Podcasts about right some

On this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, I welcome Anne Stefanyk on the show to discuss website optimization.  As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne helps create clarity around project needs, and turns client conversations into actionable outcomes. She enjoys helping clients identify their problems, and then empowering the Kanopi team to execute great solutions. Anne is an advocate for open source and co-organizes the Bay Area Drupal Camp. In this episode, we discuss: -Why your website is one of your most important marketing tools -The art of simplicity in branding -How to track the customer lifecycle -The top tools you need to upgrade your website -And so much more! Resources: Anne Stefanyk Twitter Drupal Anne Stefanyk LinkedIn Kanopi Website HotJar Google Pagespeed Accessibility Insights WAVE Web Accessibility Google/Lighthouse Use user research to get insight into audience behavior How to make your site last 5 years (possibly more)   A big thank you to Net Health for sponsoring this episode!  Learn more about Four Ways That Outpatient Therapy Providers Can Increase Patient Engagement in 2020!   For more information on Anne: As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne helps create clarity around project needs and turns client conversations into actionable outcomes. She enjoys helping clients identify their problems, and then empowering the Kanopi team to execute great solutions. Anne fell into the Drupal community in 2007 and admired both the community’s people and the constant quest for knowledge. After holding Director-level positions at large Drupal agencies, she decided she was ready to open Kanopi Studios in 2013. Her background is in business development, marketing, and technology, which allows her to successfully manage all facets of the business as well as provide the technical understanding to allow her to interface with engineers. She has accumulated years of professional Drupal hands-on experience, from basic websites to large Drupal applications with high-performance demands, multiple integrations, complicated migrations, and e-commerce including subscription and multi-tenancy. Anne is an advocate for open source and co-organizes the Bay Area Drupal Camp. When she’s not contributing to the community or running her thoughtful web agency, she enjoys yoga, meditation, treehouses, dharma, cycling, paddle boarding, kayaking, and hanging with her nephew.   Read the full transcript below: Karen Litzy (00:01): Hey Anne, welcome to the podcast. I am so excited and happy to have you on. Anne Stefanyk (00:06): Nice to see you. Thank you so much for having me. Karen Litzy (00:09): So before we get into what we're going to talk about today, which is kind of how to use your website as a marketing tool, and that's putting it lightly, we're going to really dive into that, but I want to talk about kanopi. So for a lot of my listeners, they know that I'm a huge proponent of female entrepreneurs of women in physical therapy. We have a whole conference for it every year. And I love the fact that kanopi is a majority female company. So can you talk about the inception and kind of the journey that you've taken with the company over the years? Anne Stefanyk (00:47): Sure, I'd be happy to. So I founded kanopi kind of off the side of my desk and it actually came from meeting a need that I needed to take care of with my family. My family became quite sick and I had to stop working and as a result it forced my hand to pick up some contract work. And that contract works. Certain cuts soon kind of snowballed into, Oh my goodness, I have actual projects. I probably should hire some people and get out of my personal email to run the business. But it did come from a place where I needed some lifestyle flexibility. So I built a company that is fully distributed as well. And as a result of the business model that we created, it allowed us to really attract and retain really great talent. Outside of major cities. And I have a lot of single moms or a lot of moms and I have some single dads too, but we really are able to, with our business model, attract and retain a lot of top talent. Anne Stefanyk (01:39): And a lot of those are girls. So we're over 50% women and there's only really two men in our leadership, a team of nine. So there's seven girl bosses out of the nine that run the company. And we really have focused on helping people with their websites and making it really clear and simple and easy to understand. We find that there's always too much jargon out there. There's too much complexity and that we all are just craving simplicity. So building the business was twofold, was one to obviously help people with their websites. What was also to really create impactful futures for my staff and give them opportunities to kind of grow and expand in new ways. So I'm really proud that as kanopi has formed our team, I'm part of our retention plan has to really been to take care of our families and put our families first. Anne Stefanyk (02:28): Because if we realize that if you take care of the family, the family takes care of you. And so we've extended a lot of different benefits to be able to support the family journey as part of the business. And we find that as a female entrepreneur, really recognizing and appreciating that we need flexible lifestyles to be able to rear children or take care of elderly parents or we have a lot of demands as females on us. I mean the men do too, don't get me wrong, but as a female I'm creating a space of work where we can create that space for everybody really makes me proud. And happy. Karen Litzy (03:03): Yeah, I mean it's just in going through the website and reading about it, I was just like, Oh gosh, this woman's amazing. Like what a great way to go to work every day. Kind of knowing that you're staying true to what your values are and your mission is and that people really seem to like it. Anne Stefanyk (03:22): Yeah. Yeah. We always say it's not B to B or B to C, it's H to H it's human to human. And what do we need to get really clear to speak to our humans to help them, you know, move forward in their journey, whatever that looks like for them. Karen Litzy (03:34): Right. And, so now let's talk about that journey and it's kind of starts with the website. So let's talk about how you can make your website an effective marketing tool. Because not everyone, especially when you're first starting out, you don't have a lot of money to throw around to advertising and things like that. But we all have a website or maybe we all should have a website and have some sort of web presence. So how can we make that work for us? Anne Stefanyk (04:00): Yeah, definitely. You need a website. It's like a non negotiable factor these days and it really doesn't matter. The kind of website you have, especially when you're just getting started. There's lots of great tools out there from Wix, Squarespace, even WordPress that comes with templates or pre-baked themes. And I think the most important part is to really connect with your user and figure out who your user is and what kind of website needs to support their journey. But yeah, definitely you have to have a website and you actually have to have a good website. Having a bad website is the non, like, it's really bad because it will detract people so quickly and they'll never come back. So you pretty much have that first impression. And then if you don't make it, they won't come back. I think there's a well known stamp that if your site doesn't load within four seconds or three seconds they'll leave. And if it doesn't load within four seconds, they will never come back to that URL. Karen Litzy (04:56): Wow. All right. That's a great stat. I'm going to be, I'm going to go onto my computer, onto my website and start my timer, you know, so there's some really cool tools. Anne Stefanyk (05:06): We can include them in the show notes, but the Google has a page speed test where you can actually put your website URL and see how fast it is and give recommendations on what to fix. Karen Litzy (05:15): Oh perfect. Yeah, and we'll put all those links in the website and we'll get to that in a little bit about those different kinds of tools. But let's talk about, you said, you know, you're human to human business. We have to know who are we putting our website out there for. So how do we do that? Anne Stefanyk (05:34): Yeah, that's a great question. So when you're first starting off, you probably all like if you're just starting your business, you're just trying to figure out who you serve, but you may have special things that you'd like to, you know, that you're passionate about or you specialize in. Like for example, maybe you really specialize in women's health or sports medicine or you know, one of those things. And just to kind of get clear on who is your best customer. If you've been in business for a couple of years, you probably have a pretty good idea who your ideal customer is and how they engage with you. So first off, it's really thinking about who your target audience is and what are their needs. So when we're thinking about a website and thinking about that user journey, you often identify them as certain people. So you may have like, Mmm you know, kind of creating different avatars or different personas so you can really personify these people and help understand their journey. Anne Stefanyk (06:27): And from there you kind of understand that if someone's coming to you for physical therapy, there's going to be different mind States that they come into you with. So when you first have your website, you're going to want to, of course, a lot of people just put up who they are. Like, you know, this is my practice, this is who I am. This is my credit, my accreditation, and my certifications. And maybe maybe here's some testimonials. And then we run and we go off to the races. And that's great to get you out the door. Once you started your business, you're going to recognize that you're people, when they call you, they're going to have a million questions and there's ways to answer those questions using your website. And as a solo entrepreneur, like I ran my business by myself for three years, which means I was everything and I wore all the hats. Anne Stefanyk (07:09): I was the project manager, I was the designer, I was all the things that was the marketer, was the, I know that feeling well. So it took me like three years to operationalize. And I think the first thing I did as a female entrepreneur, I hired an assistant. I would highly recommend that as being one of your first hires as an entrepreneur. And that's just someone who can do all the little itty bitty details and then move on to whatever that looks like for you. But when you're building your website, the next level you really need to take is it serving my humans? Is it serving my audience? So are they able to get the information they need? And I think this strange time that we're in, we're all, this is an opportunity for us to look at our own website and our own stuff and say, is this the best representation possible? Anne Stefanyk (07:52): Because no longer are they just picking up the phone and calling you because your practice is probably closed. You're at home right now, your phones, maybe you if you have them redirected, but either way they're going to your website first. So it's like having the right information there at the right time for the right person. And that really comes to the user journey and that's where you know, if someone is just broken their ankle and they're now told by their doctor, you have to go into physical therapy, that's their first stage as they now are going to Google and saying, you know, PT for San Francisco and interestingly enough as Google wants to keep you there, so here you are. You user is Googling for you or Googling for physical therapy wherever, San Francisco, San Jose, wherever, and up comes the Google listings. If you can get past that point, then they go into your website and they're going to click open a bunch of them. Anne Stefanyk (08:43): That's what we call, you know, your awareness phase. They're becoming aware of you. There's certain things that a user wants to see in that phase. So understanding of someone's looking for you, they're going to, Oh yeah, they specialize in ankles. And I really think you know, Oh, that's person's for me. Versus now they're in the consideration stage and now they've chose likely, but Sally over here and James and Jimmy and we're figuring out which PT to go to, then that's a different level of content and what are they looking at to compare and contrast. And then when they've actually decided to work with you, then there's another layer of content you have to consider. So, Oh, I've decided to work where they're located. How do I get there? Was there anything I need to prepare their forms I need to fill out in advance? Anne Stefanyk (09:27): And then you even have the persona of the user once they've actually gone through all your services as I imagine. And therapy. A lot of you folks are getting referral and word of mouth. Let's nurture that. Let's use the website to nurture the word of mouth and referral work. Let's give your patients a place to go really easily to provide feedback, which will then change, you know, getting those Google reviews up leads to a higher ranking on that Google page. So if you understand where they began and where they pop out at the end, kind of map it all together. You'll start to see your gaps.   Karen Litzy: And is it possible to go through sort of a quick example of what that might look like? So if someone's there on Google, they hit Google, they click on your website, you just said if it doesn't load within a couple of seconds, they're gone. Anne Stefanyk (10:14): Right? So that's a good awareness phase situation, right? What else? Someone's there, they're just click, click, click trying to find someone. What is it that they're looking for in that awareness stage? Like what are they, what is going to be like, Ooh, I like this, this person. I'm moving them from the awareness bucket to the consideration bucket. Yeah, yeah. So they need to see themselves in the way that their problem gets solved. So when they look at the website, they can say, Oh yeah, that person had the same problem and they got help. And then, Oh, look at their results. Oh look, there's a picture of them, you know, back on their skateboard six months later as part of this patient follow-up log. Oh, we don't, you know. So that's the kind of stuff is that when users really want to just be able to see themselves, they crave simplicity. Anne Stefanyk (11:01): And so often I think that if we're too close to it, we don't actually see how complex our stuff is. And sometimes when we're really smart and we have degrees in specialized things, we use vocabulary that our users are not even aware of yet. So it's really when you're talking to getting them from that awareness into considering you, it's about using really basic common language. It's about guiding them through a bit of a story. People love to read stories. So showing them like, Oh, you know, I was really showing another patient and showing the patient journey that all, I considered multiple companies locally, but I ultimately went with Sally as a PT because this, and just showing those things helps the user kind of see the whole journey so they can say, okay, okay, if you've never broken your ankle before, have no idea what to expect. You've never gone to physical therapy, you have no idea what to expect. And just the anticipation, if you can show them what snacks they feel a sense of relief that they'll be taken care of. Karen Litzy (12:04): Yeah. So what I'm hearing is that your testimonial page on your website's pretty important, is that something that should be front and center on the homepage? Anne Stefanyk (12:16): Well, that's an interesting thing. I think the main thing you want to use that front and center is being really clear about what you do. Right? Some people like to put these big sentences up there, but getting to know your user and the problem they have and this, you know, getting to how you're going to solve the problem is the most important part of that, of that real estate upfront. I will warn everybody that please don't use carousels. They're a big fad and they're just a fad. They're from a usability standpoint. And what happens is the end user thinks that whatever you put in your carousel is what you do. So if you're promoting an event in your carousel, they'll think that you're just doing the events. Anne Stefanyk (13:01): They won't even know that you're a physical therapist. Really clear upfront about what you do. You know, like I help people with, you know, however it goes, and then provide supporting content. So a testimonial is wonderful if it can also be like imbedded within a bigger story. So it tells the full story. I like that video. I mean everybody has an iPhone. So, or at least access to video really easily. You could do a quick little video testimonial with one of your clients over zoom for two minutes to say, Hey, you're one of my favorite PT clients and can you get on a quick video with me and just do a video testimonial. That's great way to leverage video content on your website to help the user see themselves as what the solution's going to be. Karen Litzy (13:47): Yeah. Great, great, awesome. And then one stipulation I would say on that is talk to your lawyer because you'll need them to sign a release for HIPAA purposes, right? To make sure that they know exactly where this video is going to be. You have to be very clear on that. Okay, great. So we're out of the awareness phase, so we're in consideration. So let's say it's between me and one other PT in New York city. What should I be looking at on my website to get that person from consideration to yes. Anne Stefanyk (14:20): So one of the greatest ways to do stuff is actually a very tried and it's email marketing or text-based marketing. So if you can capture an email during that awareness phase, even if it's just like you know, Mmm. Interested in getting some tips and tricks on how to rejuvenate your bone health during, you know, it doesn't have to be like sign up for a newsletter or sign up for this. It could be just a very simple, if you know your user is coming there specifically for a thing and you can provide some type of value added content, then there might be some small way to get a snippet of data so that you can continue the conversation. Cause most people are just bombarded with information and overwhelmed. So if there's any way to connect with them so you can feed them information. But another great way to kind of pull them into that consideration content is once you've got their eyeballs hooked and you're in, there is again to kind of figure out what are the common things, questions they need to have, they have answers they need answers to. Anne Stefanyk (15:22): And this might be from your experience, just answering phone calls when people are starting to talk to you. But it's like the questions like you know, maybe how long does it take for me to heal, you know, will I have different types of medicine I'm going to have to take? How much homework will there be? Do I need any special equipment? That's kind of, you know, just showing that you're the expert in the field and you have the answers to questions they didn't even know they had to ask. That kind of aha moment makes them feel really trusted. They trust you because they go, Oh I didn't even think about asking that question. Oh my goodness, I'm so glad they thought about that. I feel so taken care of. And that's where I think a lot of websites drop the ball is they straight up say like this is what we do, here's some testimonials. And they don't put all that soft content and that builds the trust. Can be a little blog, a little FAQ section and this is all like non technical stuff. You don't need a developer to do any of this. It's mostly just your writing time. Karen Litzy (16:18): Yeah, no and it's making me go through my head of my FAQ, so I'm like, Hmm, maybe I need to revisit. That's the one page I just sort of did a revamp of my website. We were talking about this before we went on, but I actually did not go to my FAQ page cause I thought to myself, Oh, it's probably good. It's probably not. I need to go back and do a little revamp on that too, just to think about some of the questions that I've been getting from patients recently and how does this work and things like that. Especially now with COVID. You know, like what about tele-health? What about this or about that? Anne Stefanyk (16:51): Yeah. Google loves when you update your content. Google loves it. Google loves it so much. It is one of the biggest disservices you can do is build your website and leave it. That's just not healthy. People think you have to rebuild your website every two to three years. That's who we are. That's bananas. You have to do it. If you just take care of your website and you nurture it and you love it and you make it, you make it work and you continually work on it and maybe that's just an hour a week, maybe it's an hour every month, whatever it is. Just a little bit of attention really goes a long way and it is something that we believe a website should last for at least 10 years, but that means you got to take care of it, right. A lot of clients come to me and say, Oh well, you know we're going to have to rebuild this in three years, and I'm like, no, you shouldn't. Anne Stefanyk (17:31): It should be totally fine. It's just like if you get a house right, if you don't do anything with your house a hundred years later, it's probably demolished. Like you're going to tear it down versus you've got to do the roof and you've got to replace the carpets and you got to do the perimeter drain. Right. It's kind of the website stuff too. I mean, Google will throw you curve balls if you're spending a lot time on social. Unless you're getting direct business from social media, don't worry about it so much. Google has changed their algorithms, which means that social doesn't count for as much as it did. Oh, so if you're spending two or three hours a week scheduling social, unless you're directly getting benefit, like from direct users, finding one social tone that way down and spend more time writing blogs, spending more time getting you know content on your website is, that's what matters from a Google standpoint. Karen Litzy (18:16): Good to know. Gosh, this is great. So all right, the person has now moved from consideration. They said, yes, I'm going to go and see Karen. This is what I've decided. Awesome. So now how can I make their patient journey a little bit easier?   Anne Stefanyk: So we started at Google, they got from awareness to consideration. They said yes. Now what? Yeah, now what? So it's continuing the conversation and creating kind of being ahead of them. So text messages, 99% of text messages are open and read. Okay. Yeah, I think it's like 13 to 20% of emails are open read. So it would be skillful for you to gather a phone number so then you can text them, alerts, reminders, et cetera. That's a great way. There's a wonderful book called how to, what is it? Never lose a customer again. And it's beautiful. It's a beautiful book. Anne Stefanyk (19:11): It applies to any business. And it really talks about like how when you're engaging with a new client, the first two stages of that are the are the sales and presales. But then you have six steps. Once a person becomes your clients on how to nurture and engage and support that client journey. And that might just be simply as like if they're deciding to work with you and they book their first appointments, there's a lot of cool video. You could just do a little video recording and say, you know, thank you so much for booking an appoint with me. I'm so excited. I really honor the personal relationship that we have together and I want to build trust. So this is a just, and then giving them like a forum to then ask the question to you. So just building that relationship. Cause even though your clients, I mean if they're coming for PT, they might just be a onetime client. Anne Stefanyk (19:57): But again, they also might have lots of friends and family and that works. So when their friends and family and network happened to have that, how do you also kind of leverage the website that way? But a lot of it is just clarity. And you'll notice that big way to find out what's missing is interview your last few clients that have signed up, find out what they found was easy, what was difficult, what they wish they had more information. And if they're a recent enough client, they'll still remember that experience and us humans love to help. It's in their nature, right? So you should never feel worried about asking anybody for advice or insights on this. You know, there's even a little tool that you can put on your websites. It's a tool, there's a free version called Hotjar, hot and hot jar. Anne Stefanyk (20:47): And it's pretty easy to install. We actually have a blog post on how to install it too. It's really, we'll put that blog posts, but what it allows you to do is it allows you to see where people are clicking and whether they're not clicking on your website. So you can actually analyze, you know it's all anonymous, right? It's all anonymously tracked, but you can do screencast and you can do with these color heatmaps, you can kind of see where people are going. You can track this and it's free, right? Three you can do up to three pages for free. So I feel like the guys looking at stuff like that, you kind of get the data that you need to figure out where your gaps are because what you don't know is what you don't know, right? So I first recommend like getting clear on who your user is, you know, if you specifically take care of a certain set, figuring out where their journey is, what kind of content you'd need for each of those and what the gaps are. And then filled out a content calendar to fill the gaps. Karen Litzy (21:42): Got it. And a content calendar could be like a once a month blog post. It doesn't have to be every day. And I even think that can overwhelm you're patients or potential patients, right? Cause we're just inundated. There's so much noise, but if you have like a really great blog that comes out once a month and gets a lot of feedback on it, then people will look forward to that. Anne Stefanyk (22:11): Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, humans want to get clarity, they want to receive value. And right now we live in an intention economy where everything is pinging at them. So realistically, the only way to break through the noise is just to be really clear and provide what they need. Simple. It's just simple. It's actually, you just simplify it, remove the jargon, you know, make it easy. And I mean a blog post, it could be as short as 300 words. You don't need to write a massive thing. You can even do a little video blog. Yeah. You don't like writing, you can just do a little video blog and embedded YouTube video and boom, you're done. Right? Karen Litzy (22:46): Yeah. Yeah. I love this because everything that you're saying doesn't take up a lot of time. Cause like we said before, when you're first starting out as a new entrepreneur, you feel like you've been pulled in a million different directions. But if you can say, I'm going to take one hour, like you said, one hour a month to do a website check-in, right? One hour a month to get a blog post together or shoot a quick video. Like you said, we've all got phones embedded in every device we own these days. So it doesn't take a lot. And I love all those suggestions. Okay. So now I'm in the nurturing phase and what we've done is, because I didn't use jargon, I was simple, clear to the point, filled in the gaps for them. Now those patients that who have come to see me are referring their friends to me and we're starting it all over again. So it's sort of this never ending positive cycle. Anne Stefanyk (23:41): Exactly, exactly. And that's what we really frame. We call it continuous improvement, which is the methodology of that. You always need to be taking care of it, nurturing it, loving it. Because if you just let it sit, it will do you no good. Right. And that's where you know, when you're that little bit of momentum and it's about pacing yourself and choosing one goal at a time. Like if you're feeling like, Oh my gosh, where am I going to start? What am I going to do? You know, just say, okay, I just want my site to go faster. Just pick one goal. You run it through the speed test, it's scoring forward of a hundred you're like, Oh, I need to make my site faster. So then you look at that and you say, okay, I've learned, you know, big images create large page speed load. So it'll tell, you can go through and look at your images and say, Oh, I need to resize this image. Or maybe I need, if I'm using WordPress, put a plugin that automatically resizes all my images. You know, a lot of it is content driven that you can kind of make your cycle faster with an accessibility. Accessibility is so dear and near to my heart. Karen Litzy (24:44): When you say accessibility for a website, what exactly does that mean? Anne Stefanyk (24:48): I mean, yes. So that means that it is technically available for people of all types of ranges of ability from someone who is visually impaired to someone who is physically impaired, temporarily or permanently disabled. So if you think about someone who's got a broken arm and maybe it's her dominant arm. I'm doing everything with my left. Try using a screen reader on your own website and you will be shocked that if you can't type you know with your hands and you're going to dictate to it, you'll be a, is how your computer does not actually understand your words. So it's about making your website really technically accessible with consideration. Four, font size, color contrast. Yeah. Images need to have what we call alt tags, which is just a description. So if your image is like one, two, three, four, five dot JPEG, you would actually want to rename it as lady sitting in a chair reading in a book dot JPEG because that's what a screen reader reads. Oh. So it's about the technical stuff, so that if somebody needs to use a screen reader or if somebody can't use their hands from physical, they can't type, they're reading, they're listening to the website. It's about structural, putting it together correctly so the tools can output. Karen Litzy (26:12): Mmm. Wow. I never even thought of that. Oh my gosh, this is blowing my mind. Anyway, so there's tools out there to look, let's talk about if you want to just maybe give a name to some of those tools. So how about to check your websites? Anne Stefanyk (26:28): Yeah, so it's Google page speed and it's just a website that you can go in and put your URL. There's another plugin called lighthouse, and lighthouse is a plugin that you can use through Chrome. And then you just on that and it'll output a report for you. And some of it's a little nerdy, right? And some of it's, you know, some of it's very clear. I love it. They, they'll put some jargon, let's just say that they don't quite understand that not everybody understands laptop, but if you're on a tool like Shopify or Squarespace or Wix, which a lot of like first time entrepreneurs, that's a great place to start. It's really affordable. They take care of a lot of those things built in. So that's the benefit of kind of standing on the shoulders of giants when it comes to those. But lighthouse is a good tool because it checks accessibility, performance, SEO and your coding best practices. Karen Litzy (27:28): Oh wow. Okay. So that's a good tool. Cool, any other tools that we should know about that you can think of off the top of your head? If not, we can always put more in the show notes if people want to check them out. But if you have another one that you wanted to throw out there, I don't want to cut you off, if you've got more. Anne Stefanyk (27:45): Oh no worries. There's lots of different checkers and I think the big thing error is just to be able to understand the results. So I'm always a big fan of making technology really accessible. So if you do need help with that, you know, feel free to reach out and I can get more help. But generally we look at search engine optimization, which is are you being found in Google? And there's some tools like SEO. Moz is one. And then we look at accessibility, is it accessible to all people and then we look at performance, can it go fast, fast, and then we look at code quality, right? Like you want to make sure you're doing your security updates cause it's a heck of a lot cheaper to do your security updates than unpack yourself if there is. Karen Litzy (28:27): Oh gosh. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, like you said, on some of those websites, that security part might be in like already embedded in that or is that, do you recommend doing an external security look at your website as well? Anne Stefanyk (28:44): Exactly. Most of the time when you're using a known platform like Shopify or if you're using WordPress or Drupal, then what you want to do is you want to work with a reliable hosting provider so they will help you provide your security updates. It's just like you would always want to lock your car when you would go out in the city. It's just like some do your security updates. So, but yeah, that's the benefit of being on some of these larger platforms is they have some of that stuff baked in. You pay a monthly fee but you don't have to worry about it. Karen Litzy (29:14): Right. Perfect. Perfect. And gosh, this was so much good information. Let's talk a little bit about, since we are still in the midst of this COVID pandemic and crisis and what should we be doing with our websites now specifically to sort of provide that clarity and calmness that maybe we want to project while people are still a little, I mean, I watch the news people are on edge here. Anne Stefanyk (29:47): Yeah. I think everybody's a little on edge, especially as things are starting to open. But nervous about it. All right. So I think the main thing that you can do is provide clear pathways. So if you haven't already put an alert on your website or something, right on your homepage, that speaks to how you're handling COVID that would be really skillful in, that could just be if you, you know, Mmm. Some people have an alert bar, they can put up, some people use a blog post and they feature it as their blog posts. Some people use a little block on their home page, but just something that helps them understand that what that is, and I'm sure most of you have already responded to that cause you had to write, it was like the first two weeks, all of our clients were like, we got to put something on our website. Anne Stefanyk (30:26): Right. And so, from there is I think being very mindful about how overwhelmed your peoples are and not trying to flood them with like tips and tricks on how to stay calm or how to parent or how to, you know, like that's where everybody's kind of like on overwhelm of all the information. So for right now, I would say that it's a wonderful time to put an alert up so people visit your site. If you've switched to telehealth and telemedicine, it'd be a great time to actually clarify how to do that. So if they're like, okay, I'm going to sign up for this and I want to work with you. Mmm. But how does it work? Are we gonna do it through zoom? Is it through Skype? Is it through FaceTime? Is my data secure? You know, like you said, updating all your FAQ is like, we're in this weird space where we really have almost like no excuse to not come out of this better. Anne Stefanyk (31:16): You know, as an entrepreneur we have this like lurking sense of like, okay, I gotta make sure I'm doing something. And the web is a great place to start because it is your first impression. And to kind of go through your content, and maybe it is if you don't have a blog set up is setting up a blog and just putting one up there or writing two or three and not publishing it until you have two or three. But it is kind of figuring out what is your user need and how do you make it really easy for them to digest. Karen Litzy (31:41): Perfect. And now before we kind of wrap things up, I'll just ask you is there anything that we missed? Anything that you want to make sure that the listeners walk away with from this conversation? Anne Stefanyk (31:56): I think the big thing is that this can all get really confusing and overwhelming very quickly. And all you need to just think about is your humans that you're servicing and like how can I make their journey easier? And even if it's like if nothing else, you're like, Hey, I'm going to get a text messaging program set up because I'm going to be able to actually communicate with them a lot faster and a lot easier. Or, Hey, I'm just going to focus on getting more five stars reviews on my Google profiles, so I show up. I'm just going to make that the focus. So I think the big thing is just a one thing at a time, and because we're in a pandemic, set your bar really low and celebrate when you barely hit it because we're all working on overwhelm and overdrive and we're all exhausted and our adrenals are depleted. Even in overdrive syndrome for like 11 weeks or something. Now I know it's kind of like, Oh my goodness, my websites maybe a hot mess. I'm going to get one thing and I'm going to give myself a lot of wiggle room to make sure that I can take care of the pressing needs and just being really like patient because it isn't a journey where you're going to have your website and your entire business. Karen Litzy (33:00): Yeah. We never got to turn off your website. Right. I hope not. Oh, you never will. Right. Telemedicine is going to give you a new kind of way to practice too. It's revolutionizing the way we treat patients. A hundred percent yeah, absolutely. I personally have have been having great success and results with telehealth. And so I know that this is something that will be part of my practice going forward, even as restrictions are lowered. I mean here in New York, I mean you're in San Francisco, like we're both in areas that are on pretty high alert still. But this is something that's definitely gonna be part of my practice. So if there is a silver lining to come out of this really horrible time, I think that is one of them. From a healthcare standpoint, I think it's been a game changer because you're still able to help as you put it, help your humans, you know, help those people so that they're not spinning out on their own. So I love it. Now final question and I ask everyone this, knowing where you are in your life and in your career, what advice would you give yourself as a new graduate right out of college? So it's before, even before you started. Anne Stefanyk (34:21): Yes, yes. Honor my downtime. I think especially as a girl boss, that's always like, I've been an entrepreneur pretty much since I was in high school. I never took weekends and evenings for myself until I became like a little older. I would've definitely done more evenings and weekends because the recharge factor is just amazing for the brain. When you actually let it rest, it figures out all the problems on its own, get out of your own way and it'll like just, you know, even this COVID stuff. I find it so interesting that you know, as a boss you feel like you want to do so much and you want to get it done and you want to help your staff and you've got to figure out how to be there for them and then it's like, wait, you gotta put on your own mask before you put it on the others. Anne Stefanyk (35:04): And I feel like healthcare professionals, it's like so important for you to honor that little bit of downtime that you have now. Yeah, I mean, if I knew that back then, I'd probably be way stronger way would have honored myself. And as a woman, self care seems, we put it like second to our business and our families and second, third, fourth, fifth. So it's like, you know, advice to pass out. Let's take care of you. Yeah. It will be great. You will do wonderful things. Take care of you. You'll feel great. You know, I broke my ankle because I wasn't taking care of myself. Yeah. Karen Litzy (35:36): Oh wow. What advice. Yeah. Honor the downtime. I think that's great. And I think it's something that a lot of people just don't do. They think that in that downtime you should be doing something else. So you're failing. Anne Stefanyk (35:48): Yeah. And it's just so silly. It's just this weird, you know mental game that we have to play with ourselves. I listened to one of your recent podcasts and I just loved the girl that was on there said like, you know, successes is 20% skill, 80% of mind game. And I could not agree with that. You know, having a company full of women, imposter syndrome is the number one thing that I help coach my females with. It's like, no, you know exactly what you're doing because nobody knows what they're doing. We all learn, right? There's no textbook for a lot of this stuff. Like we went to school, there was a textbook, there was structure. We got out of school and now we're like go learn. It's like okay, okay so I find the entrepreneurial journey so cool. And that means like kind of like also finding out other tribes like where can we lean into and that's why I love you have this podcast cause it really focuses on like building a tribe of entrepreneurs that are focusing on taking it to the next level. Like how can we be empowering them to do their best, be their best selves. Karen Litzy (36:47): Exactly. I'm going to just use that as a tagline from now on for the buck. Perfect marketing tagline. Well and thank you so much. Where can people find more about you and more about kanopi. Anne Stefanyk (37:00): So you can go to kanopi or you can simply just look for me just go to kanopi on the Googles and you'll find me. But if you want to reach out via LinkedIn or anywhere, I'm always just a big fan of helping people make technology really clear and easy to understand. So find me on LinkedIn or on stuff and we can chat more there. Karen Litzy (37:23): Awesome. Well thank you so much. And to everyone listening, we'll have all of the links that we spoke about today and I know there were a lot, but they're all going to be in the show notes at podcasts.healthywealthysmart.com under this episode. So Anne, you have given so much great information. I can't thank you enough. Anne Stefanyk (37:39): Well thank you so much for it. I'm really grateful for the work that you're doing. I think it's fantastic. Karen Litzy (37:45): Thank you. And everyone else. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great couple of days and stay healthy, wealthy, and smart.     Thanks for listening and subscribing to the podcast! Make sure to connect with me on twitter, instagram  and facebook to stay updated on all of the latest!  Show your support for the show by leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!

Welcome!   For being locked down do to this Pandemic there is certainly a lot of technology in the news this week.  So lets get into it.  I will give you my take on a recent federal court ruling about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and website terms of use policies. We will discuss the many risks that medical device manufacturers are introducing into hospitals, clinics, and patients. We have a couple of stories about Apple, first off they are ditching INTEL and designing their processors and why the fake news media is so eager to announce problems with their architecture even when it does not exist and much more. So sit back and listen in.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here another week with the Corona virus, I guess. Well, the latest coronavirus, right? This one is it called?  Corona, SARS two. Cause it's another version of the SARS virus. Hey Craig Peterson,  here on WGAN heard every Saturday right now from one till 3:00 PM and we talked about the latest in technology. [00:00:30] The things you need to know, things you can do. We kind of have a little bit of fun too. Sometimes we'll get into the real stuff that's serious and sometimes we just talk about some of the cool things and. Well, some things that I like to with the family and all of that sort of thing. And today, of course, is not an exception. [00:00:50] We've got, of course, these SBA loans, and you might've heard me bellyache about these because, of course, they're just not working. Uh, you know, I have a very small company and at the very least, I was supposed to get this little loan that every business that applied was supposed to get, and he supposed to get it within 72 hours.  Blah, blah, blah. From the SBA and to date I've gotten absolutely nothing and it's been weeks. And to top it off, I got an email from them a couple of weeks ago that was really ambiguous and saying that maybe I needed to provide some more information. We called them up to try and find out what's up. [00:01:32] Things just don't work there either. It just gets totally, totally messed up. So  for me  and some businesses obviously, you know, like big ones have gotten millions of dollars, including schools, universities, et cetera. And the little guys that really need the money, we just aren't getting anything. [00:01:55] Welcome to the club if you're one of them. If you're not, I'd love to hear from you. How did you make it work as a small business? Yeah, you can just email me@craigpeterson.com I would absolutely love to know. And then to top it all off, what happens this week? Of course, the SBAs loan system crashes as businesses are trying to apply for this stuff. [00:02:19] Maybe about another, what was it, 310 billion in emergency funds? It was was supposedly released on Monday or made available on Monday, and the portal course crashed and kept crashing all day long. The bankers who are trying to get onto the system to apply and behalf of the desperate clients couldn't get anywhere. [00:02:40] Very frustrating to them. Of course, no integration between the banking systems and the SBA. No integration, easy way for small businesses or even these big businesses that are pretending they're small businesses. No way for them to be able to get the information out there. And many of them are venting online on social media against the SBA, the small business administration that's running the program. [00:03:06] Now I've got to give them a bit of a break because I heard a statistic this week too, that the SBA has processed the more of these loan applications in the last, what is it, a month than they have in the last 15 years, which is absolutely incredible. [00:03:26] American bankers association is on Twitter saying they're deeply frustrated at their ability to access the SBA system. America's banks can help struggling businesses, you know? When did I say at the beginning of all of this. Based on the amount of money they were talking about and assuming that there were a hundred million businesses. I mean, families, excuse me, a hundred million families in the United States. Somebody just do a little quick math here. 100, one, two, three, one, two, three that's a hundred million. Then times 60, one, two, three $60,000 dollars per family, lets see three, three, one, two, three, $6 trillion, which was the estimated cost of the actual first bailout. [00:04:14] You know, you heard 2 trillion and 3 trillion. The actual bottom line was actually 6 trillion. So what we're really, what we're really talking about here is the ability. For the federal government to have given every family in the country $60,000 can you imagine that? What would that do to the economy? [00:04:37] Giving every family in the country $60,000 dollars. Now remember too, that you are on the hook as a family for $60,000 that were given to all kinds of businesses that probably didn't need the money in the first place. And businesses that were, you know, a friend of this Congress critter, that Congress critter. You saw what Nancy Pelosi snuck into the bills. [00:05:03] The Republicans kept saying, they're trying to keep this clean. Let's just get this to small businesses. And of course, the way they set it up, the way they did it just didn't work either.  Man is this is just me. Absolutely. Is it just me? Um. Yeah, the program first went in April 3rd it, and it's supposed to help the neediest businesses, these really small businesses, hair salons, coffee shops, dry cleaners, and businesses like mine. [00:05:31] And of course, it just didn't happen. Its Beyond frustration here for me and for pretty much everybody else. So these truly tiny businesses like mine are gone. They really, most of them are gone. I've seen estimates this week saying that it was probably in the order of 25% of them will never be back. And I was talking with one of my daughters this week and a restaurant in our neighborhood that has been here for almost ever. [00:06:06] A very old business. Uh, that restaurant, the building is haunted. It has been around for a hundred plus years, maybe 200 years. I'm not sure. Very, very old buildings. It's been a Tavern, et cetera, over the years. And he said, there's no way he's reopening. He just can't reopen. You know, he's been struggling for years. [00:06:28] It's a tough business to be in any ways, in the restaurant business, and I've seen stats on restaurants saying that we could see a 50% decrease in the number of restaurants. Number of restaurants, just an entirely here, 50% I don't know what the numbers are going to be. Um, Dallas. Here I, there's an article from, uh, the Dallas eater saying that Dallas restaurants opened in our May 1st is a bad idea. [00:07:00] Market watch has a thing about this as well. My state is reopening businesses, including restaurants and movie theaters. Am I selfish if I go?Many U S restaurants say PPP loans don't meet their needs. Yeah, no kidding. Right? Even if you get the money. You're supposed to spend three quarters of it on payroll and you've already laid off your people, how are you going to get them back? [00:07:23] Because they're making more money. As laid off people on unemployment insurance, and they would be, if you hired them back. So they're not going to reopen, and then you got to consider, well, okay, payroll was this much, but they were also getting tips which subsidized it because restaurant workers, many of them of course, making just to two or three bucks an hour. [00:07:46] This is a disaster. It is an absolute disaster. I don't know how many people are going to end up dead because of the consequences of what we did to try and slow down the Corona virus. And I'm glad we're able to slow it down. I don't know. Ultimately if flattening the curve is going to help, because you remember the whole idea behind flattening the curve was we did not want to overwhelm our medical system. [00:08:17] We didn't want the hospitals to be overwhelmed. Because we wanted the hospitals to be able to treat people that had this Corona virus. And they certainly were able to, we're seeing hospitals now, especially small rural hospitals closing down. Some of them may never open their doors again and they're not closing down because they were too busy. [00:08:37] They're closing down because it didn't have enough income because they weren't doing elective surgery. A their beds weren't even close to being full with Covid patients. Some of them only had a couple of Covid patients in them. So what, what , you know, um, and we've already had people who have committed suicide. [00:08:56] I'm aware of one, personally because of losing their job and now they had to pay the mortgage. They had to pay all of their other bills. They didn't have the money. The government was dragging their feet on it. And then the money that the government's been spending that did not end up in our hands, that money now  is not only money we have to pay back, but it's going to drive up inflation. And what's that going to mean? [00:09:21] Well, It could mean, well, the antidote for inflation from a typical economic standpoint is well you raise interest rates. Do you remember raised interest rates in the eighties early eighties? I had friends who lost homes because the only loan they could get on their home was a a variable interest rate loan. And so they had one of these variable interest rate loans and the interest rate got up into the twenties. I think I remember it being like 22-23% there it there in the early eighties. And so their monthly payments. Just went up. Doubled, tripled, quadrupled some people, and they couldn't afford to keep their home, so they lost their down payments on the houses. [00:10:05] And people are complaining right now that they cannot get a loan on their home because they don't have enough of a down payment. So the banks are getting free money. From us., Ultimately, right? Or from the treasury. So the banks are getting free money and some of these banks now we're looking for 20% down, again, which is what I had to do years ago when I bought my home. [00:10:27] I never only ever bought one home. So man, things are going to be a mess. They are going to be a very, very big mess. Um. We'll see.  In the Financial times, many U S restaurant's highly likely to return the small business aid. I was kind of interested in article denied by insurance companies. LA restaurants are waging a high stakes battle in court now because they had coverage. [00:10:56] It was supposed to cover this stuff and did it? No. Okay. Um. The many privately owned restaurants are saying the Paycheck protection program fails to meet their needs. Oh my goodness gracious. Um. This is, it's very ill suited for their industry from my industry, for most industries. [00:11:19] Basically, if you're a big enough business that you have a full time HR department, an accounting department, you probably could get the paycheck protection program. If you're a small business like me. And things are probably not so good for you, so, huh, man. Anyway, stick around. We'll get into the tech. I promise you're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN stick around because we'll be right back. [00:11:55] It kind of sounds like the national restaurant association show here with Craig Peterson, on WGAN. And I was thinking about my, uh, my favorite local restaurant. I love Mexican food. I have ever since I lived in Californ-i-a all of those years ago, out on the left coast. My wife, in fact, the native born Californian, and it, uh, it, I'm, I'm looking at them saying, how are they surviving. [00:12:24] Cause we would go over there once a week at least, you know, taco Tuesday type thing and enjoy ourselves. Have a nice little family outing. I haven't spent a dime there in six, eight weeks. I don't know how long it's been. It's been a very, very long time, so I just don't know. Anyways, let's get in. Let's get into the, um. [00:12:45] The stories for today, and we're going to talk about something that I think is really, really important. Uh, and of course, what else should we talk about? Right? But, uh, we've got, yeah, that was a drum roll. We've got an interesting problem right now. There is a law on the books right now that are inplace and has been in place for about 30 years, and it has to do with the definition of hacking. What is hacking, and it made sense about 30 years ago. [00:13:22] Nowadays, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Because we've got these terms on websites. So for instance. We'd talked about two months ago about a company that was scraping all of the information they could find about us, including our, our pictures, our video, our voices. But primarily they were after our pictures and from every site they could get their hands on from any site whether or not they were violating the site's terms of service. And some of these sites have sued them, et cetera. They've been hacked, and I guess that's what happens when you become a big target. But where should it be going? What should we be doing? We've got a problem right now, and there's a lawsuit that's been initiated by a group of academics and journalists, and of course the ACLU is behind it. [00:14:18] And you know, most of the time I look at what the ACLU is doing and wonder what it is they're up to. In this case, I think they might actually be doing something right. Isn't that nice for a change. They're arguing. That having these investigations against racial discrimination in online job markets by creating fake accounts for fake employers and job seekers. [00:14:49] Is that something that should be done? Right? Leading job sites out there in terms of service that prohibits that, right? So users of these sites are prohibited from supplying fake information, and the researchers are worried that the research could expose them to criminal liability. Because they're posting these things on the site and then they're trying to analyze all things being equal. [00:15:14] Was this a case of racial discrimination? So in 2016, they sued the federal government, and they're asking for whether a decision based on what they're saying is the First Amendment that you could in fact do almost anything online and get away with it. Now, I, for instance, you know, I have been using fake information on websites for a very long time, so when I go to authenticate myself, you know, they'll ask, what street were you born on? What's your mother's maiden name? I always make stuff up for that and I record it. So that later on I can always dig it up because you know someone can go online, they can become your bestest to Facebook friend. They can look at LinkedIn, find out about you and your history. And the younger kids these days have all of the information online and will for their entire lives. [00:16:17] So I have always used different email addresses, different versions of my email address, completely different names made up everything. Now obviously. When it comes to an official thing, like a bank account or government stuff, I'm not lying about anything except for my authenticity to be able to log into the site. [00:16:42] So I'll give my correct social security number, et cetera, et cetera, when it is required, because obviously would be a violation of a law, but they're saying. That under this federal law that's out there, the computer fraud and abuse act, it's been around for 30 years. Would it be illegal to create these accounts where we're just trying to figure out, are these people discriminating. So there is a federal judge by the name of John Bates who ruled on Friday a week ago, that the plaintiff's proposed research would not violate the CFAA, the computer fraud and abuse act provisions at all. And he said that somebody violates it when they bypass an access restriction, like a password, but someone who logs into a website with a valid password does not become a hacker simply by doing something prohibited by a web site, terms of service. [00:17:45] So that I actually, I think was a good ruling here. Now from the ruling itself, criminal is criminalizing terms of service violations, risks, turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into its own legislature. Yay. At last. Right now, unfortunately, courts are disagreeing about how to interpret this. [00:18:12] If this law is around forever. In Oh nine the California federal judge, right? What else? Ninth circus rejected a CFAA prosecution against a woman who contributed to a, myspace hoax that led to the suicide of a 13 year old by the name of Megan Meyer. And in that, the prosecutors argued that they had violated my spaces, terms of service. [00:18:40] In 2014 the night circus, uh, rejected another prosecution based on terms of service violation. So obviously I'm in favor of this. They're kind of moving in the right direction. We've got the seventh circus, uh, ruled that an employee had violated the anti hacking law when after quitting his job, he wiped an employer owned laptop that contained information that was valuable to his employer. [00:19:08] As well as the data could have been revealed misconduct by this person. So I think most of the way we're talking about the courts coming down the right direction here, but, uh, I, I'm very glad to see this because you know, that I. Protect site against hackers and hacking, not just websites, but businesses, right. [00:19:30] Including a real enterprise is real big businesses and I've done that for years. Usually the smaller divisions, because even the public companies have their own it staff and you know, they hold it all very close to the chest. It's in tasks. I don't trust anyone else. Don't, don't go with that person. Don't do what they say. [00:19:50] Yeah. Right. Which is, or I kind of get it cause I'd probably be saying the same thing, right. Cause I know what I'm doing, but in many cases they're just trying to protect their jobs. So when I am. Doing this. One of the things we do is have a honeypot set up. So what happens is the bad guys get onto a network and they started attacking. [00:20:13] They're immediately going to get into the little honeypot and the honeypot looks like an unpatched system. Might be a Linux system. Usually it is, or it might be a windows system, and so they start hacking away at it. And that immediately just sets off a trip wire, right? Cause I know, wait a minute, wait a minute. [00:20:33] Somebody's breaking into this system. So we monitor pretty closely. We know what's happening on it. I basically, all of the time, and there were interpretations of that law that would say that what I was doing was illegal. It was part of security research, even going on to the dark web and downloading some of these databases of hacked accounts. [00:20:55] Passwords, usernames, emails, et cetera. Even going online, looking for my client's information on the dark web could be considered to be illegal, so we've got to update these laws. There's a whole lot more, obviously, that we have to update, but I'm glad to see some of the stuff coming down on the right side. [00:21:15] Hey, we've heard about companies moving back to the U S now because of the Ruan virus and other things China's been doing. To our U S corporations for years. Uh, did you know Apple is doing something completely differently to this year that will potentially get them out of China, at least for the most part, stick around. [00:21:38] We'll be right back. This is Craig Peterson here on w G a N and online@craigpeterson.com. [00:21:54] Hey, welcome back. Craig. Peter sawn here. Listen to me on w. G. A. N I'm heard every Saturday from one till 3:00 PM and on Wednesdays I'm on with Matt during the morning drive time. You can pick me up at about seven 34 or every Wednesday morning as we talk about the latest in the news of technology. Hey, you might've heard of Fox con they are a big company based in China. [00:22:26] They have offices while manufacturing plants, frankly, all over the world. They've got factories in Thailand, Malaysia, Czech Republic, South Korea, Singapore, and the Philippines. They also were talking about opening up some plants in Wisconsin. Apparently those never actually opened, but they are. Busy worldwide. [00:22:49] And Fox con is Apple's longest running partner in building I-phones and some of the other devices that China makes. I mean, that Apple makes or sells, right, because remember who makes this stuff anymore? Well, Apple hasn't been making its newest IMAX or not IMAX. I shouldn't say a Mac pros. Yeah. In the United States. [00:23:14] Again, not that itself, it's a contracted manufacturing company, but the Mac pro, the one that came on 2013 as well as the new Mac pro are entirely made in the United States. Now, when we're looking at things like the iPhone and some of these other devices, yeah, they are certainly manufactured by Foxconn in China. [00:23:38] In mostly in at Shenzhen China location, but in fact, key iPhone components, according to Tim cook, are manufactured in the United States and then shipped abroad. And then the devices are assembled by Fox con, and then there's another company called Pegatron in China. Bottom line. What they are doing and what Apple is doing is protecting its intellectual property. [00:24:08] And we've heard of this before, haven't we? Where companies are in China, China requires them to give all of their intellectual property to their Chinese quote unquote. Partner, right? And Chinese national has to have at least a 50% ownership in it. It's real problem all the way around, and when we're looking at what's happening with the iPhone in the manufacturing in China, things are going to be changing. [00:24:37] In fact, they're going to be changing for a bunch of Apple's devices, including some of their new Mac books. If you've ever gotten into some of the hardware details inside of. It's a Mac books and, and in fact, they're Mac computers. Over the years, Apple has gone through a few different CPS. They were using the power CPU while before that they were using the murderer, Motorola, the 68,000 based CPS and a very, just an amazing CPU. [00:25:07] I remember at the time doing some operant system ports to it. It was just amazing. And then they went to Intel and, um. After. I'm not Intel, I mean, power PC, which was an IBM design. Frankly, power chips are the most amazing chips there are. Uh, from a cost perspective and performance. It's just, they are absolutely amazing, but they run hot and they use a lot of electricity, which is why you don't want them in a lab. [00:25:39] Top and Apple was not, or excuse me, IBM was not able to deliver to Apple chips that would meet their power requirements and performance requirements. So Apple said, okay, well we're going to switch to Intel because Intel promised that they would be able to provide the faster chips and they run cooler, so they'd be better for laptops and things, and they started using Intel. [00:26:04] And Intel worked out okay. Right now, by the way, uh, Intel is losing the performance war to AMD advanced micro devices. So that's kind of cool to hear those, you know, those things kind of shift back and forth every once in a while. But Intel has been unable to meet Apple's delivery requirements, and Apple's have been pretty tough over the years. [00:26:25] Look at what Johnny Ives has done with some of the designs, but Apple says, Hey, listen, we need a. Perf performance increase in the processor and we want to choose less juice and give off less heat. Well, those things are all difficult to do for a microprocessor manufacturer. So what Apple decided they would do is they went to an open source CPU design and started with that base and went on from there to have some just absolutely amazing chip designs. [00:26:58] Now I, I love some of these designs and they're showing up. But in all of our I-phones, if you have an iPhone or an iPad, you're using one of Apple's chips. Uh, the age 12, I think is the latest one. I'm trying to remember, uh, the version numbers, but, but they're made by Apple quote, unquote. In the U S for the most part, certainly not in China, and they are very efficient from a performance standpoint. [00:27:27] They're very fast. So they've been doing a very good job with these. Now, I, I talked to a couple of weeks ago about how much an iPhone would cost if it was made in America, and I saw another study that came out last week, so I had to bring this one up because the other one. Wasn't that clear. They figured it would only be a hundred $200 more. [00:27:48] So Wes, what RAs? Why Lara? This is from fi.org. You'll find this article online, uh, which is the foundation for economic education. And this is an article by Mark Perry. He's saying that an iPhone that today costs about a thousand dollars if it were made entirely in the United States, if it even could be, because believe it or not, the United States has fallen behind. [00:28:21] In manufacturing technologies because we have blood, China get ahead of us. We gave them all this technology to start with. I've complained about that before too, and now they are ahead of us, so we don't even have the ability to manufacture these things here in the U S right now, we not only have to ramp pump, but we'd have to develop some new technologies and. [00:28:45] That thousand dollar iPhone that is assembled in China that has some component parts made in the United States would push the price of an iPhone components from about 190 $190 that's what it costs right now. Estimated, right? Apple doesn't release these numbers, but estimated to cost $190 right now, it would be about $600 if it were. [00:29:12] Made in the us. So if the materials alone are costing better than triple what it would cost in China, we could probably see a $2,000 iPhone. Now, do you remember that the U S is only bringing in 6% of the profits from iPhone sales? Two out of three iPhone purchasers are not based in the United States. [00:29:38] Now, that's a huge change from years ago when most of Apple's customers are in the U S but right now with the whole. A wound virus has been spreading in China. The app, the iPhone sales are way down, and that's probably also true of other countries as well. So this is going to be an interesting little battle as we go ahead. [00:30:00] But here's the really big news as far as I'm concerned, and that is. That Apple is going to start making the Mac book using their chip sets. So like these eight, 12, and other processors I've been talking about, they've got the, uh, a fourteens are the new ones that are coming out. I think I got that model number right. [00:30:27] But these are 12 core chips and they are actually. Two chip sets. There's uh, that, that are in one package. It's just amazing what they're doing, but some lower powered ones for doing things that don't need a lot of CPU power and some higher powered ones. And they're going to be coming out in the new iPhones and the new iPad, but they are also going to be coming out in the new Mac books now that. [00:31:01] Is amazing. 12 core CPU is aided by a graphics processor that is probably going to have its own collection of cores. This is amazing. If you look at the current iPad pro tablets that are using the eight 12 X and Z chips, we're talking about an Apple iPad pro outperforming. 90% of recent PC laptops, so this could be amazing. [00:31:31] Apple's moving this, some of this back to the U S and they're getting Intel out of the way, and I think that's a good thing, frankly, for Apple. But listening to Craig, Peter sauna, WGAN stick around. We'll be right back. [00:31:50] Hello everybody. Welcome back. Craig. Peter Assan here on w G a N having a good time today. Hopefully you guys are as well, whether you are kind of locked up in the home maybe or any central person like you, me and your, you're out and about and maybe taking a little time on Saturday too. Work in the yard. [00:32:12] I appreciate you all being with us today. I have just absolutely amazed here what Apple is doing and congratulations to them now once get into our hospitals cause they've been in the news a lot lately. You know, we've got people. Who will have the Woodlawn virus, right? Who have the symptoms of this coven 19, which is very bad. [00:32:39] And, uh, it's particularly bad for older people. We have seen now covert 19, the average of the average. Age of someone who died, what state was, it was like 82 I can't remember if that was a single state or if that was a Countrywide, but that is frankly, absolutely amazing. That means it is killing older people, but we're also seeing other symptoms. [00:33:07] Now we have, people are getting blood clots. You heard about that athlete that had to have a leg amputated. Again, it's absolutely amazing here. Uh,  hospitals right now, according to the New York times, this is from Wednesday this week saying that airborne coronaviruses detected and woo Han hospitals right now. [00:33:29] That is not good. Um. It's man. I'm just going through these articles. It just, it just, I shake my head, but we're starting to see some electric surgeries coming back to hospitals. Uh, most of these field hospitals that were set up or shut down. Down, they were largely unused and right here, according to the Bangor daily news on Wednesday, we've got two bankrupt main hospitals warn they could close in June if they don't receive stimulus funds and president and Trump has announced that, yes, indeed, our hospitals are going to get stimulus funds. [00:34:08] But if you heard me at the top of the hour, you heard. You heard me talk about how, uh, you know, we were promised funds too, and we just haven't gotten any. So it's, this is going to be a very, very big problem for us all. Uh, and when we're talking about hospitals, there's one other angle or that people just aren't paying attention to right now. [00:34:30] You know, w we talked about the ventilators. And there w there just weren't gonna be enough. Right. And here in Maine and all over the country, there were more ventilators than were needed. And that's true. New York as well. And come to find out, of course they sold 500 ventilators rather than maintain them. [00:34:52] And instead of ordering more ventilators, what did the government do there in New York? While they just commissioned a plan as to how they were going to ration them, who got. To die, right? That's socialized medicine for you. If I ever heard the definition of it, a total death panel, but the good news is we didn't need all of those, but we've got the internet of things and we've talked about it and I've talked about it in my tree trainings and we go into it in some depth. [00:35:21] In my courses, but the so called internet of things also extends to our hospitals. It's the internet of medical things, and these devices are going online. Hospitals and medical facilities are really starting to stare this in the phase. And I mentioned when I was on with Matt Gagnan on Wednesday morning this week, that there is a problem been around for a long time. [00:35:50] I have my first, in fact, a hospital chain as a client was 25 years ago. Maybe. And we were trying to clean things up for them, fix them, network stuff, put some security stuff in place. And what did we find? Well, those those machines, those hospitals, plus all of the clinics that were affiliated with the hospital had old hardware that they just weren't taking care of. [00:36:18] These devices that are controlling the systems in the hospitals. Everything from the air ventilation systems through. All of the medical equipment. Think about all of this stuff right from the, the drip machines, the Ivy machines, the ventilators, our the MRE machines, the x-ray machines. Some of these devices are running very outdated operating system. [00:36:46] Some of them are still running windows 95. Windows XP, windows seven none of which are currently getting patches or updates, and many of them were never intended to go on line at all. Think about that. When, when they were designed the windows 95 and XP. They weren't thinking about these things being hooked up to the internet or even other networks really. [00:37:13] They were just kind of standalone systems that sat in a corner and then the programmer said, Hey, listen, we can add, there's really cool feature. We'll tie them together. And so doctors can look at x-rays remotely. And so a system that was never designed with network security in mind all of a sudden had a network connection all of a sudden was being used online on a network. [00:37:35] In a hospital that had never set it up properly in the first place. I really wish more of these medical centers in the hospitals would call me because they need so much help, and many of them don't even realize it. They, these things have no cybersecurity protection whatsoever, and then the hospital networks are often not even segmented. [00:38:01] That's something I teach home users to do. So that's allowing attackers to enter anywhere in the hospital and move around so they can get to the billing. They can get to all of these machines there. Even being researchers that are saying they have seen hackers inside cardiac pacemaker machines. Think about that one for a little bit. [00:38:28] How about if it gets onto one of these machines that's running on an older version of windows or even a brand new one that hasn't been patched up and they get onto it to a hacker, it may just look like, Hey, this is just another windows 10 machine. I'm going to use it for Bitcoin mining. I'm going to use it for spreading ransomware around. [00:38:48] You think that might be a problem? So it is now Bitcoin mining instead of watching your cardiac rhythm. Right? And so when I was going to overheat, it's gonna use up all of the systems, resources. It's going to spread ransomware throughout the hospital. We've seen that again and again and again and again, and we've seen that again and again in , even in our state, New Hampshire has had this as well. [00:39:17] I talked to and helped a school district that had been nailed by ransomware and they decided they were just pay the ransom, which by the way. Tells the ransom Merz, Hey listen, let's hack them again and put another ransom on. Cause we know they pay the ransom right. So there's third problem the hospitals are having is with all of this vulnerable equipment. [00:39:40] They're not replacing them. They're not upgrading, and they're not patching them. And not enough of this equipment has been recalled by the manufacturers because the manufacturers have gone on to a newer model, Hey, listen, uh, no need to update that machine or buy a new one for only $50,000. So where are the manufacturers spending their time? [00:40:03] Where are they focusing their efforts? Well, obviously they're focusing their efforts on getting them to buy a new machine to design these new machines. It is a very, very big, big deal. Now, another one of the big attacks, most common, I mentioned ransomware when it comes to the intranet of medical devices, but. [00:40:26] The other big one is a distributed denial of service attack. Cause you remember these devices in the hospital are performing critical. Things, right? Very critical functions that, as I said, there might be running a cardiac machine on MRI. They might just be keeping track of doctor's notes, all of which are critical. [00:40:49] So if a nation state specifically targets an IV pump and changes the dose of medication, what do you think will happen? It certainly could happen, but the more basic thread is. These devices getting a denial of service attack. So the whole network at the hospital becomes overloaded and now nothing works at the hospital. [00:41:18] So there's, there are just the basic threats that aren't being taken care of. Ransomware, phishing emails, and these attacks are targeting the weakest and the oldest operating systems that are typically running on these devices and hospitals are top targets. Now, one of the big hacking groups out there that has ransomware all over the world said, Hey, listen, in this time of covert 19. [00:41:44] We are not going to be attacking the hospitals because it just isn't fair. And in fact, they have been attacking hospitals. They are the top targets still for ransomware because they're very vulnerable and they pay. And that's why, what was it, five years ago? Seven years ago? I designed a system just to, it's a small computer. [00:42:09] Based on a little in Intel Adam chip that sits in front of these devices for manufacturers, for controlling valves for more critical equipment. It just sits there. And it is a specialized firewall for that piece of equipment. So this is a problem. It's a very, very big problem in hospitals, frankly, are afraid to do anything because they're afraid they're going to get sued. [00:42:37] Their insurance companies are sitting there saying, Oh yeah, yeah, well, if you're going to do an upgrade, the equipment might not work. Properly and you might get sued. So we're going to increase the fees for our, for our services, for our premiums. Premiums are going to go up. Okay. So they just don't want to do anything. [00:42:58] And then you got the FDA right? Man, does this story ever end? And, uh, FDA is saying, Hey, listen guys, we're okay with you doing patches, the hospitals afraid of recertifying. And I love this quote here. Uh, it says it's a willful lie on the part of some stakeholders in the system that you can't update medical devices. [00:43:25] Why do you think that. W why do they think that? Well, bottom line is that. These device manufacturers are telling them, you can't update because your insurance premiums are going to get too high. The FDA says it'll have to be read, type accepted for use, et cetera, et cetera. But I want to let you know if you work for the medical community here at any level, the FDA. [00:43:54] Has post-market guidance that they issued in 2016 and in that, the FDA explained that while federal regulations require manufacturers to report certain actions, the majority of the actions taken by manufacturers to address cyber security vulnerabilities and exploits are generally not considered to be a type of device enhancement for which the FDA. [00:44:21] It does not require advanced notification or reporting. So some good news there, we'll let the hospitals know. If you're involved with this industry, guys, pull up your socks. Hire security specialist. Some of them have been doing it for awhile. That can really help you out because there's so much to know. [00:44:40] Hey, you've been listening to Craig Peterson and WGAN and online@craigpeterson.com stick around. [00:44:51] Hello everybody. Greg Peters song here. We of course are on every Saturday from a one until three and I'm on with Matt Gagnan as well on Wednesday mornings during drive time at about seven 34. I've been in the tech business now for many decades, and then the security business helping businesses secure their internet connections. [00:45:16] Really since 91 and I have quite a backstory, and one of these days we'll have to have to share it with you, but I'm a business guy and this whole security thing, you know, back in the day. I did not really understand security, probably like a lot of you guys and uh, but I was very, very technical. I had helped to implement a number of the protocols that are used on the internet and that was a big win for me because I was able to take what I knew, dig into it. [00:45:47] It took me a few days to figure out what had happened and then lock things down and I was kind of years behind at that time. Point because the, what I got, which was called the Morris worm, had actually been known for a few years before it hit me. And that was kind of a shame. So, you know, back then, of course you didn't have Google. [00:46:09] AltaVista wasn't around yet. None of this stuff was out there. We were using a gopher search engines, right. Or Veronica, Archie, Jughead back in the day, and trying to figure it out was really a bit of a chore. Once I figured it out, it was easy enough to fix, but I almost lost my business over that and that was a very scary occasion for me. [00:46:29] So I have really kind of dug into it, and I've been helping out a lot of businesses here over the years to help be secure, and I'm doing the same thing as well. For individuals. And that's what this show's all about, right? We're trying to help you guys out with that. Talk about some latest cool technology. [00:46:48] And, uh, I was so successful in being able to help outfit, I was even drafted by the FBI's InfraGuard program and trained, I've trained thousands of businesses literally here across the nation on what. To do in order to keep safe, and I continue to do that with free webinars, courses, memberships, all that sort of stuff. [00:47:10] Anyhow, if you miss the first hour today, I talked about a change here in the way criminal hacking is being looked at by our courts, and that's. Very good things about time. They changed that Apple is going to be selling max with its own processor starting in 2021. Say goodbye to Intel, and I would add to that. [00:47:34] Good. Riddens uh, also the internet of medical things. You've heard me, if you've been listening to me. Uh, you've heard me talk a little bit about the internet of things. Well, there's something called the internet of medical things as well, and that is frankly very, very scary. So that's how we ended up last hour. [00:47:56] And I want to invite everybody to go online. Go to Craig peterson.com you will see all of the articles I talk about today with all of the background. You can listen to my podcasts, you can watch my videos every once in a while. I even have some trainings. Up there, but if you sign up, you can get my weekly newsletter, which does contain all of that stuff. [00:48:19] Craig, Peter, sawn.com/subscribe so you can just get out your phone. It'll work on your phone. It'll work on your desktop, on your laptop. Craig Peterson. Now I saved Craig Peterson because it's an O. N it's not an E. N, it's N. O. N. Alright, so it's Craig, CRA, I G just like you'd expect Peter sohn.com/subscribe and I do not. [00:48:46] I do not pass to you. In fact, when I have something that I am launching, you know, a new, a new course, a new product, whatever it is, I will give you the option to opt out of that. If you're not interested in it, and I, I, you know, just click right there and you'll still get my weekly newsletter. But you won't hear anything more about that particular promotion that's going on at the time. [00:49:09] So I'm not like some of these marketers that just slam you every day. I don't even consider myself a marketer. Right? I'm a tech guy that happens to have something to sell, not quite the same thing. Anyhow. Um. Yeah, w and the plenty of free stuff. A lot of people just use the free stuff and that's all they need. [00:49:30] We have a report that's been in the media that I want to talk about right now, and this is a report about this so-called zero day exploit against iOS. Now, what is zero day exploit? Basically. Uh, what we're talking about when we say zero day means, uh, it's kind of like patient zero, who was the first person to get the Corona virus as an idea, right? [00:49:57] That's patient zero zero day here. When we're talking about some of these hacks means no one has seen this particular hack before, at least no one was aware of it. Now, sometimes the government agencies. Of our government and other foreign governments, we'll find something out. Of course they won't. Uh, they won't tell us about it. [00:50:20] Right. They'll just kind of use it. That has actually changed under the Trump administration. President Trump has been adamant that they share this information. I'm sure that keeping a couple of things back, but the NSA even has been sharing information about exploits that are going on. So we're funded about more and more of them, but in this case, there is supposedly an exploit that's out there in the wild. [00:50:46] And then the wild means it is being used. It has been seen out there. And this particular exploit is supposed to be used just by sending out a specially crafted, uh, email. Okay. And I'm supposedly, I saw another article that was saying, Oh, it's especially triggered SMS, a text message or message message or something. [00:51:11] So there's a San Francisco based security firm named Zach ops, and they said on Wednesday that attackers a dues the zero day exploit against at least six targets over a span of at least two years. Well. Now that's being disputed because Apple is certainly acknowledging that there is a flaw in the mail app, but it is a bug that causes the app to crash. [00:51:39] It does not give the bad guys access to anything. Basically. So the bad guys, certainly, yeah. They could crash your mail app and it's just going to restart automatically, or are you going to click it and it'll re restart right on your iOS device. But in this case, what we're talking about is something that's really a whole lot different, a whole lot worse, or is it frankly, right? [00:52:04] If it's not giving them access to your data. Is it really worse because it can't take full control of your iPhone, unlike what some of the media outlets were talking about. So Apple had declined to comment on the report, but they came out and they said that the bug posed a threat to iPhone and iPad users and there had not been any ax exploit at. [00:52:29] All in the statement they said, Apple takes all reports and security threats seriously, thoroughly investigated. Researchers report based on the information provided have concluded these issues do not pose an immediate risk to our users, and they go on to say that they found these issues in mail that. [00:52:47] Cannot bypass the iPhone and iPad security protections and no evidence that they've been used against customers. Now Apple's really good too about trying to track what is happening on phones. You might have noticed if you go in complaining about a problem with your phone and you go into the. Oh store. [00:53:04] They can look at logs on your phone to see if the app has been crashing, et cetera. So yes, indeed, they can check this out and take care of it. There have been a number of independent researchers that have also questioned the conclusion that zinc ops came to, and I think this is good. You know, you've got to be out there. [00:53:26] You've got to be talking about these things. Apple did respond. I like the fact that it was all public here. And that people were able to look at it and kind of figure out what was going on. Cause there have been exploits. We know that the WhatsApp app has been nailed a few times and I think part of the reason for that is WhatsApp is supposed to be secure. [00:53:47] Well, how secure is it. Really, and so they, the bad guys are constantly kind of going after it, trying to prove that it's just not secure at all. But really they identified a crash report. They found a way to reproduce the crashes and some circumstantial evidence. Told them that may be this was being used for malicious purpose purchase purposes. [00:54:11] Okay. Um, so, uh, anyways, that's where that stands. So what to do, obviously keep your software up to date. Apple is very good, unlike again, in this month. Microsoft's updates ended up causing serious problems. For some people. Apple's updates rarely cause those types of problems, and when we're talking about iOS, they just don't get any easier. [00:54:39] You can apply them very, very simply. In fact, they will usually, if you have automatic updates turned on on your iPhone or iPad at night, while it's sitting there on the charger, it's going to go ahead and update itself, upgrade itself, and then the next morning, Qatar, you've got the whole new operating system you had to do. [00:54:57] Absolutely nothing, which is, man, that is my idea of an easy time, and you've heard me before, I'm sure say don't use Android and people just, I ignored, I don't understand why. Right? Some of these people, like Danny, for instance, I'm thinking of, he follows. Everything I say to the T and it has saved him again and again. [00:55:22] In his small business, he has a franchise restaurant and you know, Oh, we'll see how the restaurant business does, but he's doing okay right now, but he still uses an Android phone and I don't get it. You know, I, I'm not really fond of. Any of these big companies, politics, you name the company, the politics are probably bad nowadays. [00:55:44] You know, it used to be assumed that, Oh, big corporations, they were big, they were evil, they were nasty. And if you notice the Democrats, now they're not talking about the evil millionaires. They're talking about the evil billionaires, because of course they're millionaires, right? To all of them, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, the senators out there in California, Feinstein and others. [00:56:06] But, um. You know, the these big companies, so many of them are so left-leaning. It drives me crazy, so I get it. If you don't want to use Apple stuff because you don't agree politically with Apple, I think that's an okay reason. But reality sets in. And you just can't continue to use Android. You really can't. [00:56:27] And if you can get off of windows, you should do that as soon as you possibly can. Anyhow, that's just my opinion. So stick around. When we come back, we've got more to talk about. Of course, we're going to get into a very kind of an interesting problem over at Amazon. You're listening to Craig Peters on a w G a N stick around. [00:56:50] We'll be right back. [00:56:55] Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. You can hear me, of course. Every Saturday from one til three. You also can listen to me on Wednesday morning. Yes, I'm on with Matt Gagnon. Did you know there was a morning show. Yeah. Drive time. So I'm on with Matt every Wednesday at about seven 34 for a few minutes to talk about the latest in technology news. [00:57:23] And of course we get to spend a couple hours talking about this in more detail on Saturday. Well, we just talked about this iOS zero day bug, and what does that mean to you? Doesn't look like it's totally legit. Big, big problem with our medical devices and hospitals and otherwise they are still running windows 95 X P if you can believe that 2007, none of which are supported anymore. [00:57:55] And, uh, you also went into what. Uh, what really has been put in place out there to allow them to do upgrades and updates, but there's so much obfuscation. It's crazy. And then courts violating a site's terms of service is not criminal hacking. So if you missed any of that, you can find it online. You can just go to Craig peterson.com/iheart I also post this whole show as one podcast that you can find on your favorite podcast platform, whatever that might be. [00:58:31] By just searching for Craig Peterson. Or the easy way is go to Craig peterson.com/itunes or if you're like, hi heart, you can go Craig peterson.com/iheart or Craig peterson.com/soundcloud et cetera, et cetera, okay? But it's all out there and you can get the whole show, all kinds of. Put together for you, which I think makes some sense. [00:58:57] Amazon is the 8,000 pound gorilla out there. They have been just really taking over the online retail space in a very, very big way. In fact, the Amazon counts for about one third of all. US-based internet retail sales isn't that huge? Can you imagine having that kind of market share? One third of all of it, but it didn't get there entirely on its own in case you're not aware of it. [00:59:31] Amazon has about half of their items being sold by small businesses, by third parties, and you might've noticed that on label sometimes where the third party, uh, will. Ship has something to you directly, and yeah, it looks like an Amazon box and me having an Amazon tape on it. But in reality, what we're seeing is a return address that might not be Amazons. [00:59:57] Well, these typically are smaller vendors, so think of that for a minute. We've got about a third of all retail sales going through Amazon and about half of those coming from small vendors. That's a very, very big deal. And with the businesses the way they are today, you might want to consider. Should you be selling online? [01:00:24] A lot of companies abandoned eBay because of their pricing strategies and they moved over to Amazon and it's been okay for them over there. But I want to tell you about the problem that's happening right now at Amazon. And this is something I've seen over the years that has bothered me a lot. And I had over the years, a number of friends that had started software companies and some companies that I didn't even know that were. [01:00:57] Well, you know, I knew all of them, but I didn't know the owners. Then they had database software, they had scheduling software. They had a lot of different things, and what Microsoft would do is they'd, they'd keep an eye on the market and they'd say, Oh wait, wow. Wow. That database is doing really well and it's winning. [01:01:18] A lot of DTA deals that our database software's not winning. And the allegations were that what Microsoft was doing was kind of being a predator here cause they would go to the company that had the database software and uh, chat with them and see if the company would sell out at a reasonable price. [01:01:42] And then this is so anti competitive. It's crazy. But then. If that company didn't want to play ball, like sell themselves for super cheap to Microsoft, well, Microsoft was accused of doing and what Microsoft hadn't been convicted of doing in courts now is they would announce a product that competed directly with the small guy. [01:02:11] And wait to see who asked about it. So Microsoft would say, yeah, we have a database product for small businesses. Very easy to use. Drag and drop interface. Everything's going to be great. You are going to love it. And then Microsoft would sit there and see of companies would start calling them and say, when's your product going to be available? [01:02:34] What am I going to be able to do this? Well, in some cases they waited a year or more. And they never ever came out with a product. But what do you think happened to Mr. Small guy out there, the small business that had investors where the owners, they were founders had invested thousands of hours into it, maybe their entire life savings. [01:02:58] Well, people, companies, and I experienced this personally, companies who would sit there and say, well, you know, Microsoft is going to come out with something here. I want to see what Microsoft does. And so that small company. W is now out of business because what are they supposed to do? People aren't buying, you know, their models were based on so many sales and that was based on the people liking their product and talking about it and the marketing dollars they were spending. [01:03:29] But that money was going down the drain because Microsoft was there saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll, uh, we'll, we're going to do this. Yeah. Yeah, us, us, us. And so they got sued again and again, and they lost in court, but it was still cheaper for them and then made more money. Think of the billions in cash some of these companies are sitting on and, uh, that is a bad thing to do. [01:03:52] It really does hurt commerce. It certainly is not free trade. Uh, of course, we live now, I think in a largely a crony capitalist system. And they played that game. They played it very, very well. Well, back to our friends here, Amazon. But yet, you know, those allegations are still floating by the way, about Microsoft and many other companies that appear to be doing that thing in. [01:04:18] Here's what happened to them. Amazon. What happened was Amazon started looking at the merchants that were selling third party stuff on their websites, and the wall street journal has a great report on it right now because Amazon has its own in house brands. So it's making itself a direct competitor to many of these merchants who rely on the Amazon platform to reach. [01:04:50] Consumers. So now you've got your little product. Amazon is selling something that's similar to yours, or at least competitive with yours, and that's bad enough. But the wall street journal reviewed some internal company documents that showed that Amazon executives were asking for and getting data about specific marketplace vendors despite corporate policies against doing so. [01:05:23] Despite the fact that Amazon had testified in Congress that they never did this. And according to the wall street journal, more than 20 former employees told them that this practice of flouting those rules was commonplace. We knew we shouldn't, but at the same time, we're making Amazon branded products and we want to sell them. [01:05:48] So here's what they were doing. Amazon was looking. At what was being sold out there. And this one example that was given was something that I've bought. It's a car trunk organizer, and apparently Amazon employees access documents relating to that vendor's total sales. What the vendor paid Amazon for marketing and shipping and the amount Amazon made on each sale of the organizer before the company. [01:06:20] Then unveiled. It's own similar product. They're getting around the rules here. W we'll get into this when we get back. I'll tell you about some of these Amazon brands that you might not even be aware are Amazon brands. You're listening to Craig, Peter sawn here on w G a N every Saturday from one til 3:00 PM cause stick around. [01:06:43] We'll be right back. And of course there's a whole lot more to come today. [01:06:52] Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig, Peter sawn here. We were just talking about our friends at Amazon. I remember getting really, really upset with them. I sent them a a note, uh, years ago, decade or more, certainly more a go because Amazon decided it would patent something that it called one click ordering. [01:07:17] As though one click ordering was like some major leap forward and, and, and I couldn't believe the us patent and trademark office actually gave them a patent because I knew other sites that were doing it as well. It. This whole thing is totally upside down, not just with Amazon, but now you can get patents on almost anything and not, not just, I'm not just complaining about business processes here, business process patents, which, uh, I don't like. [01:07:48] Uh, but all the whole patent world, the whole thing has been changed, turned on its head with the new patent laws. It has gotten even worse, not better. Yeah, it makes it easier for the government, but in reality, it I think is hurting a lot of businesses. So let's see what we're talking about with Amazon here, where Amazon was combing through the data of these third party vendors that make up for about 50% of the products sold on amazon.com. [01:08:20] And these employees were accessing the data about what the vendor's total sales were, and they were getting around the rules by bending the concept of what's called aggregation according to the wall street journal and well, Amazon says that it did not access individual seller data. It did create reports of aggregate. [01:08:45] Seller data. And if a pool is large enough, that wouldn't be a problem. So if you've got 200 vendors selling iPhone cases, okay, but the example that the wall street journal is using here is have a trunk organizer. So in reality, how many trunk organizers were there at the time? So this pool of vendors, very, very small. [01:09:11] And when you're talking about a group of two entities, uh, okay, it's aggregated, but what's that telling them. So what Amazon had done then is they said, Oh, wait a minute. This is a very profitable niche that people who are using our services to sell it are in. So your small business, you come up with this idea of a trunk organizer, and it's better than any trunk organizer that's ever been made, and you're going to add two extra compartments to it. [01:09:43] I don't know what you're going to do right. You're going to make it very firm, very strong, and it can fold up, fit into a corner. And so you have to make some prototypes. You have to figure out, how do I do this? You might make a trip or two to maybe heaven forbid China or Indonesia or some other country, right? [01:10:02] Other than China, please. And you go out there for a few times, you. You end up paying, you know, easily 10 $20,000 just to have a stamp made that can stamp out your little product there for the insides. And then you got to get another vendor that had ships to that, that takes the material, sows it all together, and then can ship it out. [01:10:25] And then you have to have a minimum order sitting there in Amazon's warehouses ready to go. So you're into this one a hundred grand, maybe more. Plus all of the time that you spent doing it, which now is lost opportunity costs because you weren't doing something else while you were trying to design this chunk organizer. [01:10:50] So you have spent life savings on this. You've put it together. If you ever watched shark tank, and you look at some of these people, right? Most of those businesses fail. Even the ones that make it to shark tank. So you've done all of this. You had hoped that your business would succeed. Well, you're selling it. [01:11:13] It is succeeding. It's doing well. Maybe you've made back $50,000 of that a hundred thousand you put into it and maybe you get up to a hundred thousand Amazon notices. Whoa, this guy's making a lot of money. Maybe we should get into that trunk organizer business. In fact, we know exactly which models, which colors, which fabrics of his trunk organizer are selling. [01:11:43] Hm. So Amazon then takes the idea and runs with it. Amazon now has more than 145 private label brands. This is a huge, huge number. There is a website out there called this Justin. TGI research and they have a list of these brands that Amazon has. I'm scrolling through it right now. I had no idea. Most of these were Amazon. [01:12:18] You know, you've heard, I'm sure of Amazon essentials. That sounds like an Amazon brand, right? It is. Amazon basics. Okay. Those are obvious. But there's others like kids' clothing line scout and RO women's clothing, brand, Hayden Rose or furniture line stone and beam. Those are Amazon brands and you can't tell by the name, and I'm looking at this list over on this, Justin, and they all have their own logos. [01:12:54] You just, you would have no idea. Brass tacks leathercraft makes leather belts from, guess what those are? Those are Amazon chains. Ditch charming. Dove. Um, Ken sounds like charming Charlie, doesn't it? Hm. Uh, charm. Z silver. That sounds like chirpy. Oh my gosh. Amazon exclusive. Uh, and then charming Charlie's is out of business. [01:13:20] Right. Did you ever go there? My, some of my daughters used to love it cause you can get all of these little hoopy things and necklaces and stuff, but it goes on and on. This is, this is ridiculous. There's gotta be way more than what, what Tai and what wall street journal is reporting anyways, so they're saying those private labels account for 1% of Amazon's total sales. [01:13:45] That was according to a report last September, and some former employees apparently told the wall street journal that they are operating under the directive that Amazon's private label sales should be. 10% of the company's retail sales by 2022 so there you go. You know, we talked about the contentious relationships with eBay in the sellers. [01:14:11] Contentious relationships with Amazon in the sh in the sellers, the European union's competition Bureau opened up an investigation against Amazon. This is a very, very bad thing here. Uh, antitrust subcommittee chairman, David Sicilian from Rhode Island in house judiciary committee chair. Gerald Nadler. [01:14:36] We're pretty upset about this quote. This is yet another example of sworn testimony of Amazon's witnesses being directly contradicted by investigative reporting. So yay. At least somebody is doing investigative reporting out there. So I don't know. What are you going to do? I was upset with Amazon. I told them I'd never do business with them again, and then probably about 10 years later, I started doing some business with them again because it was the only place I could buy some of the things I wanted to buy, but they've been using this merchant data not good. [01:15:10] Not good at all. Well, we have a couple more cool things. We only have a minute or so left here in this segment, but let's get into this very, very quickly. At least get started. This is from dark routine.com they have a lot of great articles, but consumers and small to medium businesses are likely to fall. [01:15:31] For Corona virus scams. It said, now, I have seen a lot of emails coming in to me from companies saying that they can get me some of these loans. Uh, I don't think so. Uh, and I have, I saved some of them. I should put those out in my membership site or in the newsletter. You can see some of them do some training

James: Hey, audience and listeners, this is James Kandasamy from Achieved Wealth Through Value Add Real Estate Investing Podcasts. Today I have Jeremy Cyrier from Boston. Jeremy is one of my mentors, you know, I'm happy to have him here to talk about commercial real estate and Jeremy has been focusing on taxes and a lot of markets out of North East U.S like Rhode Island and you know Massachusetts and of course Texas and he have done a lot of bills, you know, I think he used to syndicate and now he's also investing as a passive investor and he focuses a lot on multifamily medical office buildings, retail and also office.  Hey, Jeremy, welcome to the show.  Jeremy: Hey thanks, James.  James: So, what's happening? I mean with all this covid 19, I know you're not in New York, but you're in Boston, which is, you know, almost near to epicenter there. I mean, what's happening with you personally and the commercial real estate business right now?  Jeremy:  That's a great question, we're all healthy, we’re home. I've got four kids, eight and under and it's a little crazy, but we're feeling just frankly blessed at this time to have a moment of pause in our lives to focus on the basics together. I think, you know, amidst all the tragedy that's unfolding around us, that's actually a blessing.  James: Yeah. Sometimes you know, you have to look for positive things in a, you know, whatever situation that we are in right now. Right? So tell me, I mean, about what are you seeing right now in the commercial real estate space? What was happening in February before this whole covid 19 and now we are in the middle of it. This is like almost in April, mid April to, you know, towards the end of April. What are you seeing right now that has completely caught your attention and create that "aha" moment for you?  Jeremy: Well, I'll tell you the interesting thing is we've been over the last three or so years saying, well, when's the recession coming? And we were looking for it, we're looking for leading indicators of a recession and here it is, it's upon us and it's more of a black swan event than really any of us would have expected to have happened to such a point where I've been talking to people about this being similar to our country being invaded and the government shutting down our economy is a defense mechanism. So, that's a pretty fascinating set of circumstances for us to be operating within right now in any business, let alone the commercial real estate space.  James: So do you see a lot of transaction has died down right now from what you were doing two months ago and  Jeremy: Yeah, so the, one of the things I do is I track data, so I live outside of the Boston market. I track that data very closely to see what the volumes look like and I'll tell you the 2020 Q1 data was up 75% in terms of sales volume over Q1 of 19 and so it was a very healthy start to the year but as soon as you go and you shut down the economy, all the volatility comes into the market and buyers start to pull back, lenders try to figure out what to do, who to lend to, how to lend and then you've got sellers pulling back saying, am I exposed here? Is this a dangerous time for me to be selling my property?  So, I'd say the first month of this event was really characterized by people trying to figure out what's going on, what's happening and this last month it's being characterized with more intentionality. Okay, here's what I'd like to see happen in three months, six months, nine months, twelve months. So the discussions are moving forward to a, I'm going to stop focusing on the hourly new cycle and I can see more of a two to three day new cycle and within that environment I can start to think strategically about what's next for me.  James: Got it. So do you see, so you're saying sellers are starting to look at more strategically, so, I know some people were talking about V-shape versus U-shape and I think some of the V would have changed to U right now, right? I don't know where the Nike swish. Right. So where do you think we are heading from March, 2020 you know?  Jeremy: Yeah. What's the letter of the alphabet are we going to see? You know, I listened to a great webinar, which was done with KC Conway and Eddie Blanton, Eddie's the president of the CCIM Institute. KC is the chief economist, they got on a webinar and I think you can see this; you can catch on YouTube and KC got on and he talked about the letters and he goes through the different shapes. Some of them I'd never heard of before, but they, like, what happens when you have a fiat currency recession, it's a Q, I guess but he said, you know, if early on we were hoping for a V he thinks it's going to be a W and I think he's right, I think the W is, we go through an initial dip, we have a recession now.  We start to rebound and recover, in the summer, people start to get outside and start to circulate and you know, return the flow of capital but we go back into a secondary recession in the fall driven by two primary things. One a concern over covid, you know, spiking again and the second being the, all the bad news that accumulated from March through September that shows up and we see a secondary recession as a result of what's happening right now. He said it's probably, and I think he's right, we probably don't start to see the volatility come out of the market until this time next year, 2021 and it's just going to be a matter of writing this, you know, writing things out the best we can in 2020  James: So, when you talk about the second V, right, I mean, I think first of the V and after that is another V which is coming in, which makes it a W? Right?  So are you saying the, from your perspective, do you think the second lowest point will be lower than the first low point or will be higher than the  Jeremy: I don't know but I know those low points take a lot of pain and they dish it out and so in our business, in commercial real estate investing, is it, people have been asking me: Okay, so when one of the deals are going to show up, you know, where are all these distressed sellers? Well, it takes time. Right?  James: What kind of time, why do you think we need to take time? Jeremy: Well, if you look back historically when we go through, we've gone through recessions and they happen just about every 10 years in the last four years. This one was a longer cycle than we'd seen.  So typically you see expansion kickoff and the third year of a decade, you see a transition year in the eighth year of the decade we go into a recession, then we come back up and out. This one didn't happen that way. I think it's because the Obama administration didn't push the FDIC to recycle assets like we'd seen in prior recessions, which extended the recovery period, it took longer to recover and expand in this last cycle, so as a result of that, the cycle lasted longer. I think it just was a longer period of protracted growth. So we have, you know, in the time frame of how things tend to play out, on the inside, you might see real estate deals two quarters after a Dow correction, but typically I see like a fourth to six quarter lag off the Dow.  And there's a reason for that, if you follow the money, so start with the Dow. What is the Dow? The Dow is a highly liquid market people are trading on nanoseconds and they're trading based on projections and perceptions. So from their companies, their shares are devalued, they, report, you know, revenue, they have revenues coming in lower, their earnings are lower, they start adjusting their P and L's, they lay off people. Okay, so unemployment comes up. Then they start to look at their real estate and they say, well, we need to reduce our exposure of real estate, we're not demanding as much square footage. Let's give some back. That goes back to the landlords. The landlords get the space back, they rent it for less or they can't rent it. They burn through cash?  Then they go to the bank and they say, hey bank, I'm having some issues. Bank says, okay, well let's work with you for a little while and see if you can get through it. That takes another three or six months before ultimately hits the point where the bank says you have to get out of the asset, we've got to take it. So, it's a slower moving asset class. That's one of the reasons why people like it. I mean, when you're buying, you want it to happen now you want it to be fast, but when you own this, it has less volatility than the stock market does and that's one of the reasons why people get excited about building durable wealth in the space.  James: Really interesting. So, I just want to touch back on what you mentioned just now. So you said during the Obama administration, the 2008 crisis, you said FDIC did not recycle assets as quickly as you know. So can you clarify that because that's completely new and I never learn about that. Jeremy: So, if you look back at the savings and loan crisis, this was back in the late eighties, the tax reform act. What happened was depreciation schedules were changed on how real estate was owned and written off. The tax world had distorted real estate evaluations, that combined with the junk bond industry and banks investing in junk bonds, chasing yield, okay, to make money. So, those two things together broke down the system and what happened was banks, the FDIC went into banks and said, we've got a lot of, your balance sheets are a mess, your ratios are out of alignment, we want you to call your notes and recapitalize. So, banks actually started calling owners up and saying, you have to pay us in 30, 60, 90 days. Pay off your mortgage. Well, okay, but when all the banks are doing the same thing, there's a problem. So owners were foreclosed on, they dropped their prices to liquidate their buildings. They filed bankruptcy and all this real estate ended up coming onto the bank balance sheets and the FDIC came in and said, okay, well now we're going to set up a corporation called the resolution trust corporation to liquidate all this stuff, flush it out. Okay? Establish the market bottom and then we'll come out of it. So, in 08', a lot of people were thinking that was what we were going to see. We had finance and demand induced recession and so we expected to see real estate defaults go back to the banks.  The banks would take the properties over, the FDIC would come in and say, push the stuff back out on the street, market down, recapitalize, and then we'll get back to business, they didn't do that. Instead what they did was they came in, they closed the really sick banks and they, a lot of them were set up as M and A deals. So they had other banks buy out the sick banks to dilute the balance sheets and then clear off the sick real estate. But what they ended up doing was they did a lot of forbearance agreements and they extended loan terms so that they could keep the owners operating the assets even through all the pain of the recession. So as a result of that, we never saw a real mark down or mark to market on all those properties. They weren't quote and quote recycled.  So if the idea was to keep all the real estate and everyone's in all the owner's hands, you saw fewer deals on the buy side and you just saw these owners just barely making it, holding onto these things, waiting for the economy to start to pick back up and for demand to come back into the space so they could recover the valuations and ultimately refinance the bank off the asset or sell the asset and recover or just break even on it. That takes a little while to do that. So I think that's one of the reasons why we saw this sort of longer cycle this time. I mean, a lot of people were looking at Trump's administration and his policies for continuation of this. I do think that was part of it but I think what we really had was, we had a long recovery and it took us until 2013 to really jump into an expansion phase from 08' but it wasn't like a jump, you know, it, it was kind of a slog to get there.  James: Yeah. You can see 2013 onwards and other property, the caplets not comprising a lot more compared to, you know, from 2008 to 2012 right.  Jeremy:  Yes. James: So do you think that's gonna happen in this market cycle where somewhere there's going to be, you know, FDIC going to come and do inaudible15:42  Jeremy: I don't, I kind of think that's not going to happen because if you follow the logic here with me. So country gets invaded, government shuts down the economy. People are forced out of business. Landlords default on mortgages. Banks have to foreclose on property. FDIC makes them and says; now you got to recycle the buildings. So if I'm the owner of the building that went through that whole horrendous experience, I'm looking at the government going, “Well, wait a second, you shut down the economy and now you're telling the bank to take my building away. How can you do that?” So I'm not sure that's the outlet on this one, I think the outlet's probably going to be just a market and it's going to be buyer demand and what buyers are willing to pay but it's going to be driven by two things over the next couple of years. One is who your tenant is, their stability and their durability to pay rent and number two, the lending resources that you have available.  My concern about this situation we're in is banks freezing lending, to attempt to reduce their exposure to the degradation of net operating income? That's a concern because they take the debt liquidity out of the market, when that happens, that slows transaction velocity down considerably and that will bring pricing down and that's, you know, if you're buying and that's the time to buy, when money's hard to get, when it's easy to buy and money's hard to get. James: Would you still be you have a challenge in terms of lending, right? The terms may not be as favorable during the peak tomorrow. Jeremy: But it's interesting, I think the lenders, when we go through recessions, they get picky about who they lend to, having relationships with your lenders is critical so your local banks are extremely valuable. They want to know that they've got strong hands operating these assets and using the money correctly. So those are elements to be very focused on in maintaining those relationships. It's the national banks that concerned me with inaudible18:30, so working on a deal last week and well as Fargo said, well, we're not doing it, we're not doing the deal, we're not lending period. Just shut it off.  James: Yeah. Except for multifamily, I presume all of the asset classes, like very less in terms of landing multifamily. I know Fannie and Freddie still doing it even though they have additional visa requirement, which is good for multifamily, but I think it's just hard to do any deals anyway right now because no one knows what's the price. Jeremy: What's the price? James: And no one knows what the cap rate, I definitely know Capita has expanded, right? Definitely not compressed as they, from what, two months ago but how much it has expanded, right? And who's going to take the risk of, what are they buying? Right? No one knows.  Jeremy: You get back to good old fashioned cash flow and I always tell people, there's always a market for cash flow in any market cycle, there's a market for cash flow. So the key is figuring out who the tenants are and in multifamily, where do they work? It amazes me when I talked to multifamily investors about their properties, I asked them, when your tenants fill out credit apps, you know, our rental application, you get their place of business, wherever they work, you should be cataloging every single employment center in your portfolio and finding out which industry sector they're in because you could, I mean for all you know, you might have 60% of your tenants working in the cruise industry. You just don't know, you know? So having an idea of what your economic footprint is by income diversity in your multifamily properties is really valuable information to have.  James: Yeah. Even multifamily near to airports, right? Where there's a lot of workers from airports and the airports are shut down, right? So that can be a bigger issue as well in terms of demographic, right? So yeah, we never really looked at it because, you know, but I recently looked at, it looks like we have really good diversified in my portfolio, but I don't think so many multifamily bias have done, you know, demographic analysis until now, recently, right?  Jeremy: Yeah, it's good to do.  James: Now, it's like, okay, you better know who are your dynamics.  Jeremy: Yeah, you want to know who is paying rent. So I have a question for you.  James: Sure. Jeremy: Okay, so multifamily deal making, where the deals are, where are they going to be. One of the things that KC Conway mentioned on his webinar that fascinated me was he said he expects to see hotels converted into multifamily housing and he also said, we may even see cruise ships become multifamily housing.  James: I just heard recently, I mean in fact, this morning I was listening to a podcast, by Robert Kiyosaki and Ken McElroy, who are talking about 10 years ago, someone was pitching this idea, let's convert the cruise ship into a moving condos and sell the condos as an apartment. I mean, if you heard about that, I was like, wow, really? Maybe that's coming back.  Jeremy:  It may, these crew lines they're going to have surplus cruise ships, aren't they?  James: Yeah, absolutely. Jeremy: I don't imagine demand will drop off for a considerable period of time and hotels.  James: Yeah. So let's go back to the tenant demographic analysis and the economy. Right? So, looking at what happened 2008, we did some kind of a benchmark with what happened then and what happened now but what happened now is basically the service industry and the people who want a paycheck, you know, paycheck to paycheck, right?  People are living paycheck to paycheck, they are the biggest impacted because everything stopped, right? So the people who have higher pay, who are basically living in A class or you know who are working on a normal, you know, highly paid job, they are working from home, they didn't lose their job, right? So, this is my thinking, right? My thinking is just like, yeah, I mean people, once everything opens back up, you know, the paycheck to paycheck is going to go back to work, right? But there's also going to be a global economy slow down because now this virus has impacted almost every country, right? The whole economy, the whole global economy is gonna slow down. So, my thinking is, you wanna multifamily class B and C, you know, where people are living paycheck to paycheck, they're going to go back to work and they might be a quick recovery, but people want class A, who are, you know, who are working from home, the company is going to have impact, right? That's where the Dow is going to have impact cause now your corporate profits going to come down because now you have a global economy slow down, right? So, I think even though now you're saying this is just my thinking, maybe we can just, you can figure it out whether you're thinking of the same, the class B and C is gonna is getting impacted right now. Class A not so much, but it's going to swamp later on, maybe in the second part of the W right? Or the V in the second.  Jeremy: Well it's starting already. If you look at, office work and employment and you read the news, you're going to see that companies that didn't lay off office workers are reducing their salaries.  James: Okay. Jeremy: And you're hearing about owners saying, you know, the owner of the company saying, okay, I'm going to waive my salary, everybody in the organization is going to take 10, 20, 30% pay cut with a floor, you know, not to be no less than. So following that logic, you're taking all that money out of circulation and it's not being spent, of course that slows things down so the question is how long you, you definitely have a slowdown, that's, inevitable but the second piece is how long those people stay employed? And are they able to get through this and operate at a level that with those cuts they can sustain operations and then start to pick back up when spending returns and it's going to be incrementally returning.  It's not, it doesn't just, this won't be a light switch so we're talking about W's and then I talk about it's a dimmer switch, you know the dials so you go and you can flip the switch in the room and the lights come on, but there's the round dial, you kind of push the knob and then you can adjust the, I think we're going to be doing that for a little while, turning the lights up, turning them back down, turning them back up and it's going to be partially in response to people hearing about hotspots or breakouts of covid until we have a situation where majority of the population has been exposed and we've processed the virus or we have a vaccine to manage the virus.  James: Yeah but this is going beyond the virus, right? So, I mean maybe the vaccine is already up in the next, you know, eight months or one year. I'm sure people are saying one to one and a half, but I'm sure the administration is going to cut a lot of red tape too, you know, well that.  Jeremy: Hey, they built a nuclear bomb pretty fast, right? They had to. James: Yeah because you know, during these times, everything is all hands on deck, right? So all the processes get thrown away or you know, there need to be some kind of leadership happening there but I think it's happening, but I just think the second order effect right on the overall slow down on the job losses on how the world is going to change. Right? And how it's going to impact commercial real estate. So, well, what do you think would be impacting a commercial real estate? Let's say, you know, you have experience in office, multifamily, retail. So let's go to each asset class and see, you know, what do you see it?  Jeremy: All right, retail, very, you know significant damage to retail. Okay? I mean, department stores are pretty much talking about the end of their era here this may be an extinction event for the department store.   James: So do you think if today we have a vaccine, what would the impact be if you already have a vaccine?   Jeremy:  If we had a vaccine, for the department stores? James: Yeah, for the department store for the retail industry. Jeremy: I don't know that they really cut, they survive longer, but this is devastating for them when Walmart, Target, Costco and Amazon are seeing 25 to 35% revenue growth, all that money is flowing, you know, flowing in different directions than Macy's and Lord and Taylor and Nordstrom's.  So the department stores are definitely, they were weak coming into this, this is terrible for them. General retail, you know, I think quick service restaurants like with drive-thru's come back very quickly, the drive thru is kind of an ideal service model for this environment where we'll be going through and coming out of and the cost hits a point, it's a low cost dinner, you know, dinner for the family, to go to Chick-fil-A, you know, and grab, you know, feed the family for 50 bucks. So quick service comes back quickly, I think some of the other sectors where we've got, you know, experiences, you know, it's interesting, services and experiences were really kind of the bellwether in this e-com impact on retail real estate but they're getting hammered and so you're going to have some service and experience spaces return, they'll reemerge from this and the weaker ones, they just won't make it back. They won't make it back, so it's, I think in restaurants, full service restaurants, maybe half of them come back from this. It's just going to be very difficult to reopen all those.  James: But don't you think someone is definitely going to buy that space? Somebody else that have the same vision as the previous owner. I mean, maybe the original owner is no more there, 50% have gone right because they kinda lost it. Jeremy: You're going to see new operators come in and it's, that's, look restaurant, full service restaurants, they can be recycled and you're going to have operators say, well we, you know, we made it through, let's open another location cause it's on sale. We can get the equipment and refurnish it and open and go. So there'll be opportunity there for new operators.  James: So the industry is not going away, it's just the operators are disappearing.  Jeremy: The operators that disappear, it's a slow recovery for them. It's a difficult recovery and the real estate; there will be some good restaurant real estate that will become available. It will happen. Okay, so I know retail, that's sort of my take on it. I wish I did. James: Are you seeing a lot of distressed sellers right now. I mean are you doing a lot of transactions right now?  Jeremy: No, not right now. I think it's early.  James: Yeah, I think it's still early. I think people are just riding through their cash flow. Just walk up and watching and nobody knows what's the price and nobody, not many people are distressed.  Jeremy:  Yeah. Multifamily, I agree with you, if you segment by class ABC, you look at the populations that are renting from those units. The A-class seemed to be more insulated because they tend to be professional, high-income office working  James: Those that work from home as well, right? Jeremy: Yep. The B's and C's tend to be more service level and they've got a lot more exposure in this environment. So, you know, they get laid off quickly, but they get rehired first because they're lower cost, the office workers, they get hit later and they, you know, they're slower to come back. I mean, what's that rule of thumb, if you've got, for every $10,000 in salary, it takes you a month to replace, to find a new job. James: This new ratio. Jeremy: I know this new ratio if it's true, but I've heard that. So the bigger question that I've got on multi-family is the suburban versus urban, we've been in an urban cycle the last 10 years.  James:Yes. Jeremy: And I've been. James: Explain that a bit, what do you mean by urban cycle? Is it people building more multifamily in the urban areas?  Jeremy: Yeah, it's the live, work, play, lifestyle, millennial, you know, millennials and baby boomers wanting to live in the city near where they work, walkability people that live in rich environments. There was a quote that I was reading today from Goldman Sachs and they're saying, they're expecting a flight of millennials to the suburbs from urban markets and it makes sense.  What does this suburb offer? Less density, more value for what you rent, you know, you may be working from home more so they may be making decisions about, well I could have done a one bed but I have to get two bed cause I need a home office, that's a consideration to take into or keep in mind and then there's just the overall comfort of, hey, you know, I don't want to be in downtown New York right now. That's not a good place to be, I want to get out to the burbs and just have some more space. So I think the idea of urban versus suburban is it's going to be a big topic here over the next four or five, six years.  James: Got it. So I think that's very prevalent in where you are, but you also buy in Texas, right? I mean, from what I see in Texas, everything is a suburban mid-rise apartment, not in style apartment. So I mean there is very people I know who buy apartments near downtown, even though they [33:34unclear]  Jeremy: Sure James: It could be depends on which market you're talking about.  Jeremy: Yeah, I agree with you on that. In Northeast, we have a very clear urban, suburban experience. You know, Texas, you guys just keep building rings.  James: Yeah, we have a lot of land here, right? So everything is garden style and [33:58unclear]  Jeremy: Yeah, as long as you got the water.  James: Yeah but there could be like tertiary market where it could be more interesting. I'm not sure it would be less density or not, I mean everything seems to be less density for me in Texas just because we have a lot of land here, you know, people move around pretty well, everybody, I guess so. Jeremy: Yeah, you got a lot of roadway.  James: Yeah. Could that also mean that there's a lot more investment coming from the coastal city to places like Texas or Florida or where  Jeremy: It could mean that, yeah. What's interesting about the last cycle nationally, the suburbs have been kind of out of fashion. So, it didn't have the same run up in value that the urban markets did so I started to see that the last couple of years where investors were starting to look at suburban markets and say, well, I can still get some yield there, so I'm going to go invest in the suburbs. This is now going to really bring that conversation to the forefront.  James: Yeah, I think that's why I like places where you are like Boston is called like gateway cities versus you know, places like where I inaudible35:17. Jeremy: Yeah. James: Suburban market, I would say so. Jeremy: Yeah. So industrial, I'm still bullish on industrial. I think we'll see some dislocation in distribution and port industrial, I don't know what the future looks like with China. I mean we import a lot from China through Long Beach and it goes to the inland empire and I think we're going to see some of that shift to other port markets as we start importing from other parts of the world but overall with consumer behavior shifting, it had already started before this. If there's been anything that's going to accelerate the demand for industrial spaces, it's this because you're going to have ghost kitchens, you know, restaurants that basically just, they're like catering kitchens that they just run full time, they have no seating and they deliver food, you know, basically meal prep. You're going to have more demand for online consumption and distribution and shopping, that's going to put more pressure on existing in industrial inventory, I sort of thought the industrial market was peaking in the last couple of years, but that may not be the case, there may still be some runway in that market.  James: So when you're talking about industrials, basically, warehouses where, you know, products made and distributed, I would say, right? I mean, I can see that with more manufacturing going to be coming in house right now, I mean, with all this, that's one shift that's going to be permanent.  Jeremy: Yeah.  James: Everybody knows that, right? So, do you think industrial would be the asset class that most beneficial from that? I mean, because I'm looking it’s going to be a lot more manufacturing factories coming here; I just don't know which assets.  Jeremy: Yeah and that's really, I mean, if you remember doing 102 in CCIM and we talked about basic employment. James: Yes, absolutely.  Jeremy: As soon as you start to see manufacturing coming back into the United States, that's going to be really good thing for our economy.  James: Correct.  Jeremy: It's going to really boost multifamily, a lot and it will help retail and it'll help office but you know, it's really a value, it's a power source, it's an economic engine for importing money into economies, local economies. So, I think industrial overall in terms of, if you're on the buy side, it's like you want to be really careful about industrial exposure to China, but the rest of the industrial story I think it's going to be a good place to be, I think it's going to be a good asset to own.  James: So, is industrial equaling to manufacturing factories.  Jeremy: Yeah, so manufacturing, flex R&D, so that's research and development, Warehousing, distribution, bulk storage, cold food storage. Just there, you're going to see that stuff cranking.  James: Cold food storage  Jeremy:Yeah, cold food storage. James: This is not the same storage that we are talking about now? Jeremy: No, we're talking about like freezer facilities that type of thing, yeah. James: Why is that? Jeremy: It's because people are going to be continuing to demand home delivery of food and you got to store it somewhere.  James: Well, I never seen one when I drive around, so I don't know.  Jeremy: Kinda funny looking, you know, if you, sometimes on the outside they're a little funny look.  James: Now, it's going to be looking nicer because it makes more money. So how do I position myself or anybody else listening? Let's say if I want to take advantage of this manufacturing coming in house right now. I mean, how would a commercial real estate investor should be able to position?  Jeremy: It's a good question. So you want to, you know, the main thing about manufacturing is you want to find buildings that have good characteristics for an efficient manufacturing operation. So grade level, you know, Celeste slab on grade buildings with ceiling heights in them that are preferably 16, 18 feet or higher, that have good loading access, you can get a truck, tractor trailer, multiple tractor trailers in and around the building to access it, plentiful parking for labor so typically you're gonna see, you know, one parking space per 800 square feet is kind of the building code standard for manufacturing warehouse but depending, you know, power supply, how do you have enough power coming into the property and utility services.  So you could probably, you know, you're probably going to be able to find some outlier properties that you can bring into that market and you know, convert over and, I mean, the other thing is you might want to be looking at retail and converting that to distribution, zoning is restrictive for that because typically municipalities don't like to see industrial uses in retail locations but you may end up seeing big box or department store or retail buildings that have those characteristics of what I just described cause a lot of them do being converted to that use, it could be manufacturing or it could even be distribution.  James: So which market should we be looking at to position ourselves for this kind of industrial asset class?  Jeremy: I think you can look at pretty much any market in the U.S, I think this is not a specific market, now if I, you know, I think you do this, you to follow that formula in any market in the U.S now if you want to do a, let's look at the demographics and the economic drivers in a market. You want to look for population growth, employment growth, that it's, you know, if there are more people move in there and live in there and it's growing, that's a good thing because people demand space.   James: Yeah. Well I mean the other way to look at it also is like, if there's already a manufacturing hub in that city or state, you know, that could be a good expansion place, right, if you find some assets around it. I guess  Jeremy: It could be, the other thing you're going to see are companies trying to find manufacturing redundancy. So if they've got a facility that goes down in their location, they can continue supplying from an alternate, which is, it's really interesting cause it's sort of contrary to what Gordon Gekko would tell us to do, right? Build shareholder value, become more efficient and be more profitable, do things faster and increase volume and the way you do that as you bring everything into one location and make it as streamlined as possible but now we're looking at a situation where, and this has been going on in manufacturing for a little while, customers demand redundancy because if there's an event or a disruption to a location, they want to make sure that they still have a continuity of supply chain.  And so they're getting what they need so that's even more important now than it ever was. So we'll see some of that. So I think you gotta kind of get into that world and talk to people and find out you know who's looking at bringing things home who isn't, and then start to think about the properties that they could be using and you might even have the opportunity to go out and pick up some land and put something on the land for someone.  James: Yeah. And I'm sure there's going to be some kind of government incentive to do that, right? Because now the government wants lot more manufacturing.  Jeremy: So I think so. Yeah. So office. James: Yeah, let’s go to office. Jeremy: You working from home, if you had a choice today to go to the office or work from home, which would you prefer? Is the question and I got to imagine a lot of people are saying, I'd love to get back to the office. I miss talking to people, socializing that's missed and I think the home office thing is great, but boy, when it's home officing and schools are shut down, it's really hard.  James: That's a good point.  Jeremy: This sort of experiment is, you know, forced home officing can companies do it? We've got a variable that shouldn't be there and that is the kids, the kids should be in school. But it's, I think people go back to the offices, but they, you know, offices may end up seeing a similar thought, which is, hey, instead of piling everybody on the train or getting their buddy into the center of the city to work, maybe we need to have a smaller office in the center of the city and then have some suburban offices, spread people out, improve their commutability and create redundancy in our workforce.  You know, with people being closer to their smaller offices. So I think that, I'm hearing that a little bit in the market now with people I talk to, I think that's something to keep an eye on that. So again, I kinda like the suburbs, I think there's an opportunity in the suburbs and office may actually be a suburban opportunity here.  James: Got it. So what you're saying is people are just going to go back to office. I mean, it's not going to die.  Jeremy: I don't think it dies. No. I mean if anything, you know, we've gone from, in the office space, I mean you see these offices where people are like in their benching and I mean I went into an office building and people were waiting in line to get in the bathroom, in an office building and the reason is that the building was built for more or less one employee for every 300 square feet and when companies come in and they go, we're going to be more efficient, we're going to get 1 employee in for 135 square feet, all of a sudden the bathrooms are overloaded, the parking is overloaded and that the buildings, it's too dense. The amount of people in there, it's not designed to carry that density. We'll throw a pandemic in the mix and the idea is for us to be six feet together in this world we're in right now. Maybe we're going to see that, you know, that office demand change where you know, I want to be able to shut my door to an office, I don't want to be at an open bench next to my colleague sneezing on my keyboard, you know, so that, I think we would go back to the office.  It's important, the nature of the office is to bring us together and for us to work and collaborate, share ideas, but also to have deep work time, need to be able to do deep work and we need to go somewhere to do that. So maybe it's not about packing as many people in and forcing them to assemble and work together rather spreading them back out a bit, providing some, you know, some work from home, some work from the office days, maybe your home two days, three days in the office. So I, this is a fluid one, but I think we go back to offices. I think it's how we do work. We can do it this way, you know, we can talk to each other, but it's not as fast in my opinion, information slower than it is in person.  James: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I was talking to a doctor, Glenn Mueller, right? So I'm sure you know him, right? This was like two months ago when we're looking at all of the asset class and office was the opportunity it was going from, into the expansion cycle. Right? So, and I asked him the same question, what about people working from home? He said, well, you know, humans are social creatures, you know, they like to be together, right? And you're absolutely right about communication and deep work and all that, just so hard to do working from home. Right? So I think people are going to go back to the office, especially after the vaccines is [48:47unclear] right?  Jeremy: Yeah, I will make this prediction. So just like after 9/11, the U S government moved in security and defense. This is a healthcare crisis; I think the next decade will be a healthcare decade. We tend as people, we tend to overcompensate for a trauma that we just experienced so that we never have to feel it again and so I think we're going to see when we rebound from this, healthcare will come back very quickly because there'll be such a backlog of demand for everybody else who's not suffering from Covid but has a knee replacement or you know, an oncology treatment and everything, they're going to be there, they need to get in for services but we're going to have a situation where healthcare is going to be at the forefront of government decision-making, investment and in development of protective and planned responses to anything like this coming again. So I see that space is a very fascinating space to watch and get involved in as you see us start to come out of this and these discussions come to the forefront.  James: So how should we prepare for that opportunity too?  Jeremy: Well, it centers around the hospitals and if you follow a hospital strategy, they've been merging with each other to become more efficient as they struggle to operate profitably in a very narrow margin environment and one of the things they've done is they've expanded by going out into retail locations and creating outpatient and urgent care services that essentially become a feeder for the hospital. So I expect to see more of that because that's a lower cost way for hospitals to expand. Hospitals are very expensive and they tend to be constrained geographically because of where they were cited. You don't see a lot of just new hospitals being built around the country. They tend to have additions put on them. So as a result they expand out into multiple locations that become more like a hub and spoke model. So I'd be looking at anything in the healthcare space in the next several years. I think it's just going to be really good place to be.  James: So are you talking about like medical offices or you're talking about labs or life sciences Jeremy: Medical office, yes, I can't really comment on life science, I don't follow it very closely, it's so specialized, but I probably should know more being out of Boston cause it's just a center for it, I hear about all the time. I just kind of go,"...oh yeah, labs, ugh"  But, that I, anything with healthcare, I'm loving it in the next several years.  James: But even on medical offices, I mean, the tenants have a long lease terms, right? I mean, how would that increase the valuation of the property as a real estate investor? One is, we look at the cash flow, the other thing we want to look at value increase as well. Jeremy: Well, there's, it's durability, yeah, that's one of the great things that medical office offers you is 90% and higher renewal probability rate. The you know, historically it's been a recession, quote and quote proof, investment class, not this time. I mean, I was looking at data last week 42,000 healthcare professionals lost their jobs, were laid off. I mean, you go, what, no way.  James: Why is that?  Jeremy: Why is that? Because hospitals aren't allowing for elective procedures, urgent care only. So they're laying people off, it's a fiscal nightmare for the healthcare system right now. So they, that's short term, okay? There was the version, what is it, version three of the P we're on now that just came out and there's billions of dollars going to the healthcare system, which is a good thing.  James: Got it.  Jeremy: Good thing. So short term healthcare is volatile that may be the opportunity to pick up some property, I think that over the next decade it's going to be a wealth builder.  James: Okay, so you mentioned about some of the healthcare which is located in the retail centers and all of that become like a hub and spoke model. So that's like single tenant healthcare, right? Compared to a multi-tenant. Jeremy: It could be single tenant, could be multitenant. You might have a medical office building with four practices in it. Sure. Yeah.  James: Got it.  Jeremy: Yeah, I think those are really good investments.  James: Okay and it could be offices converted to medical offices.  Jeremy: Yeah, it could be. Yeah, I mean it's, I just looked back at 2001. I mean if you were in the like the metal detector, you know, security business in 2000, probably not really interesting. James: Right, like 2001 [54:48unclear]  Jeremy: Yeah, so that's what I see here. I'm like, this is going to be interesting, there's going to be an overreaction in healthcare. I think there's going to be opportunity there.  James: Could there be like construction of healthcare facilities like medical offices or do you think just buying new medical offices.  Jeremy: I think there could be development, we're early on that. I don't know that's anything that we're going to see probably for three years. I'm just following the trend, I'm kind of following how people are, what they react to and then where they go and for us to come out of this and not have a national discussion about how are we going to be prepared for the next pandemic.  James: Yeah. Jeremy: Yeah, it's going to happen and money is going to flow there and, and there's going to be a lot of pain and people are going to say, I don't want to do that again.  James: Yeah. Jeremy: I don't want to hear about ventilators next time. You know? And so, I think that presents an opportunity for investors to get in front of that now. James: Yeah. I'm sure for the next three, four years people are going to say we didn't want to have that healthcare problem again. Right? And I don't mind paying for this. Right? Some kind of thing. It's going to be a lot more investment. So I think medical offices would be a really good investment.  Jeremy: Yeah. I liked it before this and I like it even more after that. James: Awesome. Good. So what about other asset classes like self storage or mobile home parks and you know, what else is there, warehouse I think is probably part of the industry.  Jeremy: We talked about warehouse, hey, you know, self storage, kind of a maturing asset class in this last cycle but I think it's still very viable and it's a good place to be. You are going to have dislocation of residences the next couple of years so self storage is going to be valuable to people who need to store their belongings, mobile home parks, I mean, look, everybody needs a place to live and if it's affordable, you know, it's gonna work. So again, there I think I see an opportunity too. James: Got it. I think multifamily; we did talk to her in detail about it, right? Do you think there's going to be a lot of crash happening in the single family space because there's so much short term rentals, people bought a lot of short term rentals as second houses and probably right now there's no short term rentals happening.  Jeremy: Yeah, that's not so good like kind of the Airbnb, I mean you're sort of in the hospitality business there so yeah, those folks are gonna need to convert to long term or sell.  James: Correct. So I think there's going to be, you know, a lot of people, you know, giving up their second short term rental houses that way to the banks. It could be a lot more houses available I guess. Right?  Jeremy: Yeah. That could be an opportunity, you know, if you want to buy and rent or buy in rehab and then resell that space could have some volume coming through. Yeah.  James: Okay. Got it. Interesting, yeah, I mean, did I miss out on any asset classes? I think that's the more important. Jeremy: I think we got most of them.  James: Yeah and do you think we are going to be much better in terms of economy wise? Just because there's going to be a lot more base employment, which is manufacturing happening in the U.S. Jeremy: I'd love to see that, I hope our companies can come home with that and who knows, I mean with the unemployment rate being what it's going to be for a while and the wage growth that we didn't really see in the last 10 years, and we just lost on that, maybe there's an opportunity for us to employ people that otherwise we couldn't have a manufacturing basis to make it make sense. I don't know. I'll leave that up to the manufacturers to figure out.  James: Got it. So, I didn't want to forget one asset class, which is hotels, right? I'm not sure whether we went deep into hotel. So that's going to be, I think the hotels are really suffering right now.  Jeremy: Oh, it's terrible.  James: Right now.  Jeremy: When I hear 9% occupancy rates.  James: Yeah. Jeremy: That's bad news.  James: Yeah, that's crazy right now. So hopefully hotels survive through this downturn, I guess. Right?  Jeremy: Some will, look, we still need hotels.  James: Yeah, I know.  Jeremy: We still need them so they're the strongest, best located hotels will come out of this thing, others, you know, they'll fail and they'll either get bought at the discount and with a lower basis they can compete in the market and grow back out or you're going to see them reused for something else.  James: Got it.  Jeremy: That's maybe the multifamily conversion.  James: Yeah, if the city allows it of course, then they can be a lot of studios and efficiencies, I guess and I've seen that happening in some cities and some projects. All right, Jeremy, thanks for all the value, can you tell our audience and listeners how to get hold of you?  Jeremy: Sure. So you can check out our stuff on CREinvested.com, that's C R E I N V E S T E D.com, I've got an investment course there, that is available and if you ever want to chat with me, you can email me @jeremy that's JEREMY@creinvested.com  James: Yeah, Jeremy is a wealth of knowledge. I mean, he's also a senior CCIM instructor, right. So that's a lot of knowledge if we came in, absolutely, you will be a really huge value to connect with you and just to learn from you. So thank you very much for coming on the show.  Jeremy: Hey, thanks James, it's a pleasure. James: Alright.

Life doesn’t always lead to Happily Ever After (or Happily For Now) - like a romance novel. However, romance novels tap into something deep in our heart and psyche - keeping us turning the pages to see just how it’s all going to unfold. You can use the lessons from fiction to craft your own personal love adventure. This week we’re talking to Mara Wells, author of Cold Nose, Warm Heart - about the craft of romance writing, to learn what fuels our real-life desires. You’ll avoid the mistakes that not only would destroy a good plot line - but that also would send a perfectly good relationship down the tubes. And you’ll get some ideas for how to keep the passion flowing when you’ve moved past seduction - to doing each other’s laundry. As always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it!  Sponsors: Find a quality therapist, online, to support you and work on the places where you’re stuck. For 10% off your first month, visit Betterhelp.com/ALIVE to fill out the quick questionnaire and get paired with a therapist who’s right for you. Resources:  Pick up the new Mara Wells Book, Cold Nose, Warm Heart - and support independent booksellers! (or you can pick it up on Amazon as well) Check out Mara Wells’s website for more information about her novels. FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE) www.neilsattin.com/romance Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Mara Wells. Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. What do we know about what drives the human heart? And not just in terms of love and connection but also in terms of desire. There are any number of ways to approach this question and I wanted to try something a little bit different in today's episode because I happen to be good friends with someone who is an author in the romance genre. And I thought what would be better than to dive in to romance writing and to figure out what that can actually teach us about how we operate as humans. And if there weren't something there, it wouldn't sell millions and millions of books every year and so there's clearly something there that romance writing taps into, and so I wanna mine it for all it's worth with today's guest. Her name is Mara Wells and she is the author of the new book, Cold Nose, Warm Heart, which is the first novel in the Fur Haven Dog Park series. Neil Sattin: And I gotta say, it's actually the first bit of fiction that I've read in years because I'm mostly reading non-fiction for this podcast and I really enjoyed it. It was just such a great escape for me to take a couple of days and dive into the world of Fur Haven Dog Park. And we'll find out a little bit more about what that means but is as usual, we will have a transcript for today's episode, which you can get if you visit neilsattin.com/romance or you can text the word Passion to the number 33444 and follow the instructions. And I think that's it. Let's just dive in. Mara Wells, thank you for joining us today on Relationship Alive. Mara Wells: Thank you so much for inviting me, Neil. I really appreciate this opportunity. Neil Sattin: You're welcome. You're welcome. And as I was talking just a moment ago, I had this sudden hesitation like, "Is it okay to call this a romance novel?" Is this a romance novel, what you wrote? Mara Wells: It is absolutely a romance novel. Neil Sattin: Okay. [chuckle] Mara Wells: The definition of a romance novel is that you have a guaranteed Happily Ever After or at least Happily For Now. In the industry, the HEA or HFN, and if it meets that criteria, the guaranteed happily ever after ending and that the relationship is the primary focus of the story, it's a romance. Neil Sattin: Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. Mara Wells: It's a big, big world. Neil Sattin: And I was wondering because as I was talking to a friend of mine about this interview, I was like, "Yeah, this... " Like, it's a romance book, it's got sex and romance and relationship and she was like, "Well, there are a lot of books that have that." So we were sitting with this puzzle of like, "Well, what does make it a romance book versus just like a good book that has sex and heart-centered interactions and steamy interactions and... " So is that the working definition right there or is there more that defines it? Mara Wells: Yes. A romance novel has a relationship as the primary focus, a romantic relationship as the primary focus of the story and then we have a guaranteed happily ever after ending or at least happily for now. Within the novel, there's some expansion in the definition. Sometimes we see the happily ever after is guaranteed at the end of a series if we're following one couple through a series but usually it's contained within the one novel. Neil Sattin: Got it. Yeah, and I think part of what fueled me as a reader was I knew that was gonna happen and I was wondering how it was gonna play out. So there's maybe a bit of a beauty in that when you pick up a book like this where it's like, okay, you know that it's probably gonna work out, it's gonna work out on some level. You may not know all the twists and turns, and discovering those twists and turns is part of what keeps you going. Mara Wells: Right. We read for the twists and turns. We read for the journey and I think I've... Before I was a romance writer, I was a romance reader and so for me as a reader, there's comfort in knowing what the ending is going to be and so I'm actually able to enjoy that journey more. And to see the ways in which it plays out individually for every different couple. Neil Sattin: Now I hadn't thought about this at all but just hearing you say that makes me wonder if there's some element of that when you actually meet a person that part of why you can meet someone and within a few seconds you can make a snap decision about whether or not this person is gonna be a good person like a good fit for you, romantically. And that's not always true, right? 'Cause we can meet people where we don't necessarily think that and then they surprise us because we get to know them a little better and we uncover the things that draw us to them. So it's not true 100% of the time but I'm thinking back on any number of relationships that I've been in and wondering if that's part of it. You meet someone and you're like, "Oh, something's gonna happen with this person and now let's uncover the twists and turns that get us there." Mara Wells: Right. If we think of story and then also the story of our own lives as being focused on the journey rather than the outcome because unlike fiction, the outcome in real life isn't guaranteed. But being able to focus on the journey makes that process enjoyable. Neil Sattin: Right. Well, in terms of the happily ever after or the happily for now ending, I'm not really sure what that means for the genre. It wouldn't surprise me if... It's just the stereotypical... Like the movies, they never show you what happens after the people get together and that's so much of what we face in our lives is we live that romantic journey that brings us together with a person but then there's the laundry, I can't remember who said that but. Mara Wells: [chuckle] Right. And I think that's actually one of the reasons why series are very popular in the romance genre because we live in the same world with the characters so, for example, in my series, book two goes on to follow... Caleb is the main hero of book one and he has a brother Lance who becomes the hero of book two and another brother Knox who becomes the hero of book three but Caleb doesn't go away. So in book two when we're invested in Lance and Carrie's relationship, Caleb and Riley from book one are still around. And we get to see how their life is playing out as they become secondary characters in the series and I think that's some of the delight of the series' experience for readers and actually, I'm experiencing it as a writer now, that we do get to see what happens afterwards and who is doing the laundry. [chuckle] And how are they balancing all of the challenges that they had as a couple to get together. Did they actually come up with a working solution so they can stay together? And, of course, the answer in romance is they did. [laughter] Neil Sattin: But you get to see that in an ongoing way... Mara Wells: Yes. Neil Sattin: In which it... That's cool. Yeah. Mara Wells: Yeah. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Mara Wells: So you get to check in with them and who's pregnant now and now what's happening and... In my series, you get to see the dogs again and you get to see that that happily ever after is really actually happening. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Wow. Now I really wanna read book two. I love how in Cold Nose, Warm Heart I love how the dogs play a role from the very beginning. You've got Caleb who enters this building and... Can I reveal a little bit of the intro of the plot? Mara Wells: Yes. Absolutely yes. Neil Sattin: So Caleb walks into this building and he's on a mission to save the family business, resurrect the family business because it's gone through this huge upheaval. And so he walks into this building that his grandfather has potentially offered him and he's just noticing how it's fallen into disrepair and there are just all these things wrong. But he's also assessing it for its potential as an economic engine to revitalize the family business and then at some... One of the very first things that happens is this cute little poodle runs over to him. So he's scratching the poodle and even that is a source of irritation for him because there aren't supposed to be pets in the building but there's this poodle that's running over to him but he's good with dogs like any good hero would be, I would think. Mara Wells: Yes. Neil Sattin: Right? The villain kicks the puppy, the hero scoops him up in his arms. And so, he's cuddling the puppy and at the same time thinking about how he's gonna have to fire the building manager, this horrible dude named Riley Carson who clearly is not doing his job. And then this beautiful woman runs down the hall to recover her escaped poodle and they get into this bantery conversation and in the end I think he asks her out for dinner. I might be remembering this not quite right but he's like, "We should get dinner." And she's like, "You don't even know my name." And he's like, "Well, what's your name?" And she introduces herself as Riley Carson so... And that's where the plot just goes from like, "Oh my god," for me, like, "How am I gonna deal with this?" I'm reading a romance novel, 'cause that's where I started, to like, "Oh my god, what's gonna happen?" I had that initial like, "How is this gonna work out?" Mara Wells: Right. And she says, "And you are?" And he says, "I'm here to fire you." Neil Sattin: Right. Mara Wells: And so that starts off their... The trope is enemies to lovers, right? They're on opposite ends. He wants to take the building down and rebuild it as luxury condos, she wants to preserve it and restore its art decor history. Both of them can't have their way. How will that work out? And it occurred to me when you were describing the book, about how he's coming in to assess the building and to think about it, its potential for the future. Isn't that a nice metaphor for relationships as well? Neil Sattin: Right. Right. And with maybe the interesting twist of that being with a building, there is the sense of like, "Well, if I had to, I could tear this sucker down and start over." If you enter a relationship thinking, "Alright, I'm gonna tear this sucker down and start over." [chuckle] Neil Sattin: It might not be the best start. Mara Wells: I think some people do. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: They do. That's for sure. That's for sure. Mara Wells: But he has to learn that that's not the best way forward. There's something beautiful about the history. There's something beautiful about the cracks in the terrazzo and the crumbling facade that's worth saving. Neil Sattin: Right. Right. And I think one thing that's really lovely about the plot of your book is that they do negotiate that and navigate that really beautifully in a way that makes it feel like change happens pretty organically, the way that change does happen in real life 'cause it's not that people don't change but when you wanna introduce wholesale change with a person, that's a recipe for challenge and disaster. People resent that. And so, that initial tension, "I'm here to fire you," and, "I'm gonna tear this whole place down," that introduces that same level of conflict and resentment. "Well, wait a minute." Like, "That's not okay. You can't take this place that I love and that I manage and just toss everyone out and... " Like, "That's not gonna work." Just like in real life. Mara Wells: Yes, I have a controlling belief in my own life that you can't change people but people do change, so the opportunity to change comes and people will take it or they don't but you can't force it on them. I think what's also interesting about the building as a metaphor is that Caleb is also not wrong. That place is deteriorating and there's the population, it's a 55 plus building so they're all senior citizens, with the exception of Riley, the building manager. And they're living in a building that the elevator is about to break down, that the plumbing is very inconsistent, that there's a lot of hazards for them living there. So it can't just go on as it is. Neil Sattin: Right. Mara Wells: It is deteriorating. He's not wrong but she's not wrong either. And for me that was the fun of the book, was how can they both... How can they be on opposite sides. And how do they come to understand. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Mara Wells: Yeah. Neil Sattin: Yeah. So that makes me start to wonder about the general principles of romance writing and how we start extracting even more about what fuels us as humans. And I wonder if you can give us some insight into how those problems are so important to the structure of the form of romance writing. Mara Wells: Yes. So my thinking about romance changed drastically a number of years ago when I read a book by Jayne Ann Krentz called... Oh, of course my brain just blanked on it. Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, and it's a sort of academic treatise about the romance genre in which she argues that romance is inherently feminist because what it's ultimately arguing for is a balance. A Yin Yang balance by the end of the book, that nobody has more power than anybody else in a relationship, in the world that's created in the book, that ultimately all romances the arc is toward balance and partnership, equal partnership. And I think that's a really beautiful way of thinking about it. [chuckle] There are many tropes and almost inside jokes in romance at this point and one of them is that the hero has to grovel at some point. He has to be taken down a peg. [laughter] Mara Wells: And that doesn't happen. Again, anything I say about romance isn't true of every single romance but there are definitely trends that we see. But again, it's not that he's being taken down, it's often that men do have more power, especially in particular societies and time periods that the stories might be happening in. And so, it's not that they have to be taken down to be taken down, it's that if we're going to have an equal partnership, there has to be an acknowledgement of who has advantages and who doesn't, and a balancing of power. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And how does that stack up for you in terms of the differentials in power being part of what creates the tension versus wanting to end up at a place that feels more balanced? Mara Wells: So I think the driving force in writing romance for me has been that there are these disparities between them, there is this unequal balance. Caleb is from a very privileged family, Riley is not, something as basic as that, but ultimately they desire each other. There's some sort of attraction that they just can't shake. And there are moments of rejection where it's like this just can't work, this person is not for me but it's that desire that brings their attention back to each other over and over again. So I'm not sure what I'm saying there except perhaps that the logical reasons we might choose to stay or not stay with somebody are overridden in romance by this attraction, this desire, this wanting, and the wanting is for everything that other person is. And often, the other person has some aspect of life that the hero or heroine is lacking. Mara Wells: So Caleb has this money, this privilege, this utter confidence that anything he does will turn out right and Riley needs that. But Riley has connection and love and family, and Caleb doesn't and he needs that. So the physical attraction is, again, I think a metaphor for attraction to the missing parts in their own lives. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and that is super true in real life for sure, is that we often connect with other people who illuminate aspects of ourselves that are underdeveloped or that we really want or need in our own lives. And at the same time, they can highlight the places where we might feel incompatible or like, "Well, that person, they don't have strong ties with their family. So how could I be with that person?" And I think that represents some core conflicts that people... Inner conflicts that happen in the choice of a partner is navigating that question of like, "Well, okay, they have these things that I don't have and I want that or they don't have these things that I do have and that frightens me." Yeah. Mara Wells: Right. And the choice to move ahead in the relationship anyway is always a risk because as much as you might long for something that's not in your life, it's also not in your life for a reason. Right? Some fear perhaps is holding you back, some hurt from the past has shut down that part of yourself and so you can long for it and be afraid of it at the same time. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Mara Wells: So it's attraction and repulsion can be happening in the same moment. Neil Sattin: In the same moment. Yeah. Mara Wells: Yeah. And then... Neil Sattin: Yeah. And you see that in the characters in your book. I'm thinking about the way that they are, even in this initial scene where they are sussing each other out and then you also get a glimpse into their inner monologue around the proximity of their hands on the dog's back. They're both petting the dog and their fingers are a mere inch apart and how many times does that happen where you're in that moment of wondering like, "Well, what would it be like to just cross the distance?" What would it be like to actually follow through on an impulse and at the same time to have all those inner resistances coming up like, "Well, here are all the reasons why I shouldn't do that." Mara Wells: And I think we, in real life, we're socialized that certain things are acceptable and not acceptable in interactions and we navigate our lives very carefully. And I think the promise of romance is that when you reveal who you really are, your partner loves you. That it's unconditional acceptance of the good and the bad. And of course, it's the bad that we're hiding for most of the book. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: Right. Mara Wells: But the worst has to come out at some point so that the person can be loved with that as part of the understanding. Neil Sattin: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Or else it sets you up for a disastrous book two of the series. Mara Wells: Yes. [chuckle] Mara Wells: Yes. The new couple can't be getting together while the couple from the first book is breaking up like that. [laughter] Mara Wells: That is not acceptable. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. Just out of curiosity, when would that be acceptable in a romance book for a couple to part ways? Would it ever be acceptable? Mara Wells: That is the type of relationship that happens before the book starts. So we might have heroes or heroines who are coming out of a bad relationship or a relationship that wasn't quite right for them but we don't... Yeah, I'm trying to go through the library in my head but again, the promise of romance is that happily ever after. Neil Sattin: Right. Mara Wells: So even if a couple does break up over the course of the story, they are gonna get back together. Neil Sattin: Right. Right. So if you're a long time listener of the show, you might understand that that kind of ending, I might feel a little jaded about that at the present moment. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: And Mara, you... We've known each other a long time so you know that as well. And in fact, that was maybe my hardest, the hardest thing for me in the book as just someone who's been through a divorce is appreciating every single aspect of the journey. And then there was something about the happily ever after that I loved. It actually brought tears to my eyes as much as I hate to say it but it did and at the same time I was like, "Damn." Like, you went all the way there, in those last couple of chapters and I was like, "Did it have to? Did it really have to?" But maybe someone like, where splitting up is slightly less fresh for them would appreciate that a little bit more. Mara Wells: Right. And the other thing is that romance is in many ways a fantasy of what... It's a fantasy of equality and equal partnership, right? Neil Sattin: Mm-hmm. Mara Wells: It's not claiming that this is real. It's not saying, "This is how all relationships work out." It's saying, "Wouldn't it be beautiful if this is how relationships worked out? Isn't this something to aspire to?" Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, so there's that danger, I suppose, in... There's the way that it can fuel us, that ideal, and I think that vision is such an important aspect of how we construct our relationships, holding on to an ideal vision, and at the same time, being willing to accept imperfection as part of real life versus what happens in a fantasy novel. Mara Wells: Right. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, it's a tough balance but the beauty, I guess, of a book, is that you can preserve the fantasy of where romance takes us, which is... Yeah. Mara Wells: Right. And the... You know, the first step of change in the real world is imagining that change can happen. And so, I think, in a lifetime of reading romance, that's what I'm imagining, right? Neil Sattin: Mm-hmm. Mara Wells: That that change is possible and equal partnership is possible, and that there's hundreds of thousands of ways for that to play out. You know, Caleb and Riley's journey is not your journey, but it's a journey. Neil Sattin: Right, right. What have you loved about... What drew you to romance as a reader, I guess, first? And then I'll be curious to hear about that as a writer, 'cause you haven't always been writing romance. Mara Wells: I started reading romance when I was about 10, which is probably on the young end of the spectrum, for reading romance. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: I know, I was thinking about that, actually, with this book. I was like, "Well, it's about dogs." And I couldn't find my copy, the first copy of the book that you sent me, I couldn't find it. I have the sneaking suspicion that it could have ended up upstairs in my daughter's room, 'cause it's about dogs, you know? So, I should go look a little bit more thoroughly [chuckle] for that, probably. Mara Wells: Yes. Luckily, we don't outgrow our love of dogs. So, I started young, but I think it was piggybacking right off my love of fairy tales. I would dress up as Cinderella for Halloween for almost every Halloween of my childhood. So, I loved fairy tales a lot and romance novels seemed to me to be the grown-up version of fairy tales. And I think you can see a little bit of Cinderella in Cold Nose, Warm Heart. Neil Sattin: Yeah, absolutely. Mara Wells: Yes. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: Now that you mention it. [chuckle] There's even a fairy godmother. Oh my gosh, that's funny. Okay. Mara Wells: Yeah. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: But there is no wicked... I'm just trying to think. There's no evil stepmother, really. There's the absent mother, which may be is a little bit, right? Mara Wells: Right, there's the absent mother. And I think that I personally don't believe in evil people that are just purely evil. And so, the... Caleb's family is evil. His dad is evil, right? Neil Sattin: Right, right. Mara Wells: But even they have redeeming qualities. Nobody is the villain in their own story, so they might appear villainous in someone else's story, but they have their reasons. They've made the best choices they can make. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, so important to recognize 'cause I think that is a part of how we victimize ourselves, is by projecting someone else being evil onto them, as opposed to looking for, "Well, what was their intention?" I don't think I've ever done that with the Cinderella story, is like, well, what... You know, the stepmother, she was just trying to get those dresses made for her daughters, she was just... I mean, she did say some pretty cruel shit to Cinderella, you gotta admit, but... [chuckle] Mara Wells: Yes. Yes. Or not... Yeah. No one is at their best all the time. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: Isn't that the truth? Yeah. So, it being an extension of that, that's what drew you in. And then, what drew you to writing in this genre? Mara Wells: I've been writing for a long time, and I had published a young adult novel many years ago. And I was just feeling really frustrated, and I had written this book that had gotten many, many beautiful, beautiful rejections. [chuckle] Mara Wells: And I had done one more round of revisions and sent it to my agent, and she said, "So, what are you gonna work on next?" And I just started crying, I was like, "I don't know. I feel like I've been knocking on this door for so long, and it's never gonna open again." I had my shot and that was it. And I said, "I can't even stand to read anything right now, except romance novels. I'm just binging romance novels, many, many, many per week." And she said, "Well, why don't you write a romance novel?" And I was like, "Oh, ha ha ha. I'm not gonna ruin my one true escapist thing that I do to escape the world. That's my hobby, that's my relaxation time. Why on earth would I turn that into my job?" Mara Wells: But she kept talking to me, and she convinced me to do it. And that's why I had been avoiding it for all these years, was I thought if I became a writer of romance, I'm going to read them differently, more critically, more craft-oriented. But what I found is that I have the same joy in writing the romance novels that I have in reading them. So, I'm really excited that she pushed me in that direction because writing has become more joyful for me now. I enjoy figuring out the twists and turns along the way, and what made me a romance reader is really feeding the romance writing, as well. So, I've been telling people we get advice, as writers, all the time, to write what you know, which I think is pretty terrible advice 'cause we have a pretty limited worlds, [chuckle] most of us. [chuckle] Mara Wells: But I think "Write what you love" is very good advice. Neil Sattin: Yeah. And that comes through. One, I have to say your skill as a writer comes through in reading the book. There was never a place to me that felt awkwardly worded or there were places where I could tell that I was like, "Oh, that's kind of an inside joke." Or "That's Mara being clever." [chuckle] Neil Sattin: And I liked it. I loved it. And so your skill as a writer definitely comes through and for it being your first book in this genre, like that... I think your love of the genre also came through, your knowing it backwards and forwards, in the way that the journey was really useful for me. Mara Wells: I'm glad. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Mara Wells: Yeah. Neil Sattin: I have a confession to make, which is that this is the first romance novel that I've ever read cover to cover. There are plenty of romance novels, mostly in my teens, I would say, and early 20s when it was really hard to access anything that was remotely erotic or sexual. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: Where I would skip to... I'd find a romance book and I'd skip to the good parts that I never... I don't know what happened in any of those books. I just know that who fucked who basically and so it was nice, actually, to sit down and really enjoy the whole way through which was... It was cool. Cool to experience that. What do you think... Let's talk about the erotic for a minute because we're talking about longing and attraction and... What is it that fuels eroticism in a romance novel and yeah, makes it compelling in that way? What... Something that turns us on. Mara Wells: I think it's the longing. I think it is that moment of not knowing if you should touch fingers or not, that plays out later in the sex scenes. So that the thing that makes the sex scenes very satisfying is tension and longing that lead up to it. So I would say to your younger self, who was just skipping to the erotic scenes like, You missed out. [laughter] Mara Wells: You missed the part that made... Neil Sattin: Oh, poor guy. Mara Wells: Yeah, that made those scenes more powerful because they are finally a release of this tension and a culmination of this partnership and that ultimate integration of the opposites. So I think it's the wanting that makes having satisfying. But that said, there are... In romance, we call it heat levels. There are varying degrees of heat levels and so it spans from the story ends with kissing, right? That once they kiss, we know that they're gonna have their happily ever after and we never see more than that, that's one end of the spectrum and on the other end, we have erotica. And the romance novels fall all along that spectrum of heat. So I will say that when I decided to write romance, I was nervous about that part of it. [chuckle] And I read all over the heat spectrum. I enjoy all of it but I didn't know as a writer where I would fall comfortably. Neil Sattin: Yeah. And so was that just a discovery process for you or did you have a target heat level or... Mara Wells: Yes. I did not have a target heat level, I just thought, "Well, let's see how it goes." So I got to the part in the first draft where I knew that I had to write that scene. That scene. And at the time, my father was living with us because he had been having some medical problems and I tend to write early in the morning, and he's an early riser and he kept... He would wander through the room that I was working in and talk to me, and I was like, "Oh, I can't... I can't write this scene." [chuckle] Mara Wells: Thinking that my dad's gonna walk in any moment, right? I just can't. I can't. [laughter] Mara Wells: So I went... [laughter] So I put it off until I had some time and I went to a coffee shop that's in my neighborhood and I sat there. I have this couch I like to sit on and I wrote it, and I was pretty happy with it. I was feeling very proud and then I looked up and I'm sitting in this room with music playing, surrounded by a bunch of people and I had been so much in my own little bubble world there that I... I just remember feeling so hot, I know I must've blushed dark, dark red and I texted my friend Kait Ballenger who's been a really beautiful, wonderful mentor for me on this romance journey and I was like, "So I just wrote my first sex scene in a coffee shop and I don't know how I feel about that." And she texts back, "Welcome to Romancelandia." [laughter] Mara Wells: "You're gonna find yourself writing them in lots of places." [chuckle] Neil Sattin: That's so funny. And even the... For me, I think about what runs through our head potentially when we're at a coffee shop so there's that level and even the beautiful aspect of your father walking through the room or that fear of what that's like to feel. How many parents of young children are trying to find time to be sexual but the kids could bust in at any moment. And you're in the bathroom with the shower on and the door locked and hoping that they don't pound for too long 'cause that would be child abuse, right? If they're like, "I can't get in." Never been there, so... Mara Wells: Yeah. [laughter] Neil Sattin: Yeah, so that's some of the real life aspects of it as well. In terms of determining the heat level, is that about language or... Mara Wells: Yeah, it's about specificity. And so I think that I landed in a heat level that I... This is not a technical term, but I call soft focus. So we have some idea of what's going on, but I haven't really zeroed in on every breath, every touch. It's kind of I picture the camera pulled back and we got kind of a fuzzy lens on. Neil Sattin: Right, which leaves some up to the imagination. Mara Wells: Yes, yes. And so, you can go less heat than that where it's even more fuzzy, I guess you could say, and then other novels get much steamier and more specific in what's going on. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I actually have another friend that... Someone that I've known even longer than I've known you, who writes... I wonder I should chat with her, she might consider it more erotica than romance, but it's all based around aliens so it's people having sex with aliens. And I imagine you have to get fairly explicit and it still leaves a lot up to the imagination once you're dealing with alien body parts. Mara Wells: [chuckle] Yes. Neil Sattin: And I'm taken back... I actually wanna just mention that I feel somewhat vulnerable and laid bare with that talking to the young part of me, and that is interesting for me to just sit within this moment, that sense of how much what fuels attraction and those maybe moments of culmination where you're actually kissing someone or you're being sexual with someone. How much of that is the longing, the tension that leads up to that moment? And this is a classic challenge for... And it's not really necessarily a gendered thing, but some people are just sexual and they don't actually need all of that build up. They're able to talk about sex, think about sex, and then let's have sex versus there are other people who are more focused in the tension, the build up, the longing and that just needs to be there in order for there to be fuel for the actual coming together, so to speak, to be desirable. You don't get there without the tension and the longing, for those people. Mara Wells: And then what happens when you're in a long-term relationship? Neil Sattin: Right, right. Mara Wells: And that tension and longing has been satisfied. Then what fuels desire? Neil Sattin: Yeah. Mara Wells: Then I end the book so the rest is for you to figure out. [laughter] Neil Sattin: Right. Right, I don't have to figure that out. Yeah, that's why those characters become secondary and tertiary characters. You just get to assume that they're doing whatever it takes to make that happen. Yeah, but that is the big challenge of any long-term relationship is how do you fuel passion and juice? And so often this falls into what we were talking about a few moments ago where people land in different places and it's very common for someone who needs tension and longing to end up with someone who doesn't. And so how do you do that, how do you... How do you cross worlds? And it's a challenge for both people to figure out 'cause sometimes that person who needs the tension and longing, it's helpful for them to figure out what do I need to do in order to show up so I can just be in a sexual experience with my partner that didn't require sexy texts for three days to get us to this moment? [chuckle] Neil Sattin: And vice versa. Where the 0-60 in 0.3 seconds partner can be like, Alright, what do I need to do to... What does get my partner in the mood? What helps them, what helps fuel their desire, so that they'll meet me there 'cause it's so easy for me, it may not be for them. And it's actually not a problem with them, it's just how they're wired. They're wired differently. Mara Wells: Yeah, and the romance answer to that is both people are right. And the relationship is about negotiating that. How do you accept that about your partner and integrate that into your life together? Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah, I like that for a real life answer as well. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: That both people are actually right and so if both people are right, what does that mean? That forces us to get creative as opposed to making the other person wrong and then forcing them to change, which was one of the very first things we were talking about. Forcing them to change, being not the most sustainable approach. Yeah. Mara Wells: If you wanna stay together. If you're looking for a way to break up, it's probably fairly efficient. [laughter] Neil Sattin: Yeah. Mara Wells: But this also makes me think about... Romance has had a history of readers being shamed for their reading choices and I think in the past few years, the conversation has really changed where romance writers are pushing back and saying, What's shameful about female desire? What's shameful about fantasy, right? Why do we call it a guilty pleasure? Why can't we just call it a pleasure... Neil Sattin: Yeah. Mara Wells: To read. And I think that that extends beyond reading choices. I think that in relationships as well, you can't have a guilty pleasure or a secret desire that you're keeping from your partner and have that work out long term. And so I think part of romance's job is to take the shame out of whatever desire people feel because again, ultimately, that happily ever after is guaranteed, and the partners have to accept each other exactly for who they are. So whatever is revealed over the course of the novel is accepted and loved. And isn't that a beautiful thing to think about happening in the world as well? Neil Sattin: Yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that. There is that place where... And shame is kind of the... What's the word I'm looking for? Shame is the challenge of someone who maybe is a little kinky, where something being a secret or being taboo does fuel them, does create a little bit bit of charge and juice for them, and shame is the shadow of that. The potential for it to feel shameful because most people aren't turned on when they're feeling shame. They're looking for a way to escape from that feeling of shame. So yeah, I hadn't really... That hadn't occurred to me, that romance in and of itself could be a way to reduce the shame that people feel around different kinds of desire and as a way of experiencing differences as being acceptable and accepted. Yeah. No wonder I liked your book so much. [laughter] Neil Sattin: Yeah. I think it's instructive. As I was reading it, maybe because there are aspects of it that are when you read it, you know. I knew, "Okay, this is when... I can see it coming. This is when they're gonna kiss for the first time," and it's like... So even the knowing, there was something about it that... Yeah, I feel like in this moment, could actually be more instructive for a person to read than reading a book that talks about how you might need tension in order to fuel longing in a... You might need tension and wanting and desire, and it's enough to know that that's true, but then to actually read a romance novel, I think it gives you a sense of how that actually plays out and how that works. Mara Wells: Right. And do you know that they're going to kiss? And you can feel that kiss coming, and it's that anticipation doesn't ruin the fact that they're going to kiss. It sweetens it. And so you keep reading, not because you're like, "Maybe they're not gonna kiss," but because they are and you wanna see how it goes down. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Mara Wells: Right? Because every first kiss is different and every moment, every intimate moment that people share together, there might be certain moves or phrases that various scenes have in common, but ultimately, every moment is unique. And that's what draws us to it, and it's not... I don't know, it's not... It's predictable, but not in the negative sense of that word. It's predictable in that sense of anticipation way. Neil Sattin: Right. Right, that phrase, "How's this gonna go down?" That actually came up for me several times as I was reading where I was like, "Alright, how's this gonna... I know that something... This is gonna work itself out somehow, or this, I know this twist, or I know there's a twist coming. What's it gonna be like? How's that gonna go down?" And yeah, it really kept me engaged as a reader and I loved escaping for... Yeah, it was the better part of... I guess it was most of a day and then the day before or a half of the day before where I was just like... That's the privilege of being able to read as part of my living is I could just set a day aside to do that. It felt good. I might have said a guilty pleasure, but I'm not gonna say that anymore. Mara Wells: There's nothing guilty about it. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Mara Wells: I just heard a statistic that romance readers read four times as many books as other types of readers. So I think you can see the... You got a little taste of what drives that market. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, I guess I did. Mara Wells: Right? Neil Sattin: What surprised you about your book? As you were writing it, knowing that there's a form to the genre, what... Yeah. Mara Wells: This isn't always true, again, but my book is in a fairly standard point of view, which is alternating between the hero and the heroine, third person close. And I had never written a male point of view before. Neil Sattin: Wow. Mara Wells: I just decided to. And so I think that I was surprised all along the way at how much Caleb had to say and his attitudes, and I guess it shouldn't be surprising because obviously he came out of my mind, but it's like, "Oh, he's just a person too. There's nothing scary about writing a male point of view." [laughter] Mara Wells: But the thing that absolutely surprised me is in the first scene where we meet Riley's grandmother and I found out that she's still in love with her ex-husband, 'cause I thought they were just straight up enemies. That I hadn't been planning on, but then it turned into a delightful thread in the book. I enjoyed writing the senior citizen romance quite a bit. [laughter] Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah, this is one of those things where I'm for you, listening, it's so hard for me to not do any spoilers or plot reveals here because there are so many beautiful moments that I would be sharing with you right now, Mara, because I just loved how they went down and also some of the... 'Cause it's not all sweetness. There's a lot of sarcasm, there's a lot of people digging each other in ways that are affectionate, but also quite cutting at times. But the whole way along, I felt very uplifted at the same time, that people were being really honest with each other. And so I think that the temptation in being like, "Oh, this is a romance novel, that's the fantasy of romance," is to feel like the interactions somehow don't feel real, but I didn't feel that way at all, as I was reading. In fact, you're talking about Caleb's point of view, the male point of view. That's another place where it felt very seamless to me, where I was never like, "Oh I would never, as a guy, I would never think that." Everything he was thinking, I was like, "Yeah, of course, that's exactly what I would be thinking in that moment." [laughter] Mara Wells: That's funny. What you were saying about the conversations feeling real and the interactions, it reminded me of something that the writer Richard Peck said in a workshop that I took with him one time. He said, "If you're gonna have a ghost in the scene, you better describe the wallpaper." [laughter] Mara Wells: When you have a fantasy element, you have to... The real world of the story has to be absolutely grounded, and I think that that happily ever after isn't believable if everything has gone smoothly and people are all sweet and nice to each other for the whole thing, that doesn't... Right? That doesn't feel real. So the satisfaction of the happily ever after is that it did feel real and they had real problems, and yet somehow managed to transcend that to be together. Neil Sattin: Yeah, that's I think what part of what makes it inspiring, is that it feels real along the way. Mara Wells: Yep. And I do describe the wallpaper. I describe the building a lot, so... [laughter] Neil Sattin: That's true. Now that you mention it, that is true. Mara Wells: Yes. My great love of South Beach architecture comes through, I think. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, and I felt like I was there, even though I've only been there once or twice in my life, but it was very vivid, but not in a burdensome way. Some people really get off on reading a lot of scene and setting stuff, and I am not one of those people. I'm like, "Give me the... What's happening? Okay, enough, there are some flowers. What's happening?" [laughter] Neil Sattin: Thought you balanced that really well. Yeah. Mara Wells: Thank you. Neil Sattin: Well, Mara Wells, congratulations on your first book being out. And in our understanding is that it's doing really well. I saw a lot of really good reviews on Amazon. It's called Cold Nose, Warm Heart. If someone wants to find out more about you and what you're doing, what do they do? Where do they go? Mara Wells: They can go to my website, marawellsauthor.com and sign up for the newsletter. And then I'm also on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Neil Sattin: Awesome. And how many... Mara Wells: Marawellsauthor. Neil Sattin: How many books are coming out in the series, at least as far as we know at the moment? Mara Wells: As far as we know at the moment, there's three. So book two is called Tail for Two, it comes out in July, and Paws for Love comes out March 2021. Neil Sattin: Awesome. Congratulations. Mara Wells: Thank you so much. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I'm really excited for you. And actually, before... We gotta address the dog thing for a minute. Mara Wells: Oh, okay. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: So first, why dogs? Why did you personally make that choice to bring dogs into the mix? Mara Wells: Well, my mother was a dog breeder, so I grew up with the dogs as part of the family. And I've had dogs all my adult life, and I just... I've been thinking a lot about the relationships we have with animals, especially our pets, and how they're not humans. They aren't humans, but they are still part of our lives, really important part of our lives and part of our families, but they don't speak and they don't act human. [chuckle] And so it's this weird... I'm just fascinated by the interspecies aspect of it and how passionately we can feel for dogs because they aren't complicated human beings with other motives going on that we don't know about. They're just love. And if I'm gonna write a romance novel in which unconditional love is an important part, who better to model that for us than dogs? Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's hilarious. I hadn't really even considered this until this moment, but you know this and actually a lot of my listeners know that part of what led me to relationship work was my prior life as a dog trainer. So we both have that actually, which I hadn't even really thought about a lot, but... And part of that journey for me was that very thing that you just mentioned about how much dogs are about heart and expression of heart energy. And so that was something that I really appreciated in the book. The dogs and their heart and their personality, they wove in in ways that also seemed very authentic, and I liked that. You just described it beautifully, the way that they're woven into the fabric of who we are, it felt natural, it felt more... There was more texture, really, for me in what I was reading because those beings were included as well. Mara Wells: Thank you. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Funny, what an interesting thing that we have in common there. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: Yeah. And so it's a series that revolves around a dog park. Mara Wells: Yes. Neil Sattin: Yeah. What keeps that interesting? [chuckle] Mara Wells: Well, [chuckle] there's an infinite number of dogs and the people attached to them who can come through the dog park. So it gives me a very rich tapestry to pull from, I guess, of characters for upcoming novels. And I think it's a pre-test of people. If you have a dog, then you love the dog and the dog loves you. So you're pre-approved as a decent person, deserving of a novel, perhaps. [laughter] Neil Sattin: I love it, I love it. Mara Wells: Yeah. I was looking for some sort of premise that has the potential for new people to be coming and going. And when we first moved to South Beach, the first place that we made friends was at the dog park. Neil Sattin: Yeah? Mara Wells: Yeah. And so the first parties we went to in South Beach were hosted by people we met at the dog park. And so I know that it's a very fluid and welcoming community. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. And you point out well in the book the ways that when you know people that way, there's so much that you don't know about them because generally you have those conversations that are about your dogs and things that impact your dogs, but... And I like that uncovering that happens in your book about how those people also get to know each other in a more deep way, which is really sweet to follow. And so funny in real life when you're like, "Yeah, I've been hanging out with you for three years and I don't know anything about you." I've had those conversations with people before where it's just like, "Yeah, we were dog park friends." Mara Wells: Yep. Neil Sattin: And then here in Portland, Maine, where I live, we had this dog park that was known all over... There were some national public radio stories about it. I think it was very early in the dog park era that this dog park existed, but unfortunately it was also in a historic old cemetery so the people who were the preservationists of the cemetery, and maybe the big wealthy houses that surrounded the cemetery, at a certain point decided that they didn't like hundreds of people showing up there with their dogs. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: So that actually went away. There are other dog parks in this town that I haven't explored, but that used to be such a community center. So I think anyone who has a dog who's done the dog park thing will totally relate to that as well. Mara Wells: Yep. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Well, Mara, thank you so much for being here with us today on Relationship Alive. This was definitely outside of my wheelhouse to have a conversation like this versus going straight at someone's relationship advice, but this is good stuff for all relationships. I'm really glad that you came on the show and for the joy of reading your book as well as the instructiveness of reading your book. I hope people check you out. Mara Wells: [chuckle] Ah, thank you, Neil. Thank you. This was really fun. Thank you for inviting me on your show. Neil Sattin: You're welcome.

The concept of "work-life balance" has got to be one of the most meaningless, wink-and-nod, overused career tropes out there. Right? Some say it is all about living life and finding a job that fits into that life while others claim it is about figuring out how to shape your life around your career. In fact, so much has been written about finding work-life balance that the term has become virtually meaningless. A simple search will serve up countless books and endless blogs that give you tips and tricks to magically find inner peace. Of course, as everyone knows, it isn't that simple. While some folks in 9-5 jobs might find structure in hours and expectations that TEND to be more predictable, consulting can often be all night/all day affairs with shifting timelines and demands that can rapidly lead to mental and physical exhaustion. There's also the reality of what consulting can do to personal relationships. Ask around. There are plenty of divorced consultants out there. So what on earth could anyone possibly add to the endless amount of words already spilled on the subject of work-life balance? To be honest, I didn't think we could really add to the body of knowledge on the subject. I was wrong. In the latest episode of the Consultants Saying Things video podcast, we take on Work-Life Balance from the perspective of the consultant. Spoiler alert: We didn't even agree on even the existence of the problem, let alone what to do about it. In this episode: - What the heck is work-life balance? Does it even exist? - How do people manage time? What are some tips to help? - Do we take on too much work? How do we prioritize? - What are some tips for staying sane and avoiding burnout? - What are the generational differences in approach to work-life balance? - What happens when Shashi says Phil is old? Add your thoughts to the conversation! Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to the YouTube Channel! Check out more business and technology topics at http://www.consultantssayingthings.com

In this episode, we discuss: Family law matters can be resolved amicably through mediation The process of divorce does not need to be economically devastating Mediation provides an opportunity to minimize your children’s exposure to the divorce process   Rhonda: Thank you so much for joining us for another episode. I am so excited to be able to introduce you today to Alex Jacobson. She is the founder of Jacobson Mediation Group out of the Greater Chicago area and she's a former divorce lawyer turned divorce mediator. What a mouthful that is. Thank you so much for joining us today. Alex: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Rhonda: Well, let's talk a little bit about what prompted you to move in the direction of building your practice around mediation. Give us a little backstory on what led you to where you're at today. Alex: Certainly, so I was a divorce lawyer for the past 12 years. I practiced at one of the premier divorce firms in Chicago doing all matters related to divorce and matrimonial issues, so that included child custody, property division, child support, spousal support, premarital agreement, postnuptial agreements, all the above. And as my practice grew, it became increasingly apparent that even in the highest complex situation, matters can be resolved outside of the courtroom. And I just found that after practicing at that level, that once you are in the courtroom, you really can't unring that bell. Once people start slinging the mud, it's difficult to go back to co-parenting or to reach an agreement that is reasonable for both parties. And once the judgment is imposed upon you by a judge, it may or may not meet the needs of your family. It may or may not be narrowly tailored to the needs of your family. And so, I just simply found that alternative dispute resolution was just a better way to resolve these types of cases. Rhonda: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, talk to us a little bit about, I mean obviously, there's a lot of different ways that mediation can be used throughout the divorce process. Are you, tell us a little bit about what you're seeing as far as trends? Are people moving in the direction of mediation only? Meaning you've got that neutral third party who is facilitating the conversation between the parties? Or are you, and or are you also seeing where people have attorneys and then they're utilizing mediators to be able to close the gap on our particular issue? Alex: So, I'm seeing both, in fact, depending on the issues that are being addressed. So in the first instance, I would, I would say that parenting issues often can be resolved with the parties without their attorneys being present because quite simply they are the key people that know what their children need and how to craft an agreement that meets the needs of their children, their extracurriculars, the extent that their child has a special need. They are the two people and the two people primarily who know what those needs are and who can speak to those issues and in the best way. When it comes to financial issues, they're oftentimes one or both parties who really are not equipped to handle the financial issues on her own and really look to their attorneys to provide them with the guidance that they need. And my role is to facilitate the discussion and help navigate that conversation. Alex: And, and whether attorneys are involved also depends on what phase in the case mediation comes in. So for example, cases may or may not begin sort of with a bang and there are some temporary issues that need to be resolved immediately. So, who's going to pick up Tommy from soccer practice? Who's going to pay for school tuition this month? Who's going pay the mortgage bill? These are immediate issues that the people need a band-aid for immediately while they're working on a more global resolution of all the issues in the case. So those immediate issues may be addressed with just the parties present without attorneys involved. And then once everyone has done their discovery and they're prepared to address all the issues in the divorce case, that is when the attorneys may come in and participate in the process. Rhonda: So I love one of the things that you said, I just want to touch on, because I see this in the women that I'm working with, which is, there are some of those immediate things that do need to be resolved or taken care of the day-to-day stuff. Like you said, who's going to pick up so-and-so from soccer practice and let's talk about who's going to pay the bills, you know, or which bills they're going to pay. So, if somebody is listening today and they're feeling frustrated because they perhaps feel like, you know, people aren't listening to them like, hey well we'll get to that later, we'll get to that later. Cause I mean the divorce process in and of itself, there are certain kind of key milestones and sometimes those things don't get talked about traditionally until later. What are some of the things that women could say, "Hey listen, this is an important concern or issue for me," so they can really get or bend the ear of their attorney and or mediator? Alex: Well, I mean and certainly in Chicago and I believe in many other courts, all parenting issues must be mediated before a judge will provide a hearing or a trial date. And judges also it's permissive for them to send financial matters. So, I would impress upon these women to, or anybody, to seek the opportunity, typically in mediation from the outset. So, they can address the immediate issues without going through the periods of frustration, without having them be resolved. And you know, the uncertainty is really unnerving for all people and quite frankly, that spills over to the children. And so, it's best for everybody involved if you can avoid that uncertainty and sort of assign these tasks as the process is going along. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, let's transition into talking about a couple of key things related to mediation. And the first thing that I know that you wanted to share was around the fact that family matters can be resolved through mediation. So, talk to us a little bit about that. I know we've kind of highlighted that a little, but let's take a little bit deeper. From your experience, and now the good news is you kind of have been on both sides of the litigation side and now you've moved into more of the mediation side. You know, talk to us about how those are, how some of those things are getting resolved. Alex: Certainly. So, I mean, there are very few cases in the family law realm that are so clearly black and white and there are many shades of gray. And it's just a matter of appealing to what's important to the two people who are crafting the agreement. And even people, we're, we're taping this on a Monday. So even people who couldn't agree that today is Monday after working through the issues in their particular case, can ultimately reach an agreement that it's Monday. It's possible and it's possible to do it in an amicable way. It's possible to do it in a way that, through the process or sitting in the same room together or alternatively they're sitting in separate rooms together and the mediator is shuttling between them and, going through all of the terms that need to be addressed in a way that is productive with, avoiding the mudslinging and it's, and it truly is possible. Rhonda: Yeah. So, what role would you say, I mean, so the parties, right? I mean, if they're using mediation as their primary method, need to be organized and come to the table with, completing assignments or conversations or whatever that the mediator’s kind of helping them to kind of work through. Who is kind of identifying the agenda? I mean, so the, for the people that are considering going through mediation, what kinds of things should they doing to make sure that they're as prepared as possible for those mediation meetings? Alex: Certainly, that's a very good point. I mean, the mediation can only be as productive as the party preparation for the process. So, at the outset, I as a mediator find out what issues are being discussed, whether it's only parenting issues, whether it's financial and parenting issues. And in order to make the process most productive, the parties need to complete their financial affidavits. They need to know what their income situations are, what their, what their other spouse's income situations are, what assets exist, what are their expenses, what are their expenses now, and what are their expenses likely to be in the next few years. I mean, the goal is to anticipate as many possible contingencies as you can so you can address them in agreement, in the agreement to avoid litigation down the road. So, I set the agenda, I give the homework and timelines for the homework to be completed in order for the process to be the most productive possible. Rhonda: Yeah, I love that. And I think, just having some clarity right, on you whose role is helpful through this process because people don't know what they don't know. Right? They don't know what they don't know and if they've never been through that course before, and/or if they're considering mediation as an option then I think those are some of the things that are helpful for them to know. Alex: Certainly, and, and knowledge is power, and knowledge is being more informed certainly allows somebody to participate in a more meaningful way in the process. And that's critically important, especially for a spouse who, may not have been well versed in the finances of a family prior to the process beginning. And look, there is no shame in that. I mean, when you're living together and you're married, there's a division of labor in the home and the fact that one parent may not have been responsible for paying the bills or knowing what their savings, where their savings was even located, let alone how much existed. That's, that's a normal arrangement in a, in a family. And that by virtue of a divorce, you know, changes. Everybody needs to be informed. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I have said on many of the previous podcast recordings the formula for having financial confidence is the knowledge plus the experience because you can't have one without the other. Right? And so, if they maybe have the knowledge but don't have the experience, that may impact their confidence. But as they go through this process and ask questions and they take an interest, hey, you know what? You can gain the knowledge; you can gain the experience. Ultimately at the end you're going to come out having more confidence as you step into that role because not only will you be forced to do it, I guess is the bottom line. I mean, whether you want to or not, you're going to have to step up and, and take ownership of the finances. And so, we can use that divorce process as a great way for women to navigate through that and kind of gear up for having to take some of those things over on their own. Alex: Right. Absolutely. And I would also point out that for the most part, mediation is a voluntary process. So, whereas in litigation, you might be in a circumstance where you feel like one party may feel like they're being shielded from obtaining the necessary information to be informed. And in mediation, the documents are being produced voluntarily. The financial information is being exchanged voluntarily so that everybody is armed and prepared to participate in the process. And you avoid that. Ideally, you're avoiding the feeling of being in the dark. Rhonda: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, let's move on to talk about, I always say divorce isn't free. So, the question becomes how people want to spend dollars to go through the process. And one of the things that you had mentioned was that divorce does not have to be just economically devastating for people. And so, talk to us a little bit about that. Alex: Certainly. So, I mean, when you're in the courtroom a whole host of things happen. At a minimum, each party is more likely than not represented by counsel. There are court appearances that are meaningful and court appearances that are less meaningful, but nevertheless you're incurring fees for all of them. Court appearances can be delayed, they can be canceled, they can, and every single time your attorneys need to prepare and get up to speed in order to, to be productive in, in the courtroom. In the context of mediation, you are streamlining that process. You may or may not have your attorneys present. Everybody is prepared to proceed on a set day. And ideally because the process is being streamlined, you are avoiding significant fees that would, that are associated with the litigation process. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I know that, you know, depending on what part of the country people are in, the range in which the divorce process on average, the cost on average, the duration on average. Again, we've got some national statistics around that, but each state or region or area may have may differentiate a little bit amongst you know, those areas. But on average, you know, the average cost for divorce is $15,000 and the average duration is a year. So that much we know. Alex: Which is absolutely wild. I mean, I could have a case referred to me, this week have their task list set out for the next two weeks, have mediation session the following week. And when it's all said and done, if we've reached anywhere, but you know, north of $3,500 to $4,000 just for the mediator, I would be shocked. You can wrap it up within. And that doesn't include attorney's fees to the extent that attorneys are being involved. But I mean, you can see that the process can be so slimmed down in a, in a major, major way. Rhonda: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Alex: And by the way, you know, there's also a range of mediators’ fees. You know, certainly in Chicago there are former judges that are doing this that can command, you know, a significantly higher rate and they're tending to cases where perhaps their hourly rate doesn't necessarily factor into the analysis. Mediation isn't just, isn't just for wealthy people. And there are plenty of other professionals. I, for example, practiced for 12 years, I have significant experience, but I'm not commanding the hourly rate that a former judge does. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think too, it's for people to look at the different options and ask themselves a couple of questions. So, like as I'm working with clients and coaching them through, ultimately, it's up to them and in working with the attorney or mediator to figure out what process is best. But I can take them through a simple exercise that says, okay, here's pro se, here's mediation, here's litigation, here's collaborative. Let's just talk about the definition of each of those and then what are the pros and cons? What do you see as the pro or con of each of these areas? And what ends up happening is they come out of there and like, okay, I have a little more clarity on what really seems to resonate with me knowing my husband and how he might respond, what seems like the best option. Rhonda: And then they can start kind of exploring that because they have a lot of choices on what they feel like might be best. Now they're also, I think there's value in getting input from the professionals as well. But to be able to take some time and just think through all those options I think is good. And for some people, you know, it isn't as much about the finances. Sometimes it is. I mean it just; each situation is so different. But I think being able to look at, look at the options, I believe that women always make good decisions when they have all the information. Alex: Certainly. Rhonda: And so, there's somewhat I would call kind of pre-divorce work that women can be just kind of thinking through, taking some time to ponder to see if this is a good fit for them or not. You know, so that's why I love doing these types of having these types of conversations specifically around the different options of the process. So, I appreciate your input on that as well. Alex: Certainly. Rhonda: So, the other thing that I want to chat with you about is the fact that mediation can be a good way to minimize children's exposure to the divorce process. So, I find this really fascinating and I look forward to hearing what you have to say about this talking point. Alex: Certainly. So you know, when there is a parenting issue, and I'm obviously speaking from my experience with the, with Cook County in Chicago, but it's almost immediate that if the parties are unable to resolve whatever the parenting issues are in mediation, that a judge will uniformly appoint a child's representative who's an attorney that's going to represent the needs of the child. That child's representative is and will then the children will be involved in the process. He or she will interview them, will observe them with each parent. We'll make recommendations to the court, and his or her interaction with the child may not just be on one occasion. It may be on multiple occasions, depending on what the issues are. Alex: And again, talk about, you can't unring that bell. I mean, once your kids are being interviewed by professionals and, and then by, by the way, if that doesn't result in an agreement, there may be, a child custody evaluation that's performed by a mental health professional and that involves multiple interviews with your child. And I think that, for the most part, what people can agree on is that they don't want their children involved in the process because it's not good for anybody. And in mediation you can avoid all of that. Rhonda: That, that's awesome. And I think obviously, I mean there may be times when people can't agree, and they are going to have to maybe go and utilize some of those other processes that that the court system has in place. But I love, you know, for people to be able to consider mediation for the reason that you just mentioned because I think of all the things that they can agree on, wanting the best for their kids is usually an easy one. Alex: Right. And the, the fact is that people are getting divorced, so they are not necessarily speaking in a kind way to each other. It's not necessarily a productive mode of communication between each other. And oftentimes they just need somebody, a third party to help them navigate the conversation. And that's what the mediator's there for. Rhonda: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that's, that's really great. Well, we have covered a lot of ground in a really short period of time and as we wrap up our time together, I always end with two things. One is a quote and the other is a client success story. So, go ahead and share with us your favorite quote. Alex: So, I recently read this, the quote is, "Focus on divorce as a problem to solve instead of a battle to be won." Rhonda: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Alex: It resonates and in a very significant way for me, I have, once people come down to earth, and realize that they're getting divorced or have accepted it or are ready to move forward with the process in a productive way and, and are not looking to sabotage their spouse or really just want to reach a resolution and focus it, focus on it as a problem to be solved, that's when they're able to reach a, a meaningful agreement, a lasting agreement that will serve the needs of their family going forward. Rhonda: Yeah. Oh my gosh, I love that. Oh, and it takes, I mean, divorce is emotional, right? And I think there's certainly a time to deal with the emotions, but it helps really to just kind of frame what the goal is. Right? And so, that's a great quote. All right, so let's end with the client’s success story. Alex: Certainly. So there's, there's really nothing so magical about it other than the fact that for these two individuals, they had been in the litigation process for over a year and had been engaging in discovery that was not relevant to their case, multiple court appearances that was really just causing more and more of a rift between them rather than bringing them together to reach an agreement. And one of them had been referred to me as a mediator. The other interviewed me and we sat down together at about nine o'clock in the morning and by two o'clock had reached a comprehensive agreement on everything that needed to be addressed in their marital settlement agreement. Alex: When we concluded for the day, the husband looked at the wife and, and said to her, "That is the most productive conversation we've had in over five years." And, it really, I believe, set the tone for how these two individuals are going to be able to move forward in a productive way as divorced parents and co-parents effectively. And, and it was just a very positive way to, to start down with new road for them, for their new normal. Rhonda: I love it. I love it. I think that it also depends too on finding the right mediator, right? Being the mediator is not an easy job. Alex: Definitely not. Rhonda: I've sat in on plenty of mediations. I'm like, okay, they, you know, the mediator's got to be the tough cookie in the room, right? Because you must hold people accountable and encourage them to have those conversations. Think outside the box, get people talking, manage emotions. I mean, there's a lot to it. And so I think that's a fantastic success story. And just again, giving people the opportunity to say it. Listen, there may be times when you get to a point where, yeah, it's time to mediate and get everybody in the same room and make sure you've got the right mediator and hash things out and leave there with a result. Right? Some clarity, some concrete solutions. And I love the fact that, yeah, love the fact, that they were able to leave there feeling a lot more positive. Alex: So yeah, it was great success. Rhonda: Yay. I love it. Well, I want to thank you so much, Alex, for your time today. Alex: Certainly, thank you for having me. Rhonda: And I want to encourage people to check out Alex's contact information in the show notes, as well as the transcribed audio notes, and hopefully as people are listening to this, we've given them some really great things to think about as far as the direction that they may want to go as they're navigating through their divorce process.   QUOTE: “Focus on divorce as a problem to solve instead of a battle to be won.”   CONTACT INFORMATION: Alex Jacobson Founder Jacobson Mediation Group 212 West Superior Street, Suite 203 Chicago, IL 60654 ajacobson@jacobsonmediationgroup.com (312) 877-5092 LinkedIn | Facebook   Visit the Women’s Financial Wellness Center for a full directory listing of experts. Be sure to reach out if you would like to connect personally with the Women’s Financial Wellness Center. You can visit our website or grab a complimentary 30-minute consult.   Leaving a positive podcast review is hugely important: they help the podcast get discovered by new people. Please spend 5 minutes of your time to leave a review on your preferred listening platform, we’d love to hear from you!

Fails. They happen a lot. More often than we'd like to admit. They don't always make us feel like rock star ministers and they certainly make for viral videos.But the reality is that when we fail, we learn.In ministry, we might have an amazing idea for an event or plan out the semester and find out that... it failed pretty hard.But when we fail, we can learn from what went wrong and make a better plan next time!Right?Some questions to consider:What was the last big FAIL that happened in your ministry?How did you learn from it?Who can benefit when you fail?Why do we like to cover up our fails instead of bringing them to light and learn from them?Mentioned on the podcast: DYM Community Facebook GroupMichelle's Slime FailRonald's Cage FailGot a middle school ministry question?Email talkingsquirrelspodcast@gmail.comNeed student ministry resources?Check out www.downloadyouthministry.comDo you listen to the Podcast? Consider leaving a review of the podcast!Social Media:InstagramTwitterFacebook

Join ReWatchable as we continue our journey into Sense8 1×06 “Demons”! Yes, the one with the orgy. Superfans: Mitch and Karen  Newbies: Kristen and Brittany Fun Facts: Kristen is bothered by the fact that the Chrises walked away from the fourth Star Trek movie. Brittany worries about the CBS Star Trek universe expanding too quickly and imploding the fandom. Tangent into a deep conversation about writing and talking about the things we love. Karen is having some problems sleeping, but she is trying to counter this by listening to an Agatha Christie audiobook. Mitch cannot spell orgasm. Sense8 season 1, episode 6, “Demons”: – Synopsis – Did we need Will and Riley to talk on the phone? – What do we think of the pacing? Is the fact that we cannot binge getting in the way? – Diego is the foreplay. Right? – Some questions about the consequences of Sun’s sentencing. – How do drugs work in this place? – Brittany hates being the only newbie. – On Demand skill sets. – Is this evolution? – Kala, why is she so connected to Wolfgang? – So. Much. Wolfgang. – Lito is having a sexual crisis of his own. – Wow, can this man pull off a soundbite. – Capheus isn’t running drugs, he’s saving a girl. – Okay, okay, we’ll talk about it. – The intimate moments really take you into the minds of the characters. – Van Boner – Favorite Scenes – Favorite Lines Listener Feedback: – Germans and Australians respond to our comments – 4 Non Blondes are following us Brittany’s Brainstorms and Kristen’s Kontemplations: – Sense8 season 1, episode 7, “W. W. N. Double D?” Contact us! Email: rewatchable.podcast@gmail.com Twitter: @Re_Watchable Tumblr: ReWatchablePodcast.Tumblr.com Please rate and review us on iTunes!

If You Prefer To Download This Episode Click Here Welcome to this episode of Fit Has No Size with Coach Tulin. I am Coach Tulin. Today's topic is something that's very near and dear to my heart. It can be a source of massive struggle, and it can also be a source of massive celebration. It could be something that holds you back from moving forward. It could be something that, hey, I took that step the hardest day is done. So our topic today is day one, the hardest day. Why is day one so hard? Well if you've listened to previous episodes of Fit Has No Size, I touch on the struggles. The reasons why day one can be so complicated, and to give you an idea of how this can be such a source of anxiety, of self-doubt, of moving forward from a place of not self-love for sure. I have coaching communities. For example, my Fit Has No Size membership community or those that I personally coach or my own journey. I have personally coached a couple thousand women in this process. My coaching content is based off of my journey but also the journey of many I've coached. And day one is that day that they struggle with most. It's the hardest day. If it's so hard, what do I do in my coaching community? Well, I'll tell you this. I provide a week's worth of content going over all the things that I have known that have kept countless people before them from moving forward, and I touch on all those things. And I help create day one into a space of celebration. Something that you work up to. You're not worried about 30 days from now or two weeks from now or 60 days or that size or weight or whatever it is connected to some date or event. No, no, no. The first focus is just getting started. What's stopping you? What's scaring you? What are you afraid of? Are you afraid you're going to quit again? Are you afraid of failure? Are you afraid of judgements of other people and judgment of yourself? Those are really real things, and so here's what happens. A lot of times people getting really excited about started on something and then day one comes along, and they might show up at their local gym and they might sit outside that gym for a long, long time before they walk in those doors. They're not feeling super confident about themselves. They might be wearing their spouse's sweatpants and T-shirts trying to hide themselves. Knowing for sure that they are unsure of where to even start. Feel like they're going to be judged. They feel like somebody that everyone at the gym is going to notice them. They feel like they're going to be a laughing ... so many feelings that are involved. Now, I'll tell you. There are instances where those kinds of feelings do ring true, but I'll tell you most the time it's really these boulders that we put up in front of ourselves to stop us from doing what we need to do. It's a negative self-talk. I'm not going to say it doesn't happen in gyms. I'm not going to say it's never happened. Heck, I've had it happen to me, but for all the times that I've spent. I'm just using the gym as an example. It could be a yoga studio, it could be Cross Fit, it could be a workout DVD at home, it could be a personal trainer. Right? Some of those things you feel like you have something to follow, like a personal trainer, for example, but most cases, most people feel really lost, and they don't know where to start, but they have great intentions of getting going, but they're fitness is usually starting from a place that lacks self-love. It's usually this feeling of being deprived or coming from a place of punishment because of the weight they gained or that they used to be a former athlete or the body they had when they got married or when they're 16 years old and now they're 45. I mean, there's so many different things, but I hadn't met anybody prior to my coaching, as an example, that moved forward from a space of feeling good about themselves. I take a whole week to just prep mentally from the most positive uplifting place ever. From a place of understanding, because I do understand because I've been that plus-size woman, and I still am on a plus-size woman on a journey to fit, but I know those feelings. I know what it feels like. It can stop us. That day one sometimes you pull up to the front of the gym and you sit in your car, and just to walk through the two glass doors in the front. Just to be able to turn the car off, open the car door, take one foot out, then the other foot, and walk towards the gym doors can feel like the longest walk ever. The second longest walk is when you actually get in the door and you look at all this equipment, even if you used to lift. Even if you knew all that equipment, there's just something about this day one feeling that you just look around that you just feel very lost. I can't tell you how many people that I've known that have turned around and left. Now, some of them made it in the door. Some of them handed them their card. The beep goes off as they scan it. Maybe they signed up in that moment, and they move forward and they look at all the equipment. They look at all the classes. They're looking at the people in the classes. They're looking at the instructors. They're looking at these people who are using the machines who seem so confident in what they're doing like they know what they're doing, and we go well, I know how to work the treadmill. There's a quick start button. I'll just click quick start. Or the recumbent bike. And because we didn't know what to do and because we created these great expectations in our head, it's not uncommon to not go back. There's different phases in this idea of day one. It can be, like I said, it can be just the idea of getting started. You could never walk through the doors, and again, whatever those doors represent to you. Whether it's an actual physical gym or it's a yoga on the beach, or whatever those doors represent or popping in the DVD at home or playing something that's on YouTube or whatever. Those doors can represent a lot of different things, and I will tell you I've worked with people it's taken months and even years to get to day one or passed it. It was like that for me too. Day one was this constant source of pain. I guess that's the way I can say it. It just held up my mirror to my life and the self-talk just go more and more negative, and I found that I wasn't going to go do this movement from a place of self-love but from self-punishment for the weight that I have gained or how I've let myself go and all these negative things that I've said to myself. I'm like my goodness. This body has got me through some pretty amazing stuff. Some pretty tough stuff. Broke and homeless with two kids. A husband with multiple sclerosis who lost the ability to walk for two years. I watched him relearn his ability to walk. I've watched him reteach himself to swim. I think about all the struggles along the way when he nearly passed away two years ago at the time of this podcast, literally this month. Wild. Wow. I think we're right there and to have to pull through that, but those are only two examples. If I talked about thing that had happened in between. There's a lot that went on, and so the 180 pounds that I gained on this journey and the 100 pounds that my husband gained was our coping mechanism. My husband is a former athlete, quite the athlete by the way. Loved lifting all those things, and even he had his struggles, right? How is it any different because he's had maybe greater experience than I did. It's no different. It's absolutely no different. We can talk ourselves out of day one over and over and over again. We are a master at it, and because we're a master at it, the amazing part is to actually get yourself moving forward into day one is the exact same mechanism that you had in the negative space. It's just doing the same activities from a positive space, but how do you know how to do that? Listen, support communities are important. Like I said, my Fit Has No Size membership community, that's why the support is key. It's positive, uplifting, no negativity. My other coaching group, same thing. I have a negativity-free zone. When there's negative people around me, I can feel it in my gut, which is a long, long way from where I started because I actually looked for the negative people and the people who were unhappy because it made me feel better because there were other people who are unhappy and misery less company. Here's the deal you guys, day one. Because I take that whole week to do it, and I think we think it's a start of the rest of our life and it can be. Every new minute, every new day, every new month isn't that nice to feel like it's a fresh restart? It's something that we get to start with a clean slate. I like to think of it as another chapter in our book. Why? Because my body tells a story of what we've overcome. Of the things that we have figured out and gotten on the other side of. Over and over again those are just two large examples I gave you. The number of examples in my life and in your life are huge and if you don't show it on your body, everybody holds it in their cells, and in their joints, and in their muscles, and in their posture. We hold it in our bodies the struggle that we've been through, but if we've been through a struggle, we have found a way to get on the other side because we're still here. We're still fighting. We haven't given up on ourselves, and so I like to look at day one as another page in our book of life. It's just another page. It's just a day that's going to come up. It's a big deal day. It's a day of celebration. It's huge, preparation is everything. Coming from a place of understanding. Being able to relate to what they're going through and having somebody to feel they're not there alone. Believe me I get all that. I do all that. It's what's in my coaching groups, but day one doesn't have to be this monster. It's just working with people or coming from a place or reading a book or whatever. There's so many places of inspiration, whether it's my podcast or whatever, someone else. It's being able to not feel alone in this journey, and to put day one into perspective and to not blow it up into such a big deal, but then to celebrate the heck out it. It's kind of a balance, right? It's like a game that you're playing, but it all comes in the prep, and it all comes in the prep without shame or self-punishment, or self-hatred, or lack of self-love, and when you look at it as another page in the book of your life, then it's just like this is another day. This is another struggle that I'm learning to cut over. How do you know you're going to be able to do it? Because if you look at your previous chapters and your previous pages in your book of your life, you can find example, after example, after example of struggles you've had that you have overcome, and if you're plus size, I know you've been through some stuff and I know you've overcome some stuff. It's just somehow we think that that fits in one box and this is another. It's the same thing. Day one, is no more difficult than anything else you've been through. It's just a day. It's a fresh start. The preparation for day one. Why should you celebrate it? Because you freaking did it. You got it done. You busted through those doors and even if it was still walking into gym I'm sure, using that example again, and going and doing the treadmill or the recumbent bike and you got 20 minutes done or two minutes done. You guys, when I started on my journey, I started doing two to three minutes of exercise at the time. I did it to the workout DVDs. I did the Shaun T Insanity. They jumped, I swayed side to side. They were doing all those other stuff, I swayed side to side. It was the most I could move my body. I couldn't even get up and down on the floor at roughly was at 375 pounds they guessed they think that I weighed because the scale didn't go any higher than 350 and I knew I wasn't 350 because that scale slammed stop at 350, and for how quickly I gained weight is a pretty safe estimate. I knew I was sliding into 400 pounds. Now, we think we haven't done enough, but when I tell you that the start of your journey is your own. That this journey is your own. That what you choose to do right now may not be what you do six week from now, six months from now, six years from now. It's just a day one. It's a starting point and it is a commitment to going and getting it done, and celebrating that you did, and in all honesty, you really should be celebrating each and every time you go in to do something and you complete it. Celebrate it. Celebrate the fact that you were on the recumbent bike. Now, for me, the recumbent bike was tough because it took two measuring tapes to measure my middle. So it's over 60 inches in my waist. I've now lost over a foot. The recumbent bike was difficult because it's something that looks like oh, that'd be the easy place to start. Here's the reality, getting into the seat, lifting my leg over the recumbent bike to put it on the other side because my belly apron was so far down my thighs, so not only was it difficult to not have the strength in my muscles to do it, but I now have the extra resistance of my belly, and then to put the other one, and then trying to put my feet into the straps was complicated, but I did it, but I got it done, and I was only able to do a few minutes, but when I evaluate day one compared to where I was a week ago. Now, listen. I don't want you to go back to when you were an athlete or what you did in high school, or what you did in the Olympics, or what you did for fun, or you were like the jazzercise mama. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about in recent history getting to the gym, doing the two to three minutes, 15 minutes. For me it was tow to three minutes of Insanity at home, okay? Where were you a month before? Where were you just a week before? Did you do this? And if you haven't, celebrate that. It's a non-scale victory. It's enormous because when you compare the activity you've done today versus the week before, there is growth and that's why day one is so powerful because it becomes the first example in this new portion of your book that you can turn back to and go, I remember when day one was hard. I remember when I got it done. I remember where I started. I remember how good it felt to do what I did because I chose to celebrate the moment versus beat myself up. I chose to look at that as a moment in time where I've committed to myself to move forward, not perfectly, but just to celebrate the progress. Now, I'm going to have a podcast right after this one that's going to talk about the first 14 days and celebrating that progress, so I don't want to jump into that too much. I just want to talk about day one. Day one is when to be honored and celebrated. You did it. It doesn't matter what it look like. Did it align with how wanted to feel? Because here's the reality, regardless of how long we do a workout, it's not about quantity, it's about quality, and quality comes in many forms. When we actually get it done, it's freaking hard in the moment. The sweating, the difficulty moving your body if you're in that situation, all of a sudden soreness becomes compounded in terms of pain. We start sweating. We can feel our skins turning red. There's a lot of discomfort going on in our body, but we're fighting through it, right? But this two to three minutes turn to five minutes, and the continue to grow, but here's the reality. There is a brain chemical reaction to you moving your body. There's endorphins, there dopamine, there's serotonin. I'm not a scientist, I just know they're there, and that Google tells me. Anyway, obviously, check your resources, but the reality is they exist, and when we begin to move our body, those things begin to fire and here's the truth, once you complete your workout, and you take that breath, there's something that happens. At some point after workout where you have this deep cleansing breath. You might not have been breathing well. Maybe even been breathing shallowly at the top of your throat, but exercise makes you breath deeper, and there might be emotion attached to it. Nobody said, I regret that workout. Ever see that meme? Said no one ever. I regretted that workout said no one ever because there is a chemical change that occurs in our brain, and there's something about the breath. I was recently reminded of this as I have dived into yoga, and I'll talk about that in the next episode and I had the realization that I hadn't been breathing. Now, obviously, I was breathing enough to live, but really focus on breathing in the idea of cleansing, and don't be surprised if you get emotional because a lot of us haven't breathed to that degree. I took my breath in and they really talk about like when you breath in to really drag it up through your throat and I got that. I could feel it through the back of my neck. I was like, whoa it's cool, and I felt really, really energized on the breath in, and they wanted to us to do this exhale through the mouth with sound. Aahhh like that. It was even deeper. It was even more profound than that. That's my podcast version, and I would get emotional, and I would be on the verge of tears, and then I would take that breath in, the next one, and I felt cleansed. I felt good. I felt energized, and then I would exhale, and I was doing everything I possibly could to not cry. Now, should I hold my emotions back? No, but it is a shock to the system and I had to remind myself that I've been in this place before. When you take that cleansing breath and you might cry, and you might not understand what that is. It's a release. I told you we wear our stories in our body. We wear our struggles on our body. We wear our stories ever becoming in our body, in our joints, in our muscles, in our cells. When we begin to move our body from a place of self-love, there's a lot of feelings that come along with that. Another reason day one can be difficult is because well, it's hard. It was hard, but you did it, and that's what you have to look at and you can do it again if you've done it once. You can do it again, but when you move forward with it, and not worrying about the scale, and not worrying about the wedding, and not worrying about the vacation. Not worrying about summer coming up, but you just go in with the focus of coming from a place health gains, you'd be amazed at what begins to happen to your body because changes are going to start to happen. They happen. That's the reality of moving your body. Day one is also a day where you can really, really, really tap into what's possible. You can look around the gym, or look at the workout DVD, or look at the instruction in front of the class, or look at your friend that's maybe doing a little longer than you or the person next to you who's a complete stranger. It's a place that you can look and see all these examples around you of what's possible, because I can almost guarantee that every person that's surrounding you or even on the workout DVD, and having known people in workout DVDs, guess what they had? They had a day one. They had struggle to overcome, and just because they're one into the spectrum, the opposite of the spectrum maybe where my body is. They're struggles no less. They're challenges are no less. They're day one was no less difficult. Everybody has a day one. I'm going to get into a little bit more about what to do after day one, but first I want to tell you, just take the time to mentally prepare. Get pen to paper, figure out, and I do love the idea of pen to paper. I learned this from one of my business mentors, it really does work with a different part of your brain versus like typing in on the computer, but what's stopping you? And why are you really doing it? When you find yourself that you're coming from a place that's associated with a number on the scale, or size on your pants or dress, or whatever it is, take it back to how's it that you want to feel, and just take everything else away. Take away all the goals. Take away what the doctor said, what aunt Sally said on Thanksgiving. Just put it all away, and not worry about it, and prep your mind and spirit, and just commit to doing one of moving your body. Just one day. That's it. Not worrying about a 30-day program. If you're going to like the workout. If you're not, date it. Just date your workout. Just go and find a way to move your body even if it's cranking up the music at home and just dancing wildly in your house in your underwear when nobody else is around. Or finally doing it when the kids are around, and just cranking up the music and finding that they join in with you. They don't judge you. They join in with you. They want to dance with you. It's energy. It's an energy exchange, and focus on nothing else just that moment. That you're going to do this. What has held you back before? You have tons of data sets. You've had this day one before. You have had this experience before. How did you feel? What did you learn? Or what can you learn from how you felt and what can you do differently? Because here's something we're going to talk a lot about on Fit Has No Size podcast, is how to use your past. I wish you could see me doing air quotes, but "failures" for your future successes. They're valuable data sets. You can at the end of this podcast change your mind about how you approach day one purely based off of your previous experiences and giving yourself permission to move forward in your journey without any judgment, and without expectation except celebrating that you got it done. That's it, and watch the magic unfold. The minute that we start focusing on a timeline or what's supposed to happen, or what the "experts" tell us. There's a lot of experts out there that have a lot to tell us, okay. Let me just tell you, from one person to another, just commit to moving your body. Look at how handled it in the past. What you've learned from it, and how you can do it differently this time, and then celebrate the [inaudible 00:23:54] out of it. Celebrate it. Like I did it. Jump up and down. Celebrate it. Say really cool things to yourself just like I did it. Feel like an athlete. Feel like that you got that gold medal. Whatever it is that you need to feel, allow the emotions to happen if they happen. Day one's a big deal. Now, that I've gotten through day one and in the next podcast, I'm going to be talking to you about the first 14 days in a way that changed my life, and I teach this a lot, and I want to tell you how you can take the next 14 days ad completely change the way you look at fitness, and watch it seep in to every other part of your life. If you don't follow me on social media, please do. You can find me on Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest as Coach Tulin, and you can find me on Instagram @iamtulin, or you can simply go to the fithasnosize.com website and you can learn more about my Fit Has No Size membership community there. Please note it's not open at all times. We open it on occasion, but you're welcome to join the wait list. I would love to hear in the comments below how this podcast helped you. Did you change your mind about something? Did you go and apply it? I want to hear about your day one. So, don't forget to leave a rating in your comment. I can't wait to hear how your journey to day one went.

How do you embody masculinity in a way that creates more connection and passion in your relationship? How do you avoid the stereotypes, while still getting the benefit of positive polarity in your relationship? Is there even a point to talking about “masculine” vs. “feminine” (and if so, what is it?)? Today’s episode is a conversation with Shana James, men’s coach and host of the Man Alive podcast. We take apart the myths of what it means to be a “real man” - and explore how you can get beyond what you’re “supposed to” be, uncover the true you, and bring all of you to your relationship. Learn how to break out of the box in a way that keeps you connected to the people who matter most. Please enjoy this week’s episode, with Shana James, on Relationship Alive! Resources: Here is a link to Relationship Alive episode 20, my first conversation with Shana James on Sparking Passion through Generosity and Authenticity Visit Shana James’s website to check out the Man Alive podcast AND pick up her free guide to the Unknown Skill that helps men succeed in life, career, and relationships. FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide Relationship Alive Community on Facebook Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out visit http://www.neilsattin.com/128 to download the transcript for this episode, or text the word "PASSION" to the number 33444. Transcript: Neil Sattin: All right. Hello and welcome to another episode of ... Shana James: Man Alive, and welcome to another episode of ... Neil Sattin: Relationship Alive. We are your hosts ... Shana James: Neil Sattin. Neil Sattin: And Shana James, and we're here today to talk about some really important topics that we each wanted to cover on our respective podcasts, and so we thought, "Why not ..." Shana James: Become each other and do it together. Neil Sattin: Right. We will merge like you're not supposed to do, but why don't we come together and talk about it, and so we have it for each of our shows? Shana James: I love it. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Shana James: I love it. Yeah. We've been really going back and forth around this idea of the stereotypical masculine and some frameworks out there that in some ways have been really helpful for men, and have had men step into more of their power, and confidence, and have deeper connections, and in other ways have, what might you say, pushed men into shame, and feeling wrong, and feeling they're out of one box and into another box, and feeling confined, and so really wanting to look at if we are going to take on or if men are going to take on a kind of archetype or ideas of masculinity. How can they be played with versus ... How did you say it? Versus constricting or something like that? Neil Sattin: Constricting. Yeah. Yeah, and this question too of whenever, if you're feeling like you should be some way, whatever way that is, how's that going to impact you? How's that going to impact your relationships, and because my show, like ... Shana James: Yeah. Neil Sattin: This is interesting because my show is all focused on relationship, and Shana, your show is called 'Man Alive', so it's all about this question of how men can step into who they are. Shana James: Yeah. Yeah. Neil Sattin: I was wondering before we got on, I was thinking like, "Is there a difference when ...? Is there something about men stepping into who they are where that could in and of itself get in the way in relationship?" Shana James: Interesting, so the question being if men are themselves for lack of a more specific way to say it right now. Right? Like if a man actually discovers who he is, his own needs, his desires, his truth, that it could actually get in the way of a relationship? Neil Sattin: That was the question. Shana James: That's the question. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I say that because when I'm looking at a lot of ... Shana James: Interesting. Neil Sattin: I like the word you used, 'Framework', so I'm looking at some of the frameworks that are becoming more and more popular now as a way of I think reeling ourselves back from men and women being the same, and so trying to reclaim some of the polarity and the difference, and the beards I guess. Shana James: Yeah. Yeah. Neil Sattin: As I look at that, I can see that there's a lot in that that actually does help us, men ... I'm just speaking for myself here, step into more of who we are. In fact, I even grew this out a little bit for our conversation. Shana James: "This" being "a beard" because some people are not watching this... Neil Sattin: Right. My beard. Right. You might not be watching, so I grew my beard out. That's an important thing to note. Shana James: Yes. Neil Sattin: That being said, when you start talking about what's involved in people actually relating to each other, then I don't think that those answers necessarily are long-term solutions. They could provide short-term solutions, but over the- Shana James: The answers of like, "Here's how to be a more masculine, or more of a man?" Neil Sattin: Here's how to be more of a man. Yeah. Yeah. Shana James: Yeah. Neil Sattin: Take charge, buy a gun, grow a beard, drive your truck, and own all of the archetypal or really stereotypical manly things. Shana James: This is so interesting because hearing you say that, I'm like, "Oh, that wasn't the frameworks I was talking about about being a man." I was thinking more of the frameworks of David Deida and some other people out there who talk about a kind of masculine power that has to do with presence and solidity that I'm getting a little tongue in cheek in the way I'm saying this, but I do think they're actually really powerful ways that a man or a woman ... I mean, we could talk about it. Right? Masculine and feminine to me doesn't mean man, woman, but yeah, so probably important that you and I get on the same page. Are we actually talking about the same frameworks or do we have different frameworks we're thinking of? Neil Sattin: I think that's why it's so important that we have this conversation, and of course, I was being a little facetious about the gun and the pick-up truck, and the beard for that matter, and you might be able to hear there's a plow actually. Shana James: Yeah. Yes. Neil Sattin: I wish I were driving that plow. It feels so much more masculine as well. Shana James: Manly than sitting here, doing a podcast. Neil Sattin: Right. Right, or, "Why’d I get the plow? I should be out there shoveling like a real man." Shana James: Right. The whole idea of being a real man. See, my sense- Neil Sattin: Yeah. Shana James: Right? This is where it gets confusing. I think a lot of the frameworks out there ... My sense is that their intention in some of these more conscious realms and tantra and personal growth is to help men step away from some kind of box of, "Here's what you have to be to be a man", and yet, I think they have a negative spin sometimes where men take it on as, "Oh, now I'm supposed to do this to be a man. Right now, I'm supposed to be more present." Neil Sattin: Right. Shana James: "Now, I'm supposed to lead. I have to lead every action." Neil Sattin: Exactly. Shana James: Right? Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. "I'm supposed to lead. I'm supposed to open my woman" if we're talking about a heterosexual relationship... Shana James: If we're talking heterosexual. Neil Sattin: Right, and there's no room for me to be uncertain or vulnerable, or weak, or ... Yeah. Shana James: Which is so interesting because a lot of the work that I do with men is around how to be able to bring vulnerability, shame, weakness, desire, whatever our weaknesses and what I think makes me weak, but in a more powerful way, which again, I think could be confusing, but in a way, the way I describe it is like, "I have these vulnerable parts of me, and ultimately, I know I'm a good person or I'm a good man." Like, "I know there's more to me. I know that these things don't make me unlovable or unworthy, and so I can bring these forward in relationship" or in another, any kind of relationship, but let's say also romantic relationship with a partner, and not fall into, "I need you to tell me I'm okay. I need you to tell me I'm good enough. I need you to fix me or make me feel better about myself." Neil Sattin: Right. Right. There is that sense of, how do you enter a relationship without either partner feeling like, "Wow. You're here to save me", and whatever that translates into, if it's one partner needing to be the hero of the relationship or one person needing to be the caretaker of the relationship? Shana James: Right, and they're needing to be saved. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Shana James: Then, what is it like to come into a relationship knowing that there's potential for healing and growth without needing to fix or save each other? Right? That to me is a kind of mastery. Can we love each other through these challenging moments of vulnerability for both of us, whatever gender we are? That's one end of the spectrum. Shana James: That to me feels a little bit more like the Yin or a certain kind of foundation of connection, and then, you also mentioned earlier, polarity. Right? Then, how do we keep that spark alive also? Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, and this is an important place as well because I think the reason that the more stereotypical kinds of frameworks hold so much power is if you're in a relationship where that's not happening at all, then you can hear that and feel like, "That's exactly what's missing. I need that." Whether it's, "I need to be led and opened", like, "I'm tired of making all the decisions", or, "I'm tired of your" whatever it is, or it's like, "Yeah, I need to step more into that powerful presence. For some reason, I've been scared to do that, or I've been holding back because I'm not feeling confident in expressing myself that way." Shana James: Yeah. Right. Neil Sattin: If that's place you're in, and then you hear someone's saying like, "Yeah. Step into your power and lead, and be opened" or whatever it is, then it can be like, "Wow. What a relief!" Like, "Yes, let's do that." Shana James: Right. It gives permission in a way like, "Oh, I can lead and I can take charge, and I don't have to be that asshole I saw my dad be or some other men in the past who were doing it without care for other people." I've definitely seen that help men feel more empowered. Neil Sattin: Right. Yeah, and- Shana James: And, or, but. Neil Sattin: It's like ... Two things come to mind. One is that it could certainly infuse some energy into a situation that that feels stale or stagnant, like where it's just you need something to get the whole thing moving, but on the flip side, there is this question, and this is something I've talked about on my show, you've probably talked about it on yours, of as soon as we're stepping into roles or scripts of how we're supposed to be, that actually can kill the things that create juice in a relationship that are about being in the moment, being spontaneous, owning who you are, which to me, doesn't have anything to do with whether my wife can hold my beard while we're having sex. Shana James: Yeah. Right. You mean that metaphorically? What does holding your beard mean? Neil Sattin: I was just imagining like I've grown out this big beard. I don't have a big beard like that, but it's like just saying, "Yeah", that there's a point where even if we're wearing the costume that we're supposed to be wearing, and presenting the way we're supposed to be presenting, that there's a place where that play will be satisfying, but if you watch the same play over and over and over again, it's going to get old. Shana James: Yeah. Neil Sattin: If you're in that play over and over again, it's going to get old. Shana James: Yeah. It's getting old, or if you're in a play, that I do believe that some fake it until you make it can actually work. Right? It can jump-start the engine let's say, or it can give us access to certain parts of us whether it's in the realm of leading or surrendering our vulnerability that we haven't had before, and it can be a tricky line. Right? Shana James: Like, "When is it faking it until I'm making it, and when is it that I'm just continuing to fake it?", because anywhere I think where we keep doing something because we're supposed to, I mean, maybe that's the heart of it. Right? It's like, "Oh, I am supposed to do this thing", versus, "When I do it, I feel more", and this might take some describing, but like, "I feel more aligned in myself. I feel more alive. I feel more true." Shana James: "I feel more open. I feel more joyous. I feel more vital." Right? Like, "Where is it that we put these roles in as a "supposed to" as opposed to, "I'm going to try on this role", or, "I'm going to put on a new costume and see how does it fit with me. Does it give me more access to my voice, and my truth, and my power, or does it have me feel stilted and constrained?" Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, and you can come at it from the other angle too where authenticity can also be a trap. Shana James: Yeah. Neil Sattin: Perhaps you've seen this where someone feels like, "Oh, I'm just being me." Shana James: Yes. Neil Sattin: Like, "It's me to not take the initiative ever in bed." Shana James: Right. Neil Sattin: I don't know why we keep talking about bed, but let's just say- Shana James: It's a concrete example. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Sure, and mine is right over there, so I keep looking at it, but yeah. Authenticity can also be a trap, and there's that question of, "How do you be authentic without being held back by your authenticity as its own prescription or role?" Shana James: Right. Neil Sattin: I'm thinking about how you and I even met. Shana James: Yeah. Neil Sattin: I can't remember if we spoke about this in the episode that we did together for the Relationship Alive Podcast. We may have addressed it, but Shana, you were coaching for the Authentic Man Program, and I saw you in a video, and I thought, "I want to be her friend." That's like the ultra condensed version of the story, but I was in a place where I was married to my first wife, and really unhappy, and trying to figure out why I was so unhappy. Shana James: Right. Neil Sattin: That was how I came across Authentic Man Program. Shana James: Right. Neil Sattin: I was thinking about that as I was pondering this conversation that we were going to have, and thinking like, "Right. We came to know each other in this realm of not putting on anything fake, like learning how to be present, learning how to give attention in a way, where you're not losing yourself, learning how to stand in who you are." Shana James: Yeah. Right. When I think about the Authentic Man Program and all the work I've done with men and you've done with people, I mean, I don't want to speak for you, but there is a paradox or an overlap or a something between helping, for me, helping support men to find their authenticity, and I guess I probably have a bias or a belief that authenticity is not ... What did you say? Something about like never making decisions, or like that authenticity is not a lack of energy, or a lack of life force in me. Shana James: I think I have a bias or a belief that authenticity is a kind of fullness of life force and that that could be sadness, that could be anger, that could be joy, but that ultimately, there is this sense of, "When I check in with myself, I feel good about the choices I'm making, I have access to create what I want to create." Not that I should be creating something or you should be creating something in particular, but that I know that I can create what I want, and so if a man comes and he's ... I've often said this, like some men have more of a heart-based, and some men, there's humor, and other men, there's just intellect that is through the roof, and other men, there's more of like this mysterious quality, and I don't try to steer men toward one way or like a cookie-cutter mold, but more to find what is your unique expression. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that, that there's not this sense that anyone of those things is necessarily bad, though when anyone of those things is running the show, that's where you end up disconnected or you lose access to parts of you that help you connect. Shana James: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Neil Sattin: We're talking about it in this realm of connection, and that's where I tend to dance is like, "Okay. If I'm coming to you and I'm ..." I mean, it's maybe a little easier when you think about like, "I'm angry", or "I'm really sad about something", but I want to even think like, "What if I were really depressed and exhausted?" Shana James: Right. Neil Sattin: "What if I were spent?" This is like stretching what we're talking about a little bit because that is maybe a state where you're not in your energy, in your power. Shana James: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Neil Sattin: How do you be authentically that while I'm depleted, but in relationship, how do you bring that so that it is a force that connects you, so even if you're depleted, you're still able to be with the person that you're with? Shana James: I love that. Right, and then it doesn't have to be the most passionate connection or the most exciting connection in that moment, but it might be more of a tender or a quiet connection. I love what you're saying. I just had a thought, which may have flown out of my mind when you said about being depressed or ... It's like ... Right. Shana James: How do ... Maybe there's something in here about, "I'm trying to be something so someone else will want me, or love me, or believe in me", versus, "Oh, I feel depleted right now. I feel depleted right, and I still care about you", or even in a work context. "I feel depleted right now, and I'm still here committed to getting this job done or something", but is there a way that we don't have to hide what's really going on, and at the same time, how do we bring those parts of ourselves in a way that creates more connection rather than pushes someone away? What might be the most authentic thing in that moment is, "Actually, I need some space. I need to move away from you, but I still believe we can do it in a connected way." Neil Sattin: Yeah, which bumps right up against the men need their space kind of mentality, that that's somehow part of the masculine archetype is taking space and going into your cave to figure shit out, and if you don't, now you're what? Shana James: Right. Right. Neil Sattin: I don't know. You've been, you're more feminine because you want to- Shana James: I was going to say a pussy, and I hate when people say that, but it's like I think that is this idea or ... Neil Sattin: Yeah. Shana James: Then, in some realms where I've seen men learn, "Okay. Don't bring your struggles to a woman or to a partner", and again, I see the paradox of if we bring all of our struggles to our primary partner, I think that can create a heaviness and a feeling of like, "Oh, God." We're always going to be struggling together, but if you don't bring anything to your partner, then you don't know each other, and it's all based on this more surface experience to get there. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and you missed the opportunity of pooling your resources with your partner, and sometimes, that one of you is depleted and the other of you carries the weight, and that's not gender-dependent or spectrum-dependent, but that's- Shana James: Right. Yeah. Right, and I- Neil Sattin: Go ahead. Shana James: No, no. You go. Neil Sattin: I was just going to say, so it's a dynamic, and the question for me is, "How do you ...?" Shana James: Yeah. Neil Sattin: When you're talking about polarity, the whole point is to create a dynamism in your connection, so how do you keep things dynamic? Shana James: Yes. Neil Sattin: You don't do it by necessarily being the same way all the time. That's for sure. Shana James: Right. I like that you just went back to, "What's the point?" Right? "What's the why? What are we going for here?", versus I've learned the art of setting context for something. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Shana James: Right? Like, "I'd like to try leading you around for the next 10 minutes because I want to see what it feels like in my body to unapologetically take control while still being connected to you in your heart and what's good for you", versus a lack of context, which is just like, "I want to try taking on this role. I want to lead you around." There's a way I think when we know for ourselves why we're doing something, and when we can communicate it to others, it puts us I think in a deeper place of connection of, "Oh, now we're more on the same team, we're trying something out together, we have a sense of why we're doing what we're doing", and then I think if you have a why, there could be endless number of "hows" to get there, versus, I'm going to focus on, "What's the correct how?" Neil Sattin: Right. Yeah. Shana James: Yeah. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I like that. I like how what you're talking about sounds so collaborative because that's another relationship problem where each person feels like they're alone in their silo to try and figure out how the hell to make a change or make a difference, or like they just got to figure it out. Shana James: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Neil Sattin: That can sometimes really feel true when you're in relationship with someone who's a little shut-down and who doesn't want to have the conversation about like, "I don't want to be invited into leading you", or "I don't want to be invited into being led by you". That sounds scary, or, "I'm not even there." Shana James: Right, and that could be a whole another conversation like, "What do you do?" Maybe you've probably ... I imagine you've addressed this in your podcast. What do you do when you have a partner who doesn't feel willing or isn't wanting to stretch, or grow, or expand, or change things if there's something that you're wanting? I mean, that's a whole another ball of wax we could get into. Neil Sattin: It's one thing about I think what we were talking about before we officially started, which is conscious relationship, and how our relationships really do require something different, and this is something I think about a lot because I work with a lot of couples where one of them is in that situation, and the question does come up for me, like, "Does this mean that there are a lot of partnerships that really aren't destined to stay together because one is just going to be on a growth path, and the other one isn't and has no interest?" Shana James: Yeah. Neil Sattin: For me, that balances out with having experienced actually that even that -  even like having a foundation of like, "Yeah. I want to be a better person" - there are times when I don't feel like changing. There are times where I'm stuck in who I am. Shana James: Right. Right. Neil Sattin: There are times where Chloe, my wife, where she will say, point out something that is represents an old pattern of mine, and I'm irritated, and I don't want to do anything about it, so there is space in a situation that feels hopeless if you can stay engaged, and that's really the art of what you're talking about. It's like - How do you show up even then in a way that doesn't become about, "You should be growth-oriented because otherwise, how are we going to have a conscious relationship" that doesn't become that, because now it's just become oddly confining, even though it's about growth and change? Shana James: Yeah. Right. Neil Sattin: I mean, at some point, you got to be able to figure out like, "All right. Are our values aligned enough that we're on this journey together, or are they not?" Shana James: Back to values. Yeah. Yeah. I just did a conversation last week that where we got into ... Right. What are each person's values and how often people don't necessarily know their values. Shana James: I mean, I remember doing some coaching before I got married, and we did some values conversations and where our values were differing and where they were the same and overlapped, and yeah. In some ways, we still ended up getting divorced, and we both I think are on a path of growth, but a different kind of growth, or then we had a kid and all kinds of things started to show up. I think I also want to speak a word to the complicated nature of relationships, and in our culture, it can seem like if you don't stay together with someone, it's a failure, but I'm also aware that now, we're ... I don't know. We're on a different topic in a way of conscious relationship, and what is conscious relationship, or how do we stay connected? Shana James: How do we collaborate? How do we be on the same team? Maybe it's all still ... I think it all still is connected, but also, this idea of how to not get stuck in a stereotypical masculine role as we're becoming more conscious maybe. Neil Sattin: Right. I think where I start to get a little nervous is where these frameworks, as you've been talking about for masculinity, where they potentially become problematic, where they're actually if you're not bringing consciousness to them, then they become the source of problems -  and I can't help but think at the moment of, "#Metoo", and just how much of that is about  - more like this shadow masculinity. Right? Shana James: Then, it's like are we talking about like unconsciously masculine or consciously masculine, because I think the unconscious or the box of kind of cultural definition of masculine is be strong, be powerful, go after what you want, don't apologize. Neil Sattin: Right. Shana James: At the same time, I know a lot of men, especially men who come to me, who have had really loving women in their lives, and they've been taught to be nice, and be good, and not overstep their bounds, and be respectful, and I think it has often put men in a bind like, "Wait. I'm supposed to be strong and powerful and not admit to any weakness. Wait, but then, I'm supposed to be kind, and loving, and caring, and what the fuck do I do now, and how do I actually express myself, or how do I share my needs and desires, let alone, even get them met?", and so I think the next step ... I don't know. Maybe this is arrogant to say or too conclusive, but it feels like there's a step in masculine evolution where, and sometimes the way I talk about it is head, heart and sex or head, heart and balls balance. Shana James: Right? This way of both heart and love and care and sexuality being the dials turned up in a way to a hundred percent. Like I don't know if I give up my heart and my care to be very powerful or sexual or confidence, and then I think men can get out in the world in a powerful way, and co-create or collaborate - versus the false power I see, which is, "I don't feel powerful, so I'm going to try and take because I think that's the only way I could get it." Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. What I like to add if this fits into people's paradigms in that "head, heart, balls" is also your connection to "spirit." Shana James: Totally. I've been realizing that lately, that I'm like, "Oh, it's missing that fourth piece." Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, and how that fuels your connection to something greater. Shana James: Yeah. Yes. Neil Sattin: You're being part of the whole, how we're actually connected to other beings. Shana James: Yeah. Neil Sattin: It becomes a lot more challenging to do things that are, let's just call it since you did it earlier beautifully, the unconscious masculine. It becomes a lot more challenging to do that if you're aware, if you're conscious of "Oh, we're actually connected, so why would I do that to you?" Shana James: Right. Right. Right. Neil Sattin: Why would I act upon you instead of bringing some ferocity in that still is able to be WITH you? Shana James: Right. Right, and I think some of my favorite experiences of a man's expression of power, they really come with this, there's an intensity like you said or sometimes ferocity, but sometimes just an intensity. An intensity of loving or an intensity of passion, and it's so clear to me that I'm cared about and that they want something good for me too, and yeah. I love bringing in the soul element, because in the soul, in my experience, there isn't really a masculine, feminine. It's more of this pure just being. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, and it also, like as you were saying that, I started to feel like, "Right", and there's a difference between, "I'm with you so that I can get my needs met" versus, "We're together so that we can get our needs met", and how that changes the dynamic. Shana James: Yes. Neil Sattin: Then, it's not like you were saying earlier, it's not about taking what you need. Shana James: Yes. Neil Sattin: It's about, "How are we going to get this together?" Shana James: Right, which I'm wondering, okay, if we bring that back into this stereotypical masculinization or idea of masculine, whether it's in a business context or a relationship context or a family context, when there is a sense of a man getting his own, that his own needs and desires are valuable, valued, important, and that so is "the other's" needs and desires. I just, I wonder then how that impacts, and how to move beyond like I was saying before, this conflict of, "Wait. I'm supposed to be the rock. I'm not supposed to have any vulnerability. I'm supposed to be nice and take care of others", and I do see this next stepping stone or next evolution of, "Oh, I can be powerfully grounded in myself, value myself, believe in my own self-worth, and also share I feel really vulnerable right now, and I feel moved to tears right now, or I feel really sad that there's something happening in this relationship that it's painful for me, or something I'm not getting that I don't know if I need to get it from you or not, but I'm not feeling loved, I'm not feeling affection, I'm not ..." Those things. Shana James: Right? Can we actually come to the table and, I think express a kind of powerful vulnerability, or that vulnerability itself to me is power. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. I want your opinion on something, and at the same time, let's try to shift our conversation, if we can, to get ... let's see how practical we can get", because I don't know that this is going to be practical, but let's- Shana James: Yeah. Okay. Let's see. Neil Sattin: This is the question. The question is, "Why even talk about masculine and feminine?", because in my experience if two people come together and they're willing to be in who they are to be impacted by each other, to speak to that, and sometimes that "speaking" is the voice, but other times it's how you touch, how you ... It could be anything. Right? It's not just like blah, blah, "We're going to talk about it", but if two people are doing that, that's where the energy is, and it's not necessarily about leading or following. Shana James: Being more masculine. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Exactly. It's actually about what it feels like to be more real, and we got, like I'm somehow back at that authenticity piece. It's just like be authentic with your partner, and there you are. Shana James: Right. Neil Sattin: You're going to find your way into masculine, feminine. I'm just looking inside, like sometimes, you might be more like the tree, or the snowflake, or the squirrel, or the bear, or- Shana James: Or the root of the tree, or the leaves of the tree. Right. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Shana James: Right. If we actually let go of, "I'm supposed to be some way that is either feminine or masculine", would things just take shape in an easier way? Neil Sattin: Yeah. Shana James: Then, I think the question of authenticity though can be so confusing for people because at least from my perspective, we've all been conditioned from such a young age that it's hard to know what's authentic, like what's true for us, but in the context, I found myself saying this recently, like I feel like an explorer. I love to explore dynamics and the inner world and the outer world, and, "What happens if I do this, and how will you react if I do that?" Yeah. I wonder if there's a context of play, and I don't know that I have an answer for this, but I like the idea of taking on experiments and time-bound experiments, and so for those who are in relationship, what might it be like for a day or a week to say, "You know what? I'm going to let go of any ideas of masculine, feminine, anything, and I'm just going to see what I feel moved to do." Shana James: Some of that might be scary. Right? Some of that might feel like, "This is really awkward or uncomfortable, but I'm noticing I feel moved to cry in your arms even though I don't even know if I can, or I'm noticing I feel moved to take you into the bedroom and have my way with you", or like any of those things, man, woman, masculine, feminine aside. That could be a really interesting experiment, and the opposite could be interesting too, or opposite being like, "What if we really put attention on a masculine or a feminine dynamic, and what if we each took on the other?" I don't know that I have any concrete answers, but I think in practical terms, to become an explorer and to see what brings me more energy, and vitality, and excitement, and connection in the moment feels like an interesting way to go for me. Neil Sattin: Yeah. There's something about when you said, "Let's each be the other." Shana James: The other. Neil Sattin: What that sparked in me was, "Right - That makes a ton of sense" because if I'm going to be more feminine, let's say in that context, hanging out with Chloe, then the odds are that I'm going to do it in a way that on some level, I'm looking for - that I feel is lacking. It's almost like if she were to be like, "Tell me how to be a woman. I don't really know", or, "Tell me how to be a man. I don't know what you're missing. I'm just being me." Neil Sattin: Like, "Show me", and I could see that being valuable that there's some potential for it to feel ... Like you got to be in the spirit of play. Shana James: Exactly. Right. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to be in the spirit of being critical or judgmental, or, "I'm going to show you what I've been missing from you, but-" Shana James: Right. Right. What if it's just about me? It's not about what I've been missing with us. It's more like, "Oh, do I let myself ... Shana James: When I look at the whole spectrum of how I could express myself and what I could do and say, where are the places I'm not thinking it's okay to go? For some people, for a lot of people, that's anger. For me, I've also noticed it's joy. I hold back my joy. If someone else feels less joyful than me, I feel a little guilty feeling joy or playful, and I have seen that for other people too, so again, maybe another practical way is starting to consider, and you could do this even with a partner or a friend, like, "Where do I see you holding back from what could be called a 'Natural expression'?", and that with anger, we don't have to take our anger out on someone or blame or attack someone, but at the end of my last relationship, I had this really interesting experience where I started getting a little more frustrated, and at the end, he said something like, "I don't think you're as nice as you think you are." Shana James: I said, "That's totally true actually. I believe you. I try to be nicer than I am, and there are things that bothered me that I don't speak to, and I try to just shove under the rug", because I'm like, "Oh, that's not a big deal." Then, it'll come back out later, but when I went to one of my teachers and I told her that, she laughed and she said, "Actually, I think you're nicer than you think you are." It was just this really brilliant counterpoint where she was pointing out like, "That in my soul, I actually am really loving", and it was my ego or my identity that started getting contracted and started reacting in certain ways, and if I throw all that away, there's this way of like, "Oh, how can I give voice to all of those parts of myself, whether it's nice or not nice, or ...?" Shana James: You know what I mean, and play with that in the spirit of play like you said so that we have more choice, not because now, I'm supposed to be a certain way, but so that we have more choice and freedom to be who we are? Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. Just to be clear, I wasn't saying that we should embody what we want in our partner. I was just postulating that. Shana James: That that could happen. Neil Sattin: Maybe what emerges is that because our idea of what that other is - if it's something we're wanting from our, more of from our partner, then we're going to show it in the way that we've been wanting. Shana James: Yeah. Yes. Right. That could be very interesting. Neil Sattin: That could go for, like you could decide, "I'm going to play in the realm of being more like a tree". Like what is it like to be the grand oak that lives for hundreds of years for the next week, and what kind of perspective does that give me if I bring that to our interactions versus like, "Yeah. I'm going to be the sapling that just grew and is new, and bendy, and playful?" Shana James: Yeah. Neil Sattin: It's a totally different ... You can play with ... I mean, who says you have to be masculine and feminine? You could be any of these things in the spirit of trying out a new repertoire, and it's something that you can do on your own without telling your partner. Shana James: Right. Yeah. I like that. Neil Sattin: If they are tuned in, they might be like, "What are you doing? Why are you standing there with your arms out stretched all the time?" Shana James: I love that. I'm just wondering too as we're wrapping up if there's anything we each feel called to say, and maybe ... I mean, I feel moved to continue exploring this and see if there are anymore practical ways to apply this because I think this has been a very, in some ways, a roundabout conversation, but I like conversations and that it brings up ... It has us question our norms and structures and ways that we've held ourselves and thought we had to be, and somehow, I just felt called to what you said of these ways we think we're supposed to be and, yeah, what it's like to actually let go of. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. Shana James: I'm supposed to be some way, and I could see a lot of the men I've worked with or I've had these responses of like ... I actually had a man recently say, "I let go of being ..." What did he say? "It seems like women really like me for being this kind, gentlemanly person", and he was getting really frustrated, like, "That's not all of me, and I want to have to be good to be liked", and so actually, our next week session I said, "Let's really talk about this. I think this is one of my strengths is to help men move forward and connect in relationship while feeling their own strength and their own power, and their own commitment to their desires and truth, while also being able to connect and still have their care. It's like that balance again between the sex and the heart, or the whatever that kind of passion and heart or strength and heart. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I think what could be really helpful if someone was inclined to do this, and so if you're listening and you're thinking, "How can I get more related to what these guys have been talking about?", I could see listing, "I'm supposed to..." over and over again until you're ... Set a timer for 15 minutes because the first five minutes, you'll get all those things that are obvious, and then if you keep going, you'll start to discover even more about the scripts that you're playing, and it could be, "I'm supposed to be this way or I'm supposed to not be this other way" is another one, and then- Shana James: I love that. I just thought you and I should both do that and post ours and be vulnerable with that. Neil Sattin: Okay. I'll do that. Then, if you're in relationship, it might be great to share that. Shana James: Share that. Neil Sattin: Another twist on that could be, "I think my partner wants me to be..." Shana James: That's a great one. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Again, try to exhaust yourself in terms of what you write, so it's not just the first things that come to you. Shana James: Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's not what you already know - then you surprise yourself. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Right. Right. Then, when you can share that with your partner, there may be things where they're like, "Oh, yeah. I actually do want more of that from you, but I'm seeing how you think you're supposed to be this way," and it becomes a great opportunity for you to be in dialogue about, and to surface the roles that you each think you're supposed to be following. Shana James: Yes. Yes. Yes. I love that. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Shana James: Again, in service of choice more than not supposed to let go of these roles and take on some other role. Right? I think that's the endless hall of mirrors that we can get stuck in sometimes and to feel that sense of choice. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting one because what do you do with like you're supposed to be present? Shana James: Yeah. Neil Sattin: Like I'm going to tell you that in terms of how I see successful relationships, if you're not willing to be present, then you're screwed, like that doesn't mean you can't- Shana James: Right, and that doesn't mean I have to walk around a hundred percent of the time being present. I get to actually say to my partner, "Are you able to be present right now?", or, "Can we have this? When would be a good time?" Neil Sattin: Yeah. Shana James: We do have to be willing to show up for each other I think in that way. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, so we are being a little prescriptive, but I feel like what we're being prescriptive with are with values that actually allow for a lot of flexibility. Shana James: Yes, versus stereotyped roles and ways we're supposed to be. Maybe we jut brought it all the way back. Neil Sattin: Yes. Shana James: Yes. All right. I think we could do a part two and part hundred. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Shana James: I think we could keep going with this. Neil Sattin: Probably. Shana James: I like this, but for now, that feels like a good place to come to a completion. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Shana, it's always great to ... I'm so glad that we're friends and it's such an honor to have you back on Relationship Alive to talk about this. Shana James: Thank you. I love that we're friends too and colleagues, and that you continue to inspire me, and we continue to talk about what it's like to be in relationships and new relationships in our later life, and to grow, and to be on this path of trying to figure out what the hell this is all about, so thank you for doing this with me. Neil Sattin: It's so important. Yeah. Absolutely.