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2 episodes with right maybe
2 episodes with right maybe
2 episodes with right maybe
It’s practically accepted as truth at this point: Millennials would be the first generation to be worse off than their parents. But recent research casts some doubt on that assessment. We’ll consider some economic findings that reframe things a bit. Plus, prices were up 3.2% annually in February, and month-over-month price increases seem to be going in the wrong direction. That’s not something the Federal Reserve will be happy about.
It’s practically accepted as truth at this point: Millennials would be the first generation to be worse off than their parents. But recent research casts some doubt on that assessment. We’ll consider some economic findings that reframe things a bit. Plus, prices were up 3.2% annually in February, and month-over-month price increases seem to be going in the wrong direction. That’s not something the Federal Reserve will be happy about.
I have rethought Black Lives Matter Inc.'s alignment with Hamas. They say they share the same struggle, and maybe they do. No, seriously! But it's not in the way they think, it's in the way of reality. BLM Inc. has so much in common with the bosses of Hamas. We discuss their financial commonality and a whole slew of topics on how these groups are the same.What does God's Word say? Matthew 7:15-2015 “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. 16 By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.Episode 1,183 Links:Man behind Ivy League ‘doxxing trucks' has home searched by gun-toting SWAT teamENOUGH IS ENOUGH. I'm calling on the @ADL to immediately remove my name from their “Glossary of Extremism.” Not only have they defamed me, they also lumped me in with terrorist organizations like Hamas. They have until Oct 31st to remove this defamatory entry before I'm forced to take more action. @JGreenblattADLPostcolonial Math; fog fog fog SUNLIGHTFestive Abattoir; don't brain, worm peopleBiden says we have to get over our divisions as his DOJ is throwing a guy in jail for memesBREAKING: Zach Metzger just posted this video on Instagram justifying his actions blocking the highway and terrorizing the old man at a pro-Hamas protest because the man tried to defend himself with a knife after his car was mobbed.Hamas leaders net worth: "I was born at the heart of Hamas leadership and I know them very well. They don't care for the Palestinian people. They are using the Palestinian cause only to achieve their goals, transforming the Middle East and the world into an Islamic state."4Patriots https://4patriots.com Protect your family with Food kits, solar generators and more at 4Patriots. Use code TODD for 10% off your first purchase. Alan's Soaps https://alanssoaps.com/TODD Use coupon code ‘TODD' to save an additional 10% off the bundle price. American Financing https://americanfinancing.net Visit to see what American Financing can do for you or call 866-887-2275 BiOptimizers https://bioptimizers.com/todd Use promo code TODD for 10% off your order. Bonefrog https://bonefrog.us Enter promo code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your subscription. Bulwark Capital http://KnowYourRiskRadio.com Find out how Bulwark Capital Actively Manages risk. Call 866-779-RISK or visit KnowYourRiskRadio.com Patriot Mobile https://patriotmobile.com/herman Get free activation today with offer code HERMAN. Visit or call 878-PATRIOT. SOTA Weight Loss https://sotaweightloss.com SOTA Weight Loss is, say it with me now, STATE OF THE ART! Sound of Freedom https://angel.com/freedom Join the two million and see Sound of Freedom in theaters July 4th. GreenHaven Interactive https://greenhaveninteractive.com Digital Marketing including search engine optimization and website design.
Godfrey's enjoying Hugh Freeze's fact checking session during his weekly presser as much as the next sane CFB fan, but does the Righteous Rev. sorta have a point about expectations?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Calvin Betton, live from pre-season, joins George Bellshaw and James Gray to talk about all the biggest news from tennis this week, including: Why Nick Kyrgios thinks he should be ranked No 2 in the world (see link for the full 'discourse' https://twitter.com/NickKyrgios/status/1602161813998665728) We choose our picks for the following categories Player of the Year Best Newcomer Most Improved Coach of the Year Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Calvin Betton, live from pre-season, joins George Bellshaw and James Gray to talk about all the biggest news from tennis this week, including: Why Nick Kyrgios thinks he should be ranked No 2 in the world (see link for the full 'discourse' https://twitter.com/NickKyrgios/status/1602161813998665728) We choose our picks for the following categories Player of the Year Best Newcomer Most Improved Coach of the Year Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In QSOM Second Hour we talk Ricky Martin's saga, and invite special guests Kiara Imani and Jay Pabon to the brunch table! Kiara Imani is an attorney, entrepreneur, media personality and author of the new book Therapy Isn't Just for White People. She talks about her journey of healing and more live for our audience. Plus our resident fitness expert Jay Pabon gives some tips for staying healthy while working out.
The girls are back live in the studio with your hot topics after the pride break. Join the hosts of Queer State of Mind Saidue, Micah, Marquis and Orie as they chat about MPX, Ivana Trump and more. Music from Celine Dion, Azealia Banks, Kelly Clarkson and Tina Turner
This week the boys do NOT discuss Peacemaker. They do, however, discuss whether or not Junior was right about Christmas movies, hitler's children and changing your name. For content corner, Junior talks about his wife's obsession with a new video game and Nick started yet another game he won't finish.
Because you might actually know something. Get the Caffeinated humor books! The books that made the podcast! Time for Coffee! Coffee.org has all of your caffeinated needs!Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREEDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/venozofe)
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Statistical observations suggest vote fraud Pennsylvania law on late vote receipts Nevada and non-resident votes Wisconsin anomalies all benefited Biden Michigan anomalies all benefited Biden Securing future elections ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/scott-adams00/support
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my “extra” content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Statistical observations suggest vote fraud Pennsylvania law on late vote receipts Nevada and non-resident votes Wisconsin anomalies all benefited Biden Michigan anomalies all benefited Biden Securing future elections If you would like to enjoy this same content plus […] The post Episode 1181 Scott Adams PART1: Why President Trump Still Has the Advantage. Crazy, Right? Maybe not. appeared first on Scott Adams' Blog.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my “extra” content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Statistical observations suggest vote fraud Pennsylvania law on late vote receipts Nevada and non-resident votes Wisconsin anomalies all benefited Biden Michigan anomalies all benefited Biden Securing future elections If you would like to enjoy this same content plus […] The post Episode 1181 Scott Adams PART2: Why President Trump Still Has the Advantage. Crazy, Right? Maybe not. appeared first on Scott Adams' Blog.
The starving artist, locked away in his tenement apartment, not a penny to his name, suffering for his art because that's how genius is made. That's what we all must strive for. Right? That's the only way to create a masterpiece. Right??? Maybe not.
Don't Mess With the People of God 2 Kings 5:20Naaman is on his way back to Syria with the non-leprous skin of a young child. Happy story. Right? Maybe not. Stay tuned...Gehazi, Elisha's servant, who should have known better, is a sneaky profiteer. He knows that Naaman has $4million in his pocket and WANTS to give it to Elisha. Elisha, WHO STANDS BEFORE GOD, says NO. Gehazi, seeing this opportunity, says YES. He violates his relationship with His boss ElishaHe violates the concern the Lord has for the foreignerHe violates the special concern that one believer is to have for anotherHe ignores entirely that the Lord Sees everything and that he too stands exposed before GodHe presumes on his position, with Elisha, within Israel, with the people of God and with a new, weaker brotherListen, because the story of Naamen ends horribly for Israel. (Gehazi)
Yes you, I'm talking to you. I am sure in the last few months you have felt all three of these emotions.(Coronavirus) Rightfully so, but there's more to that. Think about your whole life's journey. Who ever you are, what ever situation, you have felt these feelings. However by going though the steps in order things got better to handle, Right? Maybe so but these are the way to handle any situation to get to better. Listen and enjoy. Just another way to look at things.
When circumstances stay the same for a long time, the tempation is to "lie down" and accept the fact that things aren't going to change or get better, because, well you know, "There's nothing I can do about it". Right? Maybe there is. Listen in and find out what you must do to bring about the change your heart longs for.
So much time on our hands... Well, for some of us. Might as well work out all the time! Right? Maybe. In this episode we evaluate the role of frequency in our workouts in relation to rest and recovery.
There is a lot of research about LGBTQ+ communities. Right? Maybe. But is there enough? Professor Andrea Allen argues not. In today's episode of Between, Across, and Through, we travel with her to examine the lives and relationships of lesbian women in Brazil. Please join us as Professor Kevin Lewis O’Neill sits down to discuss how the embodiment of lesbian sexuality sits at an intersection of race, socioeconomic status, and gender roles. -- This podcast is sponsored by the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. Our Host is Professor Kevin Lewis O'Neill. Between, Across, & Through is produced, edited, and mixed by Ianeke L Romero
We're still stuck inside. So why not watch a bunch of anime! Right? Maybe... ___________________________________________________________________________ Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/gamesbadly Jake's Channel - youtube.com/jacobfoxchannel Podcast - https://anchor.fm/games-badly Merch - https://www.redbubble.com/people/Lord-Fox/shop?asc=u Twitter - twitter.com/TweetsBadly --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
In today's episode Ben & I take a look at a China jumping on the single use plastics ban that's been sweeping the planet. As we mentioned in a previous episode it's impossible to talk about this topic without first addressing global recycling. Let's see how complicated this gets. Single Use Plastic: China To Ban Bags And Other Items - BBC Is What We're Recycling Actually Getting Recycled - How Stuff Works Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, Or Maybe Not. - NYT Is This The End Of Recycling? - The Atlantic 5 Recycling Myths Busted - NatGeo The Plastic Recycling Scam - Daily Kos If there's a topic you want to hear more about drop us a line and let us know. Links are always appreciated. For more episodes check out freemarketsgreenearth.com Free Markets, Green Earth is hosted by Nicky P (Sounds Like Liberty, This Week In Liberpods & Parent 2 Podcaster) as well as The Liberty Hippie: Ben Pangie (Homesteads & Homeschools Podcast.) Free Markets Green Earth is a proud creation of The Mad Audio Lab. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/freemarketsgreenearth/message
Welcome! Today there is a ton of stuff going on in the world of Technology, and we are going to hit several topics today. From Technological Protection to tactics. Zero-Day Browser Vulnerabilities, Malware Infected Phones, Vulnerable Broadcom Chipsets in Cable Modems. Why connections always mean hacking. Social Engineering. The absolute need for Updates, Patches. The Coming Cyber War is already here, and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGANand more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on WGAN and even more. It is a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Technology Can Only Protect You So Much --- Then Other Tactics are Needed Zero-Day Browser Vulnerabilities A Free but Malware Infected Phone -- Courtesy of the US Taxpayer A Lesson to Learn - If it is Connected It can Be Hacked Routers and Firewalls with Broadcom Chipsets Are Vulnerable Social Engineering Comes to the Forefront of Attacks Updates, Patches, and Hackers Oh My! Cyber War isn’t Coming It is already here! --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here a big week when it comes to security updates, and I mean a massive weekend. Welcome to show number 1043. That's weeks people. I've been doing this for a very long time, glad you have joined us, and if you are watching over on YouTube, I'd love to hear from you. Just email me at Craig Peterson calm you know if you're on YouTube or, or Facebook, I've noticed a few people who have subscribed, and I love that thank you very, very much. I hope you get a lot out of the show. If you're listening on the radio, of course, you can also email me at Craig Peterson calm with any questions that you might have. And I always try and answer them now sometimes it takes me a little longer than others. As you can imagine, I am a busy guy. It is kind of a labor of love, but we do want to answer your questions and help You out with everything. Keep an eye on your mailbox this week. Because I am finishing the course of courses. I am so excited about this, so proud of what we're doing. And what I'm trying to do here is help you get to the point where you have all the information you need. If you're the Operations Manager now responsible for it in a company, or you're a smaller company, you know, doctors office, etc. It is going to be great. So keep an eye on your email. Because what I want from you here as I'm finishing this course up is your questions. I want to make sure they all get answered. As I've been going through putting the course together, I've even noticed that there are things that would help take that kind of extra mile if you will, you know there are these concepts that people just don't understand. And I'm going through this thinking oh my gosh, you know, to me, it's so obvious, but to so many people, it's just not because this isn't what they do every day, and they've done every day for years and years. So we're adding a bunch of different things to this course, different bonuses that are going to help. Of course, as we always do, I will still do free training, that's always part of one of these courses when we lead up to it. And there's a lot of people out there that say, Hey, listen, I can get everything I need just from the free training. And you know, between you and me, that's not true. But you can learn a lot from those. So I hope you will attend. And if you're not on my email list right now, even if you're a home user and not a business person, you're not an office manager. Let's say you're a small business owner, and you're wondering if this is something that you should do or not. I think the answer is yes. Because really, I've never been so excited about something ever. It is something I think you're going to love. I know I have put mine all into this and solos my wife. I've had a couple of other people here in our team helping out as well had a great meeting this week. And it's just man, this is exciting. So anyway, if you're not on my email list, sign up right now so that you can get on you can get not just this, but every week I send out videos, I send out a newsletter. I do Facebook Live training and YouTube Live, and we have pop-up training when there's something that's hit the news that you know you're trying to stay ahead of we do all of this stuff, and that's all for free, but you got to be on that particular email list. So subscribe by going to Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, make sure you're there. I think you're like it. You know, you can always unsubscribe, which some people do, right? It's not for everybody, but most people have been on there for years now. I have people on there. That man, I'm trying And remember, but it's been probably 25 years on that list. So join now Craig Peterson, calm slash subscribe. Now I started by saying that we have some real security problems this week. So I want I'm going to mention this a couple of times during the show, I want to make sure you guys know first of all, huge, huge, huge windows problem out there. And this problem was reported by the National Security Agency. Now, I made mention of this on the radio this week when I was a guest on the morning drive show, but I think it's worth mentioning again, and that is The National Security Agency when they have found these types of bugs. What do they do? They keep them for themselves. They don't want other people to know about the virus, because then they use that bug now to go and grab onto other people's computers, you know, foreign agencies, bad Guys, good guys, people that they're not sure of right all of this stuff. They've been using it for years. We saw this from Edward Snowden and his leaks, right? He went out, saying everything they are monitoring, and that they are capturing and, and they're putting up on to their computers and their data storage over there in Utah and just terrible things. So we know they're doing this stuff. Well, this was amazing to me, because I realized that here under the Trump administration, this is the first administration where the National Security Agency has recognized a more significant responsibility. It isn't just hacking into other people. It's providing security to us, to you to me, right, and helping us to understand what we need to do which yea yea yea right. I've always been trying to help everybody. Get more secure. So I'm glad the NSA is doing that. Now. They didn't do it under the Obama administration or the Bush administration or the Clinton administration, right? They just haven't done this, and I don't think ever. So kudos to them if they're listening. And of course, we know they are. And kudos to the government agency. So this is a big, big deal here with Windows. And we need to understand kind of what it is it's going on. But basically, it has to do with encryption. It has to do with that part of the windows that we use to try and keep ourselves safe. Now, it's not all encryption. I don't want to get too technical. Everybody, you know, my show here is really to help you guys understand things and not get all cliquey and clinical and buzzwordy, although sometimes I am accused of doing that frequently, I try not to. So it has to do with encryption. And it turns out that in the cases of this time, encryption. Microsoft isn't even validating keys, which, as you can gas, if you don't know anything about encryption, is a huge deal. So update windows pronto. Now, there are no known attacks in the wild, but you can be sure those are coming. Also, a big update this week from Firefox because of a massive security hole. You probably know, I love the Firefox browser. I use that Firefox browser. And I hope you do too. It is important if you use Facebook, because of Firefox browser has a special thing where it's fencing Facebook in so that it can't read all these other sites visited. It's great for that, but there is a security bug. So that's news, I guess. We want to make sure we fix that main, and you can do that by updating Firefox. Now Firefox is one of those browsers that updates itself. So hopefully you've recognized it Firefox came up and said, Hey, I want to restart to install patches, and then let it restart, you have to let it restart. And Chrome started doing that as well. Again, never, ever use Microsoft Internet Explorer, it is the definition of a problem for you. Okay, security and otherwise, so don't use Internet Explorer. And also, of course, the Edge browser. I wouldn't use either. And I'm not fond of Google browser, Google Chrome unless you have to use it, right, because some applications only work well in Chrome. So let's get to our first article of the day here. We're talking about half protected is half empty, and you can see behind me, technology can only protect you and me so much. Many of these threat actors, these cyber guys that are out there, they are coming after you and me. And one of the easiest ways to come after us is using phishing smishing some of these other tactics, and we're going to come up here in another segment Today, I'll be talking about smishing. And how bad that has gotten and how you can avoid it six tips. I'll give you here to avoid smishing. But in reality, right now, we're talking about the human element. And what the wetware You and I, right versus hardware and software you and I are doing, and we're getting confused, and they are taking us to task on this. But we've got to be careful here with our security controls. We got to make sure that people only have as much access to data as they need to know so so many businesses will see this all the time. And I understand if you're doing this because it gets kind of complicated to do it the right way. But so many businesses are sharing their file server with everybody. They've got an Active Directory server or some sort of a network-attached storage device, etc. And all of their files are on it, and everybody has access, you don't want to do that. Because all it takes is one person to get fooled into clicking on a link, downloading some of the malware software. And once that malware loads onto their computer, start to spread. Where is it going to spread? Well, heck, it says Look at this, a network-attached file system a file share. I'll just try start to spread that way, and it does. So keep your security controls in place. Make sure you have the minimum necessary access. Make sure when it comes to your password management, be sure that you are using password vault at a very minimum. You can go all the way up to things like Thychotic, which is just phenomenal; it changes passwords and everything as used. But be very, very careful because this can go a long way towards helping your business to stay safe. Train your personnel and make sure they know what they should be doing. You Google has some free tools you can use. I have some tools. In my weekly newsletter, a lot of businesses use that as their training. They have people go through that read it and then answer some questions. So that's all free at Craig Peterson, calm slash subscribe. So stick around. We're going to come back, and we're going to talk more about this whole Firefox warning. And we'll talk a little bit about browsers. You're listening to Craig Peterson. I'm of course on the air on WGN radio and other stations online at correct Peterson dot com Hey, hello, everybody, Craig Petersson here. Welcome back. We're going to talk a little bit right now about browsers. You know, this is the biggest problem I think many of us have when it comes to being online. which browser should I choose? And where am I going to see the problems? Well, as I just talked about in the last segment, and we're going to talk a little bit about now, we have a security vulnerability out there for Firefox. Now, Firefox is a browser made by the group known as Mozilla. And they've been making this browser for quite a few years. Now. I love this browser. I used to use it almost exclusively. Now, I've changed my tune a little bit. And I have a few different browsers that I use, frankly, for different reasons. So let's go through those reasons pretty quickly. One, if I need the most compatibility in a browser. And this usually means I'm using some sort of software as a service online. So I might be trying to do something extraordinary with a Canva, for instance, which is an amazing tool when it comes to graphics. And it doesn't always work so well with other browsers. It refuses to run under the Opera browser. So if I need the highest level of compatibility, it's Google, Google Chrome. And Google Chrome browser is the most supported, and it's number one out there, the most supportive browser, bar none. It didn't use to be, but it sure is now, the second browser level browser that I use for everything except for Facebook. Lately, I've been using Opera O-P-E-R-A. Now opera has browsers for your desktop, whether it's a Mac or Windows machine. Has it for tablets, it has it for your smartphones. P-opera is great. It is Every fast. That's kind of its claim to fame. It's the fastest browser, but it also has the highest level of security. Well, almost right? But of the common browsers that are going to work with most websites opera. So that's number two. Number three is the Firefox browser. Now, remember, I said, I don't run Facebook, inside of opera. And that's because Firefox has an incredible feature. When it comes to running Facebook. It fences it in quite literally see what far what Facebook's trying to do is get all the information they can get about you. Now, that's not necessarily a terrible thing. Because Facebook is frankly, selling advertising and they Want to know? What are you most likely to buy? And you know what this world runs on advertising. We see ads all the time on TV. We hear ads all the time on the radio like right now, if you're listening to me on the radio, you're going to hear ads, right? That's how the lights get kept on at all of these businesses. Now, would you rather see an ad for cars, new cars, when you're looking to buy a new car? Or do you want to see ads for cars all the time? Personally, if I'm looking for a new car, that's what I want to see. ads for a new car. If I'm looking for shoes, that's what I want to see ads for shoes, right? you get the point here. So if Facebook's able to kind of track what you're interested in what your friends are talking about, then it can give you the ads, and it thinks you're going to be interested in I love that concept. And as somebody who owns a business, I particularly love that concept. So I'm not wasting time or money, not wasting the time of people who aren't my customers and would never become a customer by showing them an ad, right? It's like the Super Bowl ads coming up in a couple of weeks here. But those Super Bowl ads that are almost useless and cost millions of dollars, you know, those are almost useless. So from an advertising standpoint, I love the fact that Facebook keeps that information. As a consumer, I love the fact that pays Facebook keeps that information. However, What I don't like is Facebook's habit of doing what's called cross-site tracking. What that means is Facebook knows Hey, I went to this site I went to that site, and it can help them with selling stuff it knows Hey Greg just went to the Ford website Ford trucks he was looking at, etc. etc. And so now it says Hey, Mr. Chevy dealer Are you interested in maybe buying some advertising is handed off to good old Craig there. And that's how they're making money as well. And so the Chevy guys happy because his ad went to somebody who was potentially going to buy the competition, which by the way, I buy an F 150. Any day over so many of the other products on the market, let me say that we can talk about that some other time, or a rather lengthy discussion. But that's what they're doing. So in the faith in the Firefox browser, when you're running Facebook, what it's doing is it is blocking that cross-site tracking. Because when you like something on Facebook, you might not be aware of it, but it can use some of that information for the cross-site tracking stuff. And there's a lot of information that I just don't want Facebook to have any of their business. Remember, it ends up in the hands of who knows who. Everyone to the Obama campaign. Did you want all of your information given to a political party? Then when Trump ran, they sold some of the information through a third party over in the UK to the Trump campaign. Alright, and so I certainly get it What? Why weren't people upset that the record of literally billions of people was handed right over to the Obama campaign, and yet, few only 10s of millions went to the Trump campaign, and everybody freaks out. Well, I guess that's part of the Trump derangement syndrome, right? So that's why I don't like Facebook to do cross-site tracking. none of their business was out. I'm going online, frankly. And that's where I use the Firefox browser. It's got some excellent cross-site tracking features built-in Plus it has some other features about advertising. And one of the ways that the web sites can figure out who you are, even if you turn off tracking, is to look at what plugins you have installed in your browser, right? A little bit about the history, the cache, the memory in your browser and your computer, right? The operating system version, the computer, the version of the browser, all of that stuff gets pulled out together, come up with a unique picture of who you are. So even if they can't say cookies, they can get all of this information, figure out who you are. Blocking Facebook from doing that when you are on Firefox, and in fact, Firefox blocks that kind of information gathering, no matter which website you're going to, it isn't just Facebook, so check it out. But the Department of Homeland Security now has come out issued a notification encouraging People to upgrade the Firefox browser. It is because there are serious critical actions where they use a security problem with the version of the Firefox browser. So they're warning us, they're advising us, they are encouraging us to make sure we update our Firefox browser up to at least version 72. Now the beautiful thing about the Firefox browser is it always tries to keep itself up to date. And so if your browser, whether it's Chrome or Firefox or anything if your browser comes up and says, Hey, I want to do an update, just let it do the update. Okay? Which usually means you have to quit the browser and restart it. So that's a huge deal because it's likely unless you configured it differently. You can tell it hey, I want you to reopen all the tabs I had open before all of the windows I had open and I do that all the time. I have, by the way, a little browser plugin that I use that you might like, it is called the Great suspender. I figured I should mention this to you guys, the great suspender. And what the great despite suspender does is if you go to a web page in a tab, it will automatically be suspended after an hour, 15 minutes whenever you set it for saving your computer memory and saving your computer execution time. Alright, so if you're like me, and you have a ton of tabs open, check that out the great suspender. So, in summary, if you have to have absolute compatibility, Google Chrome, normal browsing, you probably want to use opera and then Firefox for one year using Facebook, and then you know banks and things. Facebook or excuse me, and Firefox is pretty good. You're listening to Craig Peterson WGAN stick around because I'll be right back Welcome back everybody Greg Peter song here on WGAN and, of course, online as well. If you are watching on YouTube, and you want to see the articles, I post my videos on YouTube. This week we posted a few on Facebook as well. Hopefully, we'll be able to get them all up this week on Facebook as well as YouTube. So how do you find them? simplest way? Go to Craig Peterson comm slash YouTube if your YouTube user or Craig Peterson comm slash Facebook if you are a Facebook user, you know some of us like Facebook some of us don't like Facebook, I use it because of business. There are people on Facebook who are clients and who asked questions I often will put together these pop-up Facebook groups to address specific problems that people are having or the come up in in the news cycle as well. So all of that online at Craig Peterson calm, I'm also we're in the process of changing the website look and feel we got the new one laid out. But we don't have it up and active yet, but we should have it up hopefully within the next few weeks. So keep an eye on that too. I think you're going to like it a lot less confusing homepage than what used to be there. There's just too much stuff on there. So the new homepage has a couple of videos from the weekly summary of the articles. So you can click on them and read them and watch me as well. And then it has this is a new feature that we're adding to our newsletter right now. And that is, we have the top security tactics for the week. So the things you need to So like this week, as I mentioned at the top of the show, we've got a huge Microsoft huge security problem that the NSA told us about Homeland Security warned us about a problem with some of the older releases of Firefox. What software is being attacked right now in the wild? What needs attention now. So that's going to be a new feature of our newsletter as well. So keep an eye out for that. Lots of stuff going on as we get ready for our big training course that's coming up in just a few weeks from now. So keep an eye on your email box, because we're finishing up the course and I'm going to ask you guys what you think maybe I should add, make sure I have in the course. And I'm sure it's going to result in us having to produce a little bit more content than we thought, but the goal is to help you guys understand the security stuff. Now, this article is just mind-blowing to some people. It is from Forbes magazine. You'll find it at Forbes calm. And of course, I have a link to it on my website as well at Craig Peterson calm. But the United States has these programs. You remember all of the bragging people that, wow, I got my Obama phone now that President Obama took over and somehow they figured that it was from him, right. But we have had a program for a very long time for people who don't have much income. And I remember people with dial old rotary phones that got free phones, and the idea was that they could be used to call your doctor to call 911 or something that happened. A quick call to your family and friend. It was even back in the day when the phone call Company charged per minute to make a phone call on a landline. So these programs have been around for many, many years. And more recently, the government has been giving out to people, some of these smartphones. Now they're usually more limited functions and features, and they're trying to keep the costs of these phones down and keep them simple. But in this day and age, I look at it and say, Hey, listen, if we want people to be able to find jobs, they need an online web browser of some sort. So yeah, I love the idea of giving them a smartphone, you know, providing them a charity shouldn't be doing it. The government is doing it right now. But they should be able to go online and do some shopping. Some of the numbers I've seen out of Africa are amazing to me some of these charities I've worked with, who have gone and given phones even just the basic old phones you know, with the ten keypads on It that you can use to what was that called the T something rather. But you could use to spell out words and websites, and it would go there. And they've been giving them those phones, and now they've given them smartphones. But they have had some amazing results, particularly with women in Africa. They were able to build businesses now because they could communicate. Right? capitalism is a terrible, terrible name. Because the capitalists aren't the ones starting the companies. Then it's the entrepreneurs, and it's the people like you and me. Were the ones creating the companies? We're the ones taking the risk of the capitalists are the guys in the banks, who say, yeah, hey, if you don't need the money, we'll loan it to you. Right. Those are the capitalists, the people that are buying and selling stocks, and these big public companies. Yeah, those are capitalists. When we're talking about these African women, who have been some subsistence living for their whole lifetimes. Now being able to have a business where maybe they're making something selling it online, maybe they're selling their herds of animals buying herds, cheese, milk, whatever it might be. Those are entrepreneurs. And giving them the tools that they need, like the ability to be able to communicate is a huge, huge deal. Very, very big. So what are we doing here in the US? For years, the government has provided low-income households with cheap phone service, cheap cell service, and even free smartphones. Sometimes they are completely free, particularly if they are ill or injured, you know, on disability, etc. Well, one provider called assurance wireless, you probably heard of them before, offers a free Android device, along with free data, free trial. 16 and minutes now, this is all in this Forbes magazine article. So it sounds fantastic, right? smartphones can be expensive. Even if you buy the ones I say till I say don't buy, right like the Android phones, they can still be expensive, and they can still be $1,000. For some of these phones, it's not a cheap deal at all. But according to some researchers, the article goes on. There's a catch. The Android phones come with a pre-installed Chinese malware, which effectively opens up a backdoor onto the device and an endangers their private data. One of the malware types is impossible to remove, according to the researchers, and now the researchers here, our company called malware bytes. If you have bought one of my courses before you know Malwarebytes is one of the pieces of software, I recommend that you get it Not perfect right, but it helps much better than antivirus software, right? My gosh, did you realize antivirus software today? Today is effective against zero percent of the newest attacks is zero percent right, so having Malwarebytes is probably an excellent idea. So Malwarebytes said that they tried to warn assurance wireless, which is a Virgin Mobile company. And assurance wireless never got back to them. These devices that we're talking about have a backdoor and one that looks like it's impossible to remove. Those companies are still are those phones that are still out there. Man. So Forbes then after they found out from Malwarebytes about what was going on, Forbes reached out as well to assurance to wireless. Nothing happened. Okay. Then apparently, after the initial publication, this article a spokesperson for Sprint, which owns Virgin Mobile, and assurance wireless said, we are aware of this issue. We are in touch with the device manufacturer, unit max to understand the root cause. However, after our initial testing, we do not believe the applications described in the media are malware. So there you go. Chinese spying on Android smartphones. Well, that's nothing new. Having your phone coming pre-installed with malware. Hey, didn't we just talk about that a few weeks ago, how the latest releases from some of the major manufacturers of Android come pre-installed with over 100 vulnerabilities? So again, don't buy an Android period. Anyhow, let's see if the Craig Peters song. And here on WGAN online and Craig peterson.com. And we're going to talk about the ring controversy when we get back So stick around. Hey, welcome back, everybody Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. Thanks for joining me today. I appreciate it. We enjoy putting the show together, getting the information out helping everybody understand what's going on in the world of technology, you know, and I try and not use some of these industry terms that confuse people. And I've been told many times, that's one of the reasons people love to listen and to watch, and you can do both online at Craig Peterson dot com, and you can find me almost guaranteed in your favorite podcast app. No matter what it is. I'm pretty much there. I've been doing this whole podcasting business now for upwards of 20 years. So I am out there, and I appreciate every listener. Hey, if you enjoy the podcast, If you're listening to this podcast on TuneIn, make sure you spend a minute if you wouldn't mind and go to Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes. Now iTunes is the 800-pound gorilla still in the marketplace, and they do a lot of statistical tracking. Go to Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes. And if you would give me a five-star review, let me know what it is you like about the show, the best things. Hopefully, we can get even more people signed up. But I'm also on tune in, and I heart and all over the place. So you can go to Craig Peterson dot com slash, your favorite, whatever that might be tune in, and it'll take you right there, and then you can subscribe to the podcast. Well, we've talked many times about this general problem, and this is called the Internet of Things. What are you supposed to do? What is Well, we'll start there very briefly for those that aren't, you know up to date on this, because it is changing all the time. The Internet of Things now includes some of your clothing, yes, computers embedded in your clothes. Computers are built-in to the newest televisions, obviously, and into the refrigerator and your washer and dryer. At the Consumer Electronics Show, I saw some of the kitchen appliances like your stove, right? You no longer have to turn that knob on the stove. Now you go to an app, and you get your phone out, and it'll turn on or turn off whatever. That's the Internet of Things. The Smart light bulbs that we have the turn on and off the at the front door where you have maybe used to have a key, and now you can hold your phone up near that's the Internet of Things. Now, it brings about a whole lot of significant use cases and, and I love the Internet of Things. I have some of the devices at my home in my office that is all connected to the internet. And there's a good reason for it. And it works well for us. So that's the Internet of Things. Ring, which is a company that was acquired by Amazon a couple of years ago for $1 billion, is a security company. And their claim to fame was this video doorbell that they made, and they still do, and it's even still called Ring, and it's now being sold by Amazon who owns the company, as I mentioned. And the idea is you replace your doorbell on the front door, side door, whatever it might be with this little ring device. And the ring device has built into it a camera, and it's also hooked up to the internet. So if someone rings the doorbell, it will go ahead now, and it'll pop up and alert on your phone. And it'll say, hey, someone's at the door. Now you can not only look at the person at the door, and know that they are, who they are you can talk to them, you can hear what they're saying, you can go ahead and respond to them, have a conversation with them, whatever you might need to do. And then there are other ring devices now, and other devices in your home so you could unlock that front door. And Amazon has a service now that is used primarily in the bigger cities, where they'll walk into your home and leave the package inside by using a unique door lock that they can unlock. I don't know about you, Walmart is doing the same thing. With Walmart, that door lock is exclusive again, but Walmart will only use employees who have been with Walmart for more than a year and have a spot free record. Now that makes sense to me. You don't just want anybody walking in. But I don't want anybody walking into my house. So the idea behind Ring is you can be on that beach, you can be at work, you can be picking up the kids doesn't matter. And you know who has been at your home. So if you got a porch pirate, you can go back and look at the video. You can even turn it over to the police, which is where part of this problem starts. Because Ring has been doing some things that a lot of people say whoa, wait a minute now. Ring has stored all of these video recordings from the front doorbells and storing it in the cloud. Now just because it's in the cloud doesn't mean everyone has access to it, although we have certainly seen that with some cloud databases, which I believe is the problem that Ring had. So what happens then? Because now all of the videos that your ring devices have captured is online. Another problem that these companies had (Ring, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri) is that some contractors were looking at these video files listening to the audio. And people thought that was a terrible thing. Oh, you know, frankly, that's not a terrible thing. Because how are you going to make the voice recognition better? If nobody verifies the voice recognition, right? You have to have somebody listened to it. Well, in Rings's case, it turned out that some of their devices were getting hacked. Now we know this happens with the Internet of Things devices. Most of it's like 90 95%. I think all of the security cameras that we have in the United States get manufactured in China. Many of them are eminently hackable. I mean, in a very, very big way. So, if you have a device that's hacked, what does it matter to you? Well, it mattered to some of these people who claim someone hacked that their Ring device because they had a camera in their kid's room. And the bad guy took over the camera and started having a conversation with their kids. Now, if that's not a problem, I don't know what it is. Remember the LA Unified School District with their laptops. And the cameras on the laptops are being turned on remotely by their IT people at the school district. And young ladies had their laptops open in their bedrooms while they were getting changed. Think about the consequences here. They can be pretty steep, and there's no question about it. One of these days, we'll make a comparison of some of the smart devices that are out there. As far as things like smart-speakers go, Amazon has been excellent. They design their echo devices to have a hardware limit on them. So they can't just sit there and listen, unlike Google Home. There are some malicious apps on Google Home that could sit there and listen for hours on end and stream everything said. They heard streaming it all up to the internet. Okay, so Alexa is kind of the way to go there. There are these people whose kids' rooms now had hacked cameras and microphones and speakers going after the company. And in November senator Ed Markey, Democrat from Mass said that he wants to make some changes to something else that Ring has been doing. The other thing the Ring did was cooperating with police departments. What they've been doing with the police departments is sharing the video, live video as well as recorded video, from the doorbells, hopefully just the doorbells. The police are doing an investigation in the neighborhood. The idea is, hey, we can grab. They're up all this stuff from all of these different cameras. We can see this car that went through the neighborhood and spied on people. Right? Maybe, someone marking to come back to later and steal things. Now, that sounds perfectly reasonable to me. The problem was that people didn't know it was going on and didn't sign up for it. They were not aware they could opt-out of it, which is a huge, huge problem. When you get right down to it, we don't have the kinds of standards I think that we should have. There are some significant technical flaws in some of these devices. There have been Hackers accused of breaking into ring products, using the cameras and speakers to yell obscenities at customers in their home and harass children. It is an enormous thing, leaving data online uttering racial slurs issue violent and all kinds of extortion threats to residents. So it's a very, very big deal. Now Amazon responded to these charges, and this was Brian Huisman, an Amazon vice president said they take customer privacy and protection of customer data very seriously. Amazon acknowledged that on for occasions in the last four years, they fired employees for improperly accessing customer videos, and that's what I was talking about before. Ring used to have it set up so that anyone could access anything. It's kind of like God Mode over on Uber, where any of the employees could track any movement of anyone using Uber editor. Employees were using God Mode to track celebrities. It was just incredible login credentials, and a breach of more than 3600 Ring account holders last month. That's personal information. We've got to get more careful. If you are a company that has custom software that you've designed or that is designed for you, I urge you have it code reviewed. Make sure you are using the highest standards available so that you're not going to end up in a lawsuit. Ring is going to end up in a lawsuit over this. It's not just going to be Ed Markey going after him. Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN online and Craig Peterson dot com. Stick around. We got some more news, this time about cable modems. Hey, good afternoon. Welcome back. I should say I like Good morning anyways, it's a better greeting, isn't it then Good afternoon or good evening or Good night. So good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and of course online and Craig Peterson dot com. We are also putting all of the show up on YouTube and Facebook. And you'll find all of that if you dig a little bit over on Craig Peterson calm, so hopefully, you'll be able to check it out over there. Now we have Greally seen a lot of security problems this week. You might even call it kind of a week of security problems. So just started with just a quick reminder to get everything patched up significant issues with Microsoft this week, and Firefox as well. Now the Microsoft problem was so severe that they released a patch for Windows the same day they announced the bug. They kept everything under wraps, which is how they try and do it. Typically someone will report it. Usually, they'll give 30 to 90 days to the vendor to get it fixed before they all kind of open source it before they tell the world about it. They want the vendor to fix the problem if it's a white hat guy, right? Of course, this time, had the NSA involved. And they did wait until Microsoft had a patch. But sometimes these vendors they'll sit on it for six months or more. And so they the guys that discovered it, say Okay, forget about it, we're just going to go ahead, we're going to release it out into the wild. We know everybody knows, you can usually expect attacks within a month after that happens. So make sure you patch up and patch up soon. You should have automatic updates turned on. We're going to be discussing this during the training that's coming up here in this course. It is going to be phenomenal. Let me tell you, but some of the free training, we're going to talk a little bit about that. We can't do this on the radio because I want to show you screenshots and where to go and what to do and how to do it. But make sure you have that all turned on. Okay. So now let's talk about our next article of the week. And this also has to do with the security problem. Now, if you are a listener to any of the radio shows that I'm on if you listen to have Jeepers, all over New England, any of these stations, you know, this week I was mentioned, I was talking about this problem with cable modems. And there are some huge, huge issues with them. And, you know, we got to be careful when it comes to our networks because that's how the bad guys get in and once they're in whether they came in on your system. Or they came in on that little thumb drive these stuck in the computer. Or maybe they came in some other way no matter how they came in. What we found is they use the network to spread. So what kind of network stuff can you get? What should you do? And most of us want to rely on it. We rely on our cable company, maybe our telephone company, etc., etc. So I'm pulling up right now. I'm just checking some pricing active here on my computer. What should you get? So first of all, this chipset that's used by several different significant vendors out there, including Campolo, net gear, sage, calm, Technicolor, they have ten different models that the researchers have found are vulnerable, which is not a good thing. And right now we know of over 200 Hundred Million cable modems that are affected. It means if you're a small business and man, we see a lot of these guys that get a cable modem because it's cheaper, right? It's going to save a couple of hundred bucks a month as opposed to getting fiber coming in with real professional gear. Yeah, the professional equipment is going to cost you more, but what's ultimately going to cost you more if you get attacked, right? Because 20% of the businesses filed for bankruptcy in less than a week. You know what's going to save you money. There's also the problem of you not knowing what to do or how to do it, and that is the reason I have created courses that help explain it to you? But with 200 million cable modems that are open right now in this is a massive, huge deal. So I've got an article up on my website talking about this that I got from Forbes.com. They don't require any authorization these cable modems to analyze what they call their analyzer. And they have two more. Two more of these vendors used an undeniably awful combination of this software and usernames and passwords a new spectrum for the username and the password to be able to get into these. So a very, very big deal. So what do I recommend? I have a lot of this in my, in my course, right, the DIY course that did last year. It's almost been a year, and I think since I did that course. But what I'm recommending right now, for most people in their homes is something get out a pencil, piece of paper, to text it to yourself, whatever you might need to do. It's called a net gear, or B or B i. Now, you can find these things at the big box retailers. You can buy it from Amazon, and you can get them all over the place. Now you know, I don't like Google stuff because I don't trust Google. Netgear has not been the best when it comes to security stuff. So they came out that's the main reason they came up with this thing. The RV allows you to have your main unit that plugs into the cable modem. And now that from that main unit, you can have used a mesh network is what it's called, you can have other Orbi devices around the house and get excellent coverage. Now in this day and age where everybody's streaming, the kids have streaming televisions in their rooms. Hopefully, you do not use the built-in Smart TV functions, but you have an external little smart box. But our kids have them in the room, so you need more bandwidth. If you see jerkiness when you're watching videos and having troubles on the internet, that's probably why, and you may only be using the old fashioned networks, the 2.4 gigahertz stuff as opposed to the five gigahertz stuff. Orbi of takes care of all of this for you now, it is not cheap. It is also not a professional grade. If you're a business, you should not be using this, and you should be moving up to the better Cisco stuff. Now, thank goodness Cisco got rid of the low-end line. They Cisco had bought, I think it was next year actually and some of their low-end equipment. And they can confuse the industry because people's you know, I got Cisco Well, no, really actually when she got was a home-based router, firewall, whatever it was. Small businesses medium, particularly in large businesses, you should have a Cisco network. Juniper doesn't have anywhere near the security stuff. Palo Alto Networks, nowhere near the security stuff. Cisco is 100%. Okay, so we count me on this. Back to the home users, and the real small business like a small office, Home Office, this Netgear Orbi, a tri-band whole-home mesh Wi-Fi system, is what you want. Three gigabits a second speed. It's very, very good. It's this particular model I'm looking at right now, and Amazon is called an RBK 50. It's a router, and the extender covers up to 5000 square feet. It is two-pack, and it is right now selling for $286 for the pair. You get the main unit, and then you also get another unit that is part of the mesh system that kind of expands the coverage and gives you the coverage you need in this day and age right because we have so much that's going on via the internet. So this works with all internet providers saying replace your existing Wi-Fi router and extender compatible with any internet provider, including cable, satellite fiber, DSL, and more. It has wired Ethernet ports and parental controls and even pauses device internet access. You can view history usage filter websites for free set online time limit schedule, device internet access, and more for five bucks a month, and they have advanced cyber threat protection. Now, it's not a tip. It's not the real commercial Advanced Threat Protection, but this is better than you're getting from the cable company. Okay. Advanced cyber threat protection, what they call net gear armor. And this is something a bit defenders provided but defenders you probably know something I like. Its network-wide anti-virus anti-malware fraud, phishing ransomware security on an unlimited number of devices, and comes to the free 30-day trial. And this is $70 a year for that service. Now you're paying per year like if you're a business and you buy equipment from us, you are paying monthly, and every year we at least right we do major software upgrades we keep the hardware up to date and because we're using the professional's stuff from Cisco. They're taking up literally hundreds of millions of endpoints. They're watching what's going on, and we're providing updates hourly for the commercial gear. Okay, so this is quite good. It's using, you know, mu MIMO. I'm not a big MIMO fan. Smart Connect for one Wi-Fi name being formed beamforming technologies, which is Primo. What that means is it aims a signal at the device so that it's not the kind of stomping over itself and stomping all over other devices, which is just fantastic. It has to be Bay to wireless security protocol, which is the lowest you want to use. It's quite good. Includes guest Wi-Fi access DLS which is a denial of service firewall VPN, Mr. Now we here's why I say guess Wi-Fi is excellent. You know home always talking about how you've got to be careful when it comes to your Internet of Things devices, like your Amazon Echo or your light bulbs or whatever. What you do when you set them up is you configure them to go on to your guest Wi-Fi network, which can still have a password, and then they cannot easily get on to your main Wi-Fi network and go after your computers. So there goes some actionable stuff. We learned that cable modems just aren't what they used to be, especially the ones we get from the cable company. I've got some courses that go into a lot of detail on this, but if you're kind of a techie person, you can probably figure this out. I brought up that at least right now. I still like this Netgear Orbi. It is a great little device. I'm seeing it at this very minute. Over on Amazon. com on the Amazon business site, by the way, an Amazon business they're selling it for $286. So good deal all the way around. Stick around. You are listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN. We will be right back. Hello everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here. Glad you can join us today we are, of course, on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. Right now, I want to talk a little bit about a problem that you may not have heard about. You've probably heard of phishing, and you know, I talked about that all the time. That's the P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G. That's where someone sends you an email pretending to be someone that they're not trying to get you to do something. Often, it looks like it's from your bank, or maybe a bank you used to have dealings with, and they try and get you to click on something, and that might cause you to download and install something, and now all of a sudden, you are hacked. A lot of times that use this whole phishing thing to use it as a part of social engineering, right? They are trying to get you to do something, so you reveal your password and account numbers to them. Then they can get in, and they approach you and them, you know, make it look like it's all legitimate and hey, you know, we really want to help you out, and it just doesn't happen. That is the basics of phishing. If you're still if I'm not clear if you're still wondering what that is, just think of that good old standby right, the Nigerian prince scam from all those years ago. I wrote some software to help stop some filters. But that particular type of fishing doesn't go on like it used to. It's changed. And part of the reason it's changed is that our habits have changed. Now, how have our habits changed? Well, one of the ways that they have changed and changed hugely is that they have started using SMS. So you know, we're on our phones all of the time, these devices are formerly known as cell phones, these smartphones, these computers in our pockets. And if you look at the overall internet traffic, more than half of it now comes from these smartphone devices. So, by the way, if you have a business and you are not using a smartphone first strategy, you are probably missing out and maybe missing out massively. So make sure you handle that right handle that, okay, handle that for me. So, smartphones are a huge deal. Well, the bad guys aren't stupid. They're just greedy, and maybe even a little bit lazy. And that's where we get into this whole concept now of switching from email, where they're sending you phishing email trying to get you to do something to today, where they have switched over to SMS, where they are trying to get you to do something based on a text. They send you Now, and it used to be that if you send someone a text, the normal text was open within seconds after it was received nowadays. Now, with so much nastiness going on, we very frequently don't pay attention to the text messages. But they're doing the SMS phishing, and they're doing it more. So I wanted to cover five different attack examples so that you can see what they're doing and what it might mean to you. Alright, so let's go through them right now. So the first one up on the screen is a smishing. Example. Now. smishing is fishing over SMS. SMS is, of course, texting or a simple messaging system. Okay. That's what it is. That's what it was. So the first one is your bank account is locked. So you'll get a text message. It looks relatively legitimate. And it'll say from and the biggest example out there right now is the one that's up on my screen. You can see this by the way, by going to Craig Peterson comm slash YouTube, or Craig Peterson comm slash Facebook, if you're a Facebook user, you can see all of the videos from today's show. But it'll say from US Bank, separate US Bank unusual activity. It'll tell you your account is frozen.They want you to unlock it, and you want to go to a URL. Now they're not getting fancy with most of these URLs. And in this particular smishing case, it's taking them to their site. And then it has a question mark US Bank. So you look at it and say, Oh, well, this is from US Bank. I'm going to the US Bank website. I can click on that. so fast that this is not us banks URL at all. When you're looking at a URL, which of course, is what the browser uses to get you somewhere, the question mark just means pass this through to the program that's running on the original website. So there you can use it as a tracker saying, oh, wow, our US Bank submission attacks are working well, right now much better than the XYZ bank. So we're going to send out more than with the US Bank. Okay. So that's that after that question mark, in this case, is used for tracking but not always, right? There's a there are excellent legitimate uses. Not that tracking is not an illegitimate use. But in the case of bad guys, it's illegitimate. So that's number one. Number two is an urgent message about your credit card. And in this case, it's claiming to be from American Express. So if you look at this on the screen, you'll see it's from Amex. the message, which there is no such thing, right. And as you got a card alert and noticed the URL on this. It's WW, Http colon slash slash, www dot American Express dash message.com. So let's break down that URL for a little bit here. First of all, it's HTTP and not HTTPs. It doesn't matter a whole lot to you, if it's a scammer, because what they're trying to do most likely is avoid some of the tracking ability that's inherent in an HTTPS request. To be able to have an SSL certificate or a secure server certificate. They're going to have to at the very least go to a website and get a free certificate, and it's going to do a double verify, making sure they are who they say they are. That's going to record the Right. It's just a big hassle. So they're not going to bother doing that HTTPS thing. So that's why it's HTTP more than likely. And then it says www dot American Express dash message.coYou see that part? Well, again, that is not an American Express URL, not that you know, right. And not that you can verify when you go there. When you go there now, they kind of have Yeah, now in SMS, once you see, and you click on is where you're going. It's not like in an email where you can kind of hide what the real URL is people are going to, and it's going to show you the whole real URL. And when you get there, it's not going to know anything about you. But it's going to look like the American Express website. And it's going to have the login and password, and you're getting a card alert. So you're going to go there you can enter your username you can enter in your password. And tada, you're out of luck. Because now they have a username, password. And then they might redirect you to the real American Express website, and you have to log in again. You say, Well, that's weird. And you go on with life. No big deal. Well, in reality, what just happened is you gave it to them. And they're all set. So they're going to send you on over to the American Express website. And then you're done. Okay, next one up on the screen is you won a prize and click here to get it machine attack. You can see this one appears to come from our friends at Walmart. It says the example here on the screen is congrats, Kelly, we printed your code on your last receipt. You are among seven we randomly picked for $1,000 Walmart gift card promotion, and then it's got a link to a redirect Type site k three x VC dot-info, slash blah, blah, blah, blah. So if you click on that, you're going to their site. And again, they're going to squeeze you in this case for some Walmart information, maybe a bank account saying, Hey, we're going to wire the money to you what's your bank account number. And number four is, we're going to have to go through these last two real quick here and pretending to be from Amazon. You can see these up on the screen right now. And this last one is an unusual account activity from Apple support. So make sure you check these all out Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube, or Craig Peterson dot com slash Facebook. I'll try and put this up on my homepage as well. You can see examples of these newest mission attacks. Stick around. We're going to talk about why some of these businesses are not patching and are leaving us vulnerable. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN. Wow, can't believe it man is our last half hour together right now. You're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Thanks for joining me and online Craig Peterson dot com. Make sure you subscribe to my email list. You'll get all of the updates, and my most important videos of the week. You'll also find out about when the nasties are happening like they're happening this week as well. Sign up Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. I'd love to see you there. We're going to talk about the biggest problem we as consumers have, we as business people have. These lines cross because businesses are holding our data. With this new California law that's been in place for consumer privacy and keeping everything information safe, letting us know what businesses have about us and requesting its removal. There's a movement afoot to help get a handle on our personal information. You probably know that the Europeans passed a similar law, that when in fact that got teeth last year, went in a couple of years ago, just like the California law did last year. And these laws are rolling out all across the country. Massachusetts has it, and the federal government is looking at a law similar to California has to pass on a national basis. So what this ultimately means is, we could be in better shape as consumers and we could be in a lot worse shape as businesses, as we've been getting calls from businesses lately about how do I go ahead and protect myself as a business here? What do I have to comply with when it comes to this whole California Yeah, consumer privacy thing, right? Very, very, very big deal. So how do we do this? Well, as a business, the simplest thing we need to do is start at the very beginning, because the California law lots and lots, a customer client or prospect come to you and say, Show me the data you have. But there are crazy teeth in place in pretty much every state now that if you lose their data, you are in even deeper trouble. Look at what happened with Equifax. Look at what happened with TJ x right the TJ Maxx type companies who lost tons of our data Home Depot. Some of these companies had good security tools in place, but their people did not know how to use them. They couldn't read the reports. They had multiple vendors tools in place, and they didn't have just a single pane of glass. Lastly, they didn't have the type of automated systems that really can get rid of the false alerts. Man do we are there a lot of false alerts, every day hundreds of thousands, my company it for our clients we get 10s of thousands no think of it of these alerts every day. Oh my gosh, it's crazy. So you as an individual, whether you are just all just right, but if you are a consumer, or if you are a business, you have to patch now it's painful I get it. It is in nowhere near as painful as it used to be, you know, you used to install the windows patch and, and it was like putting your marble on red and Vegas, right? The odds are what 5050 not even quite that you're going to win it, it's crazy because you would install a patch and your machine Wouldn't boot. And so now you had to spend days sometimes trying to figure out, Why won't my machine reboot? What can I do? I think I'll get a new machine and move my data over. Make a good backup and write all of this stuff back and forth. The pros and cons. So how do you do all of that? How do you make that happen? Well, today, it's a lot less of a problem. Most of the time, when Microsoft releases patches, you're okay. It's not like the apple environment with a Mac where it's scarce that you ever have a problem with your Mac, okay, with an upgrade. It's sporadic. So keep that in mind as well. And now, let's go back to this. So if you are a big business like an Equifax and you find out that there is a major security problem with, let's say, some of the middleware that you're using. Now middleware is the stuff that sits between the front, which is typically the way site or your customer service people, and the backend, which is typically your set of databases. So that's your middleware. So let's say that there's a patch for the middleware, which there was. And you look at it and say, Oh, my gosh, this middleware changes. Because usually when they issue a patch, it isn't like, Hey, this is just a patch, install it, and you're fine. It's usually a hey, we've made a bunch of changes to improve things in our middleware, or our software and our web browser or web server software. We've made these changes. And as part of this, by the way, we fixed this other security problem. So when you as a business person now who have complex systems in the background, and you're trying to do an upgrade to make sure that middleware is up to date, or that database software or that front end software is up to date. It may not work properly anymore. It probably won't. Now you have to spend a bunch of engineering time to figure out what do I have to change? What other components do I need to modify? How can I make this whole thing work properly again, and that can cost you a lot of money. So what a lot of businesses have been doing is burying their heads in the sand. Hopefully, that's not you, but burying their heads in the sand. All of a sudden, before you know 200 million US citizens, data is out there. You have all of this inside information about people because your Equifax right now people lost jobs when it came to, to these hacks I just mentioned earlier, and that's probably a good thing. But I also empathize with them because I do outsource CISO, chief information security officer tasks for people. I can tell you most of the people who are in these positions have in their drawer, right there next to them, their resume. If they do get hacked, they'll pull out the resume and start shopping around again because they know it's over with. And yet they could not get the authority from the business to do the upgrades and the updates. So I have done this myself. You sit there, and you say, Oh, my gosh, what's the win here? It is not going to generate more revenue by doing these patches. And I'm just one of what millions of companies worldwide that using this software, open-source or otherwise, probably nothing that I need to worry about. So forget about it. I'm not going to mess with it. Have you fallen victim to that I know I have, and that can end up being a problem and a real problem depending on who you are? So pay businesses is upgrading. Sometimes it's because they don't know, which by the way, is another reason to be on my newsletter list. It's free. But every week now, we're telling you here are the top problems that are out there right now from a security standpoint that are being exercised right now by the bad guys in the wild. And if you don't have these patches done, you are in deep trouble. So that's easy to do just credit Peter song.com slash subscribe, and you'll get those types of things. But we're looking right now this particular article that came from secure World Expo, and they're talking about Paul's secure VPN, which we don't use for any of our clients. We have a much much better VPN software from Cisco. But anyways, patches came out for this a long time ago. months. In fact, and it turns out that most organizations have not done the patches yet. So be very careful here. If you're a member of a board of advisors, a board of directors if you're a business owner, if you have questions, reach out to me at Craig Peterson calm, I'll do what I can, but you have a responsibility. And now, it's fiscal responsibility. Coming June this year, depending on what kind of manufacturer you are, there are criminal liabilities tied into this including, ten years in prison. So hey, guys, pull up your socks and start taking this seriously. So you'll find me online. Greg Peterson dot com, and, of course, I'm right here on WGAN and make sure you subscribe to that newsletter. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. We'll be right back. Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back. Wow, the last segment of the show today. It's just going by fast, and I love it. I'm so excited about everything now. We have so many, so many things that are going to help you in the works right now. It's just been a phenomenal, phenomenal time for all of us here. So thanks for joining us. I want to do a quick review of what we've covered today. So let's go back here. I got my slides up. And we'll go right back here. So we started with some of our training and tactics. And we talked about technology and how it can only protect us so much. And in fact, part of the problem we have is the wetware. It's you, and it's me responding to things. Next up, we talked about some zero-day browser vulnerabilities. And in this case, we specifically were talking about Firefox and significant weaknesses this week in Firefox. And I told you what version of Firefox you should be running and what you need to do for the windows security vulnerabilities was exposed this week by the NSA. So you know, congrats to them. By the way. Here is your free phone, right? The Obama phones while it's not Obama's phone, it goes back for decades now, this program that we have in place to help underprivileged people who don't have much money, who maybe need some way of contacting their doctor, etc. Well, it turns out that some of these phones from one manufacturer, in particular, come with m
Achieve Wealth Through Value Add Real Estate Investing Podcast
James: Hey, audience and listeners, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth True Value-add Real Estate Investing. I'm here today with Mark Kenny, who's the founder and I'm not sure, the president or what's the title? Mark: Yeah, well my wife and I together so we might have different opinions but... James: Okay. Both of you run the King multifamily. But before that, before we go into the hot topics that we're going to discuss with Mark, make sure that you guys look at last week's episode where we had KK Singh being interviewed. KK has moved from a business owner. He used to own gas stations and laundry mat and now he's become a multifamily investor, which is a very, very interesting concept. Because I think any business owner, anybody who wants to know how that business is run and why he's using multifamily, why did he go into multifamily? And he didn't even pay tax last year just because of the multifamily investment. So you guys want to check out the last episode. But let's come back to this episode. Hey Mark, welcome to the show. Mark: Thanks for having James. Great to see you again. James: Awesome. Also, I'm happy to have you on the show. So, Mark, he's a GP, almost like 5,200 units, out of that 2000 units where he's basically the primary active asset manager and he's also GP on another 3,200 on top of the 2000 units. And he goes across multiple markets, which is very interesting for me. I want to go a bit deep dive into that. You know, he's in Texas, he's in Alabama, he's in Tennessee, he's in Florida and I believe that's what I covered. Right. Mark? Mark: Georgia, as well. James: Georgia. Okay, got it. Got it. Atlanta. Right. So yeah. So Mark, did I miss out on something about yourself? Do you want to tell the audience about yourself? Mark: No, I mean, yeah, real quick. So I grew up in Michigan. I'm in Dallas now, so not too far away from you, James. But I was a CPA for a while, did IT consulting, which you and I traded some stories about that before about the IT side and I started buying small multi-family when I was 22, I was a senior in college. About two to four units and then my brother and I...I didn't know what syndication was. Syndication is the fancy word for raising money from other people for the most part and pooling it together to buy properties. I didn't know what that was. So I started buying two to four units. And then my IT business was doing pretty well. That was, I really had no time. I always, I'd say 80, 85 hours a week and start really doing the math. I was probably 90 to a hundred hours a week and a lot of weeks. And you know, frankly didn't have any time for my wife, caused some issues and so she basically said, you need to do something different than what you're doing. And I said, well, yeah, I will. But you know you have to deal with me and we both love real estate. So we started buying larger properties through syndication. I invested passively first in a syndication with a friend of mine, said it makes a lot of sense and you know, why don't I look at doing it myself and that's what we started doing back in 2013. James: Got it. Got it. It's very interesting about your story when you're working on a W2 job, especially in the IT tech industry. I mean, it's a lot of work, we put in long hours, right? It's a constantly changing sector, right? The industry is consistently changing. We are always driven by schedule and I was just talking to, Shanti, who's my wife and all and how our life has changed when we used to be in W2 every day, like Fridays when we can really open up our time, open up because from Monday to Friday we are like so busy working like [03:55unclear] focused and where I used to work, we used to work remote as well. So after five, six o'clock we used to work like, you know, we have lunch, we have dinner, and we continued working with the offsite team. So life never ends. And now with real estate, it's so much of a difference. Now you own your own time and you're out on what to do and we can, you know, my traveling time in Austin is like 11 to 2. That's it because it's a bit of traffic. Mark: Yeah. It's interesting, right? I mean, I actually started my own IT business 2008 so I didn't even have a W2 job since 2008. But I got in a situation where, you know, any project that came up and any unrealistic timeframe that was out there, I would do it. I would make the dates. So that's what allowed me to get more and more projects. I had a number of Fortune 100 companies as customers, but so even though I have my own business back then, I still didn't have the luxury of time. You know, I was always going somewhere, always doing projects and yeah, I'd be up, I sleep three hours a night, like consistently, that's all I would sleep. James: I mean, you don't have to go by numbers, but did you make like almost a similar amount of money compared to what you made in real estate? I mean, it's a time versus money investment, right? Mark: It's a great question because when I first started looking at syndication, I said I'm not going to be able to replace my IT income. And I truly, it was a mindset. It really was. I really did not think I'd replaced my IT income. It was pretty, pretty high at the time. And after three projects that I did in multifamily I stopped doing IT. I had not replaced my IT income at that point in time, but it was enough to live and live, you know, decent. And then we've done, you know, we've done 37 projects, whatever now. But I didn't think I was gonna replace IT. But yeah, we've far surpassed it. I mean a lot frankly, and the time we have, and I don't have to ask anyone to go anywhere or you know, things like that, you can turn it on and off if you want to. Where in IT, if you're not working, not making any money, you don't have that passive income. James: So you have a very interesting life cycle because you were working in IT, a W2 job and then you went to do your own business but still in IT. And now you are completely a full-time real estate investor. So, so in terms of time wise, I mean from what we're discussing, I mean, real estate investment gives you the best return of time, right? I mean, you get really good pay and at the same time, your time is like, really low. Mark: There is no comparison. You know, you mentioned about talking to your wife a higher life is different. I mean, my life has, you know, 180 degrees different for the better than when it was before. I was on the verge of, you know, I'm not sure, you know, Tammy, my wife wasn't only happy because of my work schedule and now we got to work full time together. Just like you get to work with your wife, which is great. And the time, you know, if I want to go somewhere and you can get to the point with multifamily or any real estate investment, you get enough of it. If you choose to go sit on the beach, which I don't want to do, frankly I don't but if you choose to go and do that, you get in a position to do that for sure. With IT, I wouldn't be able to, I had to keep working projects in order to make money. James: Yeah. But can we go back to your mindset when you are working, not as a business owner, when you are working in IT? Because I sometimes analyze my own mindset when I was working, because when I was working in IT, I did look at Robert Kiyosaki's book and I could not read like a few pages because it just doesn't make sense to me, we are so busy working. What is this guy talking about business. And after a few pages I put it down and I forgot about it until recently I started reading it and I was just surprised that that book changed a lot of people, real estate investors' life. But I don't know, I think when you are working you're really, really working, you really don't care about the business side of it and I mean, I think it's up to your circle, right? Who are you mixing with? Mark: That's a great point. I know when I worked originally at KPMG Consulting and I worked for SAP you know, did some Salesforce consulting and things like that. And you're looking at other people that are older than you at the time I started out, it was, you know, early twenties when I started out. And look at other people that are partners, for example, and you have this image, you're like, that's my lifestyle. I'm going to be traveling all the time and I'm going to be working seven days a week, which is what I did. And you know, and then, you know, some point in time, not everyone gets to the point where I was, where my point was. And my wife was pretty much ready to leave me if I didn't do anything. And that was a big eye-opener for me. But you're right, you get trapped in that circle of influence, right? And everyone's doing the same thing. And at that time, I aspire to be a partner and I would've made partner, I mean, made a manager in two years and things like that. But I would have been miserable, frankly. I would have been. James: So compared to the job security, I mean, I don't know whether there's job security in any job or not because there is no job security, right? I mean, when I was a manager, I used to hire and fire people very quickly just because of non-performance, right? So there is no job security, right? I mean, I use to work on a semiconductor industry for like almost 20 years and we thought we were going to retire there but we realize you know, during different economic cycles, the company doesn't really, you know, honor your loyalty. I mean, there's no such thing. They have to make a business decision, they'll let you go if they need to let you go. There's no such thing as a company is going to be keeping you forever. Mark: Right, right. That's true. James: Right. So yeah, coming back to real estate venture. So 2008 was when you got into IT and when did you start your real estate venture? Mark: Syndication; 2013 is when I first started investing passively and invested in a few deals. And about that time I started looking at syndication, but it took me almost a year to get my first deal. And it was partly, I was looking at other things too; self-storage and building custom development, you know, homes and things like that, franchises. I looked at everything. I was looking for something to get me out of the bad situation I was in. But it still took us about a year to get our first deal. James: So did you stop work and start into real estate? Was it a step function or was it like a... Mark: It is gradual; for me, it took me three deals. So I'm thinking, let me see, 2014 is when I think I got my first deal, I don't remember exactly. But by '16 I had stopped doing IT. James: Got it. Was that a painful transition from a business owner to a real estate investor? Mark: No, it really wasn't for me anyway. You know, I've always had a big fear of money and you know, I wish I did, but I always did cause growing up and things like that. But we had enough money set aside to where, you know, I looked at it, if I had to go back and do IT, I had so many connections at a time, I could get a job pretty much, you know, right away. I didn't want to, but I was like, okay, well, I have a transition I'm making here, but if I fail, that was my mind, if I failed at doing this and after taking a year to find my first deal, I was pretty skeptical. And then we started getting the traction. So I was like, Hey if I need to go back, I can do that. I don't want to do it. But if I do, I can support the family. The transition wasn't hard for me. We were buying at that time only in Dallas, so I really wasn't having to travel outside Dallas. Yeah. So it was a pretty easy transition. James: Got it, got it. So as I was talking about that, you had like three different lifecycles, right? You're a W2 employee, you're a business owner and then you become a real estate investor and you are a CPA. So I'm going to ask you, similar to CPA question, how was your tax advantages comparing these three life cycles? Mark: Okay. So you know, even though I'm a CPA, I haven't practiced for 20... James: But at a high level, was there any tax benefit between... Mark: Oh yeah. Without a doubt. When I had the IT business, you know, I was actually paying taxes quarterly. I was getting hit hard. I mean, I was making decent money. Now, in the last two years, we haven't paid any federal income tax like zero. And in fact, it's negative. So people were like, Oh, you didn't make any money. No, we make money. But from the tax benefit we received through depreciation and cost segregation and bonus appreciation, we pay zero federal income tax. So, I mean, think about people listening to this, if you didn't have to pay taxes, how much more money you'd have in your pocket and what you could do with that? James: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I have a chart that shows how a $2 double for the next 20 years. And you know, at a 25% rate, that $2 becomes 72,000 after 20 years because you're taxed 25% every time you double, right? But if you don't have tax, that $2 becomes almost like $11 million, you know. Mark: Oh, boy, Oh my goodness. James: So the tax does impact your compounding savings. And if you don't look at it, you may not know. I mean, when I was working, I never really looked at tax because as I say, we are busy working. We just look at net pay coming to the thing. I mean taxes, like it's not nice for me. But when I look at that kind of chart, you know, it does make a lot of difference in terms of, Hey, you know, it does impact your overall savings. You know, if you compounded for not [13:53unclear] you see a big difference, millions of dollars of difference. Mark: Oh yeah. And like you mentioned, when you have a W2 job, it just comes out, you notice it, you don't like it. But when you have your own business, my own IT business, you have to write check every quarter you really notice it. And then you're like, I made that much money this quarter and where did it all go? And now I have to write a check for, you know, X number of dollars. And you know, you're just scratching your head and you're frustrated and stressed out. But with real estate, it's literally zero. James: So did you have employees under you when you have a business? Mark: All 1099. James: Okay. So if you have an employee, then you're to pay tax for them too, I guess. So that's double taxation Mark: That's exactly right. James: Okay. So W2, I mean, I don't know. I have a chart that shows W2 people are paying almost 70% of the tax in this country. So this country is supported by people who are in W2. They are the ones who's paying taxes. They're the ones building the roads, the bridges, and all the infrastructure. Right? The 30% is from the other people who are earning less than 30,000 or people who are earning more than 500,000 and above. Mark: Yeah. James: Right? I mean, people who are earning more than 20,000 to pay a lot of taxes. But in general, if you look at it, the big bulk of it is paid by our W2 employees. Mark: Right. Makes sense. James: Just because you can't run away. Mark: You can't. There are no savings, no tax shelters. James: Absolutely. I'd say real estate investors, all kinds of you know incentive in the tax code to not paying taxes. So coming back to your real estate venture in multifamily, and you skipped over buying single-family and you went direct to multifamily. Mark: We did. I mean, multifamily, two to four units when I was 22. Yeah. So it was smaller for sure. It made more sense to me, frankly. I don't remember, I actually didn't look at any homes. I don't know why I'd go back and think about that. Why I didn't start looking at any single-family homes. To me, we looked at two to four units at a time. James: Well, I mean if you look at cashflow, two to 14 definitely make a lot more sense in terms of cash flow. Right? Maybe that's what it is. And how many two to four units did you own before you come to multifamily? Mark: We had like 17 units total. James: Okay. 17 in two to four units, I guess. Smaller multifamily. And do you think that helped you when you scale up? Mark: It did. Because I know you manage, right? You and your wife manage. When we did the smaller properties, we self-managed and we took care of things and evicted people. So it definitely helped from that perspective. I didn't like the process, it's not something I want to do now, but it also, even though it's drastically different how you evaluate four units and below and in five units and below is drastically different, people can argue all day long steps are almost identical, right? You identify your criteria, you go drive by a property, contract, blah, blah, everything's the same. So it helped for sure. Plus just kind of, you know, getting comfortable with buying your first deal is the hardest. So once you start, you know, I bought like whatever it was, you know, five deals, six deals, I don't remember the number, exactly. It gets you more comfortable. So when you go buy a larger property, it's bigger numbers. So it is concerning whatever I had already done, you know, like six transactions before that time, even though they're small, it helped. James: Got it. Got it. I mean, in a way, it helps because I mean, you know at least how to read the lease and you probably know how real estate section happens, right? Mark: Your first time signing for your first deal, usually you're most likely going to be pretty freaked out, right? You've done six smaller deals. It's still, then when you start doing bigger deal, then it's the money. Right? The only thing that concerned me, you know, I have to say only it really was the, you know, brain capital to the deals. I had no concerns about how to underwrite the deals that I knew how to do that or how to find deals or talk to brokers or loan. It was always about, you know, the capital. That was my biggest concern. James: Okay. Okay. But do you think that's still an issue in this market cycle? Mark: Yeah. I'm always concerned about capital. You know, we have like eight deals under contract right now. You know, so we've never not closed a deal, but you know, that's the one thing that's still stressing me out sometimes, frankly. James: Yeah. Because you need to figure out whether you have big enough investor base too in all those eight deals. Mark: That's right. Mark: Okay. Got it. So coming back to this, no multiple markets that you have, I mean, do you want to explain on how did you get into this so many markets? I mean, I think some of it is you've partnered with some of your students, right? Mark: Well, originally I was just buying pretty much with one other person off in Dallas. Dallas, and at least, in my opinion, was definitely getting more expensive and it's even more expensive now. I have a twin brother that moved to Atlanta so I used to visit him and Atlanta has a lot of similarities to Dallas. Dallas is yet, and it may never be, but it definitely has a lot of similarities. So I started traveling there. I looked at properties for about a year and a half before we got our first deal. And I just really like the market. That kind of was if my brother wasn't there, I don't know if I would be in Atlanta, frankly. I don't know if I would have thought about going there. When I'm going there, I see a lot of activity, new buildings, new development cranes, things like that. So it was an attractive market. And then, so that's Texas and you know, kind of the Atlanta area. And then we started looking in the Southeast. This is a general statement. Some of the brokers cross different estates sometimes too. They might, if they have a license, they can actually sell in multiple States and they might say, Hey, now, we're in Tennessee, we have a project here, we have a project up in Arkansas now, which we don't own anything there yet. So these brokers started giving us deals and I started checking out different markets. And really, the way I got into the other markets as far as initially was I would have brokers in Dallas typically reached out to other brokers in other markets and make an introduction for me. And that kind of gives you instant credibility and they're going to typically give you the best of the best of brokers to work with in another market. And that's how we got involved in other markets. James: Got it. So how did you choose this market? I mean, except for Atlanta where you said your brother was there, you initially went there because of Atlanta, but now you are like in five different markets. Tennessee, Alabama, Florida. I mean, now, how did you choose these markets and why these markets? Mark: Yeah. A friend of mine who I've done a lot of deals with, he had bought a smaller deal in Memphis and I never would have considered Memphis. And some people don't like Memphis. We own a lot there. We've done really well there. But Memphis also has, you know, even though [21:05 unclear] job growth population growth, things like that, it's okay, but not like Dallas, of course. But the rent growth has been going up. They're putting, you know, several billion dollars in investments of downtown. But that particular city also has something called a pilot program, which we've done multiple times. Where you can go in, you buy a multifamily property, you have to put a certain amount of capital into it. It's a lot. And then you'll get your property taxes cut in half and then they're frozen for 20 years. So I mean, as you know, property taxes is typically one of the largest, right? [21:44unclear] I can freeze them for 20 years. Cash flow is going to typically be pretty nice on it. James: Hmm. So you're basically taking advantage of that particular program. What about the other States that..." Mark: Yeah, Florida, I always looked, I like Florida just because of probably the weather initially and when we were in Atlanta we started looking in Florida as well. And Florida has, I mean, some areas like Miami that as you probably know are extremely expensive, just not going to buy there. But I also have a cousin, multiple cousins actually live in Florida and so I heard different things from talking to them. And then some of the brokers we were talking to like in Georgia and stuff like that, had some properties in Florida and a property came up and the first time we're looking at properties there. I liked the properties in Jacksonville and we have a few properties there now. And it was one of those markets, again, similar to Atlanta, job growth, population growth, rent growth. It doesn't have to be off the charts, frankly. Some of the markets where it's so off the charts, it's just too expensive to buy in, the yields. You can't get the returns. And then with Alabama, it was a guy that had a deal and was looking to partner and I partnered with him on a few deals. He had deals there in Alabama. And then we have another one right now, a guy in our coaching group that has a deal in Alabama as well. He's closer over by there as far as that's where he'd been looking. So usually it's through some sort of relationship. Somebody either already lives there or someone is looking there and then it kind of gives me an opportunity to check the markets out. James: Got it, got it. So basically if you have boots on the ground as part of your program, that's an advantage definitely. Right? Mark: It is for sure. James: But don't you find, you know, establishing broker relationship in that kind of market it's harder because you, I mean they did not know you, right? Mark: It is, there's no question. I mean, you know, I think that's why it took us so long to get into Atlanta. We had a really hard time breaking in there. And then once we got in there, you know, it was just one brokerage firm in Atlanta that we closed 11 deals in like 18 months with. We've definitely had their attention. With that first deal., I went to Florida. I mean, I was banging my head against the wall because we couldn't get any traction with brokers there. I would say, you know, you just keep sticking with it, but there's no question, you know, if you're an outsider, don't live there and you've never bought a deal there, you're at a disadvantage. You can use things like, Hey, your track record and you can have brokers that I know. So when we got a deal in Florida, our first deal, it was with a brokerage firm that I had bought a deal in Dallas with and the broker in Dallas had called me about it. So he, you know, if you want to say put a good word in for us. So a lot of these brokers talk as, you know, it's very small world. Yeah. And I don't think we would've gotten that deal in Florida if I had not bought a deal without a broker, you know, brokerage firm if you want to stay in Dallas, I think we would have probably not been selected for that deal. James: Got it. So let's go a bit more detail into that step by step. So let's say today somebody, you know, in your circle or one of your students come, Hey, you know, I found a deal in Florida, right? Somewhere in Florida, right? So what are the things that you would do to underwrite the deal? Mark: Yeah. You know, the underwriting different aspects of it, forget the reports and stuff for a second. But you know, even financing terms can be drastically different across the country. Some of the pre-review cities and stuff like that start at 65%. So you want to first understand, don't assume we're getting 80% leverage in three or five years IO in every single location because it's different. So understanding first, the insurance can be drastically different. You know, if you're on a coastal area, it can be a lot higher than all the other areas and understand kind of the fundamentals there. Taxes, you know, do they get reassessed? And that can be through, we have a tax consultant we use, but also you can typically just call the County and the County will tell you kinda how the taxes will be reassessed and when. You know, in Memphis, that's every four years so that's important to know. They only reassess every four years. And then we'll get like a report, whether it's Yardi or CoStar. Those are paid reports. We'll also use things like some free...we have a number of links on our analyzer that take you to things like crime and the school districts things like that. Those are all links we have on that. But overall, nothing beats having someone on the ground, you know. So if you can talk to other people there and talking to lenders, you know, lenders have the biggest investment in a deal than anybody as a general statement where they have more money involved. So try to understand from lenders to kind of how some of the properties are performing there, it is important. In the report, as I said, it's only as good as the report. It is good data. A lot of it's based on, you know, actual transactions that have happened, but I'm trying to get someone like a broker or property management company. So if we have a property management company you know, David Shore is multi South in Memphis and he's in seven other, he's actually in seven other States. Once we built that relationship, then we start asking him questions. He'll tell us, don't even look at that deal, it's not a good deal. This deal maybe you can look at, you know, 95% of deals he tells us not to look at there. So having some boots on the ground can't be replaced. It might take you a while to do that. It's typically going to be like a management company or maybe, you know, a broker, but you know, brokers in to sell, you know, they wouldn't, don't get paid unless they sell a property. So kind of all the different aspects. Reports talking to people, visiting the area, trying to understand what happened before in the past. Those areas are all good ways to kind of get more Intel on the property. James: So you basically look at location, crimes, making sure how are you underwriting your tax records. Mark: The tax is huge. James: Every state is different. Mark: Yeah. Every state, county; city even sometimes. So we have like I say a tax consultant, but we have found really if you call the County and tell them the property what you're doing, they'll tell you how they reassess and they'll give you a good number. And we've only had like a couple of occasions where it hasn't really given us the information we want. Generally speaking, we always get the information we need from the County. James: Got it. Got it. So who have told you the most knows? I mean like who say don't touch that deal most of the time? Is it a property management company or is it the tax consultant or insurance company? Mark: Property management company. Without a doubt. It may be they don't want to manage it. James: Well how do you know they just don't like that property. Maybe it's just because... Mark: I know you self-manage. We have found in almost every submarket we ran with a management company, even if they don't manage a property today, they're like, we manage that property five years ago and you know like in that, you might have some Intel. We got a property here where a number of properties in Dallas I've looked at and our management company managed it. So I called the guy and said, Hey, what's up with that? And he'll say, you know, it had like $200,000 of plumbing issues or whatever it might be. But usually someone that's large in a submarket, they know the property or they at least know you know the area well enough to give you some really good Intel and it seems to amazed me where people are like, well, THE manageMENT company says we can push rents like $75, I think we can do it like by 125. it's like there's no basis for that. Like why do you think you can do that? You can push your management company and ask them questions and things like that. You know, if I go try and do a comp for a property myself, I don't fit the demographics, I'm probably not going to get a good comp. Have a management company do it for you. They'll actually send people out there that fit the demographics. They'll actually get you comps and pictures and things like that. Go into some of these reports...I get called all the time from, I won't name them, but these providers of data call me all the time. I don't talk to them. And half time the information you get, you don't even know if it's right. It's coming through there. So, yeah. James: So how do you know the management company that is calling is not the current management company? Mark: Yeah, it's happened before. You know, you can ask the broker who managed it today. They'll tell you because it could be for sale and the property management company doesn't even know it. And if you call them and tell them, Hey, I'm looking at this property for sale, then they're going to be pretty upset. James: Yeah. I've looked at out-of-state as well at one point. And I realized management company gives me the best quick data. They can tell me a lot of things about a state compared to anybody else, right. Because they know the pain of managing it. So yeah, I would say they are one of the best resources to call if you're looking at out of state investment. So after that, what do you do? I mean, you already looked at taxes, you already looked at the property, so it's all good. So what do you do next? Mark: So then we'll underwrite it. Usually using, you know, we have a quick analyzer. We have a much more detailed analyzer. In the detailed analyzer, we're going to go through every expense category, like line by line, compare them to the, you know, T12. We'll try to get two independent property management budgets so we get that. And then our analyzer also has industry standards based on property, class, and size. We'll tell you what the standards are for every single category. Which is very helpful to see if something's out of whack. You know, I just had an example. Somebody not in a group, if someone's sent me something, it was two properties. It was over 300 doors together and they had payroll at $750 a door. I'm like, no, it's not going to happen. Or we're going to share the property manager on-site across the two properties and might not for 300 plus units, we're not going to, not very easily. So I said, okay, so does the management company say they're okay with that? No. And if they did, what happened was that if you have to get rid of them and now you're going to bring in another management company, they're going to be at $1,200 a door. It just happened, another one today actually on something where they're getting charged two and a half percent on 80 doors. I said that's pretty low, two and a half percent. I'm not saying it's impossible, but you need to probably bump that up because just because one management company said they'll do it for that, if they're not your management company anymore, then you're going to be paying more. James: Yeah. Yeah. You can't underwrite just because one person said it. I mean two and a half is really low compared to any industries. Whenever I see sponsors or syndicators showing me a deal, I mean, not many people should me their deals, but I do get to see some people still. I mean, when they say they want to share management, that is an indication that you know that deal doesn't have that much upside. They have to do really, really creative weird stuff. They will share this, share that, we have to do. [33:15 unclear] covered parking. We have to do washer dryer and that's all that really small amount of upside. And that is not a good deal. Mark: That's just the gravy. You're exactly right. I mean, you know it, right? You manage your properties and people are like, I'm going to share. I was like, you're not going to. I mean, if you think it was that easy, don't you think all the management companies would do it? James: You're going to compromise a lot of things when you share management. And as I said, when you're going to that extent to really justify your upside in the deal, that means the deal is really not a good deal. Mark: Well, James, I have people who'd be like, we're going to put in like wifi and charge this and they're trying to put that in an underwriting and I'm like, yeah. First of all, you might not be able to because of the cable contract. Right. You might not be allowed to, and second of all, let's just assume you're able to do that, is that needed in your analysis to make the deal work? I sure hope it doesn't. You know, it doesn't mean that. James: Those who are learning this business, the biggest bulk of the deals that work is when you can bump up rent and you can reduce expenses if you can do these things is a big thing. So if you see any deals that you can, majority of your upside comes from here. You know, I don't look at adding more one or two washer and dryer, adding parking, adding wifi. That's what you said or sharing management. That's all right. Really the deal doesn't work at all. I think the sponsor's just trying to squeeze all kinds of juice and tell you that it's going to work, but in reality, it is really, really hard to make all that work. I mean that all that is just a bonus. If it works, it's good. Mark: Yeah, that's exactly right. And your total expenses, you could go up because the property taxes, but you know some of your points of your own, you reduce the expenses. I mean there are huge savings in water lots of times for operators. You can go in there and do repair and maintenance. We see lots of times you do as well, I'm sure were people are putting capital items in repair maintenance and they're like $1,400 a door per year. I mean that's a really high, right? So they're just putting stuff up there. If you go in and get a loan you're able to put capital in there and maybe do roofings and a/c and things like that, you can most likely bring your repair maintenance down more to industry standard. So for looking for those things, but if you don't know what those standards are, you know, you don't have any gauge. James: Sure, sure, sure. So we don't have to talk about your detail and analysis that you do, but on the sniff test that you have a quick analysis. So one of the few things that you would look at to, you know, kick out a project Mark: Return wise, I'll look at, you know, we still shoot for like a 10% cash on cash return, which is getting harder James: 10% with the IO on year one, I guess. Mark: Yeah. Overall or if the product is a five-year project, 10% cash in cash, 15% plus IRR and 100%; 100% is getting harder on five years, frankly for a lot of properties, closer to six. In some markets, it's more than that, but usually we try to stay in six and below to double the money. And then I'm looking at other things like, you know, what cap rate are they using? You know, on their exit, how they get the current cap rate, the broker. I mean, I had someone, no joke, in Florida called me and said- it wasn't Miami, by the way- they said, Oh, the broker told me the cap rate is 3 and a half. You know what I mean? So those types of things, right. So you can make any deal work. It's on a piece of paper, James: Just change the exit cap rate. Mark: Exactly right. I have an example, I do in our workshop where I'm like, you know this, and then you do the cap rate down to two, what does it do? And then, you know, other things are going to be more round, you know, total income growth over the first couple of years. What does it look like? You know, I'll see sometimes people think we're going to grow income 30%. I'm not saying it's impossible to do that, but I see a property as, you know, 92% occupied and you go up 30%, your total income in a year is pretty high so you need to have justification for that. So basically we look at a lot of different gauges, break-even occupancy, break-even reds and then the financing. You know, people don't understand financing well enough. Lots of times as far as what the hell they're going to do that. James: It can make or break a deal. Right? So let's look at like the rent growth and the exit cap rate, right? So how do you differentiate these rent growth and exit cap rate on this like five different markets there? Mark: Well the market cap rates, so we always start with the submarket cap rate, doesn't matter which property it is. And we have different ways to get that through reports and things like that. And then we put an escalator on it, an annual escalator, and it'll be different between ABC assets. And we have some ranges there. Some markets actually, you know, Dallas has gotten compressed so much on class C, you know, it was like eight and a half percent in '13. Now, it's like five cap for a lot of properties and you don't know if it's ever gonna go back. So we'll usually use you know, minimum 0.1 up and then up to a 0.2 for a year. So it could be, you know, full a hundred basis points on a five-year exit and a lot of it's depending on the property and location. I mean some of them, some of the markets that the cap rates the banks compressed there but they haven't compressed as much as like Dallas. I mean they might've been..I'll just make an example, say Dallas eight and a half. Now it's five and the market there might have been seven and a half and now it's six. So it went down, you know, one and a half percent total. But we'll actually, we'll look at the property, the type of property that, you know, the age of it as a class and then the demographics and we'll add an escalator on an annual basis for it. So each year it escalates up. James: But how do you decide that? So for example, I think in Texas a lot of people uses 3% rent growth, right? Even though some cities are different. Mark: Well, no, for rent growth we usually use 2%. This is across the board, across all markets after year two. Your first two years as you know, you might have come in and you're increasing rents, rephase revenue in and things like that. After year two, the general statement is going to be 2%. James: What about expenses? Mark: Two. James: Okay, so 2% income growth. 2% on year two onwards I guess. Which makes a lot of sense. I mean, you're not really counting for the first year for value add. Mark: Right and it might be higher. I mean some people were like in Dallas, you know, seven and a half percent rent increase growth for a while. And people were like, I'm like, but that's like today, one point in time it's proved where, you know, Dallas rent increases have gone down considerably. It's still a great market, I like the market. I don't really buy here right now, but you can't count on today. Or someone will say, Hey, the economic vacancy is 6% and I'm like, yeah, but I mean, good for them. But you can't count on that. James: You can't count on that. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, yesterday there was a national multifamily trend report which shows I mean Dallas is below national average in terms of rent growth, right? So San Antonio and Austin, Austin has been always higher than national rent growth but San Antonio is higher than national rent growth. I never seen that San Antonio being higher than Dallas. I mean it's just cities change. You have to be really conservative in your underwriting. Mark: I think people are like, enough is enough, right? When rents go up, you know, seven plus percent for a few years in a row, people are like, you know. And it doesn't mean it's a bad, bad market. I mean, there are 150,000 people a year here that moved to, [41:07unclear] you know, net. So there's great jobs and population growth. I've been arguing that for a while. It doesn't matter all those things happen. At some point in time, people will say enough is enough. James: Yeah. People can't pay anymore. Mark: In a 2% increase in their wage or whatever they get in 7% in rent, you know, four years in a row, it has a big impact on them. James: Absolutely. Absolutely. But how do you like for example, in your experience, because you're working on multiple markets, right? I mean apart from Texas, which has seen a good rent growth, I mean, I think even Florida is seeing a good rent growth. I do not know what other markets house in Tennessee, Alabama and I think... Mark: Georgia is good as a whole. I mean some markets and we bought in a place called Gainesville, Georgia, not Florida. The property has done phenomenal. But that's a secondary market for sure. It's about 45 minutes from Atlanta, but it's like, you know, a 7% rent growth right now. Same with Dalton, Northeast, you know, almost close to Chattanooga rent growths. Florida, like you said, is high; parts of Georgia is definitely high. Alabama and Tennessee, I would say are mediocre, frankly, they're just going to be average. Now, Memphis in general, the random amounts are lower, but the rent growth there is quite high right now from a percentage standpoint. But you know, the starting with rents, half of Dallas, wherever it is, right. So it's proportional, but the percent of rent growth in Memphis is actually quite high right now. The last I saw, it was in the top 10 in the country. James: Oh really? Okay. Okay. And what about the exit cap rate? Right. So usually, I mean the usual underwriters, people use like one, to 0.2 more than what the market is. Do you use the same exit cap rates in the other markets? Mark: We take the current and we'll add...so let's say the current was a six cap, we'll add 0.1 per year, 0.20 per year. And in some cases like to your point, and so like that's to the end of five years, you would've gone from a six to a seven. And in some markets, yeah, we'll be, you know, if we're going to be doing a 0.15 in a certain market and we're like, well, maybe this market isn't quite as attractive or in the past it hasn't performed quite as well, we might do the 0.20. At the end of the day, I mean, as you know, nobody knows what the cap rates going to do. We can all guess. And the important thing to consider is that you know, the cap rate has no impact on your cash flow per se. It's really more of a capital event like a refi or a sale, things like that. So if you can still cash flow and you know, get good returns, then you know, you wait to sell when it makes more sense to sell. James: Correct. What about a loan wise? Have you guys been doing a longterm agency debt or you've been doing some short term loans as well? Mark: We do about a third of the deals we do prior bridge, but not necessarily short term is still up to five years. So it's not short term really. And the rates are attractive and there's, you know, a lot of advantages too. Bridge and some disadvantages, but there are a lot of advantages. I like them, especially in the big value add deals from what you have to get them. And then we do Fannie, Freddie, and then a number of bridge frankly. James: Got it. Got it, got it. So I mean, you work with a lot of you know, students who are trying to come up in this industry, right? So can you describe one characteristic of a student who made them really successful you know, sponsor on their own? Mark: Okay. Characteristic is, I mean, you know, if you want to say grit, not giving up, but as far as a whole, it's getting really good at something that really, you know, one skill set. You don't have to know everything about multifamily necessarily to get started. You have other people there to help you. But getting really good at something that's a value to somebody else. And it sounds like, okay, that's kind of obvious. Well, we've seen it work time and time again where someone, all they do is pretty much come in and just find deals. That's where the specialty is. They don't want to raise money or sign the loan or know things like that. But I think it's being patient, you know, when you have to wait a year, potentially. I waited a year to get my first deal. That's a long time, you know, to wait. And then you look back on it, it's like, that's not a long time to wait when you started buying more deals or you're like trying to do something new and you're spreading, you know, 12 months before you get a deal that can be frustrating. So just being patient. James: Yeah. Especially when people are already committed, I'm going to do this. Mark: Yeah, some people give something up to do it. James: Yeah. I mean, I really just remember there's not much deals out there. So, you know, finding that one deal that makes sense takes time. Right. It's not easy, If it was easy, everybody would do it. Mark: That's right. That's right. Okay. James: So coming back to your personal side of it. I mean, is there any proud moment in your life that you think I would remember that moment? That one particular moment in your experience in your real estate venture? Mark: Yeah. That's a great question actually. I would say when I got that third deal and it closed because I had already decided if I close that deal, I was going to stop doing IT. So when I got that third deal and said, Hey...my son kept asking me cause I kept looking for deals when he's like, if you get that deal, can you stop doing IT? Cause he was seeing me work so much. And so when I got that that was huge for me, for my family. James: Got it. That was a transition point of view, getting away from IT to real estate, I guess. Mark: Right, right. And making the decision, like you said, to do it full time. James: Yeah. It's a hard decision, especially if you're already used to a certain industry. And what has been, you know, paying your bills, right. Mark: Paying your bills, which is great. And you know, the other thing, unfortunately, when I was doing IT, that was kind of my self-worth. That's where I got my value. I wasn't really good at a lot of things, but for some reason, my mind just worked that way. And so I got my self-worth out of my job. So to give that up, you know, it is a big thing. And you don't know how successful you're going to be or not in your new adventure. So, but I mean, the best decision I ever made. James: Yeah. I mean, you brought up a good point. Sometimes that whole industry, what you study for, define you 20, 30 years in your life and suddenly, you are changing your complete identity. I mean, it's a big thing, right? I mean, a lot of people do not want to do that. If they're known as engineer or a CPA or the IT guy, they don't want to know, what! Suddenly this guy's doing real estate. Mark: Oh yeah. I mean, my CPA said, what are you doing? He did. Now he doesn't say it anymore. He did. He said, what are you doing? You're making a lot of money doing IT, why are you not doing it anymore? I mean, you know, he couldn't even comprehend it. James: Yeah. And I have to mention this; when I was in IT, when I was an engineer, you know, I always think that people in IT, people who are engineers are really smart guys. So these are the smartest guys because that's what your circle is, right? Your circle of friends is there. You think this guy's smart solving problems. And I mean, I did my MBA, it was really eye-opening because I realized there are a lot smarter guys than me with a lot more money in the financial industry. So that was a big aha moment. And that's where I realized that you know, you have to go into business to make a lot more money. And there are a lot of other smarter guys in other smarter professions out there that make a lot more money. And so, I mean, before I forget what is the most valuable value add that you've seen in all your deals? What would you do in case your rehab budget got cut into half in a deal? Mark: Oh, you mean from a CAPEX? James: Capex wise, yes. Mark: You know, one, people need to be...if the property looks like junk outside...I've been in properties that look good on the outside and they're not that great on the inside. But you need something outside to kind of attract you. And it could just be paint, you know, something so it's not dreary and dark, dark colors, you know, but using something a little bit more attractive color-wise for paint. Landscaping, simple stuff to do. It's basically thinking about what does a tenant see? When people say I'm going to do, you know, electrical work and you know, things like that. It's like the plumbing, stuff like that need to be done, but tenants don't see that. So first start with the outside and see what the tenants, you know, whether they go up to the office and it's kind of decked out. Sometimes we'll spend a lot of money around the office to kind of put a lot of landscape in there and make it really nice, exterior wise. Interior, I mean, paint, it's pretty easy to do. Flooring is huge just from a maintenance standpoint. So if you can do it, but as you know, it's not that cheap to do floor and then we'll like resurface countertops. I wouldn't do cabinets and stuff like that if you don't have the budget for it. I wouldn't do appliances unless they need them. You're not going to get the bang for the buck for that. Again, people will see paint, they'll see flooring and they'll see like maybe surface countertops, paint the cabinets, things like that. But some people have really high aspirations. They want to do all these things, but at the end of the day, you're not living in the property so don't outdo the market. I won't be the first guy to prove something in a market, I let other people prove it first. But I would say for sure start with the outside. We start like with landscaping and paint, stuff like that. People can see that. James: Got it, got it. Awesome. Mark. So we're at the end of the podcast. Do you want to tell our audience and listeners how to get hold of you? Mark: Yes. An email address is Mark@thinkmultifamily.com and love the chat with anybody and I really, really appreciate you spending time with me today, James. James: Sure, sure. Absolutely. Thanks for coming over. You had a lot of value. And I really like going across markets here because sometimes it's hard to find someone who has done deals in different markets, right. Because it's important. A lot of people want to do markets everywhere. I mean, there are deals everywhere so you just have to buy it right and you have to analyze it right. And, you know, just make sure the numbers work and the location works. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, Mark. Mark: All right, James. Appreciate your time. James: Absolutely. Thank you. Bye.
Alan’s back and the original trio is at it again. This week the guys dive into the dirty business of recycling. Follow the path your plastic containers go down and learn where they are ending up. What can we do to make the recycling process better, who are the recycling bad actors and how do the hosts feel about the direction of solar energy? Then get your space caps back on and get ready to play along, as Dan and Travis do their best to answer questions about the two planets closest to earth, Venus and Mars. Finally, every football player dreams of being on the cover of the Madden Video Game, but is the potential trade off of this honor worth the cost? Listen now to unlock all of the secrets in this week’s episode! (09:41) What really happens to our recyclables? (53:30) What should you know about Venus and Mars? (Solar System Trivia Part II) (1:25:47) Is the Madden curse real or fake? Find Us AtWebsite: qcodepodcast.comEmail: qcodep@gmail.comTwitter: @qcodepodcastFacebook: Q Code PodcastInstagram: qcodepodcastDon’t forget to subscribe and rate the show through your podcast player of choice! Source Material Articles Is What We're Recycling Actually Getting Recycled? Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not Is This the End of Recycling? How Big is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Science vs. Myth Great Pacific Garbage Patch Mars Trivia: 20 Amazing Facts About the Blood Red Celestial Body Wikipedia: Valles Marineris Wikipedia: Grand Canyon Valles Marineris: Facts About the Grand Canyon on Mars Why is Mars Red? Is the 'Madden' Cover Curse Still a Thing? A Look Back at 20 Years of NFL Stars Offers a Verdict Videos Dirty Business: What Really Happens to Your Recycling The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is Not What You Think it is - The Swim
The Supplements Industry has boomed in recent years. Natural. Healthy. Safe. Or are they? Much of this increased demand is as a result of us seeking out more natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals - but also I think a bit of laziness in terms of eating the right foods. Just pop a few supplements and we'll be all good. What the body doesn't need, it'll just excrete. And by the way, it's a tightly regulated industry. Right? Maybe not... #supplements #wellness #healthylifestyle
So let's talk about your rental lease... Where did you get yours? Did you download it from some random site on the Internet located by searching Google for keywords like "rental lease agreement"? Did you buy it at Office Depot or Staples? Or did you go the professional route and pay an attorney to create a custom lease specific to you and your rental property? First, I don't recommend going the random Internet search route. I also wouldn't buy or use a lease from anywhere, unless it is indicated and confirmed to be written specially for your state. I'm in North Carolina, and the Landlord / Tenant Laws here (and thus how a lease must be written to comply with them) are certainly not going to be the same for you in some other state. You need a state specific lease. So it would seem the best method would be to get a lease drawn up by an attorney in your local area who is knowledgeable of the Landlord / Tenant Laws and resulting lease requirements in your state... Right? Maybe, but not necessarily... In this episode of the ... and Landlord! Rental Real Estate Investing Podcast, entitled "#11 | Make Sure Your Lease Protects Your ASSets" - I speak on the topic of rental leases... Where I got mine. How and why I've customized it. And I provide examples of how I use my lease as both a sword and shield in the protection of my rental home assets; as well as, my rental property and property management businesses. I give two locations (BiggerPockets.com & EZLandlordForms.com) - at which you can obtain state specific leases. The lease I use for all of my rental properties comes from EZLandlordForms.com - and I've then customized it to fit my specific needs, including adding and altering provisions to make the lease even better at protecting my rental home assets and businesses. Of course, I ran this lease by my attorney, along with any additions and changes that I've made. And the end result after 4 years is a document that speaks well to almost any scenario that occurs at one of my rental homes and for my rental property and property management businesses. Likewise, in this episode I give tips to making sure you have the best possible lease in place to both help keep you OUT of court, and making your WIN (should you end up in court anyway) next to inevitable. And the most important part of that equation is staying OUT of court - so I provide details in making sure your tenant is fully informed as to the lease contents and your strict adherence to following this document in the handling of any and all issues. I even go into details as to when, why and how to make an exception in handling things only as detailed in the lease. There needs to be room for reasonableness in your handling of matters, even when you are fully within your rights according to the lease and law. Yes, the lease can be your sword - but "he who lives by the sword, also dies by the sword." - so be reasonable with your tenants and your handling of matters, as that may also work in your favor should you ever end up in court. You don't want to be in front of a judge looking like the unreasonable party or a bully. In short, rental property is an asset that comes with certain risks - so this episode is all about making sure your lease protects your ASSets as best possible.
Emotional eating can be a real challenge in finding balance. Sometimes there is a sense of helplessness to it. In today’s podcast, Josh Hillis shares his emotional eating coaching strategy to help our listeners find new ways to cope with stress that doesn’t always revolve around food. What you’ll hear in this episode: How effective are cravings control strategies when you have emotional eating issues? Is the answer to emotional eating more control? The emotional release effect when you emotionally eat after tight control The role of acceptance in emotional eating Normalizing the existence of uncomfortable emotions. Diffusing uncomfortable emotions - what does that mean? Gaining perspective around the perceived urgency of feelings The role of mindfulness in managing negative emotions Defining emotional or disinhibited eating Learning to let the monsters ride the bus Being in the driver's seat of how you deal with feelings Introducing a waiting period to delay emotional eating The value of taking time to identify feelings Ways to scale and create distance between you and your feelings Three ways to feel comfortable with your feelings without using food Managing expectations of emotional eating - moving past all or nothing Psychological flexibility as a goal, defined. Identifying and being aware of your “monsters” Thought suppression and the health and wellness industry sales tactics Frequency and emotional eating Rules vs Self-Loving Guidelines Tracking progress - things you can track Resources: Josh’s Blog Fat Loss Happens On Monday Everything You Know About Emotional Eating is Wrong - blog post Annie quotes Mothers, Daughters and Body Image - Hillary McBride’s book Getting Older: Hillary Mcbride On Women And Aging Episode 13: How Your Body Image Impacts Your Children With Hillary Mcbride Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life Radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight, and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we have coached thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life Radio. I am so excited for today's guest because today's incredibly smart and talented guest goes way back with Balance365, so far back in fact that he knew Lauren, Jen and I before we were even a business. Josh Hillis has been a longtime friend and mentor to the three of us and I'm so excited for you to hear his wisdom on today's episode. Josh helps people beat emotional eating using a skill-based not diet-based approach that allows people to create a new relationship with their bodies and food and get results that have previously never been possible. Josh is the author of Fat Loss Happens on Monday and the upcoming lean and strong and yet untitled emotional eating book coming out in 2020. Josh has been writing for his blog losestubbornfat.com since 2004 and he currently attends MSU Denver and is doing his thesis on contextual behavioral science and emotional eating. He's the perfect guest for this topic. The current standard answer to emotional eating and the health and fitness industry encourages individuals to just have more control, more control over their diet, over their thoughts, over their emotions, more control over your cravings. But on today's episode, Josh shares why that advice usually doesn't work. For those who struggle with emotional eating and provides multiple practical tools to help you overcome it, I think you're going to love it and joy. Annie: Josh, welcome to Balance365 Life Radio. We're so happy to have you. You go way back with our team like way, way back. How are you? Josh: I'm good. How are you guys? It's so cool to see you guys again. Annie: I know, like, we're still, like, we're still together. The last time we were Facetiming was under a little bit different context. We were Healthy Habits Happy Moms then and we were, you've kind of helped us mentor us as far as like habits and skills and philosophies and you're just a really great coach. Just flat out really great. Josh: Thank you. From you guys, that's awesome. Annie: So we're so happy to have you and Jen and Lauren are here too. How are you guys? Jen: Hi- Lauren: Good. Josh goes way back to like before we were even a thing. Jen: We met Josh the same time we met each other. Lauren: Yeah. Josh: Wow. Jen: Years ago. Annie: Yeah. Josh: Oh Wow. That's awesome. That's amazing. Annie: So you're kind of a big deal to us, are we making you uncomfortable yet? Josh: That's awesome. Jen: When our book comes out we're going to have a page for acknowledgements and I was just telling the girls last week, like Josh Hillis is going to be my number one acknowledgement. Josh: Are you serious? Jen: Yeah, just like all your work and your blog, like it's been so insanely helpful to me. And even just watching you in conversation with people, like, as creepy as that sounds, but just how you handle people, how it's just and you're just so objective and, and really what we try to embody at Balance365 as far as there's no right one right way for every single person and just being open to tools and helping people build a, just a more varied toolbox and they currently have for their health and wellness. Jen: And also the other big thing that we come up against is that, because we're all about self acceptance and embracing oneself, we also often get lumped into a segment of this industry that we all know about, which is basically the anti weight loss movement, which is like weight loss is so bad. Why? Like nobody better talk about this. And a lot of dietitians are on that train as well as psychologists. And so it's just, it's like frightening for me at times. And I found myself questioning, you know, cause you go to the, you see these other professionals and you're like, "Oh man, like, she makes a good point, like what's?" And you've question your own values and what, but ultimately we have risen as like, look, we're just, we're just trying to take a messy middle approach. And there is really nothing inherently wrong with weight loss, changing your behaviors. Jen: And I so appreciate that and you, because I see you as a real leader and professional, not just in the health and wellness industry. Well the health and fitness industry I should say, but you are now a part of the psychology industry. Lauren: Say, "Hey, this is okay. Come on" Annie: And you're not a jerk. Like you're not, like you're not out there shaming people and you're like still able to like help them achieve the goals that they have in a really like compassionate, positive way, which is awesome. Jen: Yeah. And you've got a couple of clients I was reading yesterday on your page that you have a couple of clients that have lost over a hundred pounds. That's like, that's a, that's a life changing, values altering like those clients, like you've totally changed their lives. Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Annie: So now are you uncomfortable? Josh: No, this is like the coolest, most thoughtful, most wonderful compliments I could ever get because you guys are acknowledging me for the things that I've worked the hardest at and that mean the most to me, like in the world. So I totally appreciate it. I totally, totally, totally appreciate it. Annie: Yay. Well, we're like, we can just be your ultimate hype women when you're having a bad day. You can give us a call. Okay. Josh: Can you guys introduce me on every podcast? Annie: We can. But peaking of podcasts, we should probably talk about the topic that I, that you actually wanted to talk about because we've been trying to get you on the show for a while and you're a busy guy. So, when I said, are there any topics that you wanted to jam on and you were like emotional eating, like top on your list. So what is it about emotional eating that you love so much? Josh: I think, so a couple of different things, on like the bigger, like zoomed out level, I think it's access to making the kind of difference that I want to make with people. If they can get, what's really neat is if someone really struggles with emotional eating and they can get that under control it tends to spiral out into other areas of their lives and they have like better relationships and do better at work. I mean like it's, it's really like I don't coach any of that stuff and that kind of thing shows up. The other thing that I like about it is I think it's a place where people feel so out of control and they feel like they can't be this kind of person that they want to be and like they're like, they're being driven by this other thing. And so I like it cause I want to put them back in the driver's seat. and then also the framework that I study, which is contextual behavioral science is just really good for that. And so that's- Annie: I think it's great because I, you have, you have an incredible blog. One of the blog posts you shared with me, you noted that the typical response in the fitness industry to emotional eating is like control, like just control more things and then like, you'll be fine. And,in order to control emotional eating, individuals just they need to control their diet, then control their thoughts, their emotions, their cravings, and you think that that's pretty much crap. Josh: Yeah. Annie: So tell us why, why do you think it's crap? Tell us more. I mean, we agree. Josh: Yeah. So, one thing I just want to preface this with, because it's the most surprising cause I do think it's totally crap and I've gone that way for a while, but I was really surprised this year that I found some studies where they separated out people that had a high degree of emotional eating and cravings, eating and external eating, which is like, you see food and you want it versus people that scored really low on that. And for the people that scored really low on that control was actually fine. Control actually totally worked just just fine. But that's not the clients that I get, you know, they don't hear me. So, the flip side is that control, if you do have issues with cravings or emotional eating, tired eating or and you're procrastinating or any of those things, then control will have an opposite effect. If it works, it always rebounds and the rebound is always, pretty un-fun. Like people really feel like a really, really bad loss of loss of control and they feel kind of gross and they don't feel good about themselves. Jen: So it's sort of that the more tightly wound you are, the faster, harder you'll spin out. And applied to eating, I think people get that release, like they're so tightly wound around food trying to control everything then getting out of control, they just, I mean in the moment it's like a release, right? Josh: Yeah. So you bring up these two really big points. Oh man, it's so cool. So on one hand you've got this like rule based way of living and the problem with having a totally rule based way of living is you break the rule and you're like, I'm off. I'm like explode. Like do it all because this is the last time ever. So, there's that huge like explosion release thing there. And then the other side is that, like, food really does work temporarily for numbing emotions. So, those two things kind of spiral together where people, like, break the rule and they're like, "Oh no, I'm, I'm off my diet and I'm going to go into all the things." And then they start to feel guilty about it. And then they actually are eating to numb the guilty feelings they have about breaking the rules. It's like- Jen: layer one and layer two. Lauren: Wow. The plot thickens. Josh: Totally. Annie: So I understand if you have emotional eating issues or cravings control strategies backfire, like they aren't helpful. What does work? Josh: Great question. So, it kind of all fits in the world of like acceptance based strategies and I get, I like, I have some clients to kind of freak out when I say, like, "acceptance", you know, cause they're like, "I don't want to accept." But that's just kind of like a family of strategies. And what kind of falls inside of that is, the first thing is actually normalizing. It's just recognizing every single time that you have uncomfortable thoughts and uncomfortable emotions, that it's normal to have uncomfortable thoughts, uncomfortable emotions and, like, the foundation is people, like, believe that that's not okay. You know, cause they've heard so much about, like, positive thinking or controlling their thoughts or all of these things or they were, maybe it wasn't cool growing up for them to have emotions or whatever. Josh: But for whatever reason, they think they're supposed to be a shiny, happy person. And just recognizing it's normal to feel sad sometimes. And the number of coaching calls I get on where something really bad happens to someone and I have to say like, "It's okay. It's okay to feel to feel bad. It's okay to feel sad. It's okay. It's okay to have all these feelings." So recognize that it's okay and normal and healthy. Sometimes we can even pair with, well, that's jumping to the next thing. So the next thing is getting a little bit of distance from uncomfortable thoughts and emotions, in act and acceptance commitment training they call it diffusion or fusion. So if you're fused with your thoughts, you feel like they're coming from you, you feel like they're true or true or false, and you feel like there are a command, you feel like there like something that like urgently needs to be fixed. Josh: Diffusion is getting enough enough distance from your thoughts. You can see that like these thoughts might have come from my parents or the media or magazines or whatever. But like, my automatic thoughts aren't me. Right. They aren't true or not true. They're just thoughts. They aren't an urgent problem that needs to be fixed, right? It's normal to have these thoughts and feeling and so diffusion is a matter of, if people have done any kind of like meditation or mindfulness and like, noticing your thoughts and like not so that's where people get caught up. A lot of people have done, I've tried to meditate or do mindfulness in such a way that they were trying to change their thoughts and not have thoughts. So, it's not that, but it's like being able to notice like, "Oh, here are these thoughts and these emotions." Josh: And it could be as simple as saying, "I notice I'm having the thought that blank" versus just treating the thought like it's true. Or probably a little later we'll get to, there's a metaphor for all this called, let the monsters ride the bus and it will kind of pull this together, but, basically get it, get enough distance from those thoughts that you can be with them and that they're not driving and then the third thing is you've got to drive. Like you're the bus driver, but like you can have these thoughts and still take actions that fit your values in your life. And then the last thing is that requires having actually, like, clarified your values. Jen: Right? Right. Annie: This is like my therapy. This is what I discuss with my therapist. Josh: Do you have an acts therapist? Annie: I don't know. But there's, it does feel very similar into that, like just acknowledging like, these are my thoughts. These are my emotions. What is this? Where did this come from? I don't have to act on them. I can just acknowledge them and, and then sitting with them, not like trying to numb them, not trying to run away from them or like avoid them. Yeah. Lauren: I've realized recently that my, I'm very prone to, what did you say? Fusion? Josh: Yeah. Lauren: Where I'm like, this is my thought and I have to fix it right now. Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Jen: We know that about you. Annie: We could've told you that, Lauren. Jen: She's doing that thing again. Lauren: Well, I recently found this about myself. Jen: This is like my inner Spock. Like when my inner Spock is like, "Halt." You know what I mean? When we have to, "Let's analyze this." Yeah. Annie: So, okay, so Josh, what does this, what does this look like? So people have stress, they have an emotion. They have like, I mean, it could be emotional eating, it can be a wide continuum of emotions. It could be happy. It could be- Jen: We didn't define emotional eating either at the beginning. Annie: Yeah. Do you have a definition, Josh, that you, or a way to define emotional eating? Josh: So most of what I'm looking at is disinhibited eating. So that's, like, a feeling of loss of control with food related to strong emotions, good or bad? Good, good or bad. Wanted or unwanted would probably be more accurate, external, like, seeing things and cravings and so it'd be eating in response to any of those things. With my clients I also lump in, to me it's all the same thing. I also lump in procrastination eating, tiredness eating. Those are the other two. Yeah. Annie: Tiredness eating being that you eat when you're tired. Josh: Yeah. Annie: That's me. Annie: I do that I think. Yeah. Okay, so you experience these emotions, any of them. And then you have a behavior around food. Is that- Josh: Yeah. Annie: Any behavior or it could be a wider range of behaviors? Josh: Oh, it's typically like feeling some degree of loss of control. Like you're not, you don't feel like you're choosing to eat the Brownie, like, I woke up and there was brownies everywhere. Jen: It would be different than happy eating cause we had someone in Balance365. I feel like her emotional eating was out of control. She ate when she was sad, but she also ate when she was happy. But it's more of a loss of control aspect to it. Not a, "Oh, I'm so happy. Let's grab a cake. Celebrate." It's right. Josh: Yeah. It's not, "Let's have a bottle of wine at on date night." It's not, "It's my grandma's hundredth birthday. I'm going to have a chocolate cake." It's not that at all. Should I get into stuff like what, what we do about it? Annie: Yeah. Go for it. Jen: If you want to. Josh: So the simplest thing to do is to put in a waiting period. Right. Could be waiting. 10 minutes, could be waiting a minute. Does it matter? All we're trying to do is they've got this really, really ingrained pattern of have an emotion, eat and if we can separate that, we're good. So that means, like, if I've got clients with pretty legit emotional eating problems, we'll start off with, they have an emotion. They wait 10 minutes, they eat the thing anyway, almost every time. That's fine. We can totally start there. Jen: Progress being the waiting period. Josh: Yeah. Yeah. So, the progress is it's not automatic, they might have to like struggle with it for that 10 minutes or they might have to think about it for that 10 minutes, but at some point, but they've got enough time, they get to choose in that case where they're having it all the time, they don't, they don't have a lot of choice. But it's at least we're breaking that pattern where it's automatic, where they might not even know what they're feeling. They might not even know what they're thinking. Which is actually really common, which is really, which is why, another really, so things you can put in that 10 minutes, you can put it in like looking at a feelings wheel and being able to just like pick out this is what I'm feeling, which actually creates some diffusion that creates some separation. And there's something really magical about people being able to figure out like going from, "I feel bad" to "Oh, I'm sad. I'm sad because this the, you know, my boss yelled at me and that sucks." Right? Maybe it's normal to feel sad when my boss yells at me or whatever. Jen: I do this with my kids like they, but Brene Brown talks about how she has some research that shows, she's done research on college age students and they can only, they only identify three emotions and that's like- Josh: Really? which ones? Jen: Happy, mad and sad. And so she talks about how, you know, in order to be in touch with our emotions, we need to be able to identify emotions and we just aren't taught how to identify. I do this with my kids and we, like, talk about all these different range of emotions outside of mad, sad and happy because you can feel so many different things. But it's so interesting for you to talk about this because I also see so much child psychology stuff that actually applies to two grown ass adults as well. Like we need, you know what I mean, because we weren't taught in childhood. So it, yeah. So it needs to be brought in. Josh: All of the emotion regulation stuff for kids I use with adults. It's awesome. Annie: There's Josh Hillis' coaching secret. Kid psychology. Jen: Go grab your feelings wheel. Annie: Where are you on the spectrum? Jen: Next time Lauren has a meltdown I'm going to say "Go grab your feelings wheel." Annie: All of our slack community, our corporate communication is now going to be, "I feel because" statements, so Josh, you, so you create some distance, you identify some feelings or what your feelings, you get really clear on what that is and then you can eat the thing if you want to still, right? Josh: Yeah. And so they're sort of like these, like, kind of guideline-y things, like waiting 10 minutes. Another like guideline-y thing that I'll start off with, like, either don't do it, do whatever you want. If someone is eating the thing every time then we'll add in like a 50% guideline where 50% of the time they'll eat the thing and 50% of the time they'll find something else. And again, that's just sort of like some training wheels to have to like think about it and choose and be like, you know what, I ate the thing three days in a row. Maybe today I should try going for a walk. Jen: Right, right. Annie: And the point is to really just disrupt the autopilot, right? Josh: Yeah, yeah. Jen: Yes. Right. And also sounds like scaling a little bit. Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jen: Rather than, again, what we see big, big, big problem is people try to go from zero to 60 and it never works. It never works. And Lauren had a really good idea for bridging the emotional eating gap. She said if eating a piece of cake is your coping mechanism, try pair it with a bath, go eat your cake in the bath, and then eventually your association can be more, can become about the bath and then remove the cake and then have it be about the bath, right? It's about scaling that towards a healthier coping mechanism. Josh: That's awesome. Jen: Yes. Go Lauren. Annie: Are there, Josh, do you have any other ways to create distance or to even just feel comfortable feeling your feelings without food? Josh: Yeah. So there's always going to be three different things that you can do, three different effective things. One is you can create distance and just sit with it. Like, just accept this is normal. Right? And a lot of times that's really cool. If you're in a situation where you can't do something else, right, Like maybe you're at work and you've got to keep working, and so what you do is you notice those feelings and you come back to being present with your work or your family or whatever's going on around you. Like, you actually get present with that. The other thing would be to have a menu of different self care things that you can do. And so you notice you have those feelings and then you take a walk or do some deep breathing or take a bath or read a book or whatever. At this point I think I've got a list of like 70 different things in like 15 categories. Jen: I want to just say one thing for the moms who listen and the dads, when I find myself emotionally eating, my kids are often a trigger and alternative forms of self care are not available to me. Right? Like I can't go take, I can't check out of parenting and go take a bath or even go meditate or whatever. And so sometimes I'm just freaking eat a bowl of chips. One thing I would say is that I've scaled it from diving headfirst into a bag of chips to like getting out a little bowl and putting some chips in there and then just eating them and going, "Yeah." So I would say like, I mean my emotional eating skills are not, but they have greatly improved over the years. Josh: Well look at that. So there's a couple of great things about what you just said, right. Number one, parenting is a great context for, like, being able to just, like, accept it and be there. Also, you, you did look at, like, separating out the chips and, like, having a certain amount versus just, like, grabbing from the bag, which works for all kinds of treats all across the board. And then the third thing that that brings up is, it's actually, and this is another thing that's such an important thing. It's normal to eat to chill out your emotions sometimes. Jen: I totally agree. I don't think the goal is like 0% emotional eating. It's like, really, how often are you doing it and how, what is the loss of control there, right? Rather than- Josh: Yeah. Jen: Like emotional eating isn't all bad and it's like, really? Is it? Josh: Yeah. Jen: A couple of chips when my kids are losing it? Is that so bad. Annie: Is it problematic for you? Josh: Oh, and it's one those things where like, like the goal is psychological flexibility. So psychological flexibility is the ability to make different choices. Right. It's just an ability to make different choices. Jen: Right. Right. Josh: Like, never emotionally eating is rigid. Jen: Totally. Josh: Always having to, like, where most of my clients had is they've got like a rule, they don't, they don't say it as a rule, but like they've got a rule that if they have emotions they eat, totally rigid. Jen: Right. Josh: If we can get in the middle we're rocking. Jen: Totally. Yes. Annie: That sounds so familiar, Jen. Jen: The messy middle, yes. That's where we like to hang. Josh: I loved that so much. That is like the best phrase in the world. Jen: Brene Brown, I've brought her up a few times now. You can see I really like her. Josh: I like her too. Annie: But- Jen: Yeah, she talks about being in the messy middle, but when you're in the messy middle you get arrows from both sides, which we have also experienced as well. Being in the messy middle between hardcore health and fitness and hardcore body positive anti weight loss. Hanging out in the middle is can be quite lonely and you can get arrows from both sides. But- Josh: I get that. Annie: Okay. So say you're finding yourself, like, face deep in, like, cake or chips or whatever it is and you're, like, you have this, like, moment of, like, "Whoa, what am I doing?" Josh: Yeah. Annie: Like you're like in this middle, like an emotional eating extravaganza. Josh: Yeah. Annie: What do you do? Do the same thing, like, create some distance still or are there different rules? Josh: Oh no, that's, you nailed it already. It's the exact same rules. So, you notice you're in the middle, you separate yourself from it geographically. You give yourself some time to think about it. You do some sort of diffusion exercise. Whether that's, well, where I talked about, like, a feelings wheel, but also I've got some clients that will journal, they'll write out everything that they're feeling and just writing it out gives them a lot of distance. The biggest thing my clients use actually a metaphor called "let the monsters ride the bus" so we might as well dive into that now. So, it's a really, really common act metaphor and the metaphor is, you're a driving a bus and sometimes you get really cool passengers that get on the bus and they're like, "hey, you're great and we love you and high five!" Like that. Josh: And they get on and off when they want. And sometimes they get monsters, they get on the bus, they're like, "Hey, you're ugly and stupid and you always do it wrong" and they get on and off when they want. And your job as the bus driver is to drive the bus and you could always make a left turn towards, like, numbing and controlling, or you can make a right turn towards your valued actions. And what this allows people to do is allows people to realize like, "Hey, I've got these monsters that will get on, will ride along with me and I can still take a right turn towards my values. Even with the monsters on the bus. Like, my job isn't to get rid of the monsters. It's not to not have monsters. It's to let the monsters ride the bus." Josh: And my clients have identified, they almost always have identified, like, what their most common monsters are. And my clients get to a point where they have identified the monsters that they have in the middle of emotional eating. I've got a lot of clients that have a monster that's like, "One more will be fine, one more will be fine, one more will be fine." Or they might have a monster that's like, "You've already ruined it. Might as well go for broke. Let's start again Monday." And so when they have those feelings, again, they don't treat them as true. They don't treat them as, like, them. They're like, "Oh, there's that monster again. And that guy can ride along the bus. And I know that when I'm in, when I catch myself in the middle, my monsters are super loud." Annie: Are you familiar with Pema Chodron's work? She's a Buddhist nun. Josh: No. Annie: This is feels very similar because you have in that blog post, and I think, I think I pulled this quote from your blog posts it said, "The irony is that when people accept cravings as being normal" or I'm assuming these uncomfortable emotions, "they have an increased capacity to tolerate cravings" and that's just very similar to her work. That's like you actually, by just acknowledging the feelings and emotions you suffer less, like, and that's, like, instead of trying to avoid it or like do all these things like this contortionists, like, "I'm going to avoid it in any way possible. I'm going to do all these things so I don't have to feel the thing that I'm trying to avoid feeling." If you just like feel it and like acknowledge it, like, "I see you, monster, you're on the bus, I hear you, but I'm not going to listen or I'm not, you know, whatever." Josh: Yeah. Annie: It's like you can still take action as you notice, what did you, how did you say, that aligns with your values? Josh: Yeah. Annie: Yeah. Even though you hear them, even though they're on the bus- Josh: You nail. Yeah. Yes. The same. And that's a really, really, really big. So, here's the paradox there. You're 1000% right. The paradox is that when you allow the monsters to be there, it is a lot less painful and it's a lot less intense. The paradox is that you don't want to approach it as, "I'm going to allow the monsters" to like force it to be less intense because then it doesn't work. And so that's not actually doing it. But what you're talking about, which is really cool, it's really, really cool, is that there's two kinds of pain. There is normal human pain, which is like the feelings and an uncomfortable thoughts that we all have. And then there's like the added pain that comes from trying to, like, control and fore and not, you know, and so, you do get to avoid all of the added pain and you're not the first person to be, like, you know, there's this Buddhist that kind of sounds a lot like these acceptance and commitment training people. Annie: Well I think it's, I think it's, I don't know if it's just the universe, like, I've been doing kind of this emotional work to like make these messages become really clear to me. But it seems like I've been trying to, and I've talked about this on other podcasts, outsource feeling good or feeling great all the time. Like you said, like we get this message that like, "Maybe I shouldn't be feeling these things" or like "Everyone else feels great all the time and they never have bad days" or "They never have self-doubt" or they never have body image issues. And it's like, "That's actually just not the case. Like, just acknowledging that like you get to feel all the things and you still live, we're going to be okay," like that. It's like, that feels really powerful to me. But I like that you say like, I love that analogy of let the monsters ride the bus. I could see that becoming a big phrase in our community. Can't you Jen? Jen: Yeah, I was already picturing it as a hashtag soon. Josh: That's awesome. Jen: The other thing is I think when I was hearing you say, Josh, is because we have this other guests, she's been on twice now. Her name is Hillary McBride. We have to, we're going to call her Doctor Hillary McBride soon cause she's almost done her Phd and she is also psychologist and she works in body image and she has a book called Mothers, Daughters and Body Image. And so she has sort of encouraged the same process as far as thoughts about your body, like kind of stepping outside of it. But, and then I think her version of monsters on the bus is to acknowledge the monsters on the bus. But to say, is this really true? Just that simple question, is this really true? And I just sort of have this vision of being a driver on a bus hearing all the monsters in the back, but being able to say, "Is that true? Like, do I have to do that? Am I, you know, am I helpless to this? Is that true?" And you know, the answer is often, like, "No, it's not actually true." And then you can kind of just, yeah. Keep doing what you were doing. Josh: Yeah. Jen: Yeah. Josh: Just to, like, it's, like, notice. Jen: Yeah, just notice. Yeah. Josh: Like it's, it doesn't, yeah. Cause we, it is so normal for us to treat it like it's true. Like it's, like, it's so true. Jen: Right. It feels true. Right? Josh: That's awesome. Annie: Okay. So Josh, we discussed, being aware, creating distance, normalizing the experiencing of different emotions. Is there anything else that comes to mind when I'm addressing emotional eating? And again, I do want to recap that this is like as you, as you said at the beginning, that those are tools that work for people that have emotional eating issues. If you don't have emotional eating issues then, like- Josh: You probably don't have to- Annie: Then it doesn't apply. Or what was the difference that you said? That thought control or thought suppression would work for people that,- Josh: yeah. So, here's where it gets really funny. Cause I got really spun whenever the research that thought suppression worked for cravings and emotional eating for people that don't have cravings and emotional eating issues. And but, like, at first I was like, "thought suppression is always bad. Like how does that work?" And so I actually talked to my friend, Amy Evans, who's this brilliant behavioral analyst and she's like, "Well, of course not because the function is different, right? So if the function of that controllers is trying to like push away these uncomfortable emotions and cravings, then it's like an avoidance strategy. But if you don't have issues with those, then it's actually kind of like, maybe it's just like conscientiousness, right? Like it's a totally different thing." And I'm like, "Oh!" So it's good to have genius friends. Jen: Right? So can you give us an example in context? So person A doesn't have ongoing emotional eating issues, so we're talking about, but then something, a craving pops up or, or they're feeling emotional and they're feeling some kind of urge to eat if they don't struggle with ongoing emotional eating issues, then suppression works. Josh: Apparently. Yeah. I mean I don't coach that, but in the, in the research, yeah. Jen: So what would suppression look like for them? Josh: Yes. So, I'm guessing if they didn't score very highly than it's just a simple guideline that they're just like, "Oh, I don't, I don't eat between meals." I don't eat from the, you know, which is, which is totally fine. Jen: Right? Yeah. We call these self-loving guidelines in Balance365. They're not rules. They're flexible guidelines that keep you in a place of self care kind of thing. Josh: Yeah. So like- Annie: Oh, sorry, go ahead, Josh. Josh: I was just going to say if someone doesn't score really high on cravings and they have a little craving, it's pretty easy for them to go like, "Oh, I'm not going to do that." Jen: Right. Josh: "If someone scores really high on cravings- Jen: Then it's a bigger deal to say, "No, I'm not doing that." Yeah. Okay. Annie: I think it's important to note though, as you noted, as we noted in the beginning of the podcast is that that can work for some people, but right now the majority of the health and fitness industry are selling thought suppression. Josh: Yeah. Annie: To everyone. Like, that is, like, the widely accepted common answer versus, "Hey, like, maybe this is normal." Jen: They're also selling emotional eating at any point as as unacceptable. And so, you know, a person who is has an emotional eating episode one day, that's, you know, we're trying to say in this podcast that that's not wrong. And really, if you don't struggle with emotional eating, whether you do or don't engage in emotional eating is not a make or break for anyone's life. Right. It's not, whether you choose the chips or don't, it's just not really an issue. Like it's really a small, tiny little rock that really, you know what I mean? Like we're talking about, there's people that have real loss of control that going on, you know, sometimes daily for them around emotional eating. So, and it comes down to the frequency. How often are you engaging in these behaviors and ultimately what does that end up? What does that look like for you? After three months, 12 months, three years, 20 years, right? Josh: Frequency's everything. Jen: Right. Annie: Josh, you're so much fun to have on our podcast. Do you have more? Josh: Can I throw one other thing out there? The other thing that, the biggest misconception that I've gotten when I've talked to people about this and I've got it so much that I want to make sure not to miss it. This is still a behavioral approach, right? Like they're like, "Oh, you're like deal with your thoughts and like that" but you still, like, you still have to clarify your values and attach behaviors to that. But it's like, so self love guidelines was that? Jen: Self loving guidelines. Josh: Self loving guidelines, or like kind of like more, more intuitive skills or like, all these different things. The whole point of all this is to be able to do those things more frequently. Jen: Right? Josh: Right. So, all of my clients, I shouldn't say all of my clients. The majority of my clients track behaviors, right? So they track how often they have like a mostly balanced meal or how often they have vegetables or how often they, you know, snacked between meals or how often they noticed their hunger before they ate or how, you know, like how often they were full and stopped and like, they track actual behaviors and things that we can count the real world. Monsters on the bus is another thing that they track and count how often they use it. They also track if they didn't need it, like, "Oh, I didn't need it today," but- Jen: Oh interesting. Josh: If they're like, "Oh, I didn't need it and I used it" or "I didn't need it and I didn't use it." Those would be different things and it seems really weird maybe to use like a metaphor as a behavior to track, but it works really well. Jen: So ultimately you're tracking, the behavior change that you have people track is not necessarily emotional eating episodes, but how they dealt with those, whether they dealt with it in a manner that is more healthy than bingeing. Josh: Yeah. Jen: Right. Okay. Josh: Yeah. And so that could look really differently for a lot of different people, but it's like how often did you use this metaphor? How often would you use a diffusion technique? How often did you use your menu of things you can do? Jen: Right, right, right. Annie: Great. So, so you're putting behaviors with it. That's great. Josh: That's what grounds it in the real world. Annie: Yeah. Josh: Otherwise it goes way. Jen: Josh had a thread on his page, several months ago where you said, "sometimes I think" as far as your weight loss clients, you said "If we changed nothing at all except working on stress reduction methods, people would lose weight without changing anything at all." And then I had mentioned or just sleep, like, just a sleep habit, which is, you know, kind of goes hand in hand with stress- Josh: So good. Jen: Isn't it? So it just sort of like, yeah. So imagine if people just, so what we find is people hyperfocus on food, like they just are hyper focused on it and if you zoom out and you get back, if you just laid your foundations for say stress reduction, better sleep hygiene, anything you identify that helps your wellness wheel go, the food just doesn't matter. People will kind of eat until they're satisfied. Do you know what I mean? Like it's often these, the overeating tendencies we have are often a result of these high stress, sleep deprived, poor coping mechanism, lifestyles that we're living, the rest of the overeating issue. You don't have to be so hyper focused on the food or crank the wheel to the right and jump on the Keto wagon or cause you're really never getting to the underlying issues of why you're overeating in the first place. Right? Josh: Yeah. With my most successful clients, all these things we're doing show up as self care. Jen: Right. Totally. Josh: And it's like, and then the people that struggle are the ones that keep trying to do it as punishment. Jen: The food, the food. Yeah, totally. Josh: And the thing about sleep is no one makes phenomenally great food decisions when they're exhausted. Jen: Nobody. That's right. Yeah. Josh: I will throw out there in case there's any people that work like swing shifts or anything like that out there. For a while I had a ton of clients that were nurses that worked overnight and so for them, a lot of it was just acceptance of every time their schedule shifted they were going to be like unusually hungry. And so that is workable. But for everyone else, if we can just turn off screens like an hour earlier, like, man, this all gets easier. Jen: Totally. We just interviewed a sleep doctor before we interviewed you. Josh: Oh really? Annie: Yeah. He said the same thing. Jen: Same thing. Our podcast is the best. Josh: Your podcast is the best. This was so much fun. Annie: Are you always this energetic? I mean, every time, I've talked to you twice in five years, like you always have such great energy about you- Jen: And smiling. You're always smiling. Josh: You're super great. It's fun hanging out with you guys. Annie: You are welcome back here anytime. Josh: Also, this is, like, my favorite stuff to talk about. Annie: So yeah, you are, you're welcome back here. Anytime. Anything, any projects you're working on that you want to tell us about or where can we, where can our listeners find you or keep up with your work? Jen: You're working on a million books. Josh: I am working on a million books, so, losestomachfat.com is still my blog. I still do celebrity workout stuff and emotionally eating research, which is now a weird combination. I've got two books coming out. Lean Is Strong is coming out at the end of this year. And then the untitled emotional eating book is coming out next year. And that's my big stuff right now. It's top secret. Annie: Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Alright, well thank you so much, Josh. Josh: Thank you. Annie: We will talk soon, hopefully. Josh: Okay, cool. Thanks guys. Annie: Thanks. This episode is brought to you by the Balance365 program. If you're ready to say goodbye to quick fixes and false promises and yes to building healthy habits and a life you're 100% in love with, then checkout Balance365.co to learn more.
Did you know that 1/3 of all kids with autism develop seizures?I've got a lot of mom guilt and "shoulda, coulda, woulda" surrounding my son's seizure condition. Here's what to look for and where to get more information.What you need to know if your child is at risk for developing seizures.Read the blog post: 6 Things I wish I'd been told about my son's seizure risk.Support the show (https://paypal.me/ADayInOurShoes)
What is Winstrol And What Does It Do? If you are interested in what Winstrol (also known as Stanozolol) does, you are probably looking to get jacked and ripped! Right? Maybe you are also interested in why you should stay away from it! There is nothing wrong with that, but what you will read here might surprise you about this synthetic steroid! Let's just say it might make you skip a couple of heart beats! Bodybuilding has killed people before, so rest assured winstrol (Stanozolol) can cause death as well! So What Is Winstrol? Frequently called Winny, Winstrol is a freaking steroid that people take in order to get shredded. That is it for the most part. In the normal world, this steroid which is pretty similar to testosterone, is usually used to treat other issues on humans and for muscle growth. It's used to cure swellings in the face, large intestines, and sometimes in the throat as well. BUT THAT IS NOT WHAT YOU WANT TO USE IT FOR IS IT? Winny will definitely help you achieve your goal of getting ripped and also very muscular. There is no question about that. When bodybuilders consume this substance, it basically gives you the metabolism of a race horse. It does this by reducing the amount of sex hormone-binding globulin in the body. Not really sure what that means, but that is what it does. It will burn your fat at a massive speed! Can You Build Muscle With Winstrol? Read the Full Article On Winstrol on Muscleroast.com! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/muscleroast/support
The older you are, the wiser you get. Right? Maybe. Or maybe not. When Nicole shared 32 lessons she learned in her first 32 years, it seemed to trigger some “grown ups.” Apparently a 32-year-old talking about life lessons incited her not-yet-fans to say, "You are so young. What could you know and who are you to teach me anything?" On the heels of her widely-shared article and this feedback, Nicole posed these questions to Robert: Can you be too old to learn a lesson? Can you be too young to teach a lesson? Robert repeated something he learned from his friend Jessi Sanfilippo: “It’s hard to be the teacher if you stopped being the student.” In those parenting moments when we believe that we already know everything we need to know, it’s easy to believe that everything we know is "right." In fact, we can track most of our biggest worst-parent-ever moments to that time when we forgot that we are still learning. The culprit? That voice in your head (your inner critic) tweaking your fear that you are messing it all up. There are lots of times on our parenthood journey when we find it hard to listen more than we talk. In those moments, we need to fight that inner critic, dance with our fear, so we can remember who is teaching whom. As two imperfect parents, spouses, entrepreneurs and humans, Robert and Nicole love visiting the “Life Buffet” to fill our plates with the variety of knowledge-nuggets we collect from our local, extended, and virtual communities. We don’t know it all… but we know who does! If you can see everyone within your family nucleus and outside of it as a person with ideas, no matter their age, gender, sexual preference, ethnic background, etc. you are ready to visit the Life Buffet. Just like at the Golden Corral, you take what you find useful and leave the rest. At the Life Buffet, you can say, “no thanks!” Don't enjoy the whole nugget you are offered? Can't find a use for it? No problem, move on. Unlike your local restaurant, at the Life Buffet, you can be courageous enough to offer something of your own and welcome anyone who wants to visit your table. Check out this episode of the ‘I Am The Worst Parent Ever’ podcast to learn how to deal with the critics that try to bring you down – and your inner critic that can hold you back. Robert and Nicole discuss how to break out and share your authentic self with the world, while remaining open-minded enough to connect with others.
The older you are, the wiser you get. Right? Maybe. Or maybe not. When Nicole shared 32 lessons she learned in her first 32 years, it seemed to trigger some “grown ups.” Apparently a 32-year-old talking about life lessons incited her not-yet-fans to say, "You are so young. What could you know and who are you to teach me anything?" On the heels of her widely-shared article and this feedback, Nicole posed these questions to Robert: Can you be too old to learn a lesson? Can you be too young to teach a lesson? Robert repeated something he learned from his friend Jessi Sanfilippo: “It’s hard to be the teacher if you stopped being the student.” In those parenting moments when we believe that we already know everything we need to know, it’s easy to believe that everything we know is "right." In fact, we can track most of our biggest worst-parent-ever moments to that time when we forgot that we are still learning. The culprit? That voice in your head (your inner critic) tweaking your fear that you are messing it all up. There are lots of times on our parenthood journey when we find it hard to listen more than we talk. In those moments, we need to fight that inner critic, dance with our fear, so we can remember who is teaching whom. As two imperfect parents, spouses, entrepreneurs and humans, Robert and Nicole love visiting the “Life Buffet” to fill our plates with the variety of knowledge-nuggets we collect from our local, extended, and virtual communities. We don’t know it all… but we know who does! If you can see everyone within your family nucleus and outside of it as a person with ideas, no matter their age, gender, sexual preference, ethnic background, etc. you are ready to visit the Life Buffet. Just like at the Golden Corral, you take what you find useful and leave the rest. At the Life Buffet, you can say, “no thanks!” Don't enjoy the whole nugget you are offered? Can't find a use for it? No problem, move on. Unlike your local restaurant, at the Life Buffet, you can be courageous enough to offer something of your own and welcome anyone who wants to visit your table. Check out this episode of ‘I Am The Worst Parent Ever’ podcast to learn how to deal with the critics that try to bring you down – and your inner critic that can hold you back. Robert and Nicole discuss how to break out and share your authentic self with the world, while remaining open-minded enough to connect with others.
People are only locked away in psychiatric facilities for good reason... right? Right??Maybe not. I'm joined this time by Jenni and Shelby from Wives' Tales to talk about some of the late nineteenth century criteria for psychiatric admission, as well as a few urban legends and a lot of laughs (because involuntary hospitalization is just hilarious... or not, but we laugh instead of screaming...). List, for reference:https://dangerousminds.net/comments/list_of_reasons_for_admission_to_an_insane_asylumDisclaimer by Reed Messerschmidt from the Irrationally Exuberant podcast.Promos by Killafornia Dreaming and Killer Jobs.
We're just going to go to the library, what's the worst that can happen? Right?? Maybe?
Hello, welcome to the Katrina Ruth Show. I am the Katrina Ruth Show. Who are you and where are you from? Tell me, tell me, tell me. All right, all right, all right. Good old vibe on here. Let's get vibalicious for this show. Who's going to join me on this episode of The Katrina Ruth Show? I had to toy around with the title of this show for really quite an unreasonable length of time. I kept changing my mind about what I was going to call it, which is always infuriating when you do that, because then you start to question what the original [inaudible 00:00:48] title was supposed to be and you start to like think about it instead of just let it flow. It should always get to floor. Okay, I'm definitely having one of those days. Hello, from Canada. Hello, Nadia. Hello, Tamira. Hi, Hafron. Let me just share this one over to some of my other places and spaces where people get to come and hang with us. I'm definitely having one of those days where it feels weird that I'm the only one talking. Sometimes when I start to present on my show, I get, all of a sudden I get super self-conscious and I feel awkward and shy. Hang on, Cam, Jeremy, Lab. I'm just putting this over on my personal profile. Then, a lot of the time ... You're in Iceland. What's the weather like there? A lot of the time when I jump on I'm so in the flow zone right away that I couldn't even really notice or care what's going on around me or ... I don't know, I'm completely in my flow so I'm not thinking about myself I guess. But today I'm having one of those days where I feel kind of shy. I just feel shy. I don't know why. Do you know what? I do fucking know why. I can tell you why because I didn't livestream for like 48 hours, but that shouldn't be [inaudible 00:02:17] you should be allowed to not livestream for 48 hours without losing your flow zone. But I think because I was mentor yesterday, I could feel that it was aligned and divine for me to livestream yesterday and then ... What did I do instead? Oh, my goodness, I shouldn't even tell you what I did instead of livestreaming yesterday. I had like an hour to [inaudible 00:02:35] I thought I was going to livestream and what I did instead was watch Suits on Netflix, which I seemed to be watching all week long. I used to love that show a couple of years ago and I just haven't watched Netflix at all for at least a year. This week I've been watching Suits every single day, which is such a great show. Then my friend, Billie Jane, and I were Facetiming the other day and he was like, "Oh, you're just doing that because she's going to get married now." And I'm like, "What? I'm not up to that season yet. I'm still in season four." I thought he meant on the show. He said, "No, no. She's marrying the Prince." Which is how I ended up watching some of the royal wedding yesterday because I felt connected to it and engaged to the whole thing. Hello, everybody that's been jumping on. Yesterday I got the downlow and the intuition that I was supposed to livestream and instead I sat on that daybed up there and ate my food and watched Suits. Sometimes I just flat be a normal person for a minute and a half. Okay, I can't see the screen at all. It's gone completely dark. You get into a wealth mindset. Well, you know what? I don't know what mindset I get into from watching it, I just like the banter. I like the funniness. It's a great story and, at the end of the day, you learn so much about story writing and copywriting and selling from watching really well written show. Not that I fricking need to learn it anyway because I'm such a natural, it just comes to me, comes through me and flows forth from me, besides which I practise it all the time. That certainly doesn't hurt as well. Anyway, the screen is going super dark. Do you think that that means that the phone is having a little heat alarm meltdown? I'll just try to carry on anyway but I can't see the comments. I'm doing my thing. I'm going to sit here in my bikini and get my tan on. I figure if I'm going to livestream then the least I can be doing is getting a tan on at the same time. My face is already starting to sweat. Every time I start livestreaming out here I'm like, "What am I doing? I'm just turning myself into an in-person, Bikram yoga studio because it's so fucking hot sitting here. It is funny and I do love Harvey Spector, I've got a great quote on my phone from him. I feel like I know him personally. I feel like we're friends. I have a great ... You should always lis- ... Oh, now I wish I would remember what it was. I think it's a famous Harvey Spector quote but it's something like, "You would do anything for the person you love most in the world and make that person you" except it's funnier and most smart ass than that. I'm back. Am I back? All right, mother fucker. Okay, so then I got on to do a livestream today anyway and I was like, I don't know, something about revealing the real truth. Something about being courageous enough to follow your deepest truth and that's what was coming through me today. What did I end up calling it? Deepest truth and freedom versus a shallow and reactive life. "Actually, I need to have more Suits in my life" says Pete. We're going to assume you mean the show of course and not actual real suits. But why not? Have it all. You get to have it all, Pete. You get to watch the show, Suits, and you get to have suits in your wardrobe as well if you desire. Whatever you desire is yours. I granted it. I mean now I'm getting caught up in my reality thing again. I was going to say, "It's my reality anyway" but we already had that conversation the other day. The deepest truth thing. Actually the reasons that I came up with the title for this livestream was very much not like deep and spiritual and powerful and transformational, although maybe it's powerful and transformational. I came out of my hot yoga class this morning ... I actually went out last night and had a reasonably decent big night out. I went out 100% ... It wasn't that big. It was big enough. I went out 100% with people that I've never met before, even before I got there. I'm super proud of myself. I'm being very social. So putting myself in a ... Well, it wasn't awkward at all but what could potentially be an awkward or uncomfortable situation, going along, meeting new people that you never met before and then that kind of initial [inaudible 00:06:36] awkwardness and being surrounded by a group of people of which you know none of them, and then gradually getting into a flow zone through the evening. It's pretty cool. This morning I woke up and I had a little bit of a headache, let's be honest. I went to hot yoga. I came out of hot yoga and I was like, "Oh, I should probably go and eat because if I don't eat then I've got whatever that's going on through the day today and I probably won't get to eat until later." So I nearly went in and sat down to eat and I was thinking about having this chocolate protein smoothie that I have all the time, the café here, and some eggs and that sort of thing. Then I was thinking, "Or I could do this livestream instead" and I was kind of caught up in, "Well, I think I desire to eat. I think I desire to sit down and have my protein smoothie and do some journaling and eat." I kind of stopped outside the café and I was like, "Hmm, is that my deepest truth?" Hey, hey, Shannon. Say hi if you're jumping on, everyone, and do jazz hands, because why would you not? So I was like, "Is that my deepest truth?" I am literally standing there outside the café staring at the menu for ages which the staff were probably thinking super weird because I got there nearly every day, like I don't need to look at the menu. I was just tuning in. I'm like, "Is it my deepest truth that I desire to sit down right now and have a protein smoothie or is it my deepest truth that I desire to come and livestream?" And I was like, "Well, I don't know if I really feel like [inaudible 00:07:48] after this" and then I [inaudible 00:07:49] and blah, blah, blah, probably end up not eating. I kind of just stopped myself and I went into, "What is the deep truth here? If I was fully honouring my deep truth, what would it be?" And the deepest truth was, I don't actually really need to eat. I don't really feel like eating, it was more like I'm reacting to some sort of slight desire to eat or to have something in my body, coupled with a little resistance around doing livestream for some reason. Probably just because I feel like I got out of the habit because I didn't do a livestream. Okay, all right. Hey, hey, we're back. I think the Facebook gods are feeling my vibe that I'm not fully owning that I'm meant to be here. There's something in me where I'm not fully owning being here. I'm feeling disconnected. It's definitely partly I didn't livestream for two days, but then on Friday I livestreamed with my friend, Chris, and on Thursday I livestreamed with Patrick, so I haven't done a livestream by myself for like four or five days. It's just something that completely feeds and fuels my soul to do a live thing, livestreams for other people. Oh, my God. Super flow zone, particularly if you do it with the right person, obviously. But there's something in me where I need to be fully showing up and sharing my content with the world. I guess that's what this is about, right? I had that kind of vibe this morning like, "I don't really need to. It's Sunday morning, whatever. I was out last night. I'm going out again tonight. Like to just get my chill on. Have some food, chill out, then talk to my clients after that." And it was just that [inaudible 00:09:08] truth coming up inside of me that was like, "No, girl. You're going to get on and talk and you're going to share because you're a goddamn messenger and that's what you're here to do." Now I start to feel the flow coming over me. [inaudible 00:09:19] I just got a notification from one [inaudible 00:09:22] online who I love and I just feel like it's synchronicity that her name just popped up on my laptop computer down there right when I felt the flow come over me. When I talk about deepest truth, I didn't say honouring but I'll say it now, honouring your deepest truth. Honouring your deepest truth, having the courage to acknowledge and recognise and then live by your deepest truth ... Thank you for the press place stickers, guys. Use my little stickers. If you look inside the emoji box on the right hand side of your screen, just to the inside left of that, there's a sticker button. If you press that sticker button you'll see some cool, creative stickers that you can send that my team have made up for me, which is just kind of fun. It's like being in the audience and interacting at the Katrina Ruth Show. Having the courage to recognise, to honour, to give yourself permission around and then also to live by your deepest truth is so critical and it is something that applies in all areas, big and small. Like I was using this little, silly example of do I have a fucking smoothie or do I do a livestream? It's kind of silly, but it's also these small moments, my moment in day by day, of what make up our lives. Right? For me it's something where I've made it a must. I've made it a priority. I've made it a personal rule or philosophy I live by that I do honour my deepest truth. That I do take the time if I ever feel unsure about anything big or small, I'm going to stop, literally in the middle of the street just now staring at a menu, I'm going to stop wherever I am, whether physically in real life or just kind of internally, and I'm going to tune in. I'm going to be like, "Hmm, what is my deepest truth here?" Because, on the surface of it, it doesn't fucking matter. What does it matter whether I spend 11:00 am on a Sunday having a smoothie or doing a livestream? In the moment, for today, I could say it doesn't matter. But then again, maybe one person will hear this livestream right now who is going to have the rest of the course of their life changed because they got the key copy [inaudible 00:11:09] or the awakening or the wake up call that they needed, and how is that going to then impact the people that they're here to impact? Literally, me showing up here today impacts the entire collective and since this is my reality and I created it, it impacts the entire [inaudible 00:11:23] my reality as well. Right? So every small moment impacts every big moment and there's no way that we can say that it doesn't. It also destroys. Even if we choose inter-resistance, let's say .... Hey, hey, Lisa. Even if we choose inter-resistance. Even if we choose into something that was not aligned or we would look back and go, "Oh, that wasn't aligned and I know that what I should have done or what was aligned or what my soul was guiding me to do was to show up and to give my content or to put myself forward into that situation, or to go to the thing or not go to the thing or whatever it was." Well, that's still what we've chosen and everything's perfect and everything's meant to be, so I really believe there are no mistakes. There are no screw ups. There's never a possibility or an option for me to look back and say, "I should have done this." Like I could look back and say, "Well, the truth is that it wasn't aligned for me to put myself in that situation or to do whatever different thing I did or to not pursue another thing that I did kind of lean away from or have fear around" but it's still what I chose in that moment. So, therefore, it what I was aligned and maybe that was the growth pathway that I got to experience for that point of time in my life and maybe even for the remainder of my life. Right? So it's a really cool contradiction where there's never any right or wrong way because whatever you did choose was the right passageway that you were meant to choose. Then, at the same time, moment by moment, the question that I like to ask is always, "Well, what is aligned? What is right? What is it that I'm meant to choose? What is it that my soul is directing me to do?" And what I find is that when I allow myself to just trust in what I'm being directed to from within, that that's when everything flows in my life. Now, I guess I show a lot of kind of cool results or outcomes in my business in life on the internet and people see that I've done the work and that I've created epic results. But where it really flows and where I really know those results have come from is a series of moments, moment by moment, where I've said yes to my soul and where I've felt some level of, I guess, discomfort or ... God, I just keep moving because the shade keeps moving and I'm trying to keep the phone in the shade and myself in the sun. I'm just going to check my comments over here on the computer so I can see properly. All right, good. So, the series of like moment by moment, breath by breath, day by day of responding to flow, responding to what our soul is guiding us to do, responding to our highest truth. I talk a lot with clients and even in blogs and previous livestreams around this being something that comes from courage. I believe that courage is a huge part of living your life purposefully and living your life according to truth. Because, quite frequently, it's easier or it seems initially easier, it's more comfortable to do something that is like more following resistance. Right? So it's more comfortable, would it be more comfortable for me to just go to café and have a little Sunday morning brunch? Nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I knew my souls was guiding me to do. I knew that I was pretty mild, somewhat mild, pretty fucking mild form of resistance around doing a livestream, which is just like, "I do it all the fucking time". Either way I'd be fine. Whatever. Whether I livestream today or not really doesn't matter in this game of day, except for the fact that what if I believed that I always get to follow soul guidance and soul alignment. Right? It's just this really small kind of discomfort of, "No, I'm going to get over this weird, tiny resistance that I have and I'm going to get on and I'm going to do this thing." Then it kind of doesn't surprise me that then the wifi went out two or three times already on this livestream and froze and then the screen went dark and I kind of can't see your comments or what's going on. It's like, "All right. Yeah. I've seen like that pull is still" ... Do you notice that? Like the resistance will still come up and be like, "Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure you're really committed to this?" And it would have been really easy for me to be like, "Oh, well the wifi's not working." I actually had that thought like, "Fuck it. I'll just shut it down. I'll go eat something." Then it was like, "No. Stay with what's inside of you because you know you're here to share something with the world." Whatever that might happen to be in this moment in time, in this livestream right here, but in a broader sense and in a bigger sense as well. What I notice is that so many people out there, and I've certain been guilty of this so many times in my life, so many people out there who are creating their lives based on reactivity. Right? Maybe something happens and they feel fired up or triggered or upset or angry, so then they start to create even like their content. For example, in their business from that place or other aspects of their life. Literally, it's like, "Oh, here's the aligns pathway. This is staying on purpose and staying on alignment and staying on your truth and on your path" and then you allowed something to pull you off. Now you're like literally creating your life reactively to something that kind of got under your skin or got your back up or got you feeling reactive or got you feeling defensive, or whatever it might be. Then it's like, "Well, how does that then carry into the next thing and the next thing and the next thing? You literally see people carry it their entire lives going down this kind of segue pathway instead of staying on their true path. It could just be, "Oh, but I feel uncomfortable. I feel like awkward or I feel shy, or I'm not ready to put myself out there yet. Or what if people don't jump on this livestream?" Whatever stuff people have to do with showing up in their businesses. Right? In their industry? That sort of thing. You feel it all. You feel the fear and then what do you do when you feel that fear or resistance? Do you take a deep breath and act from soul guidance and act from your deepest truth? Because that's what creates fucking freedom. Or are you going to tell yourself a story like, "Oh, well. I didn't really have time. I didn't really feel that good and I really kind of wanted to do this other thing instead and the circumstances weren't quite right, so I just kind of couldn't" when actually you're just not following faith and you're not following your deepest truth and you're act-
Get more from us at: https://tfg.li/2fEcRty A lot of world famous martial arts started in Japan: Karate, Judo, Kendo, Jujutsu, and especially Aikido. But if you really want to study one of these fighting arts properly, like for real, you have to move to Japan and practice it there. Right? Maybe not. This week, we talked to Guillame Erard who has been practicing Aikido for 30 years. He moved to Japan just to study Aikido and has taught students all over the world. He breaks down the pros and cons of studying martial arts in Japan, as well as explaining the history and philosophy behind Aikido in particular. So if you practice martial arts, or want to know how to get started, listen to Guillaume's wisdom. Find out once and for all what it means to study in Japan (and if it's okay to study anywhere else). Get more from Guillaume: https://www.guillaumeerard.com/ https://www.facebook.com/GuillaumeErardCom https://twitter.com/guillaumeerard iTunes:https://tfg.li/tofugu-podcast Google Play: https://tfg.li/tofugu-gplay
We've been taught that we are inside our body. We've seen the movies right? The ghost comes out looking exactly like the body and it comes from the body so we are IN our bodies right? Right? Maybe not....what if the opposite is true? What if our body is in US? What does that even look like? Join Donnielle Carter this week as she explores the energetic tools that assist you in stopping the patterns and habits with your body that keep you stuck. www.donnielle.com www.donniellecarter.accessconsciousness.com www.facebook.com/RightBodyForYouRadioShow
This Sunday, Bob interview celebrated author William Eggers about newest book ?If We Can Put A Man on The Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government.? Eggers is policy analyst who believes our great nation should be able to accomplish anything after our feat of sending a man to the moon. Eggers breaks down the infrastructure of big government and explains why some initiatives have failed, some succeeded and how working together could be the answer to so many problems.
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