. So first off, I want to tell I want you to give us a little bit about what Why this is important to you? Oh, gosh, I mean, I think that I would probably have to go to a little bit of a backstory in myself. I mean, I'm first of all, I'm one of four daughters that my father had. So that in itself, there's lots of events going on in that house with my mother. And in fact, they always had a habit of choosing even female animal that was all about a daddy, there was a glutton for punishment, or he was a sweetheart, through and through. But he did raise him and my mother always did raise us to be very strong willed, very independent woman. And I said something that I've always carried through my entire life and probably proved very difficult and a lot of my relationships that I was not so much of what you call quote, unquote, a submissive woman. I just always do what I want. To do what I wanted out of life, and I wanted all my relationships, no matter what they were friendships, personal relationships, my children to live vicariously through that just, you know speak your truth. Speak your mind and and live your life to the fullest. And I really, it really hit to my core when my dad passed away suddenly, actually yesterday he realized it was five years that cancer took him from us. And in fact I woke up this morning going oh my gosh, I didn't even reflect or or anything about that which is a good thing because that means that we're you know, we're at peace with you know, his passing but I had decided about a couple of years ago. A that that cancer is is one of those that doesn't put the word I'm looking for it's it's it knows no boundaries. It's not just hereditary. It can affect anything. One right and, and that it's really important that we look for the signs and that we pay attention to ourselves. And as women, we spend so much time taking care of others that we don't stop and listen to ourselves and and listen to our own bodies and take care of our own needs. And that's where I decided, you know, that's not okay, we should be able to speak out and take care of ourselves. And so I just started like looking inward and decided I wanted to become a transformational nutritional coach. And I wanted to start working with women and in the pyramid upon women a problem phase of their lives, because that's the phase where we just given up, we have no purpose. We were just, it's all about our kids. It's all about our husbands. It's all about everybody else, and we no longer have a voice and by the time we have a voice, we feel it's too late. And I'm like, I'm techno sister. You have a voice and it's time to use it. And that's what my purpose has been. Is, is taking this drive that I have to live healthier to speak your truth to link arms with other sisters and just, you know, whatever it is, whether it's licensing, whether it's spiritual, whether it's sexual, whether its food, whether it's fitness, no matter what it is, it's like your children will be fine. Take the time to take care of yourself. Exactly where I'm at. Well, I think you bring up a beautiful point because a lot of the times those of us that are in those older years of life in we're not old, we're not dead. We we have a lot to give up, live up to and, and one of the things that I hear all too often is it's not only that they've given up, it's because a lot of times they've been so invested in helping their children. Or their spouse build up their dreams that they forgot how to dream. They didn't they don't know how to dream anymore. And they just don't have the energy to move forward with anything anymore. And a lot of that has a lot to do with Fitness, Health, the food you're putting in your body, your hormones, and like you said, they give up. I can relate to this because about a year or two ago, I was pretty much in the same place. I was. Okay, something has got to change. This is not right. Some I feel like something's hijacking my body and and what I found is there's a lot of women out there that feel that they just have to suffer silently. And I love that you're saying that's not true. I agree. And I think the other F word that we're all set is fear. Mm hmm. Exactly. Here I have the women that I have talked to is fear not a change but of making a change because they have gotten so stagnant are so used to a certain routine, a monotonous routine of doing things. It's, I want to say and I mean I'm 45 years old I've had three children I have four of my stepdaughter, but I've had four children and mentally and physically I do not feel 45 but I've also made that my passion drive like not because I remember watching my mom grow up and personalities eyes is probably today 65 right and and even then some 65 there are 45 I mean, all just depends on on your your drive to be something different, but I remember there was a cartoon and I'm gonna really date myself but way before I was born, Black and White, probably from Disney, but it was just as monotonous black or white. Whether they were just a repetitive cartoon like they had briefcases and they were just walking slowly along the line to work. And it just, it was just repetitive. They're just doing the same thing. over and over and over again, in no power, there was no life, there was no activity. And I feel like I see so many women feel that that's what they're supposed to do. Get up, feed the children take care of the husband clean the house, go to bed, right. And when I reach out to when I reach out even to some of my close friends about like, hey, there's this amazing women's conference downtown and we're going to put samples of face creams on our feasts and, and and you know, sample whatever is in here from concept. Well, I'm not no I don't and, and, you know, what will people think? Right now Like First of all, let's see if we can find something new and something done and and like let's get away from the kids away from the husbands and you know we're old I've discovered this amazing you know, like I lost 35 pounds in August give a listen to my body and I and I, you know I it's like to share all the different things that have worked for me for stepping outside of what the norm is. And I want to link Everybody with me I want to take all my sisters with me. And there's so much more there's so much fear. Well, yeah, and I agree with you on that. I think I think we have a lot of women that I listen to and and I'm surrounded by a bunch of strong women so a lot of my friends are kind of in the same boat I am their husband goes to work their husband goes on business trips, they just keep on keepin on they don't let their life be dictated by their their spouses schedule or their kids schedule. They still make time for friends. They still make time for their business, they still make time for living their life. But I realized that there's a out circle of women that I'm connected to, that that's all their life revolves around. It may be for the season, it may be that that's all they know how to do. And one of the things that it like it goes back to that fear word, word, you know, they don't want to rock the boat, so to speak. But I think it also goes back to how we're raised and what we're seeing and what's emulated for us. You talked about your dad being outnumbered by daughters Do you know? Well, he probably didn't, he didn't probably run the house, the house probably ran, you know, by the daughters more than then he would have liked to admit it admitted. But there's that that sense of confidence and ability that he instilled in you to where if your kids or your husband move on, yes, you're going to be you know, to business or to A career path or off to school, you're not going to be wrecked by that because you've got things of your own to do. It doesn't mean you're sitting waiting for Eric to come home. It doesn't mean you're waiting for your kids to come home for your life to be complete. And that's the part that we're wanting to women to realize is you are a complete human being with or without them. They are just, they are your life. You love them. It doesn't disqualify their role in your life, but they are not your your wholeness, and we want to talk about your wholeness. Yeah, yeah, exactly. My mom and dad were married for 44 years. And my dad did work. He worked. He owned his own landscaping business and then he was also a longshoreman. Very tough job. Yeah. So my mom did raise us Basically solely, I mean, our celebrations were around food. Because God was home, right? Um, you know, and it's funny when we were just together. My sister my younger my baby sister just had a baby. And he's where we sold. I just went home to go and meet him for the first time. And we were reminiscing and we were talking about how I remember when it was like Danny was home we celebrated with hungry man. You could put it in your body. Yeah, the look of joy on my dad's face wanting to meet that sounds very state hungry man dinner with the apple cobbler and the water down mashed potatoes. But it was all of us watching him eat and sitting with him because that was a rare key. Right? And what I look back on and see is that there wasn't a lot of light and color in my mom's face because what What he did in those hours to work for his daughters and his wife versus the hour during the day of what she did to keep the children alive in the house of flow. I saw that color changes we got older because she had more time and she was able to start doing things for herself. She ended up becoming a professional chef for a very small company. When I think it was close to me more moving out and still to my younger two sisters. Wow. And it was one of the things I took with me even later on was that, okay, it is okay to find your own interest outside like you're talking about outside of your role of wife and mom. And what I loved was that my dad always encouraged that. And my sisters and I have been very, very fortunate to marry husband to have always encouraged and supported any of our ventures and I believe me for I've had many years, for 21 years, I went to college for 10 years to either become an accountant, a business something and blatantly Was it a master's degree in education, I was going to be a teacher. Oh, wow. And now I'm going to become a I'm a transformational nutritional coach. Um, and God bless my husband for supporting every single one of those ventures. It but it's it was for me it was going back and like, knowing that my mom had that supportive my dad because she supported him. So just keep the house afloat, like keep food on the table. and whatnot. Exactly. And, and, you know, I think, I think we think, how do I phrase this? I think a lot of the times we as modern women think our role has changed so drastically from the quote unquote, olden days, but when you look back and You know, I'm going to use the Bible as a reference here. If you look back in the days of Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and all of them, the men went off, they went off to tin the sheep, they went off to hunt, they went off to gather, you know, they did all of that. And the women were left to take care of the home to take care of the children to take care of, you know, things that are holding the fort down, so to speak. And even even as recent as yesterday, it was Texas Independence Day here, somebody was talking about that as well. Excuse me, but in talking about that, women are afraid nowadays to be left behind by their their spouse or their children, and we're hearing more about the empty nest in their lives being just totally distraught over their children going off to college. And I'm not gonna say that I don't miss my kids. I'm not gonna say that at all. But what I'm going to say Is it opens up the doors for us to spread our wings and we need to be focused on spreading our wings not hiding away and into a shell of ourselves. It's funny that you say that because I have this is my philosophy and I have my mother philosophy of your viewers or your listeners think this is harsh. It's my philosophy. Once you're 18 you graduate you go, right need to go you need to spread your wings. Now, I understand if there might be a maybe a there's an emotional or a non mental but there's some type of a disconnect you haven't connected yet. I'll give you a little bit of time back just gonna kick you out and send you have you fend for yourself against wolves, but I came home one day and they were boxing by the German moms and she got a time we got to go. Right I was almost 19 she had found me a place. I had a job. I think that you know, but that was how I was raised. I do not understand. And I think I've done a post about this somewhere. I do not understand mom's neighbor say, No, no baby, you don't need to you need to you want to live here till you 30 you use you stay there done. Right. Right. Your job. It's your time now. Yeah, I agree. And I was raised in a very strict Christian home, and I read the Bible five times, through through, I did not see anywhere. Then it said in any fine print. You know, they can stay as long as they want. They need to go and you know, create their own household and, and live their lives. You raised them. And now it's your turn. I mean, I have the nice Do we have it like a countdown on them. Turn I've been raising children since I was 12 years old. I am right. It's my time. I want time with my husband. I want it to be just we'll check on you guys. We might even give your address Well, I think I think there's a term called leaving cleave, you know, leaving cleave to something else, not us. Do not give me grandchildren. Raising children, younger sister, so do the world a favor and get a dog grandchildren. And so I'm technically a grandmother. And they look at me and I and my girlfriends are like, really? I'm not saying I don't like babies. I love babies. Right? Like people. In today if you need to travel you need to see the world. You need to contribute any to You need to contribute to charitable causes you need to help other you know, other countries. Now we need to we need to go to Nashville we need to help Nashville right now like right. so horrible what happened in the middle of it. There's so many more important things that need to be focused on then Okay, you're 18 go get married and have children. Exactly. They go and do that they can't fend for themselves and then they come back well in and and i agree we've had we've had a we've got a son that's in the military. We've had had daughters that went off to college, they came back for a period of time and we're we were at the same place of Okay, the clock has started. What What is your action plan what you know, will be a safe place for you to land come back and land if you need to, but yeah, what's the action plan? What's the end result? I kept resetting the timer on the microwave. When my son came home from college. I was like, go take it. And and I, but they appreciate that they think it's hard, you don't understand they're like, No I do sweetheart, things have got changed just because it's, you know, it's 2020, the millennial state of mind is not a mind, I understand, because you do not understand the hardship that those of us who are our older actually went through. Well, and I think I think we also understand how important it is for them to have their independence and to, you know, it's not even just about me for for for my kids, I want them to be strong and solid and independent on their own right, and making good decisions and making a good income and making, you know, good life choices. I don't want them feeling like they're under my wing the whole time because I haven't trained them all these years to stay under my wing. I've trained them to push them out of the nest. Yeah, well And it's like I even told my elder to I have given my mind my body my soul My spirit my everything to raising you and keeping you alive right now trying to invest all of those efforts and energies back into myself. Right? Because I still have the second half of my life and that is equally as important as the rest of your life. So if we're going to roll the dice and mover important at this point, you know it's and and that is I that's what I like to also talk to my clients about it like this is now your time and dive into I really big about faith about whether when no matter what it is, God fear if universe angels whatever it is that you believe in. That is a huge when you lose that you lose yourself, yourself, your sense of self worth, right. And when you tap back in to that through meditation, through prayer through journaling, you're able to kind of like have your eyes reopen to who you really are as an individual, especially as a real woman as a woman. And a lot of times, it's a very uncomfortable process, but it's, it's step one, before we can do any other type of change, it's like, you've got to step back in, tap back into that spiritual sense of who you are, who you were created to be. Right. And, and we're gonna be going to break here in just a few minutes. But when we come back from that break, I want to I want us to talk about the difference between femininity and feminist. I think the feminist word gets, you know, thrown out there and everybody already thinks, you know, angry, bitter woman. But more so than that. I want us to talk about embracing our femininity because that's where our true strength is. I believe and and I love that you talk about this on such a transparent parent level. But I want us to dive into that when we get back from the commercial break so that we can really break that apart just a little bit. And then then we'll go into the fitness side of things after that, but we're gonna take just a couple of minutes to pay for the show with our sponsors, and we will be back in just a second. All right, we are back. And I know we talked before we left for the break in said we were going to come back and talk about embracing our femininity. So So Lucy, let's talk about that for a minute. I know years ago, I went to a women's conference because yes, I go to women's conference, biggest tomboy out there and I still go to women's conference conferences. And one of the ladies was talking about how The color scheme where you had pink for women and blue for men nowadays used to be actually the opposite. Back in the late 1800s to 19 hundred's blue was for women and pink, pink and red were for men. And so we keep mixing things up a little bit. And so when we talk about our femininity I've I left high school I joined the Navy, I worked as an aircraft mechanic then worked in the aviation industry. So in the military, I was called a dude with long hair, basically. But when we go into embracing our femininity, it took me a while to even figure out what that looked like because I had struggled so hard to try and fit in with my male counterparts that I didn't know how to be feminine. And I really didn't understand what feeling comfortable in my own body was and I really did And understand how that led to having close relationships with girls, you know as girlfriends, and what that was all about, because all my guy, all my friends were guys, and then I'm married. And you know my husband and I have this little competition going back and forth because I was trying to compete with him basically for his role in the family. And it ended us in a hot mess. But I want I want to hear a little bit of a taste because I've watched some of your Facebook posts and I've watched some of your talk about femininity and embracing it and really just discovering yourself and I want to hear how you feel to best translate to women the importance of embracing their femininity. I, first of all, I can honestly say I'm right there with you. I had more guys But I do call friends I just don't understand. I don't understand women. And again, I don't know if it was because of being raised by my gentle father I'm not sure what it is, but I know for for me I I can see I'm both sides of that sword in a sense that I can handle my own. But I am a I am I'm a I am a woman I am sweet, I am kind I am sexual I am I incense sensual, I am in tune with my my body and my senses and I'm comfortable in my own skin. I I don't feel and this again is my own opinion based on who I have seen and dealt with who is considered a feminist femininities the harshness that I'm not kidding. competition with my husband in the fact that who has the bigger package or however you want to work that right? Um, there is a role that he has and he is supposed to have. I want him to have that role. That's why I married him. He is our protector. He is our fighter. He, he's the man of the house. But if he needs a warrior right beside him, I am that woman. Right? Doesn't need another man. I am that woman. I am his Joan of Arc. As I like to so eloquently put that and I think in my messages when I am doing my posts or doing my stories is I like to I think I had done one A while ago where I was describing a road. So what from fairway you look at a rose and the roses Beautiful, beautiful, soft, pedal, scented beauty Mostly comes in a variety of colors, whether it's a tight flower or beautifully blooms, but if you get too close, you are going to get pricked by a thorn. Now, is that for the feminist part? Or is that the Thor's disorder protecting her femininity, right? It's all in how you want to look at the flower. But for me, I feel like all women are beautiful roses like we are. We have our authority to protect ourselves, but we are they're beautiful, we are feminine and there's no reason to hide that. to, to be ashamed of that. Is that's what that's how we were created. And not in a sense I mean, that's that's my, that's where I stand on that part of it. I mean, I feel I raising a daughter, raising two daughters when one's out of the house. I look at my daughter and I'm like, I want you to be as strong and I bought her this bracelet. And I said, always remember to adjust your crown. And don't have mine with the train thing. But always remember to adjust your crown. And remember the queen who gave it to you. Hmm, something along those lines, and she was amazing. I just want you to understand that no one is no one is to not knock you down. Because you need to remember where you came from, right who your queen is. Because people knocked me down. had a lot of horrible things happen. I've experienced a lot of things. I've experienced a lot of judgment. Even in the course of that I'm in now I get a lot of messages about some of my posts of like, I don't understand why you talk the way you talk or how you feel the way you feel. And there and it's a lot of times it's from women. And I just looked at my daughter and I said But it doesn't stop me. I'm just gonna get back up and I'm going to keep spreading my message because somebody needs to hear it. Somebody somebody else Can you benefit from what I have to say? Just like someone out there will benefit from what you have to give. And and I wholeheartedly agree with that. You know, one of the things that has happened over the years we started divas impact, like I said about four years ago. And right off the bat, we started getting a bunch of hate mail, mainly from feminist organizations, a few from guys, because they mistakenly thought that we were going to do this as another male bashing organization. And quite honestly, I've told everybody this is absolutely not a male bashing organization. We realize the need for men in our lives, just as we hope men realize the need for us in their lives. We we don't I'm not as concerned about what the guys of the world are saying about us women. I'm more concerned with what we are saying about ourselves and each other. You know, we you know, when You've got examples out there, like Real Housewives of bad behavior or bad girls clubs or whatever that's going on out there. They have the, the opportunity to, to send a such a empowering message. But they don't, you know, because drama sells. And when I was, you know, kind of whispered in my heart to start this organization and and get things going I was like but God I don't like women. I really don't like women their main they're nasty, you know and he's like, Yeah, you've had your episodes too and I'm like, okay, you know to Shay. And I remember a few years ago, whenever, whenever the Donald Trump and Billy Bush news broke, I got a lot of hate mail. You know, why aren't you denouncing Trump and why aren't you denouncing billy bush and why aren't you denounce? In and even with the Harvey Weinstein and, and all of those, and I said, because I'm not focused on them, I'm not letting them dictate my worth, I'm not letting them dictate the worth of all women out there. I'm working on me, I'm focusing on me. And, and and the women that I speak to, and I encourage and I empower and let them know that, yes, bad things can happen to you. But you don't have to live in a victim role anymore, you can live victoriously, and that's, you know, what we're focusing on is walking women out of those dark places. And so for the feminine femininity side of things, what I've also realized is, the more I've embraced my femininity, the more intimate my relationships have become with my girlfriends, the more intimate relationships have come with my family and with my spouse, it because I'm loving myself first before I learned how to love Anybody else and, and to me, that is the difference I see between, you know, saying I'm, I'm into feminism, or I'm into my femininity and and opening myself up to really love myself now loving yourself has a whole other series of side effects, I guess is what you'd call it kind of like a rolling blackout. There's just you start loving yourself and then you go, Oh, I love myself. So I'm gonna go to the doctor and get checked out and make sure I'm healthy. Oh, I love myself. The doctor says I could I could work on fixing these things. So I'm going to work on fixing these things to make sure my body is optimal. And I'm going I'm going to change the way I eat. We've got Kim Slater who does our magazine and and does a lot of the things behind the scenes for us. You know she's in that season right now. We'll have her on the show here in a few weeks. To talk about her health journey that she was flung into, as at the beginning of the year with a massive heart attack and, and in the lessons that she's having to learn for herself, but that whole femininity thing feeds so much of your life. It's what builds up your confidence that gets your husband looking at you with a little bit of, Hey, what do you do? And he's doing it in a way because he's more intrigued because he sees the woman that he was attracted to in the first place. It's interesting that you say that I'll quickly say that, you know, when I started my mild personal transformation last year, before that, you know, I was trying to help other other women men, it didn't matter. I just wanted everybody to be aware about cancer, you know, after losing my father and other health issues that attributed that I just didn't. My goal was I don't want anyone else to lose up Father a husband a daughter of themselves, like listen to the signs so I'm so like, driven like everybody needs to work out get up cheapest way to eat this much water. It was like what I woke up every day but that was my passion and I was ignoring my own health. I was ignoring my own grieving process I was ignoring my own fleet, my own health but mental health spiritual health all the things and as I I got a I did a post about this is something I can recall but I remember looking at a picture of myself. I think it was this past summer and I was like, I thought I was in optimal health working, working out six days a week, eating 1400 to 1600 calories a real food healthy greens all blah, blah, blah. meditating journaling, praying all the things that when I looked at myself I was pale bloated 45 pounds overweight. I just had to like look in my eyes and I was like, I stopped. And I was like, on this task to help other people, when did I stop and take care of myself first? Right. And as soon as I did, I mean as soon as we got home from that trip, I don't remember we went to sun river something. I immediately called a nutritional coach. But I knew right away my doctor just oh my gosh, yeah, go take a nap, you'll be fine. You know, I was like, okay, it's got to be deeper. And I started working with the nutritional coach and I and I stopped helping all the other people. I put everything on hold because I was like, I really wait. I'm suffering from vertigo. My hands are numb, my feet are numb. These are all things I was experiencing but ignore right because I was so passionate about helping other people live their best life and be healthy so you don't die like my daddy. That I I didn't you know, pay them for myself. But as soon as I did that the glow came back the weight when I found out I was insulin resistant. So Kyle was a huge thing. I was borderline type one diabetic. Yeah, the bad one. Yeah, um, I changed my eating habits. I, you know, we changed how I work out, changed how I slept, all of the symptoms went away, the weight falling off. And my husband even looked at me He's like, Oh, my God, baby are glowing. Right? People like, we're looking at my pictures, like, what filter are you using? Now using a filter, you're glowing, but your hair is shiny. And it was like, and I looked at myself, and I was like, I feel beautiful. I don't think and I'm not ashamed of this. This is what I want. Everyone's like, so I reevaluate everything but it was like I'm taking care of myself and like And I had no problem looking at. And hopefully it's okay to say that I had no problem looking in the mirror naked. Right? Because that's a woman as a woman, especially after you've had children. Right with the lights on girl, right? Ugly bathroom lights on, right? Like, that's hard to do, but I didn't know I was like, I am feeling myself right now. Now I'm not gonna go into a changing room lighting and I'm loving and feeling beautiful. I feel sexy. I still sleep. I feel gentle. I feel happy. Because I took care myself first. Right, feel feminine. And that wasn't a feeling I felt all before that is so harsh, hard, poor like, ready to take on the world and compete with everybody else and that wasn't feminine. I don't know if that was coming. Right. Well and I think one of the one of the things we we hear a lot of the times is or you know, I worked in the faith base area before I started out on my own after leaving the corporate arena and I went from dressing like a dude because I was always in jeans and T shirt and then I went to work in the church offices. And I knew I needed to look female but I was just how do I I was putting the outer surfaces on it was like treating the symptoms without treating the actual cause. And I would put on an outfit that everybody go oh that looks so cute on you and I would feel the most uncomfortable ever. And it had nothing to do with the outfit. It had everything to do with the skin I was walking around in I did not feel comfortable in myself. And you know you're talking about people sending you the hate messages and and then asking you what filters you use. You use and things like that, which, you know, they're thinking You look amazing. But on the other side, they're also kind of giving a second backhanded compliment, you know, oh, you can't look that good person. And I remember when we started getting those hate messages, first thing I did, I stood up, I dropped my laptop down, and I stood up and I did a little happy dance. Because it's getting people off their balance a little bit. It's getting them to look at things through a different perspective. Making them question something for themselves will have so and so can do it then maybe I can too. Or what the heck is Angie, the biggest tomboy, we know doing starting a women's organization. What gives her the right i mean, i i've had women go, Oh, that's cute. I'm like, okay, you know, and now they're going well, how do we get in your magazine? How do we get on your show? How do we do this? I'm like, well, there's a process but we're friends. Okay, but there's still a process. And I'm not doing that to be mean or ugly. But, you know, I am looking for the people that want in and want in at the at the ground level, because that means that they understand the vision and the mission, we're going after they're not coming in with ulterior motives to go, Hey, you know, this is great, but let's do this. And, and let's steer this your vision, your goal, your passion, let's steer it to the right a little bit or to the left a little bit, so it fits more of what we want. No, this is what we're going for. This is our niche. This is what we're working on, is equipping and empowering women period, in a variety of different ways. And they're like, oh, bitch, it'd be so much better if you'd sign on with, you know, this organization or that organization and I opened up the organization's page and it's just male bashing and, and hating on each other and Like, yeah, not what we're about. It doesn't resonate. Yeah. And so, when we start talking to women, I've watched women open up after going through all that they've gone through, I see what you're talking about, you see that physical transformation, the light bulb moment that comes on, and their whole life changes. And in, you know, I've shared before that, you know, being a veteran, I'm tied to a lot of veteran communities and and I'm telling you, my veteran sisters are the worst of it. I love them to death. But oh my gosh, they wear me out, because they are so stuck in being a victim, but touting that they're a warrior, but they're living in a victim role, because they don't want to fix anything. And I guess that's our biggest uphill battle is how do we get them to hear it enough to where finally they get fed up and start doing something about it. Yeah, I know I that's it. That's an interesting question. I'm not sure. I mean, I again grazers to me I have all my outside family was actually own Navy. Okay. My first husband was Navy. I'm attracted to the servicemen and I think I got some army leaves in there somewhere. I'm not sure but my dad did not serve the police officer and then my mom got pregnant but and she was like, heck no, you need to come home every day. But I don't know if it's the year you spend. You know, somebody you're being told what to do, when to do how to do it that when you're out, right of that environment. You're like, what I mean, because I know that was part of the premises of like us starting the Lightfoot media. My husband starting that I mean when way back even when he was doing Your podcasts and things that when we first started this whole thing, it was like helping veterans get started because they spent so many years being told. When when to eat, when to make your bed, where to put your shoes on, when to shoot when to do all the things. And then when you're out, it's like nobody's telling you what to do. Right and when to do it. You don't do anything, but you got to do something. And, and I know that that that was that was helpful for a lot of veteran entrepreneurs with being able to go to Eric and him saying, Okay, this is how you start, but I'm you I can only get you so far. You've got to take it from there. Exactly. That might be it for the women desert you know, maybe that's that mindset of like, okay, switch it just a little bit and and remember what that authoritative voice of you being told what to do, and now tell yourself like, speak to yourself in that. Yeah, I mean, I and I like I said, I I'm just speaking from, from experience, veterans wife. Well, and you've had a front row seat to watch all of that. And do we want to go ahead and give you a shout out there? Because in addition to your hats that you wear for fierce and beautiful wellness as a coach there and leading people there, you've just been named CEO of life flip media, haven't you? Yeah. So yeah, yeah, that that is an amazing thing in itself as well. I asked if they came with a pay raise. He says, Wait, we get paid. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about that for just a few minutes. I'm not sure exactly what to say. I think he just woke up one day with a brilliant idea. No, actually, I think it's it's a great power move for him. Because he was actually wearing way too many hats and I, I think it's a great obviously it's a great move for it to be a women ran and owned business. It's a different type of demographic with a power move. So I know that there was a lot of driving behind that. But he takes a lot of guidance and advice of mine. And I really wanted him to be able to focus on what she's really good at, which is working with our customers. And you know, the me I don't understand that part of the business you know, the media bookings and the article places I that part of it I'm like I have too much going on and this three little head of mind when it comes to business when it comes to making sure that we are on the right path. And that our business plan, our business model needs tweaking or just seen or we're not that's my forte. Right? So we just decided to to do a title change. And and I think that puts us a little bit ahead of the game, especially being a woman. Yeah, having that see I mean, I my LinkedIn is blowing up ever since I changed that. Yeah, we're having a business meeting, in fact today because since he made that announcement, just that I know, but I mean, what we're getting into because I'm like, at the end of the day, this is his baby. This is his dream and his but we talked about it for the last year or so. And I just said when you're ready, then I will not lead you astray. Well, that what that is fabulous. You need to change your LinkedIn. I made it official. Yeah. Did you find out From one of his Facebook Lives, or did he actually tell you in person? He told me in person. But you never know. You know, Facebook or my Instagram Stories like what we're doing what I just saw that she didn't tell me. Oh, I literally in the next room. Yeah, you could just tell reviews. Exactly. All right. Yeah, it's an exciting experience for our business. We've had a massive amount of growth. And I want that growth to continue. So I needed him to be in the right, roll on to focus on that, right. Yeah. It's gonna be good. Yeah. And I think we are going to have him on our leading moment show in a few weeks. I've got to get him to get all the stuff together for us to do that. But having him on our leading moment show, to really talk about how to get started and how to do what he does. And encourage and inspire some small business owners on that page for us. So maybe you can join him when we do that call, but of course, yeah, it'll be a black. Yeah. So we're gonna take another break real quick and we will be back after these messages. All right, we are back with Lucy Mitchell. We are talking about her fierce and beautiful wellness and mindset coaching and all that she does that makes her glamorously beautiful, inside and out. So as we go into this next next segment of our show, what I want to talk with you about is more. I'm going to tell you, this is all purely selfish. I'm going to preface that right off the bat. So a few weeks ago, right before Christmas, peloton came out with that commercial about the bike and everybody lost their flippin mind over it. You know, that was sexist. That was this that was that and I'm sitting here going well, what we didn't See, he was maybe she asked for the bike. Maybe she didn't because you know, quite honestly, I would like a peloton. But my husband kind of refuses to buy me one right now because I made such a big deal at a date. He took me out on one night he took me to dinner as he goes, you want to go to Jason's deli, so not particularly. He goes, come on, we can go get a salad bar. Fine, you know, so we go to Jason's deli, and we get the salad bar and we eat our dinner. And then we go to Walmart, which we had to get dog food or whatever. And he goes back to the bike bicycle section back there. And he's like, Hey, I was looking at these the other day. Did you see this bike? Do you want this bike? This bike would be a fun bike to have. Don't you want? Don't you don't want a bike? I do not want a bike. He's like, Oh, come on. You'd have fun with this one. You'd like this one. Are you sure you don't want this bike? Come on. We ended up walking out of Walmart with a bike that night. So I told him I said the theme of that whole date was Hey, you're complaining about not feeling good. So why don't you lose some weight and ride a bike, you know, eat a salad ride a bike. So we give him grief over that all the time. But my biggest thing is not about riding that bike. It's about I've had some balance issues, I've had some things that I just don't trust, the agility of my body right now. So balancing myself on two wheels is kind of a freaky idea to me, but I like the peloton idea because I feel like I could slowly progress until I got that confidence back. But, you know, you said that you the reason I'm bringing all that up is because, you know, you said that you like to cycle and you're a fitness fanatic and in So talk to me about I know some people that say jump all in, go all in and go as hard and as fast as you can until your body stops you and then there's people that are going, alright, if you're going to fail at that, then you need to ease yourself into So, I know you kind of help people break down their mental hurdles over things like this. So help me break down mine for a little bit. Okay? Nothing like putting you on the spot. the peloton is amazing. Um, and that ad was ridiculous because we don't know the backstory, right? So why people got all on the Tuesday just because she happened to be skinny doesn't mean anything because there could have been a whole mental thing. She could have been skinny because she had an eating disorder. And you know, and so moving her body was going to help this so she could eat real food, there could have been a myriad of things, or it could have been that she had social anxiety to go outside. So she got the bike so that she could like, start to connect with people. There's so many different things that I deal with on a daily basis. I You know, I use a virtual workout platform, through Beachbody on demand. Mm hmm. Because I do work from home so a lot of my workouts are done through that platform. I do have the peloton and then I do love my local cycle bar cycle bar and Tiger get your shout out. But he has always been when I talk to everyone is you start at step one, do you look at a baby and prop them up and tell them to run a marathon? Right? No. Step a step by step. I've been working with my mother who has bad knees and it's always been an excuse. What has not worked out a day in her life. She's 68 years old. She talks every day about losing the weight. And I say okay, Mama. Well, it's, you know, 80% nutrition, it's 20% movement. So you've made your choice. If you want to eat the way you want to eat that by the left Work on the 20% of movement. Maybe it's just you sitting in a chair with one pound weight, and you're doing bicep. Right? And you're just working on understanding the movement and we go up to two pounds until you feel confident and comfortable. You know, or I'll work with other people that say, Okay, if you have a problem with consistency, do not find an eight week 10 week program, because you're going to be done after two days. All right. Start with something that is and there's so many apps out there, I'll backtrack there so you don't have to do just what I do, which is Beachbody. I always say there are so many peloton has a free app and that you can use on any bike on a treadmill. They have weighted programs, they have yoga, they have wonderful meditation programs that I love to use. And there are other apps as well that you could download that has on if you Have a beginner where you start at and that and you start at basically what you're comfortable with. And if it's just one day you conquered that one day you're winning. And you could go on to day two. And there's been many times that I've started over. I mean, I had three babies, I had to be one. Sometimes Mondays every Monday is my day one, especially if you're a football team. Day one, right after the Super Bowl is day one. But I think you know, I you always want to talk to your doctor to start and talk to your doctor about any current medical conditions that you have. And then be you have to have an internal conversation with yourself and be like, how important is this to you, not to others to yourself. Right? What changes are you wanting to see logically, ideally, we want to wake up tomorrow and be 50 pounds lighter, all because we took two steps down the street. I ran a marathon there. Go I should eat 50 pounds lighter, right? It doesn't work that way. I ate a salad. And I bought a bike at Walmart. I lost 50 pounds. Right now, that doesn't work that way. It's a great start. But I but I always say you have to write out a plan and you have to write out a plan that will work for you. And if you can't do that alone, and that's when you reach out to people like me, who says, Okay, we're going to start with just the day one we're gonna do a four week plan. And after you talk to your doctor, you've gotten clear that there's nothing you have stability issues. I'm not going to say I want you to start balancing on one foot if you have stability issues, that's not you're going to get discouraged and defeated. But if you can handle you know, you can go for a 30 minute walk. Walking is one of the most beneficial 30 minutes a day walking is one of the most beneficial kick starters to a weight loss journey out there. Not cycling, not weightlifting. Plain old, angry dog. Well, I think just being outside helps mentally and emotionally and then and then the movement, you start waking up parts of your body that you don't realize were asleep. Well, not only that, but then you're also you're getting if you're, you're getting a break from the kid. Maybe it's a stronger and go for a walk. But if it's, if you're cooped up in the house all day or you've been in an office all day long, you get outside you get the fresh air, you get the oxygen from all of the plants that are around you. You get cute you're around nature, you could put the personal development into your ears and start a good book. Listen to an amazing podcast. I don't know maybe warrior diva out there. Um, you know, and and you're not only working your body, but you're working your mind. Those two working together will kick start an amazing weight loss sustainable journey. Well, I think that's where I start. I think a few years ago I I lost roughly 100 pounds and I did that strictly by walking there was there I changed you know, I'd done some intermittent fasting I had done some other things you know as far as weight loss goes, it was all around nutrition and walking. That was it. And I walked five miles a day. I didn't start off walking five miles a day I started off being winded walking down the street and back but it you know, by the time I was to a good steady pace, I was at five miles in under an hour. But I kept you know, going okay, well I've kind of nailed this I'm, I'm one of those people that are not consistent. So I'm adaptable is my number one strength I'm the Strength Finders thing, which means I can roll with the punches but I always strategic backs it up. So I always have something else. I'm planning in background to if this goes awry, I already know where we're going next. So the whole walking thing was fabulous for me because it helped with the weight loss. It was, whenever I tried to stretch beyond that, I started pushing my limits. And about that time is when the doctor says, you know, you really don't need to be doing any hit right now. Any high intensity, you need to keep it low. Well, that kind of took the wind out of myself and I kind of sunk back into. Oh, but see, I like the CrossFit stuff. I like some of those things. And he's like, yeah, just not right. Now. He goes, let's get some of this other stuff under control. And then we can go in there. And then it just made me feel old and grumpy. And there was a mental game that I was having to battle for a while over that. Because, you know, that was there was almost like I was accepting a sentence that he wasn't even giving me he was just saying, Let's get you to a certain point before we start doing that. And I was like, Well, if I'm not there, I don't want to I don't want to work any harder to get there. It's not coming off fast enough. It's not doing what I want it to do fast enough. And like you said, We live in an instant gratification society, you order in a box, and you drive to a window, and it's there. So we want the weight loss to come off just as fast as that burger is delivered through that window. Yeah, and I think I was talking to a potential client, in fact, just this past weekend, who was like, I have been doing keto for six weeks, and I've gained six pounds and I'm doing CrossFit. six days a week and I don't understand why nothing is moving in. And I said, Okay, well, that's what I'm hearing is what you're doing for the last six weeks isn't working. So we're going to start over and she looked at me and I said, don't get defeated. What I've seen because I have not been working with her and I've been what I would recommend. Okay, continue to CrossFit. That's it. Yes, that's it, you live naked. But women over the age of 40 do need weightlifting. cardio is not as important once you get past the age of 40. Because our our muscles and the way our bodies work, our muscles will hold on to fat. Because there's a fight or flight like, Oh, you don't want to have babies anymore. So we're going to hold on to this fact just in case you change your mind. So that way we have a way to support a baby. And I'm like, when did my muscles get to decide if I'm a child Barry like right yours anymore, like you could release that fat anymore. Done and done. It's the science behind it. So weightlifting expands your muscles to release the fat. It's the right type of weightlifting. If you're doing strenuous weightlifting like crossfitters do and I didn't cross it for two years and my father looked at me and said, I'm finally getting the son. I never had Alright, we're going to stop doing that. Yep. Um, so I was like, okay, it's CrossFit works for for certain individuals, and it is great, but just tone it down, don't need to be deadlifting 75 100 pounds or whatnot, stick with just the barbell, and maybe do just four days a week, if you really love that community in that workout, right? And give your body two days of full rest. And that one day can be a day of restoration of yoga, and meditation of maybe walking or whatnot. And I said, and then we'll look, then we look at the diet. And let's maybe do low carb instead of keto, because keto is not long term. No, it's not. If you're gaining weight on keto, which is meant to put your body in a state of ketosis, you should be losing weight. So something else is going on. And I gave her a list of recommendations that I would you know, I'm not a doctor. I just say I would take this list and talk to your doctor about the certain tests, maybe check if your insulin resistant. What's your glucose level? How's your body reacting to certain sugars, things of that nature? And, and it gave her a little bit of hope but but, you know, you've got to do your research and there's sometimes there's a little bit of adjustment and whatnot that I mean, and that's the recommendation. And actually, she just emailed me a little while ago. And then she'd like to work with me. Because her doctor didn't give her the answers that she wanted. And I wish she got more information from me, which is like, amazing, but it's just like, the information is out there. You just have to know how to educate yourself, as well as know the right people to talk to you. And a lot of times doctors just want to get you in and out. And it's just knowing how our bodies change. But once I found out that our bodies want our money, they want to hold on to that because they want us to still have babies. I was like, no, that's not okay. So, yeah, it's that's what I that's what I tell women. That's how I work with with some of my clients. is just sometimes you just got to read That's the wheel just a little bit and it'll kick start your journey and do it the healthy way. Well, I think, I think you also touched on something else as she was paying attention to her body and listening to it going, Okay, what I'm doing is not working. So therefore, something's off. I need to have another person come in and give me an outside view. Because a lot of times we don't even talk to other people about this. We just kind of suffer in silence. Oh, well, I tried this diet or I tried this exercise or I tried this lifestyle change. It didn't work for me. And a lot of the times, it may be just one turn of the wrench to get you running optimally. You know what in NASCAR, they talk about a quarter turn on the the car could totally make the car loose or tight. You know, and a lot of the times it's fine tuning what our lifestyle is and and it's not a throw it all out mindset it's a let's keep making the adjustments until we find what's working and and I think that's where a lot of people give up is they just go oh well I tried that it didn't work well let it's not cookie cutter it's definitely not cookie cutter. And that's why I share so much of my journey on my social media because that's how she found me on and watch how I went from being so cookie cutter to not sharing too much to them all the sudden sharing this new way, you know, when I discovered what was working for me and then really just sharing that it's it's individualistic, right to listen to how your body is responding to, to certain foods to certain movements. And when the ultimate goal I know for me was that I'm not going To be a diabetic, I that's just not what I want my children to see, that's not the life that I want to live. And this is my time right now to change this. And it goes back to making those sacrifices, you know, as a mom and as a woman, like I have to I have to be selfish right now. Right? Because I can't be a mom to my kids, if I'm constantly having to give myself shot. And I'm drained from all these doctor visits everything and what kind of mom Am I going to be for my children? What kind of wife Am I going to be for my husband? What kind of business owner Am I going to be for my clients and for a company? If I'm confused by this, you know, that I'm now I didn't take action. Right. Well, and I think I had I had a friend a couple of years ago that that passed away and she passed away from a recurrence of her breast cancer after her first recurrence of breast cancer she got healthy, she ate the right foods. She did everything right. And the cancer came back and, and she did have a genetic disposition to it as well as you know, other things that that brought it back. But I heard several people say, Well, if she ate everything and did everything right, and she got the cancer again, then what's gonna keep me from getting it and just trying to shift people's mindset to go that you can't go down that road, we are all created differently. We all have a unique DNA to us, that keeps us keeps our bodies moving. There are things in my family history, you know, I've got diabetes on both sides of the family. So I have to be mindful of that and I have to start putting things in place to to not go down that path. But on the other side of it is I also got a couple of cases of cancer on one side of my family. I could park my boat Go, well, you know, diabetes and cancer, they're in the cards for me. So I don't really need to work out, I really don't need to do this stuff because that's what's gonna get me in the end or I saw them try these things, it didn't work for them, so I'm not going to try them. Even though they're my relatives, I'm still uniquely created. And I it does not mean that it's an end result that I will catch that or that I won't be able to beat it. What what I think I've heard you say most all today in several different ways is taking care of yourself sets you up for so much more. And even if it is an illness that comes your way, you're better prepared mentally, emotionally, physically, for taking that that illness on head on, head on because if you're already out of shape, you're already feeling frumpy, you're already down in the dumps. You're definitely not in the mental and emotional state to take on a major illness, that if you're taking care of yourself in so many other ways, than if something comes out of left field, you're much more better positioned to go in in a warrior stance against that. Exactly. Yep, that is correct. And so, so you also do I mean, we talked a little bit before the break about how you do. You're the CEO of life flip media, you you do this as well as, you know, the fitness coaching and mindset coaching. So you're talking about, you know, feeling comfortable in your skin, not letting fear of missing out, you know, derail you. As we get ready to go into the last part of our show, I want you to kind of talk to us about what is the overall message edge that you really feel like you are here and put here on earth to accomplish share anything you want to share about your story and and how you can encourage and empower other women. You shared so much already it's gonna be a rich rich show but we just want to hear from from you as to what what you feel is your mark in the world and how you can help the women that are listening today. Well, I think I stop by called by many a unicorn. And that's that, you know, one of a kind, type individual. And I really do embrace that label. Because I've actually worked really, really hard to to be what other women cannot be And then turn around show them how they can be. So when it comes to self love, you know, we I know personally I have experienced so many things in my life that have shaped me to who I am today and why I want to help other women, my innate need to help others I was a hairdresser for 21 years I was an accountant, I helping my husband, I've PTA volunteer, room volunteer pretty much you need help moving I'm that person. My Drive was always to make other people happy. And and I realized that the end of the day was to fill the void of the lack of happiness in my own life due to abuses and whatnot that I experienced in my childhood. And in working with a life coach over the last year when I was able to finally understand what self love really meant, and how to forgive Others for what was done to me, I really, there's so many women I've even come across in my life that are experiencing that lack of self love. And they're masking it with food, with alcohol with shame, with abusive relationship with a lack of connection to their face. Blaming the world blaming society blaming others for their experiences. And my whole purpose in life is to use the platform that I've been given and my voice to a let them know it's going to be okay. That it's, it's not your fault. Everything is fixable, everything is figured out a ball. And if you need help figuring out that first step, no matter what it is, whether it's your relationship with food, whether it's emotional weight, whether it's physical weight, whether their spiritual weight whether it's figuring out how to take that first step on a treadmill, whether it's that first step on how to learn how to write a letter to your younger self, to forgive your younger self to connect with your younger self. I'm here because that's that's my that's my purpose now. And and it brings me joy I wake up every single day now hoping I'm going to connect to just one, even if it's just one person, and sometimes that one person is myself. It's like I reconnect with myself in some way I discover something more amazing about myself that I had buried or hidden deep down below. Because when when we carry all those burdens, when we feel like our only soul what job in this world is to be a mom. Or are we have no value as a woman in today's society. Or we've only known what it's like to be in the military. We don't know what it's like to be a veteran or are we were a mom and now we're an empty nester and we have no purpose and we were away for now we're divorced and we have no we have no wives or whatever it may be. You can lose yourself and you can lose that definition of what a What a beautiful woman really is. And that's where I come in. And then unconventional. Just sit down have a real talk over a glass of Chardonnay in our closets and that's what we need to do. kind of way I am not I I'm serious. I mean, I have been there I am sat in the closet with a bottle of Chardonnay. My husband's like what do you do and go away? Right I'm in a moment Hmm. And and it's okay. And and I don't I don't have it all figured out. I am not the leading expert in this you do not see me sitting on Oprah couch. I am one of many in this field. I just feel like we need as many voices as possible right now. Exactly. It's it's a layered approach to one I think, I think a lot of what I've seen you say and I've heard you say, we're watching you on social media and listening to you today is, you know, there's a lot of women out there looking for somebody to be an accountability partner for them to lead them to give them to you know, just actually listen to them and hear them and and you're willing to be that person you're willing to take that task on for them if that's what they need, until I told people for the long This time, one of my best friends I worked with her at the church before and, and we would go to the gym and her name was Kim Yates and we would go to the gym and we'd get on the treadmill and she'd go, I go, Okay, how how long do you want to go? And she goes, I want to go for 30 minutes at a two mile pace, he you know, and I'm like, okay, so I punch that all in, and we get going. And about three minutes in, she's like, I'm really not feeling it. And I'm like, sorry, you said you wanted to go for 30 minutes. We're going 30 minutes left, right, left, right, come on, let's go. Let's go, let's go. Let's go, you know, and and we finished the 30 minutes. She'd come to me, I'm like, we're gonna do a five mile an hour pace. You know, this is the incline we're gonna do. We'd get on and about five minutes and I'd say I don't feel like doing it. And she'd go great. Let's go get some chips and salsa. She was great for certain areas of my life fitness was not one of them. And so one of the things I want to encourage women that are listening today is if you've got those friends that are great and holding you accountable in your marriage and your spiritual life and all these other areas, I guarantee you most of the time, it's not the same person that can handle all of those areas for you. So I encourage you to reach out to someone like Lucy, who is great in what she does and in the fitness realm and, and in the mental mental improvement mindset improvement sorry, in the mindset realm as well I went mindset blank on that. You too can be a professional radio show host. But anyway, when you when you are coaching them through the min

On the eighth installment of our See It to Be It series, our amazing host Amy C. Waninger sits down to chat with Uso Sayers, CISA, an IT Audit Professional with over 14 years of public accounting experience who currently works as a managing director at Johnson Lambert LLP. Uso graciously shares a bit about how she got involved in public accounting and what about it appealed to her, and she names a couple organizations that help people of color feel supported and connected within the public accounting and IT audit field. She also discusses what surprised her about this work that she didn't expect going in, and she and Amy emphasize the importance of finding the place where you're different and going to listen.Connect with Uso on LinkedIn.Learn more about the National Association of Black Accountants.TRANSCRIPTAde: What's up, y'all? This is Ade. Before we get into Amy's episode, I wanted to share some advice on working remotely. For those of us who are impacted by COVID-19, more commonly known as coronavirus--or if you're not at all impacted by COVID-19 but you are working and transitioning into a more remote lifestyle--I just wanted to share six quick tips that you want to try out to work for you. I do want to say that I don't necessarily abide by all of these rules. I simply know that they are good things to follow based off of me implementing them at some point or another or folks who are better, smarter than me offering these things up as advice. So first and foremost, I would set up a strict calendar. By that I mean I would accept every invite for every meeting. I would have any break times that I wanted to schedule. If there's a point when you're working remotely where you have a cleaner or a plumber or you have a doctor's appointment, keep an updated calendar and make sure that you are updating your team, because it helps you work asynchronously across your team. If folks know that you're not gonna be available between the hours of 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. Eastern time because you're asleep, or some psychos are in the gym, it gives them an opportunity to not pester you while you're away but also think through some questions of how they may better utilize your time when you do get back online. My second tip would be to use check-ins with your co-workers. By that, I mean use your daily stand-ups [?]. Use your Slack team channels if that's a thing. Use those things to keep in contact with your teams, because it's very easy to lose perspective in a sense and lose empathy for your friends or for your coworkers if they're not constantly top of mind. So in that sense, I would remember, you know, team birthdays. Maybe establishing a Slack reminder that it's someone's birthday [and] you all should go drop a Happy Birthday gift in their messages. All of that to say [laughs] that if you can remember to treat your teammates as teammates, as people, not just, you know, an avatar on the other side of the conversation you're having about poorly deployed code, it makes for a better work environment, as distributed as it may be. Thirdly--and these also sort of go hand-in-hand, but I would say that you should over-communicate. This also kind of ties into your strict calendar. Over-communicate. Ensure that any time away from your desk, any planned work that you're gonna be working on, any roadblocks that you're having, you say those things before they become problems, because it's so much easier to kind of get ahead of the horse before it gets out of the table. I don't know if that's an idiom that people actually use anymore, [laughs] but I do think that it's important to ensure that folks aren't caught blindsided, that if you've been working on something and you're stuck on it, give people an opportunity to help you out, and give others the grace to see you where you are so that you don't foster resentment. It's much easier to get something done if you speak up about it sooner rather than later, and it's difficult. I know, for one, it's something that I've had my issues with, especially in situations where you are, you know, bound to your home. Reduce your stress levels and just ask for help. Actually there was one thing that I didn't mention at the top when I said "Set up a strict calendar." On your calendars, I also recommend that you put your self-cues. If you're someone like me who--I drink a lot of caffeine over the course of the day, and I recently spoke to a nutritionist who kind of reminded me that when you work asynchronously and when you consume a lot of caffeine, caffeine suppresses your appetite, and it causes you to fall into really unhealthy eating patterns. More often than not, when you find yourself at home throughout the day you get really comfortable--too comfortable sometimes--so I kind of encourage that you set up your calendar so that you have a routine, so that you're not just, you know, at home and not separating what is home from what is official work time. So when you're working from home, set up your calendar so that you have a routine. Have, you know, time for a shower, time for breakfast, time for the gym if that's something you do in the morning, so that you have a much more regimented schedule. And on your calendar as well, put in your hunger cues. If you're gonna eat at, I don't know, 7:00 a.m., if you're gonna eat breakfast or drink a smoothie at 7:00 a.m., it stands to reason that by maybe 11:00 you might need a small snack, so put a snack cue in your calendar. Maybe at 12:30 you're going to need your larger lunch. Put your lunch on your calendar. These things are important to help you establish a routine around your new lifestyle. Okay, we skipped back up to one, so I'm just gonna finish up with five and six. #5 is to protect your space. Whether it's that you need a physical demarcation of where work happens versus where life happens or if you're the sort of person who is able to, you know, keep up with the simultaneous demands of your work life and your home life, then it doesn't really matter where you work as long as work gets done. Just make sure you're protecting your space. Make sure that, if your close of business is 5:00 p.m., you're not allowing the fact that you work from home to have you check, you know, e-mails at 11:30 p.m. when you're supposed to be asleep. Ensure that you're protecting your space and establishing boundaries in that way, and help others understand and protect those things by communicating what your boundaries are. Just because we're working from home and we're mandated to work from home doesn't mean that my time after, you know, 5:30 p.m. is available to you, and if you see me online, mind your business. As far as you are concerned I am off work, unless it is a dire emergency. And then the sixth thing is don't forget to move. It's very easy, I know. I fell into the trap of eating inconsistently, over-indulging, under-indulging, such that after I had worked remotely for a while I realized that it was getting harder for me to, like, move physically, and it's easier to get ahead of that by simply incorporating movement into your day so that you don't develop back problems or spine problems or anything like that as far as your abilities may allow, but I also think that it's a good way to get out of the monotony and to inject some freshness and a fresh perspective into your day. If you just incorporate a quick 10-minute walk or maybe do some squats or, you know, whatever it may be that you can incorporate into your life to make your life easier, that is helpful and beneficial to you and obviously doesn't take away from you enjoying your day, I would say you should incorporate those things. I've been blathering on for a while. I hope these tips helped you out. Please let us know if there are any tips that work for you when you work remotely or asynchronously with your teams. That's it for now from me. Thank you so much for listening in. Next up you have Amy.Amy: Hi, Uso. Thank you for joining me.Uso: Hello, Amy. Good evening. It's my pleasure.Amy: Thank you. So I was wondering if you can tell me a little bit about your job as a tech auditor and how you got into that work.Uso: Okay, sure. So being in public accounting, I guess you could say I happened upon it. So I had an undergrad in accounting, and I was in grad school studying finance. Given that I had accounting background I figured, "Hey, finance will be a good thing that can, you know, supplement and complement my accounting degree." So I started doing that and I realized I really didn't like finance, so I added information systems as a second major. But doing that opened up--because this was back in 2002 to 2004 when Enron was happening, [?] was going down, so SOX became a big thing. I graduated in '04, and SOX--you know, filers had to be compliant with SOX in 2004, and--Amy: And SOX is the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation that sought to put some protections in place for consumers because companies were behaving very badly.Uso: Exactly. [laughs] I could not have said that better. And so most companies, especially large companies, were required to have IT audits performed. They had controls that they had implemented, and these controls needed to be validated. So that's kind of how I got into the [?] realm. Now, fast-forward 15 years, I'm still doing it because I absolutely love it. I love learning about companies and understanding their control structure so I, you know, can figure out how we can help them, how we can give them recommendations that they can implement.Amy: And when you talk about control structures, you mean things like separation of duties or checks on security so that the people who are accessing the system only have certain rights, the minimum rights that they need to do what they need to do and not extra stuff, right?Uso: Yes, exactly. So, you know, most of the company's financials come from one of the systems, and what was happening back in the day, one person can take a transaction through the system without anyone else touching that transaction. So I can create a vendor, I can pay that vendor. I can then determine where that check goes where that vendor, which leads to fraud or could lead to fraud--errors too, but fraud is one of the bigger reasons, because one [?] could pretend to be a vendor and the company never get any products or services, but I'm also the receiving clerk, so I can check off that this item that we've ordered has been received, and then I send the payment. Or I can even do it for myself, you know? Create some type of a dummy company with my address and then pay myself that way, and a number of companies actually lost money that way. But then there are also other ways outside of just fraud. You can have errors. You can also just have things that are--when you are developing code, and I know we're kind of getting into the technical realm, but when you're--and that's where a lot of errors could potentially happen, but when you're developing code you have the ability to determine how things are being calculated. So you can determine that 1 times 1 is equal to 100 versus 1, and if there aren't checks and balances in place to validate that 1 times 1 is 1, then, you know, the company could be losing money and not realize it. I always remember when I was in college, one of the things they always talked about was the [Lloyd fraudware?]. I think the guy changed one of the configurations by, like, a penny, and he was siphoning that to his own account, and I think he ended up getting millions of dollars.Amy: Oh, my gosh.Uso: You know, so now having--ensuring that the same person who is creating and developing the configuration is not the person who is making that configuration the final configuration in the system, or at least having somebody inserted to check it and make sure it's doing what the company thinks it's doing, you know? That's kind of what we call the control structure.Amy: Got you. Uso: Now, with cybersecurity, the security piece is getting focus. I think with SOX, this change management piece was the big deal then. Security was important, but now with cybersecurity and personal information and protecting that personal information, security is being put on the map so to speak.Amy: Mm-hmm, very good. So I know you got into this kind of a little by accident, because you were down the accounting path and then you just got interested in the IT side of things, but what surprised you about this work that you didn't expect before you got into it?Uso: It is interesting. You know, when you--at least I when I thought of accounting, I thought "boring." And, you know, finance to some extent, but then even though IT audit is not truly core IT, you have the ability to learn a lot about the technical side of what companies do, because before you can offer a company recommendation you have to understand what they have configured and what they have in place, what systems they have, what infrastructure those systems sit on, and then how they're securing their environment, how they're ensuring that, you know, they're protecting--another big area in the IT control realm is that [?] recovery. If we remember 9/11, a number of companies went under because all of their operations were in that building. You know, Tower 1 or Tower 2. They did not have any of that information backed up to a different location. Now we all have phones, and you'd be surprised to know how many people do not back up their pictures and their contact information outside of their phones. So the phone falls in some water, and that's all of their information. And so, you know, that's also one of the areas that we look at, because in 2018, 2019, there's still companies that do not back up data or do not back up frequently, which may sound surprising. [laughs] But it is true. And helping them understand why it's important, or understand why it's important to back it up to something other than the machine where you have the information or outside of the building where you have your information so that you can access it if something happened. You know, you might have people say, "Well, we're not in a [?] plane." Okay, but a pipe could burst. You know? So [laughs] the risks are still there, and, you know, we help companies understand what their risks are so that they can design controls, they can help them make [?] those risks.Amy: That's terrific. So a lot of computing is moving to the cloud, and how are you managing those same risks when the companies don't own the servers and the computers that the work is really being done on?Uso: So two things. The company now has to hold their service provider, that cloud provider, accountable, and they also are still accountable, because at the end of the day it's their data. It's their information. As a client of theirs, I gave them my information. I did not give the cloud my information. So when something happens, I go to the company that I gave my information to. So what companies are doing, there's something called a SOC report, Service Organization Controls report. So the cloud service providers have auditors come in and review their controls, and one of the reasons why the cloud service providers are so successful [is] because they're doing such a large-scale operation. They can afford to have, you know, the best auditors come in, validate their controls, and they can afford to put robust controls in place. So a lot of these companies--the larger cloud providers I guess I should say, because some of the smaller ones are not as sophisticated, but the larger ones, they have very robust controls in place, and they love to have auditors come in and look at it and try to tear it apart so that they can demonstrate that their controls are robust. And even those large companies have incidents happen, you know? That's why the Amazons of the world, they have data centers on both coasts and different places, because things happen, and for companies that do not have the infrastructure in place to support that in house, putting it on the cloud is probably the next best thing because it's going into a secure infrastructure. Now, where some companies think, "Oh, I just put it in the cloud. It's okay." You have to ensure--the cloud companies, in those SOC reports there's something called complementary user entity controls, and what that says is I have this gate, but you design the lock, and you design who has access to that lock. And companies don't realize that, so they think "Oh, it's in the cloud. It's okay," but no, there are those complementary user controls. If you are not doing those things, then the cloud service provider can say, "Well, we did what we're supposed to do, but they came in through the gate. We put up the fence of the infrastructure, but the people came through the gate because they didn't put a lock on the gate like they were supposed to." They will tell you what are the things--you know, they may say, you know, "You must authorize all users that are granted access," or for firewalls, the firewall is kind of the router, I guess, so to speak. I'm trying to find a good way to explain it, but the firewalls protect the network. So, you know, if you have internet traffic, it has to flow through the firewall. The firewall validates that this traffic is coming from a computer that's authorized before it can view your information. But you have to set up the firewall to do that. The cloud service provider is not configuring your firewall to tell which of your people can come in and view your information, and sometimes companies don't realize that. So it's easier, but you have to take the steps to also ensure that you're doing those things that you need to do.Amy: Thank you for that. So, you know, I think it's fascinating the way this role is changing in terms of IT and just all of the technology that's available and the way our platforms are changing. I grew up in IT back in the day, and it seems like this is a place that is ripe with opportunity for people just coming out of college or maybe even looking for a career change. What would you say to someone who's interested in learning more about whether or not they might be a fit for this industry? What kinds of resources are available to them to learn more?Uso: And this is tricky, 'cause I wish schools--and I think some schools are getting there, 'cause ideally the colleges will be providing guidance in this area because there's so many career opportunities in the IT field, even in public accounting. So even the traditional--you know, even the traditional accountant or auditor is different now. For the financial audit teams, they're adding data scientists and they're adding data analysts, so those are fields that maybe five to ten years ago, it wasn't a thing, and people may not know that. Even four years ago, some people entered school and that was not a career path, and now in your graduating years it's an opportunity. Project manager, you know? You know, if you're on the company side, project managers are in great demand. Certified information systems security professionals, you know? They're in great demand. It can be intimidating, but Google's probably the best place to start because that usually has the most updated information. I can tell you a number of universities, and, you know, when you look up careers in auditing or careers in IT auditing, you'll see that it's no longer traditional just control management. There are risk management roles, security roles, the data roles like I said, and the data roles are becoming more and more important because of big data. You know, companies have all this data. Somebody has to analyze that data and assess it and determine, you know, how can we use it. Even for auditors, you're getting information from a company, you want to know if there's all of the information that I need. So let's say you're auditing an insurance company [and] you get a list of claims. You have to performance procedures to ensure that that list of claims has all of the claims that you wanted to see for the period of time that you wanted to see it. So you may see "I need to see all claims for 2018 over a million dollars." Well, how do you know that this report that they gave you has all this information on it? You have to do some type of validation procedures to get comfortable that the information on the report is complete and then do your auditing procedures to, you know, understand and test the accuracy of it. A lot of times also the bigger firms--so in public accounting the big four firms and some of the larger public accounting firms, they also have a lot of info on their website that can potentially help. But again, that may be skewed to their company. So I would say start with just, you know, a broad search on Google depending on what aspect of IT you're interested in and then kind of use--you know, I always go for a known site. So, like, if I'm Googling something and I see Harvard is in the top six, I probably will click on the Harvard Business Review's point of view and read there first before going to the next thing, 'cause there's some things that make you go like, "Hm, I don't know." [both laugh]Amy: So what about for people of color in this industry? I would imagine that there's a predominance, especially in management ranks and probably in some of the bigger companies--I know a lot of the bigger companies are really committed to diversity initiatives, but I would imagine that it's common for a person of color who goes into this work to be the only on their team or the only in their department. What resources or organizations are available in this industry so that people can feel supported, feel like they have a community in this space?Uso: Right, yeah. And it's interesting. So public accounting generally, yes, is still pretty traditional, all white male, but I noticed the IT audit side is very diverse. It's very interesting, because I think it's one of those areas where your skill--yes, politics play a part, but your skill set is needed and your skill set is valued and respected. And there are an number of resources. Most of the bigger firms have affinity groups that, you know, they're either women's groups, groups that are by race, and then even for sexual and gender-type diversity, there are groups for that. And then outside of the firms there are also various groups. You know, there's Women in Technology. There's the National Association of Black Accountants. There's the National Society of Black Engineers. There are a number of affinity groups that are out there that focus on helping minorities 1. connect with each other and 2. be exposed to the resources and development that they need in order to progress in their organizations, and it's one of those things where I personally feel like it's--when I started in public accounting, I was a member of the National Association of Black Accountants, and I felt like that really helped me to 1. understand what it takes to be a professional. It helped me to expand my network, because I got to meet not only people in my firm, but also people in other firms. I got to meet professionals at my level, professionals that were higher than me, professionals that were my gender, my race also outside of that, and that really helped me to have a wider view, a wider point of view and different points of view, as I progressed through my career. Some people feel as though these groups sometimes hinder your career, and I say it only does that if you're not being smart about how you're using your time. Because sometimes I think people only use this opportunity for social networking. They don't use it for any technical development. They don't use it to help auditors--like, one of the errors I have focused on as I was coming up in my career was the development of [?] students. So things that I learned, I would go back and present on campus or, you know, in that I was director of student [?] services, so, you know, help them build some of the governance documents, and even talk to some of the professors about some of the things that I'm seeing and things that they should be implementing and instilling in their students. So I'm a firm believer in it. Now, I can tell you that my white counterparts will always be like, "Well, why do we need a group for black people? What would happen if we had a group for white people?" It's like, "Kind of technically we do." [laughs]Amy: [laughs] Kind of all the groups are for white people unless they're saying specifically that they're not.Uso: Yeah, 'cause I think sometimes you get discriminated against. You know, people don't want to do it because they don't want to say that "I'm in this group," that, you know--and the group may be, you know, black or Latino or whatever in the name. There's alpha. There's also the [?] for the Asians, but even though the groups have that in their name, we welcome everyone, because we realize that we need that perspective from, you know, the white male manager, the white female manager, because they're the ones that can help us understand what their points of view are, and then we can also help them, because sometimes they realize, "Oh, wait. My view might be skewed," or "I was never exposed to anyone outside of my town, my city, my race," you know? So usually it's a two-way learning experience.Amy: So I want to put a really fine point on that, because I always tell people, "Go to the conference that's not for you. Show up at the meeting that's not for you. If you're at a conference, go to the breakout where you're not on the menu." Right? Like, find the place where you're different and go listen, because I think it's important for people--you know, the same person who says, "Why do we need an association of black accountants?" That's the person that needs to go to the meeting to listen, to learn why they need associations of black accountants, right? They have no ideas what kinds of barriers are in place for people who don't look like them, and so, you know, I always challenge people and they say, "Well, yeah, but, you know, how do I even learn about this?" Go sit down in the back of the room, don't raise your hand, take notes, pay attention, and--"What if someone asks me what I'm doing there?" And I say, "Tell them you're there to learn, and then zip it." [Uso laughs] Like, nobody's going to ever get mad at you because you want to learn more about their experience, right? So thank you for being on that train with me.Uso: And I've had people who have said being in that room where they were the only really opened their eyes, because they're sitting there and they're like, "Oh, my goodness. I'm so uncomfortable." And then they start realizing, like, "This is so-and-so from my group who is the only. This is probably how they feel." And I think sometimes that's such good advice to give, because going out there and experiencing, there's nothing that compares to that. Hearing second-hand about it, I don't think you could fully appreciate it. I also liken it to parenthood, you know? Before you have a child, you have all of these things that you know exactly how to raise a child, how a child should behave, everything, and then you have yours and you're like, "Oh, my goodness. This is not anything like I thought it would be. I can't control my child. My child runs wherever." You know, you can't keep up, and you start to appreciate parents more because you realize how difficult it is to be a parent. So sometimes you do have to sit in that person's shoes so you can understand what they experienced.Amy: Yeah, absolutely. And it's so funny because I--yeah, I think my kids--on that point, I think each one of my kids exists for the sole purpose of proving me wrong on something I said before I had children. [both laugh] I don't want to get off-topic, but yes, you are right about that. It is so much easier to be a good parent before you have kids. But I think for a lot of people, you know, that self-awareness and that self-consciousness that they feel for the first time, you know, people can go a long way through their lives with never having that kind of moment where they have to be self-aware and they feel very self-conscious, and when they realize in that moment that other people have felt that way for, you know, 25, 30, 45, 50 years, right, in their careers, and, you know, I think there's just an amazing amount of empathy that can happen in those epiphanies. So I'm so glad to hear someone else say, "Come to the meeting."Uso: Yes, it's so important. And you can never, never not benefit from being there. It will be uncomfortable. I cannot promise you that it won't be uncomfortable, because people will probably look at you like, "Hm. Is she [?]?" "Do I have to be careful what I say?" Because sometimes, you know, people do--in some of these meetings, people do get a level of comfort where they share openly, and sometimes when there's somebody in the group that's of that group that they're talking about they may not share as comfortably, but you need to be there. You need to understand some other things that people see. And I always, even to my colleagues and black friends, I'm like, "You have to also look on the other side." So some of them, you know, yes, at work we're usually only, but sometimes going to some of these other conferences and understanding the expectations can help us also. So I have always tried to go to my NABA conference, but I also go to my ISACA conference, which is, you know, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association, which governs the work I do, and now that I'm in the insurance industry I go to the, you know, insurance accounting and systems association conference because I want to develop the technical knowledge and the technical skills so that I can have those conversations and be comfortable. I mean, you start to realize there are some people who are just idiots and that's just who they are, but more and more when you go out and meet other people, you realize that getting people and having them learn a little about you and you learn about them breaks down some of those barriers, because a lot of things are just perception. They're not reality. They don't really just hate you because you're a black woman, you know? Sometimes they just--they don't know what to say to you, and for me it's a little harder because am I a black woman, I'm a black woman from a different country. [laughs] So some of the things that are culturally acceptable and expected, I don't always know about it, and my friends always--you know, they gave me the whole "Bless your heart" kind of thing [laughs]. There's some things that I just don't know, but I am not afraid to learn. I am not afraid to learn, and I'm always going out there so that I can learn and develop and become a better person.Amy: I think that's fantastic. So you and I had talked before about--I'm gonna switch gears a little bit on you, but you and I had talked before about how each of us, you know, people in general, we kind of contribute to the de facto segregation and the narrowing of our own professional networks and our own communities and, you know, only hanging out with people who are just like us until we had that moment when we realized, "Oh, my gosh. I've done this to myself and I didn't even realize it," and I was wondering if you could share a little bit about your experience with that.Uso: Sure. So when I moved to the U.S. and I started my public accounting career I was in New York, and I remember my first time going to training. It was, let's say, 2,000 professionals, and the black professionals were a very small group there. We were there for two weeks. The first few days, I would always go find my friends and, you know, go sit at that table, and I don't remember if somebody said something to me, I don't remember what it was, but one day I decided, "You know what? Let me just go sit at one of these tables," and I can tell you, I mean, of those 2,000 people, if we had 100 people who were not white, that probably was a large amount. So, you know, I'll go a little bit off-topic for a second. I always hear people say, you know, "Oh, is that so-and-so?" And they may take you for somebody else, and then black folks will be like, "Why do they think we all look alike?" Being in that room, like, there were, like, so many guys that, to me, I couldn't tell who was Joe from Jim from Bob. [That] made me, like, really understand how it is that we can all look alike, but side-note. But being in there and looking around and seeing all of these different people, you know, I thought "Let me go sit from people who are not from New York, who are not black, who I've never met before." So I started, for lunch and dinner breaks, just going to sit at random tables with people that I had not met before. You know, I developed relationships. I met people who I was so similar to that, you know, it was very interesting. And after that, even at work, you know, I started having conversations, and I remember I was on a team once, and then--you know, I always said that if you heard the conversations and the things we talked about as a team or the shows that we watch, the music we listen to, and people just told you the thing and you had to map it to the person, you would get it wrong, because the person who could quote the movie Friday was not the black girl on the team, and the person whose favorite movie was Pretty Woman was not the white girl on the team, you know? And that's when I started realizing that we have a lot more similarities than differences, and the only way I got to know that was to step out of my comfort zone and go meet people that I had not met before and be uncomfortable. And it wasn't even--I mean, yes, at first, you know, it takes a little [?], but once you sit there, people are pretty friendly. There are some who are not as friendly, but for the most part people were friendly and willing to, you know, open up.Amy: Thank you for sharing that. You know, I think if we all start with just being a little uncomfortable at first, and then what used to be a little uncomfortable becomes comfortable, and then we start to be a little uncomfortable again, and pretty soon you build that muscle memory to where it's not all that uncomfortable anymore.Uso: Yep. And I'll share another story. I have two kids. I have an almost 9-year-old and a 6-year-old, and I remember when my son, who's the older one, was in preschool and we had to look for an elementary school, we looked at a number of schools. Private schools, public schools, charter schools, and one of the things that--I think he was in pre-K, and he was telling us about a friend in his class and something that he said, but he wanted to--so he told us the boy's name, but we didn't know--we didn't recognize the name, so we were like, "Oh, which one is this?" And he's like, "Well, the one that looks like people on TV," and we realized he didn't have, you know--'cause he had just started his new preschool, but before that, all of the years that he was in preschool, it was a predominantly black preschool. So he didn't have any white boys in his school, and then we started looking around and realizing that that was our network. So we made a concerted effort that wherever he goes to real school is going to be a diverse place, because he really shouldn't have to describe somebody based on what they look like on TV. He should know them, be able to relate to them, and have relationships with them, and it's so great now to see that he has such a diverse network and that I feel like I can't wait to see kind of what their future looks like, 'cause I think they will have a different perspective on diversity than we do, 'cause to them it's like, "That's just my friend." "That's not my white friend, that's not my black friend. That's my friend." Amy: Oh, I sure hope so. And I think there's another angle to that too, which is that it's sad that the representation that he sees on TV is so predominantly white.Uso: Different story, but yes. [both laugh]Amy: I didn't want to let that moment pass. I think that there's another lesson in there about media and representation and those sorts of things, but, you know, I'm grateful. I'm grateful for other parents out there who can, you know, self-reflect on the kinds of experiences and exposure that their kids are getting and say, "Oh, we need to be intentional about this. We need to be intentional about bringing more diversity and exposing our children to different types of people." I was wondering. I know that you have experience as a volunteer leader within some of the companies that you've worked in around bringing together diverse employees and their allies, and I was wondering if you could share a little bit about what drove you, what motivated you to do that work--which can be exhausting and thankless and on your own time and in addition to your day job--and also just a little bit about what you got out of that experience?Uso: Yep, sure. I think I've always had a servant/leader-type mentality, because growing up my dad always, for birthdays and holidays, took us to places where we could volunteer to help others. He was a baker, so we would bake, and then we would serve--you know, he'd take us to different homes. One was a children's home for children who had polio and then one was an old people's home. When I moved to the U.S., I first started volunteering at the library for people who couldn't read, and I realized--the thing that attracted me was this flier that said, "If you can read this you can help, because there are people who can't read this." And I was like, "Really?" And I met people who were over 21, all the way up to, like, 60, who couldn't read, and I'm talking about don't know that t-o-i-l-e-t is toilet. They just use the picture of the door to know that that's where they go to use the bathroom. In school I volunteered. [?] I used to help kids with homework, but once I got into the profession and I realized that there are opportunities 1. to network with others like myself, but also to help others in the firms, I loved it. I jumped at that opportunity. So I moved from New York to Indiana in my second year as a professional, and being in Indiana, I did not have a lot of others that looked like me in the firm. We didn't have enough to have, like, a black employees network, so we ended up in a multi-cultural circle, which was great because we had people from different parts of the world, different genders, different thought processes, and because we didn't have, like, black partners or Indian partners, our leaders were the white partners. So that really helped us 1. we got the support we needed, but 2. we were able to have conversations and understand what it took to grow in the firm. One of the things that I did was to organize these many--what did we call them? It was, like, Breakfast with a Leader. So each partner would meet with three to four professionals from the group for either lunch or breakfast and just get to know each other. That was so powerful, and I still have relationships with some of those people today even though I'm no longer with that firm. And, you know, one of my partners was always telling me about this client contact that he wanted me to meet, and, you know, people always tell you they want you to meet people, but when I finally met the person he wanted me to meet, the first thing the person said to me is "This guy really respects you. He has been telling me about you for the past year." And that--sometimes you don't realize that. You don't have that. You don't get that. You know, people will say whatever, but they don't follow up with their actions and match it, and so I think that whole experience, I still say that I think 1. if I stayed in Indiana I probably would still be with that firm, but that just really helped me to grow as a person, helped me understand my weaknesses, things I need to develop, helped me educate others on us as a group and help them see, you know, us as we are high-performing professionals just like everybody else. We just have differences, but those differences are not hindrances. So, you know, educating them and then educating ourselves. It was just a really powerful experience.Amy: That's breaking down the walls between you, right? And I think so many times people look--when they look mentor, they look for people who are just like them because that's what's the most comfortable. Not because there's any animosity, right, between them and another group or not because they harbor any ill will, just because they don't want to be uncomfortable with that first minute either, and so what you really did was you took away that discomfort and opened up--you know, opened up the channel for people to be mentored and, you know, for executives to find mentors that didn't look just like them, and that's powerful.Uso: Yep, it was very powerful, and it's really helpful because a lot of times you really do try to go to people who look like you, and one of the things that I've learned is you need people as mentors who have had similar experiences to you, but it doesn't matter what they look like. If you are a high-performing individual who is on the fast track in your company, it is very helpful for you to have a high-performing mentor, because having a mentor that may take, you know, three or five years less than you would take to get to a level, they may not understand what you need to do to get there because they didn't do that, but having a white mentor versus a black mentor probably won't make a difference to you, because what you need more is someone who has the technical capabilities and the connections to get you where you need to go, and I think people undervalue the need to have advocates, 'cause the advocates are the people who have the power to connect you and also sell you and get you to where you aspire to go. Having a mentor is great, but if your mentor does not advocate for you, you know, then you may not be getting the best out of that relationship, and I think sometimes why people try to build the relationship, the mentor-type relationship, with people who look like them is because they may have tried to develop a trusting relationship with someone who broke that trust, and then they associated that, breaking that relationship, with the person's race. No, that person is probably a person who would have broken somebody's trust regardless of who it is that they're mentoring. And yes, I do, you know, accept that there are people who haven't [?] somebody different. They may have acted differently, but I'm learning now that it's a smaller group of people. It's not as large a group of people as we think, and sometimes we generalize that one-off experience and kind of take the brush and paint the whole wall with it to say, you know, "All white men, you can't trust them because this is what happened to me," but you'll learn that sometimes you can trust people more than you think and a lot of the people who have helped me in my career have not looked like me. A lot of them were not my same gender, and, you know, they were very honest with me, and I think what was helpful was for me to be open-minded and receive information, 'cause what I've learned is sometimes we're not receptive to constructive feedback, and because of that we are not given the truth, so we don't really know the reason why we didn't make it to the next level. And a lot of times it's not just because of what we look like, but it's because of what our work output looks like. Which, you know, as we all know, there is no color there, you know? But if you don't know if your work is not of the quality that is, you know, expected of you, you may not know that you need to improve your work quality.Amy: That is true, and a lot of times we have to have trusting relationships to get good feedback. You have to build that relationship first so that people know that they can trust you with their feedback. How you receive feedback is so important as to whether you will get it a second time, and I tell people, don't punish the people who praise you, because if somebody's giving you a compliment, if somebody's telling you you did a good job and you belittle that praise, they're not gonna tell you next time, and you're not gonna know when you're on the right track, and you may hear something constructive that you don't want to hear, but if you can say, "Thank you for making me better. I'd like to think about that," even if you do nothing with it--if all you say is, "Thank you. I'd like to think about that," that goes so far in building a relationship with someone. And then if you do actually think about it and come back to them with questions later, even better, right? Because they know that you really have a desire to improve. So spot on. Oh, I love talking to you. [both laugh]Uso: And it is hard, 'cause you do not want to hear that you suck. [both laugh] You know? You don't, and I can tell you that I have received feedback that hurt me to my core, and I'm sure my facial expression and my reaction was not the most receptive, but I went away and realized, "Oh, my goodness. This is true," and one of the things that I had to realize--there is this one person who I had one shot to work with her, and I had come to her with a lot of praise and, you know, all of this stuff surrounding me, and I screwed up, and, you know, she had a lot of influence in what happened to my career that year, and I was mad, but then, you know--it took a while, but then I realized she only had one shot at me, and I screwed that shot up, you know? She didn't find all of the errors in my work. I put the errors there. I missed the stuff. But at the time it was happening it was not easy for me to realize that, you know? You have to really sometimes, like you said, just say, "Thank you for making me better," and go away and think about it and not just be like, "What? When? Where? How? What? I didn't--" You know? "Thank you for making me better." I like that. I think I'm gonna use that. [both laugh]Amy: So in the time that we have left, I'd love for you to answer--like, finish two of my sentences. The first one is, "I feel included when _______."Uso: I feel included when my opinions are asked and respected.Amy: And the second sentence is, "When I feel included, I ________."Uso: When I feel included, I am happy, and I'm usually looking for ways to help include others. Amy: Thank you so much, Uso.Uso: My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity.Amy: This was so much fun, and I hope we get to talk again soon.Uso: I'm sure we will.Amy: All right.Uso: All right, take care.

In this bonus episode, Zach chats with Amanda Edwards, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, about her journey in electoral politics and the importance of voting ahead of Super Tuesday.Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and check out her website by clicking here.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? Look, it's Zach with Living Corporate, and yes, I know. It's a Monday. You're like, "Whoa, why are you dropping content on a Monday? The world is shifting! Why is reality as I know it splitting in half?!" No, you're probably not doing any of that. You're probably just like, "Yo, okay. Another podcast, okay." And that's what it is. It's, like, a bonus pod. Look, y'all. Remember when we had Royce West a couple--you know, it was, like, a week or two ago? A little bit ago. The point is, we had Senator Royce West on, Texas State Senator Royce West--what's up, respect to the man--to talk a little bit about voting and the importance of voting. Today is the day before Super Tuesday, right? Like, Tuesday, that's the day you vote for the person that you want to continue forward in the respective race, whether it be presidential or senatorial, and we have Amanda Edwards on. Amanda Edwards is someone who is running for U.S. Senate. She is a native Texan and former Houston City Council member who represented 2.3 million constituents, and she actually left that position to run for U.S. Senate. A pretty crowded race. We're talking a little bit about just her background and the importance of voting as well as really why we should vote. And you'll hear me say it in the podcast, y'all. Like, Living Corporate is about amplifying and centering black and brown experiences at work. I believe a way--not the only way, but a way to do that for yourself civically is by voting. And I recognize there are different positions, like going full dissident. We had Howard Bryant on the show, and he talked about the idea of Colin Kaepernick not voting, because he's like, "Look, if I believe that the system is inherently broken and I can't vote my way out of oppression, then why should I vote?" But, you know, there are different points of opinion on that. I do believe we have the right to vote. People are actively looking to take away our ability to vote, questioning our very right to be here. I believe a great way to just say that we matter is by voting. So make sure y'all check out this episode. Nothing changes for the rest of the week. We've got more content for your head top starting tomorrow and then Thursday and then Saturday, and then the marathon continues. 'Til next time, y'all. Peace.Zach: Amanda Edwards, welcome to the show. How are you doing?Amanda: I'm great. Thank you so much for having me on this morning.Zach: It's not a problem. Now, look, just to start, many people are saying that, you know, Texas is really truly the battleground state. So goes Texas, so goes the nation regarding tilting red or blue. So there have been, you know, accelerated attempts to speed that up. We've had Beto and Wendy's campaigns being notable in that regard. So with that let me ask you, do you think Texas is ready? And if so, what makes you the right choice to get us there?Amanda: Absolutely I believe Texas is in fact ready in 2020, and the question remains is will the Democrats put up the right candidate who will be able to unseat John Cornyn. It is not a far-gone conclusion that it will inevitably happen. It will happen if we put forward the correct candidate, and that is someone who can build upon the strengths of Beto's election. So when we looked at Beto's 2018 run, in a time where nobody thought it would be possible to flip the state of Texas, Beto came within 215,000 votes of doing so, and he did so in large part based on the strength of getting persuadable voters out to vote for him. In other words, people who were independent voters or people who were in suburbs or people who were in non-traditional markets, like smaller markets that typically don't vote heavily Democratically, those are areas and spaces and places in which he had tremendous success in terms of getting the vote out. Where there were still some opportunities left on the table happened to be--when you look closely at the numbers, you saw that communities of color, they registered in high numbers, but they didn't turn back out and vote in high numbers. There were less than 50% of the registered numbers. People under the age of 35 likewise had high levels of registration but did not turn out to vote in those same high levels. They were under 50% of their registered numbers. So what if you had a candidate who could, by virtue of her politics, allow her to galvanize those persuadable voters yet again, but in addition to that be able to build upon Beto's run and actually also bring in those communities of color that had registered but did not actually vote, bring them into the fold as well as those under the age of 35 who had this similar situation arise with registration versus actual turnout. If you can build all three of those coalitions, you will actually the votes necessary in order not just to come close but to actually beat John Cornyn and to make history in Texas, and that is what we're planning to do after getting out of this Democratic primary, which is in fact a very crowded field, but I think a very important testament to the significance of the time that we're living in. 'Cause it used to be the case where you couldn't get anybody to run in these primary elections because of how difficult the feat was considered to be. Now of course, people have internalized that Texas is in fact winnable now, and in fact, that's why a number of us are running in this race. I for one left my city council at-large state--I was representing about 2.3 million Texans--to pursue this because I know how significant and important it is that we not just come close but that we actually can win, and the only way to do that is by galvanizing those coalitions that I mentioned to you.Zach: So what have been some of the greatest, you know, advantages and biggest challenges in not only being young and being black and being a woman, but being a young black woman in this race?Amanada: Well, the first thing you always have to do is your homework, right? And we know that this is a change election, meaning there's gonna be a lot of non-traditional voters turning out to vote, and so you can as a result--I mean, just to [?] small statistic, since 2016 for example--and there's been well over 2.6 newly registered voters in Texas. Of that number, over 1.6 million of them are people of color and/or under the age of 25 years old. And so if you look at that or you think about that statistic, the electorate is changing. So someone who's younger, someone who is a person of color, is actually consistent with the wave of change that we're seeing in Texas as we speak. So these are not, you know, things that many people from the outside looking in might view to be challenges that I face or obstacles I see as strengths. And so we have a huge opportunity in our hands, putting in a candidate that looks and sounds and is about change. Also a candidate who has a track record for such. I think it's important when you have someone--when you talk to some of these communities that stayed at home last election cycle. Let's take some of the communities of color, for example. Back in '17 when Harvey struck my community, there was 51 inches of rainfall that fell across our community. Billions of dollars in damage, loss of life, loss of property, you name it. Devastation across a broad spectrum, and I got a phone call to go check on some of my low-income seniors. I said, "No problem," and I went, and I just went to their houses impromptu, and I learned they weren't removing the walls from their homes. And of course they had been soiled by the flood water, and that will result in mold setting in if you don't remove those walls. So I mobilized hundreds of volunteers. We went out and started going door to door. Well, the first question I was asked by many homes was "Oh, are you up for re-election?" And they asked it very innocently, but the question is an illustration of a much broader systemic problem in which people are only accustomed to seeing their elected officials when it's time for us to get a vote, and we've got to make it more than just about electoral politics and voting. We've got to make it about depositing in people's lives, and I think that's how you bridge that disconnect with a lot of these communities of color who are used to being exploited around election time only to see that the promises are never delivered, and we've got to have a messenger, which would be me, who can demonstrate when they ask "Well, why should I believe you that it will be different? Because I've heard this before," I can say it's been different for the communities that I've represented, and that's gonna be huge in bridging the disconnect. So again, another strength out of what some could perceive to be a disadvantage. I see it as a strength.Zach: I love it. So, you know, it's easy I think--and let's talk a little bit about, like, the presidential race as well, because it's Monday, the day before Super Tuesday, y'all. Y'all get out there and let's get to voting. Let's go. Let's move. But it's easy, right, for black and brown folks, I think, to look at the current slate of candidates and see that the Democratic Party does not really prioritize the voice and representation, like, of us, and with that in mind, I'm curious, why do you think it's important for that same group to vote in 2020 if the alternative could be just another candidate that will ultimately ignore them?Amanda: I think that's what my campaign is all about, not just electing--well, first I need you to elect me. [laughs] But that's just one step. The second is something that I've embarked upon as a local elected official, which has been about empowering people and to also hold their leadership accountable for the things that come out of [our?] mouth. So it's not good enough to see me in the campaign cycle and let me go away and not come back until the next campaign cycle, because how do you get what you deserve in your community unless you hold me accountable? We have to have an open line of communication. This open line can be state-wide. It relates to not just being responsive to constituent requests but being present in communities, hosting a town hall. When I come to you, you should be having the report card out. "Well, where are you with this? We talked about this. What's the timing on this?" Or not even a report card. I should just proactively share with you where we are with that. That's being effective as a leader in delivering results. Before I got into politics, I will tell you, I was a [?] lawyer. I was a municipal finance lawyer. You don't get paid [?] 'til the deal gets closed. So in my mind I'm hard-wired to think in terms of deliverables, right? And so you have to close the deal before you get paid for it. In the world of politics, people just give speeches all the time and not see progress. In some kind of way that's doing your job, and I just don't think that the bar is high enough. I think doing your job is bringing home the things, the change you discussed on the campaign trail and not pointing fingers. What if the premium was [?]? And this also turns to the electorate, okay? Constituents have to raise the bar for themselves. It cannot be that you say "I want to send a boxer to go perform surgery." If you're asking somebody to bring home deliverables like policy changes, it's not about me beating somebody else in the public arena, in public. It's not about me getting some cable news, you know, applause for some Tweet I made. It's about going and getting those bills passed, and that's what we have to begin to focus our attention on. So often it's the case that we focus on the fight versus focus on the result, and I think there's a role to be played by the electorate to understand that. You've got to be focused on who do we think is a mover in that place and get something done there. That's what we should be rewarding, not so much who can be mean like Donald Trump or who can, you know, fight him. I mean, that's part of the equation, but that's not the exclusive element that we should be focused on. You know, and I think that gets lost, and that's a huge detail. I mean, part of the dysfunction we have in Washington, the polarization, is because we elect people to go in and be polarizing.Zach: So, you know, you mentioned Donald Trump, and it's interesting because the next thing I was gonna ask you was about millennials and Gen Z black and brown voters in this cycle keep getting told that we have to make compromises in order to beat Trump, which often means accepting candidates that have troubling racial records, right? And I don't even know why I'm saying troubling racial records. People got records out here that's showing that they're mad racist and/or--this is my show, I'ma stop trying to use all this little political language. I ain't playing with y'all. You know what I'm saying, they got some crazy stuff happening in their past, but we're challenged to vote for them anyway. So, like, should we make that trade-off? And if so, why?Amanda: I think you vote for what you want to see. I mean, some people try to--because ultimately that's what change is about. So if you see a candidate that espouses the change you want to see and enough people see it, I mean, whether you are in agreement with Bernie Sanders or not, you know, he was seemingly a long-shot early on, right? And now of course you see him gaining momentum, and it's not because people say "Oh, he's gonna be the easy one to win early on." They got behind him. They wanted to see what he was talking about. Same thing with a litany of other candidates that we've seen. Obama, you know? Obama was not the likely candidate to emerge.Zach: I remember that in high school, yeah.Amanda: He was the unlikely candidate, and people just wanted to see that change that he described so they got behind him. And we've done it for good and for bad. I mean, Donald Trump is another example. You know, my good example is Barack Obama, President Obama. My bad example is Donald Trump. But people wanted to see somebody mess up the system, you know? They wanted to see the establishment just turned on its head, and I don't know if they're all pleased with the way it was turned on its head or not, but he's had a critical mass of supporters stick with him, and you just--you know, in both Obama's example and Trump's example, neither of those were considered the likeliest candidate. So it's about seeing what you want to see. So you support who you believe can deliver the change you're looking for, and if the candidate that you see--you know, the candidate that you're being told to vote for isn't that person, then don't vote for him, 'cause you're the one who's gonna be holding the bag with the policies they promote. Zach: That's a fact though. No, that's true, and I think the reality is--I saw this somewhere on Twitter, 'cause you know, Twitter has all the quotables, but it said something like "The person who's electable is the person you vote for." Right? Like, just vote for 'em.Amanda: That's right. I love that.Zach: Okay. So in this country and in this state, public or private, the quality of your education has more to do with the value of your home and your zip code than your work ethic. So when you're in the Senate and you're asked to confirm the next secretary of education, what would you ask them to change?Amanda: Well, #1 I need a secretary of education that actually believes in public education. Can we just start there?Zach: Man. Yo, what is up with her, man?Amanda: I hate to start--Zach: Nah, let's let these shots off. No, let's go. Come on. [ratatata sfx]Amanda: It's such a fundamental [?]. If you don't believe that public education should even be there, that's probably not the person to have over the department of ed, #1. #2, I would make sure that we have strategies in place for our students to be successful no matter where they're in school. One of the things that is just--you know, you've heard about the phrase "The silent bigotry of low to no expectations," right? And for us to not have those expectations of our students and put systems in place for success, pathways for success, and not just success today. I'm talking about leading the next generation of jobs. You know, why--I do a lot of work on tech and innovation, and people always--you know, and I do a lot of work in minority communities as well, and they don't see those things as being harmonious, and I'm saying this should be something that's in all of our classrooms. We should be introducing our young people to the concept of entrepreneurship and, you know, just all of the things. We should be making those introductions. We shouldn't just be teaching for tests, okay? Because kids, that's not preparing them for life. I'm not saying you can't have a test, but we've gone crazy with it. We cannot just be there for tests and that's the measure for success. We have to do better, and we have to have a well-rounded education where people have multiple pathways for success, including vocational, but also including four-year institutions no matter where you live and how much money you make. In Texas we have seen the course challenged time and time and time and time again, our full financing structure, and that requires us to say education is a right, which we have not gone as far to say. So you're not going to see the reforms that you truly need to see, which is--you know, the connection between where you live and the quality of your education doesn't make any sense. Education is our great equalizer, yet we're perpetuating how unequal it actually is by virtue of tying it to your income--I mean, of tying it to your property tax value. This is not something that makes any sense, but we continue to perpetuate the systems because, you know, we have people in office who don't believe that public education has value. I am a product of public high school, and I will tell you, you know, it is so important that we are investing more than what we have in the past, because there's so many other challenges and conflating variables our students face. So I'm a proponent of making sure that all of our students, no matter where they go to school, can be successful. They need to see that. I like to go back to my alma mater and, you know, model the behavior. You should have expectations of going to school, and they've got to see it. They're not necessarily going to see that at home all the time, so we've got to supplement that with the support they're getting in school, but truthfully speaking, a lot of the support that I recall being in school when I was a student are no longer there 'cause they got cut. We balance our state budgets on the backs of our students all of the time, and consequently our students have fewer resources to succeed, like wrap around services, and just--I could go on and on and on and on about what needs to happen with our education system, but I think first and foremost we need somebody innovative coming to the table, bring some new ideas to the table, and I would be highly eager to see, once we get our new president in office, that we bring somebody in who can be serious about educating our youth so we'll have a prepared workforce for tomorrow.Zach: So that sets me up well for my last question before we let you go. So irrespective of who wins the election in November, the Democratic primary race has shown that there is a more progressive, ethnically diverse voting population that is [?], so what do you believe the Democratic Party at large can do to ensure that they capitalize on this ever-growing reality?Amanda: In terms of electoral politics?Zach: Yes.Amanda: I think we've got to make sure that we're putting up candidates that are receptive to the issues that these communities face, and too often I'm asked, "Oh, [?]?" And I say, "Well, I think it's additive to be honest with you." I think, you know, the black community cares about health care access and education just like anybody else would, but they also have other issues in addition that they care about. But what [?] me is when people try to reduce it down to one issue, and that's the only issue that we face. The truth is we have additional issues that we have to contend with, and we have to have a broad spectrum of answers that are responsive to the broad spectrum of media. And so we've got to have to figure out how to do that. I'd like for us to be serious about elections, more serious about how we treat our elections in general with a national holiday for Election Day. I mean, I just think it's crazy that we don't have that in our country. Obviously we know why that is not the case, but it should be, and just--you know, we have holidays for all kinds of things that don't make a lot of sense, but we don't do that for Election Day? And that's the primary part of how our democracy works? I think that's problematic. So yeah, I think we've got to really start to not view the diverse candidates that do come forward as being candidates that have challenges because they're diverse. I think they're candidates that are stronger because of being diverse candidates, 'cause that's the direction the country is headed, and we should support our candidates and support diversity within that representation, but also provide for more ways to provide clear sources of information that are truthful, you know? Like, some people pick up the League of Women Voters guide and things like that, but a lot of people don't even know where to start with this stuff.Zach: Right, you're absolutely right.Amanda: You know, and it's very overwhelming as someone who's been in government and in electoral politics. It's overwhelming for people the kind of questions I get. "How do I register? When do I register?" Why isn't there one clear depository for all the information for these things where you could just information for candidates, information for--you know, just things like that. There should be some kind of clarity provided for people to make it easier to participate.Zach: From an accessibility perspective, right?Amanda: Yeah. You're kind of on your own out there, and I just think that's not the way to make it accessible to the masses.Zach: Amanda, this has been a great interview, a great conversation. Thank you so much for having us. Y'all, it's Monday, the day before Super Tuesday. Making sure we bring y'all the stuff to make sure that y'all continue to have your voice amplified and centered, and you can't do that if--well, look, for the sake of this podcast and this conversation, I'ma say you voting is a critical way to amplify and center your voice. Let's make sure you get out there and you vote, and we'll catch y'all next time. Peace, y'all.

Have you ever had a doctor give you a "wake-up call?" or try a "scared straight" tactic? These techniques - and a lot more - blew up on Twitter recently. Stacey noticed that it also seemed that the doctors andhealth care providers who weighed in weren't interested in listening to diabetes advocates online. What's the disconnect all about? Full transcript below Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! Sign up for our newsletter here ----- 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 This episode of Diabetes Connections is brought to you by The World's Worst Diabetes Mom: Real Life Stories of Parenting a Child With Type 1 Diabetes available on Amazon as a paperback ebook and audiobook at Diabetes Connections.com.   Announcer  0:15 This is Diabetes Connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  0:26 Welcome. This is one of our mini episodes, shorter episodes that I put together starting at the beginning of this year, just when I have something to say, news to share or anything that doesn't fit in the traditional longer format interview show that we do every week that drops on Tuesdays. I am your host, Stacey Simms, and I want to talk to you today about well, I really want to talk to your doctors about something, but we'll get to why and maybe how to share with them. I want to talk to you about what are doctors think of diabetes, and I don't really mean our endocrinologists Just to hopefully know what they're talking about and stay up to date. I mean, the other doctors that we see or we bring our children to pediatricians, the doctors, the dentists, you know what I mean, right? There seems to be this disconnect between what the diabetes online community which doesn't speak in one voice, I get it. But what we have learned over the years and what we talk about all the time, in terms of there's a hashtag language matters, right? There's this disconnect between what we as patients want, which is no blame and shame. Work with me, help me with resources, give me the information, let me make my decisions. And the physicians who many many, many times want to scare patients straight, you know, we're gonna give them a wake up call. We're going to show them how bad they're doing and that will make them do better. And this disconnect played out on Twitter recently and I want to share with you how it went and then I would ultimately was shared at a medical conference. Before I jumped right in though I do want to Say with those doctors who are you know, in the scare em  straight kind of school, I really do think the intentions there are good. I don't know any doctor who wants their patient to walk around with a 14 A1C, you know who obviously isn't feeling well and is going to be in poor health. I don't think any doctor wants that. The question is, why don't some doctors listen to their patients more? Why don't they seem to believe us when we tell them what we think works and doesn't work. So that's my perspective. today. Let's go through what happened. There's a guy on Twitter. His name on Twitter is @DGlaucomflecken. He says he's an ophthalmologist, a comedian, and a speaker. On February 17. He tweeted, “Want to know why diabetic eye exams are so important. I can take a 28 year old with an A1C of 14, show her a picture of a normal retina, then a picture of her diseased retina. Then a picture of what her retina could look like in 10 years with an A1C of 14. Very effective wake up call.”  And he posted the pictures that he had just talked about now. Kind of an innocuous tweet a couple of years ago, I probably wouldn't have thought anything of it. But and I was not alone here. There were some telling language in this that made me want to speak up. I'm going to link this up if you want to go through the Twitter thread. It is ginormous because a lot of people chimed in as you can imagine. I'm going to read a few tweets here. I'll just read first names from the people who tweeted this out. So these are the advocates who tweeted back Megan wrote, “As someone who works in eye casualty for a while and has type 1 diabetes. I have heard doctors have similar conversations. I then also seen patients walk away upset and distressed. Living with diabetes can be filled with anxiety. I find it best not to feel that scare tactics aren't always the best understanding and empathy for diseases hard to manage may be better.” Melinda wrote, “Did you ask her if she could afford her insulin and supplies? If she had a support network to encourage her or did you just decide to be Dr. Judgy Pants?” Melissa wrote, “Do you know if she went to her car and cried from helplessness like I used to after I exams with an ophthalmologist who had This kind of bedside manner? It took some time to find a doctor who could help me create a plan instead of send me off alone and frightened.” And then Mike wrote, “This mentality scared me into doing something better briefly as a teen. Soon enough, it led to hopelessness and years worth of higher A1Cs until love, actual good doctors and peer support inspired me to change how I lived” I wrote “Curious if there are any long term studies showing this is effective, other than the patient saying, Wow, that's a wake up call. What is it like for them? 10 years down the road? Did it help hurt make no difference?” And I actually wrote “not being sarcastic, genuine question” because you know, Twitter, but then the ophthalmologist chimed in back. And during all the time these advocates are saying these things, other doctors and other people are telling us how wrong we are. So the original ophthalmologist chimes in with, “I'm just showing people their own body part. I've never had a patient get upset with me for showing them pictures. I have taken up their own body part. I don't need a study to convince me to keep doing that.” Another doctor said “Patients Like pictures. We do the same with coronary angiograms. In cardiac patients, a picture's worth 1000 words, also puts in their minds the idea of the now and the potential future, good practice.” Another person a medical resident wrote, “I like it, it's hard to convince some patients without symptoms that keeping an A1C down to an arbitrary number is worth the effort of diet, exercise and expensive meds. This could help motivate many patients.” And then he writes “Also, it's not the author's job, the ophthalmologist job to make sure the patient has all of the resources needed to adequately treat the patient's diabetes during their brief eye exam. That's our jobs as PCPs.” So that's what he's going to be or may be already is I can't really tell from his Twitter bio primary care physician. Okay, so, literally, this went on for days, I kept getting notifications, because I kept chiming in, like, Are there studies like, oh, let's talk about this, you know, and, as you can imagine, it got pretty nasty sometimes. I mean, there's jerks in every Twitter thread on every side, so we're not going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the discussion and the disconnect because this is that fascinating. Most of the doctors really believe this is a good thing, I'm so glad that that primary care physician chimed in and said, “well, it's really not your job as an ophthalmologist to give them any resources or do more with them.” And this original doctor kept chiming in and saying, “No, I really do try to support patients.” It was just one tweet, you know, we don't know what he's really doing. So maybe he is, you know, talking to them more. What about your experience? In my experience with those other doctors, right, not the endocrinologist, the eye doctor, the dentist, even the pediatrician with Benny, they have no idea what diabetes takes. That's okay. It's not their specialty. I don't mind that. They don't know. I mind when they try to tell us more than they know. Right? Like, I had an eye doctor once Tell me, Benny was not in the room, he asked, “how long has he been diagnosed?” 12 years. I think at that time. “Well, you know, 20 years is when the complication starts showing up in the eyes.” And I actually said out loud because I'm a pain in the ass patient. And I said, Really? What was the last time you actually read anything in a medical book about diabetes? I tried to be nice, I said it kind of nicer than that. But it's it really, when did you learn about type 1 diabetes? And he said in medical school, and I said, and when was that, right 25 years ago? And really, when were those studies done? Right? If you're looking at a study from 25 years ago, that study probably followed people living with diabetes who had been diagnosed at least 10, if not 20 years before that. So your data is kind of outdated. And we know if you're a longtime listener of the show, you know, from studies like the EDIC trial, and many others, that eye complications, along with many other complications are way down and almost non existent for people with diabetes, who have access to good care and insulin. I mean, we know there's a whole other world out there, but we know these complications when care is given our way down. And whenever I talk about complications, I always want to say complications can happen even with the best care with diabetes. I mean, look at life - complications can happen with anything. So we try to do the best. We can see just other factors, you know, genetics, environmental, what have you. But with eyes in particular, I've talked to two endocrinologists in the past year, who say when they see a patient with any kind of eye issue under the age of 40, with Type 1 diabetes, they call everybody who's nearby, because they never see it. They want everybody to come in and identify it and look at it and see what the poor patient, but see what it really is all about, because they never see it anymore. So my little conversation with that eye doctor, hopefully made him rethink a little bit about how he talks to other people with diabetes. I've had the same conversation with my pediatricians when I feel like educating because sometimes it is absolutely exhausting. And I had to back away from the Twitter thread because of that, that it is exhausting to keep educating and educating. You don't know everything about type 1 diabetes, you're not a specialist. Thank you for pointing this out. But what can we do about it? What's the point? Why would you say you're going to be in trouble? I'm going to give you a wake up call. I'm going to scare you straight. Why would you say all those things Thinking the outcome is going to be positive? If you're aware of a study that talks about these things, and I was pilloried on Twitter for suggesting there could be a study, what would the control group look like? people who never get good health information, people who are never shown their bad eyes, or that they're going to lose a limb or blah, blah, blah, right? No, look, I don't create scientific studies. But you don't have to be a genius here. But why couldn't you something really short, that just gives you a taste of what we're talking about here? Do a six month study, right? Pick an age group to a six month study your 25 year olds with Type 1 diabetes, everybody gets the same exams, but your feedback is - you're doing terrible. You have to be nervous. We're scaring you straight, kiddo. It's a wake up call. Now go get better. And the other one is, Hey, I really feel like we could do more together. Well, how can I support you? What are the challenges you're seeing that are creating these issues with Type 1 diabetes, there may not be anything I can do to help but I understand that you're probably doing the best you can because type one is really difficult. And then the other one, the third part of the study would People who are told here are your test results. See you next, right with no emotional kind of feedback. Why couldn't you do a quick study of that and see what happens in just six months? My guess is you would see really interesting results. So better minds than me, thank goodness picked up on this and actually put it in a presentation at ATTD, at the international conference for advanced technologies and treatments for diabetes. This is the conference that I just talked to Kevin Sayer. That episode just aired a couple days ago. This is where he was in Madrid, Spain. So this is a huge international conference and this Twitter thread made it to a presentation, which shocked me. What shouldn't have shocked me is who was doing the presentation. This was the hashtag talk about complications presentation by Renza Scibilia and grumpy pumper Chris, who we've had them both on the show separately to talk about this and other issues. But this talk about complications slide that made its way to the presentation showed the original a tweet from the doctor, the ophthalmologist comedian, and they actually blacked out his name, which I didn't do here, because Twitter is public. And they showed the original tweet, you know, very effective wake up call. And then they put another tweet next to it. And I think that this is a hope that physicians might consider saying this instead. So let me read you the original tweet again. And then the one that they suggest. So the original tweet, “Why are diabetic eye exams are so important? I can take a 28 year old with an A1C of 14 show her a  picture of a normal retina, then a picture of her diseased retina then a picture of what her retina could look like in 10 years with an A1C of 14. Very effective wake up call.” Here's an alternative to saying that “Diabetes is really tough, and you're managing as you can right now. Thank you for coming to see me eye screening is really important. We know having a higher A1C increases the risk of diabetes related conditions. Let's work together to try to reduce the risks.” Now I know some of you and maybe hopefully if you got your physician or not Doctor or dentist or somebody else to listen to this episode, it might sound very, you know, Kumbaya and woo woo. And, you know, let's work together. But I'm telling you, as the mom of a kid with type one, as a person who sees doctors for her own conditions, it is so much more helpful to hear this than to hear the other scary, effective wake up call. I mean, you know, when I go to my doctor, and I say, I'm really upset, I've been trying hard and gaining weight, you know, what I don't want to hear is “You're really fat. And we know that being obese can help lead to health complications, and higher increase of cancer. Because you know, you really want to watch out what happens, you have this risk and your family and blah, blah, blah. So just stop eating desserts.” What would be really helpful is, “Yeah, boy, it's really tough. I can see that your whole life, you've been a healthy weight. You're an active person who knows how to eat well. What's changed in your life in the last couple of years? How old are you? What is your metabolism doing? Let's sit down and talk about how things are changing maybe so that you can find a plan that might help you change” I mean, I just came up with that at the spur the moment, but it's so much different to here. Let me help you. And let's figure out what you can do to make this better rather than let me blame you and shame you and scare you. A lot of people tune that out. And if they're scared, they don't want to do anything to make it better because they lose hope. I really hope that some healthcare professionals who saw this on Twitter took a moment to stop and think about it. I know a lot of them responded. And remember kind of insulting frankly, calling the diabetes advocates, trolls and one person called the bats. I don't know if that's a UK thing, or I don't know what that was all about. And there were some people who got kind of nasty, as I said earlier, but I really hope that people who saw this conversation, maybe had a different conversation with the next patient that came into their office, maybe a person with diabetes, who saw the conversation had the words now to tell one of their health care providers. Look, this isn't helping me. I need you to speak to me in this way. Which is really, really hard to do. I will say before I let you go here that a lot of the physicians piped in with Well, my patients never react poorly when I give them this news, they all seem to appreciate it. Do the doctors not know that we talk to them differently than other people? Do doctors not know that some people like get dressed up to go to the doctor will really make sure that they are well groomed. I mean, it sounds silly, but you know exactly what I'm talking about. Right? doctors don't realize that we go to our cars. And as Melissa said, in that tweet, sometimes we cry, we call the friend and say you won't believe what happened to me. Or some people will tell a nurse things that they won't tell a doctor or they'll tell the front receptionist and they'll get the anger and so the doctor, people don't tell their doctor unless you're me and you're a pain in the butt. Very few people tell their doctor, hey, you're wrong. Or I don't like this. Or even Can we try something different? People don't talk back to doctors. And the fact that they don't know this… Come on, guys. You got to be better. You got to think about it. What do you think my way off base here? Were you part of that? Twitter chat, did it make you mad? Did it make you think? Let me know. You can always email me Stacey at Diabetes Connections. com. I'll put this in our Facebook group as well Diabetes Connections of the group on Facebook. I'd love to keep the conversation going. If you're a physician who has listened to this long oh my gosh, thank you so much. I cannot tell you how much we appreciate it when you take a moment to consider the other side of the stethoscope for lack of a better word. Let's keep this conversation going. Of course, if you think I'm wrong, I am the world's worst diabetes mom, I can live with that. And you can find out much more at the website diabetes dash connections.com. Please subscribe to the show on any podcast app or just keep listening through social media or however you found us. We appreciate that we're not going to tell you where to listen. We just hope you keep on tuning in. I'm Stacey Simms, and I'll see you back here next week.   Unknown Speaker  15:57 Diabetes Connections is a production of social Stacey Simms media All rights reserved all wrongs avenged   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Zach welcomes Dr. Oni Blackstock, the assistant commissioner for the Bureau of HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control for the NYC Health Department, to the podcast to discuss a wide variety of topics, ranging from her unique career journey to dismantling white supremacist constructs, and she graciously offers a couple points of recommendation regarding how to get started when it comes to advocating for yourself to get the health-related help that you may need at work.Connect with Dr. Blackstock on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram!Visit Living-Corporate.com.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and look, man, you know what we do. It's 2020. You know, fresh vision. You know, we're out here making moves, having conversations with movers and shakers, influencers, educators, public servants... what else? Who else? Executives, recruiters, entertainers. You know what I'm saying? Anybody who's willing to have an authentic conversation centering and amplifying underrepresented voices at work, and today, you know, I'm really excited about this particular interview. And I say that every time, but, like, I mean it every single time, even though I say it, like, over and over, but I really do mean it. And so I'm really excited. This particular episode we have Dr. Oni Blackstock. Dr. Blackstock, how are you doing? What's going on? Oni: I'm good. Thanks so much for having me.Zach: Thank you so much for joining us. Now, look, what I would like to do--'cause see, what I sometimes do, in the past I would give this, like, kind of, like, generic--I don't want to say generic, but I would, like, read off an intro, almost like a late-night show, and then I'd go in and I'd ask people to introduce themselves again. It seems kind of redundant, so what I want to do this time is just give you space and, for those of us who don't know you, just give you some space to talk a little bit about yourself.Oni: Okay, great. So again, I'm Oni Blackstock. I'm a primary care physician and HIV specialist. I also spent about the past 10 years conducting HIV research, but I now lead the Bureau of HIV at the New York City Health Department, meaning I oversee our city's response to ending the HIV epidemic. I'm originally from Brooklyn, New York. Parents, my dad is an immigrant from Jamaica, and my mom is Brooklyn-born and bred. And I have a twin sister, Dr. Uche Blackstock, and, you know, we're very much inspired by our parents to really meld medicine and public health with activism and advocacy, and so I get to do that in my current role leading the Bureau of HIV here in New York City.Zach: Okay. So first of all, incredible background, incredible legacy, and shout-out to the Blackstocks, the family, and shout-out to your sister of course as well. So I know, you know, the background being Jamaican--now, you know we do air horns. Now, let me ask you this. I've asked past Jamaican guests, but it is offensive or culturally appropriative that we also use air horns on our podcast?Oni: No, not at all. It's great. It's about the diaspora. Zach: Okay, cool, 'cause I gotta let 'em fly for you. Let me just drop 'em right here. [air horns sfx] Okay, 'cause I'm just very excited and thankful that you're here. Now, let's talk a little bit more about your background, right? So you talk about your focus being HIV and that particular illness. What was it about that work that drew you in particularly?Oni: Yeah. So I was in medical school when I feel like I quote-unquote first discovered HIV, and that was actually when I was doing global health work. So I had traveled to Ghana and West Africa, as well as South Africa, to do HIV-related research, and when I came back I did a rotation as a medical student back in New York City and saw that we had black people, Latino people, dealing with many of the same sort of medical-related issues, and even just sort of socio-structural issues, as I did when I was in Ghana and South Africa, and became very interested in our domestic HIV epidemic, and so I ended up doing my residency, which is the training that you do after medical school, in the Bronx at Montefiore Medical Center, where again I was seeing young black and brown people dying of, like, advanced AIDS, which was something I was really surprised and I think maybe people didn't realize was stlil happening in New York City. And I think what I in particular--what draws me to HIV is that it's really--it's not just an interesting bio-medical condition, but it's also, like, a social condition, and it's really an epidemic of not behavior, but an epidemic of inequality. So it's a confluence of lots of isms and lots of phobias, and you put all of those together and you sort of get HIV and you see the communities that are most impacted.Zach: And, you know, it's really interesting, this conversation particularly, because you're in a position where you're providing awareness and research and thought leadership and care for underrepresented, underserved populations--and often times stigmatized and just oppressed populations--while also being an intersectional member of a variety of underrepresented and oppressed populations and identity groups. Can you talk about, like, what that experience, that compounded experience, is like for you? Like, being in this space, being who you are?Oni: Right. Yeah, so I think what has driven me to do this work is because I'm from many of the different communities that are impacted by HIV. So I think sometimes for people who do this work it's maybe about careerism or they find it intellectually interesting, but for me it's really about helping my people and my community. So yeah, I mean, I think having the different identities, being a cisgender black woman, being someone who's queer and being at the intersection at these different marginalized identities gives me a different appreciation and understanding of what the factors are that folks are dealing with out in the community, and also the position. You know, even when we're designing, for instance, social marketing campaigns, like, I can say--you know, I'm able to give my input and--you know, we had a campaign, for instance, that was focused on pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. It's a once-a-day pill that people who are HIV-negative can take to stay HIV-negative. We did one for a focus on cisgender and transgender women, women of all different backgrounds, but what I did notice that I think most other people didn't notice is that all of the women were very, like, fem-presenting, and so, you know, I was like, "In the future when we do this work, we might want to have folks who may be non-conforming in their appearance." You know, just have different folks who may identify as women but have a different gender expression. And so I think, like, just sort of that awareness of understanding the different needs that may be out there of having these different perspectives is something that I think I can bring to this role and I think is, you know, really important, because the reality is that in many cities we don't have people who are leading this type of work who are reflective of the communities that are most impacted.Zach: You know, that's just a really good point. It's interesting because, you know, even as we talk about, like, representation and diversity in our marketing and, like, presentation, it's interesting how colorism and patriarchy still, like, sneak in to those spaces too, right? So, like, if you have--like, if you're presenting as a woman, often times it is going to be someone who is, like, traditionally fem or lighter-skinned or with hair that is a certain texture. Like, there's still, like, this template, right? That individuals are going to--that we either consciously or subconsciously seek to, like, place people in. Even when you see, like, people in positions of authority or any type of subject matter expertise in the space, you end up--I don't know. Again, they fit certain templates to me, and that leads me to another question though. Kind of starting at the top. So your lived experience brings a certain level of empathy along with your actual academic expertise. May I ask, are there ever moments or times where you believe that sometimes your lived experience or the passion that comes with that lived experience is almost counted against you because you lack a certain level of [laughs] intellectual objectivity that maybe white individuals or just folks who are not necessarily identifying these particular identity groups, that they can relate to?Oni: Well, I think--right, so that idea of, like, objectivity... I mean, it's, like, a construct. It's, like, a white supremacist construct, because we all come with our own perspectives and backgrounds. So it's sort of, like, a fallacy, I think, but yeah, I think that might happen. I think I am also fortunate, or maybe some might say unfortunate, but, you know, I did get my college degree at Harvard undergrad. I was a computer science major and I was pre-med. I went to Harvard Medical School. I got my Master's in Health Sciences from Yale's School of Medicine. So I have, like, sort of these bonafides that are sort of respected more by white culture, the dominant culture, which I feel like gives me quote-unquote credibility among some of these folks, if that makes any sense. So I feel like that somehow, like, helps to open doors in a different way, and then obviously having--you know, and sometimes just even having an MD, people make assumptions, and sometimes you can use those to your benefit, which is helpful. But, you know, at the same time, it does feel--it's kind of cringe-worthy and kind of not the best feeling to be benefitting from these same systems which also act to, like, oppress us as well, so... [?]Zach: Well, it's complex and nuanced. I'm just curious about that, because as I continue to get into just this work, any time you talk about, like, underserved folks or, like, doing work that seeks to push for equity in certain spaces, there seems to be, like, this underlying kind of attitude sometimes, so I was just curious about that. You know, you just spoke about--you used one of the buzzwords that triggers a lot of fragility in today's society, white supremacy. I'm curious, you know, on Living Corporate we've discussed the concept of decolonization, and one of the ways that we've seen colonization demonstrated is in language. Can we talk a little bit about medical terms that, intentionally or unintentionally, undermine the reality and complexity of systemic racism and other isms and various forms of oppression?Oni: Sure. Okay, so I think any term that, like, focuses the issue on the individual as opposed to, like, the structures and systems that drive risk and disease and poor health and poor well-being, so--I mean, for me, I mean, there's [?]--I actually tweeted about this recently. So, you know, terms like someone being a "medically-complex patient" or someone being high-risk or non-compliant really is about--you know, white supremacist culture puts the onus and responsibility on the individual and doesn't--you know, it ignores, like, completely, the context in which people are making decisions and choices. And so, you know, these are--you know, we're trying to, like, move away, at least at the Health Department, my bureau, from some of these terms, which are victim-blaming and lack recognition for these broader systems that increase risk for individuals.Zach: And I'm curious about that. Like, what does it look like to drive those conversations and to have folks say, like, "Stop. Let's take a step back and actually look at the systems that are impacting these individuals." Like, what does that look like? How do you broach those topics?Oni: Yeah. So I think one of the cool things here, at least the New York City Health Department, is the former health commissioner--her name is Dr. Mary Bassett. She's a black woman, and she started a whole initiative called Race to Justice, which was sort of an effort to understand and recognize the impact on racism on public health and health outcomes, and so by someone in her position sort of normalizing the conversations around racism really sort of opened the door for a lot of the work that I'm doing in my bureau with the staff here. So for instance, we received millions of dollars in funding from the federal government and from the city government that we then bid out in a competitive process to clinics and other community-based organizations to provide HIV prevention treatment services, and we were looking at this process and, you know, seeing that the same sort of large organizations that are typically not run by folks who look like the folks who are impacted tended to get a lot of the contracts. And so the great thing about being able to lead a bureau, lead an organization, is that we made sure that--we started looking at the process and figuring out "What are the ways that we could make this process more equitable?" But what we also did is in our request for a proposal we called out these different systems of oppression. You know, many times--before I came here, like, a lot of the requests for proposals would say things like "poverty" and "food insecurity," and it's like, "But what are the things that drive those things?" Right? Like, we need to call them out, and if we call them out, the organizations that we fund will know that these are issues that we are thinking about, and we're thinking explicitly about equity in this work, and so I made sure that in our request for a proposal that we use this language, that we don't just say people of color, that we say specifically the groups that are impacted. We say black and Latinx people. Like, you know, it's just calling it out and being really explicit and really putting it out there so that it becomes normalized and really part of the work that we do.Zach: And it's interesting, because I've noticed over the past--I would say since, I don't know, since... so over the past, like, decade or so. 'Cause I'm 30, so I've been working for about 9 or 10 years, right? So as I just kind of come into adulthood, just looking around, looking at the language that people use when it comes to just, like, systems of injustice or inequity, it's almost like they just--we use language that is... like things just happened. It's like we don't talk about how things are connected at all. I think I was reading some story about a young man who had a mistaken identity, and it said "A teen was hospitalized after being mis-identified by police." Well, no. He wasn't hospitalized because he was mis-identified by police. He was hospitalized because he was beaten by the police because he mis-identified him. It's almost like we take out the action or the accountability in the language and framing that we place. So let's do this. As you know, since the publication of Healthy People 2020, it's been confirmed that stress is one of the primary drivers of racial and socio-economic health disparities. Can we talk a little bit about the practical impacts of chronic stress for black and brown folks and how it shows up when it's under-treated? And then, you know, as you talk through a bit about what that looks like, I guess my Part B to that question is what are things that black and brown folks should be looking out for regarding their own stress and what ways can they advocate for themselves as patients?Oni: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so obviously these are, like, very weighty, big issues. You know, I think stress has, you know, wide-ranging impacts on our overall health and well-being. You know, when we are exposed to stress, or just the stress of being a black or brown person in this country--you know, I don't know if folks realize this, but it leads to, obviously, an elevation in [stress?] hormones like cortisol and nor-epinephrine and epinephrine, and those have, like, very harmful effects on the body. And so we can think about mental health, so, you know, depression and anxiety, and I have to--full disclosure, I myself am dealing with depression and anxiety, and I think a lot of it is attributed to really the chronic stress that we face, I think particularly in some of these professional work environments where we are held to very different standards than other people, and so having, you know, a support network and having a spiritual practice--which is something that I really want to develop more--are ways to really I think counteract these--you know, and the impact on the quality of sleep that we have, our metabolism, cardiovascular risk. You know, chronic stress predisposes us to a wide range of medical conditions, so yeah. So I think when we see--you know, a lot of the disparities or inequities that we see, you know, are driven by, you know, the impact of, you know, racism, and then it sometimes has direct, you know, effects on us, in terms of, like, the violence that, you know, is committed against us by police, but then also some of these indirect effects of dealing with chronic stress and the impact that it has on our bodies and minds.Zach: And I think--so I'll speak for myself in this example. I'm an example of this, right? Like, just kind of, like, moving and shaking in these spaces, finally taking a second to breathe and I'm looking back and I'm like, "Wait, I can't sleep. I'm having, like, auditory hallucinations. I'm, like, crying for no reason. Like, I feel sick." You know, there's all these different issues that have, like, you know, over time just been so untreated, and like, so, finally just now starting to get help for that. I'm curious though, what points of recommendation would you have for folks who are at the very beginning of this? Like, and how--what would you say to them who are just kind of looking to get started and kind of advocating for themselves to get the help that they need?Oni: Right. So I think, you know, obviously having a support network obviously is key, and so that people who are close to you, who you can speak to about, you know, the various stressors that you may have at work, in particular if you may be one of a few black people, or even if you aren't one of a few black or brown people. You know, our experiences in the workplace are very different from other people's. So definitely having a support network, and I think also not waiting for people to check in on you, but also to the extent that you can sharing with, like, your family and loved ones, particularly those who will be helpful, like, how you are feeling, 'cause I think sometimes, for many of us, we are very high-functioning, and so when you--you may be depressed, feeling depression and anxiety, but you are, like, highly productive. You're getting things done. You have a family. You have a great job. But, you know, you still need support, and it may not be, like, overtly obvious to your family. So I think, to the extent that we can, reaching out when we can. Obviously, you know, for instance, depression can sometimes impact people's ability to motivate and to be able to reach out to people, so obviously then we have to check on each other. I think also something that I have been increasingly learning is having some sort of, like, spiritual practice or some way of, like, grounding yourself, whether it's yoga or meditation or prayer. Whatever it is or whoever you pray to, having that be a regular part of your day and of your practice is I think incredibly important, because, like, you know, it's very hard to change these systems, and for the most part we have ourselves and we have our support networks. And so those are some of the recommendations that I would have. And I think also mentorship. If folks have mentors who, you know, have been in similar fields, or maybe even in a different field but can provide guidance and support, that makes a huge, huge difference. And also peer mentors as well, having folks who may be going through similar experiences as you where you can kind of commune and, like, come together and commiserate and also be helpful.Zach: You know, it's interesting. So you talked a little bit about your twin sister Dr. Uche Blackstock, and recently she published an article titled "Why Black Doctors Like Me Are Leaving Faculty Positions In Academic Medical Centers," and in the piece, towards the end of it, she says, "Academic medical centers must begin to recognize and rectify the historical and current impact of racism on the health care workforce. Their leaders should listen actively and respond accordingly to the concerns of black faculty members and students, adopt an anti-racist philosophy, and, through a lens of racial equity, intentionally commit the time, effort and resources required to dismantle the structural racism and white supremacy embedded in their current institutional cultures." Now, your work--again, we've been talking about it this entire conversation--is to combat the attitudes and white supremacist institutions that not only create but thrive off of inequity. I'm curious, in your mind, what incentives do these institutions have to actually make substantive, long-standing institutional changes?Oni: Yeah, that's a really tough question. You know, I think what we see motivates folks in society tends to be financial incentives, so I think if there is something in it, like, sort of profit-wise for these institutions, like, that can be helpful. I really don't know, because I think, you know, for many of these institutions--you know, I work at a government agency. The government has played a role for more than a century or two, probably several centuries, in perpetuating, you know, racist policies, and I think--you know, nowadays obviously we want to do the right thing and rectify things, but there's still--you know, the workplace here reflects what we see outside. Like, the public health department isn't immune from the inequities that we see outside, and I think that it requires really visionary leadership and commitment to change, but what it also requires is, like, white people to step to the side and there to be more leadership opportunities for black and brown people, and I think that's really a struggle. I think people support the idea of equity in theory, but then in practice it looks really different. I think, even just from conversations I had today with some of my staff, you know, in practice it can feel very uncomfortable. I think there's that saying, like, "When you're used to privilege, equity feels like oppression," or something like that. Yeah, so it's like, you know, when the going gets rough and you're really wanting to institute these changes, I mean, there's gonna be--there's tremendous pushback and resistance, and they're the reason why things have stayed the way that they are. So I have to be honest, I don't have, like, an answer. I would be curious to know about institutions that have had transformations and have done this well. It's a process. I know here at the agency, at the health department in New York City, you know, since Dr. Bassett came in 2014, and then the initiative started I believe in 2015, you know, it's slow-going, because these are, like, processes and structures that have been in place for centuries that we're now trying to undo. So I think--there's this organization that we work with called Race Forward, and they talk about equity being both a process and an outcome, and so we try to emphasize the process part, because people often want to see, you know, concrete change, and where there's an opportunity to show concrete change we try to, but we realize that this work takes a long time.Zach: So, you know, out of respect to the time, you know, I haven't been putting a lot of sound effects in, but let me just tell you, you've been casually dropping crazy Flex bombs this entire interview. So I just want to react to that. [Flex bomb sfx] You was also lighting 'em up like [blatblatblat sfx], you know what I'm saying? [both laugh]Oni: Wow, that's impressive.Zach: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. That was also Cardi B, ladies and gentlemen.Oni: Oh, I love her.Zach: [Cardi B "ow" sfx] All right, so let's do this. Before we let you go, we typically give folks space, shout-outs, parting words. What you got for us?Oni: Wow. Okay, so I would say that I'm sure many of your listeners or people who have been quite successful by this society's standards, and I think often, like, we use, you know, degrees and job titles and stuff to, you know, say how successful we've been, but what I realized, you know, with the different leadership opportunities I've had, the different degrees I've gotten, it's really about finding happiness. I know it sounds really hackneyed and trite, but really doing the internal work to be happy regardless of whether you have, like, these accolades or not, because, like, my leadership job here and my degrees aren't gonna keep me, like--you know, happy at night, you know? Like, it's really believing in myself and that, you know, regardless of whether I'm working in a clinic, whether I'm leading the Bureau of HIV in the health department, I still--you know, I am really the work of, like, all of my ancestors who came before me. I, like, represent everything that they have been through, so to then think about success in, like, this white supremacist framework would not be something that they would be happy about. So I just try to, like, think about, you know, the family members and [?] that got me here and really about my own self-worth and happiness and not to measure that by these different accolades and positions and degrees.Zach: Wow. You know what? Just shout-out to you. Like, this is incredible. You know, there are people--I will say this as we wrap up--you know, there are people that I--that Living Corporate and myself individually, but also, like, our team, will, like, look for to get on the platform, and we'll look at their social media and we'll be like, "Dang, they look like they're real spicy on social media," then they get on the podcast and they're not as spicy. It's kind of like, "Come on, what are you doing?" But, like, I feel like you have matched, if not exceeded, your spiciness. Like, if I was to rate it, like, it is higher. Like, three curry goats, like, [?]. Anyway, it's great. All right, now, look, y'all. This has been dope. Y'all know what we do. We're having these conversations every single week, coming to y'all with dope conversations. This has been Zach. You have been talking to Dr. Blackstock, okay? Dr. Blackstock is the assistant commissioner of the NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, focusing on HIV prevention and research and study, doing all the amazing things up in New York. Let's see here. What else? You know, check us out on Instagram @LivingCorporate, Twitter @LivingCorp_Pod, and check us out on our website www.living-corporate.com--please say the dash. We do livingcorporate.co, livingcorporate.tv, livingcorporate.org, .net. We have all of the livingcorporates. 'Cause, see, people hit me up, Dr. Blackstock, and they'll be like, "What's the website?" And I'm like, "Look, it's livingcorporate.co or living-corporate.com," but people go livingcorporate.com, and then it pops up some Australian website, and I'm like, "Look, we don't have that domain. We have all the other domains." So you gotta make sure--you know, you gotta keep with us. You know, don't slow down. Keep up. You might get left behind. So my biggest thing right now is I want y'all to make sure y'all check the show notes, y'all look at the research and the work that Dr. Blackstock is doing. Make sure that you educate for yourself, advocate for yourself, shoot, and stay courageous out here. Did y'all hear all the stuff she was saying? Casually. She works for the government and she's talking about white supremacy. What you talking about? She's not scared, you know what I mean? Ain't nobody coming up here talking about [Law and Order sfx], you know? She's not afraid, okay? She's ready.Oni: And Zach, can I just say really quickly just as--I don't know if I'm an OG now 'cause I'm over 40, but I just want to say that I'm incredibly proud of you and this effort that you have and your Living Corporate podcast. It's really wonderful to see young people just thriving, so congratulations.Zach: Oh, my goodness. Well, look, we're both thriving, and I'm just over here like [look at us sfx]. You know? That's a Paul Rudd reference, everybody. Okay. All right, y'all. 'Til next time. This has been Zach. Again, you've been listening to me chop it up with Dr. Blackstock. 'Til next time. Peace.