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Welcome!   This week I am spending a bit of time discussing Bitcoin and other crypto-currency and their tie to Ransomware and a couple of things the Feds are doing from the IRS to DOJ.  Then we go into the Gig Economy and thru the ramifications of CA Prop 22 and More so listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: The feds just seized Silk Road’s $1 billion Stash of bitcoin Uber and Lyft in driving seat to remake US labor laws The One Critical Element to Hardening Your Employees' Mobile Security Ransom Payment No Guarantee Against Doxxing Connected cars must be open to third parties, say Massachusetts voters Tracking Down the Web Trackers Apple develops an alternative to Google search San Diego’s spying streetlights stuck switched “on,” despite a directive Paying ransomware demands could land you in hot water with the feds Windows 10 machines running on ARM will be able to emulate x64 apps soon 'It Won't Happen to Me': Employee Apathy Prevails Despite Greater Cybersecurity Awareness Rise in Remote MacOS Workers Driving Cybersecurity 'Rethink' A Guide to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] The silk road is back in the news as a billion dollars was just taken from their account. We're going to talk about mobile security, ransom payments, and doxing. And of course, a whole lot more as you listen right now. Hi, everybody, of course, Craig Peterson here. Thanks for spending a little time with me today. We have a bunch to get to. I think one of the most interesting articles, what kind of start with this week because this is a very big deal. We're talking about something called cryptocurrency, and I'm going to go into that a little bit. So for those of you who already know, just maybe there's something you'll learn from this little part of the discussion and then we'll get into Bitcoin more specifically. Then the secret service, what they have been doing to track down some of these illegal operators and also how this is really affecting ransomware. Those two, by the way, are just tied tightly together, Bitcoin and ransomware. So I'll explain why that is as well. Cryptocurrency has been around for quite a while now.  There's a concept behind cryptocurrency and it's the most important concept of all, frankly, when it comes to cryptocurrency and that is you have to use advanced to mathematics in order to prove that you have found a Bitcoin. Time was you'd go out and go gold mining. Heck people are still doing it today. all over New England. It isn't just the Yukon or Alaska or Australia, et cetera. They're doing it right here. And they have proof that they found something that's very hard to find because they have a little piece of gold or maybe a nugget or maybe something that's like a huge nugget man. I saw a picture of one out of Australia that was absolutely incredible. Takes a few people to carry this thing. That is proof, isn't it? You can take that to the bank, ultimately. You sell it to a gold dealer who gives you cash. That you can then take to a bank.  Then the bank account information is used to prove that you can buy something. You give someone a credit card, it runs a little check. Hey, are we going to let this guy buy it? Or a debit card? Hey, does he have enough money in the bank? So along with that pathway, you have something that is real. That's hard and that's the gold that was mined out of the ground. Then it very quickly becomes something that's frankly, unreal. Time was our currency was backed by gold and then it was backed by silver. Now it's backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. not quite the same thing, is it? So we're dealing with money that isn't all that real, the United States agreed to not manipulate its currency. We became what's called the petrodollar. All petroleum products, particularly crude oil are sold on international exchanges using the US dollar. China is trying to change that. Russia's tried to change that. They're actually both going to change it by using a cryptocurrency. At least that's their plan. The idea behind cryptocurrency is that your money, isn't real either, right? You sure you've got a piece of paper, but it's not backed by anything other than the acceptance of it by somebody else. If you walk into Starbucks and you drop down a quarter for your coffee. Yeah, I know it's not a quarter used to be a dime. I remember it was a dime for a cup of coffee, not at Starbucks, but you dropped down your money. Okay. Your $10 bill for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, they'll take it because they know they can take that $10 and they can use it to pay an employee and that employee will accept it and then they can use that to buy whatever it is that they need. It's how it works. With Bitcoin, they're saying what's the difference? You have a Bitcoin.  It's not real. Ultimately represents something that is real, but how is there a difference between accepting a Bitcoin and accepting a $5 bill? What is the difference between those two or that $10 bill that you put down at Starbucks? In both cases, we're talking about something that represents the ability to trade. That's really what it boils down to. Our currencies represent the ability to trade. Remember way back when, before I was born that a standard wage was considered a dollar a day. So people would be making money at a rate of a dollar a day. I remember that song, old country song. I sold my soul to the company's store and they made enough money just basically yet buy in to pay the company for the room and board and everything else they had. Interesting times, not fun, that's for sure for many people caught up in it. When you dig down behind Bitcoin, once you ultimately find at the root,  was a computer that spent a lot of time and money to solve this massive mathematical equation. That's the basics of how that works. That's what Bitcoin mining is. Right now, it costs more to mine a Bitcoin. In most areas, then it costs for the electricity to run it and the hardware to buy it. There are computers that are purpose made. Just to create these Bitcoins, just to find them just to mine them.  If you're sitting at home thinking, wow, I should get into a cryptocurrency and I'll just go ahead and mine it on my computer, that's really fun. It's a fun thing to think about. But in reality, you are not going to be able to justify it. You'd be better off to go and buy some gold or another precious metal. So that's how cryptocurrency has, how Bitcoin, that's how all of these really begin is just with the computer, trying to solve an incredibly complex math problem that can take weeks or months for it to solve. For those of you that want to dig a little bit more, basically, it's using prime numbers. You might remember messing with those in school. I remember, I wrote a program to determine prime numbers a long time ago. 45 plus years ago, I guess it was, and it was fun because I learned a lot about prime numbers back then. But we're dealing with multi-thousand digit numbers in some of these cases, just huge numbers, far too hard for you or I to deal with and that's why I take so incredibly long. Now we know how the value was started and that was with somebody running a computer finding that Bitcoin and putting it on the market. Now, normally when you're looking at market and market volatility, markets are supply and demand based except for government interference. We certainly have a lot of that in the United States. We do not have a completely free market system, not even close. The free market says I had to dig this hole and in order to dig that hole, I had to have a big backhoe. Before that, I had to have a bucket or maybe some other heavy equipment to move all of the earth out of the way, the bulldozers, et cetera. Then I had to run that through some sort of a wash plant and all of these things cost me money. So basically it costs me whatever it might be, a hundred bucks, in order to find this piece of gold, and then that hundred bucks now that it costs him to do it is the basis for the value of that piece of gold. Obviously, I'm not using real numbers, but just simple numbers to give you an idea of how cryptocurrency works. So it's a hundred bucks for me to get that piece of gold out of the ground. Then that piece of gold is taken and goes to some form of a distributor. So I'm going to sell that piece of gold to somebody that's going to melt it down. They're going to assay it and say, yeah, this is a hundred percent pure gold, and then they'll sell it to someone and then they'll sell it to someone and then they'll sell it to a jeweler who then takes it and makes jewelry. Every time along there they're adding stuff onto it. But the basic value of gold is based on how hard it is to get and how many people want to get their hands on it. The law of supply and demand. You've seen that over the years, it's been true forever. Really? That's how human trade works. Capitalism, in reality, is just the ability of strangers to trade with each other is just an incredible concept. What we're talking about here with the cryptocurrency is much the same thing. The value of cryptocurrency goes up and down a lot. Right now, one Bitcoin is worth about 15,000, almost $16,000 per bitcoin. We'll talk about that. What is Bitcoin? How can I even buy it? Pizza for the silly things were 16 grand, right? It's like taking a bar of gold to buy a pizza. How do you do that? How do you deal with that? So we'll get into that, and then we'll get into how the tie between cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, and the criminal underground. That tie is extremely tight and what that means to you.  It is tied directly into the value of Bitcoin. Right now the basis is it costs me 16 grand to mine, a Bitcoin. Therefore that's where I'm going to sell it for, of course, there are profit and everything else that you put into that $16,000 number. We've got a lot more to get to today. We're going to talk about this billion dollars, which is, that's a real piece of money here that the feds just seized. Right now talking about Bitcoin. What's the value of it? How is it tied into criminal enterprises and what's going on with the FBI seizure this week? Bitcoin's value has been going up and down. I just pulled up during the break, a chart showing me the value of Bitcoin over the last 12 months. It has been just crazy. going back years it was worth a dollar. I think the  Bitcoin purchase was for a pizza, which is really interesting when you get right down to it. The guy says, Oh yeah, what the heck, take some Bitcoin for it. Okay. here we go. May 22nd, 2010 Lasso Lowe made the first real-world transaction by buying two pizzas in Jacksonville, Florida for 10,000 Bitcoin. 10,000 Bitcoin. So let me do a little bit of math here. Let me pull it up here. Today's price is about $15,750,000. So he bought it. Two pizzas for the value today, Bitcoin of $157 million. That's actually pretty simple math, $157 million. Okay, that was 10 years ago. The first Bitcoin purchase. So it has gone up pretty dramatically in price. I think the highest price for one Bitcoin was $17,900. It was almost $18,000 and then it's dropped down.  It has gone up and it has gone down quite a bit over the years. It seems to have had a few really hard drop-offs when it hit about 14,000. Right now it is above that. So I'm not giving investment advice here, right? That's not what I do. We're talking about the technology that's behind some of this stuff, but one Bitcoin then. Is too much for a pizza, right? So he paid 10,000 Bitcoin for his first pizza. That's really cool, but, ah, today where it's another word, the Bitcoin was worth just a fraction of a cent each back then. Today you can't buy a pizza for one Bitcoin. So Bitcoin was designed to be chopped up so you can purchase and you can sell them at a fraction of a Bitcoin. That's how these transactions are happening. Now there's a lot of technology we won't get into that's behind all of this and how the transactions work and having a wallet, a Bitcoin wallet, and how the encryption works and how all of these logs work. The audits, basically the journals that are kept as accountants and how a majority of these have to vote and say that particular transaction was worthwhile. The fact that every Bitcoin transaction is not only stored but is stored on thousands of computers worldwide. Okay. There's a whole lot to that, but let's get into the practical side. If you are a bad guy. If you are a thief. If you're into extortion. If you're doing any of those things, how do you do it without the government noticing? In reality, it's impossible when you get right down to it. Nothing is completely anonymous and nothing ever will be most likely, completely anonymous. But they still do it anyway, because, in reality, they, the FBI or the secret service or whoever's investigating has to be interested enough in you and what you're doing in order to track you down. If they are interested enough, they will track you down. It really is that simple. Enter a convicted criminal by the name of Ross Ulbricht Ross was running something online, a website called the silk road.  It was what's known as the dark web. If you've listened to the show long enough, the history of the dark web and that it was founded by the US government. In fact, the dark web is still maintained by the government. I'm pretty sure it's still the Navy that actually keeps the dark web online. The thinking was we have the dark web. It's difficult for people to track us here on the dark web and if we use something like Bitcoin, one of these cryptocurrencies for payment, then we are really going to be a lot safer. Then they added one more thing to the mix called a tumbler. And the idea with the tumbler is that if I'm buying something from you using Bitcoin, my wallet shows that I transferred the Bitcoin to you. All of these verification mechanisms that are in place around the world also know about our little transaction, everybody knows. The secrecy is based on the concept of a Swiss bank account. When with that Swiss bank account, you have a number and obviously you have a name, but it is kept rather anonymous. The same, thing's true with your wallet. You have a number, it's a big number to a hexadecimal number. It is a number that you can use and you can trade with. You've got a problem because, ultimately, someone looking at these logs who knows who you are or who I am or wants to figure out who either one of us is probably can. And once they know that they can now verify that you indeed are the person who made that purchase. So these tumblers will take that transaction instead of me transferring Bitcoin directly to you, the Bitcoin gets transferred to another wallet. Then from that wallet to another wallet and from that wallet to another wallet and from that wallet to a number of another wallet.  Now is much more difficult to trace it because I did not have a transaction directly with you. Who is in the middle? That's where things start getting really difficult. But as Russ Ulbricht found out, it is not untraceable. He is behind bars with two life sentences plus 40 years. What they were doing on the silk road is buying and selling pretty much anything you can think of. You could get any hard drug that you wanted there, you could get fake IDs, anything, really, anything, even services that you might want to buy. There are thousands of dealers on the silk road. Over a hundred thousand buyers, according to the civil complaint that was filed on Thursday this week. Last week, actually, the document said that silk road generated a revenue of over 9.5 million Bitcoins and collected commissions from these sales of more than 600,000 Bitcoin. Absolutely amazing. Now you might wonder, okay. Maybe I can buy a pizza with Bitcoin or something elicit with Bitcoin, but how can I use it in the normal world while there are places that will allow you to convert Bitcoin into real dollars and vice versa? In fact, many businesses have bought Bitcoin for one reason and one reason in particular. That reason is insurance. They have bought Bitcoin in case they get ransomware. They just want it to sit in there, to use to pay ransoms. We'll talk more about that. We're turning into the Bitcoin hour, I guess today. we are talking a lot about it right now because it's one of the top questions I get asked. The IRS is saying that they may put a question on your tax return next year, about cryptocurrency specifically Bitcoin. So what's that all about? And by the way, the IRS had a hand in this conviction too. Your listening to Craig Peterson. We just mentioned, gentlemen, I don't know if he's a gentleman, by the name of Ross Ulbricht and he is behind bars for life. He was buying and selling on the. A website called the silk road. In fact, he was the guy running it, according to his conviction and two life terms, plus 40 years seems like a long time. In other words, he's not getting out. The internal revenue service had gotten involved with this as well because you are supposed to pay taxes on any money you earn. That is a very big deal when you're talking about potentially many millions of dollars. So let's figure this out. I'm going to say, some 9.5 million. So 9 million, 500,000. There we go, Bitcoin. What do we want to say? Let's say the average value of that Bitcoins over time, there was about $5,000 apiece. Okay. So let's see times 5,000, Oh wow. That's a big number. It comes back to 47 billion. There you go. $500 million dollars.  Almost $50 billion. That's just really rough back of the envelope math. We have no idea. So that's a lot of money to be running through a website. Then the commission that he made on all of those sales is said to have been more than 600,000 Bitcoin. So again, 600,000 times let's say an average price of $5,000 per Bitcoin. So that's saying he probably made about $3 billion gross anyways, on these collected commissions. That is amazing. The IRS criminal investigation arm worked with the FBI to investigate what was happening here as well as, by the way, the secret service.  I got a briefing on this from the secret service and these numbers are just staggering, but here's the problem. The guy was sentenced a few years ago. 2015  he was prosecuted successfully. where did all of his money go? His money was sitting there in Bitcoin, in an unencrypted wallet, because part of the idea behind your Bitcoin wallet is there are passcodes and nobody can get at that your wallet information unless they have the passcode. So they might know what your wallet number is, which they did. The secret service and the IRS knew his wallet number, but how can they get at that Bitcoin and the money it represents? They did. This is like something really from one of these, TV shows that I don't watch right there. What is it? NCU? The crime investigator unit CIU or whatever it is on TV. I can't watch those because there's so much stuff they get wrong technically, and I just start screaming at the TV. It's one of those things. What they found is that the wallet hadn't been used in five years. They found that just last week, people who've been watching his Bitcoin wallet number, found that they were about 70,000 Bitcoins transferred from the wallet. So people knew something was going on. Then we ended up having a confirmation. The feds had admitted that it was them. They had gone ahead and they had a hacker get into it. So here's a quote straight from the feds. That was an ARS Technica this week, according to the investigation, individual X was able to hack into silk road and gain unauthorized and illegal access and thereby steal the illicit cryptocurrency from silk road and move it into wallets and individual X controlled. According to the investigation, Ulbricht became aware of individual X's online identity and threatened individual X for the return of the cryptocurrency to Ulbricht.  So Ulbricht had his cryptocurrency stolen, which by the way, is if you are dealing with Bitcoin, that is very common, not that it's stolen. It does get stolen and it's not uncommon. It's very common for the bad guys to try and hack into your Bitcoin wallet. That's part of the reason they install key loggers so they can see what the password is to your wallet. So apparently that unknown hacker did not return or spend the Bitcoin, but on Tuesday they signed consent and agreement to forfeiture with the US attorney's office in San Francisco and agreed to turn over the funds to the government. Very complex here. There are a lot of links that the Silkroad founder took to really obfuscate the transfer of the funds. There's tons of forensic expertise that was involved and they eventually unraveled the true origins of Bitcoin. It is absolutely amazing. Earlier this year they used a third-party Bitcoin attribution company to analyze the transactions that had gone through the silk road. They zeroed in on 54 trends and actions, the transferred 70,000 Bitcoins to two specific wallets. I said earlier, by the way, that it was hex, it isn't hex. It's mixed upper lower case. characters as well as numbers. And, so it's a base. What is it? 26, 40, 60 something. The Bitcoin is valued at about $354,000 at the time. I don't know about you. I find this stuff absolutely fascinating. There's a lot of details on how it was all done and they got the money back. So with a cryptocurrency, you're not completely anonymous. As the founder of the silk road finds out. You end up with criminal organizations trying to use it all the time. Just having and using Bitcoin can raise a red flag that you might be part of a criminal organization. So you got to watch that okay. In addition to that, The IRS is looking to find what it is you have made with your Bitcoin transactions because almost certainly those are taxable transactions. If you've made money off of Bitcoin. Now you'd have to talk to your accountant about writing off money that you lost when you sold Bitcoin after it had dropped. I do not own any Bitcoin. I don't. I played with this years ago and I created a wallet. I started doing some mining, trying to just get to know this, so I'm familiar with this. I've done it. I haven't played with it for a long time. If you have made money on Bitcoin and you sold those Bitcoin, or even if you transferred Bitcoin and the profits as Bitcoin, you all money to the IRS. Now the feds have their hands on almost a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, just from this one guy. that's it for Bitcoin for today. We're going to talk about Uber and Lyft and how they're in the driver's seat right now to maybe remake labor laws in about two or three dozen States almost right away. Are you, or maybe somebody driving for Uber or Lyft, or maybe you've been thinking about it? There are a lot of problems nationwide when it comes to employee status. We're going to talk about the gig economy right now. Hey, thanks for joining me, everybody. You are listening to Craig Peterson. Hey, Uber and Lyft are two companies that I'm sure you've heard of. If you heard about the general category here, it's called the gig economy. The gig economy is where you have people doing small things for you or your business. That's a gig. So during this election season, for instance, I turned somebody on to a site called Fiverr, F I V E R R.com, which is a great site. I've used it many times.  I turned them on saying that because they wanted a cartoon drawn there is no better place than to go to Fiverr. Find somebody who has a style you like, and then hire them.  It used to be five bucks apiece, nowadays not so much, it could be 20, it could be a hundred, but it is inexpensive. When you hire somebody to do that as a contractor, there are rules and regulations to determine. If you are an employee versus an independent contractor, there are a lot of rules on all of this, including filing 1099s. But can you decide whether or not they are a contractor? So let's look at the rules here. I'm on the IRS website right now and they have some basic categories. So number one, behavioral control, workers, and employee, when the business has the right to direct and control the work performed by the worker. Even if that right is not exercised. Then they give some reasons for behavioral control, like the types of instructions given, when and where to work, the tools to use the degree of instruction. I think the big one is training to work on how to do the job, because frankly, even if you're hiring somebody to do something for you, that takes an hour. You have control over their behavior. But how about an Uber driver or Lyft driver? Are you telling them where to go? Duh, of course, you are. are you telling them, Hey, don't take that road because the Westside highway so busy this time of day, of course, you are? It looks like they might be employees but under behavioral control. Next step financial control. Does the business have a right to direct or control the financial and business aspects of the worker's job, such as significant investment in the equipment they're using unreimbursed expenses, independent contractors, and more likely to incur unreimbursed expenses than employees? there you go. Okay. So no that Uber Lyft driver, that person making the cartoon, I don't have any financial control over their equipment. Relationship. How do the worker and the business perceive their interaction with each other in written contracts? Or describe the relationship? Even if the worker has a contract that says they are a contractor does not mean that they aren't a contractor. By the way, if you're not withholding the taxes and paying them as an employee, and then they don't pay their taxes and the IRS comes coming after somebody they're coming after you as well for all of those that you did not pay taxes on. Then it goes into the consequences of misclassifying an employee goes on. So there are people who could maybe they're an employee, maybe their contractor, but with Uber and Lyft, California decided to put it on the ballot because both Uber and Lyft were saying, we're pulling out of California. California has a state income tax and they want to collect that income tax. Plus California, we're saying, Oh, we care about the drivers. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. I'm a little jaded on that.I might say because I had a couple of companies out in California, way back in the day. So the California voters had it on the ballot just here. What a week ago? A little more than a week ago, maybe two almost now isn't it. They decided to let Uber and other gig economy companies continue to treat the workers as independent contractors. That is a very big deal. Because now what's happened because of this overwhelming approval of proposition 22, these companies are now exempt from a new employment law that was passed last year in California. So what goes out the window here the well minimum rate of pay, healthcare provisions, et cetera. And by the way, They still can get this minimum pay and healthcare provisions. Okay. They can still get it. It's still mandated out there, but it's absolutely just phenomenal. Apparently, the law that was passed last year was started because these gig people can really cut the cost of something and other people just weren't liking it. Frankly, gig companies also outspent the opposition by a ratio of $10 to $1, which is amazing. 10 to one on. Trying to get this proposition to pass. So it's a very big deal. And what it means is in California, these gig workers are independent contractors, but there's a couple of dozen states that are looking at this, including to our South, or maybe the state you're listening in. If you're listening down in mass right now, but South of where I am. In Massachusetts, the state attorney general has sued Uber and Lyft over worker classification. And this, of course, is going to have nothing to do with what happened in California right now. There are other States who are looking into this right now and you'll be just totally surprised. They're all left-wing States. I'm sure. I hope you were sitting down, New York, Oregon, Washington state, New Jersey, and Illinois. Okay. so we'll see what happens here. The companies have tried to make a good with the unions. Unions, pretty upset about this, good articles. So you might want to look it up online. Now I want to, before this hour is up, talk about ransom payments. I have mentioned before on the show that the department of justice now looks at people and businesses, paying ransomware as supporting terrorist operations. Did you realize that it's like sending money off to Osama Bin Laden, back in the day? Because if you do pay a ransom, the odds are very good that it is going to a terrorist organization. Oh, okay. It could be Iran. Are they terrorists? No, but they do support terrorism, according to the state department. Is Russia terrorist. no, but are they attacking us? Is this okay? Is there an attack of the United States, a terrorist attack? This is bringing up all kinds of really interesting points. One of them is based on arrests that were made about three weeks ago where some hackers were arrested on charges of terrorism. It is affecting insurance as well. I've mentioned before that we can pass on to our clients a million dollars worth of insurance underwritten by Lloyd's of London. Very big deal. But when you dig into all of these different types of insurance policies, we're finding that insurance companies are not paying out on cyber insurance claims, they'll go in and they'll say, you were supposed to do this, that, and the other thing. You didn't do it, so we're not paying. We've seen some massive lawsuits that have been brought by very big, very powerful companies that did not go anywhere, because again they were not following best practices in the industry. So this is now another arrow in the quiver, the insurance companies to say. Wait a minute, you arrested hackers who were trying to put ransomware on machines and did in many cases and charged a ransom. You charge them with terrorism. Therefore, the federal government has acknowledged that hacking is a form of terrorism. Isn't that kind of a big deal now. So it's an act of terrorism. Therefore we don't have to payout. It's just if your home gets bombed during a war, You don't get compensation from the insurance company, and ransomware victims now that pay these bad guys to keep the bad guys from releasing data that they stole from these ransomware victims are finding out that data that was stolen is being released anyways. So here's, what's going on. You get ransomware on your machine. Time was everything's encrypted and you get this nice big red and warning label and you pay your ransom. They give you a key and you have a 50% chance that they are in fact, going to get your data back for you. Nowadays, it has changed in a big way where they will gain control of your computer. They will poke around on your computer. Often an actual person poking around on your computer. They will see if it looks interesting. If it does, they will spread laterally within your company. We call that East-West spread and they'll find documents that are of interest and they will download them from your network, all without your knowledge and once they have them, they'll decide what they're going to charge you as a ransom. So many of these companies, the bad guys. Yeah. They have companies, will ransom your machines by encrypting everything, and the same pay the ransom, get your documents back. Then what'll happen is they will come back to you, maybe under the guise of a different, bad guy, hacker group. They'll come back to you and say, if you don't pay this other ransom, we're going to release all your documents, and you're going to lose your business. Yeah, how's that for change? So paying a ransom is no guarantee against them releasing your files. Hey, we've been talking about how computers are everywhere. What can we expect from our computerized cars? What can we expect from computers? Intel has had a monopoly with Microsoft called the Wintel monopoly. So if you missed part of today's show. Make sure you double-check and also make sure you are on my newsletter list. I'm surprised here how every week I get questions from people and it's great. That's it. I love to help. I was asked when I was about 19 to read this little book and to also to fill out a form that said what I wanted on my headstone. That's it heady question to ask somebody at 19 years of age, but I said that this was pretty short and sweet. I said, "he helped others." Just those three words, because that's what I always wanted to do. That's what I always enjoyed doing. You can probably tell that's why I'm doing what I'm doing right now is to help people stop the bad guys and to make their lives a little bit better in the process, right? That's the whole goal. That's the hope anyway. If you need a little help, all you have to do is reach out. Be glad to help you out. Just email me M E at Craig Peterson dot com. Or if you're on my email list, you'll get all of my weekly articles, everything I talked about here on the show, as well as my during the week little emails that I send out with videos that I've been doing. I've been putting more together. Didn't get any out this week I had planned to, but I probably will get them out next week.  I was able to make a couple of this week and we'll queue them up for the coming week, but you'll get all of that. So just go to. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll find everything there. As part of all of that of course, you will also be getting information about the training that I do. I do all kinds of free pieces of training and webinars, and I've got all kinds of reports. One of the most popular ones lately has been my self-audit kit. It's a little tool kit that you can use to audit, your business and see if you are compliant. It's just a PDF that you can take from the email that I send you. If you ask for it, all you have to do is ask for an audit kit, put that in the subject line, and email me@craigpeterson.com and we'll get you going. So I've had a few people who have this week said, Hey, can you help me out?  What do I do? I help them out and It turns out when I'm helping them out, they're not even on my email list. So I'll start there. If you're wondering where to start, how to get up to speed a little bit, right? You don't have to know all of this stuff like the back of your hand, but you do have to have the basic understanding. Just go online. And a signup Craig peterson.com/subscribe would love to have you there. Even when we get into ice station zebra weather here coming up in not so long, unfortunately, in the Northeast. When you're thinking about your computer and what to buy. There are a lot of choices. Of course, the big ones nowadays are a little different than they were just a few years ago. Or a couple of years ago, you used to say, am I going to get a Windows computer, or am I going to get a Mac now? I think there's a third choice that's really useful for most people, depends on what you're doing. If what you do is some web browsing, some email, and also might do a couple of things with some video and pictures and organizing you really should look at the third option. Which is a tablet of some sort and that is your iPad. Of course, the number one in the market, these things last a long time. They retain their value. So their higher introductory price isn't really a bad thing. And they're also not that much more expensive when you get right down to it and consider the resale value of them. So have a look at the tablet, but that's really one of the three major choices also today when you're deciding that you might not be aware of it, but you are also deciding what kind of processor you're going to be using. There is a lot of work that's been done going on arm processors. What they are called A R M. I started working with this class of processor, also known as RISC, which is reduced instruction set processors, many years ago, back in the nineties. I think it was when I first started working with RISC machines. But the big difference here is that these are not Intel chips that are in the iPads that are in or our iPhones, they aren't Intel or AMD processors that are in your Android phones or Android tablet. They're all using something that's called ARM architecture. This used to be called advanced RISC machine acorn risk machine. They've been around a while, but ARM is a different type of processor entirely than Intel. the basic Intel design is to try and get as much done with one instruction as possible. So for instance, if you and I decided to meet up for Dunkin donuts, I might say, okay, so we're going to go to the Duncan's on Elm Street, but the one that's South of the main street, and I'll meet you there at about 11 o'clock. And then I gave you some of the directions on how to get to the town, et cetera. And so we meet at dunks and to have a good old time. That would be a RISC architecture, which has reduced instructions. So you can tell it, okay, you get to take a right turn here, take a left turn there. In the computing world, it would be, you have to add this and divide that and then add these and divide those and subtract this. Now to compare my little dunk story. What you end up doing with an Intel processor or what's called a CISC processor, which is a complex instruction set, is we've already been to dunks before that dunks in fact, so all I have to say is I'll meet you at dunks. Usual time. There's nothing else I have to say. So behind all of that is the process of getting into your car, driving down to dunks the right town, the right street, the right dunks, and maybe even ordering. So in a CISC processor, it would try and do all of those things with one instruction. The idea is, let's make it simple for the programmer. So all of the programmers have to do, if the programmer wants to multiply too, double-precision floating-point numbers, the programmer that if he's just dealing with machine-level only has to have one instruction. Now those instructions take up multiple cycles. We can. Get into all the details, but I think I've already got some people glazing over. But these new ARM processors are designed to be blindingly fast is what matters. We can teach a processor how to add, and if we spend our time figuring out how to get that processor to add faster. We end up with ultimately faster chip and that's the theory behind risk or reduced instruction set computers, and it has taken off like wildfire. So you have things like the iPad pro now with an arm chip that's in there designed by Apple. Now they took the basic license with the basic ARM architecture and they've advanced it quite a bit. In fact, but that Ipad processor now is faster than most laptop processors made by Intel or AMD. That is an impressive feat. So when we're looking a little bit forward, we're no longer looking at machines that are just running an Intel instruction set. We're not just going to see, in other words, the Intel and AMD inside stickers on the outside of the computer. Windows 10 machines running on ARM processors are out already. Apple has announced arm based laptops that will be available very soon. In fact, there is a scheduled press conference. I think it's next week by Apple, the 15th. Give or take. Don't hold me to that one, but they're going to have a, probably an announcement of the iPhone 12 and maybe some delivery dates for these new ARM-based laptops. So these laptops are expected to last all day. Really all day. 12 hours worth of working with them, using them. They're expected to be just as fast or faster in some cases as the Intel chips are. So ARM is where things are going. We already have the Microsoft updated surface pro X. That was just announced about two weeks ago, which is ARM-based. We've gotten macs now coming out their ARM base. In fact, I think they're going to have two of them before the end of the year. Both Apple and Microsoft are providing support for x86 apps. So what that means is the programs that you have bought that are designed to run on an Intel architecture will run on these ARM chips. Now, as a rule, it's only the 64-bit processes that are going to work. The 32-bit processes, if you haven't upgraded your software to 64 bits yet you're gonna have to upgrade it before you can do the ARM migration. We're going to see less expensive computers. Arm chips are much cheaper as a whole than Intel. Intel chips are insanely high priced. They are also going to be way more battery efficient. So if you're looking for a new computer. Visual studio code has been updated optimized for windows 10 on ARM. We're going to see more and more of the applications coming out. And it won't be long, a couple of years now, you will have a hard time finding some of the Intel-based software that's out there. "it won't happen to me." That's our next topic. We've got companies who are investing a lot of money to upgrade the technology, to develop security processes, boost it. Staff yet studies are showing that they're overlooking the biggest piece of the puzzle. What is the problem? Employee apathy has been a problem for many businesses for a very long time. Nowadays, employee apathy is causing problems on the cybersecurity front. As we've talked about so many times, cybersecurity is absolutely critical. For any business or businesses are being attacked sometimes hundreds of times, a minute, a second, even believe it or not. Some of these websites come under attack and if we're not paying close attention, we're in trouble. So a lot of companies have decided while they need to boost their it staff. They've got to get some spending in on some of the hardware that's going to make the life. Better. And I am cheering them on. I think both of those are great ideas, but the bottom line problem is there are million-plus open cyber security IT jobs. So as a business, odds are excellent that you won't be able to find the type of person that you need. Isn't that a shame? But I've got some good news for you here. You can upgrade the technology that's going to help. But if you upgrade the technology, make sure you're moving towards, what's called a single pane of glass. You don't want a whole bunch of point solutions. You want something that monitors everything. Pulls all of that knowledge together uses some machine learning and some artificial intelligence and from all of that automatically shuts down attacks, whether they're internal or external, that's what you're looking for. There are some vendors that have various things out there. If you sell to the federal government within three years, you're going to have to meet these new requirements, the CMMC requirements, level three, four, level five, which are substantial. You cannot do it yourself, you have to bring in a cybersecurity expert. Who's going to work with your team and help you develop a plan. I think that's really great, really important, but here's where the good news comes in. You spent an astronomical amount of money to upgrade this technology and get all of these processes in place and you brought in this consultant, who's going to help you out. You boosted your IT staff. But studies are starting to indicate that a lot of these businesses are overlooking the biggest piece of the puzzle, which is their employees. Most of these successful attacks nowadays are better than 60%, it depends on how you're scoring this, but most of the attacks these days come in through your employees. That means that you clicked on a link. One of your employees clicked on a link. If you are a home user, it's exactly the same thing. The bad guys are getting you because you did something that you should not have done. Just go have a look online. If you haven't already make sure you go to have I been poned.com. Poned is spelled PWNED Have a look at it there online and try and see if your email address and passwords that you've been using have already been compromised. Have already been stolen. I bet they have, almost everybody has. Do you know what to do about that? This is part of the audit kit that I'll send to you. If you ask for that. Kind of goes through this and a whole lot of other stuff. But checking to see if your data has been stolen, because now is they use that to trick people. So they know that you go to a particular website that you use a particular email address or password. They might've been able to get into one of these social networks and figure out who your friends are. They go and take that information.  Now a computer can do this. They just mine it from a website like LinkedIn, find out who the managers in the company are. And then they send off some emails that look very convincing, and those convincing emails get them to click. That could be the end of it. Because you are going somewhere, you shouldn't go and they're going to trick you into doing something.  Knowledge really is the best weapon when it comes to cybersecurity. A lot of companies have started raising awareness among employees. I have some training that we can provide as well. That is very good. It's all video training and it's all tracked. We buy these licenses in big bundles. If you are a small company contact me and I'll see if I can't just sneak you into one of these bundles. Just email me @craigpeterson.com in the subject line, put something like training, bundle, or something. You need to find training for your employees and their training programs need to explain the risk of phishing scams. Those they're the big ones. That's how most of the ransomware it gets into businesses is phishing scams. That's how ransomware gets down to your computers. You also need to have simulations that clarify the steps you need to take when faced with a suspicious email. Again, if you want, I can point you to a free site that Google has on some phishing training and it's really quite good. It walks you through and shows you what the emails might look like and if you want to click or not. But there's a lot of different types of training programs. You've got to make sure that everybody inside your organization or in your, family is educated about cybersecurity. What do you do when you get an email that you suspect might be a phishing email? They need to know that this needs to be forwarded to IT, or perhaps they just tell IT, Hey, it's in my mailbox, if IT has access to their mailbox, so IT can look at it and verify it. You need to have really good email filters, not the type that comes by default with a Microsoft Windows 365 subscription, but something that flags all of this looks for phishing scams, and blocks them. There's been a ton of studies now that are showing that there is a greater awareness of cybersecurity dangers, but the bottom-line problem is that employees are still showing a lax attitude when it comes to practicing even the most basic of cybersecurity prevention methods. TrendMicro, who is a cybersecurity company. We tend to not use their stuff because it's just not as good. But TrendMicro is reporting that despite 72% of employees claim to have gained better cybersecurity awareness during the pandemic 56% still admitted to using a non-work application on a company device. Now that can be extremely dangerous. 66% admitted uploading corporate data to that application. This includes by the way, things like using just regular versions of Dropbox. Do you share files from the office and home? Dropbox does have versions that are all that have all kinds of compliance considerations that do give you security. But by default, the stuff a home user does not get the security you need. They're doing all of this even knowing that their behavior represents a security risk. And I think it boils right down to, it's not going to happen to me. Just apathy and denial. So same thing I've seen, being a security guy for the last 30 years, I've seen over and over, apathy and denial. Don't let it happen to them. By the way, about 50% believe that they could be hacked no matter what protective measures are taken. 43% took the polar opposite. They didn't take the threat seriously at all. 43% didn't believe they could be hacked. We're going to talk about Mac OS is driving cybersecurity rethink. By the way to follow up on that last segment. So Millennials and Generation Z are terrible with security. They keep reusing passwords. They accept connections with strangers. Most of the time. If that's not believable, I don't know what it is. They've grown up in this world of share everything with everyone. What does it matter? Don't worry about it. Yeah. I guess that's the way it goes. Right? Kids these days. Which generation hasn't said that in the past? We were just talking about millennials, generation Z, and the whole, it won't happen to me, employee apathy and we've got to stop that. Even within ourselves, right? We're all employees in some way or another. What does that mean? It means we've got to pay attention. We've' got to pay a lot of attention and that isn't just true in the windows world. Remember we've got to pay attention to our network. You should be upgrading the firmware on your switches, definitely upgrading the software and firmware in your firewalls and in your routers, et cetera. Keep that all up to date. Even as a home user, you've got a switch or more than one. You've got a router. You've got a firewall in many cases that equipment is provided by your ISP internet service provider. If you've got a Comcast line or a FairPoint, whatever, it might be coming into your home, they're providing you with some of that equipment and you know what their top priority is not your security. I know. Shocker. Their top priority is something else. I don't know, but it sure isn't security. What I advise most people to do is basically remove their equipment or have them turn off what's called network address translation. Turn off the firewall and put your own firewall in place. I was on the phone with a lady that had been listening to me for years, and I was helping her out. In fact, we were doing a little security audit because she ran a small business there in her home. I think she was an accountant if I remember right. She had her computer hooked up directly to the internet. She kind of misunderstood what I was saying. I want to make clear what I'm saying here. People should still have a firewall. You still need a router, but you're almost always better off getting a semi-professional piece of hardware. The prosumer side, if you will, something like the Cisco GO hardware and put that in place instead of having the equipment that your ISP is giving you. We've got to keep all of this stuff up to date. Many of us think that Macs are invulnerable, Apple Macintoshes, or Apple iOS devices, like our iPhones and iPads. In many ways they are. They have not been hit as hard as the Windows devices out there. One of the main reasons is they're not as popular. That's what so many people that use Windows say you don't get hit because you're just not as popular. There is some truth to that. However, the main reason is that they are designed from the beginning with security in mind, unlike Windows, that security was an absolute afterthought for the whole thing Don't tell me that it's because of age. Okay. I can hear it right now. People say, well, Mac is much, much newer than Microsoft Windows. Microsoft didn't have to deal with all of this way back when. How I respond to that is, yeah. Microsoft didn't have to deal with it way back when because it wasn't connected to a network and your viruses were coming in via floppy desk. Right? They really were. In fact, the first one came in by researchers. The operating system that Apple uses is much, much, much older than windows and goes back to the late 1960s, early 1970s. So you can't give me that, it is just that they didn't care. They didn't care to consider security at all. Which is something that's still one of my soapbox subjects, if you will. Security matters. When we are talking about your Macs, you still have to consider security on a Mac. It's a little different on a Mac. You're probably want to turn on some things. Like the windows comes with the firewall turned on however it has all of its services wide open. They're all available for anybody to attach to. That's why we have our windows hardening course that goes through, what do you turn off? How do you turn it off? What should you have in the windows firewall? Now the Mac side, all of these services turned off by default, which is way more secure. If they're not there to attack, they're not going to be compromised. Right.  They can't even be attacked the first place. So I like that strategy, but you might want to turn on your firewall on your Mac anyways. There are some really neat little features and functions in it. But the amount of malware that's attacking Apple Macintoshes, nowadays, is twice as much as it used to be. We've got these work from home people. We've got IT professionals within the companies, just scrambling to make it so that these people who are working from home can keep working from home. It's likely a permanent thing. It's going to be happening for a long time. But these incidents of malware on the Mac is pretty limited in reality. The malware on a Mac is unlikely to be any sort of ransomware or software that particularly steals things like your Excel files or your Word docs on a Mac, I should say it is much more likely to be outerwear. It's much more likely to be. Adware or some other unwanted programs and that's, what's rising pretty fast on Macs. Mac-based companies are being concerned here about cyber security issues. They are paying more attention to them. They're windows based counterparts have had to deal with a lot of this stuff for a long time because they were targets. So we've got to divide the Mac really into two pieces, just like any other computer. You've got the operating system with its control over things like the network, et cetera. Then you have the programs or applications, right? That is running on that device. So you want to keep both of them secure. The applications that are running on your device, Apple's done a much, much better job of sandboxing them. Making them so that they're less dangerous. The latest release, in fact, Catalina had a lot of security stuff built into that. Microsoft and Windows 10 added a lot more security. So that's all really, really good. Now, if you have to maintain a network of Macs, we like IBM software. They have some great software for managing Macs, but if you want something that's inexpensive and very usable to configure Macs and control the software on them. Have look at JAMF, J A M F. They just had their user's conference this last weekend. They were talking about how the landscape has changed over on the Mac side. All right. We've got one more segment left today and I'm going to talk about these cybersecurity frameworks. What should you be using? If you are a business or a home user, what are those checkboxes that you absolutely have to have to use? You might've heard about cybersecurity frameworks? Well, the one that's most in use right now is the NIST cybersecurity framework that helps guide you through the process of securing your business or even securing your home. That's our topic. It's a great time to be out on the road and kind of checking in. We've got security threats that have been growing quite literally. Exponentially. They are really making a lot of money by extorting it from us, stealing it from us. It's nothing but frustration to us. It's never been more important to put together an effective cybersecurity risk management policy. That's true if you're a home user and you've got yourself and your spouse and a kid or two in the home. Have a policy and put it together. That's where NIST comes in handy. NIST is the National Institute of standards and technology they've been around a long time. They've been involved in cryptography. These are the guys and gals that give us accurate clocks. In fact, we run two clocks here that we have for our clients, which are hyper-accurate. It's crazy it down to the millionth of a second. It's just amazing. That's who NIST is. They've put all these standards together for a very, very long time, but just before March, this year, It was reported that about 46 percent of businesses had suffered cyber attacks in 2019. That was up 10% from the year before.  Of course, we've all been worried about the Wuhan virus, people getting COVID-19, it is a problem. The biggest part of the problem is everybody's worried about it. Nobody wants to go to work. They don't want to go out to a restaurant. They don't want to do any of these things. You as a business owner are worried about how do you keep your business doors open? How do you provide services to the customers you have when your employees won't come in or cooperate or were paid more to stay at home than they would be to come back to work. I get it right. I know I'm in the same boat. Well, because of that we just have not been paying attention to some of the things we should be doing. One of the main ways that business people can measure their preparedness and their progress in managing cyber security-related risks, is to use the cybersecurity framework that is developed by NIST. It is a great framework. It provides you with different levels. The higher-end, the framework that is used by military contractors. Nowadays, we've been helping businesses conform to what's called NIST 800-171 and 800-53 High, which are both important and cybersecurity standards. So if you really, really, really need to be secure, are those are the ones you're going to be going with. Right now, no matter how much security you need I really would recommend you checking it out.  I can send you information on the NIST framework. I have a little flow chart. I can send you to help to figure out what part of the framework should you be complying with. It also helps you figure out if you by law need to be complying with parts of the framework. It will really help you. It's well thought out. It's going to make you way more efficient as you try and put together and execute your cyber risk management policy.  Remember cyber risk, isn't just for the software that you're running, or the systems you're running. It's the people, it includes some physical security as well. Now President Trump has been very concerned about it. I'm sure you've heard about it in the news. As he's talked about problems with TicTok and with Huawei and some of these other manufacturers out there. Huawei is a huge problem. Just absolutely huge. One of these days I can give you the backstory on that, but how they completely destroyed one of the world leaders in telecommunications technology by stealing everything they had. Yeah. It's a very sad story company you may have heard of,  founded over a hundred years ago. They're non-regulatory but they do publish guides that are used in regulations. So have a look at them, keep an eye on them. They have to help federal agencies as well. Meet the requirements is something called the federal information security management act called FISMA and that relates to the protection of government information and assets. So if you are a contractor to the federal government, pretty much any agency, you have physical requirements. So think about that. Who do you sell things to? When you're also dealing with the federal government they look at everything that you're doing and say, are you making something special for us? If you are, there are more and higher standards that you have to meet as well. It just goes on and on, but this framework was created by NIST ratified by Congress in 2014. It's used by over 30% of businesses in the US and will probably be used by 50% of businesses in the US this year. So if you're not using them you might want to have a look at them. It's big companies like JP Morgan, Chase, Microsoft, Boeing, and Intel who meet a much higher standard than most businesses need to meet. For a lot of businesses all you need to meet is what's called the CMMC one standard. You'll find that at NIST as well. And there are much higher levels than that up to level five, which is just, wow. All of the stuff that you have to keep secured looks like military level or better, frankly security. There are other overseas companies that are using it too, by the way in England, in Japan, Canada, many of them. I'm looking at the framework right now. The basic framework is to identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover. Those are the main parts of it. That's you have to do as a business in order to stay in business in this day and age, they get into it in a lot more detail. They also have different tiers for different tiers that you can get involved in. Then subcategories. I have all of this framework as part of our audit kit that I'll send out to anybody that asks for it that's a listener. All you have to do is send an email to me, M E @craigpeterson.com, and then the subject line, just say audit kit and I'll get back to you. I'll email that off to it's a big PDF. You can also go to NIST in the online world and find what they have for you. Just go to NIST, N I S T.gov, The National Institute of Standards and Technology, and you'll see right there, cybersecurity framework, it's got all of the stuff there. You can learn more here if you want. If you're new to the framework they've got online learning. They are really working hard to try and secure businesses and other organizations here in the U S and as I said used worldwide. It's hyper, hyper important. It's the same framework that we rely on in order to protect our information and protect our customer's information. So NIST, N I S T.gov, check it out. If you missed it today, you're going to want to check out the podcast. Now you can find the podcast on any of your favorite podcasting platforms. It is such a different world. Isn't it? We started out today talking about our cars. Our cars now are basically big mechanical devices ever so complex with computers, controlling them. But the cars of tomorrow that are being built by Tesla and other companies, those cars are absolutely amazing as well, but they're frankly, more computer than they are mechanical car. So what should we expect from these cars? I'm talking about longevity here. We expect a quarter-million miles from our cars today. Some of these electric vehicles may go half a million or even a million miles in the future. When they do that, can we expect that? Our computers get operating system updates and upgrades, for what five years give or take? If you have an Android phone, you're lucky if you get two years' worth of updates. Don't use Android, people. It's just not secure. How about our cars? How long should we expect updates for the firmware in our cars? So that's what we talked about first, today. Ring has a new security camera that is absolutely cool. It's called the always home cam. I talked about it earlier. It is a drone that flies around inside your house and ties into other Ring equipment. I think it's absolutely phenomenal and it's not quite out yet, but I'll let you know more about that. If you get ransomware and you pay the ransom, the feds are saying now that you are supporting terrorist organizations. You might want to be careful because they are starting to knock on doors, and there's jail time behind some of these things. So watch it when it comes ransomware and a whole lot more as well. So make sure you visit me online. Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. It's very important that you do that and do that now. So you'll get my weekly newsletter. I've got some special gifts, including security, reboot stuff that I'll send to you right away. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

In this very busy segment, Craig addresses a number of tech issues that are in the news right now. First off BEC scams.  Business Email Compromises are also commonly known as Spear Phishing scams and target executives.  In the past, many came from outside the US but this has changed.  Next, he discusses what happened with Excel and the loss of some Covid data.  Then he explains why the IRS is looking at Cryptocurrency on people's tax returns. So let's get into it! For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com --- FBI, DHS says hackers have gained access to election systems The IRS Is Being Investigated for Using Location Data Without a Warrant Clear Conquered U.S. Airports. Now It Wants to Own Your Entire Digital Identity. 5G in the US averages 51Mbps while other countries hit hundreds of megabits IRS may put cryptocurrency question at the top of 1040 to catch cheaters Publishers worry as ebooks fly off libraries’ virtual shelves 25% of BEC Cybercriminals Based in the US What's Really Happening in Infosec Hiring Now? --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson (2): [00:00:00] Well, we've got a story here about how Excel may have lost some 16,000 potential COVID cases. A little story about the IRS and really happening in info security right now. Great career. Hi, everybody listening to Craig Peterson. Oh, cybersecurity. IT cybersecurity, I think is a great profession. It is a difficult profession. Don't get me wrong. I talk with people in IT all the time about how it is just kind of overwhelming. How they just got this major inferiority complex in Infosecurity understandably so.  There's so much going on, it's a very high-stress job. There is a great article that was out in Dark Reading earlier this year, talking about what was predicted for security roles going forward. Due to the pandemic scare, what matters. Six months later, Dark Reading went back and had a look at it. What they've found is it's just as tough to fill open cybersecurity positions as it was pre-pandemic. In fact, there are new problems now that I, I hadn't really even thought about, frankly. 30% of businesses that responded to the survey said that their security teams are hiring now. 45% said that they need additional staff, but are restricted by hiring freezes or spending limits. So add those two together where it's 75% of companies are looking to get more cybersecurity people.  12% said that they were recently forced to cut security staff. Which is obviously in my view,  more than a little short-sighted, right? So they went in and started looking at it a little more deeply. It's a years-old story now, and it typically takes about eight months to replace a security analyst and about four months to train a replacement. There is right now a huge shortage of appropriately skilled workers. Others are claiming it's an unreasonable set of expectations amongst employers, and that job listings that are put out there are difficult to decipher. I think that's funny considering its cybersecurity, right? Get it - decipher.  I have thought long and hard about maybe offering some sort of cybersecurity training course. That's what the cybersecurity mastery thing is all about. Getting you the basics of cybersecurity and then have a couple of phone calls a month to answer questions that people have that are in the program. That's the whole thing behind understanding cybersecurity or mastering cybersecurity program because employers want the right skill set. There just aren't enough people out there. The pay is very good depends on what you consider good, I suppose.  Right now for a not particularly well-skilled person, the salaries are in the hundred thousand dollars a year range, Which is why statistically looking at this whole thing a business that has fewer than 500 employees with standard revenue based on how much revenue per employee cannot afford a cybersecurity team. You just can't afford it because it's so darn expensive. You're much better to find an outsource team. That'll do it for you. It'll save you a whole lot of money. So keep that in mind. A business email compromise is a very, very big problem. We've talked about it before. FBI is talking about all of the hacks that have occurred via BEC. I've had firsthand experience with it that is how we picked up a couple of clients. We do a cyber health assessment for one company and this company had a few different servers and some desktop machines. We did a whole, what we call an NSAAP, which is a network security assessment and action plan. So we gave them this action plan. These machines need to be upgraded. These machines this software needed to be upgraded. These machines were not properly protected. These ports were open. They shouldn't have been right. So it was a really good network plan for them. I think it was like 300 pages long of stuff they needed to do. Again, this was a very small company. I think they've only got maybe three or four dozen employees and gave it to them. Thanks. Appreciate it. Bye-bye. Then we got a call from them. I don't know what was it? Eight months later because they had become, I'm a victim of a business, email compromise attack. This happens all the time now. This is where someone sends an email pretending to be someone they're not usually within the organization, but sometimes they pretend to be a vendor. One of the attacks that I know of here, that's pretty common, comes out of Eastern Europe. Hey, Mr. CFO. They send this while the owner, CEO, the president is out of town and unreachable, and they know that because the owner posted it on Facebook and the bad guys have been tracking the company for a little while and said, Oh, he's going to be down in Bermuda. This period of time in February. So they send an email to the CFO and supposedly from the business owner, and there are methods they use so that they can use a legitimate email address, or it looks really like it is from the business owner. The email says something like, Hey, we started using this new vendor. We haven't paid their invoices. We're three months behind unless you wire this $120,000 that is going to go away and can really hurt the company. Can't deal with this right now. Please just go ahead and wire the money and then the CFO does it. We saw this happen to Shark Tank's Barbara Cochran. You know her from Shark Tank. She's one of the sharks, big real estate investors. Her assistant got tricked into wiring out - Was it 300,000? I can't remember. It was a fair amount of money. She got tricked into wiring it overseas. Now the FBI tells us that once that happens, 90 seconds later that money can no longer be recovered. It just disappeared. We have clients that have had the money disappear. Of course, we picked them up after it's disappeared, right? Just like this customer that did not do what we told him he should do. Right. Even if they did it themselves, they would have been ahead of the game. They didn't have to hire us to do it. We gave them an action plan as part of our NSAAP evaluation. Right? They lost, last I heard, actually, it has gone up, a $180,000. So they lost money right out of their operating account. It got emptied and they also ended up incurring all kinds of fees and then they couldn't deliver some things. So they had problems with customers, right.? It just goes on and on and on. This stat is something that was a bit of a surprise for me. There's a study that was just done looking at business email compromises and found that the attacks are coming one-quarter of them from the United States. One-quarter of all of the business emails is coming from the US. Of course, many times these people are caught by the FBI and end up in prison. But of these attackers located in the US, nearly half of them are in these five States, California, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and New York. So be very, very careful. Interesting reports got information from more than 9,000 defense engagements from this year between May and July, right? 2200 of them, by the way, they could identify the likely location of the attackers. So interesting stuff. That's a problem. IRS is saying that they may have a question and on the top of the new form, 1040 asking filers if they dealt in virtual currency in 2020, we talked about the IRS earlier in the show today. The IRS is concerned that people are making money off of these blockchain things, like Bitcoin, and are not reporting the capital gains that they had from these cryptocurrencies. So be careful with that. IRS is starting to take that very seriously. Then COVID, we put all kinds of systems in place because of the panics around the Wuhan virus and worry about people having the COVID-19 symptoms. Apparently in the UK, more than 50,000 potentially infectious people may have been missed by the contract tracers. How? Well, Microsoft has a million row limit on the Excel spreadsheet. Now, if you have a spreadsheet with a million rows in it, you are misusing spreadsheet software that really needs to be in a database somewhere. Okay. That's not something to do in a spreadsheet. Apparently what they were doing in the UK is hospitals, et cetera, or we're sending in spreadsheets. We're probably doing the same thing here in the US and then those spreadsheets are being pulled into one master spreadsheet and almost 16,000 positive tests were left off the official daily figures which translate to more than 50,000 potentially infectious people running around. A great little story from the guardian. Again, all of this stuff is up on my website. I have a great newsletter people love, and I'd love to have you on it. Where I talk about these things. We do a little bit of training. I answer people's questions. You'll find it all @craigpetersohn.com slash subscribe. Make sure you're on that list so you can stay on top of these things. Take care, everybody we'll be back next Saturday at one. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

This week Ask the D-Moms is back, answering a very different kind of question. How do you know what diabetes news is reliable? Moira McCarthy and Stacey both have backgrounds in professional news media. We’ll talk about medical studies, news sources and, community & social media info. Check out Stacey's book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! In Tell Me Something Good what do prescription swim goggles have to do with diabetes? Nothing really, but it ties into a new realty tv contest where we spotted a Dexcom. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! Sign up for our newsletter here ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone      Click here for Android Episode Transcription: Stacey Simms  0:00 Diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop created for people with diabetes by people who have diabetes by Gvokek Hypo Pen the first premixed auto injector for very low blood sugar, and by Dexcom, take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with Dexcom.   Announcer  0:22 This is Diabetes Connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  0:27 This week, ask the D moms is back answering a very different kind of question. How do you know what diabetes news is reliable? Moira McCarthy and I both have backgrounds in professional news media. We'll talk about news sources, medical studies. And as Moira touches on here, community info.   Moira McCarthy  0:47 When you're delving into that kind of anecdotal sharing, everyone is right, and everyone is wrong. Some things speak to some people and some things speak to others   Stacey Simms  0:59 in Tell me something good. What do prescription swim goggles have to do with diabetes? Nothing really. But it's all about a reality TV contestant you're gonna want to follow. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider.   Welcome to another week of the show. I am so glad to have you along. I am excited about this episode I love every week, of course, this one where more and I get to break down from our personal experience, what we think of what's going on news business, how you can better use information. This is right in my wheelhouse. And it's one of the reasons why way back when I started this podcast, hey, if you're new welcome. We aim to educate and inspire about type 1 diabetes by sharing stories of connection. My son was diagnosed with type one, almost 14 years ago. And it was really almost six years ago that I decided to start the podcast and did a lot of research. And it really took me until almost a year later to get it going. We started in June of 2015. But what brought me to start the show was that I listened to a lot of podcasts. I've listened to podcasts since I don't know 2005 2008 way back when when you had to actually plug your iPod into your computer and download the shows. And if you don't know that's where podcast comes from the actual iPod was the only device you could do it on way back when and I'm sure somebody with Android will correct me and it was all about mp3. But you know what I mean? That's where the word comes from. But I would walk my dog and drive in my car and listen to shows with people who had incredible personal stories about diabetes. There were so many really good personal experience shows people talking about their diagnoses, just talking about day to day some technology stuff, but nothing that was a conversation that was from more of an informational standpoint. You know, it was basically nobody was asking the questions that I wanted to ask personally. And the great thing about podcasting is, if you don't hear what you want to hear, if you notice something is missing in the niche, or the community, you can jump in and start your own show, which is what I did. Of course along the way, I give you a little bit of personal information. Although the show is definitely not all about my family. I have been mentioning lately that we were supposed to go see Benny's endocrinologist and we went in the beginning of October, then he had his lowest A1C ever, which is of course fabulous news. If you are new to the show, we started the control IQ system from Tandem in January. And we have watched him spend more time and range with less work all year long. It's really been amazing to see I give him a ton of credit. Of course, he still has to do a lot of hard work that goes along with it. He is far from perfect. God forbid I say nice things about Benny. But really, he's doing great, but it's still really is a lot of work. And you know, you have to wear all the devices. So I give him a lot of credit. I give all of you live with this an awful lot of credit, you know that. But boy, it's amazing to see that time and range go up, and the actual bolusing and the nagging for me down. It's been phenomenal. He also grew a little bit more, which makes him very excited because he is afraid he is done growing. Of course, he's been taller than me for a while now. We also talked with the endo about insulin. And if you've been following on social media, or if you're in the Facebook group, you've seen me talking a little bit about this switchover, my insurance has us going from Humalog to Novolog. And I'm going to talk about that at a different episode. I did hint about that in the bonus episode I put out last week and I'm not trying to be cagey. But I want to give you the total context. There's a lot going on with this. And I want to make sure I get everything right and get all the ducks in a row before I tell you the whole story, which is a good segue into news and to sharing a good and accurate picture. So I promise more to come on our insulin front as soon as it all wraps up, fingers crossed. All right. So with everything that's going on these days, I thought a show about news and information how to know whether your source is reliable. are worth listening to her, okay to ignore would be very timely. We're really only talking about diabetes news here. But that's almost more difficult because it's one of the few conditions that you can think of where we rely so much on community support and information from each other. Because we get so little time with health care professionals and diabetes is 24. Seven. And while so much of that peer to peer and community support is wonderful and helpful and is supportive, a lot of it is inaccurate or outdated, or it doesn't apply to you, or it is actually harmful. So we're going to talk about it. Of course here to join me on Ask the D moms, as always is Moira McCarthy, a fellow diabetes mom, of course, and a fellow news professional, if you are new, we will also tell you about our backgrounds and why the news media, which everybody hates right now is so important to us. But first of Diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop, and it is so nice to find a diabetes product that not only does what you need, but also fits in perfectly with your life. One Drop is that it is the slickest looking and most modern meter My family has ever used. And it's not just about their modern meter setup. You can also send your readings to the mobile app automatically and review your data anytime, instantly share blood glucose reports with your healthcare team. It also works with your Dexcom Fitbit or your Apple Watch. Not to mention, they're awesome test strips subscription plans, pick as many test strips as you need, and they'll deliver them to your door when dropped diabetes care delivered. learn more, go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the One Drop logo.   Hey, Moira, it's always great to talk to you. How are you doing?   Moira McCarthy  6:39 I'm doing pretty well. It's always good to hear your voice how's things down in the warmer part of America, I am looking out at the beginning of foliage. And all day here in Massachusetts. I always   Stacey Simms  6:50 laugh because I am in Charlotte, North Carolina. Growing up in the New York area. I grew up just outside of New York City and spent a lot of time upstate New York. It's so funny here because there is beautiful foliage in places. But the season is so different. The first year we had kids and I wanted to go apple picking. I was all set in October. I was like cuz I spent you know, my childhood, going apple picking in October and the crunchy leaves and the crunchy apples. And they were like no, no, you have to go apple picking in August.   Moira McCarthy  7:16 Oh my gosh, that makes sense. Like that.   Stacey Simms  7:21 It is but it's gross. wants to sweat while you're picking apples. Yeah, no, no. But I'm glad New England must be beautiful.   Unknown Speaker  7:29 And as it's my   Moira McCarthy  7:32 favorite season, it's one of my favorite seasons I enjoy.   Stacey Simms  7:37 All right, so interesting topic this week. And we're gonna stick on one question pretty much the whole time here on the D mom's. And that's about news information, how we know kind of who to trust in this community? How do you know what information to trust? And before I ask the actual question, I think it's important to back up and kind of talk about our experience, because I think it's one of the reasons why we're friends. Moira, and I have an awful lot in common, including working in the news business more, take me through your your experience. But I mean, all kidding aside, you've been a journalist for many years.   Moira McCarthy  8:10 So it's funny you asked because I was visiting the Newseum, which was a wonderful Museum in Washington, DC that just closed down about the news industry. They have a whole of technology, like all the technology from the beginning of time, and I said somebody's daughter, oh my gosh, I'm so old. And I've been a journalist for so long that I've used three quarters of the hall of technology. But I am, you know, I just want to start with that. I think it's if it's okay, I think it's really good to kind of stick up for my profession right now. Because it's been a rough couple of years, I guess. Now I know what it's like to be a lawyer. You know, I've run you always say the lawyers were all liars. But um, journalism for people like me, is a vocation. It's what I always wanted to do. And when I went to college, I didn't just learn how to write, we learn how to it's called the canons of journalism. And we actually learned how to be responsible with our information and with our sources and everything else. And it's something that I carry with pride. And I just want people to know that when you're dealing with true journalists, people who work in the field and we're trained in it, you really are dealing with people who are trying their best to give you you know, the truth. And in fact, so that's, that's just my little stick up for journalism thing, but I am, I was the editor of a group of 23 newspapers when I was about 21 years old. I went on to be a full time crime reporter and bureau chief for a daily newspaper for about 11 years. And then I went to work for the New York Times doing adventure travel, which I did for a good long time. And now I am the travel editor of a newspaper in Boston called the Boston Herald and I also do their ski section and it can be contributing editor and writer at ski magazine. But my new exciting thing is for about a year and a half now, I've been writing as a medical journalist for helpline media. So that's where my background is with a lot of other things in between. Yeah, tell us yours   Stacey Simms  10:14 Sure. And I will also stand up for my profession, by adding by adding that journalism is the only profession singled out in our country's constitution. It is an incredibly important part of our government, and country function. And my personal feeling, and you know, you can disagree with me on this, as you listen to more as well, is that most people who are angry at journalism are angry at talking heads and opinion pieces. And the line has just blurred because of 24, seven cable, and lots of other things and talk radio. It's just become a real mess, in terms of the definition of journalism is, is my feeling on that. But I yeah, and I'm with you. I mean, when I was in college, we took communications law, we took lots and lots of classes on this. And I had some incredible news directors during my career. So I was a radio reporter. In college, I say I was the world's worst radio reporter. And I really was terrible, because they hired me, but didn't tell me how to do anything. So I drove around Central New York looking for stories. I mean, I was terrible. But I made it and I learned a lot. Then I spent 10 years in TV news and local TV news in upstate New York, and in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I am now. And then I spent 10 years doing news. And this was a really interesting job. I did a morning news show for a conservative talk radio station. So there was a firewall, you know, between the the news department and the talk part of the radio station. But as I said earlier, you know, I don't think a lot of people make those distinctions as they listen. And so it was a very interesting place to be. Let's put it that way. And then of course, for the last five years, I've done the podcast, which I've really tried to instill with those, you know, journalism, ethics and disclosures and all that stuff. So that's our background, which is why I thought this is a perfect topic for ask the D moms. I don't know where this discussion is going to go. I'm excited to hear what you have to say Moira, I'm so excited to see or, you know, find out what listeners think. So let's jump in. This was a question. I'm not going to read this person's name because I pulled it out of a Facebook group. But I think it's a fabulous question. This person says, My 12 year old was diagnosed last week, we are absolutely new to the world of T1D and my brain is seriously about to explode. I have no idea who to trust for information. Who do you trust? Any tips on how to navigate the flood of information out there? I've only been at this a few days. It seems like everything's a contradiction. Go low carb, don't go low carb. read this book. No, don't read this article. Read this instead. And she goes on and on about all of the contradictions in the community and I'll get to more of them. You know, CGM changed our lives CGM is too much hassle. Technology is great technology is terrible, he can do anything he is about to die. I mean, she really lays it out. All the things that you and I have kind of talked about for years. So I want to tackle this in a couple of ways. I want to tackle this in terms of reporting in the diabetes community and studies. And I want to tackle what people just say, right community advice. So let's start with the information. And I I'm glad you brought up Healthline, because you may know more about when this started. But Healthline has this really fantastic thing that where they put on the article, not just the author of the article, the journalists behind it, but they see fact   Unknown Speaker  13:38 checked by?   Stacey Simms  13:40 Yeah, so somebody goes through all your stories,   Moira McCarthy  13:43 right, and and what people probably don't know is that that has been the case, every single place, I've worked for the 40 years that I've been a journalist and help one, I'm guessing, I probably should ask my boss for this, I'm guessing made the decision to highlight the fact checkers, for the readers peace of mind so that you can see there's a fact checker there. And then second, because they're becoming more and more important in this weird time and how journalism is evolving into, as you said, a little bit of a confusing thing. So I think that's why they put it right out there. But I have always worked for quality publications, and every single thing I've ever written has always been edited, in fact checked. And I think that that's an important distinction for people to understand. And I can talk a little bit about how you can figure that out. Because one of the things you know, as a journalist and you'll agree with me, Stacey is everything ever written needs at least a second pair of eyes on it before it's published at least a second pair of eyes No matter how good you are as a journalist, you get fact checked and looked over by someone before it runs if you're Woodward and Bernstein you do and if you're me, you do now I think the blur comes a little bit in that blogs and ziens and other online things that may just be done by one person look the same on the internet, as the New York Times does or as the Hoboken journal does, whatever it is that you read, do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, it's a great point. It's a grand. So I'm not saying that people who write those kind of things aren't smart and and don't know, but that's actually not a full journalism, experience, for lack of a better word. And what I usually say to people is, when you're reading things, first of all, figure out what the sources you know, if if the name of the quote unquote publication, when you look at it online is like, I am smarter than you.com. It's probably not a really great source. But if you start to read something, and you feel like you'd like their boys, then that's a reason to read it. But understand that you're not dealing with full on journalism set up in the classic way back. Does that make sense?   Stacey Simms  16:19 Right back to my discussion with Moira. But first Diabetes Connections is brought to you by Gvoke Hypo Pen.  almost everyone who takes insulin has experienced a low blood sugar and that can be scary. A very low blood sugar is really scary. And that's where Gvoke Hypo Pen comes in.Gvoke is the first auto injector to treat very low blood sugar Gvoke Hypo Pen is pre mixed and ready to go with no visible needle. That means it's easy to use how easy you pull off the red cap and push the yellow end onto bare skin and hold it for five seconds. That's it. Find out more go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the Gvoke logo. Gvoke shouldn't be used in patients with pheochromocytoma or insulinoma visit Gvoke glucagon comm slash risk. Now back to Moira and me interesting timing. Following this endorsement, we move to talking about disclosures and commercials. But she left off asking me for last point about looking for clues in something as simple as a blog name made sense.   I think it does. I think it's great advice. It's also helpful when you're reading a blog or you're reading a personal new non-medical testimonial, something like that, that you also ask yourself the question. Are there disclosures on this website? In other words, if this is a blogger or a podcaster, you who are they sponsored by? And are they disclosing those sponsors? In other words, who is paying them? Just because this is a good example of this show, we take sponsorship and I talk about this all the time, whenever we have somebody on the show who is one of the sponsors, I disclose it again, and I talk about how Look, they're not paying for the content, they don't tell me what to ask, they're paying for the commercial, that sort of thing. But you know, as you listen to that that is happening. And so if you're on a blog, or you're on a podcast, and they're not disclosing who the sponsors are, that's a red flag, it's also really important in our community to kind of know what the person is using device wise. Because while that doesn't mean doesn't make them biased, it doesn't make them their information incorrect or wrong. It does influence how we live with type one, we all have our little fandoms. And I think it's really important to acknowledge that. So if you're hearing or reading some information, it's okay to question   Moira McCarthy  18:35 it is but to go backwards as a journalist, when I write for someone like helpline, or if I was, you know, when I write for a newspaper, whatever, that should matter, not one bit. In other words in in these things like podcasts and blogs and, and other things that are sort of, you know, it's a new world in a different way than then that does. But my job as a journalist, when I write for classic journalistic publications, is to not bring what my opinions are to the final product.   Stacey Simms  19:09 Absolutely. And that's, you know, we've already talked about blurring the lines here, when I'm speaking about disclosures, all that, look, if you're a journalist writing for health line writing for a magazine writing for newspaper, you shouldn't disclose your sponsors, because you shouldn't have any, Moira McCarthy I don't have any Stacey Simms right. You know, to be clear, we were kind of talking about two different types of writing there. And that does make it confusing. Let's talk about reading studies. Because I think most people after they're in the diabetes community for a month, know to look past the headlines.   Moira McCarthy  19:42 Yeah. And even some of the studies I remember years ago, I don't remember what study there was that I don't even know if there was email, maybe email was new back then, and I emailed it to the Lauren's endocrinologist, and he called me up and he said, just so you know. person can create a study to prove and be successful that women who drive in red convertibles, when they're teenagers, at least once are more apt to have a child with diabetes. In other words, you can take anything and link it to something else and sort of prove it. So so what I always say to people and, and we maybe will talk to you about how you react when friends send you all those headlines that are not really true, because you sound like such an over when actually you are. So first of all, forget the headlines, read, read what it is. And then if you're reading a story about a study, you can almost always get your hands quite easily in the internet on the actual study, and read the actual study so that that's what I usually suggest. And anything that says, you know, cure diabetes in mice, my old story is when Lauren was very little, the movie, Stuart Little came out, and they gave all the money to JDRF the first night. So we went to a movie theater, opening to see it. And on the way home, my little daughter said, Oh, Mommy, I understand why Stuart Little wants to help diabetes, because he can be cured. He's a mouse.   Unknown Speaker  21:13 So So what I'm saying is,   Moira McCarthy  21:17 is read carefully and dig into it. And and my advice when friends send you articles about studies is just thank them. Like, you know, just say thank you so much. It's so interesting. And if they push further and say, why aren't you going to get back here? Then you can explain more. But I guess so I guess my advice on reading studies is actually read the studies, or at least the summary of the study,   Stacey Simms  21:40 get exactly the first thing I do. It's funny about Stewart little, the first thing I do, and I just saw study yesterday, but some like electromagnetic field, these researchers were so funny that the headline was like, we built a remote control to cure diabetes. And they were I'm laughing that they were funny. They were very young, which is what made me smile. So I think there was a college study or something. But I clicked on it to read more. And the first thing I did was scroll down. And of course it was in mice. And you know, nothing was proven. It was all correlation, not causation. And it was very interesting. But it wasn't, it didn't prove anything. And they may move into human trials someday. So what I also talk about a lot is, and I've learned this over the years, which I find kind of disappointing, but also it's good to live in the real world, is to realize that, especially with a lot of companies, the marketing department can get ahead of itself can get ahead of the rest of the company. Yes. So sometimes they'll say something and make a big splash. And you know, a great example of this, and I'm so sad is Animas Corporation, that I loved Animas Corporation, part Johnson and Johnson, they made this wonderful insulin pump that my son used for 10 years. For years, they were talking about their hybrid closed loop, they seem to be ahead of everybody. And they were getting these incredible studies out of Europe. And it really looked terrific. And then of course, Johnson and Johnson closed up the whole company. And it never as far as I know, it never even got to trials in this country. So that was a lesson for me, unfortunately, in I mean, get excited, get optimistic, you know, let go, obviously great things are happening. But be careful about letting marketing get ahead of what's actually happening. And so when we're reading articles, we're reading studies, like you said, actually read the study is probably a really good way to go. And a good thing to point out too is I don't know about your experience. I have never written my own headline for anything. You never get to write your own headline,   Moira McCarthy  23:32 right? Oh, no. And and Healthline actually has a team that writes the headlines. Yeah. Like, that's their job. And I did you know, when I was an editor of a newspaper, I was, you know, oversaw the headline writers and everything, but I know, I don't write my own headline. Um, you know, I was just thinking to that this is kind of a good conversation to have right now. Because one of the reasons, you know, beyond being a medical journalist and covering it, but one of the reasons that I've been able to follow the vaccination news, with, with confidence, and what I understand and what I know I shouldn't care about is my experience all these years and reading studies and reacting to things that I hear about diabetes. So it's a good time for people to know how to dig deeper when they see a headline.   Stacey Simms  24:16 And you mean the COVID vaccine. Moira McCarthy I do. Yeah. Stacey Simms This is a time when we need good health news.   Moira McCarthy  24:24 No, no, maybe that'll be one of the silver linings, people should know how to at least basically understand medical research of all different kinds. So understanding how to read about it. That may be a good thing that comes out of this. That's a really good point. Then, of course, there's the whole world of information that newly diagnosed families like this person whose question you read are thrown into now. And I want to tell you that my first advice when people Reach out to me, you know, connect me to a friend whose child was diagnosed her car is do not go on the internet for a while other than basics. And that's because it must come at you like this woman described like you're almost being assaulted with all these different things that completely conflict with each other. And I think that in the beginning, one of the reasons that I was able to build somewhat of a confident foundation for my family after my daughter was diagnosed 23 years ago, is that there was no internet. And so I read books, you know, Merck medical journal, and the Pink Panther book and things like that. But most of my information came from the most reliable source you can have. And that's a qualified medical team. And so before we talk a little more about, you know, how you figure out what's right, and what's wrong with people, I just want to say that it has to be incredibly difficult. And I actually strongly believe that that environment is one of the reasons that studies are now showing that parents are more concerned and more afraid than they were 20 years ago, I think it's the the overflow of information coming from every direction.   Stacey Simms  26:17 I agree. Oh, absolutely. It's, it's like, it's always like drinking from a firehose, when you learn about type one. But it has become, you know, like trying to drink the ocean. Because it's not just information from the medical community, it's, I'm going to put this in quotes. It's, quote, information, and judgmental advice from the community. What I tell people is, same thing as you try to stay off the internet, try to join a local group. Interestingly, this question was posted in one of the largest diabetes Facebook groups that I am in, and it is full of people at different stages and ages. And it's type one, kids and type Well, it's type one parents, you know, and adults with type one, it's just it's an enormous group. But it's funny when you mentioned staying off the internet for a little while, you know, I have an I promise, this is not a book promo. But with the world's worst diabetes Mom, I have a program called the book to clinic program, where I'm able to give pediatric endocrinologist to read the book and are okay with the worst, you know, the world's worst moniker, they can give it to families for free. And we've decided that it's probably not a great idea to give this to newly diagnosed families and to wait until at least three if not six months, in, not because the information is too complicated to comprehend. But because they're getting enough, they need to focus on insulin dosing, and checking blood sugar and getting routines in place. And then they can branch out more information and these other things that just come at them. I mean, we have a program here in Charlotte, where they put technology on these kids in the hospital. And I know everybody loves that. But then you come into my local Facebook group, and everybody doesn't love it, they are overwhelmed. And so   Moira McCarthy  28:02 another time, exactly. I was going to interrupt you when you're talking about your book and say, I want to suggest that you not give them to the give them out till three or six months after diagnosis, and you already are. So here's what I think. I think that when you're delving into that kind of anecdotal, sharing, everyone is right, and everyone is wrong. Because some things speak to some people and some things speak to others. And so my advice is, if you read something online, that makes you feel uncomfortable, or makes you feel judged, or makes you feel like you're doing it wrong, share exactly what you read with your medical team. Like say, I just want to run this by you when and and let's say it says I don't know I'm gonna make something up so that no one's offended by it. Let's say it says, You absolutely have to keep a pink bow on top of a helmet every day or your blood sugar is never going to be stable. So then you call your endo your CDE. Or you send them a note you say, Hey, I just sometime the spine because we don't have a pink bow on a helmet on our son. So can you let me know if this is true? And then they will say, either? Yes. I can't believe we haven't shared this with you. You need to do it or Now's not the time or pay no attention to this. Find the medical team you trust and let that be your true north   Stacey Simms  29:31 Yeah, right. Oh, without a doubt and I love love love that every everyone is right and everyone is wrong. Yeah, that I may have to put that on a bumper sticker to be able to offer stickers. Yes, it   Moira McCarthy  29:43 applies to much more than diabetes right now, doesn't it? But but so so what the way that I was already far into diabetes by the time Facebook and the internet existed, but I have a group of friends that I've made through that. And what I found was, you just sort of noticed these people That kind of fit in harmony with you, you know, and then you're like, Oh, I think I'll message them and see if we should be Facebook's Facebook friends. And then you figure out, you know, most of my, I have a diverse group of friends, but most of my very close diabetes mom, friends and adults with diabetes, subscribe to the same philosophy that I subscribed. And so I'm nada. Had my daughter on low carb through her childhood person. I don't have any problem with those people, they can do their own thing, but it wouldn't be someone who was really into that I'd probably be like, yeah, that might not be a good fit, just because, you know, yeah. And of course, you might like someone and they're funny and nice. You just disagree with their diabetes care, that's fine, too. But I guess what I'm saying is, don't take it all. So seriously, it is just boats shoot the breeze. It's anecdotal. You don't know there's this old New Yorker cartoon I love we should try to find it or in we should put it on my page. It's two dogs, and one of the dogs is on Facebook. And he's saying that the other dog The great thing about Facebook is no one knows your dog. And and what that means is you don't you don't know what's real, and what the whole story is behind that. For me, it was always everyone was always doing perfectly with their teenager except me. And he come to find out when you dig down that that's not really true. Most people struggle a little bit most years or don't do it some other time. And so, if I had, if I had Facebook back then which they didn't, and my daughter was struggling and I had gone on and all these people were just saying, you know, take her to take her to a dialysis center and show it to her, she'll, she'll change I might have bought into some of that, when it might not be what's best for my child. So again, my best advice with for anecdotal advice is they're all right, they're all wrong. Talk to your endocrinology team about what's right and wrong for your child or for your family.   Stacey Simms  32:06 I absolutely agree with that. And I always say, you know, we all parent in our own way. So we're going to parent with diabetes in our own way. There's only a couple rules, you know, put insulin in and know where your blood sugar is. Everything else is fair game. So if you you know, if you want to do a sleep over, and your friend on Facebook says that's the worst thing you could possibly do. It's okay to disagree. I think what happens sometimes, though, is people will post with such conviction, and such surety in their method that it comes across, like an information source. And I this might get uncomfortable, you're much nicer than I am with the pink bow on the helmet. I don't mind getting a little specific. I'll talk I'll put some examples out, you know, when I when I do Diabetes Connections here on the podcast, if you're a longtime listener, you know, we have talked to people who manage diabetes in so many different ways, super low carb, you know, keto super athletes, super laid back. You know, we've had a lot of people on the show, and I try, you know, when I'm editorializing or sharing my experience, I really try to give a platform I mean, I'm not gonna put anybody out who's not safe. But or you know, who's i think is not reputable. But we do give a platform here for many different types of management. And I'll give the example because I know they can take it the Mastering Diabetes guys, these are the guys, Moira I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, they have a book, they’re very popular. You see them they're holding like giant baskets of fruit. I'm not going to explain it well. But you can go back and listen to the episode or read their book, their whole thing is, if you eat tons of calories that come from fruit, tons of carbs that come from fruit, your insulin sensitivity will go down and you'll be able to eat enormous amount of food as long as you eat this type of food. And you can hear in the interview, I am having none of this, I can't imagine a more miserable way of living. It would never work for me. There are people who love it, who are happy with it and are thriving on it. So that's a bit of information in a way of living that I would suggest you as you listen, dismiss or embrace like Moira said, everybody's right. Everybody's wrong. That may work for some people. It doesn't mean it is factually the thing to do. And I think that's what makes me crazy about this well meaning community, you may be great. At 85 you may be great setting your Dexcom alarm for your kid at 120 I can't think of a better way to ruin my relationship with my son. It would never work for me. I have friends who text their kids six times a day and they say they have a great relationship with their kid. Mazel Tov wonderful, never would work for us in a million years. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about is contradiction. Well, because if it works for them, why wouldn't it work for us? Because it doesn't.   Moira McCarthy  34:54 So So advice that pops into my head is if someone says something to you on line like, you're harming your child, if you're not doing it this way, or I love my child enough to make this effort, maybe you don't, or ever, your child's going to have complications, I would shut that person down immediately. Because that's not a rational way to look at the diabetes sphere in general, because we are all so unique. And one of the things we know about diabetes is it's very individualized. It's one of the big challenges for it. So if someone if someone is writing something, or sharing something online with you, and they tell you that if you don't do it their way, you know, there's trouble, I would dismiss them immediately as as not a good source. Other than like, you know, I don't know, don't club baby seals, and don't, don't tie your children to the bumper and drive them full speed. I'm talking about semi reasonable things. Of course, it makes me sad when I see certain groups who believe certain things, being aggressive about it, because I'm sure that it comes from the right place, and they feel like they found an answer. But they, they've only found an answer in this moment for themselves. They haven't found an answer for everyone in the world. They haven't even found the answer themselves forever. They don't know what's coming down the road. I'll share a funny story too, when you say about the other parent saying their kids are fine with it. When my daughter was a teenager, I said to her CDE one day, can you please tell me why every other 14 year old on earth with diabetes, A1C is like 6.9. And my daughter's isn't, and I'm struggling and no one else's. And the CDE said, because the rest of them are all lying. I know because I treat them. I can't tell you details, but trust me that they're not sharing. And you know what? That's not all wrong. It's not It's not that bad to put a rosy picture out for the world. But don't push it into advice and and be aware of that, too. Like, if someone tells you everything's perfect all the time, I would just be like, yeah, good for you, and then maybe cross them off your list. You know, because I don't know of a person who raised her child with diabetes, or who's had diabetes who does not have bumps in the road?   Stacey Simms  37:22 I can’t  believe you would say that to my face.   Moira McCarthy  37:27 You the world's best diabetes mom, everybody else has problems with that just because you love anymore. If my daughter, she wouldn't have like spikes, post meals or have done phenomenon, right? You're   Stacey Simms  37:41 just gonna try harder. I would also add, and I do this, and I really have to stop because I'm on my phone way too much. You know, this this year, especially has just been difficult for people who enjoy information. But But I post all the time in diabetes groups, when I see something and in my group as well. Interesting, what's the source? You know? Or what? Where did you read that? Where did you find that out? And if they don't have one, then you know what, you can ignore it. You don't have to internalize it, you don't have to act on it. If someone posts something that just seems weird or off base or brand new, unless there's a source of study a medical professional behind it. Um, you know, I wouldn't recommend you fight. I mean, let's not get crazy. It's okay to walk away. It's not a real conversation. You know, you can you can say No, thank you. But I always ask for sources. And I've learned a lot from people posting the sources. I didn't realize that or people posting the source and saying, No, but you know, that that blogger was discredited A long time ago. So just, it's okay to ask for that. I think it's also a really good way to get more information.   Moira McCarthy  38:53 Yeah. It's also okay, that, lets say not just anecdotal, chatting back and forth. But if you read a blog, or you listen to a podcast that's giving medical advice, I think that it's perfectly fine to reach out to them and ask them what their medical background is. And if they don't have a medical background, then you really shouldn't take medical advice from I know, you know, hey, I want to just wrap back to the beginning because I just had an email come in, sorry, but while we're chatting, I'm I'm on a deadline. And it's from my boss said helpline, and it says, Hey, more your important formative story on Blank is on the site. Now, on advice of your fact checker, I took out the paragraph on the notion that blank blank while you did show us a study or two there are conflicting research on those points. It looks great without it so don't worry about it. So I think that shows that when you when that people should trust real news sources, that's what happens. You know, I researched I found studies but they researched a little further and found a Couple conflicting ones. Since we want to go with the story, we'll take out the studies that I did that I've got a good illustration, right?   Stacey Simms  40:07 I do. That's great. Thank you for sharing that. That's fantastic. Just came in. Oh, hot off the presses.   Unknown Speaker  40:15 Um, so Stacey, where are you traveling to to speak, he's coming   Unknown Speaker  40:21 out of the family room, I'm in the living room. Now, my   Stacey Simms  40:25 family will say, Oh, my gosh, I never took all the stuff off my calendar. So I was supposed to be all these places, you know, this month in the next couple of weeks that I'm like, gosh, I gotta take this off my calendar because it's   Unknown Speaker  40:38 Oh,   Unknown Speaker  40:40 so I'm like, stop it. I'm not going there. But I did   Stacey Simms  40:43 go, Benny. And I went to the endocrinologist this morning. So actually put on real pants.   Benny  40:50 And they said and makeup.   Stacey Simms  40:52 Yeah, it was very funny. It was very funny makeup. I know. I know. I didn't mean but who puts lipstick on anywhere where he's wearing masks? No, it was great. It was great. And I did, I did get to ask our endo. I always have a list of questions even after all this time. And it's so great to have him as a resource. You know, to answer the questions. I mean, I know we're harping on it this whole time. But really, as you listen, and I think, you know, podcast listeners, you're We know you're smart. You're looking for information. share this with your friends, post this in Facebook groups where people are concerned about the information they're getting teach people, let's help each other be smarter. And fact check stuff about diabetes, because then there's so many we already we deal with it for people outside the community, we want to talk about okra and cinnamon. Right? We don't need to deal with nonsense within the community. We just want to help each other.   Moira McCarthy  41:41 Right. And and like I said in the beginning, I think this is a good time for us to talk about this because we all need going forward to know how to understand what is news, what is opinion, if you read a headline, how to dig down in it that, like you said so eloquently at the beginning. I mean, journalism is a pillar of American democracy. And I know it sounds all Whoa. But it really is true and, and weak. We journalists care about what we do. And we want people to be able to trust what they read. But unfortunately, the way the world is now that means the reader has to do a little more work.   Stacey Simms  42:21 Moira, thank you so much. As always enjoy your trip to the living room. Be careful. You know,   Moira McCarthy  42:25 I will I'll send you a postcard   Stacey Simms  42:27 navigate the traffic. And we'll talk again soon.   Unknown Speaker  42:31 All right, talk to you soon.   Announcer  42:38 You're listening to Diabetes Connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  42:44 How would you have answered that question from that Facebook group? What are your sources? What are your go to sources of information? I'm going to put that question in the Facebook group this week, because maybe we'll learn some new great ones. Maybe we'll learn about some pitfalls. I'm curious where you get your reliable information. And if there are people in the community as well, that we should be looking at that we haven't found so far. And if you have a question for ask the D mom's just a regular diabetes question, feel free to shoot me an email Stacey at Diabetes connections.com Moira, and I'd love to catch up with each other these quote unquote interviews usually go for about half an hour longer than what you hear because we spend the time catching up as well. It's amazing, isn't it? How many of us makes such good friends because of stupid diabetes? It's the only good thing that comes out of this condition. Hey, tell me something good is coming up in just a moment. We're going to talk about the amazing race. One of my favorite shows the Diabetes Connections is brought to you by Dexcom. And when Benny was very little and in the bathtub or at the pool, I always noticed his fingertips. I mean, you know what I mean? Right? They were poked so much. They were just full of little pinprick holes that you could really see when they got wet. He's 15. I don't see his hands much anymore. But at the end, oh, earlier this month, they always check his fingertips and it's amazing. We've been using Dexcom for almost seven years, and Benny's fingers look completely normal that I cannot believe it is such a visualization. I wish I'd taken a picture seven years ago. But you know the latest generation, the Dexcom G6 eliminates finger sticks for calibration and diabetes treatment decisions. Just thinking about doing 10 finger sticks a day in the past makes me so glad that Dexcom has helped us come so far. It's an incredible tool. If your glucose alerts and readings from the G6 do not match symptoms or expectations. Use a glucose meter to make diabetes treatment decisions. Learn more go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the Dexcom logo.   In Tell me something good this week. If you are not already a fan of The Amazing Race, I think you're going to be quite soon. Now a couple of years ago I think it was 10 years ago a couple like it was yesterday. Nat Strand Dr. Nat strand won The Amazing Race. We've had her on the show before I've talked about this because the media Race is one of my favorite shows. I started watching it when I was pregnant with my daughter, Lea, who is going to be 19. A couple of weeks. I've been watching the show for a long time. I actually haven't seen it in a couple of years. But I just last week said, I gotta start watching again. Maybe I'll start from the beginning. I don't know if I want to do that, or where am I going to jump in? But I got my answer, because this season of The Amazing Race features somebody with diabetes. I was watching the promo. And you can see this little clip of Leo Brown, he's got a Dexcom on his stomach. He is part of the team with his girlfriend, Alana Folsom. Everybody in The Amazing Race gets little nicknames because there's teams have to sort of keep them straight. Because you don't know anybody's names. They always boil them down to the essence. So you know, baseball bros, brother and sister longtime dating, which is what Alana and Leo are. So here's a little clip of them talking about getting ready for the race.   Leo  46:02 We've investigated past participants on Instagram.   Alana  46:05 Leo has a manual transmission car which came in huge I think the main thing we've been doing is CrossFit.   Leo Oh, we also did a ropes course basically for the last six months, it's been our primary activity trying to gain new skills. Alana Oh, we also got to buy prescription swim goggles or team   Leo prescriptions from goggles. Realty.   Stacey Simms  46:26 I have reached out to Leo, I am really hoping that he will come on the show and talk about the experience. Because not only do I want to know about being a person with diabetes on an event like this, which Nat has shared before how she did it, but that was more than 10 years ago, and the technology has changed. So be fun to find out what what helped Leo and maybe what did not. I was also laughing because I saw the preview of the show. And DeAngelo Williams is on this season. Now I know maybe that doesn't mean anything to you, but I'm in the Charlotte North Carolina area. He's a former Carolina Panthers. But he's one of these community guys. Like even if you don't know football, you know, D'Angelo, it's gonna be a really fun season to watch. I haven't seen the first episode yet it aired out last week, as you are listening to this show. I don't know maybe they got voted off. Maybe D'Angelo got voted off as well. But I really hope I can get Leo on the show to talk about his experiences on The Amazing Race. We are coming up on diabetes Awareness Month. And this is a year like no other Can I sound like every commercial you've ever seen. But I think this diabetes Awareness Month is going to be very different as well. We've got to get through the election before anybody's gonna pay attention to anything else. And I always say diabetes Awareness Month is for people outside of the community, not necessarily in I mean, you're kind of aware of diabetes already. So I'm going to be doing my usual news push to see if I can get some news out there to people who may need it and don't really understand about diabetes. But I'm also going to be doing a little something for us because boy, we need a little something. I'm going to be running a contest through the month of November. I've got some fun prizes. I've got some great companies, we just want to make you smile a little bit. So that will be going on in the Facebook group Diabetes Connections, the group and on my Instagram account over at Instagram. I'm just Stacey Simms, so follow me there or jump into the group. If you're not already there. We're going to have a good time. We're going to give away some stuff. And we're going to keep it kind of low key because I don't know that I have the wherewithal to keep it any other key right now. Thank you, as always to my editor John Bukenas from audio editing solutions. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Stacey Simms. I'll see you back here next week. Until then, be kind to yourself.   Benny  48:38 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Simms Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs avenged

Craig discusses the oversharing attitudes of Millennials and Generation Z, and the importance of paying attention to our networks, how it can lead to malware in businesses, and what can be done to stop it. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Right To Repair Or A Fight For Survival? Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house Malware Attacks Declined But Became More Evasive in Q2 Elon Musk reveals plans to slash electric battery costs, build $25,000 Tesla Paying ransomware demands could land you in hot water with the feds Windows 10 machines running on ARM will be able to emulate x64 apps soon 'It Won't Happen to Me': Employee Apathy Prevails Despite Greater Cybersecurity Awareness Rise in Remote MacOS Workers Driving Cybersecurity 'Rethink' A Guide to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: By the way, to follow up on that last segment. So Millennials and Generation Z are terrible with security. They keep reusing passwords. They accept connections with strangers. Most of the time. If that's not believable, I don't know what it is. They've grown up in this world of share everything with everyone. What does it matter? Don't worry about it. Yeah. I guess that's the way it goes. Right? Kids these days. Which generation hasn't said that in the past? You're listening to Craig Peterson. Thanks for joining me today. We were just talking about millennials, generation Z, and the whole, it won't happen to me, employee apathy, and we've got to stop that. Even within ourselves, right? We're all employees in some way or another. What does that mean? It means we've got to pay attention. We've' got to pay a lot of attention, and that isn't just true in the windows world. Remember, we've got to pay attention to our network. It would be best if you were upgrading the firmware on your switches, definitely upgrading the software and firmware in your firewalls and your routers, et cetera. Keep that all up to date. Even as a home user, you've got a switch or more than one. You've got a router. You've got a firewall in many cases, that your ISP internet service provider provides equipment. If you've got a Comcast line or a FairPoint, whatever, it might be coming into your home, they're providing you with some of that equipment, and you know what their top priority is not your security. I know. Shocker. Their top priority is something else. I don't know, but it sure isn't security. What I advise most people to do is basically remove their equipment or have them turn off what's called network address translation. Turn off the firewall and put your own firewall in place. I was on the phone with a lady that had been listening to me for years, and I was helping her out. In fact, we were doing a little security audit because she ran a small business there in her home. I think she was an accountant if I remember right. She had her computer hooked up directly to the internet. She misunderstood what I was saying. I want to make this clear what I'm saying here. People should still have a firewall. It would be best if you still had a router, but you're almost always better off getting a semi-professional piece of hardware. If you will, the prosumer side, something like the Cisco GO hardware, put that in place instead of having the equipment that your ISP is giving you.  We've got to keep all of this stuff up to date. Many of us think that Macs are invulnerable, Apple Macintoshes, or Apple iOS devices, like our iPhones and iPads. In many ways, they are. They have not been hit as hard as the Windows devices out there. One of the main reasons is they're not as popular. That's what so many people that use Windows say you don't get hit because you're just not as popular. There is some truth to that. However, the main reason is that they are designed from the beginning with security in mind; unlike Windows, security was an absolute afterthought for the whole thing. Don't tell me that it's because of age. Okay. I can hear it right now. People say, well, Mac is much, much newer than Microsoft Windows. Microsoft didn't have to deal with all of this way back when. How I respond to that is, yeah. Microsoft didn't have to deal with it way back when it wasn't connected to a network and your viruses coming in via floppy desk. Right? They really were. In fact, the first one came in by researchers. Apple's operating system is much, much older than windows and goes back to the late 1960s, early 1970s. So you can't give me that it is just that they didn't care. They didn't care to consider security at all, which is still one of my soapbox subjects if you will. Security matters. When we are talking about your Macs, you still have to consider security on a Mac. It's a little different on a Mac. You're probably want to turn on some things. The windows come with the firewall turned on; however, it has all of its services wide open. They're all available for anybody to attach to. That's why we have our windows hardening course that goes through, what do you turn off? How do you turn it off? What should you have in the windows firewall? Now the Mac side, all of these services turned off by default, which is way more secure. If they're not there to attack, they're not going to be compromised. Right.  They can't even be attacked in the first place. So I like that strategy, but you might want to turn on your firewall on your Mac anyways. There are some elegant little features and functions in it. But the amount of malware that's attacking Apple Macintoshes, nowadays, is twice as much as it used to be. We've got these work from home people. We've got IT professionals within the companies, just scrambling to make it so that these people working from home can keep working from home. It's likely a permanent thing. It's going to be happening for a long time. But these incidents of malware on the Mac is pretty limited in reality. The malware on a Mac is unlikely to be any ransomware or software that particularly steals things like your Excel files or your Word docs on a Mac, and I should say it is much more likely to be outerwear. It's much more likely to be. Adware or some other unwanted programs, and that's what's rising pretty fast on Macs. Mac-based companies are being concerned here about cybersecurity issues. They are paying more attention to them. They're windows based counterparts have had to deal with a lot of this stuff for a long time because they were targets. So we've got to divide the Mac really into two pieces, just like any other computer. You've got the operating system with its control over things like the network, et cetera. Then you have the programs or applications. That is running on that device. So you want to keep both of them secure. The applications running on your device, Apple's done a much, much better job of sandboxing them. Making them so that they're less dangerous. The latest release, in fact, Catalina had a lot of security stuff built into that. Microsoft and Windows 10 added a lot more security. So that's all really, really good. Now, if you have to maintain a network of Macs, we like IBM software. They have some great software for managing Macs, but if you want something inexpensive and very usable to configure Macs and control the software on them. Have a look at JAMF, J A M F. They just had their user's conference this last weekend. They were talking about how the landscape has changed over on the Mac side. All right. We've got one more segment left today, and I'm going to talk about these cybersecurity frameworks. What should you be using? If you are a business or a home user, what are those checkboxes that you absolutely have to have to use? You're listening to Craig Peterson. Stick around. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses problems that businesses can face when using VPNs and why you should be looking to a Zero-trust network if you are running a business today. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Traders set to don virtual reality headsets in their home offices What's on Your Enterprise Network? You Might Be Surprised Malware Attacks Declined But Became More Evasive in Q2 One of this year’s most severe Windows bugs is now under active exploit The VPN is dying, long live zero trust Shopify's Employee Data Theft Underscores Risk of Rogue Insiders Microsoft boots apps out of Azure used by China-sponsored hackers WannaCry Has IoT in Its Crosshairs Love in the time of Zoom: Why we’re in the midst of a dating revolution --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] What is going on with malware? There've been some major changes just over the last few months. That's what we're going to talk about right now. What do you need to watch out for? What should you be doing in your business as well as your home? Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson.  We know that they're here. I have been a lot of attacks over the years. That's what we're trying to stop. Isn't it with our businesses, with our home users? That's why we buy antivirus software or why we have a firewall at the edge. Maybe we even upgraded your firewall. You got rid of that piece of junk that was provided by your internet service providers. Most of them are frankly, pieces of junk, maybe you're lucky and have a great internet service provider that is giving you really what you need. I have yet, by the way, to see any of those internet service providers out there, that are really giving you what you need. So there is a lot to consider here when we're talking about preventing and preventing malware. What we have found is that malware attacks declined this year in the second quarter, but here's what's happening. Right? They are getting through more. Historically, we had things that have hit us that have been various types of malware. I remember when I first got nailed back in 91. I had a Unix server that I was running, as you probably know, I've been using Unix since the early eighties, 81, 82. I was using Unix, and I had my own Unix machines because I was helping to develop the protocols that later on became the internet about a decade or more later. The Unix world was on rather an open world. Was everybody on the internet was pretty friendly. Most people were involved in research, either government research or businesses doing research online, a lot of smart people and we actually had some fun back in the days', puns, and everything. We weren't that worried about security, unlike today, where security really is a top of mind thing for so many people. We weren't worried about who's going to do this to me or that to me. I had a Unix server that I was using, actually at a few of them that I was using for my business. Now, one of those servers was running emails, a program called Sendmail. That's still around today. It was the email package that was ruling the internet back at the time.  I got nailed with something called a worm. It was the Morris Worm. In fact, it got onto my computer through no act of my own. I didn't click on anything. It got onto my computer because it came through the internet. That was back in the days when we really didn't have much in the line of firewalls so it just talked to my mail server. One of these days we'll have to tell some stories about how we really trusted everybody back then. You could query to see if an email address was good. You could get onto the machine and say, Hey guy, I noticed that you had this problem so I went in and fixed it for you, and here's what I did. Much, much different world back then. But that's how malware used to spread. It was something, it was just kind of automated. It went out and they just checked everybody's machine to checked firewalls, to see what they were to see if they were open. We've been doing that for a very long time, haven't, we? We have been nailed with it. That's what the viruses were and are still. Where it gets onto your computer. Maybe you installed some software that you shouldn't have, and that software now takes over part of your computer. It affects other files. It might be something that's part of a Word macro or an Excel macro. And it now spreads through your sharing of that file and other people opening it. Worms are like what I got nailed with, just start crawling around through the internet. So they run some software on your machine and that looks for other machines and today things have changed again.  They are changing pretty frequently out there. What we have seen so far here in 2020 is a decrease in malware detections. Now, just because there's been a decrease in malware detections, I don't want you to think that the threat has diminished because it hasn't. But the signature-based antivirus system is real problems. Now, what's a signature-based antivirus system. That's any antivirus software, like your McAfee's like your Norton's, the Symantec stuff, any antivirus software, that is working like your body's immune system. What happens with your body's immune system? You get a virus and you're your body says, okay, what's going on here? It starts to multiply. Eventually, the body figures it out. It develops antibodies for it. So the next time it sees that particular virus, you're likely to be pretty much immune from it. Your body's going to say, Whoa, that's a virus and it goes in and kills it pretty darn quickly. That's the whole idea behind trying to stop the WuHan virus that is spreading out there. How do we stop it while we stop it, by just developing antibodies? Right? That's herd immunity. We could also develop antibodies by an antivirus shot that is designed to stop that virus from spreading and prevents you from coming down with COVID-19 symptoms. In the computer world, it's much the same as most of the software signature-based antivirus software is exactly the same as the way your body's immune system has been working. In many, many ways. Here's what happens. Someone gets infected with a virus and they reported to Symantec or Norton, or maybe the software reported itself. Usually, it's a third party that reports that and they look at it and they say, okay, so what does this virus look like? There is in this program the developers' names embedded or the name of the hacker group is embedded in it. So we are going to now say any piece of software that it has this hacker group's name in it, we're going to ban. Right?  It recognizes it. So when the file comes onto your computer your computer looks at it. It looks at the signatures. These are called signatures. To say, okay, how does it match? Or it doesn't match at all and it might be through a string that's somewhere embedded in there. So it might be through a name. It might be through a number of other things. That's signature-based. The malware, that was not detectable by signature-based antivirus systems jumped 12%. In the second quarter of 2020. That is amazing. Amazing, absolutely amazing. Seven in 10 attacks that organizations encountered in the second quarter this year. In fact, involved malware designed to circumvent anti-virus signatures. Most cyber-attacks last year and this is probably going to be true in 2020 as well as we get into the fourth quarter. But most cyberattacks in 2019 came about without malware. That means that there were hackers behind this. We're going to talk about that. What's going on some of the data also from CrowdStrike and what they have found CrowdStrike is an anti-malware anti-hacker company. They've got a lot of great people working for them as well. What they have found. It's like the bad old days of hacking and they're back on us right now. So make sure you stick around. Cause we're going to get into that when we get back. And of course, we got a whole lot more, including a major windows bug that's now under exploit and how does this all fit together? You are listening to Craig Peterson. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome to Theme Week- SPACE!Misty and Ike go full nerd this week. Stay tuned for special episodes all week featuring Mystery Spots, UFO's, Abductions, Phobias and so so much more weird shit!First we take a trip around to some famous Mystery Spots like Marfa, Area 51, Roswell and the Bermuda TriangleMisty teaches Ike about ley lines which are the earths magnetic grid and the 7 different places on the intersections of ley lines that hold mysterious power!Then we talk about the Sedona Vortexes which have for many years been known as a special spot of magnetic energy coming out of the earth for healing the human body.Ike is pretty fascinated by them and how they make chevrons because he likes pretty pictures.Ike discovers he likes going down into holes and he and Misty discuss their difference in thought process on Energy and SpiritualitySince the ley line intersections are also known as the Earths chakras they decide that earthquakes are the earth having an anxiety attack, pent up energy that needs let out. Makes sense RIGHT?They deep dive into the 70 incidents in Bermuda Triangle, and discover- US navy does not recognize the existance of the Triangle at all!!Find out what verboten means and about some other places like:Bohemian Grove California- a 2700 acre campground with a lake and an Owl Shrine & outdoor stage. If you are rich, powerful and male you can attend the Cremation of Care, which sounds VERY Skull and Bones to us.AND- Raven Rock in Moscow which is a secret underground section of metro trains.AND- Seed vaults- vaults scattered across the world that hold seeds of the worlds crops in the case of an apocalypse!#leylines #snakemovement #moundgridders #fallequinox #negritic #and #stonecircle #isaiah #sacredcubit #featheredserpent #earthmagneticfield #newarkearthworks #enochdesignedthegreatpyramid #frequencyofenergy #geocentric #serpentmound #kulthanilni #oceanicnegroids #ay #stonecircles #vibration #celticmythology #celticcross #magick #chalicewellgardens #o #holygrail #celticpainting #celticartist #bhfyp

FRA research coordinator Jodie joins us on the podcast this week to discuss Enneagram type two. This enneagram type is referred to as the caregiver and is known for being self-sacrificing, sincere, empathic, and warm-hearted. The characteristics of an Enneagram type two all seem great. Right? They are until these caring team members give of themselves day-in and day-out without taking care of themselves. Shantelle and Jodie discuss how managers of type twos can ensure that these selfless team members are taken care of and prioritizing their own needs in addition to the needs of those around them. Type twos tend to be willing to help wherever they are needed even if their skills don’t particularly align. They are excellent at anticipating problems and finding appropriate solutions. Shantelle and Jodie share how this type best communicates in the workplace, resolves conflict, absorbs feedback, and more. Are you an Enneagram type two? Let us know in the comments or on our social media sites, and tune in next week as we dive into Enneagram type three!

Life hacks are simple shortcuts to help get everyday tasks done more efficiently. But Christian contentment is the ultimate life hack. In this episode, we explore what contentment is, how you can get it, and how it allows Christians to change their attitudes without changing their circumstances. Links Watch Redeeming Productivity on our YouTube channelBook: The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs. Sign-up for the Redeeming Productivity Newsletter. If you enjoy Redeeming Productivity, consider supporting my work on Patreon, where you’ll get exclusive updates and early releases of new content. Transcript Welcome to the Redeeming Productivity Show.This is the podcast that helps Christians get more done and get it done like Christians. And I’m your host Reagan Rose.Well, in this week’s episode, we’re going to be talking about the subject of Christian contentment. Namely, why contentment is the Ultimate life hack. More on that in a minute, but before we get into it in earnest, I just wanted to tell you that I am back at it with a video version of the podcast. So a lot of you—I know most of you—listen to this via audio podcast on Apple Podcasts or something like that. Well, there’s also a video version on YouTube and there has been going back for quite a while actually, but I stopped doing them when it got too hot. Because I shoot this in the garage and it gets too hot in the garage. And so it was, it was too hard to make it pretty and not be sweating. So now it’s cooled off a little bit. So I’m back at it. So if you are not subscribed to the YouTube channel, go on YouTube, go to Redeeming Productivity, just search it or just click the link in the description here.And you will find me there. And I have other videos there as well, in addition to the podcast content. So you’ll want to check that out. And also of course, as usual, if you’re not subscribed to this podcast on your podcast player, you ought to go ahead and do that. A special shout out to the Patreon supporters. Appreciate you guys so much! There are now 11 of you, which is amazing to me and really does help offset the cost of this. So if you are a listener to this or a watcher of this with your ojos, and you want to help support the efforts of Redeeming Productivity, do check out my Patreon page. That’s patreon.com/redeemingprod. And you can become a monthly supporter for as little as three bucks a month. And I hop on there from time to time, give some exclusive content and also do early releases of episodes from time to time. So check that out. More coming soon over there…soon. So keep your eyes peeled and your ears…ears peeled, uh, ears…ears…open ears, unclogged ears? Peeled. Okay. Let’s get into the topic of today’s show. So earlier this week I tweeted, I tweeted, um, a tweet. I tweeted a tweet that just said that “contentment is the ultimate life hack.” And over on my Instagram, I shared a little bit more about what I meant by that. And I figured, you know what? I should do a whole episode about what that means. So why would I say that contentment is the ultimate life hack? That’s what I want to talk about today. And so we’re going to do three things, hopefully, depending on how long this takes. I might have more material than I have your attention. So I might split this up, but we’ll see. So three things we’re going to do. We’re going to say, why contentment is the ultimate life hack. Then we’re going to look at what exactly contentment is, biblically, where I get a little theological on you. I looked up some Greek words. So hold onto your hats lady and gents. Lady and gents, because there’s only one lady who listens to this and it’s my mom. And then lastly, we’re going to answer a question—and that is one that often comes up. You might be wondering at the end of this episode as well. It’s if I get too content…does contentment kill ambition? Will it kill my drive to be productive if I’m actually content? Hmm. Interesting question, Reagan. Yes. Thank you. I made that up and we’ll answer it shortly. Okay. So let’s dig in. Why is contentment the ultimate life hack? Well, you know what life hacks are, right? Like someone’s like, here’s a cool way to open a jar with just your teeth or, um, you know, here’s a simple way to save 10 seconds tying your shoes. I don’t know. You remember life hacks they’re really popular in like the 2010s and still people will do like “10 Smart Life Hacks”. But when I think about life hacks kind of the goal of them is to, help you save time. They’re shortcuts. Right? They’re shortcuts. That’s really what they are, to doing common things. So why is contentment the ultimate life hack? Well, I’ve got four reasons. The first is that contentment, true biblical contentment, changes your attitude without you having to change your circumstances, right? So when, when people say, well, I’m unhappy. They think, well, if only I had X, if only I achieved this goal, or I did this thing, then my attitude would change. Then I would be happy. What contentment does, is it short circuits that whole, “trying to get at the goal in order to change your attitude,” by simply changing your attitude from the beginning. So that’s the first one: Contentment’s the ultimate life hack because it changes your attitude without forcing you to change your circumstances. And second it is, as I just alluded to, a shortcut to happiness. Basically, I think this can happen to Christians—and I think a lot of people who do not know the Lord. This is kind of what drives them, they have these ambitions, they have these goals, they have these big projects that they’re driving towards and they want to, they want to achieve, you know? Whether it’s a promotion or they want to start a company or they just, they want to have kind of their house in order or whatever it may be. But what they really want is not that goal. What they want is the felt outcome of that goal, which is happiness or a sense of satisfaction or accomplishment or, or joy. Right? And if you are content in Christ, if you cultivate the virtue of contentment, you actually have a shortcut to happiness. You achieve the real outcome of the goals that you’re after, which is satisfaction, without actually even achieving those goals. So it’s a trick; it’s a shortcut. You think that if you achieve that thing, you’ll be happy. Well, guess what? In Christ, you can be content in whatever circumstances without having to accomplish some giant thing. Third, why is contentment the ultimate life hack? Because it puts you in a right relationship to providence. It puts you in a right relationship to providence. And I’m going to talk about this a little bit more in a minute. What exactly, I mean by that. Then fourth, contentment is the ultimate life hack because it smashes sinful anxiety. It puts you in this, this kind of position toward your goals that is peace-based instead of like desperation-based. And I’ll talk about that a little bit more in the, in the final section here as well. But it smashes sinful anxiety. When you cultivate contentment, you are able to go about your goals. You’re able to be productive, able to strive without having to be stressed out or anxious in a sinful way. Okay. So contentment’s the ultimate life hack. I just gave you four reasons, but what is contentment exactly? What is contentment and how do I get it? How do I learn it? Well, there’s several verses in the new Testament of the Bible, there’s several passages that speak of contentment and they all use variations of the same Greek word, which is arkeo. And it can either mean like “sufficient” or “enough” when it’s used in active voice, or when it’s used passively, it can mean “content” or to be “satisfied”.So it’s kind of both sides of it. It can be a thing that is sufficient or it is enough. Or the effect of it, you know, when it’s applied to you, is that it results in you being content or satisfied. So arkeo, and we see this like in 2 Corinthians 12:9. These are all actually really well known verses you probably—if you’ve been a believer for awhile—these are probably versus you kind of maybe have memorized at one point or at least heard a lot. So like 2 Corinthians 12:9, it’s when the apostle Paul is recounting God’s message to him. And he says, “my grace is sufficient” It’s arkeo for you, it’s sufficient for you. It’s enough. “for my power is made perfect in weakness.“ Or we also see it in the passive side in 1 Timothy 6:8, where he writes, “But if we have food and clothing with these, we will be content.“ There will be enough if we just have food and clothing. It will be enough. We don’t need more than that. Hebrews 13:5 also says, “keep your life free from the love of money and be content with what you have for, he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.‘“ And then one more, just for good measure, Luke 3:14, it’s talking about when the soldiers were talking to Jesus and they asked him, “what shall we do?“ And he said to them, “do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusations and be content with your wages.“ So again, content, content. So we might say this: To be biblically, to be content, that it’s a state of being satisfied, of feeling that you have enough. And even in those passages I quoted, you know, if you just have food and clothing or the soldiers who have been converted and they, and they wanted to know, well what should we do? He said, don’t extort people just be content with the wages that you’re getting for your work. And it’s this attitude of being okay with present circumstances of being content in them; being satisfied. And contentment is more than just like a personality trait. Like, I think we all know people in our lives that are kind of like at peace. You know, they seem pretty content. You want to like order a meal or something, and you say, what do you want? They’re like, “I don’t care, whatever you guys want.“ Or somebody—another food related one—they get their order wrong at you know McDonald’s or something. And they’re like, “Oh, you should send that back. You should, you should, get them to correct that“ and say, “no, this’ll be fine. I don’t mind.” They’re so content. Well, some people, you know, I think are more given to this to be kind of, you know, they’re not as needy, you know. They are content with circumstances. But it’s more than just a personality trait, contentment, biblically. It has a source. It’s more of a, a view. It’s more of a belief. It’s, it’s actually an act of faith. It has a view towards, towards Christ. And God is the reason that your content. It’s not, it’s not that you’re just a contented person. It’s that you have an understanding. You have a belief, you have a theology that allows you to be content, even in bad circumstances. There’s a great book by Jeremiah Burroughs. It is called, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs, who was a Puritan. I have read this book, I think two or three times already. And it is very convicting and it is very helpful in teaching you to become more content. And he deals with contentment from all these different angles and basically how you can learn it. But in that book, Jeremiah Burroughs has a great description of Christian contentment. He says, “Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.“ I love that. It’s, it’s not, it’s not, not this kind of like Buddhist disconnection from reality where you’re kind of floating above it all, you know, “Om, om” or something. That’s not Christian contentment. Christian contentment is this inner, what did he say? A sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit. And it freely submits to and delights in God’s fire God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition. You see what that is? It’s a disposition towards God’s providence, right? It’s a disposition toward the fact that God’s in control of things. And though these circumstances might be bad, my plans might have been thwarted, some tragedy may have fallen me, but I know the God whom I serve. And because I know Him, that He is a fatherly caring God who is in control of all circumstances, I can trust that even in these bad situation, God still loves me. And I will submit to the circumstances of providence. And not just submit to them. He says, I will delight in them because I’m content. I will delight because I will say to myself, self, this is not what you planned. This is not what you wanted. But these circumstances are what God has brought. And God loves me. He cares for me. He wants the best for me. And therefore these circumstances are the best for me. And so I will praise that wise God, and I will delight in these circumstances. And I will find a way to be thankful for this providence, though it may be bitter in the time. Contentment is this ability to meet the events of life, not by being disconnected, kind of, and just letting, letting them wash over you and not caring because you’re apathetic. That’s not what it is. Contentment is not apathy. Contentment is meeting the circumstances of life, armed with a knowledge of who God is and that he cares for you. And with that knowledge trusting fully that those things are true. It’s meeting head on the circumstances of life with a peace and even a delight that God has brought them about. Contentment is you trusting that in any situation God’s will, is the best for that situation. And so you will have a peaceful spirit, which can say with all honesty and all sincerity, “as the Lord wills.“ So that’s what contentment is. The next question is how do I actually cultivate contentment? You say that rare jewel you’re talking about Reagan, I want that jewel. And that is, you know, that’s why Burroughs calls it the rare jewel of Christian contentment, because it’s valuable. And it also really is rare. A lot of people do not have this. It is a precious thing to have. And so seeing what it is, seeing that, yeah, wow, this is the ultimate life hack, I can be content without striving my whole life. So like so many people do this thing where they think, “Oh man, if I just end up with the perfect career,“ “if I could just be the boss,“ “if I could just have this product launch, take off,” “If I could, if I could just have my family perfect. And all my kids be polite and all of them graduate with good grades and go on to good colleges and be sent out of the home, then I’ll be successful. Then I’ll be happy. Then I’ll be content.“ You know, “if I could just make enough money, then I’ll be content.“ Now here’s the trick: Contentment is the ultimate life hack because it allows you, without having to achieve all those things, to already have that outcome, to already be happy, satisfied, to say it is enough—What I have right now. Because this is what God has deigned to give me at this time. That’s pretty awesome. So we know what it is. We know why we want it now. How do we get it? If content, how do we get contentment? Well, contentment can be learned. I think it is incredibly important to recognize, as I said that before, that, you know, it feels like some people are just kind of contented, peaceful people. Well, maybe some people are more given to it. But it’s clear from scripture that it can be learned. Philippians 4:11–13. This is the apostle Paul. Again, he says, “not that I speak from want for, I have learned to be content.“ I have learned to be content. It was something he could learn, “in whatever circumstances I am in. I know how to get along with humble means and also how to live in prosperity. In any, and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering.” And you say, Paul, what is this?What, what did you learn? How did you learn contentment? Whether you have a lot or have a little? He says, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.“ The secret knowledge, as it were, that enabled Paul to endure and face anything with God almighty was that he recognized that God was able to strengthen and sustain him with any challenge he met, whether it’s temptation to despair through tragedy or temptation or to idolize riches and comfort when circumstances are good. No matter what, he knew how to be content in those things. Because the secret to contentment that he learned is that he had to walk close with the Lord who would provide the strength in all of those circumstances. That’s how you become content. How will you be contented person? By walking closely with the Lord and trusting in his strength. But not only can contentment be learned, contentment also comes through fearing the Lord. Proverbs 19:23 says “the fear of the Lord leads to life. Then one rest content untouched by trouble.“ So the fear of the Lord allows you to be content. If you begin by putting God first in your life, by fearing him above all other things, whether that is other people or fearing bad circumstances of “what if this happens, what if this happens?“ Or “what if I fail? What if this?” If you put Christ first and you fear God most, contentment will follow that. You will be able to rest. Why? Because again, you’re resting in His strength. You’re resting in a trust in Him. And that’s, that’s the last point I want to make on this point, which is that contentment comes through faith. It can be learned. It comes from fearing the Lord. And ultimately it comes through faith. Namely, believing that God really is sovereign. He’s powerful. And he is favorably disposed toward his children. It’s an amazing thing. Once you realize that God actually desires good for his children and he hasn’t just saved us to, to forget us or, or, or that he has kind of begrudgingly saved us. And He’s like, “alright, you know what? Um, you’re saved, but just chill on earth for awhile until I perfect you. And you know, we can be in heaven and then maybe I’ll talk to you.“ No, he wants good for us. God wants good for us. He looks on you—if you are in Christ, if you’re Christian, if you’ve repented of your sins, put your faith in Jesus Christ—God, the Father, the One who is in control of this whole universe thing, He looks on you favorably because you are in Christ. But sometimes even Christians (I know I’m guilty of this) sometimes we’re tempted to believe that maybe God wants good for us, but He’s just, you know, not really able to bring it about. You know, maybe He’s kind of like, “yeah, I really would love good stuff for you, but you know, bad things, bad things happen sometimes.“ But no, that’s not true. God is sovereign. He’s in control of the circumstances. He both desires good for us and He is always able to, and is in fact always bringing it about in our lives, through orchestrating the means of our circumstances. That’s a complicated way of saying God’s in total control of everything. Even the bad stuff that happens to you. And even the bad stuff and happen that happens to you He is orchestrating for your good, because he loves you. And that’s just Romans 8:28. Isn’t it? I mean, this is basic stuff, guys. Romans 8:28, “And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.“ So if you, if you love God, if you’ve been called according to his purpose, which is to say, if you have been saved, you’ve been redeemed by God. Then all things are working together for your good. The only way that’s possible is because the following premises are true. And that is that God is in control of everything. And he loves you. Therefore, all the circumstances that happen to you are working for your good, and you can trust that that’s true. How’s contentment relate to this> Contentment is actually believing that actively, even in the face of circumstances that would tempt us not to believe that those things are true. Contentment is your reaction to that reality. It’s the result of your faith in trusting that God is in control and he cares about me that he’s working all things together for my good. You believe that that’s true. If you believe God’s always working all things together for your good, well, you will be content. You will not be restless. You will not be fearful or anxious because of the risk of things happening to you. Or you will not despair because bad things happen to you. And likewise, it’s just, Paul had said, when good things happen to you when your plans are succeeding, when things are going really, really good, you might be tempted in the opposite direction, which is to trust in yourself and to forget about God and think, “wow, look what I’ve done for myself.“ But even then you won’t be content. You won’t be satisfied. Even when, if your house is full of riches, you have all the things you ever wanted in life and everything’s working out great, you will not be content. If you are not trusting in the Lord and trusting that all that you have is yours by his good hand. And as Job said, “the Lord gives and he takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.“ I think that’s one of the big things that can happen to us. You may, through God’s blessing you, through the means of your being productive, and you striving hard in life, you may meet your goals and they may be satisfying for you. But my point is that they won’t stay satisfying. They won’t ultimately be fulfilling to you because you weren’t meant to be fulfilled by those things themselves. You’re meant to be satisfied in Christ. And sometimes what can happen to us is that we get everything we want. And then we start to get anxious. We start to get anxious because we wonder “what if it all goes away?“ “What if there’s a downturn in the housing market? And I, and I lose my house.“ “What if I get fired from my job?“ You know, “I got all the way here but I could lose it all in a minute.“ “What if somebody sues me or what if one of my kids turns on me and they turn out to be a real rascal and, and run off and I’d say, well, all my parenting, what was that for?“ See what I mean? If you don’t constantly walk close with the Lord and be believing that He desires good for you and all that He brings about is good, and he is in control of it, you won’t be content, whether you have a little or a lot. And that’s what makes it the ultimate life hack. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. And then finally, on this point, I would just add this contentment comes from knowing that all you really need is Christ. All you really need is Jesus Christ. Hebrews 13:5 says, “keep your life free from the love of money and be content with what you have.“ I read that one earlier, but did you notice why he said that that? It is because these are temptations, right? Especially somebody who’s kind of driven, right. Oftentimes we’re, we’re seeking to better our lives through our work monetarily. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But the problem Scripture states is the love of money. So he says, keep your life free from the love of money and be content with you, have. Why? Well he appends the reason. He says, “because I will never leave you nor forsake you.“ So Christ said the same. You can be content with what you have and not idolize riches or whatever else in life, if you are fully satisfied in the fact that Christ is yours, that he will never leave you for sake, you will always have Him. Those things they’ll come and go, money comes and goes, relationships, come and go, successes, come and go. But Christ is with you always. And if He is your joy, if He is the true source of your contentment, well there’s nothing to worry about. Cause He’s not going anywhere. Finally, the last section here. So we have a little bit more time. I want to quickly kind of get a, maybe a really high level overview about contentment and its relationship to ambition. And maybe I’ll do a followup thing, a blog post or something about this that goes a little bit more in depth. But as I’ve been thinking through these things, thinking about the importance of contentment, and how do I cultivate it, and how it’s kind of like this awesome way to get the results of achieving my goals, which is kind of happiness, contentment, whatever satisfaction without actually achieving them—So as I’ve thought through all that, one of the things that keeps like ringing in my ear is, and maybe you’re thinking this too, “If I become content with my present circumstances, is that going to like, just absolutely destroy my ambition? Does that mean I’m not going to really accomplish anything with my life?“ And I can see, you can see the rationale here. You think, “well, if I’m content, then I’m not going to need to get off the couch. I’m not going to strive for anything. I’m just of kind of float through life, you know, all happy, like just big, big kind of pleasant, smile on my face. And not really have any drive to do anything.“ So you might even be worried in that sense. If I become too content, maybe I’ll stop being hungry. Maybe, you know, like, I don’t know who says this, but I always see like the entrepreneur, like stuff on Instagram or like the memes and stuff. They’re like always “stay hungry!” “You’re a tiger!” I don’t know if they say “you’re a tiger,“ but I’ve seen that thing about “always stay hungry.“ And they’re saying like, you know, “don’t be satisfied because if you get satisfied, then you’ll stop being ambitious. You’ll stop climbing, you’ll stop kinda clawing. And therefore you won’t be successful.“ And you could see productivity-minded people hearing this and saying, “well, if I cultivate contentment, maybe I won’t be ambitious. And maybe I won’t succeed at things.“ But true Christian contentment doesn’t make you into like a passive person who has really no desires to do anything, just like a big kind of flubber that just kind of oozes through life, but doesn’t really try to achieve anything. No, it just gives you the right attitude toward ambition and goals and success. Because again, the Bible does not condemn ambition. It doesn’t, it condemns vain ambition, Philippians 2:3–4, right? Vain ambition. But what that is is that’s talking about selfishness, a selfish attitude that puts your own desires above others, and it doesn’t seek to serve people that’s what’s condemned. And that is sort of that attitude you see there in James, which is “I’m going to make a profit. I’m going to do this. And we’re going to, I’m going to go to this town, to this town and…” It’s self, self, self, self, self that is condemned, but ambition itself, the desire to, to achieve something? No, that’s not condemned. I mean, read the Proverbs. Far from killing ambition, actually Christian contentment puts you in the best possible position to meet the challenges of life. Even as you pursue your goals with an attitude of, “if the Lord wills.“ And this way, a productive Christian who is resting contentedly with the Lord is actually in the best position to be productive, to achieve things. Why? Because when you’re content, you’re operating from a position of peace, rather than desperate striving, right? You’re not asking of your goals. You’re not demanding of, of these things. You’re not seeking that they would be the thing that made you happy. You’re already happy already content in Christ. So you’re able to seek these things with kind of this attitude of, “okay, if the Lord wills, we’re going to go do this thing.“ And if, but if it doesn’t work out, you, it doesn’t destroy. You, you know, it might be hard, but your contentment wasn’t from succeeding. That thing, it was from knowing and walking with Christ. And it also means when we’re content that we’re seeking to line up our goals with God’s will, right? “If the Lord wills.” And that results in actually fewer frustrated plans. It’s when we do that vain ambition thing where we’re just kind of setting these goals irrespective of God, and we’re kind of like, “God, can you please go ahead and, uh, bless this for me,“ right? You come to him afterwards and look for the stamp of approval. I made this huge plan. Irrespective, never thought about you once, but God it’s gonna make me rich and now I’m going to pray about it so that you will a stamp of approval on it and make it happen. That’s not the right way of going about it. But when you’re content and you’re drawing that contentment from knowing Christ, even the plans you make from the start, you’re doing them in a way where you’re seeking to honor God, where you’re seeking to fulfill His will. Even the plans you make will be better when you’re operating from contentment. Also, when you are operating from a place of contentment, you will be well equipped to meet the adversity that meets people in any endeavor. Whether you’re starting a business or whatever you’re doing, you’ll understand that the Lord’s love loves you and that He’s sovereign over the circumstances. And so when trials arrive, you can meet them with contentment. And also when you’re content, you’re depending upon God’s strength, not simply on your own strength or your intelligence or your creativity to overcome issues. When you’re content, you’re actually resting in God’s strength and that gives you the ability to overcome things. So finally, I want to just kind of close with a little bit of a question that relates to this issue of contentment being the ultimate life hack. What is your ultimate ambition? And be honest with yourself, what is it you’re really seeking out of life? You know, if someone asked you, what are your goals? What are the things you’re after you might say, “Oh, I want to, I want to, um, you know, have just a great family that, you know, have three kids that love the Lord.“ It might be good things like that. Or, you know, “I wanna, I wanna start a business and make a million dollars.” Or you want to become a great photographer or something like that, right? You have these different goals. And my question is, what’s your ultimate ambition? What is your ultimate ambition? And does this pop into your head when people ask you what your goals are? Because we’re actually, we’re told what our ultimate ambition is supposed to be, and that is to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. If that’s our ultimate goal of what we want is to kind of God, what we want is to be righteous, we will succeed. That’s a right goal. And we will succeed in that. Because it’s at blessed. Jesus said, “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be satisfied.“ That is a goal that will always be met. Those who seek righteousness. And if your life is built around honoring Christ, if it is built around seeking his kingdom and seeking his righteousness and wanting to honor Him and glorify Him with your life, whether kind of your sub goals under that are raising a family or being successful at work or doing these other things, as long as those really are just kind of sub goals—They’re meant to be a vehicle by which you would honor Christ and glorify Him—that is an ambition that is worth pursuing. That is an ambition that is worthy of your effort and work and is not at cross purposes with God. And it is something which He will indeed bless over and over again. You’ll find Him blessing it. And so I would encourage you to really take an honest look, what is it that I’m seeking in life? Why am I wanting to be more successful? Why am I trying to be more productive? Is it ultimately that I want to serve Christ and glorify him? And if it’s not, do some soul work, spend some time with the Lord and get that straight. Because if your ambition is vain, if it’s just for yourself, it’s not going to be blessed. And I’ll tell you what, it’s not going to satisfy you because no contentment doesn’t kill ambition. In fact, it is the ultimate life hack. Because when we’re content in Christ, you’re not deriving your happiness from future success. But from that settled, quiet knowledge that you are in Christ, your future is secure. And the work you do now is simply your opportunity to bring him glory while you’re here. So we work and we work hard, but we always work with that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition. That’s Christian contentment. And that is the ultimate life hack. Well, that’s all I have for you this week. Please do. If you’re not subscribed, go ahead and subscribe. Give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts if you listen on there, it helps other people find it. Check out the YouTube channel. And if you’re interested in supporting the work of Redeeming Productivity, helping me to produce more of this stuff and even more videos and whatnot, please do consider supporting my work on Patreon. That’s patreon.com/redeemingprod. And there’ll be a link to that in the description. All right. Well, that’s it. I will see you again here next week, but until I do remember this, that in whatever you do, do it well and do it all to the glory of God.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcastIf you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.Competition ends October 31st 2020. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references:http://qlineconsulting.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlystraughan/https://twitter.com/CarlyTPAhttps://www.museumnext.com/article/is-instagram-culture-a-positive-influence-for-museums/During the interview, I mentioned a weekly consumer sentiment tracker from the BDA. I actually meant the BVA, apologies. Link to the tracker below, it's brilliant.https://www.bva-bdrc.com/products/tracking-consumer-sentiment-on-the-impact-of-covid-19/ Transcription:Kelly Molson:Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. These chats are fun, informative, and hopefully always interesting.Today I'm talking to Carly Straughan. Carly began her career working in tourist attractions on a three-month contract until she found a real job. But almost 15 years later, she's still here. She now works with museums, arts, and heritage and tourist attractions worldwide and is a really passionate supporter of the industry. We discuss unpopular opinions, emerging innovation, the future of attractions, and why pre-booking is a benefit to attractions regardless of COVID. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching, Skip the Queue.Kelly Molson:Carly, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's lovely to have you here.Carly Straughan:You're very welcome. It's great to be here.Kelly Molson:We've Zoom met, haven't we?Carly Straughan:Yeah.Kelly Molson:Because we had a Zoom chat during lockdown, which is lovely. That's how you're on the podcast today because I've dragged you on.Carly Straughan:Happy to be dragged. Happy to be dragged.Kelly Molson:I'm glad. I always start off with a few icebreaker questions. But even though we know each other, I don't know the answers to these questions.Carly Straughan:Oh gosh. I've got to think.Kelly Molson:You'll be fine. Okay. If you could travel back in time, what period would you go to?Carly Straughan:It would be Art Deco. I would be living in Butlins with very wide trousers on playing golf really badly.Kelly Molson:Oh, I love that.Carly Straughan:Yeah, I love that period of people were just sort of learning to enjoy their leisure time or the upper classes is just starting to really enjoy their leisure time and suddenly the working holiday act comes in and normal people start to get holiday. And we have that real sort of period of lots of people going to the seaside and Blackpool starts growing and all these kinds of spa towns pop up and I love that, that period that people just sort of really start enjoying themselves.Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:...Or seemingly start to enjoy themselves. And the art from that period of all the transport is such a big thing all of a sudden. Everyone's train traveling and yeah, just glorious.Kelly Molson:Something about the architecture from then as well, isn't it?Carly Straughan:Yeah.Kelly Molson:It's really, really striking.Carly Straughan:Yeah. If you've ever been to Elton Palace, Elton Palace in South East London, well, sort of on the outskirts of South East London-Kelly Molson:I haven't.Carly Straughan:It's really, truly stunning. That period would be mine. Absolutely.Kelly Molson:And you mentioned playing golf badly. What is your favorite hobby? Is it golf?Carly Straughan:Oh, god, no. No. I don't play golf. The only thing I like about golf is that there's a place... I think there's one or two in England. It's called Top Golf.Kelly Molson:Oh yeah.Carly Straughan:Which is kind of like golf but a bit more like bowling, so you don't... But no, I'm terrible at that too. But I'm sort of... It's nice to be bad at things sometimes, isn't it?Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:I'm bad at all my hobbies.Kelly Molson:I'm equally bad at golf to be fair. Anything that's hand-eye coordination like pool or golf or darts, I'm really bad at.Carly Straughan:Yeah. In my spare time generally, I run quite a lot, again really badly. I'm not very good at it. I'm very slow. But I can generally run for a long time and I like it. It's a nicer sort of in your own space activity.Kelly Molson:It's quite mindful, isn't it?Carly Straughan:Yeah, definitely. I started running in 2014. And then I thought, "Well, I've started running now, so I'll run a marathon." And so I went from never having run really, to running a marathon in a year which now I realize is a stupid thing to do.Carly Straughan:If you're looking for something to be mindful with... I'm not very fast at all. My first marathon, I did six and a half hours. Nothing's going to make up in your head more than six and a half hours of running really slowly.Kelly Molson:Had a lot to think about that day?Carly Straughan:Yeah. A real lot.Kelly Molson:That's an amazing achievement to do that or of anyone that can do a marathon. So awesome. All right. Last icebreaker question. I've shamefully stolen this from the Greg James Breakfast Show. He has a part on there where he asks people to phone in with their unpopular opinions and I love it.Carly Straughan:Of course.Kelly Molson:I want you to tell me something that you think is true but hardly anyone agrees with you.Carly Straughan:Oh, God.Kelly Molson:Your unpopular opinion.Carly Straughan:I'm the queen of unpopular opinions.Kelly Molson:I like it. Great. Bring it on.Carly Straughan:My husband has a joke, we have a running joke about the fact that I always want a tattoo and my idea for a tattoo is just the phrase, "I didn't really think it through." Just to have, whatever so you can see it. Because things come out of my mouth and I don't generally mean to say them. I tried to think of something that I... I once did tell some people that I thought that Devon had no shops in it. I still stand by that fact. But whenever I sell things on eBay, especially when I used to live in London, so I have a lot of... I have a clothes addiction, it's pretty bad.Carly Straughan:So whenever I sold clothes, it would always be people in Devon and Cornwall that bought them and my opinion about that was just because they just don't have shops.Kelly Molson:How strange? That's a really weird coincidence.Carly Straughan:I got shouted down about it but I was like, "No. I stand by it."Kelly Molson:All right. I think that counts. That definitely counts as an unpopular opinion.Carly Straughan:Yeah. You'll be getting letters in now from people that live in Devon and Cornwall saying, "We do have shops and they're very good."Kelly Molson:I am a little bit worried actually, when these podcasts air about what feedback I'm going to get. Okay. Right. 15 years in the attraction sector. That's how long you've been working in it.Carly Straughan:Yeah.Kelly Molson:Tell me what you've been doing and where and how you've got to what you're doing now.Carly Straughan:When people say, "Oh, how did you get started in your career?" And I say, well, I had a ski season booked. I met my husband at the end of university and I had a ski season booked. We went and did a snow season. And I needed a job between leaving University and starting this ski season. I had two jobs they offered me and one of them was a recruitment agency and I think it was £20,000 pounds a year. And the other one was Madame Tussauds in London and that was not £20,000 pounds a year. Let's be very clear.Carly Straughan:And it was just working in the retails shop and on photography and I thought well, I'm only going to be there for three months. I don't really want to go and take a job that I'm going to have to train for, I was already working in retail part-time. I will just take a short job that'll last three months. I'll go and do something else afterward. I'll get a real job. Do you know what? If someone had told me at some point during all the careers just you do at school and all that kind of thing, I really wish someone at some point had said to me, "You can work in tourist attractions," because honestly, it changed my life.Carly Straughan:Those three months were some of my best working ones. I sold Maltesers and guidebooks and whatever. This was not a career plan by any means. But I met some great people, people, I'm still friends with. My three months were up and I went off and did my ski season. And when I came back from ski season, I literally landed in London, unpacked my stuff into a shared house, and went to work the next day back at Madame Tussauds.Kelly Molson:Oh, wow.Carly Straughan:I just loved it. I was so excited to go back. I was really happy to be there. And then they started a graduate program and I was the second intake of that graduate program. The one before us were still before it was Merlin Entertainments when it used to be the Tussauds Group. But this is the first-ever Merlin Entertainments graduate program. There were seven of us. I'm still friends with everybody off that program. We did each other's jobs. It was literally just a job swap for two years.Kelly Molson:Gosh.Carly Straughan:We went and did lots of different things. I worked in HR, I managed food and beverage. I did all sorts of jobs, events, entertainment, costuming, all kinds of stuff, and absolutely loved it. I stayed with them for seven years. I did two years on the graduate program and then five years sort of working in various attractions. I run weddings at White Castle, I managed the aquarium down in Brighton and the Sea Life Center and I then went up and ran the LEGOLAND Discovery Center up in Manchester and help the most in the Sea Life up there.Carly Straughan:I got really involved in till projects. We had a till projects where everybody was changing their software and that you don't see these things for what they are at the time, I guess, but looking back, it was such as a coincidence. I was a person and this pretty IT literate and they were looking for somebody in the attraction to go and train over in America. I had never really been anywhere. And they said, "Do you want to go to the back of beyond in Pennsylvania and learn this ticketing system?" And I went, "Yeah, I'll go. Me."Kelly Molson:Take me.Carly Straughan:Yeah. I went and I learned this till system and then I helped with the rollout of that till system as kind of an operations IT person, sort of translating between the two, this is what the business is doing and this is what IT needs and making that work. And then from there, I then started working for Gateway Ticketing. So Gateway was the software that I went and learned out in the States, they opened up the London office and I snapped their handoff and went to work for them. I was with Gateway then for six years. Worked all over the place.Carly Straughan:I just had the best time working with attractions and got to see some really cool stuff. I've been out to Shanghai, I've been out to Dubai, I've been here there and everywhere and with our attraction partners. And then last year, the... I'm like, "What year is it?" 2020 is killing me.Kelly Molson:Who knows?Carly Straughan:It could be anything. In 2019, me and my husband decided we kind of weren't that fussed about where we were living and I was commuting into London most days and we had a kind of a bit of a lifestyle kind of change discussion about we wanted to kind of do something different. I was working from home a lot when I wasn't doing the... My commute was quite long. I was working out of our spare room and it just... We sort of thought, "Well, what are we doing? What do we want to do in the next X years of our lives?" So we upped sticks. We moved up north or sort of. As Midlandsy as the North can be, just South of Sheffield.Carly Straughan:We bought a house that has some land on it and I left Gateway Ticketing on really good terms. They are a fantastic bunch of people, it's just we'd grown so much in those six years that I was with them that the job I'd started doing wasn't really the job I finished doing.Kelly Molson:Right.Carly Straughan:And I was ready to sort of go and do something else. I became self-employed last year and I've been helping people now find ticketing solutions. Yeah, it's been... When I think about the person that went for three months at Madame Tussauds to sell guidebooks, I never imagined it would end with people calling me and asking me my opinion about tourism. Because at the time, I had no opinions about tourism. I had no idea it even existed as a career and I wish someone had told me earlier, really do.Kelly Molson:What an amazing adventure you've been on though. I love how you described where you kind of started from one place and you moved all the way around. You've done everything in so many different attractions. You said you ran weddings and then you ran the aquarium and it's like, wow, how varied your career possibly have been?Carly Straughan:It's funny because I went to university and people ask me what I did at university, I did performing arts and English. I have literally nothing to do with management or business or tourism or anything. I just loved it. I've always liked the kind of back of house elements of a theater. And I think that's where the two intersect.Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:I'd always liked that element of sort of show business and I think... People always said to me, "Did you go and do performing arts at university because she wanted to be an actor?" Absolutely not. I have no intention of acting at all, ever. But I always had an interest in what was happening backstage that makes the show happen. I think that that's where I see it really is that I do the stuff that nobody notices.Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:The stuff that you do notice is seamless. When I talk to people about ticketing, obviously all the time, and they say to me, "Well, who cares about ticketing?" No, that's right. That's the right thing. You shouldn't care about when you buy a ticket, it should be absolutely seamless.Kelly Molson:Yeah, I completely agree.Carly Straughan:You should not remember it. I tell people all the time, lots of people will say to you, "Oh, going to Disney is expensive. Going to Universal is expensive." When you feen, very few people can tell you actually how much it costs.Carly Straughan:Because by the time they've had that experience, they don't care. The cost is gone. And you shouldn't remember, "Oh, yeah. I spent $100 on a ticket." You should just remember that you bought a ticket at some point but it gave you this amazing experience.Kelly Molson:Yeah. And once you got through the gates, everything was magic and you didn't even care.Carly Straughan:Yeah. Absolutely. And that your memory of that is always going to be stronger than your memory of the transactional stuff. The transactional stuff has to happen but it doesn't need to be a part of your experience really. It should be forgettable almost instantly.Kelly Molson:I love that. I actually really... When you said about your performing arts background, I was thinking experience the whole time because it is a show, isn't it?Carly Straughan:Yeah.Kelly Molson:It's ultimately that. From the minute that somebody turns up at an attraction, you are creating that show experience for them from start to finish. I think that having that kind of background must have played a small part in pushing you in that kind of direction.Carly Straughan:Yeah. I just want to say that's always been my interest. It's just when you talk to someone about, "Oh, I want to do English and performing arts and..." People say, "Oh, great. You're going to be a teacher or you're going to go and work in a theater," or whatever. No one ever thinks, "Oh, yeah. Well, how many actors or show producers do I know who work out at Disneyland Paris?" Yeah, but no one ever tells you that that's something that you could go and do.Kelly Molson:Yeah. What's the best thing about the role that you now have because now you are a consultant and you work with a variety of different attractions up and down the country. What's the best thing about what you're doing?Carly Straughan:It's always been the people, I think, quite honestly. I love people. You couldn't do this job if you didn't. Yeah, I think for me, it's the people that you meet because they're always fascinating. People are always interesting and the variety of what I get to do. I have conversations with nonprofit organizations and I have conversations with totally profit-based organizations who really want to drive every penny. And they think that they're really different. And actually, they're not. Actually at the core of what they want is that they want to give a really good experience regardless of kind of profit, nonprofit, all that. All the other things.Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:And I find that really interesting. I find the reaction to the things you talk about is quite interesting in terms of if you go to a big nonprofit organization. So let's say we go to the Victoria and Albert Museum, we go to the VNA, and we talk to them about ticketing. There's no point saying to them, "Oh, and we also do ticketing for Disney," or, "I also worked on this for Universal." Because they don't see themselves in the same space. But they're absolutely in the same space.Kelly Molson:Yeah. It's funny, isn't it?Carly Straughan:They're competitors and no one sees it that way.Kelly Molson:I had the same conversation with someone a few weeks ago about this, how a lot of museums don't see themselves as attractions. I can't work that out in my head why would feel so differently about them or feel that they're not the same. They don't have the same challenges.Carly Straughan:Yeah. And I've always been of the opinion that you said about oh, it seems like quite a strange career path to think weddings at White Castle versus managing an aquarium. And they are very different. But actually, all you're doing is providing an experience to someone. What's beyond the door is sort of irrelevant. You need to still have people come in and pay you and do the transactional stuff, whether they come in and they get, I don't know, dinosaur exhibit or they get an aquarium or they get roller coasters is kind of irrelevant because they're all competing against each other for a time.Carly Straughan:The easier you can make that process or the easier you can make that judgment for someone, that choice, you're going to be more successful because you're competing against a PlayStation at home or you're competing against going and sitting on the beach for free or going to the local park. But you're also competing against people that you've no idea that are in your area. It's endlessly interesting to me. I spend my leisure time doing what I do in my work a little work time. I live at Butlins Holiday. I go and I take pictures of signage and pictures of tills. It is sad but it entertains me endlessly.Kelly Molson:I know. I love that about you and I think this is why we ended up connecting because I saw an article that you wrote for MuseumNext, which I loved and then I started stalking you on Twitter.Carly Straughan:Oh god. If you stalk me on Twitter, it's where you get all my real actual... That's where my unpopular opinions live. I can tell you.Kelly Molson:It's the best bit though.Carly Straughan:I love Twitter.Kelly Molson:I kind of started following you on there and I loved what you talked about. I love the kind of personality you show on there, but I really loved what you... I loved how much you love the sector. You are the first person that I look to see what's happening next, what opinions you've got about innovation and stuff. I just think it's brilliant. There's so much passion there for you. And I guess there's some things I want to talk about about the future. But I kind of just want to look back quickly because I want to ask what lockdown was like for you both kind of personally and professionally because you sit in a position of…Kelly Molson:You absolutely love attractions. That shines through in everything that you do and talk about, but you work with them as well. It must have been a really difficult time to kind of watch some of your favorite places close and not really know what was going to happen. And also not know what was going to happen for you with probably some contracts that you had in place as well.Carly Straughan:Yeah. Like I say, the end of 2019 was a big change for me personally anyway. I became self-employed, we moved away from where we'd been living previously. We've kind of decided that this is a new world for us. And so I then suddenly had all these plans, not just work plans. One of my things was that I planned to spend a lot of this year traveling, which I keep saying to people, I'm like the person that buys sandals before a bank holiday and I've got to apologize to everyone because I had done a lot of plans to travel this year and to sort of spend a lot of time networking and really building my business.Carly Straughan:And obviously, then, very quickly it became obvious that we weren't going anywhere. So sorry, everyone. That was me. But yeah. Because I do a lot of work with China and I do a lot of research around construction and obviously, there's a lot of construction going on in theme parks in China at the moment. I kind of felt like I had a bit of a heads up as to what was coming because I'm so involved in that market. And I could see things sort of creeping towards us and getting canceled. I have some contacts that I deal without in the very far end of Russia. And they very quickly were like, "This is going to be bad." We're closing casino construction."Carly Straughan:Casino construction doesn't stop for anything, because there's so much money in it. Sort of thinking, "Oh, god, this is going to be really difficult." But not sort of realizing how sort of emotionally difficult it was going to be for people. In terms of we are all very passionate and sometimes I think that can be a downside as well, is that all industries are affected. Life is very hard at the moment but because we're so attached to our jobs and the institutions that were involved in and the attractions that we deal with that actually it becomes much more personal.Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:I'm sure everybody feels that... Maybe not everybody feels that way about their industry, but the people that I know generally do. My husband works in Pubs for example. You can imagine. It's very similar. People are very, very scared and very... Their personalities are wound up in what jobs they're doing and all that kind of stuff. It can be really... And I've seen it with lots of people who have just... Being really emotionally difficult just even things like being furloughed, they're still sitting at home and being paid but you're not doing the things that you sort of feel you're compelled to do. And feeling quite isolated, which... I said I've been volunteering at a local charity here. And I said to the guy, they were like, "What made you volunteer?" And I said it's really difficult to explain to people if you've never worked in this but I've worked in jobs where I saw thousands of people every day.Carly Straughan:I used to have a desk when I worked in Sea Life and I could open the door and look at the queue and pretty much predict how many thousands of people we would get through the door that day and be relatively close to it. You'd see maybe 3,000 people filing past my desk, just the other side of the door. And I'd say to go from being at big conferences and networking events and the stuff that I do in the industry all the time to seeing nobody for a few months was really terrifying. Because I've never lived like that.Carly Straughan:And for me, I think I have a very, thought about running, a very fight or flight response to that kind of stress. But literally flight. If I'm in a position where I think okay, I've had a project canceled or something, what's the thing that I'm going to do to replace that? I'd go to a big networking event. I'd get on a plane and I'd go to Orlando and I'd go and see some people out there and we'd figure something out. You can't do that. All of a sudden, all the normal responses to this kind of personal difficult stuff become totally unavailable to you. My diary is notoriously full of networking events, conferences, whatever because that's where I'm really comfortable. I love the people and the genius of it and to suddenly have that taken away.Carly Straughan:Regardless of the financial implication, I was being very lucky in that... Well, unlucky in some respects because I'm so newly employed, I'm not eligible for any financial backing, which is difficult.Kelly Molson:Right, yeah.Carly Straughan:But also because I made this decision to go freelance last year, but actually I had a good pot of savings, it's going to get me through it. Actually, pretty lucky in that respect. But regardless of kind of the financial situation with all the stuff that I normally do, to make that better, was suddenly unavailable. And August is always a hard month for contractors in this industry because no one wants to talk to you. Everyone's too busy doing stuff.Kelly Molson:Yep.Carly Straughan:And actually, it's rolled around to August and I can see things improving but you just don't know at the moment. You're sort of thinking, is this a quiet August because August is always quiet or is this kind of a sign of things to come? But I do feel more hopeful than I did in kind of March, April time, because March, April time, we were really looking at lots of places saying, "We just don't think we're going to be able to open."Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:And there was a real sort of panic about it. I sit on a couple of groups that do catch up calls every few weeks and sort of watching people who work in the industry going one by one, "Okay. We thought we were going to reopen. We're not reopening." There are still people that I deal with that aren't going to reopen now for 2021.Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:I think I actually... In March, April time, you sort of were checking people off as that was happening. I feel like it's sort of starting to go back the other way a little bit now. Hopefully, things are going in the right direction.Kelly Molson:Yeah. It does. It feels like... It is still a difficult time, a really, really challenging time. And even with some of the attractions that we work with that are opening, we still don't really know what the demand is going to be like, especially for indoor attractions. It's still a very difficult time. It's hard to plan. But it does feel more hopeful. I completely agree with you on that.Carly Straughan:Yeah. And I think that's a... You're right. The stuff that feels hopeful is a feeling. We're still not sure. And even looking at places that are outdoor and thinking about things like the National Trust, which should be super resilient to this kind of... There's Mainely Outdoor, there are very big organization. Actually, I think in some cases, that's not working in their favor is that they're resilient to some change, but the stuff that you don't see coming, the stuff that certainly blindsides you like lockdown and all the stuff that's going on this year, is that if you don't have an organization that can really turn very quickly and pull in lots of expertise very quickly and make changes, makes decisions really quickly, is that you just won't survive it.Carly Straughan:And that I think is more scary actually for the really big places than it is for the smaller ones. The smaller organizations will be able to make those changes, even if it's very difficult financially for them. They'll be a little bit more resilient because they'll be able to change how they operate quite quickly. We've seen things like the National Trust and the really big sites, just don't have the ability to turn stuff around. And that's... We will see a very different landscape, I think when we come out of it. And coming out of it is another thing. We talk about returning to normal. I don't think anybody really believes now that we're going to return to normal suddenly.Kelly Molson:No.Carly Straughan:There's never going to be the same normal again.Kelly Molson:Yeah, I have to agree with you on that. And actually, we've seen that from the weekly tracker that the BDA has been sending out, that at the start of the lockdown, there was an assumption that by Christmas things would be back to normal. And now, that's shifting further and further and further and further into 2021.Carly Straughan:Yeah. Anyone who studies history will tell you, "Oh, it'll all be over by Christmas," is the worst. Let's not start on that because 10 years later, we'll still be doing it.Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:The other sort of angle on that as well is that we're talking about people who are already in the industry, who remember what it's like to have tourism growth every year and there's always a market for tourism and there's always a market for whatever it is. We've had lots of new tourist attractions popping up all over the world. People are moving their middle classes, much more leisure time, much more disposable income. But I have a 16-year-old niece. And I talked to her and she's really gotten her back reference for that.Carly Straughan:She'll enter this job market with this... At the beginning and much in the same way when I entered the job market, we were hitting the recession. This is 100 times worse than that. And I think that will be interesting to see play out is that how does that affect really longterm, not just the people that remember when stuff was really good but we're going to be bringing people into the industry who really don't have any prior knowledge of what that was like. It will be interesting to see how that plays out, I think over the next 10 years of those people really mature into the job market.Kelly Molson:What I'd like to do is just take a bit of time to look at what we think the future of attractions can actually be at the moment. Are there any positives that can come from what we've seen happen? And then do you think... You talked a little bit earlier about how you network and that essentially you would jump on a plane, you'd go somewhere, you'd go to a big event, you'd go to a big conference.Kelly Molson:Obviously, none of those things can happen but there are conferences happening virtually now. So we are seeing, a shift in that sense. What kind of other things do you think that we'll see in terms of innovation and change from attractions?Carly Straughan:Let's start with conferences. There's a lot more access now, the costs are lower, I don't have to fly, stuff is becoming more accessible and I'll talk about that again when we get to sort of what our attraction is doing. But actually, I don't think there's anything that replaces face to face.Kelly Molson:No.Carly Straughan:And especially in an industry that is so people-focused, there's so much that you just cannot do. It needs to be more of a conversation. And I think that is when you're talking about online conferences and it's much more of an output than a conversation. I love a good conference. Don't get me wrong. I did say to someone the other day, "I'd even go to a really terrible conference right now." I just want to say, they're-Kelly Molson:Just to talk to people.Carly Straughan:Yeah, just somebody telling me something that I don't even believe is fine. I'll just sit there and eat sandwiches. Great. But I do think that we are an industry that really relies on face to face and really relies on people being in the same room. And I think that goes through attractions as well is that you can have an experience at home. One of the ones that I really loved actually was the Tate did Tate Lates Online, which was brilliant. And again, that kind of payoff between access versus actual experience was that I loved Tate Lates but I now live quite far away from London. If I want to go to Tate Lates, I have to stay overnight.Carly Straughan:It's fine. I don't mind doing that. I'll mix it in with some work and we'll go do it. But actually, to be able to experience Tate Lates in my own living room was really lovely.Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:And actually, we haven't been serving those communities really well. I think that that move to saving online communities really needs to be focused on more and I think that might be the article that you referenced earlier about MuseumNext was that I think we should be doing so much more to engage our online communities or our remote communities. Because your community isn't just who's on your doorstep, it's not the people coming through your front door.Carly Straughan:Actually serving your community doesn't necessarily mean letting people in your building. You can be servicing a community online, you can be serving a community of enthusiasts who really love your mission, who really want your attraction to be successful but they don't necessarily need to visit.Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:And I think there's going to be hopefully a bit more progress in that area as well in terms of making things more accessible to people who just really can't get to you for whatever reason and I think actually, in terms of leveling the playing field, about not feeling... The other stuff that's going on in 2020 is really around access, the Black Lives Matter movement, and this kind of pushing for things like universal basic income, which I'm just passionate about, but that's another thing.Carly Straughan:It's really about where do we serve people? At what point do we stop people from accessing something? Whether that's because of their appearance or their disabilities or whether that's their income level, whatever it might be, is actually when we talk about things like who's our ideal customer and who is using our... Whether it's a museum collection of who's coming to a theme park or whatever it might be, is that we're always discounting somebody because they can't either physically get to it or they feel excluded somehow. Actually, we could be doing a lot more, I think, as an industry to be much more inclusive of that.Carly Straughan:And I hope that seeing that we can do a lot more things online actually will push people to do more. There's things that you can't do online. You can't ride roller coasters. There's a lot of stuff that I love about this industry that you cannot replicate online, but that doesn't mean you're always looking to replicate. You can be just adding, you can just be giving additional content.Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:And I think that those people that really get on board with that and again how quickly can you turn on stuff like Tate Lates Online, how quickly can you... I've been talking or seeing in the industry about online escape rooms. What a brilliant idea for museums to be in your home? And I think if you can turn those types of things around, actually, you'll be better off for it and that will make you more resilient. I had a conversation with somebody I work with recently about being a three-legged stool is that a lot of our museums we've seen recently and I use museums kind of loosely because I mean, kind of heritage, attractions of all kinds. Some of it that you would see as having a collection of something, whatever that collection might be, is that quite a lot of them rely quite heavily on one leg.Carly Straughan:And that actually, we need to get that stool more legs basically. We've been sort of ignoring the people that don't come to our physical space. And actually, I hope that we'll see a little bit more of that. I'm a pretty positive human being. I think as hard as times are, there's always been a leisure industry. There's always been museums, there's always been such service attractions for people to go to. We've had such good times the last sort of... Again, we're sort of starting in the '80s, really when people really started to think about international travel and all that kind of stuff, is that we've had real boom times. A lot of countries around the world are really pushing people into their middle classes now. And that actually, this is just going to take us back a little while. But we've been here before. We've done hard things before.Carly Straughan:People just need to adapt and those that don't adapt won't survive. And that's terrible. But I'm a big believer in if your mission is strong enough, if your proposition is good enough, there will always be a market for you. Even if it's not having a building, you can still have somebody that is passionate about you. I think one of the things we discussed before I came on this podcast is that I've been working with a higher education college out in Massachusetts in the States about them developing a museum of mental health. And they've been discussing having a museum of mental health for a very long time.Carly Straughan:And through similar article about virtual museums and what's happening with lockdowns and all that kind of stuff, they got in touch with me and I've had a couple of conversations with them in which we've basically now developed a whole concept around what a virtual museum could look like because they know that they're never going to really be able to have a physical space.Carly Straughan:They'd like some physical collections. They'd like some loan boxes and they'd like to have some pop-up stuff going on, but they don't really need a physical museum of mental health. We're discussing with them, what does a virtual museum look like? Could I go and... It's not just a website. I don't want to go and just look at your collection and click on pictures. I want to get lost in it. I want the experience that I get some a real museum. And that would be... I could walk different galleries, I can pick up different pieces of art or design or whatever it might be and I can make links that make sense to me as an individual and not just seeing a collated web page. I think that's where we've fallen down before in that sector is that we just want to serve content all the time.Kelly Molson:Yeah. There's no experience into it at all.Carly Straughan:Yeah. Absolutely.Kelly Molson:You can't choose what you do or you can only choose what you look at.Carly Straughan:Yeah. And I think that if you could get lost in a website in the same way as you get lost in a physical space and that might even be as much as going down the route of some sort of virtual reality experience. What does that look like for people? Could you ever create something virtual that people really truly get lost in? And it's a great conversation to have with people who are really interested in mental health because actually a lot of it is quite cerebral anyway.Kelly Molson:Yeah.Carly Straughan:About what does this kind of experience look like? And how does that change your emotion? And how does that... Yeah. It's fascinating. We're having a lot of fun deciding what we'd do with it. And we're talking to games designers and people who design physical spaces and saying, "Okay. Well, if we built it so I could walk the rooms, I could walk the galleries. Actually, would I pay to go into a different gallery like I would at a normal museum?" I think we're going to find a lot out. I think this is a catalyst for change. And I really hope that it inspires the older, bigger museums or attractions to get on board with that.Kelly Molson:It sounds really exciting as well, doesn't it? An opportunity to do something that is so different. I guess in a way, you can collaborate with more people as well because it's virtual and because it's an online process.Carly Straughan:Sure.Kelly Molson:There are kind of less barriers to actually go on ahead and doing it in the first place in terms of cost.Carly Straughan:And I think... That's a huge thing that you could put thousands into building a gamified platform that people could walk around with avatars or whatever. And actually, you're still not putting money into a building but you don't have to upkeep and all that stuff that comes with it. And I think we talk about this and it seems really far fetched, but think about trying to explain something like Spotify to someone who's just got a tape player.Carly Straughan:I can't imagine that something would serve me up. It would understand that I'm listening to this song and maybe I like this other song because at the moment, I literally have a tape player that plays in order. I think we've made those massive leaps in recent years. Attractions have always been that little bit behind. I think this is going to really accelerate that kind of change.Kelly Molson:Yeah. I completely agree. I think it is a time for attractions that can... If attractions can be innovative now. And like you say, actually, the ones that do have their mission in place, they have a really kind of strong and solid offer. And are going to get through this. But it is the time to innovate now because they can't assume that the way that they'll continue to open will be the way people will continue to want to interact with them.Carly Straughan:Yeah.Kelly Molson:That's my next question really, is what your thoughts are for the next, three, six, 12 months. We've talked quite a lot about attractions that are reopening now. Again, there's still that level of uncertainty around how many people are going to come back depending on whether it's an indoor and outdoor attraction. We've seen incredible demand for places like zoos and wildlife parks like you say, national parks again. Massive overwhelm, but we just don't know what it's going to be like in terms of indoor and you do have that capped capacity to think about all the time. What do you think that means for the next kind of six months from now? How does that look?Carly Straughan:Yeah. I just want to talk actually about capped capacity before I think about that because I've been banging on about capped capacity for a long time. Pretty much in a previous life a long time ago, I went and spoke to Warner Brothers before they opened the Harry Potter Experience.Kelly Molson:Right.Carly Straughan:And I remember them saying to us at the time, "You will not be able to come to this attraction without pre-booking." And it blowing people's minds. Literally, people sitting there saying, "But no one will come." Literally, no one will come if you have to pre-book. And they've been open a very long time. I can't remember how many years it is but it's long enough ago that I can't remember, to put it that way. And just, they're still fully booked.Kelly Molson:The demand for it is incredible. They're booked months in advance.Carly Straughan:Yeah. And you sort of think well hang on a minute, we've been looking at that. And I also then, again, previous job before I joined Gateway and started looking at the till systems around was that I worked in an attraction where we would routinely have a six-hour queue. Well, I can tell you something. Nobody has a good experience after they have queued for six hours. Right? They just don't. And so I was trying to work out at that time, how do we... Can we give people a space in a queue? Can we rent some sort of virtual queuing setup?Carly Straughan:I wish it had come in a better package. But I do think that will really improve some of our experiences, is that if you have to pre-book. People will plan more. People will be more... They will say, "Oh, I'm coming on Sunday." And they'll come on Sunday, and if they don't come, it's probably because the experience isn't exciting enough or it's free. Which we've seen with a lot of attractions is that if you put free tickets out, people will snap them up and then they won't come. That's something to get around.Carly Straughan:There's ways around making that work. But yeah, I think... If you can get people to pre-book, you can manage your resources internally better. There's lots of things you can do that will improve your business and make your business easier to run because you'll know how many people you're going to service that day.Kelly Molson:Don't you think as well, it's about create... Warner Brothers have done it incredibly because it's so super exciting. You're buzzing to get that ticket and to get there, but it is about creating that excitement, isn't it? Make your attraction. You need to book that ticket and you need to book it three months in advance because this is going to be the best experience you've ever had.Carly Straughan:Yeah. And I would also say about that level of experience and demand is that it allows them to price very accurately. Because they know that they can keep a headline price, I think it's 39 pounds at the moment off the top of my head, and you go, "Gosh, 39 pounds is a lot of money." But actually, you don't have to discount at that point. Because you're booking so far out, you know that if demand starts to fall off, you can lower your price. If your demand starts to ramp up, you can increase your price, all this kind of stuff that you can really have.Carly Straughan:If you just have people turning up at your door, I come from a Merlin background where you can get two for one ticket continuously from some outlet throughout the year. Well, then nobody's paying full price, so what's your yield on that ticket? And again, that whole thing about being more resilient to changes is that those are the types of things that will keep you going because you'll be able to accurately predict what's happening than just opening your doors and maybe seeing if people sign up and if it rains, they don't. Those types of things. Or the total opposite. When I worked in an aquarium, is if it rains, you'd be busy. But you just don't know.Carly Straughan:There's so many variables that can affect your business. Is that actually I think, as we... I would rather it came in a nicer package than the way 2020 years is to live with it, but maybe it will make us sort of better organized.Kelly Molson:Yeah, I agree.Carly Straughan:Yeah. In terms of sort of the three, six, 12 months, I think the next three months is really just to hold your breath and hope because I think we'll get through the summer. If they have a bad summer and we go into winter with very lean finances for people, is that we'll see a lot of things that don't open next year because people... Most attractions can't weather essentially three winters. And so if we have an okay, summer, I think we'll be fine. And especially for those outdoor attractions. If we have a good weather summer, then those attractions will probably be okay.Carly Straughan:But yeah, I do think next spring might just be really difficult because I think a lot of places will have to come to the conclusion that they just can't operate. And I do have a sort of a... Again, I'm really positive about things. And then I'm like, "I've got a really horrible feeling about winter." But I do think that if we have another lockdown over winter which I just think is sort of inevitable at this point, is that we will really be... Those attractions that open 365 will really be in serious trouble. Yeah, I do worry about it. I think next spring is going to be the time that we see actually it really sucked by it.Kelly Molson:Yeah, it's a really difficult thing to be able to predict. And I think at the moment, there's still so much uncertainty especially around are we going to get a second, we just don't know. It feels inevitable, but I'm hopeful that we don't.Carly Straughan:Yeah. It sort of seems weird, doesn't it? Because I'm generally quite a positive person, but I'm also pretty practical about it and think, "Oh, I just don't..." It's not going anywhere when it's not over and I think we have to be really careful to not sort of think, "Yes, that's looking more positive. Oh, it's going to be fine." I think which at the moment, we're just pushing that down the track and we'll trip over at some point.Kelly Molson:Yeah. It would be really interesting to talk to you again in another six months from now to see what is different. I'd actually really like that. I'm going to invite you back on.Carly Straughan:Excellent. Yeah.Kelly Molson:Because I'd like to-Carly Straughan:I'll get the tequila out.Kelly Molson:No. Carly and I had a discussion off-air about alcohol smells that have a very nasty effect on you and tequila is not a smell for me. We won't be discussing tequila again.Carly Straughan:You'll be fine though because if we're not in the same room, we'll be fine.Kelly Molson:You can have a tequila there and I'll have maybe a Sambuca.Carly Straughan:Yeah.Kelly Molson:Oh, Carly.Carly Straughan:Sounds delightful.Kelly Molson:It does, doesn't it? Zoom cocktails.Carly Straughan:Yeah, definitely.Kelly Molson:I'd like to end the podcast by asking you for a book recommendation. Maybe a book that has kind of helped shape your career in some way or just a book that you absolutely love that you'd recommend to our listeners to read.Carly Straughan:I'm sitting in a room at the moment with more books than any human being should really own. I say, my degree is in performing arts and literature. I am a book hoarder. When you said, "Can you choose one?" I sort of went, "Well, not really." I'd also say I'm not really a theoretical book... Or not in the industry. I tend to learn by doing. I like practical experience and I like more storytelling type of stuff. But I will say that the book that she has totally and utterly shaped my life and I quote more than anything else in the whole world is Freakonomics.Carly Straughan:And if you haven't read Freakonomics, go and read it. It's just really about statistics. I like real numbers. I'm not really into sort of abstract maths and I like proof. Again, that thing about having unpopular opinions is that a lot of people will, especially in our industry, because I think so many people are into that experience is that they'll give you anecdotes as fast. And we're pretty bad actually at making decisions when we don't have the facts in front of us. And Freakonomics is really about not making assumptions and looking at cause and effect and seeing where links are between data that you probably actually wouldn't normally make links between. There's a lot in it around just different things like why people with different names are less successful.Carly Straughan:Which is totally off the wall and doesn't really make much sense. But then, actually, as someone who works in HR and used to recruit thousands of people at a time, actually is it going... How many times have you looked at someone's CV and made a really quick judgment based on their email address?Kelly Molson:Yeah. Unconscious bias. Yeah.Carly Straughan:Yeah. Totally. And actually, there's a lot of discussion in it about just because it's factually correct, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. And about really sort of taking the data and then making moral judgments with it. I just found it really, really fascinating. I've always really liked statistics and I've always really been into kind of deep maths but it has to be based in sort of real-life for me. It's a great book. It's a really good book.Kelly Molson:It's a really good book recommendation.Carly Straughan:Yeah. And again, thinking about unpopular opinions, which is where we started. It has some really unpopular opinions in there. But it will... Yeah. It makes you think.Kelly Molson:This is a book for me.Kelly Molson:If you'd like to win a copy of Carly's book, then if you head over to our Twitter account, which is Skip the Queue, or skip_the_queue and you retweet this episode announcement with the comment, "I want Carly's book," then you will be in with a chance of winning it.Kelly Molson:Carly, I've absolutely loved talking to you today. I think that you've shared some really, really valuable insight and I love the story of how you've come to do what you do now. We're going to put all of Carly's details in the show notes. You'll find a link to her LinkedIn profile, a link to her website. I might link her to Twitter if she allows me to link her on Twitter.Carly Straughan:If you want to have some really unpopular opinions, please come and join me on Twitter. It's mainly cat pictures or llamas or tourist attractions. Angry about things.Kelly Molson:It's a place for me.Carly Straughan:Yeah, definitely.Kelly Molson:Thanks so much for coming on today, Carly. It's been a pleasure.Carly Straughan:It has been really fun. Thanks.Kelly Molson:Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip the Queue is brought to you byRubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

A bunch of days like that day lately, Right? They can make us better people. They can also make us terrible people. The former is better! Have a listen. The post Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Days (1) appeared first on Common Thread Church.

Welcome! Craig discusses Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: 7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Well, we went into our first collaboration product and now we're going to get into our next product. And this one is actually more of a team collaboration rather than just a video conferencing setup. Really, as I mentioned, GoToMeeting's been around a long time, man. They'd have its pros and its cons and its pros really have to do with frankly how long it has been around because that makes it. More stable. Right? They've been addressing every problem. They've seen every problem in the last, my gosh, how long has it been for them? 16 years. So Go To Meeting, a very, very stable product, something you might want to consider. I want to move into our next collaboration tool, which is Microsoft teams. Now, most businesses today are [00:01:00] using a whole array of tools. And the reason I bring up Microsoft teams is that so many of us are using what's now called Microsoft three 65. It used to be called office three 65, but now it's Microsoft three 65, which is a little bit misleading because office three 65, depending on which level you were on, gave you access to all of Microsoft office tools and where you could get windows as well, windows licenses, they pull it all under one roof and as would be expected from Microsoft or frankly, almost any company out there. The price has risen and dramatically in some cases. So Microsoft three 65 has some inexpensive offerings we're talking just dollars per month, or if you're an actual business that needs to get something done, [00:02:00] cares about having backups, cares about having an email with the proper email filters in place. And cares to have some of these collaboration tools. Well, now you're in the 30, 40, $50 per person per month range, which is pretty high when you get right down to it. Not out of the ordinary, not just a totally out of the question, but it starts getting much more expensive there, including things like Microsoft windows licenses themselves. So you can really make sure all of your software from Microsoft is up to date and that you have the appropriate licenses for it because many of us, unfortunately, Just just don't have that. Right?  What's one of the reasons that we're not keeping our software up to date. Well, one of the reasons that I've seen, again and again, is that Microsoft charges you in order to get an update in an upgrade. So. [00:03:00] The first little bit of advice here is if you are a business, even as SO/HO, small office home office, make sure you get the enterprise versions of Microsoft three 65. Typically those start with an E and I don't recommend anything less than an E three. And it goes up from there there's three and four and five and there's one and two and stuff. They change it frequently. So who knows this week, right? It might've changed and I didn't notice, but either three is where you want to start and that's going to give you access to all of the basic stuff that you need. Now, typically we'll put a Cisco email firewall in front of Microsoft and their outlook and exchange servers. The reason for that is the Cisco email filters, just so much better than the stuff Microsoft offering. Plus you also can still [00:04:00] use, and you still do use the Microsoft filters, but once they've gone through those incredible Cisco filters, those Microsoft filters, just frankly, don't add up to much, not much at all. So that's what we normally do. But a lot of companies, they just stick with the regular Microsoft stuff. Now I get questions a lot of the time about Google and whether or not they should get to Google because Google has their Gmail, but they also have offerings for businesses. I have mixed feelings on that, but basically I say, no, don't use the Google tools. Google has been decent at security. No question about it better than Microsoft that's for sure. Microsoft security is not their product. Let me tell you, but remember Google's product is you, even if you're paying them. They are watching your emails. They are selling that information and who knows whose hands it ends [00:05:00] up in, even if it's supposedly anonymized. That doesn't mean it's truly anonymous data. That data can be de-anonymized. We talked about that on the show before. So we're talking about Microsoft and if you already have a Microsoft license, like the older office three 65, or the newer licenses that are known as Microsoft three 65. You have the option of getting Microsoft teams and that's what a lot of people have done. They're saying, Hey, listen, we're already using all this Microsoft stuff. We're just going to start using teams. Now I have to give kudos to Microsoft because they have come a long way. Their software was terrible for years, for a decade or more, just terrible. They would put every feature under the sun, into their software. Not that it worked, but people, when they're doing a selection, they're not looking for what they want. They're trying to [00:06:00] eliminate the things they don't want. So if you're a vendor and you have some things missing in the mind of your prospect, You're not going to get that sale. It's just not going to happen. So Microsoft would throw everything, including the kitchen sink into their software. And most of them had a lot of bugs. Now Microsoft still has tons of bugs, still tons. It's crazy. And those bugs drive me nuts. Sometimes it's like the moment we talked about at the top of the show, major, major bug in some of their software, that's supposed to keep your data secure, basically from hard disk crashes and from data loss and in fact is barely done the exact opposite. So I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but they're tools that they've been developing more recently for online news. Have been a lot better than anything they've had before. I guess that's faint praise, right? [00:07:00] Because what they had before was just so terrible, but anyhow, Microsoft has their teams app. A lot of businesses that are already using Microsoft have said, well, we'll just use their Teams because you know, it's Microsoft and that's the employee they have used since day one, they tried to build up a name for themselves. They destroyed competitors by having people just waiting because they knew Microsoft is going to come up with something. So we'll just wait and see because Microsoft announced something that not only did they not have in development, but apparently. We're barely even thinking about and just trying to put the competitors out of business and test the marketplace. Right? That's what it is. So where are you using this business today? A whole bunch of different tools for communication and collaboration and Microsoft teams. It might be something not just for your business, but if you have a nonprofit or small family business, something you might want to [00:08:00] look at. Because teams are designed to be collaborative and it does tie in a lot of Microsoft's other tools. It allows you to deploy it company-wide and that can help to bring together employees. Now it can also make it so that your employees can't get anything done because they're constantly getting notes and messages from other employees, but if your employees get some decent training and you kind of help them out that overload that can come with some of these teams tools, can basically go away. So here are a few different ways that using a team tool could help out your business. One company-wide chat, which is kind of handy. It helps you to get your overall company message into the hands of all your employees. That's a very good thing. And that chat functionality is one of the main value adds of a team's application [00:09:00] over something like Slack, that designed more for some typing back and forth. Or some of these other things like Go to meeting or Zoom that are designed primarily for you to hold a meeting. All of the team's apps, Microsoft, and WebEx, both have. What's called threaded conversations. Now you'll see that in Slack where someone will make a comment in a channel, and then you can have a thread off of that comment. So that people that are looking through the channel or space or whatever it's called on the software you're using, don't have to see all of the comments about some main item that's in there. So threads that's important to have and Microsoft and WebEx teams both have that. Everything's recorded in one easy to find a place so that all of your conversations are right there in the channel. You know what they are, and you can find [ 00:10:00] them. A WebEx team recently has set it up so that, yeah, everything is right there in that space, but it also has a separate set of tabs that let you look at just the files that were uploaded or just the meetings that took place in that space. I love that about WebEx. There's no more digging through your inbox, looking for emails, or just all of a sudden there are 50 emails that come in because everybody had a comment on an email that somebody else sent. So you don't get that mail bomb when you're using these teams' apps. And that helps a lot making a, you know, a filter because we're so overloaded in all of our lives. Now, your conversations in these team apps can take place as a team discussion, or you could have private chats or private meetings. It really, this changes everything. If you haven't used either Microsoft teams or WebEx teams, [00:11:00] and there's the ability to integrate Skype, to have audio and video conversations. That's true in Microsoft teams. If you're using WebEx teams, you have much better options. And we'll talk about those in, an upcoming segment here. let's see, I think the next segment. Yeah. Next segment. We're going to finish up a discussion about Microsoft teams. There are still a few more things we need to talk about. We're going to also get into Zooms pros and cons. What can you use Zoom for? Why did I use Zoom? I still use it. And why? Both for marketing and for business and for family. So we'll talk about all of that and some other options that are out there that Google has.  Also, Apple has some just amazing things. What you can use to communicate securely and privately all of that right here and online@craigpeterson.com. Stick around. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

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

Welcome back to the fuel your legacy podcast each week we expose the faulty foundational mindsets of the past and rebuild the newer, stronger foundation essential in creating your meaningful legacy. We've got a lot of work to do. So let's get started.As much as you like this podcast, I'm certain that you're going to love the book that I just released on Amazon, fuel your legacy, the nine pillars to build a meaningful legacy. I wrote this to share with you the experiences that I had while I was identifying my identity, how I began to create my meaningful legacy and how you can create yours. You're gonna find this book on Kindle, Amazon and as always on my website, Sam Knickerbocker calm.Welcome back to do your legacy. today. We have a great friend of mine on Sean Christiansen and I actually met him at an event that I was speaking at and I hadbeen in contact with a few different people who have done similar things hypnosis, and neuro linguistic programming I've actually participated in as a client and learned how to do certain levels of it for for my clients in that. So when Imet him, I was like, I want to one, I have them on my podcast because we need more hypnotists on our podcast, but to want to know, kind of the ins and outs there. So we've met a few times, and I'm just excited to have bring him now to you. So you can share one of the benefits, how this has helped him and kind of where he sees this going for his life and then the future and how it's connected to his latency. Fair enough. Sure. Yeah. Sounds good. Awesome. Well, with that, john, go ahead and share with us your history and feel free to take as long as you need, right. Short of don't take don't take forever actually. But yeah, take take some time and let us know exactly. The storyline of how you came to where you are and became who you are today. Okay, cool. SoSo, I guess it starts back in high school when I was studying psychology in high school, I was studying at Dixie High School at St. George. And I was studying hypnosis, studied psychology. And in one of the classes, we had hypnotist, come to our class. And he said, you can cut therapy into a third of the time, because you get to the root of the problem. I thought, Oh my gosh, that's so cool. That's what I want to do. So I started studying hypnosis and everything that I read was right. He said that you can get through the problems. At the time. I thought that's what I that's definitely what I want to do. So I became a hypnotherapist. First out of high school. I was reading as many books as I could. And then I went to an academy up in Salt Lake called the academy for life management where I studied hypnotism and became a certified hypnotherapist, which is what we could call ourselves back at that time in 2003. It was illegal to call yourself a hypnotherapist. Now it's not unless you have a mental health certification. Anyway, so I went to school became certified, I opened up an office called the Alpine hypnosis center andHello, and I opened that in 2003. And I did that there until about 2017 I must say, back in 2004 I became a stage hypnotist. I started washing station with this and thought that is really cool. That's what I want to do. So I joined this hypnotist up in Salt Lake for a couple years, mentored under him, started doing my own shows. And then I rebranded myself as was called the hypno hick. So, that's kind of a fun, fun little thing. And so I've kept that name for for, gosh, 15 years now. So anyway, so yeah, I've I was, I've been hypnotic for a long time. And in the meantime of that, I suppose still was doing one on one sessions with clients and got really interested in forensics hypnosis, so I started studying forensics hypnosis got certified in that in 2014. I also became certified as an instructor for the National Guild of hypnotists, where I can certify other people to become hypnotist as well. So that's kind ofbackstory in the meantime of all of that I've always wanted to be a public speaker. So that's kind of what I'm doing now. That's my next goal in life is, is to start doing those and doing retreats and, and workshops and all that kind of stuff. That's incredible. So I'm curious what and because I also says psychology and I thinkit's fast it's just fascinating really that we bothhad a similar goal How can we do this faster? So when when I was going through a psychology school, I was like, this does not sound fun, like sitting there listening to people's problems over and over and over.Not resolving them what and it just that's what it seems like to me most therapists do. Don't take offense if you're a therapist. I'm not trying to brag on you. But that's just that's my experience. I am I think there's value there. I went to therapists for many years of my life and I think that there's nothing wrong with going to a therapist for that purpose. ButThere does come a point in time where you maybe want something more effective or to actually heal that trauma. Why do you think it is? Because most people are going to hear about hypnotherapy or hypnosis at some point during psychology classes as part of education. Why do you think some people will gravitate towards another be right now? I don't want to do that. If it's that much more effective, why is it not being more widely used? I think we will have a big fear about what hypnosis is, and a misconception of what it is and what it can do.I was actually talking to a master psychologist who is out of Salt Lake who's now a hypnotist. And what he was taught to do was, they have to diagnose the problem, right? That's their big job is okay, you're telling me your issues. I've got to diagnose something, because they work in this corporation where a psychiatrist cannot prescribe medication. And so now it says, Oh, this is going to take seven or 10 years to get over. Where hypnosis is not like that hypnosis is let's get you in. My goal is to help you go out and beyond.Your own for this one for three, four or five sessions, and we're done.So I think that there's just kind of that that old mentality of, Oh, this is going to take a long time you've been diagnosed with this issue so that we're gonna talk about it. As far as in class or in high school, I don't know why some people gravitate towards it. And some people don't I, I just want I just knew that's what I want to do. So there was there was no question. That's fascinating. So with this diagnosis, saying this is, I mean, there's so many layers deep here, and depends on how deep we want it to go. How political we want to go. Sure. I'm not saying we have to go all that all the way down the rabbit hole, but I think it's a good rabbit hole to at least acknowledge, and that isthe concept of diagnosis. So they're one of the things that I found in psychology that,again, don't take offense to these examples. These are super stereotypical, I understand that. But it's like a girl cop. Right? A female cop has something to prove that she's tough enough that she's able to do it in the military to a femaleleaders in the military, they've got something to prove that they can be just as good as a man in those roles. And in the, in the medical industry. For a long time, like, almost centuries, psychology was looked at as like quack medicine, like crack science, it wasn't actually science. And so, from my perspective, this is just my own education. And what I saw, there was this push inside of the psychologydepartments and field to push towards a more quote unquote, scientific based, they were diagnosed with this, this was the problem, right? Way of recording things so that they could be accepted by the grid, greater medical community, because they just weren't getting accepted. And so, to me, it seems like theif you're worried about being accepted as like a medical doctor and having the credentials not that, then it almost it lives.You in the ability to really use all of yourtools because only certain tools are looked at as effective from the medical journey perspective, especially when it comes to diagnosis, which then turns into psychiatry, which then turns into pharmaceuticals, which then turns into where the money is coming, which is whyif you want to get paid, I mean, I know a lot of psychologists don't get paid very much, because they don't get paid very much unless they have pharma behind them. That's right, this again, this is my experience.So you can crucify me online or whatever you want to do, but like this is it this is my belief system from what I studied. I was I went to school for psychology to sound like I didn't participate to one degree or another in this. This is just was my observation and ultimately why I left because I wanted to find out how do I help somebody faster thanthis diagnosis. Now you have a DD and you're ruined for the rest of your life like nowRight, what percentage of the population doesn't have a DD? What's wrong with it? It's a Okay, how can we use that to benefit a person and look at it as a gift rather than not? That's my perspective. But I found after going through psychology, neuro psychology, biochemistry, and which I want to get into some levels of that when it comes to like, why hypnosis works, but down to Sociology, for me, I found the most effective way to shortcut somebody so was to not have it become a problem and teach them how money works. Because, statistically, most of the social issues that therapists are seeing their clients for our result of lack of money, or our co existence in a home where there's lack of money, understanding how money works, it's a cause but that's hard to prove. But high correlation, high correlation between the two. And so that's why I'm in finance. You You have the same objective, how do we shortcut this successful healing of this, and you went into hypnosis and there wereWhat are your thoughts though on on from that perspective, why they why they're pushing for diagnosis. I think it's just how it's been done forever since Freud is like we, we just want to do this. And so they're just following the tradition. That's the way grandfather and great grandfather and everybody else before then did it. So that's all they really know. Except for I believe that the insurance companies and the pharmaceuticals are working together to make this all happen. Soso so again, from my perspective, again, going to the psychologists that I went to therapists, isn't kind of the objective, that this is the irony that I find in the industry, and it probably happens in my life all the time. So you can call me out on as well, but like the objective of a good therapist, from my perspective, okay, I can use this word a lot in the sentence. From my perspective, the objective of the therapist is to help me see a new perspective. Like they're professionals, hopefully at helping me see a new perspective of an event.And yet, it seems so hard for them to accept a different perspective on their life. It'sIt's a weird irony I don't understand like you go and try and talk to a therapist about them right now. That's not how it works. Like,you're so closed off that you're the only way that it could be right? How Why should I trust you to educate me on a new perspective of my life, when you can't even see a different perspective on your own life? I think that's a huge, huge, huge issue is people who become therapists do it for either the money or because they think you're gonna help people, right? Problem is, is they don't go through their own crap growing up and going through their own stuff. So how can they help somebody if they've never been through it? So people become a famous psychologist that they don't have their own family. So exactly what we're saying is they don't have their own stuff together. Right. So I do believe that people need to go through their own stuff. That's what makes a really good therapist. Yeah, I hundred percent agree. That's That's interesting. So now I'm curious and maybe you have the answer. MaybeI think you would, but at what point like what changed in society that you used to be able to call your self and hypnotherapist, but now you can't unless you have extra credentials. So what changed? Why did they start making a distinction? Again, because this is the separation between the quack and the credential. So what what changed in our economy and society in medical environment that demanded that change? So, the big talk about it is that the psychologists and psychiatrists were upset that they were calling themselves therapists when we haven't gone to as much schooling as they did. So why can you call yourself a therapist if you go to hypnosis?That's the biggest reason is they don't want to compete with us. We can help people change so fast to get there. Now we're taking their clients. It could be a conspiracy theory as to why that's happening. I don't know. But that's that's what I've heard. And that makes sense to me. Well, somebody wise once said, The ultimate Sufis that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication sometimesI think you can tell somebody that truth right now can't be that easy. Probably is that easy. I want to believe something that's stupid, simple and like, oh, that actually like, that's a logical it's an idiotic move, but it's logical like that, that makes sense based on human emotion based on ego based on these principles of like humanity. That actually makes sense. Now us trying to explain all these other justifications of why we did something that sounds like a big chain of justification so that you don't know why we did it. We're that's what that sounds like. So that's funny. So with all of your education, and what have you found to be the most enjoyable part of hypnosisso two parts of the business right so that the therapeutic side or the healing side or the whatever you want to call it side, right, the one on one client side and then I also have the the comedy stage hypnosis and they both have benefits for two completely different reasons. One is I love entertaining. That's been my whole background is I love entertaining people and I love to create an experience for people. So that's actuallyThe new business couldn't call the shots versus an experience because that's what I want to create.And that's enjoyable to make people laugh. But then you have the other side, which is when you're helping somebody to overcome something. And the cool thing about hypnosis, you can see instant change, or they wait, they open their eyes. They're like, Oh my gosh, that makes so much sense. And so they just had this instant gratification. Now, here's an example. I worked with a 12 year old wrestler, and he was competing or comparing himself to his brothers. So he was doing kind of poorly in wrestling, he hadn't even won a match. And so I worked with him one session, and I got a message from just a little while ago saying, Hey, man, thank you very much for helping me I took second statefor wrestling so so those kind of things you can't you can't get by working the nine to five Walmart job, right? With my groceries or whatever, right? And maybe, if that's your if that's how you receive fulfillment, sure, I'll challenge you on everything.I think there's right or wrong butYeah, I think that that's where are you getting your format and so from you for you, you get your fulfillment from being able tohear those success stories of like, how much somebody changed or how much that success happened or in the form of laughter, enjoyment, and almost a relaxation, and letting go of characters, the things that stress us out on our own basis. Sure. Yeah. That's awesome. For me, it's very similar. I come to work. And I love seeing somebody who's like, super depressed about their financial situation. Because I'm confident most of the time that by the time I'm done working with them, they're gonna be smiling and like, now I know where I'm going. Now. That's an exciting thing. I love it that that Penny drop is the same that I experienced when I was on a church mission. teaching about Jesus Christ isn't the same moment because the same is ultimately in my mind. It's the same transformation, whether we're talking about Christ, or whether we're talking about money, or whether we're talking about health or success, but it's the it's the recognition that that you are wortha better life. That's the recognition and once you recognize that you're worth better life because of you. That's the penny that stops whether that's your worth a better life. So you believe in Jesus Christ, you work better lives, you spend your money more intentionally, you're worth a better life. Because you're no longer comparing your your success to your brothers and wrestling. It's your worth something. And once they recognize that they have worth that once that Penny drops, that's a beautiful thing for me. In my experiences, it's a really good way to look at it like that.I think so, too.I'll pat myself on the back for that one. Yeah, um, sowhat were your biggest naysayers when you're going through this process of getting educated on on hypnosis and how that works and building a career out of it? What were your Who are your biggest naysayers and how did you overcome them? And I would say, Who are your naysayers today? Because I'm sure that happens. People every time you get on stage, I don't believe in hypnosis. There's always somebody in every crowd that way. So howDo you deal with Mesa Arizona? Gotcha. Okay, so back to when I first started hypnosis in Utah, right was your against the commandments? Yes.Right against the Book of Mormon right so so there's there was a lot of issues when I first got started in this and i would i would come up against a lot of walls but there was that burning. I gotta do this I know it's helpful people are just have a lack of education of what hypnosis is right? hypnotism sounds like mysticism which sounds like whatever else, right? So so people are assuming that it's this stuff that you can't do. But there's a whole scientific principle behind hypnosis. Once people learn that it's like, oh my gosh, this makes a lot of sense. And so we go in and out of it all the time, right seven times a day worried at most instruments, or longer or at least, and it's different for every hypnotist. But yeah, we spend a lot of our time in a state of hypnosis, right or a trance. So anyway, so once they're educated, it helps. The biggest problem is back in the day90s prior to the 90s, and then early 2000s is the stage hypnotists were very, very dark, and I'm in control of you, blah, blah, blah, right? So I wanted to give it a different feel. And so once I started empowering people from the stage that opened up a whole new realm, a lot of artists are doing that now. Because now it's like, oh, this is a power thing. And no, it's not crazy weird. So that's helped open the doors for me to be able to do a lot of schools and fairs and corporate events, because I get a good feeling. Right? So that's kind of shifted the mentality. I'm not saying I did it by myself, because the whole the whole community kind of kind of shifted at that at that time. So that's the first that's the first part. My biggest naysayer was my mom. She I was working in the corporate world, I manage restaurants and before I became a hypnotist, I was a flight attendant. So I did that for for six years. I did not know that about him. So when I knew things, so I was flying a lot and I started doing shows and so I would have to call in sick so I could go do it.Show. And so I kept doing that. Well, the CEO of the company, I actually hypnotized their sister, and help help them lose weight and it worked. And so I called the CEO of the airlines. And I said, Hey, I are the airline that your work. Yes, I intentionally skipping out. Yes, yes, yes. So I called her and I said, Hey, just so you know, I'm at this point in my life, and I really want to do this. I just don't know if I can do it full time. I don't want to do I'm out of sick time. I have no more love. And she was so cool. She says, Why don't you take the month of August off and see how it goes and will keep your keep your stats, secure insurance, all that kind of stuff. And then if it works, great, then you can quit. And if not, then you come back and super cool. So I did. And it was like the next couple of days. I got phone calls. I ended up booking seven fares that year. And so I called her back and I said, Yeah, I gotta quit. So I wouldn't finish the month of September. Often I was in 2006. And then I quit airlines and so on.So it's kind of funny, because think about it now because now you're like 15 fairs a year in August, but it was seven was like the big thing. So I was super excited than ever before. That's so cool, I think. So I want to go back to something you said, because I think this matters in literally every aspect of our life. And that is that the objective matters. And if you recall, we said it was looked down upon primarily because people were doing they're toying with it, unfortunately, often.stuff is is ridiculed and thought against before it becomes widely accepted. Andno, often, often, often, often, the initial adopters of a new thing, are people who are out there and maybe don't always have the best intentions, it is what it is sure. Once it becomes more widely accepted, then we start seeing people come in to a field with better intentions and say, Okay, how can we use this better and, and that's just what you described.people out there who are using different forms of language and programming with hypnosis, hypnosis, I'm happy to explain what hypnosis is from the, the, the medical perspective here in second, like the actual what's going on scientifically. But once you understand and it was more widely understood what is actually happening, then we can have more application of the principle because now we're understanding the principle we're not just a few people doing random things, but we we understand that principle we can control, there's more control, because now we can see actually results from principle. And then we can start using it for good. And you have the opportunity to do that with literally anything in your life. If you're a mom, if you're folding clothes, if you have children, you've got to be able to reframe things. It's got it's the same thing, the same things happening the same process, same scientific thing is happening. You it would be in your best interest to learn how to reframe things in a positive, helpful loving light serving lightbecause that's thehelps you accomplish more in life and gain greater persuasion and influence around those around you. So I love that the idea of just changing something, Nick, that was previously negative, and making it positive gossip, I have a friend, go check out his web site at his website, but definitely Facebook. But his his brand is called gossip for good, likegossip is just sharing information. It's just going on and talking about things that you've heard about that may or may not actually be true.But you can gossip about other people and negative things and judgment and kind of condemnation. You can gossip about all that or you can go gossip about all the good things that are happening in life. It's up to you what you choose to gossip about gossip is not inherently bad. It's what you choose gossip about. Yep, exactly. And so now, it doesn't last very long. So when we got to 30 minutes, but um, soAnyways, go ahead and explain more of like the scientific because I think there's going to be people on here like, Oh yeah, the church still says it's bad to be hypnotized.And it's just a lack of clarity of what hypnotism is. And unfortunately, it'sit's highly emotionally attached words to stuff that actually isn't there. So then they hear the word hypnosis, hypnosis or hypnotist, and they react to the word because of all the meaning that they've attached to it over their lifetime rather than what is reality. So they're living off in their own fictitious Fantasyland which, if you're happy, there areno business falling out, but you're going to listen to this, don't judgethis until you actually know what it is I would be my my invitation to you. So go ahead and explain what that is and what's actually happening for scientific, more scientific level. So the basis of hypnosis, the long definition is hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness.While you bypass the critical factor of thinking so that you become hyper suggestible. What does that mean? So we'll break down the three parts being in an altered state of consciousness, altered state of consciousness. Basically they hook the little electrodes up to your brain but the EEG machine, they can measure your brainwave cycles, just like a heartbeat. They mentioned the brainwave cycle. So the first brainwave cycle in consciousness is called a beta brainwave state. And just to be clear, just, this is all electrical impulses, correct? Yes. Okay, just so just so you guys know, this is electricity. He didn't come up with this hypnosis didn't come up with this. We found a way to label it and we terminate. We use the term hypnosis to define this process. dewpoint Okay. Okay, so now, in that beta brainwave state, we're paying attention, somebody megahertz, I don't know the exact megahertz or how many cycles it's going per minute or whatever that is, I don't know that. But basically, it's moving pretty fast. So then you start paying attention to something and then you enter into what's called an altered state of consciousness. So the first level would be called health.A brainwave state or what is called Daydream, right? In normal terms, when you're driving down the street, or you're doing the dishes, and all sudden you kind of go away. The subconscious mind takes over it does an activity that constantly starts to think about something else, you enter the Daydream state. That's the first level of hypnosis or an altered state of consciousness. When you talk to yourself, you're also in that same brainwave state. Then you enter into another dependency a little bit deeper called a theta brainwave state theta is more like when you're driving down the street, you go past your ex, and you don't know where you've been for 10 minutes, or you're reading a book and you get to the bottom of page completely forget what you just read. That's another state. Right? Then you have delta which is a little bit deeper. And this is more likeit's more like when you get phone call him tonight, you talk to somebody hang up the phone and you need to remember who you talk to. or teenagers nowadays that wake up one morning that texted somebody the night before with texting. So this amnesia starts to happen in that in that brainwave state. These are all normal natural states. This isn't just hypnosis, this is normal activity. Sure, then you have the deeper level.Which is called somnambulists, some symbolism is when you can kind of fool with the senses. That's when we can lessen pain. Or if you watch a state show, you can have somebody eating I know that he gets an apple, they have zero physiological signs, what's going on. So that's that's kind of a deeper level. Now there's all sorts of levels in between those states. Those are just the basics of how the brain was working. Now in hypnosis, there's four basically four ways how to get somebody into that trance. Okay? So that's the altered state of consciousness. Now what happens you start to bypass the critical factor thinking critical factor thing is your program. basically telling you who you are, who you are, or who you are, who you aren't what you can what you can do. Soif I'm working with a weight loss client, everybody knows that it takes two things to lose weight, which is diet and exercise, right? If I change my diet, eat less exercise more like burn more calories, and I consume I should lose weight. That's the theory right now. I'm gonna say there's everybody thinks they know that or they know that and it's not true.And and then we get wound up in it. Yeah, but yeah, But sir, I really likeChocolate cake or Yeah, but I like cookies were Yeah, but it's the holidays are Yep. But mom, here's where the programming comes in. Yeah. But mom always said I gotta finish my claim because they're starving kids wherethey're starving kids in Africa or Ethiopia. Right?Right. So So then we have that programming based on that. And then that's where hypnosis comes in. We put them in an altered state of consciousness to reprogram that.Well, people think that in that state, you can become have mind control, right? It is not mind control, because you still have that moral and ethical code that no matter how deep and endless you go, I can't break that. You can be conditioned, granted rights. For those of you who are really studying this stuff, you can be conditioned for mind control, but just hypnosis of itself cannot create mind control for you to do something you would want to do spike Have you into deep levels of hypnosis and I said I want you to go rob a bank he didn't want to.Now I think I think that again, this is just from my experience, so you have different experience. Fantastic for you. Mostpeople that I know who don't like it gnosis from a,from a religious context. They don't like it because from their perspective, you're surrendering control of your bodyand you should be in control and they have this deep religious belief thatthe whole purpose of this planet is to gain control of our body, and I would actually 100% agree with them from the whole purpose of this plan is to be in control of your body. Learning to control your body is another conversation though. How many things did somebody else have to show you before you learned how to do it? Did somebody help you tie your shoes? Did somebody help you put your clothes on somebody help you learn how to put your underwear on, or put your glasses on or brush your teeth all those things somebody did for you to you.Before you ever did them for yourself and you changing your diaper pro baby learning how to eat all these things. Somebody else did those for you before you can do it for yourself. SoYou are going to abide by double leaf that allowing anyone else to control your body is a grave sin and a rejection of your your holy people that you follow for me, for me, it's Jesus Christ. And it's all right for me, I don't say that blasphemous Lee, I'm trying to give you permission to believe whatever you want, right? I have deep beliefs as well. But if you're gonna abide by that, then we have to be able to apply principles across the board. So stop taking care of your children, stop helping them do anything, stop driving them around, stop doing anything for them, that's not in them choosing to do it and see how well you like life. I think you're going to quickly agree that sometimes it's better to have somebody show how to do something first or to be taught how to do something. Definitely don't send your kids to school. You wouldn't want that. Okay, so like, the reality isa good hypnosis, good hypnotist that I that I've seen. They are helping you there.are facilitating somethingby your choosing. They're facilitating it. Right? They aren't walking around hypnotizing people without. It's not like Disney where he's like, watch this clock.Okay, that's what's going on guys. So, one you are choosing into an experience to learn something to better yourself, number one, number two, once you understand how a lot of this stuff is,well, can you once you understood it, and you've practiced it, how difficult is it for you to use principles? Maybe not full on hypnotize yourself, but use principles of hypnosis, in your everyday life? All the time.myself as well. So the point the point of that question is,this isn't about somebody else, always doing this. Good hypnotism is about teaching and educating you how to do this yourself for yourself. It's about gaining more control of your body until you understand this. You'reare actually in the control of everybody else who understands this and is doing this with your media, your music, your TV, your books, it talks about mass hypnosis across the planet. It's happening. And if you aren't aware of it,it's only hurting you and your family. Right? So in with what you do you do a lot of finance stuff, right? So people who are let's say they're stuck at a $45,000 a year $30,000 fixed as much doesn't matter. Remember, right. So now they are programmed to think that's how much they make, right? So let's use $40,000 a year in example, somebody a $40,000 a year employee salesman, let's use a salesman for example.Their picture their internal dialogue, their thought process is that $40,000 a year right so that first three quarters they could kick tail and really make that that money, but their program is on $40,000. So now the last quarter, they start to tail off and that's what they make the next for that year is 40,000. Or the opposite is true. They may struggle for the first two or three quarters or whatever of the year.And then all of a sudden they'll ask you to kick it in gear again. And guess what? They're back at 40,000 it's the pictures they create in their money to self hypnosis, it's the exact same thing we're doing. So when we get stuck in that back to your control statement is they feel out of control. I don't know how to control this. I don't know how to change this smokers weight loss. I don't know how to fix this, or I need somebody else to help me get over that because the blind spot is right and proper ourselves. So you're exactly right. It is self hypnosis and we do it all the time. So let's uh, I love joining two forms, I thought and forcing them like just smashing them together. And religion as an easy one to because it's so especially in our society. It's so ingrained and everywhere I go, I'm not religious. I'm atheist, dude, that's a religion. In case you didn't know you have faith that nobody's there watching and nobody cares. Like, just because you've chosen to have faith in the non existence of being itself faith. So Ihate to burst your bubble, but youYou're just as religious as the rest of us just with a different religion, okay? football can be a religion, eating could be religion, religion is almost synonymous with ritualistic behavior. And there you go with a little theology. That's religion, but that's over simplistic as well. But with this, what is the contrast for this or this synonymous ism of prayer, daily prayer or repentance and meditation slash hypnosis?Hmm, good question. Um,the second part of the meditation hypnosis, a lot of people don't think they're the same. And they are the brainwaves are the exact same. The difference is in meditation, you're trying to clear your mind with hypnosis, you're going to same brainwave states, you're just giving yourself something to think about and focus on. That's the only difference right? You're giving yourself suggestions and safe access for us in hypnosis, religion and prayer. I've not done the studies. My guess is the brainwaves going to the same alpha or beta or theta brainwaveState right? You're you're creating visualization when you're asking Heavenly Father to to do something for us or to pray toGod just right so so let's say people ask people go to Heavenly Father and they and they ask for things. So it's like asking like this big Santa Claus in the sky asking for stuff. That's what a lot of people think of God as good as he can be in every day. I'm very, very, very spiritual. I connect with God on a daily basis and chat with him all the time. So you can be doing that when you're doing the dishes to plug yourself in and talk to talk to God. I'm so what's the difference between the two between prayer and meditation hypnosis? I don't know that there really is because you're still creating visualizations come from the subconscious mind. And just just, again, keep in mind that you have a conversation with me and we're actually talking about me trying to help you believe in God. This this comes out very differently. I'm just to help I have a healthy amount of skepticism, and I'm okay. Changing there.Yes, okay, so keep in mind that that's the position I'm coming from, don't be offended, like, oh God, Sam does believe in God. Now he does. But from my perspective,prayer could also be identical to what he said, from the perspective of when he was describing hypnosis and surpassing your critical thinking. The moment that you give up control, give up your critical thinking aspect and say, Look, I obviously can't figure this out my critical thinking no longer can accomplish whatever it needs to accomplish. I'm going to sidestep my critical thinking, put all of my faith in God. Okay, now we're going to this more perfect version of ourselves,which is ultimately our subconscious, our, or I would say, our value system, right? The part that doesn't really get hypnotized our morals values, we're going to our idealistic morals and values and asking our version of what our idealistic morals and values are to suggest what behavior we should continue to perform. And it's the same processwe're eliminating critical thinking by using a placeholder of God or Jesus Christ or Allah or whatever you call him, Jehovah, whatever you call them. Buddha, you can call whatever you want, okay? But it's it's a, it's a sidestep of critical thinking going into something that for all intents and purposes, nobody's been able to empirically prove that this person exists. So we're sidestepping that with the intention of connecting deeper with our subconscious and our AI, our morals and our values so we can become better and change our habits change our circumstances change our reality. That's my death. Like, if I was to define prayer, that's what I think is happening from a more scientific explanation.I think it's the same. You're self hypnotizing yourself, every time you're praying. Ideally, that's deep dude. And if you're not praying, and here's theHere's the worst part about it. If you decide well I don't need prayer and you get rid of prayer then what are you doing to better yourself? How At what point in your day are you self hypnotizing yourself to be better if you're if you decide you don't believe in God?What What else are you using to sidestep the critical thinking portion of your, your being?That's thosethat maybe I just want to do that as a way my mind thinks. And I think it's important because knowing that gives you so much more power to create, it gives you so much more power to determine what it is that you actually want out of life. And, and again, move past a lot of this crap that we hold ourselves accountable for, which is why we have anxiety, depression, all these things we're holding on to stuff that's really not ours to hold on to.And, yeah, what you, you say if you get rid of prayer to better youTwo litres of water for who? For what reason? There's no point right? What is better because there's no good or bad if you're not believing in,in higher power. So from what society says it's good and bad now. Yeah, I said, See, I don't know, I still think I still think there's a best of me and me as based on how good How good how successful on my at Korea, okay, so this goes back to a deeper religious belief that I hold that the purpose of this planet is to become like an infinite creator. Now you can call him God, you can call him whatever. But our purpose on this planet, as far as I'm concerned, is to learn how to create the way we saw other people creating.And if that's my goal, then although there's no good or bad again, it's just like hypnosis. You could use the principle for a good outcome or a bad outcome. The goal is how good are you at creating intentionallybecause that isIf any promise is real, that we are going to become like God, and thenwe got to learn how to become like God at some point. And that's what this whole thing is for. That's my this No, this is not my religious beliefs, right? So, but anyways, I think that that's what we're doing here. So learning how to create is the good or bad it's how effective are you it's not necessarily is what you're creating good or bad it's how effective are you at creating it. And the Enlightenment comes with recognize being being willing to accept that everything that is happening right now you are creating and then changing inputs to create better sure create more things that are going to serve you or give you the outcomes that you want. You may create that something gives you the outcome you thought you wanted and find out man I really didn't want that outcome that happens. Well, it's sometimes you know, we're bettering as a hypnotist, it helps us to become a better version of themselves. Sometimes the spouse isn't on board with that. I've helped themFemales become very self confident. The spouse doesn't like that all the time. And one lady got a divorce if that wasn't the reason she came, but she's happy with herself. It caused a bad thing in both of their eyes, but not really because she's, she's happy, she's better thankful. And I agree I'm not I'm not one to like.

On this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, Jenna Kantor guests hosts and interviews Andrew Ball on rehab after COVID-19.  Dr. Andrew Ball is a board certified orthopaedic physical therapist with nearly 20 years experience in physical therapy. Drew has earned numerous advanced degrees including an MBA/PhD in Healthcare Management, and post-professional DPT from MGH Institute of Health Professions. He has completed a post-graduate fellowship in Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (LEND) at University of Rochester, and a post-doctoral clinical residency in Orthopaedic physical therapy at Carolinas Rehabilitation in Charlotte, North Carolina. Clinically, Drew has mastered a wide-range of manipulative therapy techniques and approaches via continuing education and residency experiences (ultimately creating and co-creating several new techniques). In this episode, we discuss: -The pathophysiology of COVID-19 -Physical therapy treatment considerations in acute and outpatient settings -Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among patients and family members -Functional tests appropriate for patients following COVID-19 infection -And so much more!   Resources: Email: drdrewPT@gmail.com Andrew Ball Instagram APTA Cardiovascular & Pulmonary Section COVID-19 Resources United Sauces Website    A big thank you to Net Health for sponsoring this episode!  Learn more about The ReDoc® Patient Portal here.                                                                       For more information on Andrew: Dr. Andrew Ball is a board certified orthopaedic physical therapist with nearly 20 years experience in physical therapy. Drew has earned numerous advanced degrees including an MBA/PhD in Healthcare Management, and post-professional DPT from MGH Institute of Health Professions. He has completed a post-graduate fellowship in Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (LEND) at University of Rochester, and a post-doctoral clinical residency in Orthopaedic physical therapy at Carolinas Rehabilitation in Charlotte, North Carolina. Clinically, Drew has mastered a wide-range of manipulative therapy techniques and approaches via continuing education and residency experiences (ultimately creating and co-creating several new techniques). He is certified by the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) as a sports performance enhancement specialist (PES) and was personally trained and certified (CMTPT) by Janet Travell’s physical therapist protégé (Dr. Jan Dommerholt of Myopain Seminars) in myofascial trigger point dry needling. Dr. Ball serves on the Specialist Academy of Content Experts (SACE) writing clinical questions for OCS exam, as well as research and evidence-based-practice questions for all of the physical therapist board certification exams. Dr. Ball currently serves on the clinical and research faculty at the Carolinas Rehabilitation Orthopaedic physical therapy residency teaching research methods and evidence-informed clinical decision making, but also contributes to the clinical track mentoring residents in manipulative therapy and trigger point dry needling. His publication record is diverse, spanning subjects ranging from conducting meta-analysis, to models of physical therapist graduate education, to political empowerment of patients with physical and intellectual disability. Dr. Ball’s most recent publications are related to thrust manipulation and can be obtained open-access from the International Journal of Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation. Drew is married to his wonderful wife Erin Ball, PT, DPT, COMT, CMTPT. Erin is Maitland certified in orthopaedic manual therapy (COMT), certified in myofascial trigger point dry needling (CMTPT), and has extensive training in pelvic pain, urinary incontinence, and lymphedema management. They live with their two dogs one of which is a tripod who was adopted after loosing his hind-leg in a motor-vehicle accident.   For more information on Jenna: Jenna Kantor (co-founder) is a bubbly and energetic girl who was born and raised in Petaluma, California. Growing up, she trained and performed ballet throughout the United States. After earning a BA in Dance and Drama at the University of California, Irvine, she worked professionally in musical theatre for 15+ years with tours, regional theatres, & overseas (www.jennakantor.com) until she found herself ready to move onto a new chapter in her life – a career in Physical Therapy. Jenna is currently in her 3rd year at Columbia University’s Physical Therapy Program. She is also a co-founder of the podcast, “Physiotherapy Performance Perspectives,” has an evidence-based monthly youtube series titled “Injury Prevention for Dancers,” is a NY SSIG Co-Founder, NYPTA Student Conclave 2017 Development Team, works with the NYPTA Greater New York Legislative Task Force and is the NYPTA Public Policy Committee Student Liaison. Jenna aspires to be a physical therapist for amateur and professional performers to help ensure long, healthy careers. To learn more, please check out her website: www.jennafkantor.wixsite.com/jkpt   Read the full transcript below: Jenna Kantor (00:02): Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Jenna Kantor with healthy, wealthy and smart. I'm super excited because I have Dr. Andrew Ball here who is going to be interviewed on COVID-19. Has anyone heard of it? Anyone? Bueller, Bueller and return to performance post infection. This is such an important conversation. I'm really excited and grateful to have you on Dr. Ball. Thank you. Andrew Ball (01:26): Well, first of all, please call me Drew. And second of all, let me thank you and your listeners for having me on. Jenna Kantor (01:34): Wonderful. It's really a joy. Would you mind telling people a little bit more about yourself so they can better get acquainted with Mr. Drew? Andrew Ball (01:46): I have been doing physical therapy for, I have a 20 year history in physical therapy. I've taught for a good majority of that time. I started out in pediatrics doing what I was told was the first fellowship in pediatric physical therapy and neurodevelopment at the university of Rochester, which has since kind of turned into a PTA accredited residency program at the strong center for developmental disabilities and then evolved into doing orthopedics. I hold an MBA, PhD in health care management. I went and did a post-professional DPT, but I got to sing. None of that matters really the salient point. And I think I'm using that word correctly. But don't go with it. Go with the pertinent point is that I could be any one of your listeners who treats in outpatient orthopedics who treats in sports. Andrew Ball (02:48): My passion is working with musical athletes. I started working with guitarists. I played piano at Peabody when I was a little kid, put that down and Mmm. And ultimately I got back into music by playing guitar, by being forced to play guitar because I was working with guitarists. And at some point it's like working with a football player and never having played football or treating dancers and never having dance. There's a point where there's a level of respect from your patients. You just don't have it unless you actually have, okay, I've done the work. You can't really speak the language. So I recognized that there were two ways, one of two ways to do that. One was to begin building guitars. So I started doing that. And then ultimately one of the guys that I built a guitar for who plays guitar for Carl Palmer formerly of Emerson Lake and Palmer in Asia. Andrew Ball (03:58): Basically he told me like, this guitar is great, but you really have to learn how to play or, yeah, I mean you really are going to have to learn the language of the little things like the posture and the whole, you can talk about holding the guitar, but you know, if you're a grunge player and you're playing bass, you've got to play that guitar and you gotta play that bass guitar and your name and it doesn't matter. Cause it doesn't look cool to have it in the right, you know, proper position. And the muscle memory that these guys had been in gals have been doing, you know, since they were you know, 12 years old you know, you're not going to change that. It's like changing someone's golf swing or if you're going to change it, they have to understand that it is going to be for a greater good. Andrew Ball (04:45): Like being able to play a 60 date tour versus having shoulder pain after 30. So, I kind of weaved and wobbled through trigger point dry needling. And I also teach for my pain seminars, but that got me into working with the Jamaican Olympic track and field team. It got me into working with the Charlotte symphony and I'm one of the physical therapists for them. But ultimately I am trust like any one of your performance PTs who is interested in that population and at the same time truly truly wants to help individuals that have a hard time finding care. And so that, is that correct? Jenna Kantor (05:37): Yeah, I think that's great. I mean you could go on for a very long time and I really want to get to the point because this man clearly he is a person to learn from. He has so much information to share and I'm really happy about this topic that we're diving into with COVID-19. Let's go straight into the point COVID-19. What are the effects that it has on the body that we need to start paying attention to? Andrew Ball (05:57): Like the first things that we have to just acknowledge cause this is going to be something new to us to consider. Right. So there's a lot of things that we need to consider. The physical I'll talk about first. And the psychological, which is a piece that we don't, that certainly performance, that's a huge issue, but that's certainly not something that most PTs outside of the performance training group really, really focuses on. So I'll start out with a friend of mine who was one of the first a thousand people to be diagnosed with COVID. She was in Washington state. She was one of the first 250. She's super, super bright. She holds a PhD in aerospace engineering or aerospace engineering design. Andrew Ball (06:57): She's a little bit younger than I am. How old am I? Not quite 48 years of age. And she was, is extremely fit very outdoorsy plays an instrument. So I just want to kind of walk through what she experienced. And this could be again, any one of your listeners on days zero, we'll call it before she was diagnosed. She was skiing I believe snowboarding, but skiing and had some aches and a dry cough and fatigue and experienced something that she had never experienced before that she described as chest awareness. Now your patients and folks that you work with are very acutely aware of breath. Andrew Ball (08:06): Right? So I kind of asked her, was that what you meant? She's like, no. I felt like I had to consciously think about every inhalation and exhalation that I chose. And that was before, before a diagnosis, but that was faint. She described it as on day one, which is the day that the fever tends to rise. Not everybody has a fever. So there's variability here that she spiked a fever of 102. She had difficulty breathing day two, that worsen. She had a dry cough and we should get into the idea of a dry cough versus a wet a cough a little bit later when we talk about the physiology of this and how it differs from a pneumonia. And had some GI dysfunction as well. And although we kind of talk about the upper respiratory issues, we also need to understand that the virus enters through the injury. Andrew Ball (09:16): The angiotensin converting enzyme to receptors. And, there's obviously the majority of those are or in the lungs, but there are some in the GI tract as well. They're actually all over the body, but and that's why some of the lesser talked about symptoms include things like GI disturbance and urinary issues. And in her case loose bowels by day three, that's when she had a virtual visit. And luckily because there were so few folks being diagnosed at that time, she was able to get a clinical diagnosis by that evening coded by Dave. Or that's when she went to the emergency department because she felt like she thought she had a pneumothorax. She felt like she was unable to fill her left lung with air. And they did a chest X Ray. Andrew Ball (10:19): They did the nasal swab. That was day four. She described it as touching her brain. I mean, it's a significant swap. /you have to go all the way up to the back of the throat in order to get right. Which is why many folks who feel like they have a mild case when they hear that they choose not to engage the healthcare system. And I really think that's a bad, bad, bad, bad decision. Because yes, 80% of folks are gonna have a mild to moderate case, but those 20% that you carry it to can have a severe reaction to the virus. That can be, it can be fatal. Five through nine, her fever began to break. Roughly day seven, she had a reflexive excuse me cough. Andrew Ball (11:21): She was unable to sleep. She felt like your ears were completely clog. She was coughing up blood and coughing so much that she had conjunctive like conjunctivitis, like that redness in the eyes. Day nine was what she described as noteworthy and describe that as intense exhaustion to the point where she had trouble lifting a spoon. She had trouble zipping up a jacket. And it wasn't until day 11 that she felt like having any kind of food or any kind of coffee. Now here's the critical point is performers or super, super attuned to the idea of I felt bad. The show must go on. I've got it. Push it there. And roughly day 11 through day 14, that's when the viral load is decreasing, but the inflammation is increasing. That's when people go on to ventilators. That's when people kick into this cytokine storm that we've heard of. Andrew Ball (12:27): And it's critical to understand that as a healthcare provider and certainly as a patient or performer, cause there have been a number of cases where people had mild cases and they push themselves during this phase a little bit too soon and died having had very, very mild symptoms and then took a turn as a day 14, she still had some difficulty concentrating. She was still exhausted. She found it exhausting to speak and still had a morning sore throat and that's considered a mild.   Jenna Kantor: Okay. Wow. So I think that's, that's important to understand where these people have come from. You know, we don't, well we can get into the idea of ventilation and whatnot before we do it probably makes a little bit more sense to get into this kind of case and how we would treat them coming out of this when they can have contact and we can help them. Andrew Ball (13:36): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So kind of jumping forward into well let's take a step back before we do that. If you don't mind just into the pathophysiology a little bit, where would you like to jump back and forth? Let's if we do the pathophysiology, just because I don't want this podcast to be too long. Let's make it very brief, very, very brief so that way we can move forward. So I think it's important to understand that COVID-19 is not influenza, it's not cystic fibrosis, it's not pneumonia. And those are the diseases that when you took cardiopulmonary physical therapy, like that was the primary focus was these diseases where the airways would fill with mucus. That is not at all what happens in COVID-19. So a percentage of folks get acute respiratory distress syndrome and it's a dry cough. Andrew Ball (14:32): And the reason that it's a dry cough is that the airways don't fill with mucus. What's happening is that the capillaries begin to leak fluid into the lung tissue itself. So think that like lymphedema of the lung, which sounds horrible, right? So the airways are getting, a couple of things are happening, the airways are getting squashed, but still get kind of in and out, but the elasticity of the lungs is going to decrease considerably. And why she felt like she had pneumothorax. Exactly. So, the lungs start to stiffen. Much more fluid within the lungs in the lungs lining. So if you think of the lining like a balloon and having that kind of the alveoli, having that kind of consistency, normally it's as though you took Vaseline and you just slathered the balloon with Vaseline and then expect for the gas to exchange at the same rate in between that membrane and it just does a brand harder thinking of this and that. Andrew Ball (16:10): So the problem is not mucus. The problem is ventilation and perfusion. So part of the reason why I got very interested in this is there is a role obviously for quarantine workouts. And by that I don't mean, you know, our brave soldiers within our profession that are in acute care in the ICU and are turning patients so they don't get bed sores and turning them into prone for optimal ventilation profusion. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the therapist that the only thing that they're posting is information on what healthy people can do when they're stuck at home. And there's a place for that short, but I really feel like there is a role and a responsibility that our profession has to educate the public and to educate each other about COVID-19 and little things. So I started out just asking questions about what can we as physical therapists do? Andrew Ball (17:20): Right. You know, I went back to my cardiopulmonary books, you know, what is the role of putting people into a head down, a position that postural drainage. So they can get the mucus out. Well, newsflash, they don't have mucus, right? So that's not going to help. And it's not the best position for Benadryl for ventilation profusion. So that's important. And the other thing I started asking was, well, what about chest PT? You know, I was awesome at chest PT. I haven't done it since graduation, but I remember that as well. The problem with that, again, no mucus, the clear, the only thing that you are going to do if you are trying to help a performer with a mild case who is getting over COVID-19 is you will weaponize an aerosol the virus. So, you know, there were several folks that were suggesting that based on a poor understanding of the physiology and now we really have to retool and get the information out that no, the best position for somebody who has an active case of COVID-19 is prone because that optimizes ventilation profusion because of fluid dynamics and the anatomy of where the alveoli are. Andrew Ball (18:37): So I think that's important to understand because in performance, you know, we fast forwarding, we like to think about things like posture, right? Posture may, it can't hurt, but it's not going to make the huge effect that we think of. With some of the other respiratory structural kinds of problems. Can you see, Oh, taping can be somewhat helpful for folks who have breathing dysfunction and until folks get very, very, very far in their recovery process, that's probably not going to be helpful. When I talk about prone, these folks have been placed in a prone position for the minimum protocol I've seen is 12 hours, but usually it's somewhere between 16 and 18 hours a day and a 24 hour period to optimize ventilation perfusion. Jenna Kantor (19:35): Right. That's exactly right. Well, the other issue getting into the psychology of all this, Isolation, psychosis, delirium, and these are people who are in pain and I have a hard time taking a breath. Right? They can't have family members can't have family members in there. Right. So what do you think the impact of that is going to be when you see the patients six to eight weeks after the resolution of symptoms in outpatient or as a performance based therapist?   Andrew Ball: Yeah, it's going to be probable in more than 50% of cases, 54% of cases. It's going to have a huge mental health impact that you can see at least 12 months later as PTSD. Now, I don't know about you and the musicians or performers that you've worked with myself included. Andrew Ball (20:42): I don't think that we're the least bunch and you layer, post traumatic stress a top that and what you end up with if you don't understand that walking into the room with the patient when you do the evaluation or when you treat them is a whole group of individuals, half of these folks who are going to have behavioral reactions to everything from the frustrations of making their appointments down to frustrations with the treatment process. It's just going to blow up seemingly out of nowhere. And I'm here to tell you it's not out of nowhere. Jenna Kantor (21:25): I get it. When you're talking about the psychological component, Oh, that's such an untapped situation. This is also new to us. Jenna Kantor (21:39): I don't know. I mean I guess it would just, I mean, off the top of my head would just how I am with my people when I'm with them. It's just really checking in, just checking in, asking. I would just keep asking and being like, are you okay? Let me know if this is starting to freak you out in any way. I think that that's gonna be the big thing. Like I need you to feel comfortable. I need you to feel safe and has to just be that level of, I mean, which we always have any way, but a new level of thought process, you know, sensitivity where something like going, even prone could make them go, you know, and they don't even know. They don't realize they're doing it. Their whole body could just even just naturally tense up and it could just become harder to breath just because they develop a new habit to feel like that's what it's going to feel like when they're on their stomach. We don't know. Andrew Ball (22:28): Fortunately or unfortunately, there's a ton of research. Oh, I'm working with patients with post traumatic stress as a function of you know, I don't want to get political here, but as a function of endless military action that are had over the course of the past years. So there's a fair amount of information on that, but awareness is going to be critical in working with these patients. Going back to infection though the question that I get asked probably more often than anything else is when is it appropriate to begin working with these folks without personal protective gear? And the answer to that is, there's some guidelines from the European rehabilitation society, but we really don't know. What we know is that patients can go stealth and can be contagious long after their symptoms disappear. Andrew Ball (23:37): And there's at least one case study a well written case study showing that the symptoms that the patient can shed the virus for 37 days after they're no longer symptomatic. And the problem with that is that here in the United States testing is scarce, right? To diagnose it, to say nothing of when are you clear completely of the virus. I'm not aware of widespread secondary testing. And then some of the guidelines from like the world health organization suggest that someone needs to be tested. I think it was in China. Needs to be tested twice and have a negative result twice before they're clear. And if we're not doing that, then we really have to wait six to eight weeks. Andrew Ball (24:44): And that's why, because you're going to be long, long past what we know to be the longest reported case. Now whether or not your patient is that, you know, new one that can where they stick around shedding the virus for 42 days or 48 days, you know, we don't know. And one of the scarier things from a public health perspective for me is the recognition that this is an RNA virus, which means that it's going to be harder to create a vaccine because like the common cold, like the rhino virus it slips, it mutates quickly. No, fortunately that has not happened. Andrew Ball (25:49): But there is every reason to be worried. And I don't want to freak people out, but there's every reason to be concerned that if we don't kill this thing this year, that it's going to come back every year in a slightly different form, perhaps more contagious, perhaps more stealth, perhaps more deadly. Perhaps it will shed the virus for a longer period of time before we were able to begin working with patients, which kind of gets to that economic effect. I understand that people are hurting. I understand that folks have private practices and cash based practices that have limited cashflow and they're hurting. I totally get that. Yeah. I mean, you know, and folks go, Oh, you don't understand. You work in a situation where you don't own your own practice. Andrew Ball (27:01): Well, that's true. You know, I have a significant impact income from teaching. So, you know, I get it. I understand that the dollars are tight, but if you told me that if we shut down for an additional two weeks and we can kill this thing completely, I would do that even if that meant a significant decrease in my salary. And at some point, I think that, and I'm not saying that everyone is a clinical doctor in our profession, I've gotten some feedback for that. But as a clinical doctoring profession, I do think that we have a solemn responsibility to the public in terms of educating on COVID-19 versus kind of filling the Instagram space with Mmm. Lots of home workouts, which are important. People need to keep fit and certainly keep their minds going while they're in quarantine. Andrew Ball (28:10): The problem is that there's so many outpatient private practice, cash based PTs that have a such a voice on Instagram that some of this information about just the mechanics of the disease, the physiology of the disease, how long you need to wait in order to protect yourself and your patient from either reinfection or infecting others just isn't pushing through. So, once again, thank you for allowing me to come on this podcast because I do think that those of us who have a voice in that space have an obligation to get some of this information. Jenna Kantor (28:57): Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It really, it is very valuable. I want to actually dive in, even though we've been going for a while, I think it is important to dive into now somebody who had the ventilator. Yeah. I think that, that we can't overlook that. There will be some people who've been that unfortunate. So could you talk about what that means with somebody who has been fortunate to recover from such a horrific. Andrew Ball (29:28): Sure. So, as I said, about 80% of patients are going to have a mild to moderate and they won't be hospitalized. They may, because of the stress and strain on their lungs, they may develop pneumonia, so they may actually end up, you know, having secondary sputum. But those are folks who, even with the pneumonia are going to have something that we consider a fairly mild case. 20% are going to be severe to critical. And the severe group are the ones who are going to have dyspnea. They're the ones who are going to have rapid breathing that's defined as more than 30 per minute. Their oxygen saturation is going to drop to 93%, and they'll have on a cat scan, you'll be able to see lung infiltrate. That looks like kind of a grounded glass appearance of about 50%. Andrew Ball (30:30): So, and then you've got 14% that are severe that fit that classification and about 6% that are critical. And that's respiratory failure, septic shock, multiorgan failure. And within that group, okay 20%, about 25%, we'll end up in the intensive care unit most of which or many of which will end up on a ventilator. And if you end up in the ICU on a ventilator, your chance of survival is about 50%. So what tends to happen with that ventilated population is on roughly about day 14 we talked about how the viral load increases and then decreases while the inflammation increases. Well as the inflammation in the lung increases okay. A percentage of those folks, as I said, will end up roughly around day 15 needing to be ventilated for about four to five days. And half of them will come off and half of them will not. So the people who come off their recovery. So their recovery we don't, again, there haven't been a ton of folks, so we don't know a ton. What we do know is that in severe cases, there's going to be ICU acquired muscle weakness. They're going to have a severe loss of lung function, a severe loss of muscle mass. Andrew Ball (32:16): Yeah, we're getting younger too, but just as things been saying percentages. Yeah. neuropathy, myopathy. The good news is, is that we can begin to protect recovery. And the greatest, what we know is that the greatest amount in physical function will be seen. If the patient falls into acute respiratory failure, we'll see that within roughly the first two months of discharged. So that gives us some kind of a gauge. In addition the degree of disability at about a week after discharge determines the one year mortality and recovery trajectory of that individual. So we have some guidelines as far as that's concerned from acute respiratory distress syndrome, right? So that's not necessarily coded, but we believe that we can extrapolate in general what we haven't talked about is the impact on them. Andrew Ball (33:30): And the fact that about 30% of family members of individuals with acute respiratory syndrome end up with PTSD. So now you have this group, we're 50% of folks who have been in the ICU have PTSD and 30% those folks have family members who have PTSD. How do you think that's going to go down or like, a lot of them can't go into the hospital, but they can do a FaceTime video. So what they get to see in that FaceTime video with their loved ones in the hospital, I'm talking about after they're discharged. I'm talking about later. Yeah. No, but I'm just saying the family members with the person, I'm like their interaction. That's what I'm referring to, their reaction with it. If you're prone for 16 to 18 hours a day, right? Jenna Kantor (34:07): Yeah. So what do you do with these folks when you finally see them? Right. So you're going to have chocolate. Chocolate makes people happy. Right? It's funny, it's funny you say that. I'm doing a webinar with some some other instructors that I teach with and we're kind of talking about the format. And I'm a huge fan of the old school. I love the daily show, but I'm a huge fan of the old daily show with Craig Kilborne. He used to do the thing where he would like ask opinion questions. I'll ask you Reese's pieces or M&Ms no, I'm sorry. The correct answer is eminence. No, I'm sorry you were wrong. No, I would agree. But that's what he would say. Jenna Kantor (35:13): He would end with those kinds of questions. Kind of like his version of the James Lipton kind of five questions. What do you hope that God says when you die anyway, we're getting off track. So what I'd like to kind of go through is you're going to have folks that have worked with you in the past. They are post infection. Ah, they’re your dancers, they're your musicians in the pit. They're your directors. They're your loved ones that are going to refuse to see anyone. But yeah.   Andrew Ball: Right. And of those folks, you're going to need to know what to, you know, what to do. I would say if you hear nothing else from me, remember your vitals and there's, it has to be a Renaissance now of taking heart rate, taking respiratory rate, taking oxygen saturation, taking blood pressure with every patient. Andrew Ball (36:12): The functional tests that we're probably gonna have to start using are things like ambulatory distance, which is going to be severely decreased. We'll be lucky if some of these folks are able to walk 300 feet. Some of them, right, if they're severely impaired. You know, that's not far enough to get from your car to a doctor's office. You normally need about 500 feet for that to say nothing of getting back to your daily life and doing your own grocery shopping with which you need at a super target or R or Walmart, you need a good half mile, you need a good 2,500, 2,500 feet. But things like the five times sit to stand test or test that we're going to need to brush up on the six minute walk test. Fortunately we can remote monitor some of those things. Andrew Ball (37:05): Tele-Health isn't just you know, getting on a zoom call with somebody tele health, we need to think of that in an expanded way, right? There's apps that will allow for you to do a six minute walk test or your patient to do a six minute walk test and then send you those results remotely from there, from their app. Some folks aren't going to be able to walk for six minutes, right? So at that point we're going to have to back up into feet per second or four meters per second. And we have some metrics for that. You know, we know that somebody who's under 70 at a normal walking pace should be able to walk a good 2,500 feet at a 4.0 feet per second. So, you know, somebody comes in completely deconditioned and they're walking 1.5 feet per second for 500 feet. We've got some work to do. Jenna Kantor (38:36): Yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, don't forget about deep breathing, deep dive. And I don't just mean you know the breath, but I mean the breadth, I mean the deep diaphragmatic breathing, bringing it all the way down into your belly, your performers should be well for those dancers who sing, that's huge. That's so huge to reconnect with it, even though that may seem so basic with them before, but have they caught the disease. And, for sure to make sure that starts to get all connected and back in check and not a stressful Andrew Ball (38:43): Right. You know, and then I look into things that, Mmm, that as I've spoken with some cardiopulmonary specialist, you know, all of this comes from the European rehab society. I also want to plug the American physical therapy association. I shouldn't have done this at the very top of the of the discussion. But the pacer project, the post acute  COVID-19 exercise and rehabilitation program, it is completely free, but it's time intensive. Mmm. You know, they've tried to break things down into 45 minutes or hour and a half lectures, but there's like eight or 10 of them. You don't have to watch all of them. It's free. If you want to get the certification and the CEO's is fine, go through the APTA learning center, but they've put everything up on YouTube and all you have to do is search APTA cardiovascular section and you'll get the the literature. I think a lot of orthopedic sports performance based PTs they're really tech savvy and they kind of want to get the information through podcasts or a like a one hour presentation. So that's, well, essentially what I'm trying to do is to translate. Jenna Kantor (40:08): That's what's so great. I mean I'm going to be sharing this in groups as well to keep spreading the information, which is absolutely wonderful. This is good. Andrew Ball (40:21): Well, I do add in a couple of things that I've kind of brought to there. Okay. So some of their attention and because they're kind of case study oriented, they're like, well, we're really not teaching that. But particularly for it can't hurt. And particularly for performers humming and I don't mean like humming a song. I mean a long, deep droning Andrew Ball (40:52): There's evidence to suggest that it temporarily increases carbon dioxide and it temporarily increases nitric oxide. And in so doing leads to temporary base or dilation, so it can't hurt. I don't know how long it actually lasts. Certainly the deep breathing and increasing walking distance and walking speed is more important. But if you're bored and have nothing else to do while you're in quarantine humming is probably not thinkers would appreciate that. Jenna Kantor (41:28): They'd be like, yeah, for sure. That will be a vocal way for them to get that all connected. Also nasal, yeah, there's a lot of stuff with training and staying vocally fit, if you will. So that would actually speak to there values. Andrew Ball (41:44): Yeah. Yeah. I could go into a lot more here. I just want to make sure that that folks have a good kind basic understanding here. You know, we've heard, you know, wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. So I'll make a plug for wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. And even in some other countries where the health care workers understood the severity of COVID-19 the healthcare workers seem to be a risk to themselves because they didn't properly and thoroughly and frequently wash their hands. I would say whatever you think you're doing, it's probably not enough. Okay. The other thing that I would say about the hand sanitizers that we tend to use the world health organization and FDA suggest 75 to 80% alcohol. Andrew Ball (42:50): And that is not what most clinics have. Most have like the foam sanitizer or the like the Purell, which is 60%. Okay. You know, plugging performers amazing, okay. Guitarists, my performance Buddha and spirit animal is Ron Bumblefoot fall who is in the band spun. Do you know who that is? No, it's not the name. He's in sons of Apollo. He was the lead vocalist for Asia this last tour. And those of you who love guns and roses he was the guitarist the main guitarist on the last guns and roses album. Chinese democracy is ridiculous as a player and he's amazing as a teacher as well in any of that. He also has a line of hot sauce and one of the, and I just love when performers do this and kind of take responsibility for the position that we're in, but a Unitedsauces.com which is the distributor that he works with has retooled one of their lines to put out hand sanitizer that is 75 to 80% alcohol. Andrew Ball (44:20): So that will in fact kill the Corona virus. So, Mmm. Great. Local company here in Charlotte. Highly, highly recommend and plugged them. Hey, you want to support a performer you know, during these times. And the last thing that I will leave folks with is as you are working with patients post infection, ask yourself, do you need to put your hands on this patient? Can this be done remotely? And I'm really more talking you know, it really more talking to the folks who do outpatient work, who have their own side hustle who do work in a healthcare system who are going to be pulled inpatient, right? You know, either somewhere like New York city where you are. And folks have to be kind of pulled in, you know, right down to the rural hospital you know, in the middle of nowhere. Andrew Ball (45:32): And there's two physical therapists, one inpatient, one outpatient, and they need help working because now they have more folks that are getting ill. You know, really ask the question, both inpatient in your cash practice, in your private practice for the sake of killing this thing. And for the sake of decreasing whether or not you're a force vector, do you need to provide that treatment? And is there someone else who can be your hands? Can you delegate that to a nurse? Can you delegate that to a family member? I really think that we're going to a friend of mine who runs another podcast Adam Meakins, has been talking about physical therapy in terms of AC DC during COVID and after COVID. And I really think that all areas of practice are going to change as a result ranging from the little things that I just talked about, you know, having to do vital signs with everybody right down to really asking the question, can I go from an interdisciplinary model of care to a transdisciplinary model of care? Andrew Ball (46:58): Can I let go of that professional boundary and ego. And I know that a lot of my contemporaries are not going to be comfortable with that. I think we have to be secure in the knowledge that we have more than the hands that we place on people. It's all important, but I do think that there's going to be a paradigm shift. Jenna Kantor (47:30): I love it. Thank you. So, for coming on, Drew, this was an absolute joy. Where can people find you and reach out to you either on social media or email? Andrew Ball (47:39): Well they can reach out to me. I'm on Instagram @drdrewPT. They can email me at drdrewPT@gmail.com. If I don't respond, I have a ton of spam filters. So don't be shy about reaching out to me through social media. But I really want to make it clear. I'm not the expert here. The true experts, you know, are people like Steve Tepper Ellen Hilda grass Angela a beta Campbell Telia polic you know, these are the folks that we really should be talking to are Eric. And if you really want more information, I'm happy to direct people to it. Jenna Kantor (48:37): That is helpful. Yeah, absolutely. Andrew Ball (48:39): The Easter projects, the post acute COVID-19 exercise rehabilitation project is really where folks want to go for more in depth information from physiology to post acute through the entire spectrum of post acute care. Jenna Kantor (49:00): Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming on. You guys give a big shout out to him if you have seen this, just so he can really see how he has impacted so many. Thank you so much for coming on, Drew. Have a great day, everyone.   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!

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

Welcome!   For being locked down do to this Pandemic there is certainly a lot of technology in the news this week.  So let's get into it.  President Trump issued an Executive Order to protect our Electric Grid from using equipment not manufactured in the US, Microsoft Teams is under attack, Phishing and Ransomware are in the News and What will Post-COVID Business look like? So sit back and listen in.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: Hey everybody, welcome Craig Peterson here on WGAN. It is quite a week. I just can't believe how fast time is going. So many people are at home with nothing much to do, they're watching Netflix, et cetera, and I am busier than ever just trying to help people out and I'm going to be doing more free training and stuff over the next couple of weeks. Now I've just been so, so busy. I don't know if you've heard any of my features here on the radio station. They're supposed to have started airing, I guess we'll see if they do air, but I'm putting together these kinds of filler things that are a couple of minutes long. The whole idea behind them is to really help. People with just various technology issues. You know, me, I'm focusing on security because that is what seems to be lacking the most, and especially when we're seeing what we're seeing right [00:01:00] now, which is all kinds of people. Just getting everything stolen from them. It Is crazy what's happening.  You know, we're all working at home right now to some degree. Many of us, obviously you still have to go in and. You know, in foodservice and manufacturing, et cetera. But even with that, the bosses aren't necessarily all there. Some people are getting sick and are staying at home for very good reasons. I think we'll see more of that in the future. Someone gets sick instead of the old American worth work ethic of going in and getting everybody else sick. I think we're going to see a lot more of the, Hey, I'm going to stay home because I'm not feeling well. This is going to be interesting because so many companies have these sick policies, sick day policies that I've never liked particularly. I think some of those will change too, but what is going to happen here in our post-COVID world, right? We've got this COVID-19 of [00:02:00] course the Wuhan virus causes the disease. it's also called, what is it, C O V I D SARS-2? Remember SAR. SARS had a much, much higher death rate than COVID-19 is turning out to have. But there are many, many people that have this. And we've seen some statistics now coming out saying that even people that are staying home, this one hospital this week did some, a little bit of research and found that 60% of their patients had quarantined in themselves at home. Now that tells you something too. We, we still don't know enough about this whole WuHan virus and the diseases that it might cause. Some of the symptoms we kind of know, obviously when it comes to respiratory problems, is an acute respiratory disease, which is what SARS is. Yeah, we know the basics of that, but man, the stuff we've been hearing about people having circulation problems, having legs amputated, even people who are [00:03:00] in good shape, you know, I hate to see it, but I can understand a diabetic having problems, right. And maybe ultimately having a leg amputated because of circulatory problems that come with diabetes or circulatory problems that come with being morbidly obese or even just obese. Those all kind of make sense to me, but. I don't know there's just so much we don't know. One of the things we're trying to figure out is what does the business looks like?  What is going to happen? And there's a great article that came out in the computer world just this last week that is talking about telecommuting. I think it's really kind of an interesting thing because what we're talking about is a disease that's going to be affecting us probably for the next 18 months to two years now. I don't mean like the whole country or world is shut down for that period of time. Obviously that would be catastrophic to everyone. We would have people dying of starvation if that were to happen, but what I'm talking about is really kind of like what happened with the Spanish flu. You know, every last one of us has had that flu that happened in 1918 and unless you've been an absolute hermit that I've never had any food, you didn't grow, et cetera, right? It just sticks around. And that's going to happen with his WuHan virus. Well, it is going to be around forever, frankly, now that it's been thrust upon us, however, that came to be. Depending on whether or not we've got a vaccine. We've got some really good treatment when they're in place. That's really going to be the point where we try and get back to usual. I don't know. It's so many businesses are doing layoffs. One of my sons. His boss was just furloughed and a couple of his team members were furloughed. He's [00:05:00] kind of low end to management. He has a team that he supervises, and so the supervisor, one of the supervisors of the team supervisors got laid off. So when the business gets back going again, are they still going to have that extra layer of management in the middle? I don't think so. And some of these team members that were laid off are not necessary, you know, not, not talking about my son here, but just in general. But some of these team members that have been laid off in businesses are not necessarily the best of employees. So what does that mean? The owners and executives and businesses are going to have to find themselves running businesses in very different ways. I talked this week a little bit with Matt. Of course, I'm on the radio pretty much every morning during the week on different stations, but I was talking about what is [00:06:00] happening. What are we looking at? Where's this going? And one of the things that came up was, Hey, listen, we have these executives at the C-level. We have all of these people down, the front end, is that going to change the way most businesses work? And obviously I think the answer to that is yes, right? Absolutely. Yes. The vast majority of the burden to put together these new businesses and new operations is going to fall to the people in information technology. That's exactly what we are doing. So we've got to have it, executives, starting to talk about what does the business look like going forward? What should they be doing? How can they have an infrastructure that works for the employees and that is safe and secure because the bad guys have [00:07:00] redoubled their efforts and there are so many opportunities to them now because there are fewer eyes watching everything? Right now. Working from home is a term. That many people are using. And frankly, if you want to guarantee that the business change is going to fail, maybe you just call it working from home. Telecommuting on a corporate basis can work, but that's not everybody. That's not where we're all going to be here when we're talking about these multibillion-dollar companies. Barely any of them had true corporate work at home or telecommuting pre-COVID-19 now, some of them did in some cases, but frankly, the big distinction between work from home and corporate telecommuting is that [00:08:00] they thought work at home was an occasional thing for convenience. So, or you're not feeling well today. There's a blizzard, there's a big storm out there, or there's a power outage at the main office because they're, they're doing some construction. Some businesses also said, Hey, listen, every Friday during the summer, you know, you want to stay home once a month or whatever, just go ahead and do it and work from home. That's not corporate telecommuting. Telecommuting is where the employee or the contractor, these people who are working on a gig basis are based at the remote location full time. Now I've talked a bit about the gig economy. And gig workers before on this show, and I've talked about it many times on, on the radio and TV, but in case you don't know what that is, the gig economy is a major change. We started to see a few years ago where people, particularly businesses, were looking and saying, Hey, listen, we don't need to have all of these people on the payroll. Because in reality, this job is part-time. So why would we pay someone full time when it's a part-time job? And why would I have one person working at it when I could have three, four, or five people working at it when necessary. So all of a sudden there's an uptick in my business. Instead of having to try and find someone else, hire someone else, bring them in or, or turn down the work because I can't possibly handle it because I only have this one person who was part-time before. What we ended up doing is saying, Hey, How bout we just find people to do this one narrow thing, and the more narrowly the task can be defined, the better of the businesses because the cost goes down. [00:10:00] The more complex a task is, the more expensive it is. And you look at something like Amazon Mechanical Turk in case you're not familiar with that service. Amazon has, there are people who maybe some of you guys are doing this, who sit there and do very small, very narrow tasks for typically a fixed price. So it might be, get me the phone number and name of this doctor in this town. And you're paid a penny or whatever, 5 cents for doing that very, very narrow task. So they can go ahead and they have someone else saying, find me the name of all of the doctors that meet this criterion in this town and get me their names, their phone numbers, and their addresses. Much, much cheaper to break all of that down to the business. So they're looking at things like Mechanical Turk, but they're also looking at sites like Fiverr, which I've [00:11:00] used before as well. F I V E R R.com and if you go to fiverr.com in fact, let me go there right now while we're talking, you can find people to do almost. Anything for you. It says right on their homepage here, find the perfect freelance services for your business. And most of these are very narrow tasks. And their original idea is you, you know, five bucks, they discharged five bucks for it. And, you know, isn't that. or more reasonable thing than having to have an employee and having to have all of the expenses involved. All right, so I'll stick around. I wanted to finish this up here. A little bit of wandering and meandering as we're talking about. What does the post-WuHan virus world look like in the business space? You're listening to Craig Peterson, on W G A N and online at Craig Peterson dot com. Craig Peterson: Hi guys. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and of course online at craigpeterson.com. We were talking before the break, a little bit about the post-Covid 19 world. And I started talking about the gig economy and what it really is, what does it really mean to us? And I was just talking about a website called fiverr.com which kind of defined the whole gig economy for a while, frankly, for a number of years. And now there are more sites out there as well. But really Fiverr is the place to go online. So they have things like design a logo. Customize your WordPress website, doing voiceover whiteboard work for people. SEO, which is search engine optimization, illustration, translation, data entry. Those are kind [00:01:00] of their top categories, and you can go there. You can find what people are doing, what they're offering, what's the best thing for you, for your business? What might you want to consider? If it is really quite good and there are a lot of true experts that are making there. Their talents available to businesses now it's not just five bucks to do something. Some of these are a lot more expensive and some go on an hourly basis and, and I've used a number of other websites in the past in order to get people to hire people to do things. Upwork is one of the other big ones. U P W O R K.com. Check that one out as well. Whether you're looking for help or you want to provide help and sell some help. But upwork.com is another good one that I've used. And in both cases, I can go and post something and say, Hey, this is what I'm interested in. Having done and people will bid on it [00:02:00] for you. Now, a little inside tip here you might not be aware of in that is if you want people to bid on it, they have to be aware of it, and the only way they're going to be aware of it usually is if you reach out to them. So you have to do a bunch of studying and research and advance so that you know who looks like they might fit for you, and then you have to send them an invite directly because most of these people, especially the good ones, are not sitting there just waiting for a general. Query to come in, Hey, I need somebody to do a logo. Now they don't pay attention to that because they are in demand. So you have to find the people that you want to do. For instance, your logo, whatever the work is. So you'll go online, you'll look around, you'll look at their samples, they've posted, you'll find a few people, and I've found usually in order to find somebody that's good. I have to reach out to as many as 50 five [00:03:00] zero people on these websites to get the attention of somebody I really want. So if you are top-rated, it's phenomenal. They have ratings like at Upwork they have really great ratings and stuff for who some of the better people are. It really helps you with your decision. So when we're talking about the future, it's not just telecommuting. Or you might have lost your job. So what do you do now? I know, for instance, one of our listeners here, Linda, she reached out to me and I helped her with some, or actually one of my techs helped her out with some of the problems she was having. because she has lost her business actually, I think it was, and she's trying to start another one by doing website evaluation. You know, that's a perfect opportunity for somebody. To go to Fiverr or Upwork and see if they can't dig up a little bit of work as well. Now when you're first starting out, you're going to have to look at [00:04:00] those main feeds and you're going to have to comb through them and approach people. And you'd probably have to do stuff for really cheap until you develop a reputation. Cause you have to have people giving you those five-star reviews. But it's going to take a little bit of time. Now, one of the big questions that come up is payroll taxes. And when we're talking about the gig economy, the IRS has a set of standards that are in place that help you evaluate whether someone should be treated as a contractor or if they should be treated as an employee. And there's quite a bit of IRS case law if you want to call it that, IRS rules and regulations that have come out of the IRS courts that are paid by the IRS and judges work for the IRS and they get to decide what's right or wrong with you, right? But, there have been a lot of cases that say, Hey, listen to, here's where the line is drawn between a [00:05:00] contractor that you can pay 1099 and somebody who's W2. And that line that we're talking about is, is not just, Hey, they're working at home. Yeah. They're working from home. Well, do you supervise them? Do you give them the work that needs to be done? Are you setting deadlines? Are you telling them what equipment or software to use? You know, you need to talk to your attorneys, reach out to your accountant to figure out what all of those rules are and how they apply to you. But it, this adds yet another little twist to it. You know, it's one thing if you have just this limited task and you hire them once to do the task, like, okay, I need a logo design, or I need to have this changed on my website, or. Whatever it might be, and that's all well and good and that probably fits the contractor definition. Probably don't even have to 1099 them if you're using one of these sites like Fiverr or [00:06:00] Upwork because they're going to take care of it for you. Some of these sites will do tax withholdings for people and there's a lot of things they'll do, but where they are living also now. Will it affect your payroll taxes? So let's say that you're going to keep people on as employees and your businesses in New Hampshire, but they're living or switch it around here cause it doesn't work for New Hampshire. Right? But let's say they're living in a different state with a different tax jurisdiction. And you are your businesses in a state that has income tax provisions. I know in the Northeast we have some agreements between the States because of, of course, New Hampshire has no income tax and they're the ones that are always used for these things. But, there was an agreement between the state saying, Hey, listen, if they live in mass, you have to pay mass taxes. If you live in New Hampshire and you work in mass, you have to pay mass taxes. If you never ever stepped foot in mass, you have to pay mass. No, you don't. But did you see what happened in New York where? The governor of New York has come out and said, Oh yeah, by the way, all of you people that volunteered your time, if you stayed in New York for more than two weeks, you need to pay us income tax even though you were a volunteer. It just gets crazy. Right? So how do you keep track of all these jurisdictions? And if you're hiring people that live in some other state, they're in Illinois, they're in California, they're in one of these blue States that has crazy regulations and high taxes. Now you have to worry about all of that sort of stuff. Okay. It is really going to be difficult. The employee's home is in Atlanta. The company needs to treat that is an Atlanta office or Bureau in every way. If what's the legal [00:08:00] nexus? I've seen cases where just having a phone number from a state was enough to say, yeah, you are a resident of that state. It's really kind of crazy and not just a resident. I'm talking about businesses here. You have a business nexus there, so you have an Atlanta phone number and you don't have an office there, et cetera, but somebody answers that phone. Even if it's not in Georgia, you could get nailed you. Do you see what I'm talking about? This is absolutely going to be a huge, huge different corporate telecommuting is going to just drive us all crazy. Frankly, and in some states, you have not just the state tax, but you have a County tax, you have a city tax, all kinds of different local taxes at different percentages. I remember I had some stuff going on in Washington state, and it was different [00:09:00] tax rates, even for sales tax. You've been on the County, you were in. It, it kind of gets crazy. So, you're going to have to change their tax status if they're doing a hundred percent of their work in that other jurisdiction. And I think that's going to end up being a problem for a lot of people. So keep, keep an eye on that one is, well, ultimately this is going to lead to I think, nothing but confusion. Anyways, we'll move on to another topic when we get back enough about all of the taxes and things you're going to have to worry about with people working from home. But boy, there are a lot, no time to let your guard down because of Corona fraud. Is a huge threat. And what's we'll talk about what those real-world threats are. So stick around. We'll be right back. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN online, Craig peterson.com Craig Peterson: Hello everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here, WGAN, and of course online at craigpeterson.com. Talking a little bit, of course, it is hard to avoid this, how it got into the post-COVID world out there. What does it really mean? We're just talking. In the above telecommuting and how it's really going to cause some stresses on businesses. And you know, we've already talked in weeks past about how it's going to help businesses with a number of different things, including helping them with their ability to cut costs on, on travel and office space, et cetera. But there are a lot of other things to consider as you just went over. Oh, now we got to talk about what is happening to us at our homes and our businesses from, of course, the security side,  because it's no time to let your guard down. Coronavirus fraud is a huge threat and it's been growing. We're seeing constant warnings about it from the FBI and from. These are various security companies that are out there. Certainly, we're getting all kinds of alerts from Microsoft and from also the Cisco people, but the scammers, the bad guys out there are just constantly reusing old ways of hacking us. And they're using scams that they've used forever as well. And that's part of the reason why I always talk about making sure you stay up to date. It's more important to stay up to date right today than it ever has been before. And scammers are rehashing. Some of these campaigns, kind of like the, remember the Nigerian [00:02:00] scams way back when? Some of those are back now in a bit of a different way. So we've got countries now, and of course, our States are starting to try and get a little bit back to normal here that got some paths to recovery. And in many cases, they're trying to get rid of some of these lockdown restrictions. But meanwhile, the crisis has brought out the worst in these con artists out there. And there's a great article by Ammar over at, we live security talking about some of this thing because. Really, they're exploiting every trick in their book when it comes to trying to defraud people. They've been trying to impersonate legitimate sources of information on a pandemic. We've talked about that where they'll send out an email saying, click here to look at this map of the pandemic, and there might be ads on that or might even be worse. Various types of spyware, obviously the that they're trying to put on there, but they're trying to defraud people and they've got also these fraudulent online marketplaces set up where they're offering deals on everything from hand sanitizer through toilet paper, eh, some of the masks and things. In fact, we just saw it was like a, what was it, $250 million, or maybe it was $25 million, refund from the Chinese for some state that had ordered some of these N95 masks that, that did not meet the standards. So. The scams are everywhere, and as I said, States are getting nailed in this as well. And the most popular, by the way, COVID 19 map. If you really want to see what's going on, you should go to Johns Hopkins University and there's a professor over there by the name of Lauren Gardner at civil and systems engineering, a professor who's working with some of her graduate students. To keep this up to date. So you can go there right now. and it says it's Coronavirus dot EDU, which is, of course, John Hopkins University, which is one of these teaching universities, that is a teaching hospital, but they're showing how many deaths globally, more than a quarter-million. Oh, almost what is getting close to 80,000 deaths in the United States. I also saw some really interesting numbers that were published this week in a scientific journal about how, you know, we're, we're looking at these number of deaths and we say, okay, 80,000 deaths, which is always horrific, but a. Normal flu year would get us what, 40,000 to [00:05:00] maybe 80,000 right? We had a really bad flu year a couple of years ago, but they delved into the statistics behind it. Now, this is where it's really kind of gets interesting because when you look at those statistics behind the normal. Flu, the flu pandemic, I guess they really are. it turns out that the statistics are heavily inflated and they, it's done because we don't track flu deaths like we're tracking the COVID 19 nowhere near as much detail. People that might have died of bacterial pneumonia in years past who were to be counted as a flu death. Now that is a bit of a problem. Right? So what do you do when you have these bad statistics? They're saying that some of these years where we reported 20,000 or more flu deaths, [00:06:00] actually may have been a thousand deaths in reality. So, Right. Any, anyway, so I'm kind of rambling a little bit here, but that brought it up when I was looking at this Johns Hopkins map here in front of me, how many people have died? How many people have recovered? It turns out that at this point that this COVID 19 flu is definitely more fatal. Then the normal flu season and the article I was reading in the journal were saying it could be as much as 44 times more fatal than an average flu year. Now that's really bad, isn't it? When you get right down to it, 44 times more fatal. but we don't know yet. Right. That's kind of a bottom line on all of this. We just really don't know and we're not going to know for a while. Anyways, back to it. [00:07:00] These maps, and I'm looking at a picture of one right now that was in, we live security.com, which is a map. It looks a lot like the John Hopkins map, and it probably is actually, and on top of that, it's got an ad for, you might need disposable coveralls with a hood protective suit. Now. Is this good? Is this not a good suit? They say, click on that to see it on Amazon. And Amazon certainly could have these for, for sale, but are they really sending you to Amazon or are they sending you to some other site out there? Right. What are they doing? They've got a live chat. They've set up. It's, it's really kind of amazing what the bad guys have done. They put a lot of work into this. The world health organization. you know, I don't know, the bigger, the higher up a government or non-governmental entity is in the food chain, [00:08:00] the less I like them, but they do have their own dashboard showing you what they think is going on. With the Coronavirus, so you'll find them at who dot I N T, which is the world health organization international, and they've got a big warning right on their homepage. Beware of criminals pretending to be the world health organization. they will, they're saying they will never, they, the world health organization will never ask for your username or password to access safety information. They'll never send email attachments you didn't ask for. They'll never ask you to visit a link outside of. Who dot I. N. T. They'll never charge money to apply for a job, register for a conference, or reserve a hotel, and they'll never conduct lotteries or offer prizes, grants, certificates, or funding through email. So that gives you an idea of the scams that are being pulled [00:09:00] right now when it comes to the world health organization. So don't let your guard down everybody, these emails that are going out are a real problem. They've got fake one-stop shops for all of your pandemic needs. That's a problem as well. Just just be very careful where you go. I'm looking at some emails as well. They've got tricks and there are many of them are the same old tricks they've always been using. Don't fall for the tricks. All right. Stick around. When we get back, we're moving on again. We're going to talk about this new executive order from President Trump. Is it going to make us safer? You're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online Craig peterson.com. Craig Peterson: Hello everybody. Welcome back Craig Peterson here. You can find me on pretty much any podcast platform that's out there. One of the easiest ways is to go to Craig peterson.com/whatever your favorite podcast mechanism is. iTunes is kind of the 500-pound gorilla. They're not the 800 anymore. They're just 500 and you can get there by Craigpeterson.com/itunes. Craig peterson.com/spotify Craig peterson.com/tunein whatever your favorite might be, you'll find me right there. So let's get into our next kind of controversial topic. And this has to do with President Trump's ban. Now it went into effect on May 1st, so it's been around for a couple of weeks. It seemed to be something that was released kind of at the spur of the moment. And it has to do with cybersecurity and the critical infrastructure. Now, you probably know that I ran for a couple of years, the FBI's InfraGard webinar training programs, and we did a whole bunch of training on critical infrastructure stuff. That's really kind of the mandate for InfraGard, but critical infrastructure. Now, just look at all of the jobs with Colvid 19 that were considered critical. The critical infrastructure really encompasses most of the economy nowadays. Even law offices are considered critical infrastructure. He said with a chuckle. Now that can be a problem. It can be good. It can be bad. It really kind of all depends, right? But bottom line, when I'm talking about critical infrastructure, I'm talking about the infrastructure that literally runs the country. There's one of the most overused words in the English language, literally, but in this case, [00:02:00] it really does. We're talking about the infrastructure that controls our electric grid, the infrastructure that controls our telephones, our smart devices. Obviously the infrastructure that controls the internet, the infrastructure that controls our sewage systems, our water systems, the whole electric grid, all the way up to our houses. That is the major part of critical infrastructure. Obviously our roads are considered critical infrastructure and the bridges and, and all of the ways of maintaining them. That's all pretty darn critical because without those commerce comes to a slowdown, dramatic and maybe a grinding halt and people die. Think about what happens if a whole region loses power, which happened here, went back in Oh four, I guess, and I think that was the most recent time. It happened in a very big way in, [00:03:00] was it 86 up in Quebec? And the one in Quebec was because of a bit of solar activity and the one here, you know, I've seen attributed to a bunch of things. The most recent one was that. Our power outage was probably done because of a probe into our electric grid, looking to see if they could potentially hack it and it ended up tripping one of these sites, one of these major sites that are used for distributing electricity, and then that tripped another, tripped to another, tripped to another and before we know it, we had a major cascade failure. So all of that stuff is very, very critical. If, if you've been in a hospital, you know how much they eat electricity. Now, hospitals, of course, have generators for the most part, and that's an important thing for them to have, right? You want to be able to have power if the power [00:04:00] goes out. So, okay, I get that, and that's a very good thing. But at some point, if you don't have access to, let's say, the diesel to run the generators, or maybe they're natural gas generators and you can't run those. What ultimately can you trust if you're a hospital. Because if the whole region loses power, so let's say New England, we lost power in all of the new England states, including New York State, New York City, maybe New Jersey. So we're talking about a five-hour car ride in order to get beyond where this particular power outage occurred. That means even people that have generators are going to run out of fuel because they, the gas stations aren't going to work. Most of them don't have. Pumps. So the trucks can't really deliver it cause the gas station doesn't have electricity. They can't be on, they just don't know what's happening. So they're going to have to send trucks to New Jersey or someplace to try and pick up diesel. And if it's even broader to say we had another Carrington event, like what happened in the mid 18 hundreds where there was a major solar flare that knocked out everything in the country. Now back in the mid 18 hundreds that weren't such a big deal. Today it would be huge. So between those two, obviously having a more localized power failure is better. How about the sewage where it all backs up maybe into the streets? How about the water supply where we just can't get water. Because it shut down. So many of these devices are now part of our internet of things, and that's a real problem.  So President Trump signed this executive order that prohibits operators of the United States power grid to buy and to install any electrical equipment that has been manufactured outside of the US they're even going so far as to provide funding and finances to remove some of this equipment from our electrical infrastructure. You probably already know that we are not allowing these Chinese firms to build our new five G infrastructure or any of the equipment that's in it either. Then here's the code from the order. I further find that unrestricted acquisition or use in the United States of the bulk power system, electric equipment designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by persons owned by controlled by or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of foreign adversaries augments the ability of the foreign adversaries to create an exploit vulnerabilities in bulk power system, electric equipment with potentially catastrophic effect.  I think he's right. We're seeing these power grids, water grids, et cetera, being attacked. And much of it's coming through the internet of things like keep warning people about, it's, it's really, it's just absolutely amazing. So let's go back. I went and checked in the news, cause I had heard about what had happened over in Israel. And this is May 7th okay, so this week, this is very, very recent. Israel is blaming the US for Iran causing a widespread cyberattack on Israeli water and sewage facilities during April. This was a report that came out from Fox News on Thursday, and according to the report, [00:08:00] Iran used American servers to hack into the facilities. A I've talked about this now for 20 years, and, this whole part of it just really bothers me. They used American servers. Most of the time when the bad guys are using American servers using American computers, what they've actually done is they have compromised a server. 20 years ago we were talking about how Al Qaeda was videotaping the beheading of Americans and distributing them worldwide using American servers. Isn't that amazing? It's shocking. It shouldn't be shocking anyways to all of us, but that's what they were doing. They were using servers that they had hijacked. Now here we are 20 years later and Iran is using these servers to attack. [00:09:00] We know that our servers here, our desktops are being used, they're being compromised and then use to do denial of service attacks. Many other types of attacks out there. So it looks like President Trump might have been a little bit ahead of the game here. I'm looking at, the article here that I'm seeing on the Jerusalem Post. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the issue at last year's cyber tech conference in Televiv saying that Iran is attacking Israel on a daily basis. We monitor it and prevent it every day. They are threatening and other ways. What is important is that every country can be attacked and each country needs a combination of defense and attack capabilities. Israel has such an ability. So think that through a little bit. I know here in the US we have the ability to attack back, no question about that. Now, I also found [00:10:00] online over at, Analytics India magazine online, and this is from a couple of weeks back, three weeks ago, cyberattacks on the critical infrastructure of India is a worrying trend. So let's see, we've got the US that we know has had the critic, our critical infrastructure tack. We know your Iran appears to be responsible for Israeli. Critical infrastructure attacks, and according to the prime minister, they're being attacked daily. We've got India, and here's another one. This is the Czech Republic. This is just a quick search that I did online to find out who's been attacked lately. And this is from April 20th so what about three weeks ago? Attempted cyber attacks against several hospitals and an airport in the Czech Republic show. The coronavirus pandemic has not slowed down the West digital adversaries. So the leaders over in the Czech Republic are saying that they were able to stop these attacks, but they're getting more highly sophisticated attacks all of the time. Czech's top cybersecurity agency has warned, expected imminent serious cyberattacks against us healthcare sector aimed at disabling computers and destroying data. So in many cases, it's ransomware. In fact, that's the number one threat right now against our businesses in the US, it's still ransomware. Can you believe it? It is still ransomware. We are still not protecting ourselves and our business. It just drives me nuts. And that's our, we'll do some more training about this in the next few weeks here. This is particularly problematic right now because we're, we are in the middle of a pandemic. We do have hospitals trying to treat patients and they are under attack and they are getting ransomware and some of these big ransomware bad guys out there. I've said, Oh, no, no, no, we're not. Going to, Hey, if we do take control accidentally of the hospital's computers, we're just going to release it right away. We're not going to hold them ransom, and yet they have been, so be very careful. Everybody, this is, this is not going away anytime soon. They are going to continue to attack us. So when we get back, let's talk about something fun here. Let's talk about what the James Dyson Foundation is doing for our kids. You're listening to Craig Peterson here on W G A N and online CraigPeterson.com/subscribe make sure you get my weekly newsletter so you keep on top of all of these new stories for the week, and I'll be on with Matt Wednesday at seven 30. Craig Peterson: Hey everybody, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. I'm on every Saturday from one til three and I am so grateful you guys have joined me today and all of the people that have been signing up today from my newsletter, by the way, when you sign up, I've got. Three little special surprises that only don't even mention when you sign up. So we'll be getting those over the course of the next week or so. Some really great tip sheets, some tools that you can use in order to help make sure your home and your business is properly secured. And hopefully by now. they've started running my little features and those are going to be fantastic. I'm trying to generate a couple of weeks so we can put them up and keep them fresh. But it, it kinda goes into some details of, you know what you should do. So let me, I'm going to put one in here right now. Play one of these features. This one's on passwords. Just give an idea of what these are so you can kind of keep an eye, an ear out for them. I was going to say an eye, but it's obviously an ear. Have you ever heard the term poned? While you might have been poned? Hi, this is Craig Peterson here with a security blink about something known as powning. Poned means that your account has been the victim of a data breach. Your username and password have been stolen from a third party. Now there's an easy way to find out if your account login has been stolen. Troy hunt started and still maintained a website called have I been postponed? He's collected the records of almost 10 billion user accounts from the dark web. Think about that for a minute. If you have an online user account, the odds are that your account data is online, out in the dark web, and the bad guys are using the same information they're finding on the dark web to send you phishing emails recently that's included scareware emails that are threatening to release some information about you. If you don't pay a Bitcoin ransom to prove their point, they're including your email address and password they found online. I'm contacted by listeners every week because these emails truly are scary, but are best ignored. How do you find out if you've been a victim of a data breach? Although it's safe to assume that you have been, you can just go online to have I been poned.com. Troy will let you enter your email address and he will search his database to see if your account information has been stolen. So what should you do? Get one password. It's the best password manager I've ever found. Use it to automatically generate a new password for you. For every online account, you have. One password will also automatically check to see if your account is listed on have I been pwned. To find out more about pwned accounts and password management and to find out how best to use them. Visit Craig peterson.com/compromised. So that's what we're doing, putting them out. I think that sounds pretty good. I heard it sounds really good. I'm thinking of the future ones, I'm going to do it a little bit less scripted. It just sounds too highly produced. I don't know what you guys think. Let me know. Just email me@craigpeterson.com I love to get a little bit of feedback from you. Well, let's get into our friend here, James Dyson. Now, in case you don't know who this is, James Dyson, that's spelled D. Y. S. O. N. He's a British inventor, and you probably know him best via his vacuum, the Dyson vacuum. It's really kind of a cool thing. Definitely overkill, but this thing works on the principle of cyclonic separation. And they used some of the similar technology too that Dyson did in order to make some very cool bladeless of fans that you can get. I really liked these things. They're absolutely amazing. He has designed a whole bunch of things. I'm looking right now at his Wikipedia page, and of course, they've got a picture of his bagless Dyson vacuum cleaner, which is really what got him into most homes, most people to understand, but he has been very, very big in inventing things over the years. I like his air blade hand dryer, which you will see at many bathrooms, probably more of them as you go forward. It does use ultraviolet light in order to clean the air. It doesn't spray it all around. I do not like and I have never liked the air dryers and bathrooms. It makes the spread of germs inevitable. It is a very, very bad idea and yet. So many people just think it's fantastic, right? So much easier. We don't have, to use paper towels, which are frankly much better. They spread the disease a lot less. So the Dyson air blade is a very, very cool, hand dryers, kind of like a squeegee. Air to remove water rather than trying to just blow it all away or evaporated with heat very fast drying, a lot less energy and safer too for us in this COVID-19 day. Anyways, let's get into what he's done right now. He's trying to encourage kids to do a little bit of experimentation. He has this fantastic PDF that you can download by going to the James Dyson Foundation website that you can just search for online, James Dyson, DYSON foundation. Now a few, our parent, [00:06:00] grandparent, if you're homeschooling because there's no more school for the year, or you're homeschooling because it's just a great thing to do. You're gonna want to check this out. It would have been handy when my wife and I were homeschooling all of our kids as well, but he's got these challenge cards is what he's calling them, and there are a total of 22 science challenges and 22 engineering challenges. Yeah. It's just so cool. One of these, the first one reminds me of when I was a kid, cause I remember doing this in school and this is how to get an egg to fit into a bottle without breaking it. Now, back then when I was in school, of course, it was a milk bottle, but what they're doing is they want you to get a glass bottle that has a mouth that smaller than the egg. You're going to put that egg into a glass of vinegar and make sure it's completely covered.  So within two days, that egg is going to be very rubbery. Do you remember doing this? You guys ever done this? Then you heat the bottle in hot water. Obviously make sure that you remember a taut, okay. Use a tea towel and your handle it, and then rest the egg on the neck of the bottle. You don't want to put it so the narrow end is down over the mouth of the bottle. Then as the Air inside cools down, it's going to contract. Right. Expand contract, right as you heat and cool. So. The bottle is going to contract a little bit. The air is going to contract a lot. And you're going to have a vacuum inside this bottle, so it's going to suck the egg inside. So cool. And then the card goes into some detail. How does it work? It talks about the protein and what kind of acid is in the vinegar and what ends up happening. It actually [00:08:00] changes the chemical compound of the egg, which is what makes it rubbery. They've got this underwater volcano thing, which is so cool. This is a colorful underwater volcano that you can make very simple, again, ping pong balls and making them float using a hairdryer. It talks about the Bernoulli Bernoulli effect, which is, you remember I first learned about when I was starting to work on these new hard drives that had just come out and how har, how the heads floated using. Bernoulli a fact, a balloon, kebabs. Can you put a skewer into a balloon without popping it? So they explain how that works, what to do, what not to do. Liquid densities, just a whole ton of them. A geodesic dome is their first engineering challenge. Let me see if I can pull that up on my screen because this is pretty cool to make. Make sure you grab this, send it to your kids, grandkids. Use it yourself. Measuring the speed of light weather balloon. How to make a paperclip float. Yeah. Surface tension. Right. Skipped, fire extinguisher, scared pepper, dancing raisins that so many cool things. A lava lamp. I've always thought those were the coolest things. Did you know that some of the best random number generators out there right now are actually using lava lamps? A whole bunch of them. The visible link and then the Geodesic dome is you're using these jelly sweets and cocktail sticks and putting them all together. And how is it done? Talks about Buckminster fuller. I just love this stuff. I don't know about you guys, but it's so simple. Marble runs the kids can make, and it's where marble is running down the outside of a box and how you guided spaghetti bridges. See, all of these are cheap, strong as this drinking [00:10:00] straw. Not the crappy paper ones, but a real drinking straw. Electric motors. Yeah. Anyhow, check it out online. Of course, there's a link to it as well @craigpeterson.com you can go there. You can see all of this week's articles, and if you are a subscriber to my email list. You will already have it in your mailbox, should have gone out to this morning. So double-check your email. If you did not get it, just send me an email to me@craigpeterson.com that's Peterson with an S O N.com and just ME. Right. Me, it's me and Craig peterson.com and I'll be glad to double-check as to why you didn't get it. Hopefully, I didn't get caught in a spam box somewhere cause we send out thousands of these things every week. And you never know if someone, if people don't open them, I don't know if he knew how this works, but if people don't open them, like on Gmail, Google mail, if they're not, people don't open them. They assume, Oh, nobody's interested in this. And so it gets a lower priority until all of a sudden Google thinks, Oh well. This must be spam because people aren't opening it. So make sure you open it and download any graphics that are in there. Cause that tells Google and everybody else that, Hey, you care about this email. If you turn off the remote images, which is what I normally do personally. but when I get a newsletter, I always make sure to turn it back on. so if you got the images, then Google or AOL or Hotmail or office who 65 whatever you're using will know that it is a good email. It's valid. All right. Stick around. When we get back, we're moving to be on we're going to talk a little bit about Microsoft teams and some phishing that's been going on. You're listening to Craig Peterson here on W G A N. Craig Peterson: Hello everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN online and craigpeterson.com. We've been covering a lot of stuff this show today. We just talked about these challenge cards and if you're interested, if you didn't get that URL, I'm going to give it to you again. I love these things are great for your kids, grandkids coming over for the day, whatever it might be. Go online and go to either look for James Dyson's foundation or just go to my website craigpeterson.com. You'll find it there under the radio show, but the James Dyson Foundation is who published these things they're absolutely phenomenal. We also talked about President Trump's executive order banning foreign electrical equipment from getting into our grid. Looks like they're trying to remove equipment that's already there. After the attacks that have been mounted all around the world against different [00:01:00] countries is no time to let your guard down. We've got Corona fraud in a very, very big way still, so we talked about some of that, what that's all about, and telecommuting in a post-COVID 19 world, what does that look like? How is that going to affect our businesses, our lives, our jobs, et cetera? So if you missed any of that, you can just go online to Craig peterson.com check the podcast and you can listen to it right there. I've also been trying to put them up over on YouTube and put them up on Facebook from time to time. I'm going to get better about that. I absolutely have to because we've got to get this message out to everybody, and if you have shared my newsletter with friends or some of these webinars I did. Two dozen over the course of a couple of weeks if you shared any of them. I just want to thank you guys so much for doing that. This is such an important thing for me to get the word out. That's what I've been trying to do for. Decades now because I got nailed as a small business owner by one of these pieces of nasty where there was out circulating at the time, and I really don't want it to happen to you or anybody else. And it really upsets me when I see some of these advertisers who are deceiving people. Just this week I broke down one of these ads I was hearing for VPNs. And every word they were saying was correct. But if you get into like the legal definition, if you're sworn in, it's the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, right? It's not what it's supposed to be. What does that mean? Well, the truth, you know? Okay. So did you rob that store? No. Okay. That's the truth of the whole truth might be, no, I did not Rob that store, but I heard Jane robbed the store, or I know Jane robbed this store or that would be the whole truth. So they, they're talking about their VPN product. And they're talking about how it can keep your data away from prying eyes. Well, yeah, it's kind of true, but it also exposes you to even more prying eyes. You see what I'm talking about when I say not the whole truth. So that's why I've been doing all of these free little training and also been doing lots of stuff for some of the paid courses and training too, because we've got to help people understand, and that leads us to what we're going to talk about right now, which is Microsoft teams. And now Microsoft teams are not bad. It's software that you can get as part of your now called, [00:04:00] Microsoft three 65 subscriptions, which can be good, right? And teams are what you need in order to have collaborative work and to be able to do collaborative work. But just as a quick word of warning, the only collaboration system out there right now that has full-audibility and all of the features that are required by some of the more advanced regulations is WebEx teams. But anyways, on all of these fronts from the Microsoft teams through, you might be using Slack, which is another very popular one, and even WebEx, but we're seeing a whole lot of phishing emails, and there's a warning that just came out here this last week that. People, particularly people who are working in industries such as energy, retail, and hospitality. There are some hackers out there right now that are attacking people specifically pretending they are from Microsoft teams. So they're trying to steal the access credentials of employees who are working from home. And what we've been finding is that many of the people who are working from home right now are. You know, they're, they're not being supervised by the security people. They're using a home computer. It may or may not be up to date. It may or may not have reasonable security precautions on it. It can be a real problem. And when they are getting an email like this, if you ever get an email that looks like it's from Microsoft or looks like it from a vendor that you've been using. If you're in the office, you might lean over to somebody else and say, what do you think of this email? Do you think this is legitimate? Or you might report it to your people, your security people, et cetera. But we're finding with people working from home that they're not double-checking it. And so they're clicking on a [00:06:00] link. They think, Oh my gosh, I'm not using Microsoft teams properly, or I mess something up and there's something I have to do. I got to recover this. I got to figure this out. And in fact, what it is, is that the bad guys out there that are trying to hack you realize what it is that you're trying to do, which is get, just get my work done, right? Just get the software working. So they have been directing attacks to the people. That is a little bit more ignorant in some of these ways. All right. Now at this point, it looks like most of these attacks are not highly targeted. In other words, it's not spearphishing. So it goes right back to what I was talking about earlier. Those emails that we were getting from the Nigerian Prince, right? They are general. So they're unlikely to mention your username and Microsoft teams, even your company. They are just generic and they can be sent to anybody. And so the hackers have taken a list of different companies and what businesses they're in and have been trying to direct them to those businesses. Now, the URLs that are in these, oftentimes we're finding that they. Are using multiple levels of URL redirect, and the idea behind that is to throw off these malicious link detection tools that are out there and to hide the actual URL of the final domain that's being used to host the ultimate attack. Isn't this something. These people are doing. So I did some training here on using Cisco Umbrella, which is a product that we sell, but you can buy directly from Cisco. It is specifically designed to help prevent these types of attacks, and I think it's really important that everybody use that installs it right. Get the free version if that is what you need. If you're a business, you should talk with me because there are special business levels that are not offered on the umbrella website, but special business versions that allow a lot more tracking and a lot more granular control. But make sure you have this in place because even with the multiple redirects, the odds are high that Cisco umbrella is going to be able to attack that. All right. So one message is impersonating the notification that's received when a coworker is trying to connect with you or contact you via teams. The other one is claiming that the recipient has a file waiting for them on Microsoft teams, and the email footer even has legitimate links to. The Microsoft websites, you know, Microsoft teams, application downloads, et cetera. And in one of the attacks, these phishing emails containing a link to a document hosted on a site used by an email marketing company. So we have to be very, very careful. And especially now we're, we're working more at home. We are going to be continuing to work more at home, move most of us anyway, and we are using these collaboration tools and maybe you don't have access to your normal texts of people that you would text support people that you would have access to. So double-check all of that. Well, when we come back, we're going to talk about the biggest threat. To the small, medium enterprise space. You're a small business, your small office, your home office, what it is, what those numbers look like, and what you can do about it. And we will be back in just a couple of minutes here. This is Craig Peterson, you are listening to me on W G A N or online at Craig, Peterson.com stick around. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig Peterson here. So glad to have you guys. I really enjoy helping out and I love getting those emails you guys send to me. You're so kind. They're just on some of the compliments and some of your suggestions. It's just fantastic and you can reach me directly. By sending an email to me@craigpeterson.com now, I get a lot of emails, particularly lately, so if it takes me a little bit to get back to you, I apologize in advance, but we do try and get back to all of the people who reach out, but you know, that's not always possible. Just a matter of life, I guess, in this day and age. All right, so let's move on to our next topic for today, and that has to do with the biggest threat out there right now for the small business space. And I was looking at some numbers here during the break. I'm trying to [00:01:00] figure out, so, so what is. Going on. We, we've talked a lot about phishing. We talked about what was just happening here in some of the online space. Things you need to look out for and what, what we're really talking about here when we call talk about small business, the biggest threat is. Ransomware to realize that. How long has ransomware been along? Been around? Excuse me. How long has it been out there? How long has it been attacking us? We have some statistics out there. I'm looking at right now from health net security saying that 46% are small, medium businesses have been targeted by ransomware, and 73% have. Paid the ransom. Now, paying the ransom can be cheap. It can be expensive. It really depends. Of course, the FBI suggests you don't pay a ransom because of two reasons. One, it doesn't guarantee you'll get your data [00:02:00] back. In fact, half of the time when a Ransom's paid all of the data is not. Recovered. And the other reason is it shows the bad guys who will pay ransoms, which means, Hey, listen, guys, you guys are paying a ransom.  Maybe we should go after you again because unfortunately, many of the businesses that have been hit by this stuff don't properly update. their security and those are the companies that ended up coming to me. Right? They should have come before the ransomware hit, not after the ransomware hit and not after they had a second problem. You know, if, if you've got somebody who's providing you with its services. And you have been, you know, ransomed. Don't go back to them to try and fix the problem. It's like, well, who was it Einstein that said that the same thinking that created a problem cannot solve the problem. And we've seen that again and again and again, but paying the ransoms. Here's what it costs right now. 43% of SMBs said they've paid between 10,000 and 50,000 to ransomware attackers. 13% said they were forced to pay more than $100,000 now, I can guarantee you any SMB out there, well, if you're like 500 employees. Huh? It's going to cost you more than a hundred thousand. But, uh, you know, if you are a company that has less than a hundred employees, it's not going to cost you more than that. Not even close to it, but paying the ransom doesn't guarantee anything. If you are a bigger company, we're seeing the average cost of one of these attacks being over a million dollars, because if you're trying to recover, you're trying to do the. Great. You got to notify all of your customers, your customers, find out that you've been hacked and that you had ransomware, you had the lost business while you were down. You [00:04:00] have a lost reputation after you get back. Okay. It's just absolutely amazing. Now. Businesses that are in the B to B space like mine, right? I'm, I'm a business to business. In other words, my services, my security services, the hardware, everything. We're selling to businesses. I really don't deal with consumers, although we've certainly helped a lot of consumers out there, listen to the radio show, but the businesses that are in the B2B space are. Saying that about 80% of them, this is self-evaluation. 80% of them are prepared for an attack to some degree or another. They've at least taken some preparatory steps. People, these businesses that are selling to individuals. In other words, B to C, business to consumer, it's about 20% less. All right? It's crazy. 28% of SMBs admitted that they do not have a plan to mitigate a ransomware attack. So it's very important to get all of this stuff together because the bad guys are coming after us. You've got to have a plan. You've got to prevent the attack. So what do you do? Since ransomware. It is right now really the top threat it gets in via phishing attacks. It gets in a lot of different means, but it's really a saran somewhere. That's the bottom line. I would suggest something here because I know you guys. It is so frustrating trying to do updates. It's even more frustrating when you install an update and it breaks something. Right. And frankly, the update thing comes up in the middle of doing something. You say, Oh, I'll do this later. So you put it off. Hopefully, you're running the pro version of Microsoft Windows, not the home version that doesn't let you do much of them put off. And then they'd remind you the next day, Oh, I gotta do this. I gotta remember to do [00:06:00] this. And then you delay it. And in my training, I talk about what the best delays are to use, depending on what kind of business you are, but you gotta kind of figure that out. What are the best delays, uh, between the time Microsoft tells you that you should do it and, and when you absolutely need to do it? So you're sitting there and saying, ah, last time I did this, I had problems and took me a day to recover and I lost all of that work and I don't really know what I'm doing right. I don't know if I should legitimately install it or not. Right? Have you guys had those questions? Yeah, I bet you have. Send me an email me@craigpeterson.com if you've ever had any of those types of questions go through your mind because I think it's normal. Those are the same questions that go through my mind, my team's mind. So what we end up doing, of course, is doing a bunch of online research, at least we understand a little bit about what needs to [00:07:00] be done and how to do that sort of evaluation, right? We're kind of security professionals, so I get it, right? You're sitting there wondering, what should I do? So because of that, let me tell you the secret. Cause it really is a secret. Obviously try and stay up to date. Obviously have windows defender turned on and UpToDate, as UpToDate as you can get it, but I mentioned it in the last segment and if you want more details, go back to the last segment. You can find that online@craigpeterson.com under my radio show. But listen to what I had to say there because probably the best thing you can do. It installs and uses Umbrella. Cisco umbrella is available for free. There are home versions, there are family versions, there are paid versions. They do not sell any of the, you know, the real business versions on their website, and you can always email me@craigpeterson.com if you have some questions about which one's best for you. But what we deal with typically is the enterprise versions. I'm even using the enterprise umbrella. That my company sells at my house, right. In order to protect everything appropriately. But what happens with ransomware is it has to call home. Usually, when malware gets onto your computer and it establishes a foothold, one of the first things that do is call home. So it calls home and says, okay, I've got this computer. What do you want me to do? And the more modern ransomware will give lists of the files that you have on your computer. He liked that. And so it asks, Hey, listen, the files on your computer are this, that, and the other thing. So a bad guy, I'll look at the names of the files on your computer, and if it's interesting, they'll get on your computer. They'll poke around a little bit. And that's why there's such a variant in how much the ransom is. Sometimes they'll demand multimillion-dollar ransoms for the data if they think that you might be worth it. If you are a town, for instance, you're a city like Atlanta. Look at this. They've been ransomed what, two or three times we know of. So the first thing it tries to do is call home. The first thing some of this phishing email does is try and get you to one of these sites where you can get the ransomware. Umbrella, Cisco Umbrella is designed to stop both. It's available for free. Install it. Now I have a course on it and I may be giving that course again. An absolutely free course. We'll see soon, so I'll make sure on my email list so you get it, Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig Peterson: Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig Peterson here. Hard to believe the time is almost up, but you know, because that's the way that

James:  Hi, audience and listeners, this is James Kandasamy from Achieved  Wealth Through Value-add Real Estate Investing Podcast. Today, I have Bruce Petersen, my buddy from central Texas and in Austin too. So, Hey, Bruce, welcome to the show. Bruce: Thanks for having me. It's just going to be a blast. This will be the first person I've done a podcast with that I actually knew before the podcast. James: Good, good, good. So let me just make sure I introduce Bruce properly. So Bruce owns like almost 940 units as a GP, he's the operator. He focuses a lot on Austin and San Antonio and he has done overall almost 1100 units. And how long have you been in the industry, Bruce? Bruce: Started my education in 2011. I bought my first 48 unit property as a syndicated deal back in 2012. James: Okay, awesome. So tell our audience before becoming a multifamily syndicator what were you doing? Bruce: Well, like we talked a little bit before we started here, I'm a college dropout. I'm the guy that did not thrive in a formal education environment. It was sucking the life out of me. So I dropped out of college, fell under retail because you know, I don't have a degree, there's not a whole lot open to me unless I want to start my own business. And back then, I had ideas but nothing formal. So I went into retail and I did that for 18 years. I quit working for other people at the age of 43 in 2000, I guess it was 13, I guess. Well, no, 2010, I think. And just started looking around and trying to figure out what to do with my life. I did a Google search to find somebody to help me invest in real estate because I didn't know how to do it. And I got very lucky and found a really good mentor. She helped me through the process on the first one, even a little bit on the second one. And you know, we've been off and running since. James: Got it. Got it. So, you have like almost 940 units. I mean, did you expect Covid-19 to happen and cost this recession? Bruce: Did I expect it? Of course, I expected it. Nobody saw this shit coming. This is that whole Black Swan thing, right? That Holy crap, this is probably going to make 2008/2009 look kind of small. I'm not worried, honestly, I'm not Chicken Little, I'm not a pessimist. I'm not a doom and gloom guy. I'm the eternal optimist. We're gonna make it through this without question. Things are a little dicey right now. What kind of collections are we going to have for the month of May? I'm not sure. People were worried in April, but April turned out to be pretty good. We averaged about 95 to 96% across our portfolio o we're fine. May, we're already starting to see a prepaid rents being made now. This is April 29th, right now, that we're recording this, but we're starting to see prepaid rents come in like we normally do. So I think we're going to be okay. James: Yeah, I mean, we were worried about April payment. Now we are going to May 1st week, right? I mean, next week I guess. Well, this week we are going to May 1st, so it's just crazy. So hopefully things doesn't change. And did you do anything different in your property that you have ensured that everybody's taken care of and was paying on time and you know, what did you do differently right now? Bruce: Yeah, just like you, I believe you have your own management company as well as we have our own management company too. So we're on the phone all the time with our staff, first and foremost, making sure everybody is healthy; both physically and mentally. I gotta make sure that we are the voice of call for our staff right now to make sure they don't get panicked. If they feel panic or concern coming from me as the leader of this thing, we're all doomed. So that's the thing. I'm an eternal optimist anyways, but I'm going way above and beyond to make sure that they feel we got this under control, guys. But you know, outside of, you know, making sure everybody's safe, we have closed all of our offices, you know, we're the whole touchless thing you're hearing about everywhere. We do self-guided tours. We've done virtual tours for leasing. We're still leasing, right? One of my properties, we've actually leased more in April than we did in March and that blew me away. We leased probably about 25 to 30% more in the month of April than we did March. So that was really surprising. James: That was surprising in one of our properties. We virtually list more than when they were in the office and we were joking, Hey maybe we don't need staff in the office Bruce: We haven't gone that far but... James: The prospects are running away because we do face to face, maybe we should do everything virtually. Bruce: Well, it's funny that we're rethinking a lot of things in this industry right now. What do we really, really need to do our jobs effectively? You know, just like all industries, all companies, you know, not so much for us, but companies that go to an office every day. How big an office do I really need, cause it looks like maybe my staff can truly work from home? So there will be things that change after we come out of this. So it'll be exciting. I think we're going to be better off for it. And a lot of people think, yeah, I'm a nut for saying stuff like that, I'm naive. I think we will be better off. It's going to take some time to get to that point but once we do fully recover, I firmly believe we're going to be better off as an industry, as a country, and as a world, honestly. James: Got it. Got it. So let's go down to the market and submarket and all that. Right? So why did you choose Austin and San Antonio? Bruce: I live in Austin. It was easy. My mentor taught me to buy something for your first deal that you can get to within an hour, hour and a half, maybe. And I thought, well, it's not much closer than 10 minutes down the road from my house. So I bought down the street from my house. James: And it's an awesome market by itself, Texas and [06:12 crosstalk]  Bruce: Austin's a little...well, I guess a lot of major cities are like this, but I live in a really nice part of town, but I'm only 10 minutes away from my properties, which are kind of a much more working-class area, we'll put it. But that's why we decided to buy here because it was a great market and it was right down the street. And then we branched out to San Antonio. Same thing. We can get to it within an hour and a half. My regionals can get back and forth easily. There are no worries there. So it's worked out very well. You know, we happen to be in one of the hottest parts of the country to buy and it happened to be my backyard. James: Yeah. Yeah. I was looking at the numbers published by CVRE talking about cities, which was performing very well before the Covid-19 and Austin is number one, so it's crazy out there. So what do you think the difference is between Austin and San Antonio? Bruce: Austin? I'm more profitable here, almost, always. San Antonio does well for us, but we're almost always more profitable in Austin. The pocket we've always bought in, in Austin is an incredible pocket. You know, I've got a studios going for over 900 bucks and it's in Rundberg and the Moore. If you Austin, that's by big city standards, it's not a dangerous neighborhood, but by Austin standards, it's one of our rougher neighborhoods. But I've got studios going for over 900 bucks. I've got three bedrooms. I'm the only one in the submarket that has a three bedroom but they leased for as high as 1749. So, we do better in Austin. We prefer Austin again cause we live here, but we have higher class properties down there. We have B plus properties in San Antonio. We've always had C to C plus properties in Austin, but they've been more profitable. James: Got it, got it. I mean you are similar to me, right? I mean we have our own vertically integrated company. But how did you structure your company in terms of staffing? Bruce: Well, first of all, and a lot of people don't understand this, especially people first getting into it. The management company owns the employees. And I hate to use the word own because that sounds, you know, like they're just animals or you know, they're just numbers. They're human beings that we love dearly but they do work for the management company. They do not work for the properties at all. So a couple of things there that now, I'm free to move people from property to property as I see fit. If they're owned by that property, that's one specific investor base. This is the same investors that invested in the other property down the street. So it gets a little weird moving salaries and people around for property to property but we don't have that problem this way.  And then secondly, with the PPP, the Payroll Protection Program that they rolled out that not many people that I know guys cause it all filled up with who's Chris hub. But what happened is a lot of people were told that, look, if you're a GP and that's your only exposure in multifamily, we're not going to support you with those PPP and this is an investment for you. Oh, but I have a management company so I have an actual functioning business on top of an investment so I get to submit for the PPB through my management company and I didn't have any problems. So that's the way we structure it and it works very well by having everybody under one umbrella too instead of spread over the properties. I have more employees in that one company so I can get better insurance rates as well.  James: Got it, got it. What about in terms of like you and the site management stuff? I mean one of the roles that you do, I think, I believe you have original, I'm not sure whether you have a VP of operations or not and then going down to the site staff, how did you structure it? How did you do your split off with roles and responsibilities? Bruce: So in the beginning, like all entrepreneurs, when you start a business, you got a new company. We wore every hat and my wife and I, every single hat and then we had the onsite staff. So we've never done the onsite work. We've always bought large enough to afford a onsite staff. But then as we started to grow, we started to bring in, we've got bookkeeping now in-house. We've got a regional manager in house. We have a director of operations, but not a director of operations, he's actually an operations manager. He's doing all the back-office work. He helps set up vendor contracts. He renegotiates vendor contracts that people are having issues. He works somewhat as our tech guy also. So that's the way we've laid it out.  And then Stephanie, my wife and I, we are basically the two people that provide direction, leadership, and vision and make sure our culture is exactly where we want it to be. So day to day, like boots on the ground, we don't do a lot of that anymore, but we're always involved every single day; digesting numbers, making decisions based on reports, walking properties, make sure everything looks right, making sure rehab projects are going as planned. But again, day to day operations, we don't do a whole lot of that anymore. James: So do you think that owning this own property management company is a good thing? Do you like it? Bruce: I actually love it, but as many people will tell you, and I know that you're thinking of this now or I shouldn't put words in your mouth. It's a bitch; it is. You're always dealing, you know, it's a transient industry, people are always quitting. You're always losing people. You're having to let people go, unfortunately, sometimes. So it's just this never-ending cycle of replacing people. But this is what I've done my whole life. In retail, I was always in a leadership position, so I'm used to hiring and firing and firing is not fun but sometimes you have to do it, but it's the hardest thing that we do, without question. The construction company is not that bad. It gets frustrating sometimes dealing with subcontractors and the asset management company, you know, that's pretty, pretty easy, relatively speaking. Yeah. It's the management company that's a pain in the butt sometimes. But I love my employees though, so I love having it. James: Yeah, it's a huge turnover, in the property management company and you are like hiring and firing. Sometimes we think we just keep on hiring and firing, you know, what else are we doing? So finding the right person is always the hardest. Bruce: Yeah. And finding the right person that even...so I just got word that one of my property managers, yesterday, late in the afternoon, sent an email to her regional manager and say, look, I'm giving my two-week notice. This woman is spectacular at her job. She runs an incredibly profitable property for us, but she's got some medical issues within her family; not her, her husband, her mother, and her father all have medical issues right now so she had no choice. First, I've got to go, I'm sorry. So, you know, even good people have things happen beyond their control and there's more turnover that we've got to deal with now. But it's fine, we'll get through it. James: Yeah, it's crazy out there. And what about underwriting? Do you get a lot of deals off-market or from brokers? I mean, before this, pre-Covid, we're not talking about Covid. Nothing is happening right now. Bruce: Right, right, right. I've gotten a few things sent to me off-market, but for the most part, all my deals have been fully marketed properties. You know, you're plugged in with the big brokerages in town. CVRE, ARA, HFF, JLL, those guys. So you know, usually they're fully marketed deals, but yeah, I do all my own underwriting. I'm a one-stop-shop. And I think that you and I were taught a similar process and there's nothing wrong with the way everybody else seems to be being taught today, but it's not the way I do it. You put 400,000 billion trillion people into your GP because nobody could raise 5 million bucks, but everybody can raise 12. So if everybody gets together a raised $12 an hour, first of all, you're going to paying yourself because you're probably doing this illegally. But secondly, you're giving away the whole pie. I want the pie for myself. You know, if I got a 20% promote and I carved it up amongst five or 10 people, all of us are getting that much. It's more work for me but I get the whole pie and I'm fully in control. So yeah, we do everything ourselves. James: Yeah. Nowadays, I see syndication being put up by like six people, seven people and sometimes 10 people, and there's more than 10, I've seen a lot. And there's no way 200 or 300 units, you need that many people to manage the assets. You probably need like one maximum two. And maybe the third, maybe the other half a person to do investor relationship. But that's like, I really want to say investor relationship person nowadays. Bruce: Right. Well, you make a good point though that you still only came up with three people because legally, right, you notice, they have to have a legitimate job in your general partnership. You know, how can you justify 10 different jobs for people? Do you get assigned these investors? You get assigned Mr. GP number two, the toilet rehab; how do you do that? Yeah. It's just too complicated. One at a time, build your own database and raise your own money. James: Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. So in terms of value, and I'm sure you do a lot of interior and exterior value add and all that. What are the most valuable value-adds you have seen between interior and exterior? Bruce: So I'll start with ROI, right? So the biggest return on investment project I've done to date is we kicked out everybody's favorite company, CSC, right? The company that would manage our laundry rooms for us, and they didn't manage anything. They put a little washer dryer in there, they barely came out to service it. They'd come out sometimes to collect and you sometimes get checks. They hold...it's just a nightmare. So I was at a month to month situation when I took over this asset, and about a year and a half in, I decided, you know what, we're going to buy our own units. And we spent $40-42,000, something like that, to buy our own units. We took our monthly laundry income up from 1,450 bucks a month, to $6,000 a month. My ROI is well over 100% and it improved the value of my property by about $900,000. So not everybody's in that situation because you get into those ironclad contracts that you buy from the seller that you bought it from, and you're stuck with that contract until it runs its course and those are 10 year contracts, almost always. So I just got lucky there. But that's been the most profitable one I've done so far. And everybody knows to have laundry on-site, but I think a lot of people are hesitant to do it themselves. It's really not that hard. James: Yeah, it's not that hard. I mean, yeah, if I can, I'll buy it myself; if I'm not under contract and I'll do it myself. And you are right. Actually that's one of the...in fact, it is the highest valuable value add because on one of my properties, we spent like 31,000, we're making like 2,500 per month. That's a lot of money. Right? And you're spending 38,000 and you get like millions of dollars in value increasing. Right. Bruce: Exactly. Yeah. It's incredible. James: And you're right. The company never come and service. It's hard to get. And they steal money as well sometimes. And they are hard to negotiate the contracts. Right? So why wouldn't we do that? So very interesting. So I want to talk about your book because you're going to be launching a book. Hopefully, I can align this podcast launch with the launch of your book. Let's talk about your book because a book is very hard to write and why not talk about it. Bruce: Okay, so this came up on another podcast that I'm working on getting booked onto and they're like, okay, help me understand it. You said you're a college dropout and you wrote a book. How the hell do you write? Look, I barely know how to use a library, but I know how to pay somebody that's really good at pulling information out of my brain, putting it in a book form. And now, I can go through and kind of red line and say, that's not the way I speak. So to be fair, I did use a ghostwriter and many people that write books, they use a ghostwriter. But that's what I did. I paid somebody a fair amount of money, I'll be honest, but it was a skill that I didn't possess. So I knew enough that it was something I couldn't do and I knew I had a book that I needed to get out. It was important for me to get this book out and so I reached out to some people to help me write it. And it's taken about nine to 12 months, but we're finally about to launch. The launch date is May 5th so things are going really well so far.  James: So you're doing a reveal the title of the book? Bruce: Am I allowed to cuss on your podcast?  James: Yeah, absolutely.  Bruce: It's syndicating is a bitch and other things you haven't been told.  James: Syndication is bitch and other things? Bruce: Yeah, 'Syndicating is a bitch and other truths you haven't been told.'  James: Wow, that's awesome. Yeah. That's something people think real estate is so easy, right? Syndicating real estate is so easy. Right? So can you talk about some of the most carriers stories from the book or you want to hold on to people?  Bruce: No, no. So I'll start by kind of say, I said I had to get this book out. Let me tell you why I wrote it and then we'll go into a couple of stories. You know, we've all been to real estate conferences and expos and two-day seminars and all this stuff. And the stuff that they're teaching from this stage, it's all legitimate stuff and these are good people teaching it and giving you basically a two-day sales pitch or you know, a sales pitch at an expo, whatever it is, they're almost always selling something to either try to sell their program, their education to you. And again, I firmly believe these are good people and they've got a good product, but you're only hearing for the most part. There are some out there that are exceptions, but you're only hearing the dog and pony show. You're only hearing about the rainbows and lollipops, the unicorns. I'm going to do this. And yesterday I'll be a billionaire.  Okay, that's not going to happen. This is hard. What we do is hard. You know, we make mistakes. Things that come up that we never saw coming, there's no way we could have known they were coming so things surprised us all the time. So I wanted to be the guy...again, let's think about the person pitching from the stage that they tell you the truth, the scary stories, the arson, the dead guy in your pool, losing 5 million of your investor's money. If they tell you that stuff, I'd say 50% of the people that would've signed up, would go, ooohhh, no. I don't want to do this. So it's not in their best interest to give you the story. Again, I don't believe they're lying, I think everything they're teaching is legitimate. But my book is pulling back the curtain to show this is every bit of the step in how to syndicate a deal. Everything. I laid everything out. You don't need a course but I want to tell you some scary stories along the way and we'll laugh together. I cussed a little bit in the book too, but I want people to understand, most people that I think they can do what we do and not that I'm brilliant, I'm not brilliant, I'm a college dropout, but most people shouldn't do it.  Most people don't have the intestinal fortitude to do this because it is very difficult. It's very stressful. There's a lot of work involved. But yeah, I just want them to know what they're getting into before they try to do this. Many people, I'm hoping, will read the book and go, okay, thank you for putting this in a book. I now know I don't want to do this.  James: I think you're going to just create more money raisers out there because most of the money raisers are raising money because they don't want to be an operator. Bruce: Right. James: Being an operator, you're absolutely right. It's a really, really hard job and nobody talks about it. Because most of the people who are taught, they are not even operators. They're more marketing arm off the operators. Right? Bruce: Yeah. And that's another reason I don't want somebody else raising money for me. I'll show you my deal, Mr. Money raiser but I don't know what you're out there saying on my behalf. Are you making weird promises that I can't back up? And yeah, so that's another reason I just don't like using them myself. James: Yeah. And that's why even in my book, Passive Investing in Commercial Real Estate, I talk about make sure the passive investor, whoever you're talking to, are they the backbone of the deal or not? The operators are the backbone, not the money raises. I mean there's nothing wrong about raising money for investment. You actually showing the parts to real estate investment but the passive investor needs to understand that they have to really understand who's behind the deal. And a lot of times people behind the deal are not really on the spotlight, they're somewhere far away. And a lot of times the money raiser doesn't even want to show them because they're worried that they go directly to that. Bruce: Right. And I've actually had some times, you know, I've had people say, yeah, I was going to invest in this deal, but then I asked the syndicator who the actual operator was and they, Oh, wait a minute, how do you not know? James: There are too many layers, I guess. Bruce: Exactly. They had no idea who they were raising money for. They were raising money because I get a cut, you know, which probably again is being done illegally if you don't know who you're pitching a deal on behalf of. So yeah, there's just such a mess out in the industry right now. James: You know, there's this concept called sub syndication now. That within a syndication, there's sub syndication and within the sub syndication, there are many layers in between. And yeah, I dunno. Bruce: Or they raise money as a syndication and then take that money that they syndicated to put it into a syndication. That's too complicated. There are too damn many layers. No thank you. You're a great guy. You're doing good by your investors, but I want no part of you raising money for me, just no. James: Yeah, that's different from fund to fund. Fund to fund is where even the fund, I mean this is probably the SEC lawyers can talk about it, but the fund itself will have PPM and there's another fund that has a PPM. Right. But that is different. I think that's legal, right? Bruce: Yeah. There are ways to do it legally without question, but I really feel many people aren't doing it legally. James: Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure why people want to walk the gray line. I mean if you get caught, I mean you can be in very big trouble, right? Why do you want to walk the gray line? Why? Bruce: Well, the same reason Bernie made off existed. People make really bad decisions chasing dollars and I don't want to take time to build up the multiple thousands of people on a good, robust database of investors. I don't want to take the three to five years that that's going to take so I want to shortcut it by bringing in one of these other people in. And I don't really know much about them, but they said they could help me raise money for my deal. And it just, and then you got the people that are out there raising thinking, I don't have to do anything except just pitch somebody on a deal. That's my involvement. You know. So I hate to say these things cause it's kind of harsh, but because I know a lot of these guys that I think some of them it's just laziness and others, it's greed. James: Yeah. So who do you target? Who should be reading this book? Bruce: Basically. And that's important too. Cause I don't teach you how to invest in real estate. I'm assuming if you're trying to look into syndication, you're already investing in real estate. So I don't need to take the time to teach you how to invest in real estate. So somebody that's a single-family rental investor or maybe a flipper or maybe they bought some small apartment complexes themselves, somewhere between a five 12 maybe 24 units but they're not getting to the scale that they want to be able to hire staff or full-time staff or better quality staff so they're looking for a way to try to, you know, grow exponentially but safely. So it's those people, I think. It's the people that are already in it but they want to take it to the next level. Cause again, I'm not going to teach you how to do a spreadsheet. I'll do a proforma. There are other ways for me to teach you that but that's not what this book is about at all. James: So this book would basically tell you all the hard part of doing a syndication and is it just catered to multifamily or is it any other commercial...? Bruce: What I say in the book is and I probably stole this line from Jean Drawbridge, right? My attorney, my syndication attorney. But look, you can syndicate a Snickers bar. A syndication is basically just everybody pulling their money together to go make a purchase. That's it. Then you have a security definition and there's a word too, but syndication is we're just going to put our money together, go buy something. That's what a syndication is. So I do talk about that in the book, but I also say, but we are going to talk about multifamily syndication because that's my experience. But yeah, you can go out, most, I would guesstimate, I've seen stats about this, but I'm going to try to remember of all the major purchases in the nation, not in Austin, not at San Antonio, but in the nation, across every industry, almost every single one of them were done as a syndication. It's very rare that one person will put all the money in for a deal and buy it by themselves. Talking about us buying the Dallas Cowboys, you know, investing in a restaurant, anything, almost everything is a syndication. So yeah, you know, anybody can do this intellectually and if you can master the art of a syndication, then, again, you can syndicate anything but I'm talking to you about all the individual team players you need: your attorney, your real estate attorney, your syndication attorney, your bookkeeper, your management company, the broker, the mortgage broker. I tell you exactly who you need exactly when you need them, what you could expect to pay them. And then, I give you the whole rundown of your 60 to 75 day purchase.  What does that close process look like? I walk you through your due diligence period of 20 to 30 days, and then after due diligence, you're wrapping up your loan. I walk you through everything. So I want you to know how to do this yourself. You probably still need a mentor, honestly, because a book can only do so much, but at least I'm giving you the blueprint. James: And where is it available?  Bruce: It's going to be audible. It'll be Amazon. It'll be Barnes and Noble. It's going to be everywhere, everywhere books are sold.  James: So that's going to be on May 5th, right?  Bruce: May 5th James: Yeah. Are you the one who writes the book in audible? Bruce: No. I wanted to, but my ghostwriter said, Bruce, look, we'll do whatever you want. You're the client, but I'm telling you right now, do not do that because you've never done it. She said, you've got a good voice. You're a very good communicator, but you've never done this. It's going to take you forever to get through it because you're going to screw a lot of things up. You're going to get frustrated, you're going to get pissed. I know you. It's like, Oh, okay. So I had somebody else read it for me, but the next book or two, I hope to read my own book because again, I think I have an energy that somebody just reading it is not going to have, so I'm hoping to read my next book myself, but we'll see. James: Got it, got it. What is one advice that you would give to passive investors who are looking to invest in syndication? Bruce: Well, I tell them that, first of all, you're investing in a business. You're not buying into real estate. You're investing into a business that happens to buy real estate. That's it. Just like any business you ever invest in, things can go wrong, things will go wrong, and if you can't handle, maybe we have a hurricane or a tornado or a fire and I can't send out a distribution or Covid, I might not be able to send out a distribution for one, two, three, four quarters until I get an insurance check back in or Covid until the economy opens up. I might want to be able to send the distribution for a while. Long term, our trajectory will be up, but you know between now and then, we're going to do a little bit of this. And if you can't stomach that, if you're going to lose your mind, if I say I can't send you distribution this quarter, do not invest in this deal with us because no matter how hard we try, how good we are on the front end and due diligence, things are going to happen, things are going to come up. So if that's not you, then please be self-aware and don't invest.  James: Got it, got it. So let's go to a bit more personal side, right? Why do you do what you do?  Bruce: Why do I do what I do? First of all, I worked in retail for 18 years and that sucked. I thought it was fun until I realized, this really sucks.  James: You must be happy right now because retail has crashed.  Bruce: Retail is totally destroyed. Exactly. But it's fun. The biggest thing...I would say, the most fun I have is also the thing we talked about that's the hardest. It's working with the employees. It's watching them grow, watching, you know, developing them, being a leader to them, and then having. Part 2 James: Okay, go ahead.  Bruce: All right, so you asked, why do I do what I do? Again, it's for my staff. I like communicating with the staff and working with the staff, but also, you know, you always hear people talk about, you know, we're in the business of creating safe, clean, nice places for people to live. You know, we did a school supply drive at one of our lower-income properties for three years in a row before we sold it. And these are people that can barely afford to pay their rent, to be honest. Right? They barely make ends meet. And so, we decided we were going to buy all the kids - there were 87 kids on this 120 year property. Who knew it'd be that many, but we bought backpacks for all the little kids. We bought all their school supplies. We reached out to the schools to say, give me the school supply list for each grade at each of these schools. We provided all that for them, had them come into a vacant unit. They walked in the door, got some pizza. At the front, my daughter standing in the kitchen, handing out pizza, they walk to a table where my wife and our property manager was handing out the backpacks. Then they left that room and went into one of the bedrooms where my autistic adult daughter was in there. She was participating too and she was giving them their bag of supplies that they could now put in their backpack and they walked off. And it's that stuff that, you know, money's one thing, returns are another thing. It's really making a difference in somebody's life. And I know that sounds cheesy and kumbaya crap, but it's true. You know, I cry fairly often in this business because we do get to make a difference. Now some people, you could give them a free car and they bitch because they have to wash it or put gas in it. Give them a bright, shiny new puppy and they're pissed because they got to feed it now. So some people are just miserable people; they're just mean, they're mad. But most people really do appreciate when they can see that you are really in this with them and you care for them. And that's the real good part. James: Got it, got it. Yeah, it's definitely a fulfilling journey helping our residents and at the same time taking care of employees as well while providing returns to your investors. You are impacting multiple level of hierarchy there. And is there any proud moment in your career that you can never forget throughout your life? I mean, this moment I'll never forget it until I die. Bruce: You said proud. Now, do you mean with respect to a staff member or attendance or like a personal achievement?  James: Anything. Bruce: Well, selfishly, right, we've talked about school supply drive. That's probably the best thing we've ever done. That was my wife's idea. I owe her all the credit for that. It's phenomenal idea. But on a more selfish level, we were the rental owners of the year for Austin of 2016 for the national apartment association in 2017 and we were the Realty multifamily investors of the year for 2019 so that's been cool for me. Because they recognized those school supply drive things that we were doing so that's probably the coolest thing and the proudest part outside of just helping other human beings. James: Awesome. Awesome. All right, Bruce, why don't you tell our audience how to get hold of you Bruce: So you can go to the website if you're interested. I'm apt-guy.com. I'm basically the apartment guy. You can follow me on Instagram. That's the social media I try to stay the most active on it's apt.guy or Facebook,  the APT guy. If you're interested in the book, again, there'll be on the first page of the website. It'll tell you how to get it. Again, it launches May 5th. So yeah, that's the best way to get ahold of me and try to follow along with what we're doing. James: Awesome. So the book is going to be an Amazon, I guess, right? Absolutely. Bruce: Amazon. Audible. It will be at all bookstores too. James: Oh, cool. That's awesome. All right, Bruce, thanks for coming. I'm sure everybody got tons and tons of value out of your knowledge bombs out there. Bruce: Oh, dude, I really appreciate it. Again, it was fun to do one with somebody I knew personally. James: All right. Bye. Bruce: Alright, buddy.    

Hello and welcome to warrior divas real talk for real women. This is your host Angie Lehman ro and in the studio with me today I have Connie Wyatt Coleman. She is a dear friend of mine. She has a long lineage of, of expertise that she brings to the table but more importantly she is a woman that's after Christ's heart and ferociously runs after him every day of her life. So I cannot wait to see we we talked a little bit about how this show may go. And then we said, You know what, we just need to have one of our talks on the air. So that's what we're doing today. Welcome, Connie. Good to be here. Good to be here. Rules of Engagement. No throw punches today. No throw punches. But that's what we do when we get together, right? Yes. And you know what i have treasured it. Very few friends will take friendship and allow accountability with it. And we've had a long history of being able to love each other and hold each other accountable at the same time. We have and you know, it's one of those things that we have laughed together. We have cried together. We have been mad together. We have watched our children grow together. When we met I didn't have grandchildren and now I do. That is crazy. And they're big. They're six getting to see him too. Yeah, they're beautiful. So, you know it's it's crazy. All the all the things that have happened your girls have grown up gone through high school ones about to get married, you know and, and praise the Lord she has not been a bridezilla. Oh, goodness. That is a Praise the Lord. Yes, I will take it in this day and age with everything going on in the world to kind of put some things in perspective. Yeah, puts things in perspective for us. So I'm glad to hear all that's going good and all of our lives but you know, we also know that not everybody's doing good with things going on in their world. It doesn't have to do with if you're hearing this and listening to this in the middle of the Coronavirus thing. It doesn't even have to do with that. Some people just have a hard time getting by day by day. life on this earth is just hard, right? It just is. I I watched a video. Last night somebody had a lady and a pantry. She was singing the song Jolene. But instead of singing it, please don't take my man it says please come and take my man. And she says, and if you don't answer I'll have to call Irene. And so I know this affects people in a humorous way it affects people in an angry way and a pic affects people in a lonely way. And one of the things we like to do on warrior divas is just shine a light into that darkness in so you can see a way out and we were talking last night and one of our studies in john, where you know, that where there was a challenge to the to the apostles to be that light and to continue to live that light out. Not To expose, but that that fear and evil cannot reside in the light. And truth is the way truth is the light. And so, you know, I started thinking, what are some of the ways that I could poke and prod Connie to open up the truth of Christ to to the audience today, you know, because she didn't take a whole lot doesn't take a whole lot. If you get to follow her on Facebook, she shares some little morning devotionals on there quite often that are very good, packed, powerful, very easy to read. And that's not an easy task for someone who is as educated as she is to speak the commoners language that I can read and understand. I love it. All these people getting on and sharing their messages on Facebook and all that stuff in there using all these big words and I'm like, okay, I didn't know I was gonna have to break a dictionary and a thesaurus to figure out what this person saying, I just want it to be relevant. And that's something that Connie does. Every time she shares in this season, haven't you? There's been a lot of ugly and we'll address some of that later. But there's been such an influx of creativity and letting their light shine like you're throwing them out and, and even people that maybe didn't before coming on and just time and time again, using all different ways of creativity to make it through this season to encourage other people to love on others, with social distancing in place, but right, you know, just some real creative ways to intentionally reach out to each other. Well, you know, and it's the what it was at the Dallas orchestra performed yesterday. For the first time together since the beginning of March and they did it all from their own living rooms and did it online together. Yeah. Wonderful. What a wonderful way of you know, right now one of the things that this is teaching us is how to push through limitations. What a great thing. You're telling me I can't do this, but I'm gonna find a way to still be relevant in the world I live in. Yes. And what a great thing for all of us. Wow. Yes, personally and professionally. I know. My staff up CEO at wise choices Resource Center in pregnancy Resource Center indicator and just getting together with the staff on zoom and going okay. We know what the box is. We know what our limitations are. We know what we can do safely and what we can't within the guidelines and protocol, but Okay, now, step outside the box. How can we continue to reach our clients To reach our partners in ways we haven't thought of before, right? That would be sustainable, really, even after this season is over, because there's the good news this season will eventually be over. Well, and while we're recording this today in the studio, we're actually recording this on Good Friday. We are. And the reason I kind of wanted to do that is it's a part of the time that we're in our darkest hour where it's actually between the 12 and 3pm. Our time I know that's not the time it is and in Jerusalem, but our time, this would be the time that was the darkest of the dark days going into Easter weekend. It's Friday, it's Friday, but you know what Sunday's coming. And we have the benefit of hindsight to see that. Yeah. But you know what Jesus had the full sight to prepare his disciples before that, so that they wouldn't have to live in fear so they wouldn't have to. They could see hope at the end. You know, I think the thing that gets me is how quickly we judge them. Mm hmm. Because I he tried to tell you, he tried like multiple times, yeah. But then I look at myself, right? And how many times has he fully told me and we have full revelation of Scripture, right? How many times has he shown me the plan and that he will not leave us he will not forsake us. He, he is coming again. And he is victorious. And we have the whole counsel of Scripture and yet we still back up and fear and we still wonder and doubt in the middle of the season if if what he said is true, and if it will hold true. So it's Real easy to look at Peter and go walk. How could you deny him? Right? Well, Connie, how can you live in fear and deny the power he has in your life? Well, we were talking about we read the, the gospel of john, in our group Bible study yesterday. And one of the things that we read about was right after that were Peter, you know, had denied him three times. But when Jesus made it so important to go and see his apostles multiple times after he, after he had risen, and there's the one occasion where he's talking with Peter. And he's telling asking Peter over and over Do you love me? And Peter saying, yes. And do you love me? Yes. And do you love me? Yes. Excuse me. And I think the reason gee This is asking him that is to get Peter to say yes to Him. But also for Peter to hear Jesus say that I love you get it sunken into Peter said, Peter is kinda like my six year old grandson. You got to repeat it a few times for it to sink in. And sometimes you might have to inflect your voice a little more than you really need to you know, it's that Moonstruck snap out of it moment. Oh, God has to do that to me. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Walking through a situation just this last week. And just like, Lord, I could really use the cliff notes at this point. Right. Right. One other chapter just who, let's, let's get some cliff notes here. But well, one of the other things we talked about in our study this week in our warrior divas Facebook group and if you're not a part of it, you should be a part of it because we're starting to do more and more studying in there. And because We're on a mission to equip and empower. Not just our generation of women, but women that are coming back behind us, you know, we want it to be a legacy project. And so one of the things we were discussing this week in there was how the Roman soldiers and pilot inherit, they had no clue as to what the scripture said. So when those Roman soldiers are at the feet of Jesus about this time of the day, and they're casting lots for his garment, they had no idea they were fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. The one that pure steam on the side and didn't break his legs. They had no idea they were fulfilling prophecy. And yet he realized who it was right? No, I I'm like you we kind of talked about this weekend and I can't believe you know, we're sitting here right now and Think about all the things that happened on that Friday and just like today, things you never dreamed, you would see happen, right? The Son of God hung on across Really? His disciples did not deny him. I mean, Christian people would rather loose Brabus than Jesus. I mean, who are we right? But then I start thinking about Saturday. And when the sun goes down, it's it's the Sabbath, right? And somehow in the middle of the chaos, and the trauma, they go back home, and even though they don't get it, they don't understand it in the middle of the doubt. When the hope of their expectation is in the tomb, they walk by faith And they cry out to the Lord on the Sabbath. And that, that Saturday to me has always been. I mean, you know how it is when you come through a trauma and and you get back to your house and you kind of sit down and you kind of start feeling yourself and see if you have, you know, do I have flesh wounds? Did I really survive this day? Did that really happen? And then Saturday, what, what do I even do with this? What do I even really still believe? Where is my heart Really? And in that quiet Saturday, they still observe the Sabbath. Right? They still honored what the what he had been setting in motion for years. And I think, I think right now is the time to do that. You know, I think some of the trauma of this COVID thing may be kind of adjusting and now we're moving into Okay, I've survived the first part, I'm not mortally wounded. I'm not bleeding anywhere. What do I do with today? Right? And that's when we come back and we draw on everything that the Lord has sewn into us. Yesterday, the day before, the in his previous sness He called us to a season of prayer or diving into the word and if we will, but sit still in his presence. He will draw those things out and you said give us the hope. That Sunday's common Sunday is going to get here he is going to fulfill His promises. He is going to draw us out of this. But I just feel like truly rotten, right in this season. That man this a Saturday season it feels like well, you know, I think there's some some big truth to the fact of the numbness that you just brought up. You know, when all this first started happening, I know I talk to a lot of people there. They're like, I've just slept a lot and watched a lot of Netflix I'm basically Netflix didn't chilled, which I know that there's another slang for that at times but, you know, sleeping and watching TV sleeping and watching TV, it was a it was a numbness it was this shell shock. It was a What do I do now there were some people that haven't slowed down our grocery workers, our truckers, our doctors and nurses. Those people haven't slowed down, our food processing plants, farmers, they all are still showing up every day. And so, for me, my husband and I own a plumbing company and our plumbing company. While our residential calls haven't been as much. Our commercial calls are still happening because we serve a lot of restaurants, hospitals, food processing plants, right. So for us life hasn't shifted as much as it has for others. I'm still doing coaching as a matter of fact, I've had people come and hire me since this happened because now they're shifting to add online to their already brick and mortar business or whatever it is. So I'm helping them through that transition along that ways. So that I still had a day or two where I was like, Whoa, what is this gonna do? And then my sleep schedule got off and all sorts of things. And like the apostles, I had to go, Okay, it's time to get up. Yeah, yeah, you know, I'm kind of like here. When this first started, God called me to go to the square there and indicator in our small town at seven o'clock every morning, and just pray around the square. And it was, I thought, just gonna be one day. And then when we when we were there that day is like, no, this is every day until this is done. And I was like, oh, Because I don't leave the house at 645 in the morning on a normal day. So, um yeah. So it's it's kind of been that kind of thing that God did that made me stay on a schedule. So I do that and then I go to the office and I'm only one there but you know, Hey, get the work done that needs to be done and then I'm home by two or three my husband's already retired so we were kind of already that's a new normal so getting used to him being retired and home. And so yeah, it hasn't changed as much as a lot of people's lives have. Man You're right. There's there's some people really adjusting and another thing we've talked about is just the grace that you know, your two days kind of came in the beginning. Someone else's reality hit or just I don't know what you even call those two days, right? crash or shut down or process level we're hitting over the last couple of days as layoffs are starting to happen. Yes. And there will be some like my personality is kind of the kind that just gets through it and doesn't really even see things. I'm a trauma triage person. Yeah, and I'm in it and then once we get done, and it's over and everybody else is all excited about going to work then then mine will come right but as sisters we have to be able to embrace each other and and recognize that we do process all that different. And not only that, but whether one sister isn't as concerned as someone else or as sheltered in place. I guess that's shelter in place is the is more out and about or another one is more cautious. There's grace for both right? And instead of bashing each other man, we can do better. We can support each other, encourage each other and walk through different seasons in different times, right? And hopefully we're we do that better than I'm seeing some. You know, like I said earlier in a lot of ways you see a lot of amazing creativity and intentionality coming out and then sometimes, wow, you know, fear can either mask itself as overly confident or as under confident, and just what we're typically used to seeing fear look at look like and even in either one, we have to have grace to come alongside and encourage meet them where they are, right. That's what Jesus did for us. That's what he did for Peter. What you were just talking about. He met Peter right? Worry was right. The typically boisterous Peter now became the overly cautious Peter, right. And Jesus every time put that and just think I didn't even think about that that's just a number of hours between him being overly confident and slicing the soldier's ear off right. And a few hours later, he's the other way and denying haven nosing. Right? Wow, I had never even really write that. But just a number of very brief hours, that Peter goes through all of that, and yet the Lord had grace, calling back to truth, but had grace and love and mercy for both extremes. Well, you know, we were talking in our study this week about the Pharisees and the Sadducees how they, how they were manipulating pilots so much, you know, and pilot saw it. He he recognized it And as we read through each of the Gospels we read, you know, Matthew one day mark one day, Luke one day, john one day, and we've got some other verses about the resurrection and, and all that stuff coming up that we're gonna discuss later on today. And the when we're discussing that I said, you know, the Pharisees and the Sadducees were going to pilot going, you know, he's he's stirring things up and they were pointing at Jesus now all I can think of is, when you point at somebody, you got three fingers pointing back at you, right? So they're pointing at Jesus saying he stirring them up. But in reality, he was stirring their hearts and getting them to see something beyond what the Pharisees and Sadducees were teaching them. That's when they get in trouble. And therefore, oh, come out. They were like our sheep bowls. are not staying in line. Like, we love them to stay in line and they're starting to want to look behind the curtain as they say in the laws, you know. And, you know, I love the part where we read last night, that pilot when he put the plaque over Jesus's head that said, the King of Kings King of the Jews, you know, and they're like, no, it needs to say he claimed to be they were trying to spin it. I said, they're like the media today, you know, they're always trying to spin it to put the right words to get the biggest attention to get this to get the things approved. You know, and, and I'm not out here call on fake media. I'm not doing all that stuff because I have some very good friends that are part of the media that do their due diligence. So you know, I'm not going there. I'm not getting on that bandwagon. But on the other side of and with me being in radio media and podcasting, now I am the media. So, but on the other side of it It is, we need to be cautious of the people around us that are stirring things and pointing to others deflecting to others. We need to have the mindset to look exactly at what is the truth. And the difficult thing right now is in so many ways, no one knows no one knows right? The truth really is except you can always know the truth of Scripture, right and always know the truth for the direction of your life for how to treat others are how to walk through problems, even if you don't know the truth of whatever problem it is you're facing or whatever the disaster for lack of better word, right is. Because anytime you're walking through one you don't know the truth of it until you get all the way through it and see but this is is I mean, this is one that has shaken the world. Yes, rightly or wrongly, and I shake in the world. And I don't think we've seen half. And I don't say that, like pessimistically, I don't think the curtains have been pulled back to see the spiritual ramifications of this as much as anything else. Well, I think we talked a little bit too. And the reason I brought up the Pharisees and the Sadducees, we talked a little bit before we came on the air about we need to be very careful about having a religious spirit during this time. I was in a group the other day and somebody was like, Hey, we're gonna do a call Friday at four, something like that. And somebody on the west coast is like, Well, you know, I'm observing that I'm reading my Bible, because it's Good Friday and the guy goes, well, what's good Friday, you know, and somebody said, Well, for those that are religious, it's a sacred holiday. And let me just tell you, all right, for those of you that don't know me, Well, I have a sassy side. Why are you laughing? Connie? We did I learned it from Connie. No. I did. Well, you asked my husband, he would say you learn from the best, but we didn't mention no throat punches, right. I think that might have given a clue. Right? Right. So, but in that group, when the person said, for religious people, in my right part of my mind, I knew she meant no offense to it. But in my sassy part of my mind, I wanted to say, Well, I'm not religious, but as a Christian, I observe. Yeah. Because to me, there's a difference. There is a difference in being a Christ follower, and full of grace, because what we talk about About earlier with Jesus talking to Peter, he was talking to Peter after Peter had denied him three times. And he was asking Peter, do you love me? And he asked him three times do you love me? Helping Peter rehabilitate his own heart and his own guilt over the denial of Christ. He was having that intimate moment with you. You know how we, we do. We talked about my six six year old grandson, though that you grab them by the face, you put hands on either side of their face to where their cheeks are just squished up just right. And you go Do you understand me? And that I can envision in verbal picture. That's what Jesus was doing with Peter. You know, yes, you've made mistakes. Yes, you are a zealous person. But I want you to be zealous for my people. Yes, big difference. Big difference bead my sheep tend to my sheep. Love My sheep, and being religious about whether or not they're going to church and trusting God for a miracle to heal them and keep them safe and all this. Oh, it's exhausting being self righteous. And you know what's funny is we can all go there so fast because I mean, let's admit it black and white is way easier. You know? It's just easier. It is. And the Sagittarius and Pharisees were very black and white, very legalistic by had it down to a science. But Wow, how they could get it wrong. Right. They could get it wrong. And that just to me, just goes to prove how easy it is to get off track. They knew the word, right. If anybody knew the word they knew the word right? didn't have the spirit. They had the religion in the relationship. And here's the thing that really, really gets me. They knew the word they knew the prophecy. And watching those soldiers go, were to the to on either side of Jesus and breaking their legs, but not breaking Jesus's leg and piercing him in the side instead. You wonder if they're looking at that going, whoa. I think they looked at it and said, Let's fix the mess up our deal. Right? Because at the same about the same time, they're casting the lats. Yeah. to both of those were fulfillment of prophecies by people that were not prophetic people to fill. We're not people of studying of the word, you know. And one of the things I talked early on in the week about was Judas You know, we call him Judas, the trader, but he was the first domino to fall in setting the prophecy emotion. Yeah. Yes, Jesus knew it was all coming. But for it to happen those 30 pieces of silver had to be exchanged. Okay, we don't like to think of a life that includes being broken better and betrayed. Well, that works. Um, yeah, it's a betrayal. Right? You know, and and we get all bent out of shape when it happens to us and prayerfully we're not doing it to others. But yeah, we've got a live on a really, really tough planet to try to walk out and While he promised us he would lead the way and he would never forsake us, he did not promise us that it was going to be a simple walk, or a simple journey and to think that a betrayal was what kicked off. The prophecies is just kind of telling. Well, you know, a friend of mine shared something last night we talked about the, the being laid off of work. You know, there's I've had several friends over the last few days have posted that they've been laid off work and some of them are taking it very well. You know, God's got something better, but some of them are feeling like a betrayal of their employer or the government or even if they work for a friend of theirs, the friend you know, but one of the things that she was a friend of mine Catherine Clift shared was she remembers her husband when he used to do his daily live worship podcasting said that God doesn't demote he promotes and God is always faithful and I was like, What a great reminder to all of us, no matter what we're facing, some of us may be still stuck on Friday still, and and you know, now dealing with the numbness of Saturday, but Sunday is still coming. And, you know, I, one of the things I loved yesterday and reading from john, you know, I, I found something new I liked from each of the Gospels. You know, Luke really was great as well. But john, when he he, we call him the narcissist of the Gospels. Jesus loves the one who Jesus loves, but there's a reason I mean, one of the things that That I found yesterday in the scripture that not really picked up on it said, Well, let me find it. I've got it right here. And I say I've got it right here. And Jesus was looking down is is near the cross of Jesus did his mother, his mother sister marry the wife of colobus cloak, ah, whatever. Sounds good to me, and Mary Magdalene, when Jesus saw his mother there and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her woman, here is your son, into the disciple, here's your mother. From that time on, the disciple took her into his home. Why would why wouldn't john, thank you as the favorite. Jesus just gave him the blessing of his mother and gave john the honor of stewarding Her to the end of her days. Yeah, I would. I would think I was the favorite too, wouldn't you? Well? Yeah. But also, that comes with a price. It does. He was the only disciples still standing around the cross watching all this happened. Right and he loved, right. So, again. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm I'm Jesus's favorite. He loves me best. Right. Will I follow him? Right? On Friday? Well, john 30 right in john finished strong. Yeah, Jesus, and even better question. Survive Friday. Love Saturday. Rejoice on Sunday. What are we going to do with Monday and Tuesday, right. I mean, really, you get through the battle, you survive it. You rejoice and you see the victories and you See what the Lord has done for you? And then what are you going to do go back to how you were living on Wednesday and Thursday? I mean, what are we going to do with it come Monday and Tuesday Are we going to forget about it and just awake earlier, they thought they were at the top of the world. And now their world is totally shattered at their feet. And so good question to all of us. So we've had Coronavirus still do. And I'm not at all downplaying the suffering, whether it's health wise, financially, emotionally, that people are going through, but we will survive it. Right. What are we going to do with it? What are we going to do on Monday, that carries the victory that Jesus paid the price for and that we're going to celebrate on Sunday. What are we going to do on the Monday after Coronavirus? Right, where will our loyalty and our and our walk and our faithfulness be man? Well, and to be quite honest, if you look at the beginning of the 1900s, we had World War One, we had the Spanish flu. We had the Great Depression. We had World War Two, all before 1950. Right? That's a lot to pack into a 50 year period. That's a lot. And so we as Americans, you know, even though we're hurting other countries as well, we as Americans, are countries country has seen difficult times. We have come through difficult times. That's the time known as the greatest generation, right? can't even believe what if now is the beginning of the next greatest generation. It can be they can boo but the choice is ours. What Do we want it to be? One of the things that we talked about? In? I think it was Matthew that just struck me so solidly is when the Jews were saying crucified, Jesus crucified Jesus, and parshas pilot was wanting to wash his hands of it. They were like, his blood is on our hands in the hands of our children. You know, it's, it's apparent the things we do today are the things that our children dream, reap the benefits or the consequences of its Yes, it's just a known fact. So what is it that we what is the legacy we want to live now is blessed the other day to be able to record a message for a conference Coming up for heartbeat international and just a little seven minute kind of like a TED TED Talk. And the topics had been picked way back. I don't know last September, probably. And it's it's so funny how God worked it out because I had submitted a topic for a workshop, but they had asked me to do this talk on a different topic. And they got crossed. And so what they actually did was put in the, all the paper, all the promotional stuff that I was doing my seven minute TED Talk. And it was a different title. And, you know, in my fleshly, I was like, Well, I can make this work. I can make that title work with the message I already know I'm doing. Well, the title of the message was living out a god sized dream and I kept trying to make At work with a message on, I'm just gonna be brutally honest on walking in your authority. Right? Well, you can make the to kind of coincide except when the Lord wants a fresh word, right? And yeah, that you want the cliff notes and he doesn't do that. And so you know, you you kind of go through it. I'm like, Lord, in the middle of everything that's going on. You really want me to speak about living out a god sized dream? Really? Um, I don't really want to be virtual so they can't throw anything at me. So this is a good this is a good thing, right? Um, but he just he took me totally off where we are but took me to Solomon. Hmm. And just you know that he asked for understanding and discernment and judgment and God wrapped it up in a nice sized bow and call it wisdom hmm and said for that I will give you Also wealth and honor. And I kept studying that message him guys don't get it. I mean, a Who am I to ask for a god sized dream in the middle of all this and be? I don't even know what to ask for if I did, right. And I got to I think it's First Kings chapter three got to verse 15. And it says, then Solomon awoke. And I was like, whoa, wait a minute. You go back to verse five, and it says Solomon was in given which is a place he shouldn't have been in darkness at night, which is kind of where a lot of people feel we are right now. Right. And God came to him in a dream. Hmm. So all the things that that we remember that Solomon recounted his lineage of from David and from God's promises and everything that's been sewn into him. We aren't smart enough, right? We aren't good enough. And if we really do want to live out a god sized dream, it really can start now. Right? And it's just having the conversation with God to know what his size dream is yes, because we can't. It's not about us dreaming and dreaming a dream and saying, hey, God, will you please bless this? It's about us. Coming awake, and letting him teach us what he's already sewn into us. You know, whether it's our setup, or our hang ups or whatever it is, he's already sewn it into us. And when God speaks things into us, he sometimes speaks things into us, that you may not even know is a possibility. Yeah, just because in I was thinking about Noah. Yeah, Noah builds an ark, because it's gonna be flooded. And it's never rained on the planet Earth up into that point. I mean, no wonder people were calling him weird and crazy and all sorts of things. But it rain had never fallen on the earth before. And he's building this thing that's supposed to flow. It's supposed to do all this stuff. So God will call you to do things that other people may look at and go, why are you doing that? That's crazy. And chances are if it's a god sized dream, they're going to do that because I find it's a fusions three, three this month 20 says now to him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we can ask. think or imagine Yeah, I can dream up a lot of really cool stuff. But God can do beyond write any of that according to the power that works within us all about His power, His Spirit working through US and US following where he leads in this season, in good season, in difficult season, right. And I guess there's a question for us. It's Friday, Sunday's coming, right. We're kind of on Saturday where it's kind of a still in between. What are we going to do with that time? If we really are supposed to shelter in place and a lot of us are home more and have more time on our hands? What are we doing? I mean, now's when you want to start a god sized dream. Well, you know heard a new partner. I heard a new episode of Tiger kings coming out on Easter Sunday I'm joking. I there is one coming out on Sunday but that's not an endorsement of any twitch that's not an endorsement by any means. I'm just saying you know how many people are more excited about that than the fact that the tomb is empty on Sunday night? Spoiler Yeah, I'm just spoiled it. I've read the book. I've read the ending. Truly, you know if we have a little extra time and you know, I know a lot of your listeners are, love the Lord and are living some amazing, amazing lives and dreams and ways of tuned on enough to to see the different ways they help. their communities and each other. And I mean, just some amazing women on here, just say, what are we doing with this time? What if we really did, let's just call it Saturday. And we spent the season of Saturday letting him awaken us to what he wants to do next. You know, I'm gonna throw my husband under the bus for a minute, just because he's not in here and I can do that. But early on in our marriage, you know, we would say some things like a lot of married couples do. We may say some things that maybe some of us that have been married a while do too, but the ratio Yeah, that's a whole different topic. We need a different expert that we say stuff to each other that we say in the heat of the moment that we wish we could have taken back, because it does cause hurt. It does cause pain. It does cause strife. But there was this phrase that my husband said to me one time early on in our marriage, we're having marital difficulties. And he said, I love you. But I'm not sure I'm in love with you. And that was rough. Don't get me wrong. We've gone to counseling. We've been married 27 years now almost 28 years now. We got over it. He and he is still alive. It's I'm still married to the same husband. You know, but the other part of it was me asking myself on a regular basis. Do I love the Lord or am I in love with the Lord? Because when you love somebody, you're like, Hi, bye. I love you. I mean, I've told the cashier Love you. Bye bye. But when you're in love with somebody, you want to spend time with them. You want to know what makes them happy. You want to do things for them that make them happy. You want to find a way for y'all to live your lives completely together. And that's a huge difference. And where I took offense to Mike saying that to me so many years ago, I'm thankful now that he said that to me, because I've had to dig deep and I've had to ask myself that question, as am I living my life as if I'm in love with Christ? Or am I living it as if I'ma Love you, bye. Oh, sorry, I thought we weren't gonna do any throw punches today. Huge, huge difference, you know, yeah, it's it's a difference in looking for his hand and looking at us face. Just that simple. You sit down to study your word to see what he can do for you. Or you sit down to study His Word to hear his heart, right? And see him face to face it it'll change your life forever. Well, there's there's been times the more and more I get into the word, you know, used to I'd read the word, and I'd write my little journal and put it have a whole lot of my thoughts in that journal. And I was super smart. Yeah, I was good at what I was doing right. But then, the other part of it is what I started realizing was when I was starting to write things in my journal questioning things. Normally it was questioning motives of my heart. It was questioning how willing I was to walk with God how big I was. Willing to dream with him? How if I could discipline myself in this area? Whoo, I hate that word. Discipline myself in this area that he would open up this area for me. You know, and the more disciplined I became, the more the doors were opening. And I'm not talking about religion and law. I'm talking about being disciplined to be more in tune with him in his calling. walking the street in the neighborhood, not as a hooker. Okay, walking the street in my neighborhood. She had died laughing at me right now. Hey, Jesus, loved tokers. Anyway. Oh, yeah, that walk in my neighborhood Street. Even if we're not able to be within the six feet with each other I can still share a smile. I can still share a Hello. I can touch bases with people in my in our Facebook group the other day. We have a neighborhood Facebook group, right? And here's my thing. There is a church song we used to sing. Back in the olden days they don't sing it so much because we think so much contemporary now, you know, in my church, but back I don't even think I've ever sung this in the church I go to now Whoo, that was a rabbit trail anyway. The song you they will know we are Christians by our love. Yep. All right. Well, if you're having intelligence, not by your intelligence, not by me telling you I'm a Christian. Because if you're having to tell me, then I probably wouldn't have never known it from your actions. Not by all the oh they won't know it by all The things we don't do, right? The somebody in our Facebook group post the other day was in our Facebook group for our neighborhood was posting about their next door neighbor. Right? Not one of the neighbors in the almost 300 homes in our neighborhood. Their next door neighbor was mad because their next door neighbor had called city out on them because their trash cans had been in front of their yard and was mad that they had called the police instead of coming over and having the decency to knock on their door and have the conversation and all this stuff on Facebook. So they put it on Facebook and then said in there several times and I'm a Christian and data and all this stuff. I'm like you're making it worse. No, you're a religious person. Please don't. Please, please don't tell anyone that you're a Christian. Just please don't. And then the other part is is we wanted to tell them to will. Couldn't you have gone next door and had the conference They're Christian. They're Christian they they everybody should cater to them. You know, my favorite along those lines, if you talk to any waitress, oh, you're about to push a button here. The the time they hate to wait on tables the most is when the rude people come in after church on Sunday because they're very rude. They're very demanding and they do not tip. No, they leave little pamphlets and little business cards with Jesus loves you on it and they don't tip their server. They're also probably the ones that don't tie the well at church either. I'm just I'm not judging. I'm not judging. I'm just putting it out there. We can do better. We can do better. Because here's the thing. Once the Sunday came, you know, I love it. I keep going back to john because not because it's the freshest But because he was just more in tune with the behind the scenes the things that most people don't talk about his favorite well I relate to him really well because I'm everybody's favorite but but john whenever he runs the team he stops and looks in but in true Peter fashion john notes that Peter grunts straight in all right. So Peters in there John's in there they go back. Mary's telling the other disciples all this stuff by now she seen Jesus she's had a conversation. But you know when she went and talked to Peter and john, she was trembling. She was wondering she was she was upset. It didn't really say she was fearful, but she was upset. But by the time she broke the news to the rest of the disciples, she was elated. She had seen Jesus. I mean, look When you are in a terrifying situation and even now if it's in your spirit, hers was audibly. You hear the Savior call out your name didn't get any better. It calms you instantly. It fires you up instantly. it verifies everything you've ever thought he sewn into you before told you before. And that's all it took was for the man she was in love with the teacher, the Savior she was in love with not just love distance, distant link to just in the craziness of the moment. Call out Mary. Well, I think I think it for me, you know, people like oh, you just like that it was a woman and you're into women empowerment and all that stuff. I said, There is so much more to this than that. I said, here's the thing. Mary had seven demons cast out of her. She had already seen what she thought was impossible become possible. Yes. Who better for Jesus to show himself to somebody who was already primed and ready to see what they believed was once impossible. I mean, how cool is that? I love it. You know, I feel like I'm that person. My husband thinks I'm that person. Which demon am I talking the hangry one. derailed that has lived less than a chosen daughter of the king. has heard his voice call me to himself and has forgiven and redeemed and restored and allowed my place of deepest wounding to become his place to show off what he can do, right? I totally identify with what you just said. Well, we have to take a quick break because you know, they like for the commercials to run here to pay for our radio time slot and all of that. So we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna dive into what happened from Sunday and beyond. Hey, this is Angie Monroe of the warrior Davis show broadcasting live each Tuesday 11am Central from globe life park in Arlington, Texas, login to hear real talk with real women that will empower and equip you to make a more powerful impact in the world each Tuesday 11am Central unfishable Radio Network joke Hey, this is Angie Lehman row of a leading moment show broadcasting live each Thursday 10am Central from the globe life park in Arlington, Texas login to hear amazing people share their stories of resiliency in business and life here how their leading moment can inspire your leading moment login each Thursday 10am Central on fishbowl radio network. All right, and we are back with Connie Wyatt Coleman. And we are having some great conversation. We've talked a little bit about Friday and Saturday and leading up to that, and we've talked a little bit about Sunday. But you know, one of the things that as we were talking about Jesus appearing to marry and then to his decision dipoles a lot of times it would have made more sense if you look at it if he would have gone from today's standard of people gone back and shown himself to the Pharisees the Pharisees the pilot and gone okay keep me coming I don't know we're coming out Oh, we have jumped the shark now. But you know he in my mind that's who I would have shown myself to you thought you could keep me down boom. And a lot of tastes today we see that people in today's society. I was down this is my comeback. I'm you know, you know someone's So said this about me and I defeated that and I have made myself this because of that you had made yourself squat. No self made nothing. I'm a self made man say, I make those all the time. There's a doctor of theology. That friend of mine that had a post up yesterday, and he says, Some of y'all aren't gonna like this. It's Dr. Mike Brown. And I really don't care. He says before I say what needs to be said I acknowledge the sacrifice and work of American people attempting to do all we can do to mitigate the virus. There has been cooperation, sacrifice, adaptation and behavior monitoring. Which are commendable and noteworthy and exemplary. I love my country and its people. Having acknowledged all that, well, here we go again, claiming all our hard work and sacrifices beginning to turn this virus around. just heard on TV how impressive we have been in lowing the projective death tolls. Meanwhile, men and women of God who are battling in the spirit against this calling millions to prayer and sounding trumpet for repentance, a return to the Lord and a humble petition for his deliverance are mocked and castigated. See I can learn big words and lampooned as antiquated, flat earth fools, believers who are praying, fasting and calling out to God or patted on the head like little ignorant trolls that must be tolerated until their kind will eventually be absorbed by the globalist monolith with all of this sublime And superior wisdom say that he's one of my people that writes some big words that I have a hard time with. And so, you know, he's, he says, quit claiming God's glory for ourselves less through our arrogance, we inform him we can handle these problems on our own. Romans 121 through 22, because that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God. Neither were thankful but became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened. professing themselves to be wise they became fools. God forgive us remember us in Deliver us. You are refuge in our strong tower forever and ever. Wow. So my, I thought that was I thought that was a good deep word for us. To sit with because, you know, even the disciples could have gone. Have you seen my Jesus? Looky there, he did this and then he was boom, then he was back as well and leave it to Peter he kind of did. Right. Not in those terms, not in his own strength, right. But after Jesus was on earth and after he showed himself to the people and after he transcended that's when that's when Peter walked in and the power and an anointing fell. And I mean, yeah, he was. He might not have done it with the mic drop. Right. But I mean, he did he was like, just an airdrop. Yeah. Jesus Whoo, y'all killed. This is the Jesus who offers you salvation. Right? This is the Jesus who offers you eternal life. And Spirit had opened up and people could hear truth and understand truth and the huge movement of people coming to understand who Jesus was, and what he was here to do. Just exploded. Well, you know, so what are we going to do after Sunday? Well, first off, we we need to not be like Thomas. Poor Thomas. You know, he was the one that because he hadn't been there and seen Jesus when everybody else did. He he had to touching him and poke his hand into his side and all that stuff. Believe. It doesn't say any of the other disciples did that. So Thomas was a bit morbid we know that. But when when we did this, you know, I love that Jesus without saying he was omnipresent, showed he was omnipresent in this because if Jesus had come back and said, john called me and told me that you were doubting me and who I am, then Jesus would have said it there because john would have written it down. But Jesus didn't say that. Jesus came in and said, Peace be with you then said to Thomas, Put your finger here. He was laying Thomas that he already knew what Thomas needed to believe. We did. He didn't have to articulate that to Jesus. Jesus already knew. And guess what? He knows what each one of us need. Well, okay, so we're going to talk about Christian versus religious again. If I put out on Facebook or in a group that I have an unspoken prayer requests then if somebody it then I somebody comes to me and tells me that they can't pray for me because they don't know what what I need prayer for because it's unspoken. Why are you trying not to lab that that that they need to know what I need prayer for so they can specifically proof to God for me. She's got this look on her face to people like she's trying to choke back. Tears of laughter I'm waiting for how you responded. I'm sure I'm sure that wasn't one of those that I held back on the keyboard once. But basically, somebody had shared in one of our groups that someone so needed prayer, no, I shared that someone so needed prayer, please pray for her. And they came back and, and it was like three comments of you need to tell us what's wrong so we can pray the right way and ask the Holy Spirit to intervene, intervene the right way, and dah, dah, dah. It was just like boom, boom, boom, boom. And mine was very short and to the point, when more through better, we can do better. She keeps a weekend. I mean, let's be honest, spiritual abuse takes all forms. It can be sassy or ferrocene. smacking somebody over the head with a Bible verse instead of meeting them where they are, and loving them and loving them to a new level. And ladies, let's just say it, it can be women who mask prayer, as gossip beauty shop for your circles. Yeah. God does not need you to know the details in order to sit down and say, Dear Heavenly Father, Jesus help my friend. They need you. They're crying out to you, you know what they need? And I know you're able. Right? Amen. Right. I don't need another detail. There is nothing about my prayers that can really do it. It's just us petitioning together. Let's take it a step further. So obedience, if you need to know the details, the Holy Spirit is able to quicken your heart on what to pray for, right? You don't have to, you just don't have to write I can't tell you how many times that I have heard prayer meetings, turned into gossip sessions because we cannot just simply say hey, so and so nice. Prayer. In order for people to really truly pray fervently, we think they need to know the detail that you know, because her husband this and her daughter that and her son did the other end, right. That's a failure on Christians, brothers and sisters, to take prayer requests to the Lord seriously. And it's a failure on our part to abuse each other. With gossip when there's no need for it if we're truly relying on the spirit to pray. Sorry, you just hit a nerve. I cannot stand it. Well, you know, last year it's interesting. We're coming up on a year since my friend Kim passed away, and on the wee morning hours of a April 18. I woke up in the middle of the night, my husband and son were up in Arkansas with my parents and woke up in the wee mornings of the night and I wrote a letter to her in in Facebook Messenger, just letting her know how much I loved her how much I cared for how much you know, I didn't. I didn't know where she was in her medical crisis at that time to if she was even reading things or not. And I went back to sleep. After I wrote that letter. It took me a while to go back to sleep, but I basically cried myself to sleep that night after writing that letter. And I woke up the next morning, and there was a post on her page. That said, Please pray for my family. I had not verbally talked with my friend in weeks But I knew that day from that post on her and what God had started my spirit overnight that my friend was soon to answer death's door. I knew it. I didn't have to have her pick up the phone and call me. I didn't have to have her daughter pick up the phone and call me. I didn't have to get a text. I didn't have to get a detail about how the body had ravaged her system. The chemo had ravaged her system so much and done it. I didn't mean any of that. You didn't have to comment on the Facebook post inside tell us what's going on? No, no, no, you know, I didn't have to do that either. All I had to do basically about the time I saw that post, my husband called from Arkansas to tell me that we had lost another loved one in Ohio. That was our third death then since January and on his side of the family. He's trying to talk to me. As he's talking to me, he can notice that my voice ain't right. And I could just go, I said, I have this sense that Kim is dying. And he's like, Well, what do you know? I'm like, that she's dying. And he goes out of you know, that. I'm like, it's just a sense, you know? And it was just and she was the one that pushed me and challenged me and never wanted me to hang back to what she was called to, but she wanted to be involved into what we were doing. Yes. Right. And so, being in tune with her brought me in tune with God. being in tune with God brought me in tune with her. Last week. God I post, from a cousin in Georgia saw posts from a cousin in Georgia. Just saw one of the kids posted, please pray for my family. Instantly I knew what had happened. Before my husband even got confirmation of what had happened. I instantly knew because I'm connected with that mom. And we have shared our hearts with each other. And were to share each other's hearts. The Holy Spirit intervenes to communicate in ways between us that when we don't have the strength or the energy to pick up the phone and make the call, the Holy Spirit can say, hey, you need to text them. You need to call them you need to check on them. When you find that true, yeah. Some of us are better at doing it. I mean, I just yesterday I mean, I considering my older brother, right? And he posts to Facebook almost every morning. And I saw it yesterday morning. He had posted it Wednesday. But I just saw it. And I mean in the first three or four words, I could hear in his voice that something wasn't right. Right. And he was he was absolutely transparent on the post just that it had been a rough day and he's, you know, walking through this and a pastor friend had passed away, but there was just something deeper, it felt like, again, to your point, I know his heart, right. And so I just text shot him a text real quick. And I'm like, Look, I know, I know you're trying to navigate all of this and blah, blah, blah, and just know in this moment, right now. I'm praying strength for you. And I almost he texted me back He said, You know, when I posted that yesterday I had this, just this feeling just this over, was overcome with it. He's a little did I know, by 10 o'clock last night, or the night that he posted that deal, but 10 o'clock that mind. His father passed away. Oh my goodness, he got the call. He was able to get there and he had about an hour with his father. But that he didn't he didn't have to ask outside of that post. Say Anything else was going on? I had no clue his dad had been sick again. Right. But I just knew after hearing his voice that he needed encouragement Hmm, I had no clue anything else that had transpired. Didn't need to know right. The need to know just needed to know that I was reaching out for him. So can do what do we do after Sunday? Yeah. We live life with people. And when God put somebody on your heart, follow up with it, right or no follow up. I, I can't tell you personally, how many times you know, I've told you 100 times I thought before I took this job that I knew what spiritual warfare was, I thought I was prepared. I had no No, no, no clue, no clue. And there have been many times, just online that it's not something that people ask for prayer for necessarily, it's not something that you would ever put on Facebook, but just the, the battles that come and God has quickened to other people's spirits, right to to call or just to send it, send a text or, hey, you want to go have coffee, you know, just any little thing but somewhere along the way, the Holy Spirit put me on other people's hearts. When I needed it, and they didn't need details, probably didn't even share details when we went to coffee. Right? Not with a lot of them. But some of them just Hey, you just crossed my mind. I want you to know, you know, I love you keep going strong. Well, and, and here's the other thing that you have to realize even Jesus had tears to His disciples. He took his disciples within places. He taught lessons that they were all able to hear and do. But even when he went to have certain moments with disciples, there are some that were closer to him than others, that he confided in more so than others. And that's okay, too. Yeah. You don't have to tell everybody everything that's going on. You know, you shouldn't and Connie's one of those people that knows a lot of what goes on with If she doesn't know it right away, she'll know it at some point when we have a discussion. And, and I'm hoping that I always hope that I'm that friend to my friends whenever I'm doing that as well, that they feel that they can speak and open their hearts to me and tell me anything. And it will not shock me it will not hurt me it will not push me away. And that I will not think that they are less than a Christian. I will just love them as Christ loved them. You know, and, and we need to be that friend to others. I know. One of the ways the Lord has done that, for me is just for several. I don't even remember when he really put it on my heart but somebody was going through a trial and you know, just letting them know I'm there letting them know I'm there. I don't you know what, I'm available to you whenever you need me. You don't have to tell me a thing. You don't have to tell me what's going on. just text me the word Jesus, and I will know immediately, right? That you need prayer that you need me to intercede in your behalf and you need me to stand in the gap or stand strong with you. Hmm. And that's all I need to know. That's it text me the name Jesus. Right. And I have some friends that that take me up on. Right. And I'm thankful because I have friends that man, I can just sit and pray, please pray. And that's where the power is. Because, look, here's the truth when when we're in the middle of a battle, right? We may think we know what our prayer need is. Chances are just like right now, we don't know truth. We don't know truth of situation that we're in right now. And when we're in the middle of a battle, a lot of times we can see pieces and parts but we can't pull ourselves out. Have it far enough to see the big picture, right? And if I'm telling someone what to pray, instead of allowing the Holy Spirit to tell them what to pray, hmm, if they're praying for what I want them to pray for, that may or may not be what I need, it may or may not be what the Lord has for me. So if I truly want people to pray where the need is, I'll leave that up to the Holy Spirit as much as possible. You know, as you're talking about that, I started thinking about the movie, tornado, you know, cuz, and there's a reason for it when you're in the middle of the tornado. When they were they were driving into the storm to get the data from the storm twister. twister. That's what's called twister. Yeah, Helen Hunt. Yeah, she dropped, they dropped their driving in there to get all that data out of it. But to drive in there, they had to have the other one stay back to be able to tell where the tornado was going and where Their exit route was too close because they were too close and, and you know, even being in the truck, she's like cow, another cow. He says, I think that's the same cow. Because at that point, they just didn't know what direction was the right direction out and, and there's been times where I've been in the thick of it and I'm like, I don't even know how to pray for me, right? I just don't even know what I need right now. Sleep, sleep would be nice. When when Ali had the twins and we were all here. It was like Sleep, sleep would be nice, but you know. But then there have been unexpected blessings that have happened because what happens when you just say I just need you to pray and you don't give guidance to what you need prayer for. The Holy Spirit supernaturally opens. have so much more than you could ever imagine because you've opened your receiver up to receive more than you ever hoped was possible. Just kind of who he is. Isn't that awesome? Our God is a great God. My dad, he's kind of cool. Yo, I'm also loved that. After Sunday, the apostles went fishing. Yeah, they went right back to living their lives. I did. Not the same. They were forever changed and, and yes, Jesus showed up and did the miracles of the fish. And then like they said he in that I love me. Do you love me, Peter, do you love me? He was reinstating Jesus. Jesus was reinstating Peter at that point he was he was getting Peter to realize his role and his purpose in being the rock the foundation that the church was going to be built on. That Yes, you may stumble and Ball. But there's still grace. You're still love your there's still like place for you. And how many of us have stumbled and fallen in life? I know I have many times more than three. More than more than more than three. But you know, I love that too because he Do you love me? Yes, Lord, right Feed my sheep. Right? Feed my sheep. It's not about you, right? It's about others. But the whole scenario is, well, Jesus, cook them breakfast, hmm. And then told Peter to feed his sheep. We can't give what we don't have. Right. The Lord feeds us so that we can feed others. It's not about us. It's not about promoting us. It's not about a platform for us. It's about the Lord sowing into us what he has for us To live in us and through us, and then us beating others with that. Because if you're not spending time with the Lord and you're not in His Word, then I can say, hey, Angie, you know I'm rooting for you, all day long. I can share my great intellect, intellect with you. Be slim pickins more than one. What do I have that really offers you any hope? one thing and one thing only the love of Jesus Christ, right? He says it into me so that I can sell it into others into story. And that's just what did he win over death hell in the grave to do to feed us? Right so that we can feed others. But that's what the whole that's what living on a god sized dream is about. Right. It's it's not about us. It's never about us. It's always, always about sowing life into others. Always. Well, and, you know, when he's telling them wait, we joked all week there's so quit hoarding the toilet paper. It's all about it's not God, toilet paper. Sorry. But, you know everybody talking about spraying and praying but are they really pray in the Lysol spray and pray, spray and pray that you know, we make fun of the disciples being told so many times we talked about that earlier. But we've already talked about how we've been told multiple times, but when he goes in, he talks to the disciples and He presents himself to the disciples. And then he presents himself to Thomas he goes in there because you have seen me you have believed Blessed are those who have not seen any Yeah, believe me, and believe, you know, here's the thing. They had something a gift, john 316, you have a gift that I'm giving you, you know, my only beloved son. This is a big love gift I'm giving you It's better than a diamond ring girls. And I'm giving you this gift. Enjoy your time with him. feed off of your time with him absorb from him as much as you possibly can. Because you have no idea the legacy that your involvement in these three years with my son is going to have. I mean, they couldn't even grasp the fact that he was going to come back from the dead. Could you think they would be able to grasp that 2000 years later we would be sitting here talking about him. And then the most favorite one of all Yeah. And the Doubting Thomas. I mean, no, who would have thought it? No. And we're in a microwave society. Now we don't think about that either. No, we don't think that the decisions that I make today affect my children. We might think that far. But we don't even can't even fathom what the Lord has passed us because of us. Right, if we will surrender to what he's calling us to do. All right. You know, Kim Slater had her surgery and beginning of January, and she has had an opportunity to look internally both physically and spiritually During this journey, and I saw her on that podcast the other day, yeah, she is. With God's help she is slaying it. Oh yeah, she is she's doing amazing she, she has God gave her the word of the year this year as restart. And that was before January one came around in January 2 she had her open heart surgery right. And when I went and saw her The day after she came home from the hospital, she has a heart shaped pillow. And on there, the doctor drew it has the it's a heart like a Valentine heart shape. heart but it has a picture of a heart medical wise on there. It's what she could use to hold up against the wrists incision when she went to cough because it was going to be painful, right. But on there, the doctor drew and showed her what he had done internally on her So she could see scientifically what was done physically inside of her to open up her, her get blood flowing better. And it was amazing. The day after her surgery days after her surgery, just the color that was back in her that hadn't been there in years he didn't know. And just not knowing how bad she was until it happened. But with that change, it's had overflow effect. She has lost weight. She has started eating healthier, making healthier choices, learning about how to fuel her body the right way, learning that she actually likes to exercise. She doesn't like getting started. But once she started she actually likes it. You know, so she can just get past that little bump of starting. It's like me riding the bike with a stun the other A Day in the neighborhood. We go to one driveway, and he'd stopped so I'd have to stop my bike. And he was taking arrest like a six yea

We talked last time on some of the financial impacts the Coronavirus had caused, but now we will discuss how to plan to get through tough times and market downturns. John and Nick will talk about a few suggestions they have when they see situations like this and how to withstand a volatile market.Helpful Information:PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/Contact: 813-286-7776Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.comFor a transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/Transcript of Today's Show:----more----Mark: Hey everybody, welcome into this week's edition of Retirement Planning Redefined with John and Nick of PFG Private Wealth. Here today again to talk some more about the, well the coronavirus, like we can't not talk about it. It's the only thing going on in the world it seems like. And we're going to talk about retirement planning for this volatile market. Mark: So guys, welcome in. How are you this week? I'll start with Nick. How's it going bud? Nick: Oh pretty good. Just trying to be a voice of reason for people during this crazy time. Mark: Are you doing your part, staying safe, staying home, all that good stuff? Nick: Yep, I [crosstalk 00:00:32]. John: So let me jump in here. Nick's been doing his social distancing for the last three years so he's pretty good. Mark: Good stuff. How about you John? Nick: For at least three weeks, at least three weeks. Mark: At least three weeks? Yeah. Mark: How you doing John? John: I'm good, I'm good. I'm more upbeat today. I feel rejuvenated. I'm ready to roll. Mark: Well that's good. And that's tough, that's a challenge we're all going to face because a lot of us have been doing this for about three weeks already and we're looking at another month going through April at the time we're taping this. We've still got a few weeks to go, so we'll see how it plays out. But there's news every day, it's changing all the time. So we'll see how this plays out. But we thought it'd be worthwhile to at least go through some conversation about retirement planning through or during this volatile market. So let's just kind of jump in and talk about the overall importance of a strategy. Nick, I mean we talked about it long before this downturn happened and more than ever I think that it benefits to work with an advisor because it's a little bit easier some would say when markets are up and things are good and everything's going swimmingly well, than it is during downturns. And if you don't have that roadmap, it certainly can make things more cloudy. Nick: Yeah, it's been interesting. John and I both started in the industry in about '06, '07, so right at the kind of onset of the recession. And after we kind of got through that period of time, people were still afraid of it and what happened in that period of time for three, four, five, six, seven years. And since the markets have been going up for so long, planning has become more prevalent and people have understood that it's an important thing to do. It seems like some have done it almost because, okay, well this is what we're supposed to do, so we're going to do it. Nick: And now the feedback that we've gotten from clients is that it's really kind of clicked to them how important the planning is and how much peace of mind kind of re reviewing it and understanding parts that maybe they didn't quite get when we first set up the plan or in the first couple of reviews, realizing the importance of the plan as we move through times like this after having kind of a smooth sailing decade really. So we can't emphasize enough the importance of clarity and even just helping to avoid rash and unsmart decisions we can kind of put it that way. So the confidence level that we've seen for people that have a plan versus those that don't, from the standpoint of we've been introduced to new clients and we've gotten referrals kind of through this period of time and it's definitely a drastic difference. Mark: Yeah, definitely. Mark: Well John, let's talk about some of the things that the plan determines. Let's go through a few things to consider in there. John: Yeah. We like to say the plan determines what type of investments you should be going into and what strategy within those investments. And that's where Nick and I really try to focus on, "Hey, let's get an understanding of what your needs and goals are. What are you trying to accomplish?" And once we determine that, secondary always comes the investments and one of the things that with the investments go, we try to curtail or develop a comprehensive strategy for each individual person because everyone's different, everyone's risk tolerance is different. But the plan really dictates how much risk you should be taking. John: So we've had scenarios where basically we're doing a plan and the person when we first meet they're pretty aggressive and then when we do the plan it's, "Hey your plan works very strong at four to 5% rate of return, so why are we taking all of this unnecessary risk?" So really when you do something like that, you could be putting more scenarios where failing happens in the plan because there was a pullback. So we really have the plan dictate how much risk you should be taking, which with our clients, if we see it working around four or 5%. Not that we just aim for that, but we kind of scale back on the risk we're taking. Which I'll tell you right now, some clients are appreciative of that strategy, of just saying, "Hey let me gear what I'm trying to aim for a rate of return based on my plan."John:Other things that we really look at is someone's risk tolerance, which I think in the last month or so people's risk tolerance kind of shifted a little bit because they saw some real volatility because we've been almost in that 10 year bull market with not a lot of pullback. So we really try to figure out, "Hey, what's someone's risk tolerance and how much can they mentally afford to lose?" There are some scenarios where we might stress test the plan and that's a case by case depending on the individual. But it's important that you kind of take a look and just stress test it to figure out exactly how will my plan work with any type of market pullback? And then we're going to touch on this later in the next session next week, but importance of kind of building the right asset allocation in your overall investment portfolio. Mark: Well Nick, a lot of people had the question, especially with the heavy downturns, it came so fast, obviously in response to the virus and so on and so forth. You have people saying things like, "Why don't you just close the market?" Right? They want you to shut it down or whatever. And we thought, well we closed it a little bit during 9/11 but that was a little bit of a different scenario. But you're effecting liquidity by doing that and that's another key component to an overall plan is understanding liquidity as part of the strategy. Nick: Yeah. So the speed at which this happened, one article that I read had pointed out that this bear market happened in half the amount of days as the one during the great depression, which was kind of an eye opening sort of thing to think about where it really only took us about 21 days to get here. And so the speed at which that happened, literally when you think about it, in between the time that people get their monthly statements, they've lost a significant amount of money. So to tie into the planning, and this is something that we've tried to reemphasize with clients as something that we take into consideration, but I think it's also helped maybe shed a little bit of light on us spending a little bit more time talking about it with clients as we're putting together the plan is having a liquidation order and a liquidation strategy. Nick: And so what we mean by that is, people tend to look at their money as one pot of money and they don't necessarily think about it as, some people refer to it as the bucket strategy and a lot of times that makes the easiest way to understand, where we have short term, mid term, long term money and in understanding that even if you are two years from retirement or in your first couple of years in retirement, et cetera, we still have a long time horizon. And we don't just shut things down from the standpoint of the overall investment strategy and shifting the cash and those sorts of things. Nick: So we try to review and make sure when we have clients that are taking monthly withdrawals, we usually look to set up six to 12 months of expenses, dependent upon the client, dependent upon what they're comfortable with from a risk standpoint. Set up six to 12 months in their account of cash so that they know they have that income. The emphasis that we've made with clients on keeping a cash reserve where some feedback that we've gotten over the last few years, "Hey, interest rates are so low. This money's just sitting there. I hate not having it do anything for me," et cetera. Nick: And we've kind of tried to hold the line and tell them, "Hey, we understand but that money will come in handy." And really the peace of mind that people have when we go through it and we kind of walk them through. It's like, "Hey, look at between the money that you have in cash in your bank account and the money that we have sitting in cash to be sending you your withdrawals, we have a year to two years worth of income without you having to sell any of your other holdings, which gives your money time to bounce back and not realize these losses that we've seen," really starts to help people understand the importance of having that liquidation order and liquidation strategy. Nick: And then also, from the standpoint of having the big broad based game plan, having a premise or an idea of when we're going to start social security, but then understanding that, "Hey, when things change like they are right now," saying, "Hey, let's look at the numbers. Instead of us waiting another year and a half to start social security, let's go ahead and get it fired up now. Let's have that income start to come in that way you have a little bit more peace of mind, you have additional income coming in, we have to take less out of your investments." And as difficult as it is for people to think in the way of, "Hey, now's a good buying opportunity from the standpoint of your investments. Let's let that money work for you and try to get as much bounce back as we can over this period of time." So that liquidation order and how it fits into the broad based game plan has become really evident and important to a lot of people. Mark: Well, and speaking of importance too, one of the things that we're doing is we're all hunkering down in place and staying safe, staying home, all these things that we keep hearing now, but we can't just hunker down on our plan through this time period and just say, "Well I'll get to it after things start to get better." Right John? You want to revisit, you still want to have these conversations even during volatile periods. John: Yeah, and one thing we've tried to do during these last few weeks is really reach out to clients, especially the ones that are retired or are knocking on the door of retirement and revisit their plan and just let them know that, "Hey, even with this pullback, this is kind of where you still stand." And for the majority of them, they're still in a good situation. Again, partly because we had some strategies in place for a downturn in the market saying, "Okay, well now that the market's down, we have these other buckets, whether it's cash or whatever it might be, where it's not tied to the market and you can access it and let your investments recover." John: So I'll say in our reviews, when we show people their plan still works, it actually really provides a lot of peace of mind and it helps them make better decisions not to cash out where it's basically like, "Okay, you know what? Even though it's dipped, the S&P's dipped 20, 30% over this time frame, my goals are still going to be achieved so let's go ahead and stay the course." So that's where it's really nice just to have the plan in place. It's something you can always take a look at and say, "Hey, I know that the market's doing this, but how am I doing? And how is this going to affect my overall goals?" And when you evaluate it and say, "Hey, you're still okay," I think people feel a bit better about what they're doing. Mark: Yeah, I agree. And I think it goes a long way towards anything we're doing whether you're getting inundated with news every day on the virus and it's driving you nuts and you need a reprieve or you're getting inundated with market volatility or whatever. Sometimes having some clarity, having a calming voice, having someone to kind of talk you through some of these pieces certainly goes a long way. So it applies to your health, it also applies to your wealth. So reach out to the guys if you've got questions or concerns. That's going to do it for this week on the podcast. We talked a little bit about, again, how to plan through this volatile market. We're going to talk some more strategy on the next session. So make sure you subscribe to us on Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, whatever platform you choose. Mark: You can find them by simply typing in Retirement Planning Redefined, if you're using one of those apps and you enjoy a particular one versus another, just type that in the search box and you'll find it. Retirement Planning Redefined. Or go to their website, pfgprivatewealth.com, that's pfgprivatewealth.com and you'll see the podcast page there. You can subscribe that way and get all the episodes as they come out, check out past episodes. And of course, as always, before you take any action, if you have questions or concerns, please check with a qualified professional like John and Nick before you do so, and you can reach them at 813-286-7776 at PFG Private Wealth. 813-286-7776. Guys, thanks for your time this week, I appreciate you, for John, for Nick. I'm Mark and we'll see you next time on Retirement Planning Redefined. Nick: Thanks Mark. John: Thanks. 

Although the product is an important factor, at the end of the day, it is customer experience that determines the success of your business. And one of the best things that can lead to great customer experience is through systemizing processes. In today’s episode of Freedom in Five Minutes, guest George Chen, founder of UBestPacks.com talks with Dean about the importance of offloading tasks, leveraging your VSAs, and the influence of customer service over the success of your business. ----- Automated Transcription Below: Dean Soto  0:00   Hey, this is Dean Soto — founder of FreedomInFiveMinutes.com and ProSulum.com P R O S U L U M . com. And we're here again with another Freedom In Five Minutes Podcast episode. Today's topic is this. Systemizing Global Manufacturing the Easy Way with George Chen. That and more coming up.   Oh. Today is going to be a treat. An absolute treat! Because I have one of my favorite people here on this podcast. Someone who has taken – oh my gosh, like he not only does – he systemizes in a way that allows his global manufacturing business to run with as few people as possible.   He is so creative when it comes to systems and really doesn't hesitate to at least try to systemize pretty much everything in his life as well as with his business. So, that being said, I am here with Mr. George Chen. He is the President and CEO of U-BEST PACKAGING SOLUTIONS. George! What is up, my man? How's it going?    George Chen  1:29   Hey. What's up, dude? Stoked to be here. Very excited. Yeah.    Dean Soto  1:34   Awesome. Awesome. So we actually met through — Paul who is a mutual friend of ours.   And he introduced us and we started working together. You do some pretty amazing things. I had no idea - when we first started - all of the things that you do. Can you kind of give an overview of what you are in charge of? And really, how did you get to that point?   George Chen  2:03   Yeah. So, what I'm in charge of. So, I run U-BEST PACKAGING SOLUTIONS. We're based out of Brea, California, Orange County. And we do anything branded. So, if it involves putting your brand on it, whether it be packaging, business cards, flyers, to clothing, apparel, we do it all. So, what I oversee is I oversee our U.S. operations as well as our overseas operations. We have manufacturing sites here in Orange County, as well as in Taiwan and China as well. We not only do packaging, but we also do shoe manufacturing as well. So in various different industries. And how I got here. Well, it's funny, I started a sticker company. In college, I traded two DJ turntables for a vinyl plotter. And what a vinyl plotter is — if you look at cars. And they usually have those family stickers where it has a mom, dad, son, whatever. Yeah, so I traded two turntables for a vinyl plotter to cut both stickers. And from there, we moved into different types of packaging. And that's kind of how it started.   Dean Soto  3:21   That's crazy. That's crazy. So actually, were you selling your vinyl cuts to your friends and things like that? What I mean — that's pretty dang cool.   George Chen  3:36   No. I was — originally, I just wanted to make a bunch of stickers for myself. And I was pretty into the car modding industry where you take the parts off of that. So it kind of went hand in hand. And then eventually, we started selling parts. Vinyl, you know, kind of like tinting parts for certain head lamps and headlights. I would sell it to car modding shops. And that's kind of how it started.    Dean Soto  4:05   That's crazy. That's so crazy. And now, you have a whole manufacturing company in Brea that I have been to a couple of times. You have a staff there, and you do some really amazing things there. So what's out? Give a big rundown of some of the things that you're able to do right now. I know you say you have your shoe manufacturer and you have whatever. What's your favorite thing right now? What's the most innovative or what was your — kind of the thing that you love the most that you're doing right now?   George Chen  4:43   I wouldn't say it's one single product that we do. I think it's more so the gratification of printing something and showing our customers and seeing the look on their face. That's what I love doing. I love — it's not that I love printing or I love manufacturing. I love the feeling of giving my customers a product and having them go, "Holy crap, this is better than I imagined. Thank you for this, like, I'm so stoked." That's usually where I get my gratification. But if you want to boil it down to kind of more so a product, I would say, our paper packaging. Doing boxes and doing retail packaging, or a lot of marketing, influencer marketing packages. So, a lot of times we've worked with global brands and we make special influencer boxes for them that they ship out to all these marketing influencers. And we build like really, really cool custom wooden boxes. Sometimes plastic boxes, clear acrylic boxes and just make the user experience something super cool that they can post online and share with the world.   Dean Soto  5:57   It's amazing. It's amazing. You actually deal with a whole bunch of different industries right? With all of this? And as I've seen your packaging too, and we'll get into some more deep questions in a little bit. But I've seen your packaging. It's funny because when I think of packaging, I think of just — it sounds bad because you're probably gonna be like, "Yeah. That's like totally not what we do." But I actually just think of like, cardboard box around   George Chen  6:31   Brown shipping boxes.   Dean Soto  6:32   Yeah.   George Chen  6:34   Literally what everyone says, "Oh, you do packaging? Can I buy like brown boxes?"   I'm like, I mean, we can do that. But that's not our bread and butter. Yeah. And then everyone's like, Oh, yeah, you guys are like... I say no. Yeah.   Dean Soto  6:48   So yeah. I want people to get an idea of all the different things that you have created. Some of the most creative things like for Afters Ice Cream, which is really big over here in Southern California you did some really creative amazing things for them and for some pretty big named companies right? So what are those kind of things?   George Chen  7:12   We're pretty big in the restaurant industry. I would say we do a lot of franchise restaurants nationwide and we do local franchise areas like Afters Ice Cream. We did everything from their wall installation. So if you go on their website, I think it's AftersIceCream.com. You guys can go through their portfolio and see some stuff that we've done. So we do all of their ice cream cups for them. We do all of their wall installations for them. So, wallpaper wraps, signage, photobooth opportunities. We just recently did the Rick and Morty collaboration, and we did all the window clings that go in the storefront. The wallpaper packaging and merchandise quoting   Dean Soto  7:58   The Rick and Morty Thing man was so cool. Like kind of give an idea of what that actually was just because, man. If you guys saw the video of this, you felt like you were in the cartoon.   George Chen  8:12   Yeah. So I think it was at their Pasadena store. And they have this building on the side just solely for a photo op. But once you walk in the door, it's covered in wallpaper of different designs of Rick and Morty and you go in there and you take photos, and with ice cream and whatnot. But, you know, you just gotta go to the website and take a look at it for yourself. It's kind of hard to explain.   Dean Soto  8:41   I love it. Like I always kind of — I always think of what you do as putting ideas and dreams into a physical and tangible product whether it's actual packaging for something. Or you know, wrap or something like that. It gives that whole physical... You're able to put these ideas into a physical form which is absolutely amazing. I love it man.   George Chen  9:13   We like to say we bring ideas to life. If you have an idea and you saw something super cool and you want to recreate it, or you want to redesign it into something that fits around your product, that's what we're good at. We're really good at building packaging around our customers' products — whether it be boxes, bags, or whatever it may be. We're really good at you know, catering to certain customers and making something very memorable.   Dean Soto  9:41   Yeah, I love it. So guys, if you haven't noticed, I'm like, these guys. You guys got to know exactly what this guy does. So that as we go deeper into how he actually gets this done, you'll just be blown away that he's able to do what he's able to do. So with such a lean organization. All that being said, when we first met, I mean... prior to us even meeting, you already seemed to have a mind for systems and operations and you run your business, from what I can tell, very differently than a lot of other people in your industry. And that one of those things is definitely a focus on outsourcing and documentation. So, what is your whole idea when it comes to those two things — documentation and outsourcing? So that you can maintain a flexible but still powerful organization?   George Chen  10:51   Oh, it's funny. Before we met, I actually did not really thinking that kind of way. It might have seemed that way but not really. I did learn from a friend one time. We were — I can tell you, when we started this company, I was typing out invoices on Microsoft Excel and doing inventory counts manually by hand, typing them into Microsoft Excel and calculating our inventory that way. So that's where we started. And we my friend was helping me out. And we were talking about inventory management systems because going through my inventory every week and counting everything was not working. So we found a company called StitchLabs.com. And he explained to us like, you know, you have to catalogue everything. You have to go through and input all this data. And it's going to take a lot of time, but if you put in the work now, it'll be smooth sailing later down the road, because you'll have all this infrastructure that you've implemented. So that was kind of the beginning of where I had that kind of system thought and operations way to do things. But in the like, until we met, that's when it started really kicking in and understanding. They are doing the outsourcing and documenting all of our processes. Because, you know, in the very beginning it was me. I was doing the account managing. I was doing the sales. I was doing the invoicing. I was doing the purchase orders. I was doing the accounts payable, accounts receivable, so literally doing everything. So there wasn't really a way that I systemize everything, it was just Oh, something came up, I had to do it, and I just did it and then we'll go on. But slowly as we met, you know, I started realizing, "Hey, I can document all this stuff. Cuz at the end of the day, how to type an order is going to be the same every single time."    Dean Soto  12:46   Exactly.    George Chen  12:47   So how do I document it so that I can pass it along and have someone else take care of it for me? Where I can focus on the more important parts of scaling my company, doing business development to product development. Things that actually I'm very valuable at because at the end of day, my time isn't used best if I'm typing up invoices or purchase orders, right? But yeah systems changed the way I run the company.    Dean Soto  13:12   That's awesome. That's awesome. What was  the first thing that you put into a system that — not necessarily the first thing... But the first thing that where you were blown away where thought "Oh crap I don't have to do this thing ever again and now that gives me time to do this other thing that's way valuable. What was the first thing where the light bulb just clicked?   George Chen  13:43   Order processing and invoicing. I hated doing that. Like, I absolutely hated it. I don't like typing out invoices and typing out orders. It's such a waste of my time. And once I implemented that package. I was able to focus on sales. I can just talk to a customer and say, "Hey, please process order and these are the details of that order." And never have to do it again. That was the beginning. And that, you know, that snowballed into even... I mean, we've always had a process on how to do some of the printing in our warehouse. Yeah. But once that happened, I was like, "Okay, now I'm starting to look into all of the different things that we do, and how I systemize this?" Coming from a startup company or coming from, like, not having any business background - learning on the fly. Now I have to think, how would a global corporation do this? Right? They have all the standard operating procedures. Now, that made me realize, because I was doing everything myself — I knew that I had my operating procedures. Those are all in my head.    Dean Soto  14:48   Yeah.   George Chen  14:48   There's no way for me to teach someone and have them replicate it time and time again, without any errors because then it's all subjective. Then it's like, "Oh, you have your way of doing this. I have my way of doing this." I'm teaching you how I'm doing it. But you're not going to be doing it the same way I'm doing it, because there's no documentation.   Dean Soto  15:05   Yeah, exactly. So   George Chen  15:06   I started looking in my warehouse, and, you know, printing facilities. And I'm looking at, how do I systemize this now? So now I went through our printing process and started documenting. Okay, you mix the ink for 16 seconds. And why do we do this? Like, we started listing out all the different reasons why we do certain things, and what to look out for. If the ink is not mixed properly, you're going to get separation and whatnot. And it kind of teaches everyone "Hey, this is the exact way to do it. And if something goes wrong, then we look at that document and say, okay, where did it go wrong?"   Dean Soto  15:42   Yeah.    George Chen  15:42   And you can easily pinpoint now, at what process something went wrong. And now, we have a much better quality control because now we know, "Hey, this print station is producing something different than this other condition. What's the difference between the two? Or what not.   Dean Soto  16:00   I love that. I love that. That's cool. Especially the the idea that because you have the process, you can see where something breaks down. It's not a person, you know. If somebody messes up and it's just because it's in their head, then it's like, "Okay, well how do I fix that?" And that's not very fixable, especially if they keep on messing up. But if it's the process, it makes it super easy to be able to say, "Boom, there's a problem right there." And to fix it, I love that. Before we get into more of the tactical stuff, walk me through how a new customer comes in. Like what's your entire system from new customer comes in to ideation where you're coming up with strategy and everything like that to actually delivering a product. What's your involvement in all of that?   George Chen  17:00   Now. So in the beginning, I was — beginning to end, I was in everything. Now we started outsourcing a lot of our account managing. So now, when a customer comes in, they call us right? Either whoever's in the office will take the call or if I take the call, I'll get their contact information. They'll most likely give me a brief of what they're looking for to do. "Okay, cool, thank you. And I tell I instantly, as soon as that call is done, I provide my VSAs who the customer is, what their email address is. I say, please send them an intro email. And what an intro email is — it has our customer application form. It also has some of our portfolio and some of our past projects, and it kind of gives you a brief about our company and what we do. So it starts off there. They send the customer application, they get set up and then they respond with what they're looking for. Get a quote for, say it's a very standard product, they'll go through a quote, if it's involved. And then they email us what they're looking for: quotes. So then my VSAs, will go ahead and grab that information and start working on the quote, looking at either where to pull some products from different places, wherever it may be, shoot back the quote to the customer. Quote, good customer start placing the order they'll send us the artwork, my same VSA. So at this point, I haven't touched anything. I'm just monitoring my same VSA will take that artwork, send it to our pre-production department, they'll come out with a proof. The proof goes out back to the customer through the VSA. Customer approves the proof. Then we move into manufacturing that is done either here overseas, wherever it may be. And from there, the product gets delivered. I have not touched this product or talked to the customer. The only time I'm involved is more so product development. So if they're trying to build the packaging around their product, or if they're trying to come up with something new with different types of materials, that's where I kind of jump in. More of the creative side and helping them understand what capabilities — because a lot of times, most, I would say 90% of customers... they have a graphic designer in house or they have hired someone to do graphic designing. But that graphic designer is solely for online. You know how to make pictures, put it on a website and make it look nice. Yeah, they don't have the experience of doing graphic design for packaging or for printing because it's way different. You need bleeds, you need Pantone colors, you need all different check points. So the difference is that's where I come in and I help them guide through that process in doing the understanding of how to build these custom projects.   Dean Soto  20:05   That's the stuff that you enjoy. Yeah?   George Chen  20:08   Yeah. No, it's fine. It's fun. Because then I'm on starting it from scratch, and then bringing these ideas to life. Where at the end of the day, the customers like, "Wow, that was super cool." And for us, you know, we try to provide a five-star experience every time we work with a customer. We know what it's like, dealing with, you know, I don't know someone like... Well, I can't really compare but someone like Vistaprint or someone like youprint.com to do your business cards, right? You just send something online, you hope it comes out and you get your product and it's like... We guide you through that whole process because we know what to look out for. We know that if you're printing a box and it needs to go in the fridge or you're printing a box and it's going to go on something that's what... We know that "Hey, you need to use different types of material to get what you're looking for." That's why we're different from most suppliers in that we will look at your product and try to understand it instead of just trying to sell you something. Yeah, that's not our goal. Our goal is to give you a five-star experience where you can tell us "Hey, this is what I'm trying to go for." And we take the reins, and we guide you along the process. And that's our way of providing a five-star experience.   Dean Soto  21:26   I love that and you have the time to actually do that.   George Chen  21:30   Yeah, I'm not typing out invoices and purchase orders all the time.   Dean Soto  21:34   Man, man. So there was a time where, when you were working with your Virtual Systems Architect, your VSA. She did something where... Because she, you know – obviously you guys had the processes that you guys created. All the documentation. everything got systemized but there was a time where the customer actually sent something to you. Like an image. And she knew right away. It wasn't really through the process, she actually knew that it was wrong and like, slapped your customer on the hand a little bit, right?   George Chen  22:21   So that specific example is when one of our customers sent us artwork that was not print ready. So what it means is that once you send us the artwork, all we do is take it, make a proof out of it and print it. We don't touch it. We don't do anything at all. But what they sent to us was an artwork. But it had text in the middle, giving instructions on what needed to be what size and whatnot. And if we took that and we printed it, that would have went wrong, or it would have had all that markings on there. So what my VA did is that she responded and saying "Hey, we noticed that the artwork that you sent was not print ready. Please make sure you remove all of your markings and resend this artwork so that we can move it into print."   Dean Soto  23:11   Oh my gosh, I love that. I love that. And that was like not necessarily something in the process. But you feel like because you had so much documentation... Because all that – because you know, as your VSA is actually creating all that documentation. They're learning your business. Do you feel that that? That's one of the reasons why that happened?   George Chen  23:36   Yeah, I think more so why that happened is that just copying them a lot on every single email that goes out. I think it's more so just the training process, right? If you have someone with you at all times, and they see how you interact with someone, they'll start picking up on that, right. They'll start seeing "Okay, he treats them in a very professional manner. Very courteous. Certain ways you talk to them. They'll start picking up on that. And that's kind of how we've educated every single one of our employees here. You help. You educate them. Versus telling them to do. Yeah. Help them understand why we're doing what we're doing. And why. Because for us, sometimes, a lot of our customers think, "Oh, I need this today." But we realize, "Hey, if you do something quickly, problems happen." Then you start skipping steps. And then that's why we have such a strict, strict guideline on our processes. They're able to pick that up because of our training. And if you have a good training process and teach people why they're doing what they're doing, versus "Hey, go do this." It help them understand a lot more. And for them to pick up on it, and for them to execute it better.   Dean Soto  25:04   Yeah. Yeah, it's cool because, you know, out of all of the people, you definitely — with your documentation, you know, a lot of people that I know who create this type of documentation whether it's with a VSA or not, they just say, "Here's the process. Go do it, but you really do bring the why. Like, why is this process being done? Why? Even like, during the middle of the documentation, you say,"Mix for 15 seconds." like you'll have things like why are you mixing for 15 seconds? Why are you doing this? Why are you doing it? Why? I've just noticed that because of that, your guys are like superhuman. They're able to take on a lot more that they otherwise, wouldn't. A lot of business owners want this kind of robotic kind of just do as I say type thing. Whereas I can tell with your guys to the point where it seems like you're able to just hand off to your I guess she would be your general manager or ops manager — hand whatever off and she handles a lot of the stuff you're doing. What have you noticed that has come with that "why?" Compared to because you know, other people who do this type of systemization stuff. Do you notice that your staff is better because of that?   George Chen  26:42   Yeah. 100%. So, because for us, you can print the sticker using probably five different methods of printing the sticker, right? You could print a sticker, you could digitally print it. You can silk screen it. You could print it with flexo. There's so many different ways to print a single sticker. But you have to understand what your customer is trying to achieve. Are they trying to put it on a box? If they're trying to put it on a shipper box, you know, the brown cardboard box that you thought we do. You don't need such a crazy sticker for that, right. But if you're trying to put a sticker on a bottle that is going to go through a wash, you want to make sure that you're using a vinyl sticker for that. So, understanding "why" helps them better process on which method to print the product for the customer. And teaching them "why" helps them able to empower them to come up with solutions on their own. Right. If you give them an education, they can now offer that same education to your customers. And that creates so much value added to your company. Very, very rarely do you have these companies think for the customer? Because usually it's all about me. How do I get the sale? How do I make this next paycheck? Whatever it may be. For us, it's like, how do we maintain this relationship? So that, you know, you can count on me? Yeah, every single time we talk. Right? That's the difference between us and a lot of other people. We teach them "why" so that our employees can come up with the solutions themselves. So that I don't have to be answering the same way every single time. If I tell you, these are our capabilities, of course, there's going to be times where it's something that they've never experienced or whatever. But a lot of times, it's how you have to understand the machine. You have to understand our different methods of producing a product and which solution is going to be best for the customer. Because it's going to be different every single time. And if I gave you — Okay, if I told them it's a sticker, then you go misprint it but that's not the way, right? You have to understand if they're printing a sticker, what's the sticker for? Yeah. Are they trying to match certain colors? You know, with printing it. That's why we get a lot of customers — they say this today. I got a call from a customer. "Hey. We're looking for woven labels, and we're looking for bags. What's the price?" You're like, I'd be zero information. You told me two categories and expect me to know what's in your head and give you a price. I can't do any of that. Right. So now I have to ask them all these questions and teaching my employees that same thing. Like, you have to understand why you're doing what you're doing. Yeah. So that you can offer the best solution for the customer.   Dean Soto  29:32   Well, it's cool too because you have the ability to do that. Because of all the things that you've systemized in your operation and stuff. It's cool, too, because you could, I mean, theoretically — you probably could just say it would be this much. But then, say they bought that stuff off you. And it didn't work for whatever application they're doing. Like, that hurts your business big time.    George Chen  29:54   Yeah, no. They won't come back. There's no way they would come back. Yeah, and they expect you are the professional. You're supposed to know what I'm looking for. Pretty much, you're supposed to read my mind — is what they want.   Dean Soto  30:07   That's crazy. That's crazy. So one more thing I want to touch on before I ask the strategic Five Minute Question. And then get more information about your business and customer base and stuff. So you kind of mentioned this, you kind of alluded to it before,       There was a pretty big shift where you're getting questions like all the time even when you had systems, documentation, and things like that. You were getting questions. And there was a point where we even talked and you're like, "Oh, I should just make it to where they asked somebody else." Can you kind of explain like how you had to make that mindset shift of always being the person who's getting the questions when you could delegate that to say your general manager who, you know, your VSA who runs the other VSAs?   George Chen  31:10   Yeah. So we originally, you know, I mean, during the training process, you're always going to be the one to answer all the questions. Yeah. But if you're training multiple people, you don't want to be answering the same question for the new trainee every single time after that, right? So what we learned is that we created a frequently asked question document for everything in our company, right? So when, you know, when a customer is asking, what is the duty charge from China to LA for a .... Right? Now we have frequently asked... like that's gonna be asked every single time when we have a new account manager that we're bringing on or whatever. So we've created this document where they can refer to that, and they'll know "Hey, if the customer is asking for duty charge, hey, go look in their frequently asked questions." It should be there. And then if it's not, you know, ask who you report to. Ask them the question and if not, then come ask me. So now I've delegated all the questions that are being asked into my main manager. And then from there, you know, if it needs to get escalated, then it gets escalated.   Dean Soto  32:16   I love that. I love that man. You don't do any of the training whatsoever for anyone new that comes on as far as like a VSA like remote person, right?   George Chen  32:24   Not anymore. So the VSAs of Pro Sulum... they come systems trained. I'm sure if you're listening to this podcast, you know that. They all come to some trainings and I hired one in August of last year. I think August No. Two years ago now. Yeah. August two years ago. And then, within three months, I had that VSA training the other VSA. And it was mind-blowing seeing her you know, within three months, be able to train two new people in the same way that kind of I trained her. And she was really quick to pick up on, you know, how you train. How we do training in our company. And since then, I haven't had to train anyone.   Dean Soto  33:16   The best thing was when I talked to you. One of the speaking engagements that we did. When I said, "Hey, how's your new one coming along?" And you're like, "I don't know, my main VSA is..."   George Chen  33:38   Yeah, I had the ability to say, I have no idea what's going on.   No, it's not good. But no, I mean, I obviously I did kind of know. But I think it's more so just having that weight off your shoulder and knowing that a task that is delegated and being taken care of. Because the worst thing is, you delegate a task, and then you have to go follow up. and say, "Hey, what's the update?" Yeah. Seriously, that is something that I hate. Yeah. But, you know, with these standard operating procedures, "Hey, you need to report to me after a certain amount of time, because that's our operating procedure now. And I haven't had to go follow up anymore. And it's been handed to me." And I think that's one of the biggest differences now. Systemising all this stuff is that these are my expectations. But it's not. It wasn't in our standard operating procedure. Yeah. So when it wasn't happening, it was making me mad. But that's at the end day. That's my fault. Because I didn't systemize it. I didn't implement it into our process. And now that it is, I get so super hands-off approach now, and I get reports handed to me and that's how a company should be run. Yeah, you know, all right.   Dean Soto  34:59   I love it man, I love it. I love it. So, two more questions. The first one is, if you had...if you were talking with someone, and they said, George, what's one thing that you can tell me that if I implemented right now. We call this like the Five Minute Focus Question. If I just did this one thing and more strategic, not like a tool at all or anything like that. I mean, it could be a tool, but more and more in the strategic level that would improve their life, their business. What would that one thing be?   George Chen  35:40   I think it would just be in stead of trying something, just do it. Because if you think about it, you know, as adults, we don't really fail at things nowadays. Right? We have this level of comfort in our decision making that we're going to take — most of the time, we're going to take the same solution or we're going to decide on something that we already know is a most probable outcome. Yeah, when we have come across something that we don't know, a probable outcome, we usually don't make that decision anymore. We just push it off to the side, or we keep not attending to it. And it just kind of gets lost, right. So a lot of people have a hard time trying new things or being willing to fail because we've taken all of that out of our day to day now that we're older, right? When you were kids, you always fail. You always fall down, you always get back up, right. But now, when's the last time you fell? Yep. Never. Right. So I think just doing it and being being willing to fail again, and just being willing to fall down and see what happens because you're not gonna die. It's not the end of the world if something doesn't go right. But then you learn from it. I think that's the biggest thing and just doing it. Whenever, like something comes up, just, just don't be afraid to fail. I think that's, that's one thing that really changed the way I think and just being confident in moving. Once you move like you can only start winning after that.   Dean Soto  37:22   I love that man. I love it. And that's one thing I definitely noticed about you. You just do things.   George Chen  37:29   Like, my motto is do it first and then ask forgiveness later.   Dean Soto  37:36   Man, I love it. It's so good. It's so good. Yes, so who is your dream client? If someone were to come and work with you. Who would be your dream client and what would they expect with working with you and U-BEST?   And keep in mind guys, he works with really big names as well. Like these are huge companies that you're probably wearing shoe-wise right now. But, yeah. Who do you feel that you serve best? Or at least you have the, you know that like, "Oh my gosh, we changed these people's lives all the time." These types of people.   George Chen  38:37   Yeah, that that is a very good question that I have actually not thought about.   Dean Soto  38:42   Sorry. I know.    George Chen  38:45   That's a great question because for us, when we see an opportunity we'll always go... I would say for a while it was Adidas. For a while, it was trying to work with the adidaa. Either in shoe manufacturing or doing marketing or packaging for them for a while. It wasn't even — I guess it could still be. I think I was really into shoes for a while — being a sneaker head and, you know, trying to go for all the easy stuff. But when I was really into that I think Adidas was definitely on my top priority in trying to do because very few companies do "Made in USA" shoe manufacturing.    Dean Soto  39:34   Oh yeah.    George Chen  39:34   We're one of them to supply certain brands that do "Made in the USA" shoes. But the trend has a lot of big shoe pumping brands. They've started moving manufacturing here to reduce lead times and to better serve the changing market nowadays. So yeah, if Adidas was listening. My company would love to work with you. Going back to what you said, what kind of what would they expect? They would expect a five star service, right? Being able to delegate a task to us or a project to us, and letting us take care of it. Because a lot of times how companies utilize us now, when I was the main dealing with all the customers at once...They would be like, "George, this is what I need, go get it done." And then you know, take it, give them the product and have them stoked about it. And that's, I think that's the easiest way to help these brands scale. So our bread and butter is taking a company from either three locations. So in the restaurant industry, our bread and butter taking company from three locate two to three locations and helping them scale in 200 or 500 stores within a short amount of period of time. And the only way to do that is for us to take all their print materials and everything they need printed and taking it off their plate so they could book.   Dean Soto  41:13   Oh, sounds like   George Chen  41:15   there you go.   Dean Soto  41:19   All right, so it sounds like you cut out a little bit. Are you still there right now? I knew this was gonna happen. It always happens at the most inopportune time. Can you hear me right now?   George Chen  41:33   Yeah. I cut out.   Dean Soto  41:34   You cut out right at, like, toward the end of what you were saying like what they can expect...   George Chen  41:44   What they can expect is... they can expect a five star experience regardless if the customer would say "Hey, George, this is what I want. Take it." And then that's what we do. We would take it and then run with it and provide them a product. And that's our bread and butter — helping companies scale and taking away a lot of their tasks to do. So our bread and butter from the restaurant industry is taking a brand with two to three locations and helping them scale to 100 to 500 stores. And how we do that? We help them with all their print marketing & print materials, so that they can go focus on the franchise sales. They can focus on finding their next locations; for their next next door to be open. That's where they're valuable. And utilizing their time not trying to shop for the best or cheapest business cards. That's a waste of their time and working with us they get that five star experience in delegating a task and knowing that it's going to be handled properly and it's going to be executed and the products are gonna come out exactly how they want. And that's our five star experience.   Dean Soto  42:56   And what I've noticed too, for those listening as well is that you're almost actually like a more of a trusted adviser. I've seen where you've taken — I always think of when somebody comes into especially like a restaurant or store where a package is going out. I mean, you know, I'm always proud of my iPhone package when I get it like it's one of the things I look forward to every two years when I get my upgraded iPhone. The packaging and just undoing it. There's something about it that's prestigious and I've noticed that you've actually taken several businesses that had went the cheap route and their packaging has to be wrapped in a rubber band and all this other stuff. And you've made it look like so professional that it takes the brand. It actually does take the brand to another level because people are willing to handle that. It sounds so dumb, but, you know, even just in takeout food. If you have a really cool package. If you have something like, it's like, I'm going to Instagram, I'm going to take pictures of it. There's something about it that you are able to bring to people and it's literally not that much more expensive than going like... They're really paying for you, George. Because you have the time to be that trusted advisor like "Hey, let me help build your physical brand."   George Chen  44:34   Yeah. Well, I mean, what they say is "Camera eats first, right? Yeah. That's the image we live in right now. So everything is instagram every one is taking pictures of food. And yeah, at the end of the day, they get me or they get us. Right? Grant Cardone said it in his book, right? The difference? I can go to this shop down the street and get it at this price. Yep. The difference is you don't get us. You don't get us to think for you and figure out what the best way in keeping your costs low and still getting that wow effect when a customer opens that box or opens that product.   Dean Soto  45:14   I love that man. I love that. So how can people contact you? Work with you? What's the best way for them to actually get to work with George?   George Chen  45:23   Yeah, so our website is UBestPacks.com U as in umbrella. Best B E S T. Packs P A C K S .com. My Instagram is George Chen @georgechen. George with a zero for the O. Yeah, you contact us there through our website or through our Instagram.   Dean Soto  45:48   I love it man.    George Chen  45:49   Would love work with all of you,   Dean Soto  45:51   Dude. Yeah. And so if you're listening and you want some amazing branding, like I mean if you want to really take your business to the next level when it comes to Physical branding and you want your packaging to look better. I mean, better than all of your competition. You have to work with George it is absolutely amazing. So, George, thanks for being on man. And for sharing all the things that you do. It's honestly amazing. There are so many other ninja stuff that he does. But I didn't want to keep him for so long. But yeah, man, it's so good having you and I appreciate you being on.   George Chen  46:29   No, thank you so much it was, it was a treat getting to share our experiences and what we do. And just trying to try to teach people and giving them a better experience, as we know. I mean, we've heard of so many times, customers like "Oh, I can go on Alibaba and order this. And they order $10,000 worth of product and it gets here in the wrong color." That has happened for us, too.    We help customers avoid it. And it's night and day, their experiences. We've had customers leave us a lot of times and saying, "Oh, I got this wrong, you know?" I remember one time this girl. She was nickel and diming us for five cents off a T shirt. For I think for like 500 shirts or something. She was like, "Oh my gosh, like why can't you just give it to me for five cents cheaper?" And I'm like, I've already done so much for you. Like, this is my price. I'm not making any money. I'm doing this out of courtesy because you are a friend of a friend. Whatever it may be, the next order she ended up going to someone else. And I heard that supplier made her cry. The service and how they would not do everything that she asked. And I was like, "Dude that's what you get." But I think customers always have to understand. It's always better to pay five cents more. Yep. And have that peace of mind, knowing that something else is going to be taken care of, where you don't have to worry about it. To have five cents is for something, you know, maybe not in the millions of quantity. But you know, for something — if it's a smaller, like, trust that you get what you pay for at the end of the day. Yeah, and you would want that peace of mind. And paying a little bit more customers have to understand that at the end of the day. It's all about service. It's rarely about product. Of course, the product plays a factor. But at the end of day, it's the service you get and why companies do so well through customer service, because you always remember when you had that great experience with that one supplier. And you always go back to them and you don't really care as much about what the price is. You really care about how you felt and how it was a piece of cake. Yeah.   Dean Soto  48:59   Yeah. No and that's what's... You're spot on with that because you've engineered it yourself to be able to give that service and you know think of all the not just the money that was wasted by her but the time that was wasted by her and the stress and all that stuff that    George Chen  49:23   The stuff that you can't put a price on.   Dean Soto  49:27   I know, exactly. For five cents per shirt.   George Chen  49:32   You got actually five cents.   Dean Soto  49:35   Oh, but it's time that she can't get back. She that probably put a huge amount of stress on her. At the end of the day if you find somebody who's amazing at what they do, and as long as they have the systems to stay amazing like you do, you're only making things better. Like all the time. That's what makes what you do so valuable that I can't think of anybody, any other company that's built like yours to where you're just constantly delivering more and more value over time as you figure out more systems to offload.   George Chen  50:19   That's what we learned. High-end value. How not just to take, but to give even as a supplier, right. Like, how do you give to this person? And that's definitely helped us for longer for sure.    Dean Soto  50:33   Dang, I love it. Well, thanks for being on man. I appreciate it. And guys, go check out UBestPacks.com George is amazing. He is. Yeah. If you really want your brand to soar from the physical design standpoint. you got to go check him out. And we'll have him on again to talk about his other exploits with systems and operations. But until then, guys, thank you. This has been the Freedom In Five Minutes Podcast and I will catch you on the next Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode.

Rick Valicenti (founder and design director of Thirst, a communication design practice for clients in the architectural, performing arts and education communities), Iker Gil (architect, director of MAS Studio, editor in chief of the quarterly design journal, MAS Context), and Jenn Stucker (associate professor and division chair of graphic design at BGSU, founding board member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, AIGA Toledo) discuss community-based collaborative design.    Transcript: Introduction: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Intro Song Lyrics: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie Sheffer: Welcome to the BG Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and american culture studies and the director of ICS. Today we're joined by three guests working in collaborative design fields. First is Rick Valicenti, the founder and design director of Thirst, a communication design practice for clients in the architectural, performing arts and education communities. His work has been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art and resides in the permanent collections of the Yale University Library, Denver Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, he was honored by the White House with the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for communication design. Jolie Sheffer: We're also joined by Iker Gil, an architect, the director of MAS Studio, editor in chief of the quarterly design journal, MAS Context, and the editor of the book, Shanghai Transforming. He curated the exhibition, Bold: Alternative Scenarios for Chicago, included in the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. Iker is the associate curator of the US Pavilion at the 16th Annual Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2010, he received the Emerging Visions Award from the Chicago Architectural Club. Jolie Sheffer: Finally, I'd like to welcome Jenn Stucker an associate professor and division chair of graphic design at BGSU. Her work has been published in several books on design and she's received various awards including two international design awards from How Magazine for her community based works in Toledo. She's also a founding board member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, AIGA Toledo. And she previously co-chaired two national AIGA design education conferences. Jolie Sheffer: The three of them are here to talk to me as part of the Edwin H. Simmons Creative Minds series. Thank you and welcome to BGSU. I'm thrilled to discuss more of your work on creativity and collaboration. I like to start by having you each give a little background on your current work and how you came into the kind of design work that you're doing. So Rick, how did your career change from your time as a student at BGSU to your work now? What are some of those major u-turns or forks in the road for you? Rick Valicenti: Well, thank you. That's a good question. That's a really good question. Okay, so let me fast backwards to 1973 when I graduated from Bowling Green. I went back to Pittsburgh, spent some time in a steel mill for two years, went to graduate school at the University of Iowa. Came to Chicago afterwards with two graduate degrees in photography and discovered that I was not interested in photographing hotdogs, cornflakes and beer. So with that I thought I would leverage a time in the writer's workshop doing a little bit of letter press work as well as my time at Bowling Green studying design. And I thought I'll be a designer. It wasn't that easy. But it has been a journey for now almost four decades since then to get to a place where I feel there's relevance in what I do. And that has been the challenge, and it continues to be the challenge. Design, as you know, is a practice that has at its core, or patronage, somebody else. Rick Valicenti: In fact, it's been said you have to be given permission to practice graphic design. Not necessarily the case, you can do self-initiated projects. And it was in leveraging what I learned in graduate school, which was how to make up a project, how to provide for myself a thesis and then create work in response to that. That has allowed me to both do that on my own as well as in collaboration with other people. And then to encourage younger designers under some guidance to do the same. And of late, the more interesting work has been work that has been related to an issue, not unlike the work that Jenn practices in her classwork. But to me that's the most fulfilling and it was unfortunately not the work that I showed because it was work I was prepared to end the evening with. But I chose because we had been blabbing for so long last night to just stop early. But it's okay. Jolie Sheffer: Tell me what led you to start your own firm? Rick Valicenti: I was one of those lucky designers who, while it was difficult to crack the Chicago design scene, two years of doing what I would refer to as thankless design work, design work where I was asked to do something prescriptive. Like do this by Friday. Yes, I could do that. I was quite good at it. I lucked out by having the opportunity to be the dark room guy for a very reputable Chicago designer, who was at that time 63 years old. And so in his last three and a half years of practice I had moved from the new guy in the studio to the last employee he had. And it was a fantastic experience to be in the company of real design practice. Design practice that understood the history, it understood the present, and it was looking out to the future. This guy was connected to the other thought leaders in the Chicago design community and I had access to them even though it was vicarious. Jolie Sheffer: Great. Thank you. Iker, tell us about your journey into Chicago architecture and the current kinds of collaboration you do. How has your approach to design changed over time and what were some of those key junctures for you? Iker: So I'm originally from Bilbao, which is a city in the North of Spain in the Basque country. And I think a lot of the changes in design and a lot of the ways that I've been thinking had been motivated also by the change of place or how the people that I've encounter or any other aspects that really change as I move from other places. So from Bilbao I went to Barcelona to study architecture. I had the chance there to not only have the professors that were faculty there, but also other visiting professors, like David Chipperfield and Kazuyo Sejima. So that was a way of beginning to connect with other experiences that maybe were not the local ones. And I was very interested in expanding that. And I've had the luck to get a scholarship from IIT in Chicago to go there for a year. Iker: So it was a little bit coincidentally in a way that I ended up in Chicago. And I was there for a year as an exchange student, I still had to do my thesis so I went back to Spain. But there was something about Chicago, a apart from my girlfriend that now is my wife, who is from Chicago. But there was something very intriguing about the city, a lot of potential, very different from being in Barcelona. But there was something always in Barcelona that was interesting for me about the cultural aspect of architecture. There was the aspects of people building a significant building or just a civic building that there was always a publication and an exhibition, a way of coming together to talk about why those things were important. Iker: So when I went to Chicago, when I moved back and I did my master's, I worked for an office. I was always interested in the ADL, the community, the design community, the architecture community. How do you strengthen that and how do you create the platforms to do that beyond what you can design? So I decided at some point that I really wanted to make sure that I did both of those things. And I went on my own about 11 years ago just to make sure that I could create the designs within my office, but create other platforms for others to have that conversation. And more recently I've been able to create the structures to support or organize design competitions and really began being interested in not only the final product, but how do you structure the conditions for those things to happen. Jolie Sheffer: So you're talking about not just designing buildings, but designing communities and relationships. Iker: Yep. And I think that's a role of, in my case, an architect or designers. Like the work that you do, but also the work in the city that you do. And how are you part of the community, and also how are you proactive shaping that community? Not something that you want to benefit from someone else's effort to structure something. What is what you can do and why you can give to the community back? Jolie Sheffer: Great. Jenn, talk to us about your path into graphic design and how your approach has shifted over time. Jenn Stucker: So I was at graduate here at BGSU. Very proud of the training and the experience that I had from Ron Giacomini, a chair that Rick also had the opportunity to study under. And when I graduated I went right out into the field, I got a job in graphic design. And I think was pretty good at my craft and pretty good at making. And also at the same time pursuing this educational path. I am originally a transplant from Colorado, I guess you could say. And one of the things about the Toledo area is there's this "neh" mentality. It's the rust belt. I- Jolie Sheffer: Better days are behind us. Jenn Stucker: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:09:16]. Yes. It's definitely like, why did you move from Colorado to Toledo? Is usually the question that I get asked. And I'm always like, wow, there's so many great things here. You're four hours from Chicago, you're this far from Toronto, you're this far from here. In Colorado you're four hours from the border of Wyoming, at least where I live. Right? And you're looking at the same topography and you're not getting any cultural change. And so for me, my family was here. My husband and his family. And so I was here for the long haul. Jenn Stucker: So the idea really just became, I need to bloom where I'm planted. I need to make this space and place better, and contribute to it and work towards that. Changing the attitude, how do we create positivity in this community? And so I started getting involved in creating projects that really illuminated Toledo in a positive way. And so then I reflected back on the fact that I wasn't necessarily armed with that as a student, with that understanding of the fact that I had agency and power that I could do something. I didn't necessarily have training with, how do you collaborate and get a, you know, writing a grant to get the funding for this? And who do I need to talk to and who needs to bring this to the table? And all of those things. Jenn Stucker: So part of that I think now is coming to what I do as an educator, is to show those students. I tell them, I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm completely fumbling through this. I don't know what I'm doing. This dots project in Toledo that I'm literally the one that's going to be photographing all the dots around Toledo, or trying to find spaces in January and it's cold. And then actually putting them down on the ground and actually taking them off the ground and doing these sort of things. I don't know that when I'm creating the idea. But I know it has to get done and I'm going to do that. And the fact that I'm just Jenn is what I tell them. I'm just one person, I'm not any different than you. And so I try to give them a lot of power that they can do that thing that they want to make change for. Jolie Sheffer: You're all talking about very place-based design practices, or in different ways your work is all very much about locating yourself, right? And building in relationship to that community, and creating community. Could you give an example, Rick, of one of your projects that had a very Chicago-centric, and how that place shaped the process and the collaborations that you developed? Rick Valicenti: With pleasure. In 2016, I was the artist in residence at Loyola University. And there we devoted an entire year to prototyping empathetic ways of grieving for those who were left behind by gun violence. That was a very Chicago-centric theme. And it was something that I was curious about beyond the candle vigil, right? Or the protest march. Are there other ways we can come together both as community led by design in order to acknowledge and honor the life lost? And of course help the healing process for the families left behind. That was a very place specific design assignment. The difference was we were doing it on the North side, and a lot of the activity, gun violent activity was happening on the South side. Not all of it because in the building that we were located, in the alley right next door one of the students had been shot. Rick Valicenti: Down the street the young photographer had been shot and killed on that street. So as they call it, the franchising of gun violence had migrated North to the Rogers Park and Edgewater area, which is where Loyola is located. It made it more real and more tangible, but the prototyping of these empathetic gestures was, I think, healing for all of us. And I've been rewarded by that project ever since. And I really want to see now if something like that can migrate to other cities. And I've been talking to a few people like, wouldn't El Paso benefit from this kind of intervention? Dayton, Ohio, would they not benefit from it? Jolie Sheffer: And could you talk through what that project actually ended up looking like? Rick Valicenti: I'll give you an example. There were 20 students in the class, half of them were from the fine arts area, half of them were from design related fields. And so they all had different approaches to it. And every class began with somebody from the outside. Rick Valicenti: Okay? And I thought this was important. And Iker knows this model of practice that I use, I call it moving design is what I have named the umbrella. But I'll give you an example of three kinds of people who came to the class. One person we arranged for a car to pick up the head of the emergency room at Stroger, which is the hospital, Cook County hospital. And this guy was picked up in a car, came to our class in his [Ohar 00:14:07] blacks with his red tennis shoes. And it was the day after a very violent weekend. This guy showed up shell shocked. You could just see the trauma in his face. He never made eye contact with the students. He was a young guy, maybe 38 or something, had his head down as he spoke. And that was a moving moment. More for me, I think, than anybody else. Rick Valicenti: But it was like, oh my God, here's a first responder who's there and he told us of some of the things that he had seen that have kept him from sleeping. We also had Emory Douglas, who was the communication director, minister of the Black Panthers. So Emory talked about the use of graphic design to move an agenda. And how an unskilled, unfunded initiative of communication design could migrate into the public through the printed ephemera. And he was there to really rally these students. That was fantastic. And then another woman, her name was Cecelia Williams. Cecelia Williams was 28 years old. She is an activist. She's a mother. And in her 28 years she has lost 29 family and friends to gun violence. The first one was her second grade teacher. She came to the class, again, with her version of PTSD. Moved the students and begged the students to do something. Rick Valicenti: Just something. It was in the form of just write the mothers of one of these victims a sympathy card after you hear the headline. Right? That's a simple thing. Or, gather all your cards and one person just take it to the funeral home and leave it in the basket. Simple moment. If you'd like I could share you an example of one of the projects, how we manifested our work at the end. We had lots of installations and interventions around the area, but one in particular was a community based exercise. I showed them an image of logging in Wisconsin. Tree logging. And those images that we're all familiar with are the felled trees in the shallow water, and the guys are standing on the tree trunks. And I said, it wasn't too much earlier before that picture was taken that those were living organisms, but now they're felled to the ground. And let's just imagine that we use the tree trunk as a symbol of those who are fallen. Rick Valicenti: And we've returned them to their vertical position. So that was the form of it. And then we started to talk about, well what could we put on those and what is the form? Are we going to be having tree trunks, that seems wrong. So we ordered lots of very long and very huge custom mailing tubes from a firm in Chicago called Chicago Mailing Tubes. And they made 24 inch, 18 inch and 12 inch mailing tubes of varying lengths. We had them wrapped in white paper and then the students took the grid of Chicago and wrapped each of those trees with black tape to suggest, not replicate, the grid of the city. And then we invited the community to come. And we had the list of the 760 some victims from the previous year to write their first names in whatever black calligraphy we could, whether it was with a Sharpie or whether it was with a brush pen. Rick Valicenti: And to see the community members come together with the students, honoring everybody with the names. And so, okay, that's one facet of it. And we have all these tubes now, and we put end caps on the tubes and the students started to talk about things that they would like to say. If you had to say something to a mother, to a community, to just reduce the pain of gun violence, what might it sound like? Everyone is a hero. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. Whatever those messages were. And they typeset them in a black and white type, in all caps in a Gothic typeface on an orange disk. That orange disk had a hole cut in the middle and there was an orange piece of a cord, nylon cord, that we knotted. And that provided now these tree trunk-like forms to be carried. Rick Valicenti: And so there was a procession around town into the quad of the campus until they... Oh, I'm sorry. When the morning started all of the trunks were there in the center of the quad. That's right. Like the felled tree trunks. And then the procession started. And there were prayers read, and some music played, and some dancers from the music school came and they did a performative dance. A kind of celebration and resurrection, if you will. And then we were all invited to grab the chords and walk the trunks back to the alley where this student had been shot in the back, and return them to their vertical position. And there, I don't know, there we just reflected on it. But it was all quite moving. And we had it filmed and photographed and there was the record of it that could carry on. Rick Valicenti: We thought that could live in other places. The alderman, I'm sorry if I'm going on so long, I'm taking up this whole hour. But the alderman, his name is Harry Osterman, he was also invited to come. And he said, you know what, I would like that to be re-installed in my local park. And sure enough we installed it in his park and complete with all of the rides that a kid would have, the seesaw on the slide. A couple weeks later we get a call from alderman Osterman's office saying, it seems that there has been some violence in the park and your display has been vandalized. In fact, it has been destroyed. It has been cut up. It has been sawed. It has been smashed. Rick Valicenti: And I thought immediately, oh my God, the last thing we need is for Loyola to be a headline. And this good intention to be diminished. So we quickly scrambled and we went and we cleaned up the site and we got a chainsaw, we rented a chainsaw and we cut the things up so that we could transport it. And here what had happened was the other gang from the other side of the street was upset that, right, there had been some franchise in some retaliation of a recent shooting and this was the way that they could mark their territory. So there's lots healing that needs to be done, but design was certainly there to put a mirror to it. To make a good intention. And to certainly reveal the scab or the wound. Jolie Sheffer: Iker, can you give us an example of some of your place specific work? Maybe one particular project. You talked last night about the Marina Towers. I don't know if you want to talk about that or feel free to take that in a different direction. Iker: Yeah. Maybe one thing that I think is more important is structurally I think being in Chicago is what has saved my practice. I think a lot of the opportunities of doing self-initiated projects or projects that I was particularly interested are allowed to happen in Chicago because maybe there is not the pressure that there is in New York or any other places. And I think the idea of having space as a designer and an architect to think about things was something that I found very important and very unique to Chicago. Iker: So I think in a way, the way I was trained and the way I practice right now is different because of being in Chicago. And particularly that project of Marina City, I think it's one that it's very specific to the idea of Chicago about how it reflects how I work and how the projects evolve. And taking one icon of the city and really using that for me as a personal interest in understanding not only the building but understanding the architect, the ambitions of the architect. Why that building was so forward thinking when it opened in the early 60s. And then beginning to understand, how do you capture that value? Iker: How do you tell that story to people who are not architects? What are the tools that you have? And in that case I worked with Andreas Larsson, a photographer, to really begin to capture the diversity of the community. And it was a way of saying, you don't have to read plans in sections and elevations or use models to communicate the value of a building. There are other ways that maybe you can engage. And then through that you can learn some of the other things. Iker: And then that was exhibited, and then it has continued in doing then renovations in the building with Ellipsis Architecture. So always in collaboration with someone else. And the idea there is that, how do you celebrate the spacial qualities of the marina architect, but at the same time making it modern so new people can be living there. So it's an interesting project that has been ongoing for 10 years. And it just summarizes my interest in Bertrand Goldberg. And then as you work with other people, as you evolve or you have other skills, you can really begin to communicate that in different ways. And I can see that he's probably not going to be the last renovation or not the last project in some shape or form that I'm going to do about that building and that architect, which I think it's fantastic. Jolie Sheffer: Well there's something really interesting. You said something about this at your talk about how a project never really ends, it just sort of evolves into some new shape. Right? And clearly that work is an example of that notion that you never really have an end point. And your example too, Rick, went that way. That it takes on a new form and it may be not what you intended or what you imagined, but you have to let that life go on. Iker: I think in the end they are like your own personal obsessions. They are your interest, but it's sometimes it's an interest and sometimes it's an obsession. And they are in the back of your mind and then there is something that happens that it comes forward again, you have the opportunity to do it and then he goes back. But there are things that obviously you have a certain attachment. And then you realize that there are a lot of buildings, in this case, that share some of the ambitions because they were built in the same period. And then you can make a comparison or connect it to other experiences in other cities. So something that is very local and particular you can engage in a conversation with something that is happening in other cities. So I find it very particular, I never let go of those interests. It's just they transform and the outcome is very different. Jolie Sheffer: And Jenn, you mentioned the dots project. Could you talk about what that was and how that was very much play specific to Toledo? Jenn Stucker: Absolutely. So the genesis of that project came from the Arts Commission. I'd previously had done a banner project for them collaboratively with my colleague Amy Fiddler. And at the time I was president of AIG Toledo. And they came to us to say, oh we're having the GAS conference, the Glass Art Society is going to be coming. It's an international conference and maybe you could do some banners again. And I thought about that and really wanted to do something different. And one of the things about banners is the passivity that it has. And you have to be looking up, kind of encountering those. And so I've always been fascinated with maps and the "you are here" dot specifically. When I go to museums, when I go to zoos, wherever I'm going, I look for that and it gives me a sense of place. And the idea of sense of place seemed very important here at this time. Jenn Stucker: They were going to have people coming from all over the world. What is our sense of place? What is Toledo? And knowing that I wanted people to discover the city, and hopefully through walking. And how could I branch out into various places? So thinking about this dot of "you are here" and wanting people to discover the city, came up with this idea of three foot circular dots that had artwork on them created by a hundred different artists in Toledo that were site specific to that place. So working with the Arts Commission, what are the signature places in Toledo? The Toledo public library, the San Marcos Taqueria. It could be anywhere within the Toledo area, Point Place. So they helped curate that list. We talked about signature points, reached out to all of those establishments to say, more or less, congratulations, you're going to be part of this project. So that they would know that there was going to be a dot in front of their place. Jenn Stucker: And then having artists participate in creating those dots. And then on the dots was a QR code, and this was 2012, so it was still kind of cool then. And the idea was that you would scan the dot and you could then get the background information about the place in which you were standing. So you would learn about St. Patrick's Cathedral and get more information. And then to also give honor to the artist that they too would have their artist statement and what inspired the artwork that they created. And so one of the things about public art is that oftentimes if it's a sculpture, it's a very place specific, and only if you go to that place. And it's typically usually one artist. And so what I really liked about this project was that it was a hundred different artists that were participating in this. Jenn Stucker: And it was originally developed for outsiders to discover Toledo. The things that happened secondarily to that were amazing, where I was getting emails from people that had read about it in the newspaper. And one couple in particular said, we've read about this, we went out to start looking for these dots. They collected 25 of them and ended up at San Marcos Taqueria, said they had the best tacos they've ever had, had no idea it was even there. And they said they were looking forward to discovering more of their city. And I was like, that's a mic drop kind of moment. It couldn't have been any better than having people really realize the great things that we have in the community. So the byproduct of that was just, like I said, people seeing the great things that were here. Jenn Stucker: I wish I'd partnered with a cell phone company at the time because we had people that are actually buying cell phones. Because really, the iPhone had only come out, what, 2007 or something. So we're not too far to not everybody having a smartphone. There were people that were going out to buy a smart phone so that they could participate in this project. And there was a scavenger hunt component too, so we had an app for it. And the first hundred people to digitally collect 25 dots got a custom silkscreened edition poster. And so people are posting on Facebook and finding this dot and taking their children out. And I don't know, couldn't ask for a better project. Jolie Sheffer: We're going to take a short break. Thank you for listening to the BG Ideas podcast. Speaker 1: If you are passionate about big ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie Sheffer: Welcome back. Today I'm talking with Rick Valicenti, Iker Gil, and Jenn Stucker about the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in creative fields. One of the things that you both talked about during your visit was the idea that the form of a given project will change, right? And I think Iker, you put it as something like, what's the story I want to tell and what's going to be the best form to tell that story? So how do you go about, what is part of your process and figuring out that answer to that question of the relationship between form and story? Iker: Yeah, I think that came out about the work and the way we structure MAS Context. And then really the first thing is just framing what the topic that we want to do, and then who should be the voices that need to be part of that issue. And sometimes you realize that you need something that sets the ground and it might be more academic. It might be an essay that really gives the shape to that. And then there are many other elements that can compliment, that can contra, that could take another direction that comes in the form of a short essay. And you need to be very aware. I think that a lot of the work that I do is actually paying attention to what other people are doing in their work. So whenever there is an issue that is coming together, I know I already have in my head what's the work that everybody's doing so I can make those connections. Iker: So it's really understanding how they work, what they are trying to say, what's the shape that it can be. And we've had, in the issues, we have long essays, short essays, photo essays, diagrams, poems. But also the people who write, they don't come from all the academic world. And some of the most interesting articles have come from people who are just residents in a building. And they can tell a story much better than an academic that has talk about housing. And one of the examples is we've done this for 10 years, and then the most read article is about Cabrini–Green, about our resident who grew up there and live there. And we walk with him, with Andreas Larsson actually. And we told him just let's walk around the neighborhood and tell us the stories of what are the meaningful places for you here that you grew up here and your families. Iker: And we just took photographs of that and we made captions of that. And it really was a way for us to understand what it means to leave there. Yes, there are some negative things, but there are many other positive things about Cabrini–Green that they all mask under headlines and other things from other people who have no relationship. So yes, there are many people who write about public housing, about Cabrini–Green, but his point of view and the way to talk about it in a very clear, succinct, and just experiential way of there. It was remarkable and it obviously resonated with the rest of the people because it's still the most read article. And it was in issue three, 10 years ago. Rick Valicenti: We should also keep in mind that Cabrini–Green, if we're talking about form, no longer exists. That building complex has been raised and it's gone. Now it's a Target. Is it not? Iker: Yep. It is. So it's like, when you demolish buildings you just don't demolish the actual building, you demolish the structures, the society, the relationship, everything that is built around that. So the void that it's in the city with the destruction of public housing is not just the building, it's all the fabric, the social fabric that got destroyed. And it's very complicated to regain. And unfortunately nothing really... It's happening at the level that it should be done. Rick Valicenti: And at the time you had an idea that it was going to be demolished or did you not know it was going to be demolished at that time? Iker: I did know that it was going to get demolished. Rick Valicenti: Oh, you did. Okay. But in either case you have left behind through the medium of design and this documentation a real important record of what it was like there at that moment. Iker: Yeah. Because in a way, these stories are not just headlines that once the headline leaves the story leaves. These are people who this is the place where they grew up. Where they live. Where they have their family. And then once the buildings are remove, they have to keep going with their life. They have to do other things. So it is really unfair to just live through headline after headline. The city is a much more complex thing. And I think one of the goals that we tried to do with the journal is really, yes, talk about issues that are important. But that there is a legacy that those things are looked in depth, that someone can go back 40 years later and finding that it's still relevant because there's another situation that contextualizes in a new way. Iker: So this is just a series of thinking that evolves and it grows and builds from each other. But I think there needs to be some, like paying attention to all these issues and build from those rather than be surprised by the latest thing that happens. And then once it goes, it just, oh, it's all sold. Jolie Sheffer: Could you talk, Rick, about your own forays into book work, as you describe it, and why that form made sense for some of those projects? Rick Valicenti: The book format I particularly love, I love its linearity but I also love its ability to be opened at any page. I also love its form, its tactile nature, its ability to change voices and change perceptions as you change the tactile experience when your hand touches a page. Change the paper, change the size of it. All of those things are available tools to find engagement in that which is being communicated and that which is being received. So you know, perhaps as a writer, you're able to capture your thinking in your typing. Jolie Sheffer: Absolutely. I don't know what I'm thinking until I'm typing it. Rick Valicenti: That's right. Until after maybe you've read it and say, oh my God, that's really special. But the designer takes that source material, if you will, and either amplifies it or adds harmony to it in a harmonic sound, or adds depth to it, or adds another perspective. And so I'm keenly aware when I'm making a book that it's not a typesetting assignment, that it really is a duet at the most basic level with the content. Whether it's with the author, whether it's with a photographer, whether it's with both. And how can you bring something to life in a way that under different hands or different perspectives or different budgets or whatever, it would sound different. Rick Valicenti: And just like you can do that when you're reading a poem, or a kid reading a kid's book, you know it sounds different than the parent. It happens when people perform songs, other than the person who wrote the song. So I like the book form, but I really like its linearity. And I must admit, when non-linearity was all the rage with interactive media, I was like, what's that about here? What's happening? I'm getting used to it, but that doesn't mean I need to like it. Jolie Sheffer: What about you Jenn? You've published work in book form. What for you is your particular process in thinking about that as a medium? Jenn Stucker: Well most of the publications, I guess probably been a little bit similar, it's been mostly for documentation that this happening happened has been a big part of that. The other part is most of the work has been with recent alums or with students, and so there's something about creating the object that adds that secondary level of, I guess, accomplishment, right? Or achievement, or that this thing... I guess the same thing is it happened. And so if we have evidence of that. I taught at SACI in Florence, Italy, through our program here at BGSU, last summer and we self published a book out of that called the FLRX times 14. Or 14 of us and putting material together to sort of, what was our experience here in Florence? All being American citizens coming into this place and space. And I don't see those students again. Right? They were from University of Michigan, Penn State, Parsons, couple from BGSU, Marshall. And it was a nice moment to capture and make a capsule, I guess, of that experience. Jolie Sheffer: Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. It has been a real delight. Our producers for this podcast are Chris Covera and Marco Mendoza with help from Aaron Dufala, Hannah Santiago and Kaleah Ivory. Research assistants for this podcast was provided by ICS undergraduate intern Tay Sauer. This conversation was recorded in the Stanton audio recording studio in the Michael and Sara Kuhlin Center at Bowling Green State University.  

Welcome!   This has been a busy week in the world of technology.  We are going to hit several topics today. From Employer device privacy, dangers of huge facial recognition databases, Marriott enters the home rental market, overblown results on dangers of screen technology, big tech stomping on small tech, smart home alarms, and cable companies, Apple stands ground on iPhone encryption, and Microsoft ends support of Windows 7. It is going to be a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com I've got some free online privacy training coming up. I have been teaching courses on security for the FBI InfraGard's program. And now I'll share some of the step-by-step tips and tricks that we all can use to keep ourselves and our information safe online. And it won't cost you a dime. --- Related Articles: What Does Your Employer Know About Your Daily Activities Privacy Gone: Tech Start-up Has Huge Facial Recognition Database If You Can’t Beat ‘Em - Join ‘Em says Marriott Screen Time Causing Mental Health Issues Are Overblown Big Tech Stomps All Over Small Businesses Home Security and Alarm Systems Useless After Charter Cable  Pulls Plug Security First, Apple Stands Ground on iPhone Encryption No Security for Windows 7 After Today --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hey, it's my intro music. Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome, welcome. Hopefully, you've been able to join me before. We talk a lot about technology and of course a lot about privacy and security. Technology today is all about privacy and security. Isn't it? It just seems like every time we turn around, and there's some other business out there just trying to get our information or even worse, some hacker who's trying to get it from us. So I try and help everybody understand what is going on what is privacy? What's it all about? I give a lot of tips and tricks on things and recommendations. I do a whole lot of different pieces of training, free training, pop up stuff, Facebook, and YouTube lives. I'm trying to get the word out. So I appreciate everybody that shares this. We've had an increase every week, with people subscribing to the podcast, which is excellent! You're listening to me here on the radio, and who are spreading the word. You know, there again, there's so much information out there, it's hard to know what you should believe. There are all kinds of motivations behind it. So hey, what's my motivation? Well, I'm trying to get the word out, I know that probably 90% of you wouldn't ever be a client of mine. And that's just fine. Because hopefully, the 5% that would be a client of mine will become a client, and we can help them out. But I want to get this information out. Sorry, I don't hold anything back. You've probably noticed it if you're one of those people who learned about the show or the podcast so that you now know about it, and you heard it from a friend, and the friend said, Yeah, you have to listen to Craig. You probably had an earful from somebody telling you about how I am just giving away the store. And that's my Go, hey, if I'm not giving you the store, let me know if you have any questions, let me know. It is just "me" at Craig Peterson dot com. Now, many of you may have noticed if you're on my mailing list, that we changed the format of the newsletter starting this last week. Right? It was one of those January 1 promises that we had hoped to get it up by the first of the year, and it took us a couple of extra weeks is not always the case. But then here's the new format for the weekly newsletter, if there is any real critical security stuff, updates patches that you need to apply in your business or your home. Those are now going right at the top of the newsletter. This last week, I think we had about ten a dozen or so of these very high priority security patches that required immediate patching. And we went so far as to give you links right there in my newsletter, so you can click on the links to those CVEs we're giving you a link so that you know what the critical vulnerabilities are. It tells you even what to do what software it is everything right, step by step. That's the name of my game. You can use all of that now to stay one step ahead of the bad guys one step ahead of the crackers. That's the whole idea, right? The bad guys out there trying to crack into your computers. Now, we also had two other sections. I'm not going to be able to this week, I, you know, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. But one of the sections was my weekly podcasts broadcast in the video. So I gave you links in the newsletter last week to the YouTube videos. So you can see articles that I'm talking about it has captions so you can read along if you wanted to watch it there. And I also posted them up on Facebook. The last one for last week's show would have gone out on Friday. So Yesterday, you should have gotten that one if you're a Facebook follower. So please do follow please do subscribe. I'm, I'm I don't know that I'll be able to get much help this week because we've got something huge happening. I am trying to help people here with some of the privacy stuff. So I am going to be we're putting together right now. And I'm going to be giving away a step by step guide for you to be able to protect your privacy online through tracking. Now you know about ads online, right. And ad revenue, I think, is essential for businesses. You need to be able to show ads to get attention, right? There are so many competitors out there and so many different spaces. So how can you get your message out if you can't advertise? So there was a trend for a while to have ad blockers. Ad-blockers are more than a bit of a problem now, because how does the publisher generate any revenue when they can't sell ads. And I saw a fascinating statistic that got me going this week. Have you seen where ads directed at users of iOS, which is Apple's mobile operating system that users of Apple's iOS are using Safari, advertising to them is worth less than it is to Android? Now think about that for a minute. Why is it cost more now to send to Android users than Apple users? Well, Apple integrated some new anti-tracking technology into Safari. That is a very, very big deal, because now with that anti-tracking, technology, and Safari, the advertisers Cannot track you and other sites that you're online. So the fact that can't track you means they don't know as much about you, which means you're not worth as much from an advertiser standpoint. Now, you could argue either way, right? In my business, we do some advertising. However, mostly it is word of mouth, and that's what we've done for decades now. And word of mouth works, right? Because people know me that I helped out their business and kind of, I'm, we need some help. We need some security stuff. We need a cyber assessment, you know, how good is this? Am I covering everything? Right? So that's how I usually do it. But most businesses are having to do it via advertising. I'm thinking about doing some advertising in the future for some of the products I've put together. Apple is stopping them from tracking you when you go to multiple sites. What would it be like, if I told you how to go about blocking advertisers from tracking you going to multiple sites on your computer as well. So that's what I'm putting together. Right now we're putting together a step by step guide that we're going to be giving away. It's part of a training webinar we're going to be doing as well, that is going to teach you a lot about some of the privacy stuff that you can do. And that's coming up here in a couple of weeks. So make sure you're on my email list at, Of course, Craig Peterson, calm slash subscribe, because you'll be able to get all of that and it's free. Again, I don't hold anything back to people. I'm not some guy who doesn't know what he's talking about and just has to market sell, sell, sell. I am trying to help out here. Okay, so make sure you are on that email list. Just go ahead and go to Craig Peterson, calm slash subscribe, and all it asks for is your name and email address. And then you're going to get this new newsletter I'm doing. So the second portion of the newsletter is the top four videos that I did that week. So these are the ones that people watch the most. And I know a lot of you don't watch the video. All of the articles I discuss are in the newsletter in the third section. So that's what we're doing now. And that's based on feedback that we've had from all you guys, and I appreciate it. We got some super fans out there that email me and pretty much every week. Some people send me Facebook stuff and LinkedIn stuff, which is cool as well to see some of that. I have to warn you I will answer or someone, not me, will answer as a member of my team. And it might take a little while okay because I get thousands of emails a day, and I have some very heavy mail filtration in place. Now the excellent news is that mail filter tends to work extremely well and tends not to block legitimate emails. But the operative word there is, usually. At any rate, I still get hundreds to have to go through every day of legitimate ones, and I try and respond so if you do send an email to me that's just me at Craig Peterson calm, make sure the chat a little bit of patience and we'll we will get back to you. If it's urgent, you can always try and text me as well because, you know, I had this contact from a law firm, and they had to get some briefs filed with the court by 4 pm. And it was like 1:30 in the afternoon, and they reached out to me, a Windows machine decided to die, and we can't get him to come back. So you know, I do get those types of emergency things, but email is probably not the best way to do that. The best way to do that is probably via texting Me? Well, that's the new newsletter. We also use the newsletter to announce special pieces of training. Karen, my wife, and I have been working on a special webinar for about a week or two. And we've got another week or so hours worth of work in it. So you know how this goes, right? I said I would have just said to myself, I didn't promise you, but I would have a new newsletter out the first of the year, and it took until the middle of a month. So I guess that's not too bad, right, two weeks-ish to get that out. So you know, we'll see what happens with this webinar. But it should be on time. But if you're on the mailing list, you'll know about it. Just Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. Something else important. I don't want people to use my mailing lists to spam other people. So what I do is I do something so that when you subscribe, it's going to send you an email, and I noticed there had been 100 people who subscribed, and I sent them an email. They have to click on the link. That's to confirm that this is their email that it's not somebody else who's messing around. That's trying to send them spam from the right. So I'm going to have to reach out to those hundred people individually. But if you subscribe, make sure you check your email box, he's I'll send it from my email address for me at Craig peterson.com. Look for that link, click on that link. Then you'll be able to get that that the weekly emails from me and notices about what's coming up. I typically remind you in advance about one of these pieces of training, and I'll remind you like a couple of days before, I just don't want you to miss them, but I don't get kind of asked him like some other people do no question. And we don't do these very often. My big courses and training are only really once a year. Hey, you're listening to Craig Peters on WGAN stick around because we're going to get right into it when we get back Hi, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back, WGAN and online, of course, over at Craig Peterson dot com. Hey, did you know that your employer monitors you? Well, you may have known that. We're going to get into a little about what some employers are doing and also why some businesses are tracking. And when it comes to employers, of course, and some of the trackings, we're talking about still legal stuff. And when it comes to some of the big box retailers, it's still legal as well. So I guess the big question is, should it be, and what are they looking into? What are they gleaning from it, and why would they be doing it? Let's get down to that, and I'll give you a couple of tips to help you protect yourself. The Wall Street Journal this week, had a great article That was talking about, well, it was illustrating that was a kind of a cool way they did this thing. But it was talking about this guy who they named Chet. And, you know, Chet, kind of an old name, which is kind of funny, because we're always talking about it this week on the radio. When was the last time you met somebody named Chet? And for me, it's probably been 30 years, maybe, maybe a little bit longer. And perhaps that's why they use the name chat, right? Just not that common a name. But this is a paywall Wall Street Journal article, and you get like one or two or three a month or whatever it is for free. And then other than that, they want you to pay for it. So you may or may not be able to see it, but what they're doing, I think, is fascinating, because this article is walking through the day. In the life of this fictional workers, names chat. And it starts by noting that the employer logs his time and his location when he first wakes up to check his email in the morning. So there's stage one. Most of us, according to statistics, check our email first thing in the day and the last thing at night. Now I am not like that. But most of us are. So if you are, hey, I get it. But you check your email, so your employer knows that and then from there, this guy chat, he goes on to the Guest Wi-Fi. Now, here's where it's a little bit interesting. And it's something that a lot of people might not be thinking of. But when you connect to a guest Wi-Fi somewhere that provides a method for someone else, to be able to monitor you and where you are and who you are. So, for instance, if you go to your local Walmart store, Target store, you name it, store, they have Wi-Fi provided for you and that Wi-Fi can then be used to identify you and track you through the store. Some of this technology set up in such a way that it's just so accurate. It knows that you're standing in front of a specific item within the store for a minute or 30 seconds, whatever it might be. And then they can use that data now to figure out more stuff, right, big data is what it's all about. So far, poor old chap, he logged Into the guest Wi-Fi connection at the coffee shop in the morning. And then he went over to the gym. And of course, at the gym, there's a guest Wi-Fi, and you're attracted the gym, your locations tracked, and if you're like most people, you've got your Email Setup, so that it is checking every one every five minutes, 15 minutes or automatically your emails push to you. Right? Isn't that how that works? So now your employer knows where you were, and probably knows you're at the gym and even which Coffee Shop you're at. It depends on whether or not the employer has tracking software on your phone. They may know the exact location of all of those things. Now, if you're connecting to the office, and let's say you get through the email system at the office and using a VPN, that is when a lot of stuff changes and they know even more. So now, Chet arrives at his building where he works. And I don't know if you've seen these and we talked about some significant security problems with this. I'll bring it up again here right now. But when you walk in and you have your phone, and you use your phone as your badge, you know, kind of like used to swipe a badge, or maybe you tapped a badge. Now it'll use Bluetooth on your phone to identify you. Some of the newer systems are even using your face, and some are using facial recognition. Now I have a massive problem with the facial recognition stuff because Now they've got a picture of you. That's on the computer. Right? They have to take that to have the initial validation to say, yeah, this is chat. He's allowed to come in after 6 am and leave after 6 pm or whatever it is, and how secure is their database? I think that's the big question. Do you know if they're keeping your biometric safe? See, it's one thing to have your card lost or stolen, that you might swipe, are easily replaced, it can be disabled. It's one thing to forget your password or have your password stolen? Because you can always change your password. But how about your face? Your face isn't something you can easily change unless you're what was it John Travolta and Nick Nolte's Face Off, the name of that movie. I can hear you all yelling at the radio right now. Anyways, that is not going to change now. The same thing is true of your fingerprint. The same things true of Iris scans are so many types of biometrics now that people are just giving up for free. I heard something great on Stuart Varney's show on TV here this week. And Stewart was talking about yet another breach. And in this particular case, it was the Saudi Prince who had broken into Jeff Bezos iPhone using some software from a company over in Israel. And what's changed? Well, it isn't that there was a hack or that it waJeff Bezos was hacked. You know, we've had so many celebrities hacked before, what he noted, and what I want to bring up here now is we don't seem to care anymore. There was a time when that would be a big deal. What do you mean, the Crown Prince hacked the Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world smartphone and stole all of his pictures. We just don't seem to care anymore. So when we're going into the office in the morning, and it's doing a facial scan, we don't think twice about giving our face information to them. Now the government forces us to if you want a passport, or if you want a driver's license, or if you're going to get on an airplane, you know, it's one thing to have it at the point of a gun. It's quite another just to give it up voluntarily if you ask me. So now, when chats walking around the office, that Bluetooth in his phone is trackable for Near Fields communications. Some of us use our phones to unlock our computers when we're in front of them, just using that Bluetooth. And then on the other side, we have the issue of well, you know, we got Wi-Fi, and we're using the company Wi-Fi, and they want us to use the company Wi-Fi. Tracking as you move around is supposedly utilizing a lot of this data is to see which teams are frequently collaborating make sure employees aren't accessing areas they're not authorized to be in, etc. So once chat set said, this desk is browsers tracked along with his email, there's new software now that are looking at the email, it's looking at things like slack or teams, whatever you might be using to collaborate. It's figuring out whether or not the workers that you're interacting with are responding quickly. See which employees are most productive. Some of the software in the company computers, even snap screenshots every 30 seconds to evaluate the productivity in the hour's work. Now, of course, that's not typically done for people who are who knowledge workers are. That's usually more for people who are, you know, taking dictation or doing some form of a repetitive task but, you know, Hawthorne effect, right? We've been doing this forever. I remember teaching that at Pepperdine as a professor there, ai artificial intelligence keyword scanning also been used and all of this, even chats, phone conversations on his work desk, phone and work cell phone can be recorded, transcribed and monitored. And they're using this to measure productivity, etc. So bottom line, your life is not yours. You are just not secure in almost anything. But I don't want you to give up. I want you to keep trying. I want you to make sure that you're using your iPhone, use Safari because it blocks some of this tracking. And I'm going to have some excellent information for your next couple of weeks. We're working on it now to help you stop the tracking. But check it out. It's on the Wall Street Journal site. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. Hey everybody, Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN online and of course at Craig Peterson dot com. That's Peterson with an "O." Hey, are you panicking about your kids or your grandkids and the use of the smartphones? Do you remember what they were saying about TV years ago? And how it rots the brains and you know, we use it as a babysitter. Kind of still do, don't we? And what effect does this have on their brains? We're starting to see the results of these devices on the younger generations because we've had the iPhone for over ten years. We've had the internet now for Well, just been about almost 20 years since it's been legal to do business online now actually is longer than that because it was 91. Wow, okay, thirty, it's been around for quite a while, and we're starting to see some of the results. We're seeing kids that have a little less patient, and they won't sit and read, like we used to read right, though, won't even sit and watch most movies, their ideal clip on these online sites where they're watching video is 15 to 30 seconds. They now have an attention span less than a goldfish, which is eight seconds a goldfish is attention span. Now, that's a bad thing. Okay. And now that they're into the workplace, some of these kids, here's what's happening now. They'll sit in a meeting, and we're as millennial usually, whereas baby boomers would sit there until give us plan our strategy, what are we going to do? So one of our options, we want to No. Okay, so we're going to do some research. So you look up this, you look up that you talk to these people, and then let's get together in a couple of days. And let's review what we've learned. And then let's make a decision, and you'll try and make a decision in unison. Now, when we're talking about the younger generation, the millennial generation, and of course, we've got Generation Z in the workplace too. Still, when we're talking about millennials, they will tend to try and get the answer right away. They'll sit on their phone, they'll b, and Google will reach out to their friends on social media and ask for their opinion. The friends might not know anything about what it is that you need to have researched. They may not know hardly anything about the whole topic that you're trying to get research, but they will reach out to these friends and get their opinions. And they are opinions are not necessarily worth anything, right? Then they will typically decide. Hey, listen, we're going to decide before we leave today. Whereas it might take the baby boomers a couple of weeks to make a decision, the younger generations millennials and Z's, will both try and make a decision right away. Now, what's the reason for this? And, you know, I, pretty much every psychologist and psychiatrist that I've spoken to, in fact, I think every one of them has said, Listen, this is 100% because of social media. It's 100%. Because of their ability to go online, these kids live online, and they always have. So how about younger kids, let's say you have grandkids or kids that are in their teens are approaching their teens. Now. Even maybe Five years old. I know some people that are getting smartphones and smart devices for their young kids, your five-year-olds. What's going on? Well, there was the research that came out a week ago by two psychology professors. They looked at the data that produced in 40 different studies. And this article in The New York Times goes on to say that they looked at the links between social media use, and they see if there are any ties with depression and anxiety, and they were looking at teenagers. And we've got the lead person here, lead investigator of this study, principal authors Candice Rodgers, a professor, University of California, Irvine, published in the Journal of child psychology and psychiatry. And the quotes here from the New York Times, there doesn't seem to be an evidence base that would explain the level of panic and consternation around these issues. And these are significant issues right with this has been a big debate for a long time as parents as grandparents, we don't want to harm our children. And we know that staring in the phones has affected us, you know, look, look at the relationship between couples and families. Did you see that Robin William's movie from years ago called RV, where the whole family was sitting around in the same room, and they were texting each other? You know, that's kind of the real world. You see people up for meals, and they're on their phones, reading articles, texting, whatever it is they're doing. There is a significant risk to our mental health from these machines in particular, and Congress has looked at some of the legislation they might pass. There have been other things to write but Is it the phone, that's the real problem when it comes to these mental issues, and that's what they were looking at the social media aspects of it. The World Health Organization said last year that infants under a year old should not have exposure to electronic screens. And the children between the ages of two and four should not have more than an hour of sedentary screen time each day. Some of the big execs over in Silicon Valley don't allow their kids to use some of the hardware-software they create. This is a problem from several directions still, right, even though there's no direct correlation between, well, let's call it depression here, and the use of social media by kids. However, I certainly have seen studies that would indicate otherwise, but there Saying that in most cases, the phone is just a mirror that reveals the problems a child would have, even without the phone. So they're saying that focusing on keeping children away from screens and making it hard to have more productive conversations about topics like how to make phones more useful for low-income people, blah, blah, blah, right? So I guess really, what they're saying is that if you compare the effects of your phone, to the impact of maybe eating correctly, or getting enough sleep, or playing games, outdoors smoking, the phone is just a very, very minor. So there was a little bit of a correlation but not a huge one. Mr. Hancock, who is one of the authors here, he's the founder of the Stanford Social Media Lab. He reads similar conclusions. He says he looked at about 226 steps. On the well being of phone users conducted, that he said that when you look at all these different kinds of well being, the net effect size is virtually zero. So there you go. Now, you know, in 2011, doctors were worried about something called Facebook depression. But by 2016 is more research came out, and they looked at that statement, they deleted any mention of Facebook depression, and emphasize that conflicting evidence and the potential positive benefits of using social media because of course, there is another side to all of that. So there you go. There's your answer if you have grandkids or kids, and you've been anxious about your kids, using these devices getting depressed because of social media, you know, okay, it's not a big problem. But here's one thing that I didn't hear dressed in any of these reports. And that is these negative self-images that tend to develop from being on social media. You look at these Instagram posts, and you look at the Kylie Jenners' of the world. I think that many girls and many boys are getting the wrong idea about what a woman's body should or could look like, and also getting a false value about it right. How much does that matter? Does that is that your relationship? I think they're getting a warped view of things, which is why I mentioned at the beginning this program that I think we see now in business, and I've talked with many people about it is very, very real. No question about it. All right. Well, when we come back, we're going to talk a little more about privacy. And this new secret of company that might end privacy as we know, in fact, they kind of already have me listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online, Craig Peterson dot com. Hello, everybody, Welcome back, Craig Peterson here, WGAN online and of course, Craig Peterson.com. Hey, we're talking a lot about privacy this week and next week, and that's mainly because well, it's in the news. And my wife and I have been working hard on some materials that we're going to be providing you guys. The only way you're going to get them is if you're on my mailing list because otherwise, you're never going to find out about them. But step by step guides know the sort of things I usually do this kind of going a step beyond the special reports, and then we're going to have a little webinar on it as well. We're just we're doing a whole bunch because privacy is something that I think we're starting to take for granted. Privacy is what we're beginning to expect. And I think that's a real problem. So when I saw this article this week in the New York Times by Kashmir Hill, I knew I had to share this with you. This is a brand new article. And it is very, very concerning to me for a number of reasons. It's about this guy. His name is Juan tomcat. He is from Australia, and moved up to Silicon Valley, and had been trying to do some sort of social type of an application, something that would, you know, compete out there in the world, make him a few bucks and have some fun doing it. And so he released a couple of different social apps. He had one that put Donald Trump's yellow hair on your own photo. He had a couple of others that were kind of a photo-sharing thing and nothing was all that successful. So we decided to need to be there to do a little bit more research and So he did. And he figured, you know, maybe what we need here is something a little more. That's going to help people recognize other people. So you meet someone, you have their picture, can I find that person just as an example. And in fact, he struggled for quite a while trying to figure out that this software that he had written, figuring out how the heck they were going to market it and, you know, they went to a bunch of different people and tried to figure it out and, and get it all to work. So what he ended up doing was kind of like what Mark Zuckerberg does start Facebook. He illegally crawled Facebook, YouTube Venmo millions of other websites and grabbed photographs from them and recorded the URLs for those photographs. So it's too late for you. If you have any photos anywhere online, basically That he might have found, because we're talking about 3 billion images that are in his database. That is incredible. So we had one programmer, right, this scraper that went in and stole all of these pictures. By the way, it is clearly against the terms of usage for Facebook, as well as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram Venmo. To use these to scrape the sites and to use these pictures for facial recognition. Twitter explicitly banned it, but you know, who cares, right? Like Zuckerberg, when he started Facebook, those allegations of how he stole the Harvard year yearbook and grabbed all of these pictures and then had people rating each other make mostly guys writing girls kind of a dating app sort of thing is kind of how it started. So in Now, he has found some investments. And that includes some serious money guys behind this whole thing. And it is. One of those people is Peter teal, who is one of the people who sit on the board of directors of Facebook. So Facebook says, well, we're looking into him grabbing the photos off of Facebook. I kind of wonder if anything's going to happen with Peter Thiel being on the board of directors as well. Here's how the software works. I don't know if you've seen facial recognition software before, but it basically looks at the difference. The distance between your eyes, your nose, your cheeks, you know, different points on your face that are defined, typically by bones, right. The nose is mostly the cartilage that's given its shape and its position. But it takes all of that and draws a line. I'm sure you've seen this sort of thing before. So what he's done now is he's taken those more than 3 billion images. And he's categorized them all by coming up with the vectors and mathematical formulas describing every last one of those 3 billion faces. So he's trying to figure out what I can now do with this database that I have? And he got some guys to help with some of the marketing. And he got some people to go after a few different categories industries. And he found that law enforcement was very interested in this. So let's talk about law enforcement for a minute and facial recognition technology because law enforcement has legally been using facial recognition technology for 20 years. You watch one of these TV shows like the CSI is on TV, which I don't like those shows because there are too many technical errors, and it drives me crazy. You can't do that doesn't exist, that technology doesn't exist. But so that's why I don't watch a lot of people do. The government has their National Crime information computer centers. They've got databases of faces of arrested people, people who are in prison, etc. The police can run your face through this database of people that they've had contact with before. Now it's expanded. This has been for good 20 years, but it's expanded more recently to include the databases of our DMV is our motor vehicle. In other words, our driver's licenses on the state level, and they pulled all of those in as well. Now those photos have to be shot pretty much straight on, and when they are shot straight on, then the recognition software that the law enforcement personnel are using can kind of recognize that person and do matches and everything else. So it's been an excellent tool for a lot of years. And one of the things law enforcement cannot do is collect data on everybody. So these databases that law enforcement has been using are somewhat limited. Now, I talked about this whole problem, man, it's probably been ten years ago when I first talked about it here on the radio. But the big problem I saw back then was that law enforcement was starting to use these public data aggregators. And I've had a few on the phone here before. I've done interviews with some of their CEOs and their technical people. But what these data aggregators do is take what's called open-source information, as well as paid information. Open-source information might be something they scrape a website, that is, all of the property owners in a town, or they scrape a site that has either information, right, almost everything. They might get feeds from companies like Equifax that are telling them about your credit rating, and you did this, and you bought that. They'll scrape UCC one filing to Secretary of State's office that will say, Yeah, he owns a brand new Ford Explorer, this model number, even license plate numbers they can get. So they'll pull all of this data together, they can get their hands on, and then they sell it. And you've seen ads, and I'm sure online, you know, check yourself online, see what we know about you. These are data aggregators that are selling this data, and it gets used by skip tracers, bounty hunters, law enforcement, all kinds of businesses to determine creditworthiness. They're even used to see 30 news to see if maybe you should or should not get a job. So it's kind of scary data. When you look at it, and I've looked at mine before, when I did these interviews, and I found that about a third to two-thirds of it was correct. Most of it was incorrect. We just had something similar happen when I was out at a wedding out west, and we were at this house. There was a card when we got back from an insurance company and stuck in the door handle. It had the name of a deceased relative on it. Well, you know, she's dead, so they're probably trying to sell insurance. I'm not going to do anything with this card. The next day is when we had the knock at the door, and it was the insurance investigator. She said that this relative had been in a fatal accident with car x. And they were trying to track her down. Well, guess what? She had been deceased for at least six months before the fatal accident occurred. Some third-party had used her identity, and she had to try to figure it out, Someone was hiding who they were. Now this insurance investigator was trying to figure out what's going on. The insurance investigator had her suspicions as to what might be going on. She showed us all of the information she had gathered from these public information sources, these data brokers, and they put it all together. She showed it to my wife, saying you're honest with me, and obviously, you got the death certificate, etc. Sure enough, what did they find? Well, yeah, she'd been dead for a while when the accident happened. But when, when we looked at the details of the information that they had about the deceased relative It was dramatically incorrect. It did show some associations. But it showed people on there we'd never heard of before as relatives. They had relationships wrong. But you know, it was the right place for that insurance investigator to start with and worked well. The police started using these types of databases and the federal investigators as well, because they are not regulated, like the law enforcement agencies are. Now we're starting to see law enforcement agencies, and according to this article in The New York Times, some 600 law enforcement agencies are now using this technology from a company called Clearview. They have been able to solve some bizarre, unbelievable crimes, things that happened. They found a good Samaritan. They found shoplifters they found burglars, thieves, all kinds of things that they couldn't see before because these people had never been involved with law enforcement previously. So I don't know, what do you think there are no limits on the type of data collection. I think maybe we're all going to be in trouble here. Because what happens when someone runs a picture or when they upload pictures into it. It becomes problematic here because these pictures are uploaded, and the company keeps them. Now you've got a blacklist of people that have had contact with law enforcement. What's going to happen when your employer sees that, because this database is not showing perfect matches by their admission at best 70% of the time, they come up with possible matches. Stick around, and we'll be right back. Hey everybody, Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and, of course, online at Craig peterson.com. Hopefully, we were able to catch the first hour of today's show. We covered something in this last segment that I want to go more in-depth into, which is this secret company that has kind of come out of left-wing that is going to end privacy as we know it. And, of course, they're breaking the rules and laws all ready to put the silly thing together. And it bothers me, frankly, but above that, right, we're really from above looking at all of this. What's bothering me is honestly, I don't know we call it an apathy where we just don't seem to care that much anymore. We care when we hear about a data breach, and we care when we find out that they stole our personal information. Part of what I'm going to be teaching you in a couple of weeks in this course is how you can tell what information was stolen. So I'm going to give you some dark web tools, the dark internet so that you know where to find out if your information has been stolen. And I think that's important. So we're going to include that in the upcoming webinar, we might put that in as a bonus for attending the webinar coming up in a couple of weeks. But it is disturbing that we can hear about something like what I just talked about the last segment, which you'll find online at my website. That, to me, is very bothersome, but it's also disturbing that we're no longer getting our up and trying to get Congress or somebody to do something about it. Not that I think Congress is the answer well to anything pretty much, right? Anything they touch, they're going to mess up. We're becoming apathetic as business owners, as well as business people. As the person who all of a sudden now is responsible for it within the organization, right, the office managers, those of us who liked computers, and we kind of got stuck with the role, and that's kind of what ended up happening to me to those years ago. Right. I think I'm a lot like you in that respect that, you know, it's challenging to be an expert in everything. I've got to kind of run the office, and I got to make sure. How am I going to learn about all of this security stuff? And then on top of it, the boss is breathing down our necks, trying to get this security stuff done, right. And if you're a business owner, you're worried about it too. But what are you doing about it? And to grease the wheel, I am probably like most people out there, and you really haven't done. You've probably got antivirus software, which, as of now, is utterly useless against the newest attacks. I mean, 100% useless. Why do you think they're giving Norton away now when you buy a subscription to LifeLock? You know, it doesn't do any good anymore, that's excellent technology 20 years ago, but today, it just doesn't work. Collectively as office managers, as business owners, even as C-levels on boards in fair-sized little companies. It's like burying our head in the sand. And we're, we're hoping nothing's going to happen. Right? I'm going into companies frequently, that is, you know, re governed by various rules and regulations, and very aren't doing what the laws and regulations require and they just sitting there saying well We'll just wait for an audit. When an audit happens, if an audit happens, we'll deal with them, then, right? But what happens when your data gets stolen? There are some very crazy things going on right now. We have a client that we picked up last year. It's just incredible. They have a completely new network system, we've fixed up a lot of things for them. I think things are going to be much better for them. We got an alert from our systems that they were getting 4000 hack attempts and our coming from Iran, coming from India, Iran. It is the first time I've got to say, the very first time in all of the years now, but I've been responsible for cybersecurity for all these businesses. It is the first time that I have ever actually seen an Iranian IP address in an attack. They're trying to log into this guy's email account. So one of the employees, and I'm not going to go into more detail than that. But this is real. You hear about breaches every week, and there are more breaches every weekend. It's small businesses, large businesses, home users, just because there are breaches every week, I want everybody to be aware that that doesn't mean that it's acceptable. It may be a kind of standard. Hopefully, it's the old normal, and probably, you're going to be able to find somebody that's going to be able to help you out, right? You go to a company like mine, and you say, Hey, listen, just take care of this for me, or you attend some of my courses so that you can learn some of this stuff that you need to do at least the bare minimum. Hopefully, you're doing that and not just getting passive after hearing about it so much. What's the what's that saying "the first year, you're shocked and horrified by something, and then you become accustomed to it, and then you embrace it." Not that I'm saying you guys are going to embrace hacking and become hackers. I don't think that'll ever happen. But you just get used to that idea until you do get hacked. And then it's all done and over with. Enough of that right now, make sure you're on my email list. So you get my weekly alerts, you get my monthly summaries of the absolute must-do patches for that month. You will also find out about my pop-up training. I haven't been sending out direct notices about the Facebook Lives and things I probably should. Still, you can get all of that just by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe because we've got some great stuff coming up here in a couple of weeks going to do some of the training and webinars to go along with it. I want to move on now to another article that was over on the CNN website. And it's talking about a significant change in a major US Corporation. I was on the phone with them earlier today. We've got VRBO, and you might have heard of them. That's Vacation Rentals by owner. They've been around since 95. You may not have heard of them, but they've been around a long time. Airbnb, you probably heard about them. And you've probably heard about Marriott. They've been busy buying up hotel chains, including one chain, in particular, was hacked previously, and Marriott just really inherited all of their problems by buying that company, keep in mind if you're looking to grow and make any acquisitions. What's interesting is how do you deal with a company like Marriott, which is bricks and mortar? How do you deal with the online startups like the VRBO and Airbnb is, it is completely changing the way the hospitality business works. I kind of put "hospitality" in air quotes here. You probably didn't see me. But is it hospitality when all you have is a home that you're going into an apartment you're going into versus a fully functional hotel? Right? That's the big question. So this is cool, I think, because Marriott has decided not to try and beat Airbnb at its own game. It's going to join them. April last year, Marriott came out with its homes and villas program. And it has 5000 rentable premium and luxury homes in almost 200 locations around the world. It is amazing. It's a significant departure for Marriott. They've been offering hotel rooms for nearly 100 years. But in this case, Marriott is going to do what Airbnb and VRBO have been doing and offering homes and villas up for rent. And this is a part of the whole sharing economy, bike scooters, and homes. That's a code from Stephanie Lennart. She's Marriott's global chief Commercial Officer, when she told CNN, home rentals and being B's have been around for decades, so the core idea itself isn't that new. The new part is technology platforms, bringing it to consumers at scale so that it's democratized and affordable. So Marriott's already had success, obviously through hotel business, and as I said, I was on the phone with him this morning. I'm going to be staying in one of their hotels again. But the company is being led here by Stephanie outside of the brand comfort zone, that you know brick and mortar. It's great. They've been around for almost 100 years. But everything is changing out there. And are you changing in your business? Are you making it easy for your customers to do business with you? And that's what they were asking themselves. They've been kind of tracking and watching the home rental market. She had a pilot program going over in Europe and 2018. That became ultimately the homes and villas program that they had. They found that their most loyal customers at Marriott 30% of them had used a home rental in the prior year. I've used Airbnb. I've used VR Bo, and you know, frankly, I've had mixed results from the two of those different things. And they found out nine times out of 10 this person was renting a home for a whole different purpose and they were getting that from someone else and Marriott thinks that this is a complimentary business and adds to their core business. So isn't that kind of interesting? people stay more than triple the average one and a half night stays at the hotels in these different types of bookings. And they think that they are going to be able to do a whole lot more. They're focusing on some of these millennial trends. And frankly, you know, I'm an old G. But I have to tell you, boomers, age 23% of travelers are age 55 to 64, booked a homestay from 21% in 2017. So it's happening. We're all doing it out there, and congratulations to married for sticking their neck out. And frankly, you might need to two so keep an eye out for what other people are doing in competing industries and maybe borrow their ideas. Listen to Craig Peterson and WGAN. We'll be right back. We're going to talk a little bit about lawmakers and what small businesses are telling them right now. Welcome back. Welcome, welcome. Craig Peterson here online and on WGAN and many other radio stations during the week. Thanks for joining me. Lawmakers have long been accused of being corrupt. I'm not going to defend them, that's for sure. Here is a different type of corruption and one that a lot of people haven't thought a lot about. You know, there's been a lot in the news about Joe Biden's son. Hunter, getting money from Ukraine. Joe Biden's brother getting what is it $1.5 billion from Iraq is the latest story that I saw out there. Nancy Pelosi's son-in-law, getting money from Ukraine, John Kerry's relative getting money from Ukraine, right. You do hear a lot about alleged corruption, and you have to wonder, frankly, how do these Congress critters go down to Washington, DC, nary a penny in their pocket and end up multimillionaires. It's nuts, isn't it? And of course, they exempt themselves from certain laws that we have to live by, for instance, insider training trading rules. If you're a congressman hearing bills, it is regulations will likely be added here or there, or you're going to mandate some action by businesses. It is perfectly legal for you to go out and invest in companies that are going to take care of this problem and charge businesses a lot of money, right. All of a sudden, you're a likely multi-millionaire. If you or I were to have done that, we would be nailed for insider trading. It's long been a double standard. But here's another side of that double standard that's bothered me for a very long time. This isn't business. It includes unions. And this is where a business or union wants to get rid of the competition. And what they'll do is they'll get a congress critter to sponsor a bill that let's say it requires a licensing for something like most states have licensing for barbers. Are you kidding me? What does a barber need to know? Well, you don't know how to haircut. But you know what? A state-sponsored haircut. What does that look like something under the Soviet Union? Well, they have to know how to clean the instruments and clean them properly. They don't use autoclaves. But they do use alcohol and various other things to clean them. So what does that take a five-minute quiz on it? If you want to keep barbers out, you can put together a nice little Barbers association that goes to the state capitol. They say I think for the health and safety of our citizens in the state, we've got to have rules and regulations surrounding barbers. It gets passed. And now all of a sudden, you get to control how many barbers are. And in some states, they have several people who are allowed to have licenses look at taxi medallions in the big cities like New York City as an example. And in New York City, there's only so many of them. And they were valued at like a million and a half bucks apiece, just crazy money, and people suck their life savings into them. And then, of course, the bottom fell out of the whole medallion taxi market when Uber show showed up, and, of course, some of these other wild ride-hailing services. So we've known for a long time that both unions and businesses use the federal government to squeeze out the competition and I don't think there's any The real debate about that it happened. It happens all of the time. The left does it the right does it. They all do it to us. Well, there this last Friday, there was a hearing, and there were executives from four different businesses that pleaded with federal lawmakers to rein in Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. It is a New York Times article. And this was a congressional hearing that was in Boulder, Colorado. They had some smaller companies. Now, these companies are pretty big in their market segments, but much, much smaller than Google, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon. We're talking about such a nose, pop sockets, Basecamp, and tile. Now I have used equipment. I've had people from all of those companies on my radio show before, and those top executives testified that the biggest technology company Companies blocked their businesses. They stopped them from growing. And according to the New York Times, their stories vary. But they shared a theme that tech giants have used their powerful positions in search eCommerce, online ads, and smartphones to squeeze them out, as well as other rivals. Now, when we get down to this, I think it also boils down to the antitrust laws that we have. Right through, the whole idea was, well, we're not going to let companies get too big. We're not going to let them get two horizontal we're going to help make sure they stay in the industry, make sure there's competition. But we say that on the one hand, the federal government does right, but then, on the other hand, they don't do it at all. So let's take a great example of General Motors and what happened to GM. When a company gets to a certain size, the government This side that it is too big to fail. So our lawmakers look at it and say, Oh my gosh, how many voters work at that company. So instead of letting the market take care of the problem, and these, By the way, most of these people probably ultimately would have had jobs, probably better jobs, probably higher-paying jobs. But instead of letting the market take care of it, and split up GM, keep the profitable divisions alive, maybe let GM continue to operate them and sell off the unprofitable divisions or let them die off. Which is the way the markets work, right? It's the fittest survival of the fittest if you will, and that does well for everybody because now you have a stronger company that's doing better. While we're in the car industry. Look at what happened with Chrysler twice now twice. They've been bailed out by the tax. payers. So why didn't the antitrust laws work in those cases? Right? They didn't work. We've got examples here in New England, look at Seabrook and what's happened there and with the Old Man, and the costs that have been incurred by the ratepayers. Then we have this whole about hubbub about tobacco, so what's happening now is these big guys like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, are capitalizing on the strength that they have because of their size. The government regulations, and using it as a weapon against the smaller startups. And this happens every time, as I said, this is a left issue. It's the right issue. It's unions, and it's big business. These are the guys we're talking about right now. It sort of happened just this week in a federal hearing. So you now have these big companies that we don't let the market deal with anymore. Do you think that the government would allow Google to go under? Now none of these companies, to the best of my knowledge, are having cashflow issues right now Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. They're probably not likely to go under. But these smaller guys, you know, Pop Sockets and Basecamp have had issues. They've had products that they've had to let go because they weren't profitable enough, right. That sounds like what GM should have done. Tile? Who knows these guys, right? There is not the competition there needs to be out there. How do you compete with Google? Now there are some out there. I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google because DuckDuckGo does not track me. It does not sell my information. It is a pretty darn, safe place to go. Apple I use because they do not make money off of selling my data. They make money off of selling Hardware and Software and Services right. So Apple, according to Tile, is put up hurdles for their smartphone app that didn't apply to Apple's competing product. The high-end audio company said Google copied its patent speaker technology and use its dominance and search to enter new markets. Pop sockets were to make smartphone grip said that Amazon bullied it into sales agreements and ignored complaints about counterfeits on the Amazon retail platform. It goes on and on, you know, intimidating with a smile. And frankly, as I think I pointed out pretty clearly, I think Congress is part of this problem, not necessarily part of this solution. So what are you going to do about it? Let me know what you think me at Craig Peterson calm. Just drop me an email me at Craig Peterson dot com, and you're listening to me on WGAN. Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here back on WGAN. It's our last half hour together today but fear not. We have more coming up this week. Make sure you subscribe to your favorite podcast platform, whether that's tune in Apple podcasts. I'm all over the place on any major podcasting platform. You can just search for me, and you'll find me Well, you know, if you search for me, you're not going to find me but search for Craig Peterson, and hopefully, you'll find me. I hope you saw this morning's email because we have covered several features there. We also have links to this week's podcast so that you can watch those, so hopefully, you've got that. And then we're keeping you up to date on the latest security news that you need. The patches you have to apply at your home and your company. The Big ones. And we define big and vital based on how easy it is for a bad guy to use it and whether or not we know bad guys are using it out there. We contacted the FBI this week, because of something we've been seeing going on. The FBI puts all this together and shares it. I want to put a plug out there for Infragard. There are chapters in all 50 states now. I think you will enjoy it if you are the person who's responsible for the security of your organization. Now, this includes health care and financial but even lawyers and doctors and everybody that might be considered part of the critical infrastructure is invited. I find it useful because I do get some excellent insight information, sometimes directly from the FBI through the FBI Infragard program. Now you can have to apply, and they have to do this basic background check on you. And then you can become a member and, and they share some stuff with you. They don't share with everybody else. Sometimes I think that it's, you know, they share with us maybe a little less than they should. I believe they should share with us a little bit more, but it's well worth it if you are someone involved in security. So I, you know, you've got my feeling here already right on IoT, the Internet of Things and smart homes. I have some smart home equipment in our home. There's an apple speaker, what do they call that Apple home, something like that I can't even remember now. And I've got some of the Amazon Echo stuff. I've got a little echo hockey pocket. So there's two or three them in the house, and we've got one of the apps Amazon Fire tablets. And we also have an Amazon Echo two, which is one with the screen. Then we use that for talking to grandkids and stuff, but also asking questions playing music and things. It is so handy. And then we've used Apple home also to hook up some lights and other devices. Now the apple home, by far, has the best security design of all of the rest, it tends to be a little bit more expensive. And there are not as many vendors using it because it's a bit more expensive. And Apple frankly was a little bit late to that game, but we are using it to control lights in the home, which is kind of cool. So if you invest in a lot of this IoT stuff, maybe you've made the mistake of getting Google Home. Perhaps you're using the Amazon Echo stuff, and maybe you are using the Apple stuff there. You know those are the two better ones that are out there right now. Neither Apple nor Amazon are known to sell your information or have big hacks against their devices. I chuckled when I mentioned the Google Home known to share and sell your data, and be hackable. And they found some apps people were using that were recording everything they were saying and uploading it to the internet. So stay away from that. But there are a lot more companies and just those that are in the IoT space. For instance, Verizon now has Home Security stuff where they have cameras will install, and they have alarm systems, spectrum charter also has that type of thing. So you invest a lot of money in that, and you've heard ads on the station here for some of these different you know, home security devices, wired yourself. You don't have to. Why is it just everything in between, right? Well, what happens when one of those companies decides that they don't want to be in that business anymore? That is what's happening right now with Charter Cable is killing its Home Security Service. It's been telling customers that the security devices that they've purchased, they weren't on a month to month. It wasn't a lease, and it wasn't a rental. But they're saying that their devices, the devices they purchased, will stop working on February 5. Amazing, right? So this is Charter Cable, you might know it as Spectrum that's another brand name that they've been using. And over the years, some customers to spend a lot of money on these products that will no longer work. Now I mentioned in the last segment so knows and when I was talking about the big con companies and unions left and right both working with the government to keep competition away. Well, Sonos has done something kind of similar to this charter thing. If you have an older Sonos speaker, they will give you a discount on a new Sonos speaker, because they're not going to support the old ones anymore. And they will then brick your former Sonos speaker. So the speaker that you bought and paid money for a bricking means it will no longer work. There is no way to recover it. There's no way to make it work ever again. That is a very, very big deal until a lot of people upset with Sonos. But you know, as we go forward, this is going to happen more and more and more. You're going to have internet cameras, and you're going to have sensors, they're going to be useless in a couple of weeks. Now, that's bad when you consider some people. It is according to the DSL report. Some people spend 1200 bucks on their systems. So here's a massive problem for you if you are a Charter customer Spectrum customer, and you have their security devices, and this is something that you have to watch out for, right? It's, it's the old question going with a smaller guy a bigger guy, what do you want to do? Companies come to come to me to help them with security because they know I care. They know it's a family business, that we have the whole family involved in, you know, obviously, as well as other people that work for us, versus going to an Ernst and Young, that's going to charge them an arm and a leg. They're not going to get any kind of attention from, but when we're talking about this type of equipment, this is where I think you get a real win. By going with Amazon, they are going to be a runaround. They can afford to upgrade your equipment with you, and I'm not worried about getting abandoned. Buy them a charter partner now with Amazon's ring and boat to give customers a free equipment bundle if they buy a year's worth of monitoring. Well, isn't that wonderful? So if you're an existing customer, you can throw away all of your stuff and get getting new hardware for free if you sign up for a year, and if you don't own any of their existing equipment, you can still get a hardware bundle and a year of service. So the big question is why there's no way for charter customers to keep using devices. They're using the ZigBee specification, which I've had the ZigBee people on my show before. It allows multi-vendor interoperability for smart home products. Why can't they just switch on over to another ZigBee based system? Well turns out that years ago, spectrum devices were firmware coded to prevent them from being seen and unusable within their Normal University. ZigBee devices. So this is a problem we're going to have going forward. It goes back to also data portability that we wanted for so long. Remember Hippo is supposed to give us medical record portability, we go to any doctor, they'd all have our medical records the hospital to be able to read them. And that was more than 25 years ago, and it still hasn't happened. So I'm not going to hold my breath. These alarm systems are going to be able to keep our, you know, keep it useful for the next five or ten years, more than going to be going away. All right, when we get back, we're going to talk about a significant event that occurred last week with Microsoft. And another big event. We're going to talk about what the FBI has been saying about Apple lately. So stick around, and we'll be right back. You're listening to Craig Peterson. On WGAN and online. Craig Peterson.com. Hey everybody, welcome back. Craig Peterson here, WGAN and online at Craig pet

This week’s Bourbon Community Roundtable touches on lots of good hot topics. We look at MGP's stock as it continues it's downward trend with our thoughts on how this will play out for them. Then we talk about sourcing in general and if consumers are getting oversaturated with the same bulk market products. Stickers are always a fun subject, but this week there was one released that got national media attention. Will distilleries crack down on stickers? Lastly, we congratulate Old Forester on it’s revamp of the barrel program and cap it off with our most annoying bourbon terms. Show Partners: Barrell Craft Spirits is always trying to push the envelope of blending whiskey in America. Learn more at BarrellBourbon.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks more about smoked grains. Breaking Bourbon announces Stagg Jr. as their whiskey of the year. Let's discuss. What do you think about the MPG losses for the 3rd quarter in a row? Is the bourbon market oversaturated with brands? What happens when the aged whiskey runs out? Let's discuss the effect of stickers on bottles. What do you think about the New Riff Pitino sticker? Sticker predictions? Brown-Forman comes out with a barrel proof single barrel program for Old Forester. What is taking everyone else so long? What's the most annoying term in bourbon? 0:00 Kenny didn't did my over talking on the sticker thing. get in the way of getting the opportunity to talk about vodka. 0:11 I guess so, 0:13 son of a bitch. Yeah. Hey, I got it. I got it. I got to dial it back a little bit. Man, I really need to talk about vodka on this show. But how much I hate it. I've never done that before. 0:35 Maybe one it's Episode 237 of bourbon pursuit. I'm kidding. And here's some of the news. You know, we've been keeping up with the talks of the trade war going on. And however President Donald Trump and his French counterpart president Emmanuel Macron, have agreed to hold off on the escalating trade war. And this is now avoiding what would have been a massive tariff increase on French goods such as wine, cheese and handbags, Trump and threaten the new duties and retaliate. 1:00 For a tax slapped on revenue earned in France by American tech firms such as Facebook and Google, the two sides will hold off on potential tariffs until the end of the year, as French officials have said and negotiations over the digital tax will continue at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. A 25% tariff still remains intact and in place due to separate trade disputes related to Airbus numbers are starting to come in for visits to distilleries across Kentucky, and Sazerac, who is not a part of the Kentucky distillers Association has released their numbers earlier this week. The distillery ended 2019 having a record breaking 293,996 visitors during the calendar year. This is a 35% increase in visitation over 2018. And as you know, there is currently a $1.2 billion investment going into everything around Buffalo Trace, including producing more whiskey but also expanding the visitor center. The expanded Visitor Center will be utilized together 2:00 A bit more distillery archives. And as the expanded space will back up to the recently completed fermenter expansion, the visitor center will have a backdoor access to the whiskey making process allowing for new and updated to a routes. The expanded space will also supply another place for event locations for hosting evening parties. Now for this week's podcast, this roundtable touches on a lot of good subjects, we look at the stock of MGP as it continues its downward trend, and with our thoughts on how this is going to play out for them. Then we talk about sourcing in general and of the consumers. You and I are getting oversaturated with some of the same products that we see on the bulk market, and stickers. It's always a fun subject. However, this week, there was one that got released that got national media attention. And does that mean that distilleries are going to start cracking down on them? Who knows? We'll find out and then we congratulate old forester on the revamp of their barrel program. While we cap it off with our most annoying bourbon terms. Are you interested in this 3:00 See what sort of barrel pics we have going on. Right now we are still set to select an old forester whistlepig to Buffalo Trace barrels to four roses barrels and a new roof barrel this year, or aiming to do somewhere around 20 barrels this year and you can get in part of the action as well. Not only just getting a chance to have a bottle from the barrel pick, but you could also be on this selection team. Go to patreon.com slash bourbon pursuit and you can learn more there. Alright, it's that time once again to see what Joe over barrel bourbon has to say. And then you've got Fred minich with above the char 3:35 it's Joe from barrell bourbon. We're always trying to push the envelope of blending whiskey in America. Find out more at barrel bourbon com 3:43 I'm Fred minikin. This is above the charm. Last week in my above the char I talked about smoking the grains before distilling them and how that is changing the character and the flavor profiles of bourbon really all American whiskeys 4:00 And I asked a question in the barrel finishes, we bring up a stink as to whether or not those are really bourbon. I asked, should we start asking ourselves are the smoked grayned Bourbons, also bourbon. Now they technically meet all the qualifications but there was a time in American whiskey history in which they tried to dictate what types of grains were used and where they were coming from. So the question is, because smoking the grains changes the character so much it takes a big right or left hand turn on Kentucky bourbon, Should we open that up? And we got a really good email from Jason Lambert. He's the lead distiller at came and spirits company in the Grand Cayman says he's a big fan of the show. Thank you very much for that Jason. And he, he says, When you think of bourbon, you often think of this as tradition in history. But when it comes to smoking grains, I think 5:00 Industrial kilns were mainstream and most all malls were smoked to stop germination. In this respect, a smoke bourbon would be welcomed with open arms. So as long it is properly labeled, however, this would open a Pandora's box to include grains like the smoke corn, you discussed about MB rolling. But again, I should 5:24 I think they should be accepted as long as it is very clearly labeled. Now, Jason brings up a great point. And I think that is always my main concern is that consumers are not deceived. And that's what has happened in a lot of whiskey labeling is like somebody will follow it to a tee, and then someone else will take advantage of the equity that that one person has built and do something like dump a gallon of sherry in there and then call it it's Sherry finished barrel. The Sherry finished blend or 6:00 Whatever. And you know, when it comes to the smoking of the grains, I just want to be, I just want to make sure that consumers are protected. And the fact is, is that people will do things that they can get away with. So as long as people are, you know, making note on their labels that they're using smoke grains, I don't think we have a problem. But the minute that someone comes out and is pumping mosquito smoke or peated Bourbons into the market without notifying the consumer, that's what it is. 6:35 That's when we have a problem. Because what will happen inevitably, someone will taste that product, and then not like it or like it, and they'll expect that's what bourbon is supposed to taste like. You have to remember that when we talk about consumers, we're really talking about, you know, one or 2% of the consumers, people who are not necessarily engaged in whiskey at all. We're definitely not talk about people in this podcast. 7:00 But when people are arguing for class action lawsuits that somebody was deceived or something, they find like a small amount of people to prove their case. And that's what I'm talking about here. I imagine someone going to some some place like Walmart that's where attracts everybody and they grab a bottle of what they think is bourbon, they go home and taste it and it tastes like smoke or tastes like pee or something that the tourism away from buying another product of bourbon because what they think of in their head is bourbon is that smoke flavor that they didn't like, and so they go back to Crown Royal or vodka or gin or whatever it is never giving something like Evan Williams a shot even though Evan Williams doesn't taste anything like that smoke product that they dislike. And they're in is what why Jason has hit the nail on the head when he talks about it's all about labeling, and trying not to deceive the customer. And as long as we have upfront labeling, I'm always going to be okay. 8:00 With just about anything as whether or not barrel finishes, or actually bourbon, now, that's a debate for another time. But I can tell you 1955 things like four roses of today and Buffalo Trace, they were not even considered the way they are made today would not be considered bourbon in 1955. And that's when the barrel entry proof was the legal maximum was 110. So, even though we have some rigid standards in American whiskey, it's always evolving. What American whiskey looks like in 10 years. Who knows? Maybe mosquito smoke corn finished and Sherry barrels is the standard. I don't know. But I do know that I'll be here to taste it. And that's this week's above the chart. Hey, if you'd like to write me and tell me what you think about above the char, maybe I'll read it on the next episode. shoot me an email or hit me up on Instagram. 9:00 Graham at Fred minich Until next week, cheers 9:06 Welcome back to another episode of bourbon pursuit the official podcast of bourbon and tonight we are having bourbon Community Roundtable number 40 and it's also the first verb Community Roundtable of 2020. So welcome back everybody. Glad to have everybody here right 9:22 here. So pretty much we got the whole crew here tonight. So Fred, Ryan, Brian, Nick and Blake as well. So how's everybody doing? Doing well doing well Kenny start to the New Year. 9:35 Just fantastic. 9:39 So excited. And for anybody that's not able to if you're just if you're in the car you're just listening or something like that. Ryan has finally got a new background. He's He's finally stepped up and he's got a whole new house renovations got bottles behind them now. I know. I'm like halfway through. You can maybe see if I get all the way. running our shells. I have another 10:00 One next to me. That's empty. But uh, yeah, I'm only halfway there and I'm running out I should have went bigger like Kenny said, but I don't have any more walls so 10:10 I think that's one thing is as we start going down and when people ask they're like, Hey, can you send pictures of like your your shelves or? Anybody have ideas and as soon as you have an idea for how big your shelves need to be, just triple it. Yeah, because always triple it because that's exactly i mean even doubles not going to get there but so when you think you need shelves for your bourbon, just triple it, because that's what's gonna happen. I yeah, just liquidate. I've been like giving like somebody comes to my house and I'm like, Here, take this bottle bottle for you, bottle for you. 10:44 So I'll go on over. I'll give you a funny story. So this past Sunday, my wife kind of went on a cleaning spree and went down to the basement and y'all know my basement. I know many people have seen it on social media. I mean, it's just littered with bottles and just crap everywhere. And she's 11:00 Like, this has gotta go. I probably ended up dumping out probably like three bottles worth of whiskey of just like samples of like 100 ml ml samples of just stuff that like it's, it's stuff that's all like from distilleries that wasn't very good or under age and I'm just like, I'm never gonna drink this. I don't know why I'm hanging on to it. But there's a little piece of you that just dies every time you sit there just empty down the drain. 11:26 Yes, I did. Actually, I had a bunch of media sample bottles and I just dumped them into the canter. We'll see what happens here. Infinity bottles. Yeah, exactly. already had one infinity ball that never touch. And then I like wow, be a great idea to create another one. So I don't drink it and let it sit there but uh, yeah, it's, it's good problem to have. Yeah, yeah, it is. Alright, so let's go ahead and go around the horn real quick. So Blake, we'll start with you. Just go ahead and do the usual. Yeah, I'm Blake from bourbon er calm. Bo you are Bo you are Bo, nr? It's been a 12:00 wow you know I almost forgot how to spell the name so glad to be back these are a lot of fun to do so that you can check me out at all social medias Instagram Twitter, Facebook as well as CEO box comm that's s ELBACH s I'm Nick from breaking bourbon, breaking bourbon com check us out 12:20 on social media all at breaking bourbon. And so I'm not going to spell it for you like Blake Blake i don't know i don't i don't want to screw it up and embarrass myself on live here. But yeah, you guys should know it by now. Breaking bourbon again. Glad to be here guys. Good Brian. Yeah, thanks for having me back. Happy to be for the first one of the of the New Year Brian with sip and corn. You can find me on Twitter Facebook and Instagram at sip and corn si p p n co CEO or MC there I go next can't even spell your own name anymore. And and also see me at bourbon justice.com. Let's start getting into some of the 13:00 The topics for tonight and so one of the one I kind of look at is how breaking kind of made stag Junior famous because it was one of these things that's like stag Jr. has been around, it's been around forever and all of a sudden, they come out and say it was their whiskey of the year and 2019 batch 12 and never at least correct me if I'm wrong Never before has Sazerac ever put out a press release about a new release of stag Jr. and now all of a sudden people are just going crazy for it it's just I don't even know if the initial release of stag Jr. Got a official press release 13:35 batch number 13 yeah even know they had badges 13:40 not getting 13:42 Okay, can I jump in so I was going to share this story earlier but so I was in South Carolina this weekend when we hit a few stores just see what they had three different no it was one bar and two different stores. They're like well, you know, we did just get the George t stag Jr. I don't know if you know this, but it was just named whiskey of the year. 14:00 I'm like, No, no, don't trust those guys. 14:05 It was gone off the shelves and the guy was like, yeah, you know, one of the employees grabbed it here because it was just named whiskey of the year. So, like, dang it breaking strikes again. 14:17 Y'all have a meeting with Jim Murray, you know? 14:22 I wish somehow it's like, it's like a catch 22 because, like, in a way, it kind of it kind of hurts us to to do something like that, because it's generally not insanely difficult to get here. I mean, it's not on the shelves all the time. But it shows up. I mean, if you're in liquor stores as much as we are, you're going to see it, you know, it's going to be out, you're going to have a chance to get it, you know, and so when when you do stuff like that, you know, you always think about the impact of, you know, are people going to lose their minds about it, but the flip side of that is, is, you know, it's kind of nice to have something that's just kind of a regular release, you know, they're not all going to be great. I don't think you know, there's going to be a 15:00 Elijah Craig barrel proof that's fantastic there's going to be a larceny you know barrel proof that's that's fantastic you know that kind of thing you know so it's that idea that kind of these regular releases that we get some really good once in a while we don't have to necessarily hunt you know the crazy stuff that everyone's already going to go nuts for no matter how good it is or not you know that you might just stumble upon you know really good batch or you know really good run a single barrels or something like that. So that's what's kind of exciting about that. But yeah, the catch 22 is it probably is going to be a little difficult to find for a little while at least although you know, probably taper off and be able to find it like you did before. If you know the know the liquor store, guys and you're getting your area. I think it'll still show up, you know, couple months from now. So one of the benefits of never deleting an email is that I have been able to trace every single Buffalo Trace, press release, and I found the original one with the original George t stag Jr. Or the stag Junior bourbon press release July 25 2000. 16:00 13 and I did not find any other follow up releases. So this 16:08 this is the first based on my inbox, which is a very well kept never deleted inventory of all Buffalo Trace press releases. And I remember the first either the first one or the first couple of those were just hotter than all hell. I mean, they were just unveiled. 16:28 Yeah, yeah, terrible. Yeah, terrible one of the one of my lowest rated Bourbons and everyone was super excited for it when it came out. And everyone thought I was going to be the, you know, the George t stag just a little younger, really, it's pretty much should be the same thing. Otherwise just maybe not quite as developed. But that one was pretty bad. And that one kind of turned us off from it for a little while. Of course, I have three bottles of that batch one. But you know, so it's been a little while we've had it here and there. You know, this one kind of popped up and Eric was the one who got it first and he was just going on and on about how great it was. 17:00 We had it and we're like well it's yeah we're going to start buying this again now you know so just yeah I think there's going to be hits and misses they're not all going to be they're not all gonna be home runs but this one was pretty good and from what I hear batch 13 is pretty good too and from a lot of comments people I don't think people didn't realize there were batches you know, if you're not a die hard bourbon enthusiasts, I don't think you're necessarily noticing that the proof is different. And it doesn't say batch anywhere so you know, I think Buffalo Trace maybe realize they could educate people a little bit better. You know, kind of talking about that there are actually different batches of this. You know, like for example, having held us with their you know, how they're identifying their batches now. We're knows maybe we'll switch to doing something like that. Maybe they're just going to try to get people on their website and do press releases from now on you know, be interesting to see what happens you know, everybody actually not opposed to like the the the announcement of a new release like this, if anything, it helps. It helps in a lot of ways kind of like Chronicle when these things are coming out. It gives you you little nuggets of information. 18:00 Because let's face it 18:02 We are at the liberty of what information they want to divulge to us we're very fortunate that someone like new riff or heaven Hill will tell you answer any question that you want. But Buffalo Trace, doesn't they, they don't tell you everything and so like to get any kind of like real like actionable information from some of those distilleries that don't give you information is always a plus. You know, it's the funny thing is this one question that came in and said how many people in the roundtable do the news earlier and guilty of insider trading? You know, for me, I don't even know how this was on your radar because stuff like you know stag Jr. Huge t single barrels are I mean, even even a lot of I mean, thankfully, heaven Hill sends us a lot of the samples for every release of the Elijah Craig barrel proof so we have an opportunity to taste it but a lot of times like a new stag, Jr. thing, just it's just not on the radar for me to go and search out among the liquor stores so well, they're gone anyway, they're not on the shelves here. It's like 19:00 Global's a different scenario Yeah, they get kind of compiled in with the you know Weller releases well or 12 where people have to camp out for it so I'm like stag jr No thanks not camping 19:11 or people camping out for stag Jr. He had they just do like they just they budget in 19:18 the raffles in the lotteries in the release. Yeah yeah it's part of the long line scenario maybe not the camping out but at least a two hour wait sort of scenario that's bourbon for you. Mm hmm. All right, let's go ahead. Let's move on to something fun. Well, maybe not fun, fun to talk about. You know, this is something that was an article that came out of Barron's calm on Friday and talked about MGP is now posting its third loss in a row, sorry, third quarter loss in a row. On Friday, the news came out that the stock had actually lost 20% of its value. It's currently I just checked it before we started here around $38 a share. It's high was back in around June of 2018, where it peaked around 19 20:00 $5 and it said at least within the article that it made a bet on aging whiskey, and that was related to blame, and really was a failed bet at the end the day. So I want to kind of look at the finance guys over here, because you all know what this means about, you know, trying to hit numbers, not posting or not meeting your, your expectations, your results. So what is this to you kind of say about the current market of maybe craft distillers that maybe don't need to source as much whiskey anymore? 20:31 Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually pretty telling, you know, if you dig in a little bit, they dig into like the, you know, the price to earnings ratio, all this other stuff in really what it comes down to is, I don't think MGP is getting the prices for their age whiskies that they wanted to, they thought that they could just kind of they were controlling the market, they could demand whatever price they wanted. And, you know, but you also have a lot of these other distilleries you've got Bardstown. 21:00 bourbon popping up you've got some other you know castle and key who's doing a lot of contract distilling, as well as just some other places around the country we've got a lot of decal bourbon that popping on to the market. So 21:11 I think they were just thinking they were in the driver's seat in our kind of getting proved that they weren't. 21:18 You know what that means for a stock forecast? I don't know that may be a little tough, but 21:24 ultimately, I think they're going to have to bring the prices down some they're still extremely high demand for MGP whiskey. But as I think that MGP probably thought that they would be able to release their own black brains with a little little bit of a better result and they haven't really done that, you know, what the remis and then well, they had the 21:46 the one that Oh, shoot with the old master distillers name that they released under his name, met Greg. 21:52 Greg Mets select but then you know that after he left, I assume they didn't care that on so I think between the fact that they haven't been able to really 22:00 thrown brands with much success. And then there's other stuff popping on the market where you know brands and smaller craft distillers they're looking to source. They have more options now. So I think that's the big thing. So let's analyze what MGP is MGP for years has been a supplier to people who were seeking craft spirits or distilled food, basically distill, distill the alcohol use for food. And in 2016, they hired Gus Griffin as their CEO Gus. Gus comes from Brown Forman. He's not from that kind of brought home and certainly had its like it played in the source market. Don't get me wrong, but not to this extent. And that facility in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, had been used as a blending agent for years and Canadian whiskey and American blends. It was never a place to do it's to have its own whiskey until Pernod Ricard sold it to ldi or Angostura 23:00 We're up, and they started selling stuff out into the wholesale market. They saw so much success with this. Unfortunately ldi could not, could not survive, so they had to sell you MGP MGP saw so much success with the source market that they said, Hey, why don't we have all this great whiskey and hey, you taste the honeybell from NGP. And you tell me it's not great. It is fantastic whiskey. And they're like, why don't we do our own brands. So they bring in this guy from Brown Forman Absolutely. Perfect position ready to go. Here's the problem. The company's infrastructure had always been built around 23:41 the wholesale market or the trade industry or other distillers and helping other other brands. They had not successfully done their own brand. They didn't have the sales infrastructure. They didn't have the marketing teams in place. They had some here and there but they did not build brands. And so in 2016, they shifted 24:00 gears and they started let letting go contracts and they started saying, hey, you're gonna have to find another source for your whiskey because we're cutting back. And here we are, we're basically seeing the results of a fantastic distillery not being supported by, you know, something that we always talk about that we hate in marketing and sales or apps. So that without that infrastructure there, you can see the results. And I know the stock market is not like real life, but it's an indication of what what happens. 24:38 Yeah, I mean, I also think when you look at this as a as a distillery going into this, you want to be able to buy whiskey and and have something that you can kind of buy and then sell almost overnight like that. That's kind of the goal a lot of these people went with. And now when even I mean, Ryan and I, we've been down this path we've talked to MGP like the most that they really sell 25:00 to people like us is like four year old product of that they have the 36%. Right? If you're buying a lot of 30, or buying a lot of four year old product, that means you're banking on betting your whole business on aging NGP stock. And so that doesn't necessarily play into the long term category of a lot of distillers where they say like, okay, we're going to get this to get us over this hump, until we can actually start selling our own whiskey. And so, most people unless you're, unless you're trying to build a business where it's NGP all day, every day for the rest of eternity, then it's gonna be hard for I think, to keep to keep selling some of these younger stocks. I think that's right. I also think frankly, Indiana has something to do with it. I mean, they they caught some bad press with Templeton and everyone referring to it as Oh, it's just 25:48 a whiskey made in a factory in Indiana, and they can't call it Kentucky bourbon. And everyone knows when Indiana's on the on the back. That's where they got it from and it's just a brand trying to 26:00 Make make it go until they can sell their own. And in the meantime, you've got brands stocking up on that can call themselves Kentucky bourbon and you've got a JW locally in particular, with all kinds of warehouses that are full of bourbon. And they'll have that cachet that MGP just won't and a half wonder if it's the market figuring that out. Also, you got to think about to Ozi Tyler has a lot of stuff on the market. Bardstown, bourbon, which 26:30 Blake mentioned earlier barsa Berbick and he's got a lot of stuff out there. I mean, the market is almost in about a one or two years if you're starting a brand. It's a buyers market, you know, because a lot of these people are going to be you know, desk selling have also heard rumors as that anything I can confirm it. So there's been some really strong Major blueblood distillers that are starting to say, Well, you know what, maybe we sell some of those two year old age doc that we have in tanks. So you're starting to see some Kentucky probably 27:00 open back up on the market. Well, you know, the old Barton stuff that's 12 and, you know, 17 years old remains there for half the price as you will know, Kenny. Yeah. Well, it is Kenny was alluding to or talking about, you know, us being in the source market. It's hard to I think MGP is actually built a name for themselves especially for the rye whiskey and the older bourbon I think. I think if you carry the rye whiskey, a lot of people will give you a benefit of the doubt because it's damn good rye whiskey, probably the best out there but the problem is is their pricing it's you can pay $1,000 more for aged, you know, product from Tennessee or or Barton's, and 27:43 then a four, you know, a four year old NGP and it's like, what you know, and when you taste it, it's just it's hard to, you know, invest that kind of money for that young of a product. And like Kenny said, You're banking on you know, aging, that stock and whatnot. So 28:00 I don't know, I think they're, they're getting squeezed barsen by recovery, like other said, and castle and key and 28:07 yeah, I think that's just all part of it. And, you know, they, it's adapted. So they'll they'll figure it out, I'm sure, when they shifted their business plan, they left the market open and people took advantage of it, the only way that they can correct this, you know, to get themselves back in place, is to flex their muscle. And I would really, I would really say that they should spin off their brands, and they should go back to servicing, you know, the craft market because they were so good at that and their infrastructure is set for it. And the market accepted it, you know, we can all say what we want about those class action lawsuits and everything, but no one was ever really bitching about the whiskey. And, and and that's that's telling you something 28:50 that's true. When you're going into you're really putting the marketing in a lot of other people's hands in you don't have to bank everything on your own strategy. You know, you're going to get some great 29:00 ideas from from some really inspired people by doing it that way. And I think that's what's built up their name to this point, because there's certainly an enthusiast group that's, you know, follow these brands that are, you know, probably built from enthusiasts themselves that have sourced MGP To get started, you know, done really well with it. And I think that's built such a strong name for them, you know, in that group, and then just by and large, as a lot of people out there that I don't think they care if it's MGP or not, they just care if they feel somewhat connected to the brand and they liked the whiskey enough in That's it, and it's just about getting distribution to the right places. So I think that makes a lot of sense, Fred. 29:39 You know, I mean, maybe this is, you know, certainly could be a bit of a glut here. Everyone's producing like crazy, you know, we're seeing whiskey come to market a lot younger, you know, then it was he came and dropped off a lot of regular everyday products we see on the limited release stuff, of course, you know, but is it to the point now, where it's just gotten that much harder to compete, and people may be overproduced 30:00 A little bit, you know, compared to what the what the projections were, Nick, you bring up a very interesting point. You know, we always talk about the glut but The what? The thing that's different now is that there's this whole lifestyle and tourism impact that American whiskey has jack daniels is enjoying it and so like if you're a fan of it, you can go to Jim Beam, you go to Maker's Mark what a Buffalo Trace and have the experience of your life. No one's going no one's going to Indiana. So you know that's, that's a that's a component there and I'll say this about MGP I hope that they stick with it because I think that's a good company. They just, you know, we all make business mistakes. I think this was a business mistake but I do not want to see them sell I think they have the passion for it. I do not want to see this get in the hands of printer card or Dr. Joe or someone like that, who's just going to turn this into a churn and burn place without any attention, you know, to the whiskey in American American whiskey hands and I don't want to see it be sent off to for blending purposes again, the world got 31:00 taste that whiskey and the world said we like that whiskey from Lawrenceburg, Indiana. 31:07 And the people have spoken here here. 31:11 So while we're also on the source whiskey path right here, you know, as we start looking at the scene of more and more Bourbons coming to the market, there's only a limited supply of sources that things are coming from. And this is one that, you know, we all kind of talked about before on the show, are we starting to see that the bourbon market is now being oversaturated with brands? Because, and don't get me wrong, we're probably problem too. Right? We're part of the problem too. Now, however, like it's it is becoming to the point where there is a lot of private label stuff out there. 31:45 I just saw somebody released one called Blue Ribbon bourbon, which is a revitalization of a label that was a 12 year old Kentucky bourbon about a week or so ago. And I think we're going to end up seeing more and more of these in the next probably few 32:00 months, few years, something like that. So do we see the over saturation of the market starting to happen? Well, I was I was wrong about this about four or five years ago. And so I guess I'm not, I'm not going to be reporting on the demise or the bubble being pop just yet. I mean, I thought four years ago that I'd be buying someone's still out of bankruptcy and I'd be the able to have my own little distillery on the first side hospital. Sure, didn't happen, obviously. And if we can get past tariff issues, and if we can get past trade issues, there's so much capacity overseas, it'll it'll soak all this up, and we won't notice a blip here, despite all of this production coming out. So we just have to think it's going to keep pushing. And I guess I would say, you know, from a, from a production standpoint, there's there's a lot of it, you know, where it's going to get consumed, it's going to grow almost just from 33:00 A pure, like, different brand standpoint, pure number of producers out there. You know, I think there's probably plenty of them out there that do not necessarily have a passionate person behind them. You know, there's a lot of money in it right now. You know, there's plenty that do have passionate, excited people behind them, I think we're going to see, you know, a percentage of those succeed, you know, but they're fighting for shelf space on a limited number of, you know, a limited number of retailers. You know, they've got to go through the distribution system. You know, there's, there's ways around it, of course, to some extent, but I think the reality is, is I think if you flood with flood with just too many different brands, there's just too much noise. And I think we're going to see a challenge for, you know, just an overflow of these to succeed if they don't have the driving force, the passionate people behind them, you know, kind of that gumption to, you know, to stick with it. I don't know, I don't think it's necessarily a quick money play, you know, per se, the same way. It may have been, you know, five, seven years. 34:00 years ago, at this point, I think the competition's a lot tougher. And so you got to pull a little bit more into it. You gotta have something special, you got to bring a destination into the mix, you've got to you just have to do more. You're not just, you know, the bottle something, put it out there and have nothing behind it and succeed. Yeah, one thing, I think with the source, you know, I mean, obviously, like Kenny said, there's a few sources that people get it with the refreshing thing about the source, age market, it's comes with an age statement, like nothing else out there is really coming with age statements. And you know, that's one niche they can hang their hat on. It's like, okay, we can give you a 11 1214 year old, you know, whiskey and you can't hide age. You can't there's just, you know, five, six, it's fine. But when you get 11 1214 there's something special unique you get with those types of Bourbons and still, and we're whiskey geeks. So we noticed these brands, we know where they come from, but the general public, they have no idea. You know, they're like, oh, any idea about this brand? No, it's 12 years old, you know? 35:00 They've been producing forever. Right? They opened up yesterday. Yeah. And so it's, 35:06 you know, as us we probably think, yes. Like, oh, how ridiculous. Can there be another 12 year old baartman brand out there. But the general public, I think, doesn't see that it is see that age number 12 years, and they get excited about it. I guess the other question that kind of comes with this is, we all kind of know what happens when you buy a bunch of stuff. It ends up running out right, it'll go dry. So what do you all kind of see is like some of these brands that are hanging their hat on putting that big number 12 of Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey as their brand. When we know here in maybe a year, maybe six months, maybe it's two years? I'm not too sure. But this will run out? 35:49 Yeah, I mean, I think it's tough to say because I'm, I'm kind of with Brian, where, you know, probably four or five years ago, I thought and by 2020. We'll see a glut nobody's gonna care about 36:00 This stuff anymore and I'm going to pick up, you know, 36:03 maybe not Pappy, but at least like well, or 12 or something again, but the demand is increased even faster than anyone expected. So 36:12 I think people will stick with brands, even if age statements are dropped. I mean, look at Elijah Craig. Granted, that's a massive company behind it, but they've gone through it Look at you know, Jim Beam eight year, the Black Label that they've gone through it and seems to be no issues. So, you know, I think a lot of these things are just blips on the radar radar, and it's a marketing thing that they have to figure out. Even when, you know, you hang your hat on age statement, you have to drop that age statement later. That ultimately what I think it comes down to is, is the is the whiskey good and, you know, it's easy to get stuck on a age statement. If it's good people drink it, people will talk about it and you know, it'll continue to grow so I don't I don't see any signs of slowing down even with it. 37:00 There's going to be a huge flooding of the markets in the next five to six years of Bourbons from New distilleries have been, you know, aging for a while, as well as other major distilleries that have just increased production over the last six to seven years. 37:15 As long as bourbon is cool, people keep buying it. 37:20 You keep it cool, Fred. 37:23 I've got that. 37:25 Pretty sure. So, you know, as we start looking at you know, Bourbons come on the scene. There's one thing that we always also see that that happens in this world of bourbon and that's, that's stickers. 37:39 With the careers of master distiller spanning almost 50 years, as well as Kentucky bourbon Hall of Famer and having over 100 million people taste his products. Steve nalli is a legend of bourbon, who for years made Maker's Mark with expertise and precision. His latest project is with Bardstown bourbon company, a state of the art distillery in the heart of the bourbon capital the world. They're known for the process 38:00 fusion series however, they're adding something new in 2020 with a release named the prisoner. It starts as a nine year old Tennessee bourbon that is in finished in the prisoner wine companies French oak barrels for 18 months. The good news is, you don't have to wait till next year to try it. Steve and the team at Bardstown bourbon company have teamed up with rackhouse whiskey club rackhouse whiskey club is a whiskey the Month Club on a mission to uncover the best flavors and stories that craft distilleries across the US have to offer. Their December box features a full size bottle of Bardstown suffusion series, and a 200 milliliter bottle of the prisoner. There's also some cool merchant side. And as always, with this membership, shipping is free. Get your hands on some early release Bardstown bourbon, by signing up at rackhouse whiskey club.com. Use code pursuit for $25 off your first box. 38:50 So, you know, as we start looking at you know, Bourbons come on the scene. There's one thing that we always also see that that happens in this world of bourbon and that's that sticker 39:00 And there's one that the recording of today is Monday and there's one that just kind of get real big real fast and this was a play you know, one thing that I always loved about new riff is somebody that's something about riffs something and so riff pitino of play on Rick Pitino is one sticker that kind of got big on bourbon today. And what this does is it depicts a a kind of like a to face of Rick Pitino you got UK on one side you have Elad another, they have UK holding up a trophy and they've got a bunch of UFL players throwing dollars at strippers on the other side. And this got so big that it got picked up by Kentucky Sports Radio which is a very large syndicate here in the state that then got picked up by barstool sports. And in the barstool sports article, it actually talked about how it was coming from the distillery, right it didn't say it was a pretty 40:00 private group I didn't say it was a pic it like it said new riff. I'm sure they love that. Yeah, I mean, I guess I guess you know any publicity is good publicity but like At what point or I don't know maybe how about practicing a little journalism I Tommy call me old school but hey how about we actually call the company that there's no money in it with it you could call somebody for that. Yeah, yeah I mean all of this I feel like new riff is is an enormous victim right now and it just it drives me crazy because this has this has been happening I've been covering this business for you know 1415 years in all it's never happened this egregiously but like a brand really got damaged today it there's no question about it that someone saw that article in is going to have a bad opinion or saw the tweet is going to have a bad opinion about new riff for the rest of their life and they will not have taken the time to follow up to see you know what the real story was, but new riff got 41:00 Damage today because somebody made a sticker and put it on the bottle and made national national trending news, whatever you want to call it, but you know they're hurt from this or are they hurt? I mean they sure they're they're hurt I mean that's 41:20 but they're getting press on this folks who had never heard of this small distillery in Northern Kentucky now know about new riff and they're going to hear a lot of response to me about Oh, new riff is actually you know, get get the get the new riff. I mean, this is a fantastic single barrel. Well, I don't think anyone actually most people, you know, the way the world goes with this stuff, it's it's going to be the one thing that someone clicks on and then they're going to see a cat and they're going to go to something else. So I that I don't think there's any kind of real value in any kind of trending topic. I mean, there are multiple studies of somebody who comes up with something you know, clever on Twitter. 42:00 They don't their Twitter followers don't grow, you know, they get 30,000 retweets and what have you and their Twitter followers grow by 20 or something silly like that. And, and, and the fact is, is that within the Kentucky Community, you know, they're already kind of an outlier because they're in Northern Kentucky. They're not in Lexington, or they're not unlovable, and they're not in Bardstown. So they're an outlier as it is. And, you know, this sort of thing, puts them in kind of like a weird position in the state. And it has made state news. It's been tweeted by Matt Jones. And so everyone sees it, and all anyone had to do was pick up the phone and call the distillery. And then there's the whole thing could have been like, hey, this barrel group is doing this using this. They just pick up a sticker. Now it's free speech, right. And the distilleries can't dictate to anybody what they can do to the bottle after it's been purchased the same way that Nike can't dictate to you what you do with a pair of shoes that you pick up, you know from shoe locker or 43:00 Whatever. I mean, when I was a kid, I used to spray paint shoes. And that was probably stupid at the time, but I did it. No Shoe Company was coming after us to, you know that we couldn't spray paint our shoes. And that's really what it is here is that you have to practice you know, practice some, some, you know, some common sense of say like, Hey, is this a good idea? Does this pass the smell test? And I think this, this whole thing has 43:28 it could be the one sticker that, you know, puts the whole 43:33 you know, takes the fun out of all of this. I mean, honestly, a lot of people don't like the stickers. I love them. I love looking at everybody's stickers. I like getting on social media. And seeing people's post about it. I thought it was great. And this one even if 43:49 I mean I it was too far, it was too far. 43:55 actually makes it cool with younger people and that's growing. 44:00 It looks like because most bourbon brands are like, old man kind of like real old school kind of thinking. I don't know, the barstool sports, you know, they have a lot of millennial. Most of you know followers and that's where Bourbons growing and that's the future of bourbon. And I think they'll probably think it's cool. I know it probably drives me crazy Fred that that's what they love, they love like, I like tweeting and all this stuff and I and I, and I watch barstool sports. I listened to the pizza, the guys pizza reviews are great. And I just, you know, this is just one where I don't know it's just I would have to agree with Fred where I thought this one kind of went over the line a little bit on on a sticker but but the press was fantastic. You know, it's you can't pay for that kind of that kind of viral effect. But was it wasn't Ken Lewis, the one who on the on bourbon pursuit said he didn't like the stickers and is like, you know, I understand people are free to do whatever they want, but we put a lot of time and effort into those 45:00 bottles and 45:02 we prefer that then they stay the way they are you're right it was killing us on this podcast and said that I think he's the only the only you know owner I can really think of who's talked about that now granted new riff gets way more just because of the the funniness of the the name way more stickers and craziness than other ones but overall you know it definitely hit an audience but i mean i don't know i can't condone putting strippers on your bourbon bottle that's just a little far for me. So here's here's another side okay, so I like again that that audience that's getting touched is not going to get converted for new roof. It's just not they're not going to take the time to go seek out a bottle if they do they're going to do it in Jersey where the bottles not available and find a bottle go to seal box calm 45:57 should a quick link in the show notes. 46:00 Nice I like it. This is the whole setup, you know, not what this stuff but this is this is a this is a trend that that social media has brought that a lot of people do not appreciate and that's the social responsibility aspect of, of, of alcohol, their actual laws about what can be put on the bottle and their actual laws about what the distillers can promote. Yeah, putting a stripper on the bottle is is is within many violations now obviously new rifton do that. But I have seen multiple bourbon groups have a have their child hold the bottle and you know quickly those things often get taken down. But people don't practice they don't they don't look at. They don't look at the bottle as like some kind of 46:55 regulated you know, piece of real estate and 47:00 You know in these kinds of things are going to end up hurting the the distilleries, the community, the hobby, all of it. Because we're all the the bourbon world's already under, you know, every Attorney General in the country is already looking at, you know, the secondary markets as like some kind of like easy press release for them to take down and arrest arrest Joe Schmo in a parking lot in Pennsylvania. They're like, pound their chests and say like, hey, look at us, we're taking down illegal illegal drinking and legal selling. And so, you know, we don't need this kind of activity happening. Because all it does is it puts it puts a bigger Bullseye on the entire industry. And it just frustrates the shit out of me that people don't get that when it comes to like having their kids next alcohol when it comes to the stickers when it comes to anything and the fact is, at any given moment, like Facebook or whoever could just snap 48:00 It's all gone, it'll pop up in something else, but it'll be gone in that particular medium. And that is where you know that the stick that particular sticker is in that same kind of categories, right there. 48:13 Yeah, I mean, we've talked about stickers plenty of times on the show before and, you know, whether it's you know, you want to commemorate something or whether it's a an opportunity for you to pay homage to somebody I know we've seen people that have like had Freddie on the bottle before I know there's people are afraid to on the sticker. You know, there's a lot of fun things that get played with it. This just happened to be one that blew up rather quickly. And only because I think it 48:39 It had a little sensitive subject around to it, but you know, it's a it's it's Kentucky and it's basketball in the day. So maybe that's just why it started really supporting it. You know, you shouldn't ever went to frickin level. 48:55 There's just there's no restrictions on the rival 49:00 Read between Kentucky and u of L so that that that's part of it. And that's, that's why it's on. That's why Matt Jones is is tweeting it. And that's why it gets on barstool sports. But I think overall there's there's obviously the risks, Fred, that you point out. I think overall, it'll end up being fine for new riff. I think what it's going to do though is it's going to call the attention to all the distilleries about what goes on these, these stickers for the private groups, because a lot of them use trademark images. I mean, there's plenty with with Marvel Comics, images that are trademark images. There's, there's there's just free use of anything out there that are protected marks, and the distilleries are going to have to have some responsibility for that. I absolutely disagree. I disagree with you on that because once that once it is bottled, it is going to the distributor and it's being sold to a retailer. So the the 50:00 The responsibility on this is going to be on the retailer. If they are putting that sticker on there at the distillery, there's some liability there, I would assume. Yes. Yeah, it's wherever they go place. Yeah, that's where a lot of them come on. I mean, I've know some that go on on post sale, but a lot of them go on at the at the distillery, they'll give them the sticker and it goes on there, that that's going to be restricted. Now once it gets into into the group's hands and gets whatever stickers on it, that can still be trademark infringement, but you're gonna have to go after the group for it, which will be next to impossible. So if it's if it's Disney trying to protect a Marvel mark, they're going to go to the distillery and say you need an agreement with whoever does private selections that they will not be using any infringing marks. I wonder what Rick Pitino thought when he saw 50:55 the he says 50:58 he's like, I just can't get away from this trip again. 51:00 thing, you know, you know, he's he's probably, you know, he hasn't did he Sue anyone with all the coverage that he got? I don't think you know, probably now i don't think i don't think he will I think he's just trying to get another job and to be honest with you, if the Oklahoma State job pops up, I pray to God that he goes there because we could we could use a winning season anyway, that this whole thing is 51:26 it it just kind of like plays into a whole nother 51:31 you know, conversation to be had about, you know, what is, 51:37 you know, what, what is the standard of, I guess, being cordial, you know, we've lost in, in an overall society, we just, we just put pictures up with people and, and, and have a good laugh at it. And yet we have 12 year olds trying to kill themselves on a daily basis, because they're getting made fun of online. It's like 52:00 At some point in our society, we're going to have to take some, 52:04 some responsibility for what we're posting online. And this is this is a part of all that it's a greater conversation. But 52:13 you know, 52:15 it's sad, it's sad that it's accepted. And people just go on with it and have a good laugh. But the fact is, you know what, my grandpa wasn't doing this you know, when when they were trying to you know, create a cut, you know, basically rebuild this country after World two. And you know, and here we are, and it's just kind of like, this is what we're This is what we do on a daily basis. That's it 52:42 your mood and change the mood? Yeah, go look a little like a good device. The subject I feel like the you know, the the router game will fall every problem. 52:52 All right, let's move on. I think we're ready. 52:57 I'm ready. That went deep. So you know, as we are 53:00 Talk about private barrels and you know, private pics and stuff like that. You know, I think there's one and I think, actually, Blake before we can go on to that I think you had a had a sticker prediction for 2020 as well. Did you want to kind of really? Yeah, yeah, it kind of, to piggyback on that a little bit, I think there's going to be a brand or distillery that comes out and says, you know, they can't control it. But they will be very boisterous, kind of how the Van Winkle have been about the secondary about, you know, no stickers on their bottles. Like we said, you know, if the bottle comes untouched, gets in the hands of a customer. You know, my six year old can color on it, I can throw a sticker on it, it doesn't matter. But a lot of times when these things are getting advertised, I think they could stop it and you know, somebody put it in the chat. That's why steel box puts the sticker just in the box and doesn't put it on there. But I think there's going to be somebody else who comes out and says, You know what, we don't like that. And we'd prefer that you know? 54:00 People not do this to our bottles and in there a little more outspoken about it. So I think that's coming especially after today. You think that's what it's new riff Blake or do you think somebody Yeah, I mean they already kind of said it. I think it's new riff I mean you think about the the major ones are getting stickers. New riff will it a lot of Buffalo Trace pics you know Buffalo Trace Weller's, all that kind of thing. Will it seems to be okay with it? I don't know. I've never seen them have an issue. I've seen them do some distillery releases where they have stickers. But yeah, I think it'll be new riff, you know, especially after this backlash, that that does say something. 54:42 You know, some people kind of get the fun of it and others, you know, to his point that he made on the podcast it was we put a lot of work and design effort into this bottle. We prefer that it stays the way it is. So, you know, I think it'll be interesting to see what they're able to get away with it. 55:00 Cuz, you know, they can't, they can't dictate free speech? Well, I'm very much in opposition of, of poor taste, I also support free speech. And, you know, if when someone gets that bottle, and they can put whatever they want on it, and I think the only thing could probably dictate his say, you can't, we will not be putting this label on the bottle. And if we catch you doing it, we're not going to resell to your group. I think that's about the extent of it. And honestly, I think that would be the biggest return of all they said, Look, you know, we're just not going to let you do another pic. If this is how the bottles are going to be treated. I don't think there's anything wrong with that legally, you know, they're allowed to choose which groups they allow to buy barrels. 55:49 So I don't know it take a little bit of the fun out of it. I mean, I know we had some fun with our rollers trail pick, so it does add some fun, but overall, I think it's gonna 56:00 If it continues, you know, they'll have to at least acknowledge the fact that they're not associating with with a lot of these stickers. I mean, it we can all, you know, prevent all this by just, you know, practicing common sense, right. 56:18 That's way too much to ask these. 56:22 Remember we started what what is bourbon? bourbon is drama. Yeah. So that's what it's all about. Yes, it is, always has been, by the way. So as we as we continue this theme of talking about single barrel selections and stuff like that, there's there's one that's sort of leading the pack and kind of made a big splash this year already. I know it's rolling in January. But the biggest news was that brown Forman is now coming out with a barrel proof and 100 proof option for their single barrel program of old forester and will be retiring their 90 proof version. This all is going to come into effect around the May timeframe that kind of begs 57:00 Question. What's taking everything else so long to get on board with this? Gosh, I applaud them for listening. I mean, yeah, absolutely. I'm Foreman's like just they are like nailing it on all aspects the past like two, three years, they just been doing great releases at great prices like putting out ever since Jackie's joined. I mean, it's just they've been nailing it out of the park and they're listening to fans. They're doing everything like I commend them so much like it's it's incredible. I've done an old forester pick at barrel strength it's absolutely incredible. You know, and it's I'm so excited for this unfortunately our pic will be at 90 proof because it's not before 57:39 before May So, but Gosh, way to go brown Forman like talk about company and listens to people and then listen to their fans like I applaud that. Absolutely applaud them. I mean that's on those barrel pics there have been some of the best straight out of the barrel bourbon, I've have had hands down and we've been 58:00 crying for it for five years, and maybe it takes that long but we finally have so I'm happy. Yeah, I put this in a post today about I've never been that huge of a brown form and fan for over the years. But there Honestly, I think they did better than any other distiller I can think of in 2019 really last couple years with their whiskey row or releases, you know, the the hundred proof raw or the straight rye that they released. That's like 23 bucks a bottle. And now this with the barrel picks, what does every single person say? Whenever they go to do the barrel pics, what will they let's do it a barrel proof. And the answer's no, you got to water it down to 90 you gotta water You know, one of seven. There's something hard to do. We got to do a TTB filing. Yeah, yeah. And I don't think they just continue. I thought the old forester birthday bourbon was fantastic this year. So yeah, I mean, kind of hats off to them. I think they're 59:00 They're crushing it with the whiskey crowd right now or the, you know, the enthusiast crowd at least. So, I want to get in on their barrel program now. Like, who do I need to call on that one, but now I'm excited to see what else comes out of there because we know they have a lot of good barrels sitting so it should be a lot of good barrels to kind of, so a little breaking golf. Sorry. 59:23 Breaking News. Yeah. Okay. Let the man talk. Okay, kind of sorry, Fred, kind of to that point. 59:31 Blake, you know, I think you know, talking about the enthusiast crowd, you know, you gotta wonder if if the Steelers are looking at it as a real small portion of the community that does really want that is going to be impacted by that and you know, look at it as from a cost benefit that maybe it's not there, you know, but that kind of listening to the enthusiasts and even if it you know, the single barrels and barrel proof only do get into a small number a hands, you gotta wonder if they're looking at kind of that spiral effect of, you know, if that kind of interesting 1:00:00 goes down from there to just people's association with the brand. So kind of talking to everybody, you know, the enthusiasts, I think we're relatively speaking a pretty small group, you know, when you look at what really sells and where the numbers really get posted, but we're a pretty vocal group too, I think and it's great that they're listening and making their products better. And yeah, I mean, across the board when you have those pics and you're there and you're tasting all the barrel, and it's so good then they water it down and it's it's not the same It's a shame to know that it's going to be watered down and they're basically going to ruin what's otherwise a fantastic bourbon. 1:00:36 Well, and so I wouldn't go to room. Sorry. 1:00:40 I want to hear what you say. But I've some of your and watered down some of those old forester private selections have been fantastic. Sorry. I just mean, I just mean in general, you know, yeah, I'm with zero proof. It's fantastic water down. It's just not anything near where it was. Yeah, you know, it's really those it actually some tastes better with 1:01:00 Water than they do it barrel proof, you know and so it's kind of funny how that goes to. All right, go Fred. All I was going to say is because of everything that she has done and is continuing to do, and her 1:01:14 her effort to find herself we're putting Jackie's I can on the cover. bourbon plus. All right, fantastic. She if you guys can beat me out, 1:01:32 pulled away. We should probably 1:01:34 more community vote next time. 1:01:38 Jackie's gonna win every day of the week. Yeah. The photography on her is amazing, but this story is about her. We know about the whiskey side and that's there but on the personal side, she's she fought like hell. And I got to tell you all when I tell you that every single great thing that is happening on the old forester line. 1:02:00 is in large part because of Jackie's I can. But also you know who she would say is her partner in crime Campbell Brown, the president Campbell deserves a lot of credit for taking a brand that was kind of like forgotten in the world and giving it the love and attention that it's deserved. And that's a good brown Forman on it sharp dude, he's done. They've done amazing things since he joined. So that's a great point. Yep. And I guess kind of like last question that we do, as we kind of wrap this up is, you know, as we see, brown Forman come out with this barrel proof single offering, and I know that the eyes are on one company, now that everybody kind of looks at and says like, okay, we love We love to taste your stuff, a barrel proof, we want to see a barrel proof offering. I mean, is it do we actually see this as a change of the bourbon consumer market, where more people are actually opting to actually want to have barrel proof expressions, rather than saying like, Okay, well, I'll just 1:03:00 Take this 94 proof counterpart because that's all you're going to give me. Haven't we always been there? We have. But I mean, now you see the them actually starting to adjust to maybe some market reactions. Yeah, well, the single girls are like, really for whiskey geeks. It's not for the general populace. So, I mean, but the general population, they even think 94 proof is fucking hot as hell. They're like, you know, they even like 86 they're like, Oh my gosh, it's so hot. You know, but uh, 1:03:31 I think so. Yeah. 1:03:35 Yeah, I'm Ryan, I come across this people. I wonder their way. Yeah. Yeah. 1:03:40 What has happened is they finally have listened to the data and listen to the people who are out in the market saying that new consumers and women and people who are wanting to, you know, to drink in a sophisticated fashion, want higher proof and I believe it you 1:04:00 No, Peggy no Stevens has played a big, big role when she handed over the bourbon women's research that women preferred basically Booker's as the as their drink of choice and the like every day that you can find in the in the market. And so when they started seeing that data, they're like, Oh, well, we all need to kind of, you know, create, you know, somet

Speaker 1: (00:00) Hey guys, Biblical Selling… is that an oxymoron or can it be done? Well this week we're going to find out with my good friend, Michael pink, a master sales trainer that's going to answer that question for us. So, stay tuned. How do I bring my faith to work? How do I tap into the power of God in my work life? Paul, why am I going through this adversity? Is God mad at me? I'm also yeoman and I've been helping leaders like you enter these questions at more for over 30 years. That's what this podcast is all about. Let's learn and grow together. Welcome to TGF today. God is Herb's well, Michael, good to have you on our podcast. known each other for a long time. The first, uh, time that we met. Do you remember that? The way I remember it? You were involved in a magazine. Oh my goodness. That was 1990. Speaker 2: (00:55) Okay. That's kind of the Genesis of my memories. I'm thinking does that go back far enough? But I certainly remember the magazine days, so wow, that's, that's way back there. Yeah. you were in my pit days, you know. Speaker 2: (01:12) Well I also knew of you from a, from a, uh, a mutual friend of ours, Mark Heron, who uh, did some graphic work with you in your, when you were the, uh, had your ad agency and uh, so Speaker 1: (01:23) you have really excelled in the sales area over that time when I was on the track of all the faith and work messaging and doing workshops and so forth, then you were kind of along the a similar path but really focused on sales. Uh, give us a little bit of background on yourself in terms of kinda your sales and how you got to be such a specialist in that area. I know you were had a pro, you were professionally in sales, but uh, had it translate to equipping others around them. Speaker 2: (01:54) Well, it's, it's a good question. It started like this. Uh, I moved to this country, uh, in, um, 1985 and got a job in sales in January of 86. I had to learn to speak the language. She was a whole new language for me. How did you come from Canada? But I moved to Tennessee and you know, they had to learn me how to talk. Right. So at any rate, um, so I got down to Tennessee and I got a job selling copiers. The thing I knew OSS, you have to understand, you want to talk about the Holy spirit. I'm driving, if you know Nashville at all. I 40 goes right through the middle of the town downtown and I'm driving through there and the Holy spirit said, and just the core of my eye corner of my eyes. Hmm. Quantity to a building. So that's where you're going to work. Speaker 2: (02:40) I mean, I hadn't, I wasn't married or anything. I was just down there on a trip and it's like what? And I, you know, I saw it was copies. I said, Lord, I don't want to sell copiers. I've done that. I don't want to do that again. But he told me that's where you're going to work. So I went by, got it. And I applied. And now long story short, they wanted me and they hired me and put me out in a Murphysboro in a branch office out there. And the fact of the matter is, I want to two things. Number one, I want it to be able to glorify God. And I said, I don't want any intention or fame or anything else. I just want to be able to have enough of a platform to give you glory and credit and honor. Because what I know, we've got a lot of Christians in the marketplace who are doing not doing well. Speaker 2: (03:20) And so their reputation, they're, they're, they're, um, their messaging of the gospel isn't necessarily well-received. It can be very authentic, but a lot of times people don't regard you very highly if you ha, if you're not doing well, if you're, if that's just the reality, that's just the way it is. So I said, I want to have a platform. I want to do that. And so, and I was a little nervous to be honest, you know, getting back in sales and straight commission and all that. And so I, on the first day when the vice president said to me, Michael, we expect you to make one sale for every four or every five demonstrations that you do. The national average is one out of four. That's what we expected. And we don't expect any sales you first month, but we want to have your second month and for every month thereafter. Speaker 2: (04:01) So in 90 days they wanted me to make six sales. Now I was with the company two years off, so I didn't see anybody do that, but that's okay. But what really bothered me was selling one out of four minute failing three out of four times. And I, and I've got frustrated with that. I said, Lord, if you call me to do this, I said, what farmer plants four rows of corn and embrace the God, but just one of them come up. And I said, and I picked up my Bible and I said, I'm going to find principles and strategies. I'm going to start starter. Provers and I can apply deliberately and consciously to the sales process. And instead of selling one out of four, I tend to sell one on one. Well, they thought it was a little lofty to be put a mile late. Speaker 2: (04:36) But as it turned out, 90 days later at the first quarterly meeting that I was involved with, all your results are projected on a screen. And when it came my turn, I said, I've been here 90 days, I've, I've done 22 presentations and I had 22 sales. It was one out of one and was three and a half times a number that I never saw anybody hit. Well, they all said I'm from Mars. I finished the year at about a 90 some odd percent closing rate instead of 25% and they may be the the a sales manager. And that was to find out whether in fact it was transferable. Well, you know what, 10 months later the team that gave me the results were up not 30% for 130% in 10 months. Huge increase. That meant it was transferable. So that was the Genesis of that when I was, cause I was going into the scriptures and mining it and saying, wait a minute, there's a pathway, there's a blueprint. Speaker 2: (05:25) There's a model, there are things in scripture that are actually practical. It's not just for my marriages, not just for the most important thing, our eternity and all that was important as that is, but it's for the here and now. Even if you're calling to sales and business, there are practical things that you can apply. You can pull from scripture and do it. And so that began, that was the beginning, the Genesis of that. And when I left that and I started my own publishing company, hidden men of publishing and, and from there I went into sales training and in 1994 and I've been doing it ever since. And sharing and continuing to mine the word of and the principles from the, Speaker 1: (05:58) from the scripture and teach them to the body of Christ or anybody else who's interested. You get some pretty remarkable results. You know, when I think about sales and where we're going to focus on sales and marketing in this podcast, when I think about sales, I can hear somebody say, well, I'm not really in sales. And my answer to that is we're all in sales. We all have an idea that we have to sell. We all have somebody that we need to persuade. We're all in situations that requires certain skill set to communicate in a way that is persuasive. Um, how do you take, Speaker 2: (06:35) well, you know, it's true because the people, they don't have sales representative on their business card. They may be a CPA or an accountant or a dentist or whatever. They're in sales. Believe me, they're looking at their numbers every month. They're in sales. But it doesn't matter what my definition of selling is this, it's the transference, a passion or you could say the transference of conviction. So if you don't have anything that you're passionate about or con or, or have a deep conviction about that maybe you're not in sales. Okay. But we do have, I'm passionate about a lot of things and things that I believe in deeply. You could say it's a transference of belief. And so in that sense, if you are passionate about something, you believe deeply about something, how do you communicate that in a way, ms goin to get, um, somebody interested in, in your value proposition. So to speak and get them to want what you want. How are you going to do that? And what does the Bible teach about that? And so that's some of the stuff that I open up big time and uh, and talk about is how you [inaudible] Speaker 1: (07:32) you can actually do that based on biblical mop. Yeah. And I think that's the key distinctive here is how do we bring the kingdom of God into a professional area like sales, you know, and we constantly are teaching men and women too. How do you manifest the presence of God in the area of your calling? It if gunner also, my spiritual mentor said that wants to me, he must have said it 500 times to me, you know, how are you going to manifest the spirit of God in that area? That's what you've, you've really figured out and really saw the scriptures to help people understand that. And, uh, you know, um, when we think about selling being spiritual, um, you know, you know, how do you approach that? What, what, what's the first step in? And really getting to first base on that. Well, first of all, Speaker 2: (08:27) selling is an activity, but it's between people. It's not between me and the hospital or me and the hotel or me and the other firm. It's between me or you and another individual. And each of us have three parts to us. We know we're body, soul and spirit. And so we are communicating and all of those levels, whether we know it or not. And so it's, I think it's important when you're, you're not just in a selling situation transferring, although some people do that and they're not very good at it by the way they, they suit up, they show up and they throw up, you know, and I hope something comes out of that. But that's not the way to do that. And so you recognize that there's a whole other element there of, of my soul, of my heart, of my passion and my conviction and auction actually the spirit as well. Speaker 2: (09:15) There's, I call something I call a space between me and you, between me and a buyer, between, you know, two people. I went in a selling situation, I call it, there's the, there's the, there's the spirit of the sale, the there, there's a spiritual substance between me and you. I can't see it, but I can feel it. And so can you, and that's what happens. People say, you know, I don't know what it is. I just don't trust that guy. And the guy was, is he's saying the same thing that maybe somebody else said, but he's unaware of the fact that he's communicating with his entire being. And maybe his motivation is, I don't care about this guy. I'm just trying to get money out of his pocket and put it in mind. And the thing is, people can pick up on that. So there's a spiritual dimension to selling that I think is important. Speaker 2: (10:02) And so what I want to do is come into the selling situation with, Mmm, what it says in progress three, three and four where I'm going to write mercy and truth on my heart. Okay, I'm going to blind it around my neck and I'm going to go into a situation. Mercy to me meant never trying to get somebody to do something that wasn't in their best interest in truth was basically full disclosure because on us, you know, you've been in marketing for a long time and you're a genius at at that end of it unparalleled by almost anybody. But in that marketing thing, you know that you can tell the truth but convey a complete lie. I tell people as an example, um, I once spoke at the promise keepers meeting in when it was going big time. It was at the RCA dome and Indianapolis 60,000 men there. Speaker 2: (10:47) It was phenomenal. It was a big experience. People are going, yeah, you did. Yep. I said, no, I was in the bleachers. I wasn't on the platform. Um, but nobody could hear me. And so you can, I tell everything I said was true, but if you leave out certain things, you can convey a lie. And lying is the, is really as the intent to deceive. And so you can deceive intentionally by leaning on certain facts. And so people who have their intent open can pick up and discern those things oftentimes. And so I look at that, his interaction with people as a body, soul and spirit kind of thing. Well let's help our listeners today by getting some tools that might be useful to them in sales. And I, uh, put a question together for you. And the question is five things you've learned about sales that have impacted your life the most? Speaker 2: (11:38) Well, besides the fact that that I learned at selling is the transference of passion. When you, when you just, when you understand that, that if you're not passionate, you don't have conviction or deep belief about what it is you're selling, you really need to be find that well go find the thing that has that for you cause you're not going to do so well. Number two, this is a very big one off [inaudible] and it's so contrary to how I was trained in sales. Now I was trained by the way, as a young man, I mean I sold insurance, I sold copiers and both of those industries focused heavily on training. And so I'm, I'm familiar with that, but they don't teach what I'm about to tell you. And this one has put millions and millions of dollars in my client's pockets. And it's, it's a simple rule. It's this selling is not about telling. Speaker 2: (12:27) It's about listening. And if you're going to listen, you need to ask questions. If you're going to ask questions, you need to ask strategic questions, the right questions. So where, cause as a Christian, I'm thinking kid, God, you've called me into sales at this time in my life back when I was in my thirties. So where do I find those questions? What questions should I ask? I asked you about the ballgame last night. Do I ask about the weather? W w where do I go in this thing? And it's that kind of study that got me now to answer that question, when I'm reading the scriptures, I look for patterns. I see patterns of three. I have a pastor friend of mine, uh, that has seen now, um, 1500 of these three full progressions, body, soul and spirit, prophet, priest and King and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of those. I look for those patterns. Speaker 2: (13:18) I look for patterns of seven and OS. One day I was reading numbers 13 and I noticed Moses is getting ready to send the 12 spies into the promised land, but understand this and for the people listening to this podcast or watching it, when they were going into that promised land, it wasn't like they, the people on the other side of the Jordan river were saying, Hey, I heard you were coming. Come on in. Hey, let me show you my guest house and you got my main house. Here's the keys to my Alexis. Hey, I got an SUV out back and I have all my cattle. Good luck. We're headed to the desert. No [inaudible] that wasn't it. They were going to be met and they knew this. They knew they were going to be met with resistance and if there are going to be resistance, and it wasn't like, Hey, I don't like this. Speaker 2: (13:56) No, it was resistance to the point of death. They were going to fight to this, to the death on that. So with that in mind, they knew there was risk and if they were successful, they knew there was a great reward. So resistance, risk and reward. Golly, that sounds like business, doesn't it? We, you know, we take risks all the time, all the time, and we have a resistance to our ideas. We think you think, and I think, Hey, this is something that people love. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. I mean it's just the way it is. You take a look at acts chapter two you know, Peter gets up and he gives the best presentation ever and thousands of people are there and some people are saying, I don't understand this guy. I'm perplexed. And other people say, no, they're drunk. They're this. Speaker 2: (14:40) They were mocking them. And I don't see anything worth mocking. And I don't see anything perplexing look like a straight forward presentation to me. But some people said, no, wait a minute. This makes perfect sense. That 3000 of them gave their life to Christ. That's the reality. And you never know which ones you're going to get. Are they going to love it? Are they going to hate you or are they just going to, I don't understand what he's talking about. And you're always going to get those, that kind of a mixture. So they knew they were going to get some resistance. And so Moses has you read it. Number 13 you'll see that he had a verse 17 to 20 his seven questions he had to have answered. Well OS when I saw there were seven questions I that Whoa, wait a minute. That's the divine imprint of God right there. Speaker 2: (15:21) I want to dig deeper on that. And I spent two or three days reading those four verses and on my knees and at my desk praying and seeking God for what is, what are the implications and what does the application to business. Now I'm telling you, you know this Oscar, cause you're one of the very few people I know that do what I do the same kind of thing. But I know hardly anybody other than you, you and a couple other people who actually will take the time and say, how do I apply this practically in business? Right? They just read the verse and it's a story from 3000 years ago and they move on, Hey, I've checked, I read my three chapters today, or whatever their thing is, right? No, I'm not. I got to understand this thing. And so what happened is, um, I thought I had an understanding of it. Speaker 2: (16:08) And coincidentally I call this the Moses questioning strategy as it happened us within a couple of days of me getting my understanding of this, I would buy a client who was in the air conditioning wholesale business, meaning they supplied brand X to air conditioning contractors. They kind of guys are calling your house in mind, thanks our air when it goes out. And so they sold their particular line of air conditioning. And so they would call on the big contractors and say, Hey, why don't you install our equipments that are the ones who were installing? That was the business and the president. Uh, I ran into him in the parking lot. I said, Michael, I've been calling this one contractor a big contractor twice a month for six years. You said, I'm taking heat, him and his crew breakfast, lunch and dinner. My wife and I had been to his house, his wife, and he had been to our house for dinner. Speaker 2: (16:53) We'd gone to movies together, but in six years I haven't got a nickel's worth of business. What would you do? I see, well, it was me. I'd ask him seven questions. I just, I just discovered this and they looked at me like, what are your title? Seven questions? I said, well, they're not seven questions. Exactly. It's more like seven topics. And he said, can you write that out for me? So I created a, I got three or four page document and under each topic I wrote all these questions. Did not at that time disclose where I got it from and I wrote it. The kind of questions like Moses said, first question is, you know, look at the land, what it is. Okay, well what it is, man, he's looking for this. These are the general circumstantial questions, which you know, the art of war, if you, if you've ever read that book by sun Xu, you know that they looked at other box canyons are the, are there mountains or the planes are there, bogs are there, you know, different, what's the lay of the land or the swamps is their forest. Speaker 2: (17:47) They had to know the lay of the land to have a victory. So that's essentially what Moses was doing were kind of contemporaries. And he's looking at that. So those are the general circumstantial things. So in a business, that's the first question. I want to find out all the general circumstantial things, but then it goes deeper. So anyway, I wrote all this out for the guy and it was a Wednesday when he went to his call with these questions. And now this is a man who's been calling on twice a month for six years and at each other's home. But in that one call he discovered more about that man's business than he had ever known in six years. As a result, the gentleman asked him for a quote, a proposal, which he gave him on Thursday and on Friday, 48 hours afterwards, he received a purchase order for $60,000. Speaker 2: (18:31) No, he was blown away. I mean he was so blown away. He said, Michael, he speaks to us because, excuse me, it just was too amazing to him. So he called it an emergency sales meeting. Cause us the first thing that you might think and others might think, and I would think that too probably, well maybe that was just the time. Maybe it's just coincidental. Maybe. Maybe, you know, people could think that, but he put me in front of a sales force of 18 guys. He held up the sheet of paper and he said, I don't know what this is and I don't know why it works. I want every one of you using it. And Michael, I was going to tell you how to do it. So he hired me for the day and I trained to Salesforce and this was the end of March. Now this is important because it's air conditioning, so it's seasonal in terms of the demand. Speaker 2: (19:14) The preceding April, they had done 1.2 million in sales. This was the end of March. They were hoping to do 1.3 million in this April. It's a a hundred thousand dollar increase. Most people are happy with that. It's an 8% growth. I just, when people are, they just think, okay, a hundred grand, we're, we're, we're climbing our business. So that's what he was trying for. But he made them use this questioning strategy and they were reluctant because they thought it was kind of corny, even though they didn't know it came from Moses at that time. The end of the month, I checked with them, said, how'd you do? Well, it wasn't 1.2 it wasn't 1.3 or four or five or six or even seven. They did 1.75 $550,000 Pope 46% I think it is over the year before his face. I'm not exaggerating his face. When I saw him just went white, he was almost speechless. Like how, what, what is this? Speaker 2: (20:04) And he asked me, what is, what is this? And I know he's thinking, is it Zig Ziglar? Did you learn it from Tom Hopkins? Where'd you get this? I said, I learned it from Moses [inaudible] I didn't realize how that was going to land on his ears. He looked at me, like I said, like I was inferring, I just talked to Moses the other day, you know, and uh, you'd been less surprised. So I just cold cocked him or something. But anyway, uh, I tried to explain it to them as best I could. He thought it was the strangest thing, but that was the beginning of that question. The strategy, and I've taken that to corporations large and small and seeing their sales one company, Ohio, they were stuck at 22 million a year for three years. President calls me, says, Michael, can you help me? W we just can't seem to get above 22 million. Speaker 2: (20:46) We'd there for three years. Okay. I go there and I bring not only the Moses question he strategy, which is important, the other biblical principles and strategies and tactics that go along with that. Brought that to the table. Middle of the year, I think it was there in the summertime. By the end of the year, they went from 22 to $30 million. Big, huge thing. It happens over and over and over and over and over again. Is that, so that's a big thing when you say, well, some of the things I learned I learned from the Bible. Well, listen, I've been trained by Xerox, I've been trained by insurance corporations, I've had the PSS course. I almost bought a Sandler training system at one time. I understand what's out there in the world of sales. People are married to that, but I decided us, I don't know. I do know about you, but I don't know about dude watching this, but this means everything to me. Speaker 2: (21:32) And by God I can find it in here if it, if it exists, if it's there, I'm going to find it. And if I can find it and I can synthesize it and put it into project racing or do so, and to prove it, I'm going to take it out into the marketplace before I ever teach anybody. I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, before I start teaching in abroad, you know, all over the place. So a few years ago us, uh, back in, uh, I'm trying to get my timeframe here, 2015, you know, I'd been developing some new materials and really pulling out some stuff and getting a handle on things. And our friend of mine called me, he had a, a commercial real estate agency. Yeah, 12 agents. But when he called me, they were down to three and these three guys were looking for a job. Speaker 2: (22:15) He was thinking of shutting it down. He said, can you do what you do for me and what you do for all these other companies? Come in and do an analysis. It's expensive, but it's worth it. And so I went in and I did my three day analysis. He's a very good friend of mine and he said at the end of that he said, do you think you could help me for six months? Maybe we could turn this thing around. You do the front end, help me do the sales, I'll do the back end. And I said, okay. At the end of six months we had a 900 and something percent increase in sales. Well, people think that's not bad. [inaudible] he asked me to do it another year, so I extended it a year, 2016 the two year growth rate was 6,000 and something percent you said one more year please, please, please. I did it for the third year. We ended up with 11350% three year growth rate, which made him his company the fastest growing real estate brokerage in the history of the inc 500 and the 16 fastest growing privately held company in America. So that isn't a boast on anything but this boasting on this and the person that wrote this book, Jesus Christ, I'm talking about him and his word and it works. [inaudible] very practical, measurable, meaningful ways. So that's true. It's one of the things. Speaker 1: (23:27) Well, I want to transition, uh, and talk about a new resource that you've come out with called rainforest strategy. The planet's most successful business model. You talk about seven well secrets that will revolutionize your business, turn your ideas into revenue and your life. Speaker 2: (23:47) This is a new book you've come out with. Um, what's this all about? Rainforest. Well, you know that the book's been out a little bit longer than that, but the, the, the, uh, content, uh, in some of, I keep developing new content, but the rainforest is this here, here's how it came about. Very important. Nope. You remember how I told you I got the job selling copies when I first came to this country because the Holy spirit said, go there. Right. Well, I'm trying to remember the year now might've been Oh five, I'm not sure. But at some point in that era, that timeframe, I was in my living room, on my knees, praying, having my time with the Lord. And I remember asking him, I said, Lord, how'd you start your business? You know, the one that we call planet earth, not planning on Hollywood, but planet earth. Speaker 2: (24:32) I mean, how, how'd you do that? I said, I got Tom here. Just explain it to me. Okay. Hmm. And he began to do that. I think he was laughing pretty hard. Uh, and, and he gave me some incredible information, but one of the things he said to me was, and I can't say the words, but the gist of it was he invited me to go to Panama. The country. No, you have to understand something. A, I'd never been to Panama. B. I have never met anybody who had ever been to Panama and see, I never read about or knew anybody in Panama except for Noriega and he was in jail in Miami last I heard. So it wasn't completely completely left field thing. Come the panel. I'm going to show you something. I said what? What? What do you want to talk about? So it's to do with business. Speaker 2: (25:21) Oh, okay. So I thought I was going to meet some banking things or something I didn't know, but I'll say, okay, we'll go. And so I remember, Mmm. Telling some people, Hey, I'm going to do. And I said, Lord, when he said make haste right, right now, don't delay. I've got on the phone that day and I made a reservation for like a two week notice or whatever it was. And uh, I told people I'm going to Panama. He said, what force? I don't know how long you going to be gone? I'm not really sure. What are you going to say? I don't know. He just told me to go to Panama, so I don't really know. So I'm, but I'm going. So I go to Panama, I fly down there and one of the guys, that kind of mindset, well listen, I'll underwrite the entire trip if you'll, um, look for some real estate for me. Speaker 2: (26:03) Okay. So we, I got down there, rented a helicopter and his expansion, he ended up putting an offer on a three kilometer wide stretch of beach front property and you know, for 25, 30 million, whatever it was, and you know, help them do that. Because I had no agenda. I didn't know why I was down there. And one day when I was up in the mountains staying in a bed and breakfast, I'm just walking and observing the amazing beauty of the rainforest. Often the distance and the plant life and everything was just staggering to me. I was so impressed and his Holy spirit spoke to me, just spoke to me. Now how was it praying on my knees and saying, speak to me, Lord, my servant listens. I'm just taking in the beauty of it and walking to get some breakfast. And he said, so on everything you need to learn about business, you can learn in the rainforest. Speaker 2: (26:55) What are you talking about? You can learn about business in the rain forest. I, I went to the lobby, I said, are you guys having, are there any seminars in the rainforest today? I thought maybe somebody doing a business seminar in the rainforest. I didn't know. I was trying to figure this out. No, there's nothing going on. That's a strange thing. Business in the rainforest, you know, and I went and rented the car and you know, took a look around and reinforced, didn't go on a trip that particular time, but I got home after that and I Googled rainforest and the word business. It turns out there was a book written by the CEO of Mitsubishi and, uh, another gentleman and it was called what we learned in the rainforest business, lessons from nature. And I opened it up and I thought, wow, I'm not crazy. [inaudible] Speaker 2: (27:41) this whole thing. It's really there. It's a real model. I went back to Panama, I went there a total of five times. I went to uh, you know, Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica. I went, I went to the upper Amazon and Ecuador. I mean, I searched this thing out. I went to the world headquarters for tropical research research for the Smithsonian Institute. I mean, I dove in with all four feet, you know what I mean? I mean, I just don't render this thing. I was like fascinated that they got that everything I needed to learn about business I could learn in there. And so I did and I searched it and I found so many amazing things in the rainforest that apply to business and it was just nice to know that somebody else that the world respected because of his stature. Again, you got an ice statute. People pay attention to you. Speaker 2: (28:27) Give me a few, give me a few. Okay, I'll give you one just that I think is really amazing. Do you know what an an agouti is? A G. O. U. D I know. And agouti is, it's a, it's a mammal. It's, it's kind of like an Otter in terms of how it moves, but it doesn't live so much in the water, but it's probably the size of a dog. Mmm. But it moves kind of like an honor. Right. And when it runs across the land, it's got a bit of a hump to it, but it's an unusual creature. And when I'm down in the rainforest, I saw these booties. One thing I learned about them, and I call this the Brazil not effect, is that in the rainforest, only the agouti of all the creatures that live in the rainforest, the Gootee is the only one with teeth sharpen up and jaws strong enough to open up a Brazil nut. Speaker 2: (29:16) Now, most people don't know this. I didn't when I first learned it, but in Brazil, not most people are familiar with the Brazil nuts. They see them there. The shaped almost like a section of an orange. What they don't necessarily know is that they come inside a ball like this, like a size of a grapefruit with lots of Brazil nuts in them. And that outer shell is so hard. No other animal can open it except for the agouti. Now as it turns out, the agouti loves Brazil nuts and Brazil nut trees. They have a problem. They don't have legs, they don't have mobility. And so they pay the agouti [inaudible] say you can have all the Brazil nuts you want, man, it's all yours. Just do me a favor. Go down the river a little bit and plant some more, uh, nuts in the ground for me so we can expand our franchise. Speaker 2: (29:59) And they do like squirrels. They buried the nuts in the ground, so they don't always go back to them. And up comes another Brazil nut tree. So this, this example, yes. What's happening here when you analyze this is that one, one entity. The agouti is trading what it has in excess. And the excess mobility energy could go anywhere for what it didn't have any of, which was food and Brazil. Nut trees has incredible amount of food just dropping to the ground, but it has no mobility, no ability, no ability or mobility. [inaudible] a multiply the franchise. So we employs the agouti and they have this relationship. And so I'm looking at that and thinking, how can I apply that principle in business? How can I take what I have in abundance and trade it for what I don't have? So here's the best example. The first one, first one I did actually first one I did [inaudible] what I have in abundance. Speaker 2: (31:00) Well, I have knowledge. And the nice thing about this, when I give you or the listeners this knowledge, the beautiful thing is I still retain it. They have it. But I have it too. If I, if I give you my watch now you have it. And I don't if I give you my knowledge now, we both have it. So it costs me nothing to give you knowledge. So I called a friend of mine who was the a part owner and, and participant in a success magazine, been around for a hundred something years. And I said to him, he was doing the relaunch of it and everything was going fine. And they were selling ads in that magazine for $60,000 for a full page ad. And I called him up one day and I said, Hey, listen, you know, actually I got it wrong. He called me up and said, Michael, what would you charge for your training? Speaker 2: (31:48) And I said, well, I said, what's money among friends? I just learned this, this Brazil nut thing. So what are you talking about? I said, all I want is a piece of paper from you. What do you mean a piece of paper? I said, I don't even want wanna hope he spent, I just want one side of a piece of paper, the full side. And you realize, Oh, you want a full page ad? And I said, yeah, and I want it to run for the year, which at that time was a bimonthly publication. So six issues and they had it on. So see now here's the thing. They had unsold advertising space. I had time and we traded my training for a full page ad in a prominent business magazine success magazine. And the deal was for a year I was $360,000 four me doing my training now, that's the agouti effect. That's the Brazil not effect and it works and everything. I know a guy in Speaker 1: (32:40) Canada who, and you can, they can Google this if they haven't ever done it. I think it's called one red paperclip or just Google red paperclip. Have you ever heard the story? Awesome. No. It's a young guy and he was on the news, everything. He traded a paperclip. I can't really, I'm going to butcher the story, but you'll get the idea. He traded this red paperclip for a pen that somebody didn't want. They had a lot of pans. Okay. And so he basically traded up and he took the pen. Any traded it for, I don't remember what a letter opener or something and then he traded that for, you know, a little piece of furniture and then he traded that for something bigger. Then he traded it for a snowmobile. Then he traded it for a truck and then he ultimately traded it. What does way up to an Alice Cooper concert and everything else. Speaker 1: (33:25) We ultimately treated it for a house in the end of the year. He went from a paperclip to a home free and clear in someplace in the prairies of Canada, a good home, nothing wrong with it. And he traded it up and it was just, Hey, I have this in excess. I don't need you have something in excess. And he worked his way up. That principle works in business. I use it to get a, you know, incredible advertising thing, which by the way led to a publishing deal and lots of other things. So that's one. Yeah, that's just what I want to stop you for a moment. And, uh, I was looking over the chapter titles of the book. Um, but as you were talking, I was thinking about, you know, you and I both been equipping leaders for 25 years and, um, you know, we're both getting in a to a winter season of our life, if you will, a little, uh, we don't want to admit it, but we are, and I see that gray hair. Speaker 1: (34:19) So, um, but, uh, I know that you still have a passion to equip leaders and so do I. And you know, um, we've been thinking about a new program that's going to come out in the next, uh, few months that, um, I think [inaudible] we'll incorporate, uh, things that you're teaching cause you'll be at probably a guest on one of my programs that I'm going to do in this, but it's a very exhaustive program for leaders. And, uh, I just want the listeners, uh, to know that that's coming and if you're interested in it to go to a webpage that we set up to get on our waiting list and that's become God's change agent.com because God's change agent.com and that's just a waiting list. You'll also get a free download of a resource that, uh, is very compatible to what Michael's talking about today. So just go to, uh, become God's change agent.com and just get on our waiting list and you'll be the first to learn about this when it comes out. Speaker 1: (35:24) So, um, yes. So this reminds me also of some of the things I see in your book. I just want to go through each chapter and the title of that chapter one is the epiphany better than gold. I assume you're kind of share what, what you just shared about the epiphany of the rainforest and then chapter two is breaking the code. The mystery unfolds. Chapter three is spontaneous. Well seeing what others, miss. Boy, is that true? A chapter four, well, secret number one, the fungus factor getting the most from the least. Uh, chapter five is practice abundance or experience scarcity. Chapter six is well, secret number two is grow towards the light powered by vision. Mmm. Chapter seven is well secret number three, enter the no pest zone. Seven natural laws to get control of your time. And chapter eight is the [inaudible] a pathogen problem, the feeding, what's been eating you. Speaker 1: (36:27) Chapter nine, well secret number four, the photo censuses. Photo synthesis of ideas. That's easy to say. Turning vision into provision. Chapter 10 deals with, well secret number five, the strangler fig phenomenon, a lesson and timing. Chapter 11 Wells circuit number six, the Brazil nut effect. Leverage through strategic relationships in chapter 12 as well. Secret number seven, the orchid element, creating irresistibility. Before we went on, I asked if you'd be willing to share a little bit, uh, of this book. And so you agreed to give away. Mmm, I, uh, first two chapters of the book just to see if people would like what they see and if they, they like it, there's information in there about ordering it, but, uh, you agreed to do that. And so we set up a webpage, a call, Michael pink, download.com Michael pink, download.com. You can go there and download the first two chapters of this book, uh, in a PDF format and, uh, it'll give you some good, good stuff there, but you're going to want the whole book. Speaker 1: (37:39) Uh, and, uh, as we, uh, close out today, Michael, I just want to talk briefly about the fact that Jesus had 12 salespeople, you know, I call them salespeople and, uh, they all were not highly qualified. Uh, in fact, they had very little training in what they were doing yet. Ah, Jesus. Turn these guys into the, um, the most incredible world movement. Uh, what are some things we can learn about how Jesus related to his disciples? Well, you know, I love all the warm and fuzzies because they're wonderful and nobody is more loving than Jesus. Nobody's more gracious than Jesus. Nobody's more humble than Jason's. He's, he's everything. He's amazing. But people sometimes lose sight of the fact that he also, yeah, he's the ultimate businessman. He's got a ruthless competitor who lies about him, who lies about their own promises, right? Who do anything to succeed and, and he's Speaker 2: (38:36) up again, but that, that competitor is against up against Jesus where everything he touches is self replicating and self duplicating. And, and so the best the devil can do is imitate what Jesus does and love. This is number one. Numbers are important is business. People are going to appreciate this. I'm going to get down to the nitty gritty, you know, in the parable of talents where it gives one guy, one talent, another guy to another guy, five. And those aren't talents like how now you can sing and chew gum. These are, these are weight measures. Uh, some estimates say, you know, 75 pounds would be a talent and it was either silver or gold was gold. It would be multi-millions, five talents of that. It would be quite a bit. Um, so it kind of depends whether we're talking gold or silver, but it doesn't matter with substantial amount of money that was given in this story. Speaker 2: (39:20) And it's illustration. But Jesus is telling it for a reason. And so he says now the, in the story, the person goes away, but when he comes back, he wants an accounting. Interesting. [inaudible] so Jesus tells a story and the only question Jesus is reported to a vast, again in his story, [inaudible] what have you done with what I gave you? He didn't say, Hey, how's your mom? How's your grandma? Do you guys have a good Christmas? No, I'm not saying those things aren't there. But the one question that a boiled down to is what I gave you this, what did you get? And so the first guy says, we gave me five, I've, I've doubled it into 10. The other guy says, you gave me two, a double that into four. And the other guy says, Hey, I knew you were a tough guy. I hit it cause I was scared. Speaker 2: (40:05) And Jesus as you know, took the talent from the guy who he considered to be a essentially faithless guy. And he took it and he gave it to the guy who had doubled the five as opposed to the guy who doubled to, for the simple fact, the doubling, doubling $1 million. It's a lot harder than doubling $100 for example. You and I can double a hundred dollars pretty quickly, but doubling 100 million, that's harder. And so the larger the amount, the harder it is. So we gave it to the guy that had accomplished more, but the thing that I really, really spoke to me was [inaudible] he's zeroed in on the numbers because salespeople have a tendency when you say, how's it going this month? They give you a story. Well there's this one guy and you know, he's got his wife sick and this and that and, and uh, and then, you know, there's other ones. Speaker 2: (40:52) And they tell stories. Jesus just cut through all that. What are the numbers? That's number one. Uh, number two, what Jesus did that I really like is you read it in Luke 10 [inaudible], he sends the 70 out. Well, the 72 depending on which it is, he sends them out and when he come back, he debriefs them and they said, you know, it says the 70 came back and he said, Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name. And so there was a bit of a debriefing, which puts a value on them. Listen, I wonder what happened, how did it go when you're out there? So we cared about that and debrief them. And probably my third, but favorite thing about cheeses is that, I mean so much I could talk about, but he taught them by example. He didn't just say, and I'll go up there and do this. Speaker 2: (41:35) They saw him time and time again, laid his hands on people. He's healed the sick, raise the dead. They watched it firsthand, 100% successful all the time. And they, he modeled it for them so that they could actually go out and do that very thing. And so I think that's important as leaders is that people want to know, but they want to know can you do what you're saying? Oh awesome. You know, I teach what I teach. But I took that three year hiatus to see if what I had additionally learned really worked in the non forgiving, highly competitive, somewhat on ethical world of commercial real estate. Can we do that? And by the way, during that time when it became the fastest growing company in America or 16th us, his company, fastest growing real estate brokerage. Wow. A lot of new people. I personally led several of them to Christ who led other people to Christ. Speaker 2: (42:30) There are other people doing that. They started a Bible study on Wednesdays at noon. I didn't lead it. I wasn't, I didn't want to because of my, my relationship there, let them do it. And there was a revival of broke out in the office. I mean people that would or were maybe born again but had become closet Christians and weren't talking about, now they're vibrant. People that didn't know Jesus were born again and their lives were transformed. All this was happening in this business setting. And, um, so I see that kind of thing happening. I like to, uh, you know, when I learned something, I want to test it out. I want to try it. And so what, what we're sharing here today has, it's not just a good sermon. Hey, I found a verse. I bet you this works like that. It's not that I had to pay a price off three years of obscurity, three years of nothing, three years, and nobody knows anything to gamble on. Speaker 2: (43:19) Is what I'm learning really going to work? Is it really going to make a difference? Is it gonna have an eternal difference? Yes, it did. Is it going to have a financial difference to the tens of millions? Yes, it did. Is it, you know, is it going to give them a higher platform? Oh yeah. Very much so and so, but I wouldn't, I didn't know that going into it. I believed it and I thought it would. Yeah, I didn't know until I actually get it. You know, when I think of Jesus, uh, one of the things, uh, I saw in the life of Jesus as to why he was so effective with people was a heat, almost every time solved a problem in somebody's life. He served them, he engaged with them, he talked to them and on, I know a lot of the principles you talk about have all those elements in it, but you know, almost every time if you read all the stories of Jesus, he saw the problem, whether it was healing or feed 5,000 or, you know, Lazarus coming out of the grave, you know, whatever the case. And that's how influence happened then, you know, so often I think the world teaches us about sales and, uh, is go in and get that order rather Speaker 1: (44:31) than taking the first step of serving the people and seeing what need they have and try to solve that need. And, and, uh, that's what you talk about in this book, uh, rainforest strategy. And so I want to encourage our, um, listeners and those watching on YouTube to download this at Michael pink, uh, download.com and you'll get an immediate download of the first two chapters. And so, uh, Michael, thanks for being with me on this, uh, podcast. I want to remind everybody if you're listening by iTunes, uh, please, um, give us a rating on that, that'll help others find us because of the positive ratings, if it's helped you. And if you're on YouTube, uh, become part of our channel is subscribed to our channeling and leave us comments at the bottom of this page so that, uh, we know, uh, if this program has been helpful and we can improve. Speaker 1: (45:32) And, uh, so Michael, why don't you give out your website to people if they want to reach you or connect with you? Sure. Well, there's two ways of course, Michael pink.com is my, my name's sake. And selling among wolves.com is a, you know, a detailed thing on my sales training. Either one of those ways, selling among wolves.com or Michael pink.com. Either one. I'd be glad to hear from them and let me know if you reach out to me, let me know that you heard about me from us cause I want to make sure that us is it where the of the support that he sent our way. And I want to bless Austin, the process. Well you can uh, see the book behind you. Hold up the book there and behind you on the shelf there. I just self your left shoulder there. This one here. Speaker 1: (46:13) Yeah. And that's the book we've been talking about. And so really well, well done by Zig Ziglar and Mark Victor Hansen, the chicken soup for the soul guy. I mean he sold over a hundred million copies. He loved this book. He said exciting minds, mindset changing ideas and a lot of good endorses on the back from big name folks. So I don't know if I told you this story, but you'll find it interesting if you don't about Zig Ziglar. So Zig Ziglar grew up in the church. I grew up in, in Columbia, South Carolina. I didn't know, I didn't know who he was. I was a child. Uh, but I had heard that later as I left, that my pastor that, um, you know, led me to the Lord, uh, knew him and he later moved to, uh, I forget where I ended up moving to. But a few years ago, uh, somebody came to me and said, OS I was in a Zig Zig Ziglar conference and somebody asked him, what do you read? And he says, well, I, I do read this one devotional called TGI F and, uh, and that, bro, that blew my mind. Wow. Um, uh, great. A great connection there. Yeah. Well thanks Michael. We will see you next time. And, uh, guys, uh, connect with Michael if you have a need in sales training or whatever, he's a great resource, so God bless you guys. Take care. Thank you. Thank you ass. Bless you, my friend. Hey guys.

Learn More About The Content Discussed...No Boss Talk:https://nobosstalk.comKelly Roach’s Website:https://kellyroachcoaching.comKelly Roach on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/kellyroachinternationalThe Camp Elevate Facebook Group:hereBeth’s Instagram:@bethholdengravesBeth’s website:https://www.bethholdengraves.comProfit HER Way Course:https://www.bethholdengraves.com/profitKeynotes discussed:Now I feel like I can like look you in the eyes, I can have a real conversation, we can connect with one another. I never once felt like I could connect with people. It's like it almost stole my superpower because I was so good at selling when I could connect with people. (07:16)If you decide that you want this to be a moneymaking venture, you can, you know, turn it into a business where you can quit your day job, retire your spouse, travel the world, retire, whatever the case. (12:34)She did a $300,000 launch her first month and unstoppable because she leveraged her existing Facebook group that she had never really understood how to get maximum value out of. (15:22)The way that you create that is when you deliver compelling content that really meets people where they are and serves them in a really high level. (16:52)And this is the big piece that sets you apart besides just personable, valuable content that works by the connection is the accountability piece is, I have someone in my inbox saying, Hey, Beth let's chat. (20:39)When Did It Air...January 20, 2020Episode Transcript...Beth:Welcome to ‘You’re Not the Boss of Me’. If you are determined to break glass ceilings and build it your way, this show is for you. I’m your host Beth Graves and I am obsessed with helping you to not just dream it, but make the plan, connect the dots and create what you crave. Are you ready? Let’s get started.Hey bosses and welcome back. Another episode that I'm saying, oh my goodness, pinch me, how did I get this opportunity? I guess it happened because I visualized, manifested and just decided I will have Kelly Roach on the show. And it is happening! I'm excited for you to dive into this episode. A little bit about Kelly is, she is known as the Business Catalyst helping elite business owners become game changers in their field, achieving million-dollar breakthroughs in business. She has helped me to have my own personal breakthrough and you'll hear about that in this episode.She is a former fortune 500 executive and she transitioned from her big, big job in fortune 500 to working with online strategies for entrepreneurs. I am so grateful that she made this transition so that she could be accessible to all of us with her live launch strategies. She's been featured in every major publication on every major news station and now on You're Not the Boss of Me podcast. She has her own podcast too, which is called Unstoppable Success Radio. I listened to it without fail every single time when an episode drops. I cannot wait for you to hear what Kelly has to say. And trust me, you will want to hear about how the live launch method can help you grow your online or network marketing business. So, are you ready, bosses? Here we go.All right, everyone welcome. And you can't even imagine how excited I am to have like my girl crush idle with me. It's like when she said yes, I felt like, Oh my gosh. So, Kelly Roach, welcome.Kelly:Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.Beth:So, I found you when I was scrolling Facebook one day and I saw this perky video about how we could use live video, to sell without being weird, spammy, all of those things. And I was so curious because most of our listeners are network marketers who are looking to be more authentic and genuine. And I know with your live launch programs, you work with a ton of us. I'm wondering, coaching clients. So can you talk about what comes to mind when, let's go back to when you decided that the webinar or, and we do a lot of that even in network marketing was old school and how you discovered life being the way to create better community, create better connections and have more sales.Kelly:Yeah, definitely. Well, you know, if I dial it back to where all of my original business success came from, I was literally going door to door business to business, working for a fortune 500 company doing sales. I literally would come in the office; I would pound the phones for four hours straight. Like literally didn't even put the phone down. It would rest on my shoulder in between calls until I got a headset. And, and then in the afternoon I would go out every day to 20 to 30 businesses. So, this was like hardcore, you know, sell it. Right? And, but what was really, really cool about it was Beth, when I could connect, you know, face to face, eyeball to eyeball, belly to belly with someone. I made the sale, you know? And then when I started my own business in 2012, I'm like, okay, cool.Like social media is awesome. It's this amazing like interface and platform and all of that. But what I started noticing was happening was like all of these layers and layers of technology and barriers and things to manage were coming in, but I was new to the online space. So, as I grew my business, I was listening to the people that were teaching how to build business online. I was still taking the principles that I knew, but I was like, okay, how do I apply this to social media? How do I apply this to the online world? And so, I'm layering in all the tech and the funnels and the emails and the webinars and the prerecorded videos and the list goes on and it's just exhausting, and it just never really resonated for me. It never felt good. I never felt like I could show up.Like right now I feel like I can like look you in the eyes, I can have a real conversation, we can connect with one another. I never once felt like I could connect with people. It's like it almost stole my superpower because I was so good at selling when I could connect with people. And then I felt like when I got into the online world, I had so many barriers between me and people that I lost my superpower. And so finally one day I was just like, screw this. I remember, you know, the girls are still on my team now that were with me and I was like, we're getting rid of it all. I'm like, I'm not doing any of that anymore. I'm like, it's ridiculous. It doesn't work. It's not working. You know, we worked so hard. So, I said, let's just try, like us and the camera.Like let's just try like removing all of these obstacles and barriers and try to focus on connecting once again with people. And low and behold, the second that we made that change, our business started to grow and grow and grow exponentially because now all of my competitors are doing prerecorded videos and prerecorded videos and edited, you know, stuff with, you know, all this fake like, you know, you know what you see online. It's like all fabricated stories of the fairies and unicorns, right? And glitter and dust and then here I am, just this person that's teaching and sharing real stuff and people are getting value from it. And it just exploded. And then I was like, okay, this is too good not to teach. And that's how I started teaching the live launch method. It was really out of necessity because we were failing not out of like something so great that was working so well, but it's now really revolutionizing the way that people do business online. It's really cool.Beth:So, I'll share with our listeners because I've shared with you that I felt really called once. And I'm saying this to network marketers, that I see too many people attempting to coach before they've, what I think is the before you've made $1 million. So, I just thought, okay, I want to share what I've learned. That is not all of the magic tricks. Like I kept seeing like build your business with automation. Never get on the phone again. And I'm thinking we're changing people's lives. We've taken what we've learned from you, in terms of our network marketing team. We're now doing laser coaching sessions, so they get to work with a Million-dollar earner. We are, and we'll talk a little bit at the end. Kelly just challenged me to create a live launch. So, stay tuned for how we can share the business opportunity with more people using what we call the live launch.So, some of you are thinking, what is live launch? And I want to give a little background of, I had invested so much money into thinking about how I could build out coaching programs and always got caught up in the tech, could not figure out how to put the Facebook pixel for an ad. And then it was overwhelming. I thought, screw it. I make plenty of money in network marketing, but my message, the amount of women that I can impact and help now is incredible, because that's my mission. So, I took a leap into live launch and literally just started sharing the tools and techniques, built a group and have women that I'm already working with in a program, and paid back my investment within 48 hours, which was insane. It's insane. It's crazy. So, we know it's magical and if you're wondering what is live launch? I want to connect those pieces to what we're doing in network marketing.So, I'm going to give Kelly a hot seat right now because I've been in the hot seat. So, let's, let's just role play this. If I was going to, let's say I'm in the travel business, which I'm not, and people could make money with me either booking travel or setting up travel agents to work with them. Okay? And normally they'd hop on a webinar and I'd share all the slides, which took me all day to put together. I missed picking my daughter up from school because I'm putting together the slides and literally it felt like my drunk uncle was driving me around. But I've decided I'm going to do this, the live launch. Wait, we're like creating something right here on, on the spot. And so, what comes to mind if someone's listening and says, okay, I want to use Facebook Live to share what we're doing with this travel business. So how would live launch work for that?Kelly:Yeah, definitely. Oh my gosh, I'm getting so excited. So, if it were me, the way that I would design the live launch would be like I would have part one of the content be you know, how to get your luxury travel paid for. Right? And never spend a dime while staying in the best resorts around the world. Right? So, it would be like you would teach them, the first thing that people want to do is they want to travel more, and they don't want to spend their life savings on it, right? So, you have to meet people where they are. Right? And then it might be like the second piece of content might be how I went from, you know, getting my travel paid for to getting paid to travel. Right? And then the third set might be how I went from getting my travel paid for to quitting my day job and being able to retire my spouse based on my travel, you know, my side travel business and then in might be how I can help you launch your own travel business, even in the pockets of your spare time, so that you can first get your travel paid for.And then if you decide that you want this to be a moneymaking venture, you can, you know, turn it into a business where you can quit your day job, retire your spouse, travel the world, retire, whatever the case. But really what it is, is you start off by meeting people where they are and giving them the content that they really crave. Everybody wants to travel more. Everybody wants to get their travel paid for. How can someone do that? Right? They can get into a network marketing couple company that offers travel, right? Buy and do it. Start taking the trips themselves, get the trips paid for, invite other people to do it. How do you do that? You share content. When you travel, you show the beautiful pictures, you show the video, you do live streams from there talking about, I cannot believe it, but this is me working right now, right?This is me working, I'm, you know, on the beach and you know, blah blah blah. I think it's just what we have to remember is that everybody in this day and age wants to feel connected. That is why we're on social media 24/7. But the problem is that, and scientific research shows this, although people are more connected than ever, they feel more disconnected than ever, right? But when you come live and when you teach and you add value for people and you show up in perfectly, that's a really important part. Like I let my dog in with me, I let my five-year-old daughter and with me, you know, like showing up in perfect is a huge piece of your human connection. That's going to get people really excited to buy into your brand because it gets them to open up to you to say, Oh, you know what? Beth is like human, like she's cool. You know, she's someone I want to get to know, right? She's not just this, you know, talking head on a white screen, you know, green screen behind her that's trying to present as you know, this, that and the other. So, I don't know if that answers kind of what you were looking.Beth:Yeah. Oh my gosh. My brain like is triggering and I'm thinking, okay, so that, that was just one topic. So when you think about the pillars of what I've noticed in Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, and even in the free group is, this is where people stay in network marketing businesses is, you talked about community and connection. So, a lot of us out there have these groups where people are hanging out learning products and we're missing the boat. It's sell, sell, sell, special, special, special, buy my stuff, join my team. And it's turning people away. What would your suggestion be for people that have existing groups using some of these awesome live launch tools?Kelly:Oh my gosh. So great. And this is so huge because I just did an interview with Michelle Bosh. She's in our program. She did a $300,000 launch her first month and Unstoppable because she leveraged her existing Facebook group that she had never really understood how to get maximum value out of. So, there's probably listeners right here right now that could be doing the same thing that just don't know. Like, you know, how do I take these pieces and make it work? I think exactly what you just described though; Beth is exactly what's been happening in the coaching space to be honest. I feel like, you know, there's so much selling and so much marketing that people forgot that we're here to serve.So what I say is first of all, if you have a Facebook group, start doing a weekly live show, right? You know, obviously Beth works with me, so you know, I'm such a believer in this, but start doing a weekly live show where you're not selling anything. You're not asking for anything. You are focused on giving. You are showing up to serve. You are showing up to add value for the people in your group. You're setting the tone as the leader and the group of what your values are, what kind of leader you are and that people should come hang out in your group and spend time there because no one wants to hang out in a group where all they feel like they're getting promos and specials and sales and buy more, and you know, do this and do that. Like people want to feel like there's something in it for them, right?There's a reason to come spend time here and as you said, Beth, they want community, real community, not just being in the group because it just so happened that someone's prospecting you to join their downline or you know they're in the group because you know, maybe at some point they've expressed an interest in a product. They actually want to feel a real sense of community. And the way that you create that is when you deliver compelling content that really meets people where they are and serves them in a really high level. What will happen is people start commenting on your chat and they start engaging with one another. They start getting to know other members of the group and now all of a sudden you have this dead group that you feel like you're pulling along on your shoulders to try and get people to engage to people.Looking forward to your weekly live show, building relationships with one another, posting of their own volition in the group because there's like a dialogue going. I always say it's like playing catch, right? That's like you don't want it. No one wants to play catch with themselves. They want to play catch with someone else and if they feel like it's just a one sided, they're being hammered with offers and specials and sales and do this, and there is no reciprocity. You know they aren't going to invest. Whereas if you build that reciprocity and build it and build it, this is why you see me constantly. Every day I'm doing either a podcast video or podcast, a video, some piece of free content. I'm going in someone else's group. I'm going on someone else's show because you to build a brand, which you guys are not as network marketers, it's really, really important that you're building a personal brand. When someone thinks of you, you don't want them to think of the name of your company. You want them to think of you as a person and as a leader and how you're leading people that have the same philosophy and values that are in alignment with the company that you represent. Does that make sense?Beth:Oh absolutely. And that is, you know, it's going on six years since being in the industry. And I feel such a shift, that it is people are joining because it's, it's not necessarily, yes, people love the products, but there's a million products we could all love. But the thing that I think is so interesting is that you're given a distribution channel, right? So, if you looked at live launch as a way to create more interest, more excitement around your opportunity or product, the winning pieces, you don't have to build the website. You don't have to collect the money. You don't have to distribute the product. So, all you have to do is show up. And we did. We did this in a let's get physical challenge. You would had been so proud, like the proud coach. Because we did the exact pillars that you teach in your free content. Like you literally could watch and what is, there's one going on this, you know, timestamped now, but isn't there a way to get that content now?Kelly:Yeah, I mean anybody who wants to get in the tribe, the next one we're doing and just a couple of weeks. I mean, we do it every couple of weeks. So, you know, anybody that wants to go through that free journey and then they can come to you to help them customize that content. Right? How does this work in network marketing? Right?Beth:Right. So, it's the tribe of Unstoppables, and Kelly and I just chatted before we started is, I'm already shifting. I have the 25 women that are going through the Profit Her Way program. Now we are going to live launch every single one of them, test it, see it for either opportunity, because I have a big travel group in there, so we just literally just wrote up the travel. We have a lot of health and wellness and so I'm so excited. Because my brain, I've started since working with you, every time someone is talking, I'll think, oh they should live launch that. Oh, they should…Kelly:It's so funny, because now I get phone calls and texts and pictures and messages from people like every day saying like I just told this person they need a live launch. Look for them. I just told this person I need to live lunch because everyone's just realizing like Holy crap, we've been doing it the hard way. Like the tools are there for all of us. You know what I mean?Beth:The tools are there and what I love is, I watched it the first round. This is, you might not know this. I watched it the first round and then didn't jump in to really digging in and learning. And then finally it was, and this is the big piece that sets you apart besides just personable, valuable content that works by the connection, is the accountability piece, is I have someone in my inbox saying, Hey, Beth let's chat. How's it going with your live launch? Let's do this. Not just a cheerleader. I mean she cheers for me every day, but accountability, and that is a big piece that is missing and the network marketing space. So, where did you come up with this idea, that Oh, people will sign up and pay for my program and they're going to be assigned an accountability coach?Kelly:Yeah, I mean we want the Unstoppable Entrepreneur to be the best business incubator on the planet. Like I literally wake up every morning and I asked myself, how do I make this the Harvard of online business money-making? You know, I think everybody deserves to be able to have the freedom to, you know, put their family first and be financially free. And I've experienced the opposite. And then I've experienced where I am now and all I want to do so badly in my life is just bring people across that finish line, you know? So, what we realized is that it's not just about education, it's not just about information. It's not just about coaching, right? It's a coaching program. It's not just about coaching. It's also about the fact that life happens, right? We all have a lot on our plates. We all have families and other obligations.Some people work a full-time job and they're building a business. Some people are running two companies, right? You can be caring for a sick parent. You have kids at home, whatever it is. And so, we realized that if we weren't dedicated to being in your face and in your inbox saying, Hey Beth, I haven't heard from you in a week and a half, are you okay? What's going on? You know, your live launch is coming up, you know, let's make sure things are okay. Let's get you on a hot seat. It's been a while. Whatever it is. We want to make sure that that commitment on our side is as high as we expect the commitment on your side to be. And I feel like that's a lot of what's lacking in the online world. And so instead of complaining about it, we're trying to be the change that we feel will be the catalyst and making a bigger difference for people.Beth:I love it. And that was huge for me, was even doing it before the first of the year, which is exciting because now we're going to take that even further and help these women too. And one man, it's Profit Her Way. But I had to say Profit Her/His Way. We had to vote him on the Island, and he made it. So, when you think about how your life looks now, because I am all about preaching that we have to block time in our calendar for joy, for self-care, for time with our kids. Because I didn't do that in the beginning. I was literally burning the candle from both ends missing really, really, really big events. And one day I read something that said, you want your husband, your kids to remember you as holding your phone or holding their hand? So, I preach be wherever your feet are, your multimillion-dollar entrepreneur who is so, so everybody knows Kelly Roach. But the thing that I love most about you, you do not have the hustle grind mentality. So, can you talk a little bit about that shift?Kelly:Yeah, definitely. I mean I think coming from fortune 500 I've already experienced that burnout. I always say I feel like I lived a whole life in my twenties before I moved over, because I had such a high level of responsibility that I learned so much so quickly, and I feel like that really informed my decisions and my path when I started in the entrepreneurial world. And I joke all the time because people will be like, Oh my gosh, Kelly, you worked so hard all the time. Do you ever take a break? Do you ever take a vacation? I'm like, yes. I take seven vacations a year with my family. I take off on Fridays in the summer I'm at the pool. I feel like the difference between me and every other online entrepreneur is I don't pretend to take a vacation so that I can have a photo op and be working so that I can show that I took a vacation.When I go on vacation, I'm not on my phone, my phone is off. It is locked in the safe for the week. I am present, I am with my family. And I think that's so important, right? You have to have that downtime. You know, I go out to dinner with my family at night and I'll leave my phone at home on purpose, because I know I run two companies. If the phone is with me, there's someone that needs me, but if it's not with me it will be there, you know, when I get back. So, I think just being really intentional, we have one vessel, one body. I woke up at five this morning, I did not want to work out and I was down there doing my little workout video, you know, getting ready for the day because I knew I'm going to be going hard and going straight through for you know, 10, 15 hours.But it's those really conscious decisions about, you know, what do you want your life to look like? And I know for me, I want to make sure that when Madison is like graduating high school, going into college, getting married, like I want to be in great physical form. I want to be in really good energy. I want to be in a healthy mental state. And so, I'm thinking 15 years, Madison’s five, just for everybody. You know, I'm thinking five and 15 years down the road, and I'm making my decisions today based on the person that I want to be when that time comes. And I think it's really important that as entrepreneurs we're thinking that way because it will take everything from you, entrepreneurship and building a business, because you care so deeply, because it is your passion. It will take everything that you give. So, unless you learn to set real hard boundaries for yourself and have a high level of discipline around that, you will always succumb to that. So, it's a learning that I think we all go through. But I think it's one of the most important things that you can learn as an entrepreneur, because your energy is everything, right? And you can't fake energy. Like you can try to show up in a certain way. People see right through it.Beth:It's that whole vibration they sense the energy. So, I always like to end the podcast with one question and you guys, I gave her no pregame session here. So, everything like, learning that travel piece hot seat is, and this is the piece that is a big mystery for many. And I know that you work so hard and you help us so much, with not only the strategies, the tools, but also what really has to happen between desire, belief and commitment. So, many of the people invest in your program and you will see some do $100,000 launch and some just not take that action. It's just always something. They have the desire. At one point they had the belief, what separates the people that in network marketing, I see it too. I'm all in. I'm all in. And there are some that do and some that don't. What is your belief about that?Kelly:Yeah. And it's so tough. I mean, we could do a whole show on this, but I'll give you a couple things. You know, number one, it's total ownership, right? You either believe that everything is happening to you or you believe that everything's happening for you. Amen. And that is it. Period. End of story. I mean, I am in an of the belief that we are wholly and completely responsible for everything that is or isn't in our lives. And the actions that we take every single day are the outcomes that we create, right? And I think when you have that mindset, you couldn't possibly not get up in the morning. And do the work because everything is possible, but also everything is, is up for grabs. Like you, you can't expect it if you aren't working. Right? So, I think that that ownership piece is huge.But I think the second piece is people that are called to something bigger than themselves, right? Because I think that it's enough to drive short term behaviors when you want to, you know, get the next payday, you want to get the next client, you want to, you know, pay your mortgage for the month. Like that's one thing, right? And, there is a hierarchy of needs. Like we all start down at the bottom of the hierarchy. But to show up consistently every single day, you have to be fighting for something bigger than yourself. Whether it's your family, whether it's your legacy, whether it's the people that you want to impact, the causes that you care about, you know, whatever it is, there has to be something bigger than you that you're working towards and fighting for. And that way on the days when you don't feel like showing up and the days where you don't feel good or you don't want to get on camera or whatever it is, you have something that's like, now you got to keep going, right?There's something you're doing it for. So, you know, it's always so cliché because people always say you have to find your why, and like I hate that advice because I feel like it gets twisted and manipulated a lot. But at the end of the day, you do need to know that why? Like my family is my everything, right? Like I make every decision with family first. And so, like when I got up this morning and I was thinking about working out, I wasn't thinking about myself. I was thinking about how am I going to feel after working for 10 hours when Madison gets home from school today and what person am I going to be? And I know I'm going to be a better, happier version of myself if I work out this morning. Right? So, it's like something bigger than you even in the little thing.Beth:I love that. I love that. And it wasn't until that I pushed the beyond, that the money piece, the financial freedom and knowing what foundation I wanted to build, and what my bigger mission and larger mission and we'll, we're going to add yours in the show notes so people can read about the work that you're doing. That's way beyond how much, you know, being a multimillion-dollar entrepreneur. We'll add that for people to see. And also, one more time, because you have so much free content that network marketers can apply to, and we're going to rewrite it for you guys. Don't worry. It's coming. We're going to rewrite how you can look at your recruiting, how you can look at your product sales using the live launch method. I've just decided, I'm like looking at my blank whiteboard. It's going there. And so, explain again how to find you, how to find the unstoppable entrepreneurs. Well, it's the tribe of Unstoppables that is the free group, right?Kelly:Definitely. So, yeah, I mean, you guys can just go onto Facebook and search Tribal Unstoppables, we usually run the free workshop like once every six weeks. My recommendation for everyone listening is come through our next round and then immediately go to Beth and be like, help me make this work for network marketing. Right? And I think if you bring those two things together, and I know with what Beth has up her sleeve, she's going to be changing the face of how you guys launch. So, I'm very excited to see where that goes and where you arrive. But yeah, of course we would welcome anyone into the tribe. And you know, I'm excited, I think there's a massive opportunity for, you know, I always say, I know we're wrapping up, but I just want to make one comment before we wrap. I always say that if kids, as soon as they became a working age, were educated about the opportunity of network marketing, we'd have no homeless people. We'd not have no jobless people, we'd have no one that is graduating college with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. The opportunity in network marketing is unbelievable. And kudos to all of you guys that are listening to the show. They're taking that and bringing it out into the world because it really can change so many lives and makes such a huge difference for people.Beth:I love, I love that. And I always say too, it's the best training to become an entrepreneur because you get to learn about building community culture, marketing lives, money, though the energy…we have so many topics. We're going to have to have a part two.Kelly:I know…We'll have to set that up.Beth:So as soon as we get the live launch, I've got three that I think that we can get that ready to go. I'm going to check back with you because we could do some really fun things together on helping network marketers with that live launch method. So, I'm excited. Thank you, Kelly, for being on today.Kelly:Thank you so much for having me.Beth:Well that's a wrap and thank you so much for being with us today! Is Kelly not the most extraordinary human? I love hearing her speak. I wish I could just stay with her all day and climb inside of that brilliant brain of hers. So what we talked about today in the live launch method; using it to grow your network marketing business. This is one of our big pieces, our big modules and Profit Her Way, which is teaching you to build a business you love, that doesn't steal all of your time and joy, but gives you your own marketing, your own profit plan. This is my six month mastermind and doors are open. If you want more information, please go to bethholdengraves.com/profit. Thanks so much for being with us today, and as always be you bravely.Thanks so much for hanging with me today on the podcast and remember, you can create what you crave. If you're looking for a supportive sisterhood, I would love to see you over in our free Facebook group. As most of you know, I love camp. It's part of, 'You're Not the Boss of Me' because when we're building this thing, we're doing this thing. We need a supportive sisterhood and I also crave more fun and more connection. Join us at camp over in the Facebook world, thecampelevategroup.com or just click on the link above and we will see you around our campfire and help you to create what you crave.  

Do you want to grow your coaching business? Everyone knows how difficult it is to get people to sign up for services such as yours. So in today's episode, Nate Woodbury talks about how you can effectively market your coaching business. He also shares some tried-and-tested tips on growing your client base effectively. How do I market my coaching business? Do I pay for advertising? Do I do online banner ads? Do I do a billboard? Do I do radio ads? Do I do mailers? Do I do email marketing? What is the best way to do marketing for my coaching business? Hey there. I'm Nate Woodbury. I'm a YouTube producer, and I work exclusively with coaches and speakers. Now, this isn't a promo video. I'm just giving you a background of Who I am and what I do. I help coaches and speakers use YouTube to market their business. Now currently producing 13 different channels. The largest of which is through Kris Krohn. We started that channel five years ago when it was at zero. We started from scratch, and now we're almost to a half-million subscribers. It's currently bringing in between 5 and 6 hundred thousand dollars per month in leader revenue, as well as an additional five figures of, you know, kind of icing-on-the-cake revenue from advertising. I say that just to give a foundation of credibility that I know what I'm doing. And I really have some great advice that can help you leverage YouTube to promote your coaching business. Here's what you can expect for the rest of this episode: I'm going to talk about the National Speakers Association for a moment. Yes, it's a great organization for speakers. Also referenced by ICF, the International coaching or coaches Federation. But then we're going to dive deep into the power of YouTube. And I've got two different examples I'm going to share with you of how they're leveraging YouTube. In exactly what they're doing and the benefits results that it's getting for them. And then at the very end, I'll wrap it all together and share with you why this is such a good opportunity. It's not just a good opportunity for everybody. But it's a great opportunity for somebody who has an expertise and who sells their expertise. You're a coach, right? That's what you do. So, I am a member of the National Speakers Association. I've been with that group about seven years. But it's only been in the last year, year and a half, I've been a member because I've been a speaker. Prior to that, I really have been more of a coach or a consultant. And there are a lot of people within this organization that are in those same shoes. What the NSA is really good for is helping you know how to grow your business, how to monetize your business and become successful as a coach or speaker. Now, while the name of the organization is National Speakers Association, it's kind of funny. We almost changed our name. In fact, they did change the name, and they announced it without talking to the membership first. The membership kind of revolted and said, "No, we like our name. They're going to change it to platform, which they thought would be a more encompassing name of coaches and speakers." But anyway, so if you - if you do attend the NSA and you hear that joke about platform. That's what they're talking about. So, I do recommend that you find the nearest chapter to you of the National Speakers Association and go and attend one of their monthly meetings. Now, there's another organization that is just for coaches. It's called the ICF, the international coaches or coaching Federation. The reason I don't know that, there's not a chapter here in Utah. And I'm kind of sad about that. So, if you know something that I don't about the ICF in Utah, go ahead and comment below so that I can be aware. But if the ICF is anything like the NSA, then you should be a part of that organization if there's something locally that you can participate with. Okay, let me introduce you to Paul Jenkins. I took this screenshot a week or so ago, so we've actually got more subscribers we're over 85,000 now. If you go live and check by the time you watch this episode over probably up to 90 or a 100 thousand subscribers. Now, here's the cool thing: We started at 235 - 22 months ago. So, it's been almost two years. Okay? Paul Jenkins is a positivity psychologist, and now he does a lot of coaching and public speaking. So, he still is a professionally licensed psychologist. But he doesn't do that part of his practice as much anymore. He focuses on coaching and speaking. He's had a podcast for 12 years. He's had so many amazing guests on his show. It's given him a lot of great opportunities, and he's gotten to connect and meet and get to know a lot of great and amazing people. But it hasn't really been a marketing tool for him like YouTube is two years ago and we were chatting about doing this campaign together, he let me know his goals and how he really wanted to make a bigger impact on the role. He teaches a lot about positivity. He talks a lot about parenting and about relationships. And he had a desire to really better leverage his talents and skills and impact the world in a bigger way. So, that's why we were talking about YouTube. In November of 2017, we launched a campaign, launching five episodes a week. And again, right when we started, his previous YouTube channel was only up to 235 subscribers. Now, we're up to 85,000 subscribers at the time of this recording, and he's making revenue in 3 different ways. We weren't actually planning on this being a significant part for another year or two, but it is actually currently in four figures of revenue every single month just from YouTube advertising. Much bigger than that, this channel has become a lead generation machine for his parenting courses. I mean, one of his most popular videos is "How to get your kids to listen without yelling." The videos like that pull in parents that are wanting to learn parenting advice. They get such great value in these videos that they really like and trust and respect Paul and his wife, Vicki. And he gives away a free gift. They enter a sales funnel, and he sells a course. And so he's getting a lot of leads, and he's making sales to these courses to people all across the country and even all across the world. Now get this: His channel is averaging 15,000 views per day. That's 15,000 new people every day who hadn't heard of Paul before who are now finding him and getting touched by his message. And then a lot of those are then going to his website visiting his sales funnel. Now, here's the other cool thing: He's getting full fee speaking engagements because people find him on YouTube. They recognize his expertise. They love his content. They find out he's a speaker, and they invite him, and often they want his wife Vicki to come with as well. So, he's getting full fee speaking engagements because people find him on YouTube. Now, I want to introduce you to Kris Krohn. He retired at the age of 26 using real estate, and he's dedicated his career to helping other people learn how to invest in real estate and have the same success that he did. We started his YouTube channel from scratch. And at first, he was wanting to monetize his channel getting people to come to his local events. We had built the channel up to 65,000 subscribers, but we had only had in the previous year maybe 1 or 2 people that traveled in to attend his event. But we knew there was interest there. There were comments all the time many every day saying, "How can I work with you? I want to work with you, Kris. What do you have?" They would even say things like, "Do you partner with people? Do you consult? Do you provide advice? Do you provide coaching?" And Kris didn't have anything. All he had was events that people could come to. So, he created a digital course. It was a video training course about how to invest in real estate. And the first month that we launched that, he actually broke a hundred thousand dollars in revenue selling that course. Then after the excitement settled down, he still was averaging 40,000 per month for the next several months. And then it just started to grow and increase from there as this channel grew. Now, we're bringing in between 5 and 6 hundred thousand dollars every single month just from these YouTube leads. Okay. So when we launched that course, that was two years ago. What's happening today? Here's the cool part: Today, he is filling his events. So not only is he selling these digital courses. But people are flying from all over the country, coming to his events. His last event had over 250 people. The majority of which came outside the state of Utah. They came here because they found Kris on YouTube. Now, the moral of that story is that there are different ways to monetize your audience or following your traffic that you get on YouTube. Courses are very powerful. They're a great way to do it. But over time, you can really monetize it in any way that you want. It can lead to speaking engagements. It certainly leads to coaching clients. It certainly can lead to people coming and attending your events. Here's the main reason why YouTube is such a perfect opportunity for you as an expert who is selling your expertise. Alright, people want to hire you to get benefit from your expertise. Okay, right now, all around the world, people are searching for your expertise. They just don't know that you exist. Right? They don't know you. They don't know about you. But they know what they need help with. And that's what they're going to Google and YouTube and searching for. They're typing in, "I need help with this. This is my question." YouTube can put you in front of them. All you have to do is make videos that answer their questions. Now, there's - there's a step. You've got to do keyword research before filming. So, if you do keyword research first, you can find out the exact phrasing of these questions, and then you can make videos with those questions as the title of the video. You post that video to YouTube, it'll rank day one. People from all around the world will start to find you. Now that you've got an understanding of how you can leverage YouTube to make money as a coach or how to market your coaching business. I want you to go watch this video. This is my leaf strategy video. That's the strategy where I teach you how to find the questions. So, you'll know how to do this keyword research so you can find the questions people are asking. I show you the tool that I use. It makes it really, really simple. It will be a world of difference in growing your coaching business by using YouTube.

What topics should you cover on your YouTube channel? It's an easy answer, but it's one that requires some thinking and planning. In today's episode, Nate Woodbury talks about what topics you should include on our YouTube videos, as well as what we need to keep in mind before filming. Stay tuned to learn more! You've got a lot of energy and excitement now. You've heard about YouTube. You've seen what's possible and so you want to make a YouTube channel. What topics should I film on? On this video, I'm going to share with you a great strategy that will choose topics for you that ensure that you get the best results. YouTube provides an amazing opportunity to showcase your expertise. I mean seriously, all around the world right now there are thousands of people searching for you. Except they don't knew you exist. So, what I mean is they're searching for your expertise. Right? They want to know. They need help. You can answer questions. You can help them. But there's just this disconnect. You've got this problem of obscurity. So YouTube provides a good opportunity. Because you can answer their questions, put these videos on YouTube, and now these people that are searching for you find you. Right? They see you as the hero in that moment. You've provided them help. You've given them advice. You've answered their questions. So, that's the answer. How do you know what to make videos about? Well, what expertise do you have? And what questions are people asking? So, the rest of this video, I'm going to be sharing three things. I'm going to talk about first of all, length. How long should your videos be? Then I'm going to talking about these questions. How do you find these questions that people are asking online? So you know what to title your videos. And then I'm going to talk about what this does for the algorithm. So when you make videos like this, how does YouTube use that to help you and help your channel grow. Your videos need to be 10 to 12 minutes in length. Is that surprising? You've probably heard people say, "Oh, you got to keep your video short. The shorter, the better." You know, maximum 2 minutes. Maybe two and a half, maybe 3 minutes?" When you watch a super bowl commercial, 30 seconds, right? They've got to pack the whole bunch into a short amount of time. Why is that? Why they need to be so short? Well, it's a promotional video. It's a commercial. We know that we're being given a sales pitch, right? We don't want to pay too much attention to that. They've got to make it really entertaining and deliver whole bunch of information. Psychologically give us all excited and whatnot in a short amount of time. We're not going to sit there for a 10-minute commercial on something that doesn't really imply to us, right? However, we're not talking about commercials. We're talking about making how-to content. Content that people are searching for contents that are going to change their lives. On YouTube, people are really accustomed and expect videos to be on the 10 to 12-minute range. The more specific the topic is, it actually makes it easier to make your videos in that 10 to 12-minute range. Let me just give you an example. My friend Katie Gutierrez, she's an interior designer, and she could talk a lot of interior designs. So, if we go out into one of our categories, let's say, "living room design," she could probably talk about living room design for an hour if we wanted to narrow it down and make it to 10 to 12-minute episode. She could easily do that. But like how to make it really valuable? She could say, "Well, what are my top tips?" Okay, I'll make a top tip video. I'll share my top 5 tips." And right then we film and we go from there. But what if we did keyword research, and we found the phrase, "How to design a living room with a corner fireplace?" Oh! Then all of a sudden, she got great ideas. "Well, yeah, if you got a corner fireplace, you've got to do this..." And I have no idea what the answer to this. But "You got to make sure that you balance it out with a nice rock feature or fountain, or then you got to put your couch here, and you got to make sure that the lighting does this. And that your artwork, you got to have different colors." Whatever it is, if there's a specific scenario, I know that Katie's minor goal right to work to know exactly what to do. Does that make sense? And because you're narrowing it down, I mean you're cutting away all of the extra stuff that isn't relevant to this specific answer, and yet, you can go deep. And I've found that 10 to 12-minute range or video like this is perfect. If you get to like to 5 or 7-minute mark and you think, "I'm done. I can't think of anything else to share." Well, then, definitely stop your video there. You don't just want to ramble on. If you just repeat or if you just summarize what you've already covered, people are going to leave anyway. So, you might as well not do the remaining several minutes. What about longer than 12 minutes? Yeah, you can longer. If you're keeping people's attention, go ahead and keep going. Just know that if you make a video that's like 30 minutes long, that's kind of a turn of for some people to click on the video. They're like, "Ooh! This is perfect. Oh, wait, this is 30 minutes?" Does that make sense? You got to be careful with that as well. The biggest secret I share and why people pay me a thousand dollars per hour for consulting time is to teach them this principle of keyword research before filming. Yeah, that's it. You got to do your keyword research before you hit record on your camera. Before you plan your content, do that keyword research first. It actually take a load off of your shoulders because you know of a huge variety of topics. You're not going to run out of information. You can get way more specific and targeted and feel like your talking to just one person. Because you don't want to talk to everybody and like, "Hey, everybody! Thanks for watching this video. I'm going to share some general advice, and hopefully, it applies to you." You can talk to just one person. The person that's got that corner fireplace or that person who's strep throat and wants a remedy without antibiotics, right? Now here's another amazing thing that this does. It eliminates all the competition. Because all your competition is going after the broad category. They want the most traffic. They want to rank and beat everybody. Challenges, when you make a video like that, there's hundreds of other videos out there like that, and you can't compete. I mean maybe if your Steven Spielberg, you can do that and you can make a cinema production quality. And yours will be the best. You know what? Just do keyword research. Find a question, answer that question. And you'll rank instantly. Here's why this works. The YouTube algorithm likes good engagement and likes a long average duration or a long retention rate. Okay? So, if you have a really specific video, such as how to design a living room with a corner fireplace, the people that are searching for that and they find your video, they're going to watch it all the way to the end, right? Because that's exactly for them. Why would they only watch a part of it? They have that question. They're going to watch it all the way to the end. And the algorithm sees that and says, "Wow, I know that only 50 people have watched this video this month, but all those 50 people watched it all the way to the end. Let's find 0 more or 200 more people like these 50." So YouTube starts to show your video to new audiences. And not only do you get the next 50 the next month. But you're also starting to get other views from YouTube suggesting it and promoting your content. Isn't that awesome? By just doing keyword research before filming, you're really laying a solid foundation of having a channel that the YouTube algorithm likes. And it'll find more and more people that are good match for your videos. Now that you understand this strategy of what to talk about on your YouTube videos, you definitely need to learn how to do this research. The good news is I've made a video all about that specific part. It's my leaf strategy video. You'll find it linked right there. In that video, I talk about how to do that keyword research. It's actually really simple. There's a tool that I show you how to use where you can type in category, and it will pull up all the questions the people are asking. You basically just pick these questions and say, "Oh, that will make a good title. Oh, that's a good title." You just plan out all of your videos.

Welcome!   Today there is a ton of stuff going on in the world of Technology and we are going to hit a number of topics from Facial Recognition, Hacks, Cyber Insurance, Privacy, and CyberSecurity Legislation, Incident Response, Warnings about Smart TV's and monitoring your pets.  It is a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: The Convenience of Facial Recognition is not All Its Cracked up to be   Call 611 Now -- Hackers Breach 1M Cellular Customers January’s Coming - Do You Have An Incident Response Plan? Protecting Company Assets and Cybersecurity Insurance Peeping on Toms Last Generation Legislators Trying to Solve Next-Generation Security Issues Block 90 percent of Malware with this Smart TVs, Security, and the FBI Apple:1 Android:120 --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson 0:05 Hello everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGIR and WGAN and other stations. I am and FM still shout-out to everybody. Thanks for joining me today and deciding to spend a little bit of your Saturday with me. Hey, if you are new to the show a real quick introduction I've been in the technology field for many decades. I have been doing internet work in fact, since the early 80s helped to develop a lot of the systems some of which are still in use today. And I have been a victim of security problems with my business. I built a big business it was doing pretty well technically a small business, but it was doing pretty well had 50 employees and then we got nail now this was way back in the 90s. But when we got into Nailed, I had quite the wake-up call about what I really should be doing. And, and, man, it was scary. It was really, really scary at the time I owned our own building, we had our own data center. We were building some of the biggest commercial properties on a line on the Internet at the time. And it was a really scary thing. Craig Peterson 1:26 It was like, you know, the bully in the yard right at school, and they would suck you right in the solar plexus right in the gut, right. And that feeling that you had you just you couldn't breathe, the not really pain, but it was just shocking. And that's how I felt. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to do it. We had anti-virus software. Why didn't it protect us and it really bothered me and took a couple of days now. I was very, very technical. Well, of course, I still tend to be if I have a real failure it is that it's kind of hard to remember what it was like not to know any of this stuff. So you know, bear with me asking me questions. Okay, I get it right. I can be very confusing sometimes. But I was very technical. And it took about two days for me now this is back of course before Google or AltaVista, or any of these really great search engines. So I was using the stuff at the time, like our chain Veronica gopher stuff, and trying to find out what was going on. It was actually digging into the machine itself, that revealed what the problem was, and I'd become a victim of what's known as the Morris worm, crawling through my machines and some other machines on the internet. It was a really scary time, and I decided right then and there that I had to make cybersecurity priority, and I had to be able to help people with their cybersecurity and businesses as well. Now businesses you hope can afford to pay and keep my lights on, right. And they've been very good to me my clients over the years, you know, I've had some great clients. And I've decided at this point in my life that I only want to work with great clients only clients that really, really want to work with me. But the same can't be said for consumers because you retirees and other people just don't have the money to pay what it costs to secure a business. You know, it kind of at a minimum, you're talking about $50,000 investment, plus monthly and 2500 bucks a month is pretty standard. And you could certainly go out and hire somebody to have somebody who's a quote it person unquote, but they are not really going to be able to help you out very much and they not going to keep up with it. And that's the biggest problem we have right now. My people who are involved in this every day, spend about a third of their time in classes. And in coaching and conferences trying to keep up with what are the attacks? What is the best software out there, what you're doing, you're using, what are the techniques that we need to use nowadays. And so you as a home user, there's no way you can afford it. And as a business user, if you're running a Soho like a small office, Home Office, you cannot afford to do all of the right things. And that's what I'm trying to help out with. And that's why we talk a lot about security here on the show, and that's why I do pop up training and Facebook Lives where we kind of delve into one aspect or more. And then I have paid courses as well, that tells you what the tools are, how to use the tools where you can get the tools what are the best ones my newsletter we talked about that a bit. Craig Peterson 5:02 In fact, if you got this money as a newsletter, we add a new section. And actually we have a new section that we're probably going to do this monthly, but it is the number one through five things patches you need to apply. Here are the five things you absolutely have to take care of when it comes to patching this month because there are extreme vulnerabilities and they are being used by the bad guys right now. I can't think of anything more valuable if you guys can let me know. For everybody, whether you are big business, a small business, a home user, right it, make sure these have been applied or you could be in a whole lot of trouble. And now we're looking at the costs of recovering from one of these breaches and a very large percentage of businesses today. They're breached, they file bankruptcy the next day. Because that's how bad it's gotten and ransomware attacks are up, and they're up across the board no longer they necessarily aiming primarily at these real big companies because they realize the smaller guys are the ones that are going to be easier to compromise. And then when you add into that equation, the fact that it takes about eight months for a company to notice that it has been hacked. Wow, think of the damage one of these guys could do. And it's everything from stealing the intellectual property that you've developed and designed. We have another client that we picked up, and she has a business that was a cutthroat. I had no idea how crazy cutthroat it is. She's in the design business for clothing. And purses, women's wear shoes, various other things. And in this whole design thing that she's doing, there is quite a bit of money and she had been selling into these huge retailers and things are going really well. And, you know, maybe one of these days we'll get deeper into that story. But this is just a couple of weeks ago, I met with her and she lost everything. And now at what, how old is she now? 55 I think, or 50. She's starting over again, from scratch and I don't want that to happen. Craig Peterson 7:40 So the easiest, simplest, most straightforward and free thing you can do, frankly, is to subscribe to my newsletter. Now you're going to go to Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, and I'm asking for your name and your email. That's all I'm asking, for now. I don't hound you, I'm not like one of these internet marketers that sending you emails every day multiple sometimes, unless I've got something that's big going on, like there's a training or something, I might send you emails during the week. reminders, hey, I'm starting this afternoon or whatever, right? That's the only time you're going to get a bunch of emails from me. And that's for the free training as well as some of the paid ones. But I am I don't sell your name. I am not trying to target you or anything else, right. So if you subscribe, you will get my weekly newsletter. And in that newsletter, I have usually between eight and 10 articles, we tend to write a short article that few paragraphs long kind of describing what the problem is, what you need to do give you some tips on what to do about it. And then we will link also to a third-party article, you know, unlike Forbes magazine, or so Newspaper out there, etc. Dark Reading is another one that we get, we linked to quite a bit. But you get all of that there is no charge for any of this. I don't want you to feel like I did. And I got hit once that first time and I got hit once again a few years later completely different way. And that's when I decided, hey, listen to this, this low-end antivirus firewall thing that you buy at Staples or from one of these brake fix shops, it doesn't really know much about it. It just isn't going to cut it so I upped my game after that. But you are going to understand what you should do how you should do it. My recommendations I throw those in there once in a while if somebody comes out with a new product, as we did with Wi-Fi here recently, and with some of the new Wi-Fi technology, what you should be looking for there and segmenting Your network at your home or your small business, so that your kids playing games who might be hacked, are not going to affect your main network, they're not gonna be able to get onto your computer, they're not gonna be able to get on your business computer, none of that stuff. But the only way you're going to find out about this is if you subscribe. Now, I have hundreds and hundreds, probably 1000 recommendations from people who just really appreciate all of this stuff that I'm doing. And, you know, there's free stuff, hey, if you can afford it, I'd appreciate it if you get the paid stuff because, you know, there's more, it's better because you can afford to pay for it right? But I really don't hold anything back. Right? I'm not trying to play secrets. It's the type of software you use as a business. That for instance has some sort of a military subcontract, you have defiers ITR regulations or a doctor's office where you got HIPAA regulations. Or a business that has to deal with FINRA or PCI regulations, financial transactions and companies. Those guys hopefully have enough money to do it mostly right. And as I said it, it gets expensive. We were just in a company we did a proposal, just a What about a month ago, I guess now, and to secure her stuff properly, would cost her about 80,000 a year. Now she had a number of employees but she decided she wouldn't, didn't want to pay it wouldn't couldn't whatever. And you know, I understand that too. But your best free advice you're going to get by going to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe, and I will be sending you my newsletter and I have three special things that you're going to get as well. That will come in the email after you confirm your subscription So you subscribe, look for my email, click the link, and you're all set. So I want to talk right now about what to do after the fact. If you've been hacked, what are the right things to do? Craig Peterson 12:17 Well, there are some things that you can do right away. I remember back in the day if you noticed that your machine and this is true today, it has run somewhere and is doing something odd, the best thing to do is shut it off. And then have somebody take that disk and put it on another machine that can analyze it, not just a regular machine. You don't want to spread that ransomware but an analysis machine uses Knoppix or one of these other tools in order to have a look at it. But if you're a company, what do you do if you're an individual, what do you do? A lot of people turn to insurance in order to cover it. You may not be aware of it, but your homeowners and Sharon's may have a writer that covers cyber intrusions, on your computers. And if you're a business person, you probably have already purchased some sort of a cyber insurance policy. That makes a whole lot of sense, frankly. But it can be a requirement for your company as well to have cyber insurance. So I've got five things to know right now, about cyber insurance because the attacks are increasing. It's becoming more and more important for companies to protect themselves. And cyber insurance may not cover you. And I have seen quite a number of times where companies This is in the news, I think, goodness, I don't have personal experience with this. But in the news, I've read articles where companies filed for their cyber against their cyber insurance policy and the policy didn't payout. Right now in the news, there's a big story about a large company that going to sue their insurance company because they wouldn't pay out all of the money that the company thought should be paid out. Now, in this case, we're talking about cyber insurance. That said, Hey, you have to take reasonable steps. Now with the cyber insurance that we have. So for instance, depending on the level of service you have from us, we have a policy underwritten by Lloyds of London, whereby if you are compromised, well, we're taking care of your systems. There is I think it's a million dollars worth of insurance, so it'll cover the smaller businesses typically. And then hopefully you have your own cyber insurance, right? That's how this whole thing works. And then, of course, our company we have our general insurance is our liability and All of this stuff you would expect to have the right key man type stuff, etc. But since the cyber attacks are now a top business concern, we're seeing numbers from Microsoft that found that cyber attacks beat out economic uncertainty, brand damage and government regulation as the top concerns for business owners and C level executives. So if you're sitting on the board of a company or you're sitting on the board of a nonprofit that you're trying to help out with, this is something that should be big on your mind. I did a presentation for university, about insurance, cyber insurance, how it all works, what the problems are, today, and let me tell you, they were very, very interesting. I think that's good 47% of the organizations that were surveyed said they have cyber insurance now. So that's good. That's pretty much half of all organizations say that they have it, which is up a lot. It's up 15% in the last couple of years. They're figuring that by next year, the gross written premiums for cyber insurance is expected to be around $8 billion. So a lot of companies signing up for it. 57% of companies with revenues of more than $1 billion had a cyber insurance policy. Now compare that to 36% of companies with revenues less than 100 million. And if you get down to the small guys, less than a million dollars in revenue, we're talking a number in the teens, percentage-wise of businesses that have cyber insurance. So if you don't have cyber insurance, you're not alone. Hey, that's for certain. But the big problem I think you're going to face is, if you do get hacked, how are you going to survive? I mentioned earlier that it's about I think this just takes about 20%. It's a pretty large number of businesses that get hacked, filed for bankruptcy the next day. But the majority of businesses that get hacked, are bankrupt within six months. So keep that in mind. Can you afford to lose the business? Is your business your retirement? Do you hope to sell it or maybe milk it is a cash cow for years to come? Big Questions, good questions. And if you do what's going to happen if you lose that income, because the business has gone under because you lost your client lists your production schedule, your bank account information, your intellectual property, very, very big deal and it's a very, very special Everything to okay. The top risk covered by cyber insurance seems to be a business email compromises. And that's actually kind of a good thing. Because according to the FBI, we're talking over $20 billion. And I've seen numbers, as high as $30 billion has been lost to these email scams. So business email compromise is where the fraudsters and maybe we can go into this in more detail some time, but it's where the fraudsters get involved and a trick you or somebody in your organization to sending the money. And you might say, Oh, it's not gonna happen to me. It'll ever happen to me. We're not that stupid when people pay attention to the email. No, it happens because the fraudsters aren't just sending out an email saying I'm a Nigerian prince. I need to use a bank account. They have done some research on you. They've done some research on your business. They know enough to be able to fool your financial people into sending money. And one of the stories I tell pretty frequently when I am last few months here while I'm doing presentations for businesses and other organizations have to do with that exactly. It has to do with the $45 million that was stolen out of an operating account. I have another one that's a much smaller business that came to us and we're securing them right now. And they lost $80,000 out of their operating account and to them. That's a lot of money. How are you going to meet payroll if you don't have that money sitting there? so busy mail compromise, good insurance to have. But here's a big concern. We have two big companies out there we've got drugmaker, Merck, you probably know about those guys. And a food giant called Mandela's They're both suing their insurance providers over non-payment for damages from not pet shop back in 2017. Craig Peterson 20:12 So think about that, Not Peyya was considered by many insurance companies as an act of war. And we think better, we're able to protect all of our customers from that. But these big companies weren't protected. I think they've retired us they would have been but you know, they know better, right? But think of you as a small business, or as a just a homeowner, how are you going to be able to fight these big insurance companies? Merck and Mondelez are both suing their insurance companies because the policies weren't paid. So keep an eye on that one as well. Hey, one of the things I had planned on doing and I may still do is Little free of pop up training on DNS filtering now you know, what is that? What's that all about? Basically, this is how you can defeat the bad guy's use of a key and critical internet resource. Now they're using DNS in order to mess with us. They use DNS when they have ransomware. The wants to call home. They use DNS when they have a botnet that needs to call home. So your computer might be unbeknownst to you may be used by nation-states like our friends in Russia, or China or Iran or North Korea. It may be used unbeknownst to you your computer to attack the Kremlin or the White House or the Department of Defense can be used to attack businesses, other innocent people in their homes. And the only way it can really do this is with a lot of coordination. And that's what a button that is all about. That's what the coordination is all about. And if you have ransomware, and if they want to make any money at all, they need to be able to tell you how to decrypt your files that were taken ransom. Now the ransomware guys don't always give you a good key. In fact, FBI numbers show that even if you pay the ransom, there's only a 50% chance that you'll get all of your files back. which is you know, it's too bad. Too bad. So sad. But that is the way it is. Because they are calling home they may not have called home properly. They might not have the right keys. You can contact the tech support people actually the ransomware guys, their tech support departments to tend to be better than many of the tech support departments that we have here when you call first software you bought right? But anyhow be that is it may I put together a special on how you can for free and basically in less than 90 seconds, how you can improve your security on your computer. Whether you are a small business or a home user, how you can secure your computer improve your security by 90% that is a very, very big number and I know you know Craig God really 90% Yes, really 90% because this technique, although it only takes you 90 seconds is probably gonna take you 10 minutes to sort of put together but this technique now allows you to basically stop ransomware in its tracks and stop some of the busiest compromised stuff in its tracks, which is huge right now, especially if you're a business and also stops your computer from being used as part of a botnet. It's huge, right? We're talking about some very big stuff here. And you can do it for free. Now we have software that we sell, a monthly basis per-seat basis. Actually, it's a per user basis. You know, it varies but gives-or-take 20 bucks a month that does basically the same thing. It has more features, it gets updated more often there are a number of different differences for it, but you can get it for free. And so I go into some depth on and it's, it's about a 10-minute episode that you'll find up on my website at Craig peterson.com. If you have a hard time finding it, you can always email me just me at Craig Peterson calm and I Walk through the whole thing with you. Okay, we obviously don't have time today. I have three minutes left today. Craig Peterson 25:06 So we're not going to get into that. But it's really a very big deal. You'll also find if you go to my website, I've got some additional podcasts here. Congress is finally tackling privacy next week, the Senate's going to take it up. And so I talked a little bit about that, how it's gonna affect your cybersecurity, a very cool little robot. You know, I'm always dripping on robots, but a cool little robot for your cat. If you're a business person, this is critical, but I also talked about it from a homeowner standpoint, what do you need to do when it comes to cybersecurity insurance and I go through some scenarios of what has actually been happening out there in the world today, how to protect yourself after t mobile's big data breach that nailed me as well. I go into some detail about why I opt-out of facial recognition. And I think that you should too, it's becoming more common and it does make some things a little easier. And there are times when using facial recognition is actually a plus. And so I discuss those as well. Craig Peterson 26:18 And Samsung, man, Craig Peterson 26:20 I'm, I'm sorry, but I really ripped on Samsung. And Android, frankly, went into a lot of the reasons why I say you should never ever, ever use Android. And there are some excellent reasons not the least of which is Apple releases a security update and it releases a security update for iPhones within usually a week or two of the security problem being found. And then it's available for everyone who owns an iPhone, the very next day. That's how fast it is. Samsung, not so much you can take the better part of a year to get the security updates for your Samsung android phone and can take even longer. If you don't have a Samsung, you have another manufacturer. Now some manufacturers are better Samsung's actually one of the worst when it comes to security updates. But right now, Android devices, if you bought a brand new one, and you updated it, there are over 100 pre-installed security risks right there in Android. So I go into a lot of detail on this. It's the holiday shopping season. I go into how to buy or how to even get an iPhone for free, and how to buy them inexpensively and which models you should look at which is another big deal because Apple fully supports these phones for at least five years. Samsung, who's the biggest Android manufacturer only supports it for two. Yeah. Anyways, all of that and more. Make sure you visit me online Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and you'll get all of this for free. Take care, everyone. Craig Peterson 0:03 Hey, welcome back. Craig Peterson here, WGAN, Hey, I'm already getting, getting some feedback here about my last statement. So let's straighten this out. I understand why a lot of people do buy Samsung, you know, I get it, right. It's something that I've thought about over the years I've had issues with over the years as well in it, it kind of goes back to what to buy when it comes to technology period, right. And I have always been the type that says, get the best that you can afford to buy. Don't cheap out because you will save a lot of money in the long run. If you can afford that. You know that purchase price. You're going to save money because the equipment can last longer. So for instance, just this week, we have a client that decided that they were going to go and because they had had a problem with a Dell computer that they had purchased at just retail, regular old consumer Dell. So they had had a problem with that they didn't want to buy anymore now they're going to go by HP, but they went ahead and bought another HP consumer-grade computer. Now that according to the statistics that are out there, the average consumer-grade laptop and that's what they bought last about seven months. So you pay 700 bucks for a no half-decent, pretty crappy consumer-grade laptop. Versus let's say that they got what re recommended which was a commercial DELL LAPTOP or maybe even an HP, HP enterprise laptop and you may not be aware of it. But Hewlett Packard split into and they have the consumer division that just costs reduces things. You know, they'll save a half a cent on a component by putting in something that's cheaper and crappier. Right, they don't care. And then they have their HP enterprise, which makes equipment for businesses completely different companies now, okay, they were split off, because there's no money to be made in that consumer space because it frankly, it's a race for the bottom. So they decided, hey, listen, we don't like Dell because the low-end Dell that we bought broke, well, yeah, on average, not just Dell, but across the industry. 7% they won't last seven months, okay, seven months is average. And it was I think $100 more for the computer that we recommended. That came with a three-year warranty that had better components in it and everything else right, that a hundred bucks, really makes a huge difference. But they decided they wanted to quote save money and quote right and What does it cost? So for instance, we, we ended up lending them a DELL LAPTOP. And that DELL LAPTOP that we lent them was at least five years old, maybe six years old. And it's still working. Because it's a commercial-grade laptop, it's not a consumer. It's not what you buy at Walmart. It's not what you can buy at Best Buy or staples. It is a commercial-grade laptop. And as a general rule, if you're a really small business and you want a commercial-grade, you'd either have to go to a company like us, or you could buy Apple if Apple's gonna work for you. So let's look at the apple stuff. So the apple laptop might cost you two or $3,000. You can get them for now right now about $800 for a little air, which is about the same price as you'd pay for one of these consumer-grade Dells or HP's. But you go ahead and you buy one of those apples. I have Apple computers that are 10 years old. We're still using. Okay, laptops included. So let's add up the numbers here. Let's say they only last five years for that Apple Computer. When is the breakeven point? Well, at about 18 months, and then for the next three and a half years, you have a free computer. That also works really well because Apple is not making major cuts in the quality of the components that you have. So, where I come in to understand this is I know personally in my business, I spend as much as I can on technology. But I do cut some corners sometimes, right? You look at it, and you say, Well, let me see. I can buy this laptop. It's a third of the price. So I can buy three of these laptops. Instead of buying one of those more expensive laptops. Right. I know you I know. You thought the same thing, right? Because I think of that too. That's what I do. So you look at it and you say, Well, I could buy three of these, yeah, but you're not going to have a machine that's still it's going to last it and you won't be able to buy three of those other computers, they just aren't going to last. And you're going to have to move all of your data when that computer fails, if you can move it if what fails isn't the SSD, because, for instance, now SS DS are not created equally. And these are the drive solid-state drives that replace the spinning drives that are in our computers. And they have a limited number of write cycles. In other words, they have a predetermined life factor. We could tell you a story about that, that we won't right now. There are some that just completely die after a certain number of hours, they just shut themselves off. So beware. So you can't even compare an SSD of a certain size. As a regular consumer, you have to look at what's the technology inside behind it. How long is it going to last? How many right cycles Is it good to be able to handle How about the GPU? If you're doing engineering work, you need a much better GPU that Yeah, okay, there's a GPU built into that Intel CPU, but it's nowhere near as good as having the next-gen CPU or GPU made by company x company y company z. Craig Peterson 6:16 So, even though I'm tempted to cheap out, I don't and I am much happier because it lasts longer and it performs better the whole time. So I'm not sitting there waiting constantly for something to happen because it's so slow. And that's why I moved to Apple, frankly. Now back to the phones. Why I said I don't understand why people buy Samsung's Yeah, you know, in reality, I do understand. And it's, it's primarily because you have been fooled. Right? They the guys out there that are selling you that Samsung phone is pretending Well, maybe they just don't know better, but frankly, there are people in the organization that knew but do know better. pretending that this Galaxy phone is just as every bit as good as an iPhone 11 or an iPhone 10 and they are lying to you. And then when your phone fails and I was on that Android bandwagon for a while myself and my Android phones would fail, and they would not get updates at all for even for security patches. I realized that my suspicions were right, that these manufacturers are just trying to crank out the phones as cheaply as they can, as many as they can, and then move on to the next model to get us to buy the next model. Because the whole smartphone industry right now is suffering because of this whole big problem of people are just happy enough with the phones they have. So there's something called planned obsolescence as a part of this as well. Now I'm not saying that Samsung isn't giving you security patches because of Planned obsolescence. Although they might be I'm saying that Our friends at Samsung are really playing some games with you. And they are deceiving you. And they are really causing nothing but headaches. But there are ways around it. If you are buying an Android phone because you can't afford an iPhone, again, you've been fooled. Because buying an older model, the iPhone is always a better investment. And it's a better investment because it will still have some resale value in a few years, unlike that Android phone and it will be supported by Apple. Think about what's on your smartphone. Do you do have your contacts there? That might be a problem. Do you have any documents from your business, any text, any emails? That might be a problem because if your phone is hacked, which Android phones are, I just told you there's over there right now they're shipping with over 100 vulnerabilities pre-installed okay. Think about what else might be either to use your phone to check your bank balances. Does your phone have an app from your bank from your credit card company? Think about that for a minute. Apple gets their fixes out within a day. Samsung as we just found out can take up to even almost a year to get them out if they even provide them for your phone. Because they're only providing them for the Samsung the 10 and the S 10. And the S nine right now and that that will change so five years versus a couple of years okay. Plus the fixes they just come out from Apple. So do everybody a favor. Buy some of these iPhones by right now I would say go out and buy an iPhone 10 Xr good value. Easy to get and it's going to last a while stick around. We'll be right back with more you listening to Tech Talk with Craig Peterson right here on WGAN Craig Peterson 0:03 Hello everybody. Welcome back, Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. You can get all of this week's articles right there from me on my website and also the newsletter I try and keep you up to date on all the latest tech news you need to have. What are the important things and how should you be handling them so all of that up and Craig Peterson dot com and you can get my podcasts all over the place just in your favorite podcast app I'm really am almost everywhere now. You will find me please subscribe, and that helps our numbers and it helps get the message out and I really appreciate it if you do this isn't a labor of love. And I hope you can share this love with other people as well as we try and help them out. We are seeing right now. A major revolution in the world. And part of that has to do with our facial recognition. So I want to talk about facial recognition what department Homeland Security is doing right now, what China's doing this whole thing with some of the Arab countries and, and really why you should opt-out facial recognition. Department of Homeland Security has been using facial recognition now at the gates of some airports at some gates. And they've been trying to match your national ID photo with the picture that's taken at the gate. And they have arrested. I think it's almost 10,000 people who were here illegally, who overstayed visas, etc. I went to the airport to hop on a plane just have a domestic flight, not even International. And as they hopped on that plane, We're about to they were arrested. I mentioned illegal immigrants, which is certainly one qualification of people. But it also arrested criminals that were wanted for various crimes were, you know, independent of their legal status in the United States? Well, we have seen now over in China, some very, very scary uses of some of this facial recognition technology. And I being basically here, mostly libertarian, certainly on when it comes to our own privacy and security very libertarian. We've seen in China, some serious problems and right now, like this week in Iran, and I want to talk about what's coming here in the US within the next six months in China. They have been using facial recognition as part of their social credit system. So now in China, if you buy a phone, smartphone or otherwise, the carrier is required to take a picture of you Craig Peterson 3:09 and send that photo on off to the central government. So now the central government in Beijing has photos of everyone who's in the country legally. And I guess the illegally as well. And then they're using that to track you if you jaywalk, for instance, you lose social credit. There's a great dark, I think it's dark mirror right episode about this sort of thing. But if you jaywalk, you lose social credit. If you lose enough social credit, you can't vote. You can't even get on a train to go to work anymore. So they're using that in those ways. They're also using it to suppress religious minorities. Just this week on I think it was Wednesday. De An article came out showing a secret document that was in China that was part of their, you know, the Socialist Party over there. And the socialists had decided that they wanted to be able to have more reeducation camps. And the people that have gotten out of these camps say these are internment camps. They are torturing people. It's just insane what they're doing. And they're doing this to ethnic minorities there in China. A lot of them are part of a Muslim minority as well. So China has this facial recognition technology that they are starting to export. And China is a major driver in the United Nations now to have a facial recognition standard that they can use, okay, and that they want to be spread around the world and it's just absolutely amazing when you get right down to it. So we have also heard just this week about what's happening in Iran? Well, a couple of weeks, I guess. But there have been protests in Iran, you know, our sanctions against Iran have really been hurting them. They have a very hardline socialist government over there. But again, it decides what rights people should have and what they shouldn't have. They're not obeying any sort of constitutional protections as we have in the United States because they just don't exist, right. When it comes to a socialist country doesn't matter. It's whatever the head of the Socialist Party says whether it's a fascist government or communist government, it just doesn't matter because everyone's equals under their feet is kind of the bottom line. Right. Can you tell my political leaning on this one? Yeah, it's I think it's a bad thing. So in Iran, what they've started to do is they have been positioning snipers on top of buildings and shooting and killing at least hundreds. We don't get good reports on Iran, obviously. And they pretty much shut down the internet over there of people who have been protesting the government. Now it doesn't look like it's gotten to that level yet in Hong Kong, where they're also protest protesting the socialist government. But what China has started to do now is they are selling fully autonomous killer drones in the Middle East. And these drones are, are designed to decide by themselves, who they should kill. So you could literally if you're wrong, you could literally let these things loose in the streets. And let's say the curfew is 6 pm just as an example from 6 pm to 6 am. And anyone that the drone sees in the streets that it does not recognize either through the facial recognition or perhaps a uniform or some other method. ology, if it doesn't recognize you just shoots and kills you. Craig Peterson 7:05 extensively, these are going to be used in warfare, which means if we are battling over there in the Middle East, our troops could be up against these drones. And it could be very, very bad for us and for everybody else. Now let's talk about what's happening here in the US. I was shocked when I went down to New York City. It's been at least a decade, maybe 15 years ago. And I entered a building because I wanted to visit someone who had invited me to their business down there. So in I go, and I could not go into the building without presenting some form of ID, which they scanned and kept, and that really upset me, really upset me because it wasn't what businesses of theirs and they said, Well, you know, no, no. We need to be able to count the bodies that might be in here in case there's, you know, another bombing and we want to keep track of terrorists and every Now it's okay, well, wonderful. So there's a great article that I have up on Craig peterson.far.com, Karen peterson.com that came from Fortune magazine. And this is for actually from their newsletter. And fortune moved into a new office building in Manhattan a few months ago. And they had a new entry system. So a lot of these buildings, you have to have a card, you put the card up to the reader, and it might be something that you just touch it and it reads it with RFID might have to slide it in. But they put in a system that allows you just walk through because they've scanned your face. Just smile at the camera and in you go No more waiting, no more forgotten card keys or anything else. This I think is a very big problem. And the problem that I see and there are many of these, frankly surrounding this, but the biggest problem is If you lose your badge, you can get a new one. What happens if they lose the information about your face? What happens if that stolen?  You only have one face. And how can you be sure whether it's this building in Manhattan or the Department of Homeland Security that wants to scan your face at the airport? How can you be sure that it's going to be kept safe? Because unlike a John Travolta in the movie face-off, you just don't get to change your face over time. Big, big problem. So don't let them scan your face. And there are programs underway at the airports to try and get you to do that. Because you can just walk through everything's wonderful. All right, I disagree. So your next steps. Don't let your face get scanned. iPhones a little bit of a different deal when we talk about that when we get back. You're listening to Craig Peterson WGAN. Craig Peterson 0:04 Hi, everybody. Welcome back, Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. Hey, let's finish up that last little discussion here. I just told you to opt-out of facial recognition systems whenever you can, you know, in some cases like what the Homeland Security Department is doing right now at airports, you can't really opt out of that. It's kind of like this. What do they call this ID program that they have, where your ID is something that the federal government recognizes and needed to fly. And the states are sending all of this stuff off to the federal government, which I think is a major violation of privacy, something that we've got to protect against but you know, again, you can't really opt out of that depends on the state. But I think as of next year, every state all 50 of them are going to have this new secure ID is part of your driver's license stuff I, I am really, really not happy with that. But maybe, maybe that's just me. I don't know, maybe it's just me I'm kind of paranoid in that regard. But let's talk about your iPhone or heaven forbid your Samsung Galaxy phone. here's, here's what's going on in the iPhone. The iPhone has had for quite a while now ever since it started having the thumbprint reader or the fingerprint reader. The iPhone has something called a secure enclave. Now, this has caused some people some problems over the years because if you replace the broken screen on your iPhone, and you didn't do it correctly, that broken screen at the bottom had that little fingerprint reader and if it's disturbed at all, you you now lost access to the phone period because that secure enclave was destroyed which is why so many people ended up going to Apple to have their screens fixed and moaned and groaned about it for very good reason If you ask me, so yeah, problems on that front. Craig Peterson 2:12 However now moving on to the next step, Craig Peterson 2:15 What is the 10, I guess the iPhone 10 came out and it had facial recognition built into it. And now the facial recognition not perfect. And it's interesting with my I have identical twin daughters. So my two daughters identical. One of them weighs a little more than the other one does. And they both have iPhone tabs with facial recognition turned on. And they can one of them can always unlock the other one's phone and the other one can sometimes unlock the other one's phone. But the facial recognition in the iPhone was having problems with identifying Eastern faces like you know oriental or whatever the culture holidays. But you know, Chinese and even Indonesians and Pacific Islanders and all of those people had some problems with. And China now with their facial recognition is trying to get African faces because it's having problems with African faces. So there are some problems with it. But one problem that does not exist with the facial recognition on the iPhone only is how is that data stored? Where's that data stored? Is it going to be stolen? Could it be stolen, etc, etc? The way Apple did it is the right way. And it stores your fingerprint information locally in the phone in the secure enclave, which is virtually 100%. No one has ever shown it to be anything less than a hundred percent hack-proof. It's amazing what a job they've done. So it stores the information about your face in this secure enclave. So if the phone wants to know is this really you? It asks a secure enclave. Hey, is this really him? This girl enclave says yes. And that's it Apple never get your face and never get your fingerprints. It's never sent up to the cloud. All of that is handled in the phone in a special chip that has a special sealant around it so it can even be physically broken into without destroying it, called the secure enclave. Very, very, very big deal. So when we're talking about facial recognition, and Apple I do trust it. I do not, however, trust the way Samsung's doing it or any of the other Android devices that I'm aware of right now. Now they're getting better but still don't trust them. Definitely do not use Samsung's fingerprint recognized recognition system. It is very, very, very hackable. They may fix that in the future. I'm not sure their facial recognition is actually better than the fingerprint system, but I wouldn't use either. But then again, you already know I wouldn't use an Android device, including any of the Samsung's that are out there. So, there you go, opt-out when you can have facial recognition. For the most part, it's a very bad idea. And if you're using an Apple device, facial recognition is okay. I still personally prefer the fingerprint as opposed to facial recognition but maybe that's just me, but I have an iPhone eight as well. And that's all it has on it on maybe I'd like facial a little better if I had it on my phone. But I'm not planning on changing from an iPhone eight, probably until next year, next September when the iPhone 12 comes out. Although my age can be supported for a while Apple just stopped supporting the iPhone six. So after the iPhone six, there's the six s there's the seven I think there was a seven as There's an eight, I don't think there was an eight as there was some 10. Craig Peterson 6:06 And now 11. So there you go, that six models that they're still supporting iPhones vs. Samsung, which support which is probably the best out there for support only supports two models versus six models. And it takes some half a year to get security patches out versus one day for Apple. Okay. All right. So let's talk about security. You might know that I've used Verizon for a long time for my cell phone plan. And then I switched over to T-Mobile because they had a much better deal. And most of the time where I'm trying to use the phone, I have coverage. It's rare that I don't Verizon definitely had better coverage than T Mobile does. But I'm saving a lot of money over on T Mobile. Well, T Mobile had a data breach, they confirmed so I want to tell you what Do how to protect yourself after this data breach. This isn't just for people who might be T Mobile customers. This is true for almost anybody out there. Okay, that just in general, when you have a cell phone, it's estimated that there were more than a million accounts that were breached according to Tech Crunch. So it is a big breach, but you need don't freak out now. Okay, don't ignore but don't get too nervous at the same time. Now, t-mobile has said that it has notified people who had been hacked, basically who's dated been hacked. And here's what they wrote. Our cybersecurity team discovered in shut down malicious unauthorized access to some information related to your team mobile prepaid wireless account. We promptly reported this to the authorities. None of your financial data including credit card information or social security numbers was involved, and no passwords were compromised. The data accessed was information associated with your prepaid service account, including name and billing address if you provided one when you establish your account, phone number, account number rate plan and features such as whether you added an international calling feature. Okay? So since the right planet features bit requires T Mobile to notify anyone who's affected. If you haven't heard anything yet, the odds are good that you're not in trouble here. But let's be a little paranoid. Let's tell you what to do right now. Okay. You're going to want to double-check your account settings. You can call t mobile's customer service number if you have at mobile phone, you can just tell 611 to confirm whether or not your account is affected now 611 does not just work for T Mobile. If your T Mobile customer that's what you dial in catch a T Mobile if you're a Verizon customer new dial 611 it'll get you to Verizon, etc, etc. Most of the carriers use six-one-one to get customer service. So if you are worried that your data was stolen here, you're lucky because really real critical information like your payment details, passwords, so security number was not stolen years, anyone can tell. So at best, they might be able to impersonate to either at t mobile or in another service. But here's what you should do. Set up a password or a pin with T Mobile. So when you call them at 611, make sure you have your latest build with you so that you have all of your account numbers all the information that they will ask you for. And then you can set up this password or a personal-identifiable number with TMobile. That way whenever you contact customer support, they're gonna ask for that specific information in order to proceed. Now don't forget the pinner pass. Word Are you going to have to go to T Mobile store in person and you have to verify you are, who you say you are, etc, etc. But that's the bottom line here, just quickly set up a pin. If you haven't done this with your carrier already a highly recommend you do that. And we've done it with all of our accounts for a lot of years. In some cases, there are also multi-factor authentication or two-factor authentication that's available. So they'll send you a message in their app that is much safer than sending an SMS message. Craig Peterson 10:37 So I want to talk to those of you. And I know many of you have done this, but those of you who specifically have accounts that hold Bitcoin, or any of these other cryptocurrencies, one of the ways that 10s of millions of dollars have been stolen from you guys. Is that your SMS has been hacked. So what the guys and gals are doing they're trying to hack you is they use SMS portability. And they pretend that they are you. They call up your carrier, they say hey, I've got a new phone, they give them the numbers for the phone, just an unlocked phone. And now all of your text messages and your phone calls are going to be transferred to them instead of you. So when you are trying to verify now, your payment, whether it's a bank account, or more particularly right now we're talking about a cryptocurrency account. When they try and confirm they're gits you going to send a pin via text message via SMS to your phone but it's not really going to go to your phone is going to go to the bad guy's phone. So this is why you really want to have a pin or a password so that when the bad guy calls up tries to steal your phone calls and your pin. They can't. Because they don't have that important information, the stuff they really need. So what I want you to do right now is go ahead and call your carrier, set up a pin, set up a password, so that you are safe here in the future. So we've talked this hour about facial recognition about why you should never ever buy an Android and some of the deals that are going on for iPhones, even older ones, and how to protect yourself with T. T mobile's big data breach. So coming up, we're going to talk about the five things you need to know about cyber insurance. The robot This is cute here for surveilling and playing with your cat Congress what they're doing this week on privacy, and a whole lot more you listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN online at Craig Peterson dot com Craig Peterson 0:04 Hey, everybody, Welcome back Craig Peterson here on WGAN of course online at Craig peterson.com. Hey, if you are new to the show a real quick introduction, I've been in the technology field for many decades. I have been doing internetwork, in fact, since the early 80s helped to develop a lot of the systems, some of which are still in use today. And I have been a victim of security problems with my business. I built a big business it was doing pretty well Well, technically a small business, but it was doing pretty well had 50 employees and then we got nailed now this was way back in the 90s. But when we got nailed, I had quite the wake-up call about what I really should be doing and, and, man, it was scary. It was really Really, really scary at the time I owned our own building, we had our own data center. It, we were building some of the biggest commercial properties online on the Internet at the time. And it was a really scary thing. It was like, you know, the bully in the yard right at school, and they would suck you right in the solar plexus right in the gut, right? And that feeling that you had you just you couldn't breathe, the not really pain, but it's just shocking. And that's how I felt. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to do it. We had anti-virus software. Why didn't it protect us? And it really bothered me and took a couple of days now. I was very, very technical. Of course, I still tend to me. If I have a real failure it is that it's kind of hard to remember what it was like not to know when any of this stuff. So you know, bear with me asking me questions. Okay, I get it right. I can be very confusing sometimes. Craig Peterson 2:09 But I was very technical. And it took about two days for me now this is back of course before Google or AltaVista, or any of these really great search engines. So I was using the stuff at the time, like our chain Veronica gopher stuff, and trying to find out what was going on. And it was actually digging into the machine itself, that revealed what the problem was. And I'd become a victim of what's known as the Morris worm. crawling through my machines and some other machines on the internet. It was, it was a really scary time. And I decided right then and there that I had to make cybersecurity priority. And I had to be able to help people with their cybersecurity and businesses as well. Now businesses you hope can afford to pay and keep my life On the right. And they've been very good to me my clients over the years, you know, I've had some great clients. And I've decided at this point in my life that I only want to work with great clients only clients that really, really want to work with me. But the same can't be said for consumers because you retirees and other people just don't have the money to pay what it costs to secure a business. You know, it kind of at a minimum, you're talking about $50,000 investment, plus monthly and 2500 bucks a month is pretty standard. And you could certainly go out and hire somebody to have somebody who's a quote it person unquote, but they are not really going to be able to help you out very much and they not going to keep up with it. And that's the biggest problem we have right now. My people who are involved in this every day spend about a third of their time in classes. And in coaching and conferences trying to keep up with what are the attacks? What is the best software out there? What should we be using? What are the techniques that we need to use nowadays? And so you as a home user, there's no way you can afford it. And as a business user, if you're running a Soho like a small office, Home Office, you cannot afford to do all of the right things. And that's what I'm trying to help out with. And that's why we talk a lot about security here on the show, and that's why I do pop up training and Facebook Lives, where we kind of delve into one aspect or more, and then I have paid courses as well, that tells you what the tools are, how to use the tools where you can get the Tools What, what are the best ones. And my newsletter, we talked about that a bit. In fact, if you got this morning's newsletter, we add a new section and actually, we have a new section that we're probably going to do this monthly, but it is the number one through five things patches you need to apply. Here are the five things you absolutely have to take care of when it comes to patching this month because there are extreme vulnerabilities and they are being used by the bad guys right now. I can't think of anything more valuable if you guys can let me know. For everybody, whether you are big business, a small business, a home user, right, it's making sure these have been applied or you could be in a whole lot of trouble. And now we're looking at the costs of recovering from one of these breaches and a very large percentage of businesses today. If they're breached, they file bankruptcy The next day, because that's how bad it's gotten and ransomware attacks are up and They're up across the board no longer they necessarily aiming primarily at these real big companies because they realize the smaller guys are the ones that are going to be easier to compromise. And then when you add into that equation, the fact that it takes about eight months for a company to notice that it has been hacked. Wow, think of the damage one of these guys could do. And it's everything from stealing the intellectual property that you've developed, whether it's designed, it can be a man, we have another client that we picked up, and she has a business that was a cutthroat, I had no idea how crazy cutthroat Craig Peterson 6:47 it is. She's in the design business for clothing, and purses, women's wear shoes, various other things. And in this whole design thing that she's doing the is quite a bit of money, and she had been selling into these huge retailers and things are going really well. And, you know, maybe one of these days we'll get deeper into that story. But this is just a couple of weeks ago, I met with her, and she lost everything. And now at what, how old is she now? 55, I think, or 50. She's starting over again, from scratch and I don't want that to happen. So the easiest, simplest, most straightforward and free thing you can do, frankly, is to subscribe to my newsletter. Now you're going to go to Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, and I'm asking for your name and your email. That's all I'm asking for. Now, I don't hound you. I'm not like one of these internet marketers that sending you emails every day multiple sometimes unless I've got something that's big going on. There's training or something, I might send you emails during the week. reminders, hey, I'm starting this afternoon or whatever, right? That's the only time you're going to get a bunch of emails from me. And that's for the free training as well as some of the paid ones. But I am I don't sell your name, I am not trying to target you or anything else, right? So, if you subscribe, you will get my weekly newsletter. And in that newsletter, I have usually between eight and 10 articles, we tend to write a short article that few paragraphs long kind of describing what the problem is what you need to do give you some tips of what to do about it. And then we will link also to a third-party article, you know, unlike Forbes magazine, or some newspaper out there, etc. Dark reading there's another one that we get, we linked to quite a bit but you get all of that there. is no charge for any of this, I don't want you to feel like I did. And I got hit once that first time and I got hit once again a few years later completely different way. And that's when I decided, hey, listen to this, this low-end antivirus firewall thing that you buy at Staples or from one of these brake fixed shops, it doesn't really know much about it, it just isn't going to cut it. So I upped my game after that. But you are going to understand what you should do how you should do it. My recommendations, I throw those in there once in a while if somebody comes out with a new product, as we did with Wi-Fi here recently, and with some of the new Wi-Fi technology, what you should be looking for there and segmenting your network at your home or your small business so that your kids playing games who might be hacked are not going to affect your main network there, I can be able to get onto your computer, they're not gonna be able to get on your business computer, none of that stuff. But the only way you're going to find out about this is if you subscribe. Now I have hundreds and hundreds, probably 1000 recommendations from people who just really appreciate all of the stuff that I'm doing. And, you know, there's free stuff, hey, if you can afford it, I'd appreciate it if you get the paid stuff because, you know, there's more, it's better because you can afford to pay for it right? But I really don't hold anything back. Right? I'm not trying to play secrets. It's the type of software you use as a business. That for instance has some sort of a military subcontract, you have defiers it or regulations or a doctor's office where you got HIPAA regulations, or a business that has to deal with FINRA or PCI regulations, financial transactions and Companies, those guys hopefully have enough money to do it mostly right. And as I said, it gets expensive. We were just in a company, we did a proposal just I want about a month ago, I guess now, and to secure her stuff properly, it would cost her about 80,000 a year. Now she had a number of employees, but she decided she wouldn't, didn't want to pay it wouldn't couldn't, whatever. And you know, I understand that too. But your best free advice you're going to get by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, Craig Peterson 11:38 and I will be sending you my newsletter and I have three special things that you're going to get as well. That will come in the email after you confirm your subscription. So you subscribe, look for my email, click the link and you're all set. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and I'll be right back. Stick around Craig Peterson 0:06 Hey, Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Thanks for spending part of your day with me here. We're covering some of the topics that are really of interest, I think to everybody, and are certainly of importance to everybody. And that includes and I think in many ways is most particularly cybersecurity. So I want to talk right now about what to do after the fact. If you've been hacked, what are the right things to do? Well, there are some things that you can do right away. I remember back in the day if you noticed that your machine and this is true today. It has run somewhere and is doing something odd. The best thing to do is shut it off. And then have somebody take that disk and put it on another machine that can analyze it. Not just a regular machine, you don't want to spread that ransomware, but an analysis machine uses Knoppix or one of these other tools in order to have a look at it. But if you're a company, what do you do? If you're an individual, what do you do? A lot of people turn to insurance. In order to cover it, you may not be aware of it, but your homeowners' insurance may have a rider that covers cyber intrusions, on your computers. And if you're a business person, you probably have already purchased some sort of a cyber insurance policy. That makes a whole lot of sense, frankly, but it can be a requirement for your company as well to have cyber insurance. So I've got five things to know right now, about cyber insurance because the attacks are increasing. It's becoming more and more important for companies to protect themselves and Cyber insurance may not cover you. And I have seen quite a number of times where companies This is in the news, thank goodness, I don't have personal experience with this. But in the news, I've read articles where companies filed for their sideburn against their cyber insurance policy. And their policy didn't payout. Right now in the news, there's a big story about large companies that are suing their insurance company because they wouldn't pay out all of the money that the company thought should be paid out. Now, in this case, we're talking about cyber insurance. That said, Hey, you have to take reasonable steps. Now with the cyber insurance that we have. So for instance, depending on the level of service you have from us, we have a policy underwritten by Lloyds of London whereby if you are compromised? Well, we're taking care of your systems. There is I think it's a million dollars worth of insurance. So it'll cover the smaller businesses typically. And then hopefully you have your own cyber insurance, right? That's how this whole thing works. And then, of course, our company, we have our general insurances, our liability and all of the stuff you would expect to have the right key man type stuff, etc. But since the cyber attacks are now a top business concern, we're seeing numbers from Microsoft that found that cyber attacks beat out economic uncertainty, brand damage and government regulation as the top concerns for business owners and C level executives. So if you're sitting on the board of a company or you're sitting on the board of a nonprofit that you're trying to help out with This is something that should be big on your mind. I did a presentation for university, about insurance, cyber insurance, how it all works, what the problems

EP021 - CEO and Founder of Your Location Lubrication (YLL), Zach Zeller http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 21 is an interview with Zach Zeller, CEO and Founder of Your Location Lubrication (YLL); recorded on Thursday, November 7th, 2019. Scot and Zach discuss a variety of topics, including... How Zach got his start in the industry with YLL YLL’s last 10 years of growth, driven by their fleet-focused approach The creation of YLL’s proprietary high volume oil change system Spiffy and YLL joining forces for Fleet Management as a Service Zach transitioning into his new position as SVP of Fleet Business Development at Spiffy Zach’s thoughts on the Vehicle 2.0 framework from a fleet maintenance perspective If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot:    Welcome to the vehicle 2.0 Podcast. This is episode 21 and it's being recorded November 7th, 2019 welcome back to vehicle 2.0 listeners. We took a little bit of a fall break there on the podcast and are excited to be back with you here today. It's 50 we recently announced that we are merging with your location lubrication, also known as YLL. So we took this opportunity to have the CEO and founder Zack Zeller on the podcast. Zach has been working in the industry for over 10 years, so we're really excited to get his insights about the automotive industry and his experience. Welcome on the show, Zach. Zach:    Thanks Scot. Scot:    And I think this is your first podcast ever. Zach:    So it is. Scot:    So we're excited to land the big first interview here on vehicle 2.0 let's start off by you and I have had the opportunity to spend a lot of time together and I've got to hear your story, but listeners haven't. So tell us how you got into the automotive space. Zach:    Yeah, so, you know, I got into automotive, the mobile onsite oil change space by having a bad experience at a, at a brick and mortar business. So, you know, had to go get the oil changed, you know, trying to upsell and, and do all these services that I didn't think were necessary. You know, it was cold, snowy, and so, you know, after my experience, bad experience yeah, I needed to, the thought there had to be a better way to do oil changes, right. There had to be somebody that could come to my house and provide this service, you know, while I'm at, at that, at home or at work. And so I started looking around and this was about 10 years ago and couldn't find, couldn't find that service. So, you know, with some research and idea, I thought, you know, I'm, I'm going to go out there and do this myself. Zach:    So jumped on Craigslist, went out and bought an old 2000, two 40 Econoline van and it put some oil in it and filters and started going door to door and knocking on people's doors to, you know, offer this service. Quickly realized that doing it one at a time, I wasn't making any money. Right? It's pretty quick. So, you know, I determine that, you know, for, for, for a while L that you know, our opportunity was in, in the fleet business and where could I go to find large fleets? And that led me to Orlando, one of the largest rental car company locations in the U S so moved down to Orlando and start knocking on the door of the rental car companies. And that was kind of my first end. So, you know, start off by doing four, five, six, 10 oil changes a day. And you know, I could start seeing the opportunities there and seeing that there was at the airports, right. Large fleets, large concentration of cars. And that's kinda how I got started. So, you know, by, by doing the one and two a day to five to 10 a day to, you know, now we're doing, you know, several hundred a day at the, at large airport locations. Scot:    Yeah. Awesome. and then one of the things that's pretty interesting is, so first of all, congratulations. Most businesses don't make it like five years. You've made it 10 years. I'm very successful. That's awesome. One of the things that we got excited about is you guys can handle, you know, something like four to six oil changes somewhat simultaneously. Talk a little bit about, so you've developed some proprietary technology, we don't want to go too far into that, but you know, how did, how did you realize you needed to be able to do that? You know, that many oil changes simultaneously did to really capture the high volumes. Zach:    Yeah. So, you know, it started you know, I w the day I got a phone call that there was about 200 oil changes at, at the airport location there in Orlando. And I went out there by myself. It was just me and one van. And, and you know, I had thought I had developed a system that to work, to be able to handle that. And what I realized was about after 10 cars that the system I had developed couldn't handle high volume. You know, I mean it was good for the five, 10 cars and, and it just wasn't working right. So it was really that I, I realized that, you know, to service 200 cars to do it efficiently, to do it. So the rental car companies could put those cars back on rent that we need to develop a system that could be high volume, right. That that could do four, six, 10 cars an hour. You know, so those cars can get back on the road. And so that's where we, we started trying all these different systems. We went to different manufacturers and trying different ideas and you know, over the last 10 years, we think that we finally found the right system that allows us to, to do what we consider high volume oil changes. Scot:    Yeah, yeah. If you're doing 200 oil changes and it takes 30 minutes per, that's a hundred hours separate. Zach:    Right? Yeah. Just doesn't work. Yeah. Scot:    So there, you know, that's weeks and weeks of time, which, which doesn't work. Cool. So what locations are you guys in? So you started in Orlando and have expanded quite a bit. What are some of the locations where you're in now? Zach:    Yeah, so we start in Orlando and then you know, through, through word of mouth. You know, we expanded into Tampa. We went down to Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm beach. So we kinda cornered the Florida markets, Fort Myers, and we worked our way up to Atlanta and then kind of out to out the West coast. So then we, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver. So kind of the, the major, what we consider major airport locations is kind of what our target market's been. Scot:    Hmm. Okay. And then talk a little bit about, so you spend a lot of time with rental, large rental car fleets. How do they think about the life cycle? Like how often are they buying vehicles selling them and, and how, what does that life cycle like for those kinds of really large fleet owners? Zach:    So, you know, I think what we've learned in the businesses, you know, the rental car companies are in the business of buying and selling cars, right? And making money off those you know, they're, they're keeping them in fleet and renting them out to really for the depreciation. So they're an asset to the rental car companies, right? And so providing the service and maintaining the vehicles is in the best interest of them. Right? They want to maintain that value of that vehicle so they can turn around and sell for the most money. So what we found is, you know, they're going out there and they're, they're buying cars there, pain to maintain them. Right? And that's part of the, you know, it's part of the service we offered the preventive maintenance service, right? They want them to, first of all, they want him to be safe on the roads. Zach:    So, you know, they care about the tires, they care about making sure the cars are rentable and ready to go. And then, you know, again, trying to get the most value out of them at the end of their life cycle. And you know, they're only keeping them for six months a year, right? They're putting 30,000 miles on these cars. You know, and they've got a lot smarter people than me that can figure out, you know, the life cycle of these vehicles and, you know, when's the right time to send them to auction and when to sell them and, you know, so we're there to support them and to help maintain those vehicles to the highest standards. Scot:    Right. And then you started in preventative maintenance. And then if they go out and buy a bunch, you know, I think today you're actually dealing with a situation where they went out and bought a bunch and you have to help them on that and they and then when they get rid of them, do you guys do anything there? Zach:    So currently, no. Yeah, you know, we help them, you know, there's, there's times that they have an increase of business and they need to go out and buy cars quickly so they'll go out to the auction. Right. And the goal is to get those cars on the road as quickly as possible. So, you know, doing a safety inspection, and getting the oil changed and helping them there. But as far as, we haven't been able to get in that market of the D fleeting of the vehicles a lot of opportunity there. Scot:    Awesome. anything else kind of on the YLL history or, you know, so you've, you guys maybe give us, give us an idea of the scale of the company today. Zach:    Yeah. So, you know, 10 years ago, start off with, with one person, one van. And you know, now whileL he's just,just over a hundred employees, we've got just about 70 vehicles on the road. You know, and more in 12 cities. Scot:    So it depends on how you count cities. Yeah. Yeah. We get that a lot. Awesome. Well, we're really excited to, well, let's talk about you know, so you, so you approached us a while ago and talked about how do we combine forces with what was your thinking there? Zach:    Yeah. You know, I started to see spiffy and learn, learn a lot about what spiffy was trying to do. You know, what I saw is, you know, we've, we've got, you know, while Al had this niche, right, the high volume oil change at airport locations soft, spiffy, had a lot of other interesting, you know, you guys rolled out your fleet management of services, which is really what caught my eye of, you know, you guys saw the need of fleets from the beginning of the inflating through the whole cycle to the D fleeting. And that's really where I thought that there could be, you can see the benefit to the rental car companies, the one stop shop, right? And so instead of sort of, you know, spiffy and while L kinda going at it against each other and being the competition, let's, let's join forces and let's, let's be the, to be the leader in the industry for the entire life cycle, those vehicles for the fleets. Scot:    Awesome. Well, we're real excited here at spiffy to join forces with Weill L a we feel like this is going to be, you know, put jet fuel behind the fleet management as a service division. And my favorite part is we can kind of go through the numbers combined. We'll be in over 20 locations. Our goal is to get to 50, so we're almost at that halfway Mark now. So that's good. Well together we'll have over 200 vans out there with all the equipment to do the variety of services we offer. And then the high volume capabilities you have. And then, you know, driving and servicing the vehicles. We'll have together over 300 technicians that are trained. They're W2 technicians versus kind of random 10, 99 kinds of folks. So we, we share a vision in that. We, we, you know, to make the consumer or the B2B consumer customer happy, you really have to have a trained technician there. Scot:    It can't be just kind of a random consult contractor. And then I think together we're servicing about 1500 vehicles a day. So that's a little scary as a software guy to get my head around. But that's a, that's kind of a, a good size of the scale over 40,000 services a month. And for all the people that are excited about oil I did some math and I think we're we're changing over 50,000 gallons of oil every month is combined company. So if there's anyone in the oil industry on the podcast would love to work with you. Cool. So you know, the topic of the podcast is vehicle 2.0 where we talk about the cars are going to change more in the next 10 years than they have in the last 110 years since the introduction of the model T. And we use the, the vehicle 2.0 framework where we talk about the four big waves that are changing vehicles connected car changing ownership, Evie and AB. So, so you guys are really you're kind of, I would say in that ownership side. So you've, you've been deepened the rental car model for a very long time. So we can spend the bulk of our time there. And if you wanna talk about anything else, that's fine too. But do you see any interesting trends with the future of car ownership? Zach:    Yeah. You know, I mean if we're looking at car ownership and, you know, for the rental car companies, you know, we're seeing a lot more shared services. So, you know, riddled car companies are, are working with, you know, the big ride share services, you know, they're trying to try to get them to use their rental cars, provide, you know, new cars that are, you know, safer and, you know, provide a better experience for the riders. You know, we're also seeing a lot more the car shared, I guess when I say car shared services, but you know, commutes, the Scot:    Kind of pulling and yeah, those are all the areas one out there. Yeah. Zach:    Yeah. And we're seeing a lot more of that to where, you know, especially on the West coast, that's becoming a big part of the fleet business. You know, the Facebooks and Goggles and all that are trying to provide ways for their employees to get to work instead of bringing individual cars. Let's, let's start doing this car pooling and they're going to turn into the rental car companies task for the help. Yeah. So we've started to see that quite a bit. Scot:    Yeah. I was I was listening to one of the conference calls with the Hertz CEO. And they got a question from one analyst, which was essentially you, you would think the Uber's and lifts of the world would start eating into the rental car companies. I know I consciously, a lot of business trips all, all kind of just use ride sharing instead of renting a car if I'm only going to one or two locations. And they, it was interesting, they, they actually said they have lost kind of like 5%, but it's like they're real short kind of, you know, kind of half a day kind of rentals but actually lose money on those. So it's actually been okay to lose that because then what have been able to do to your point earlier about keeping the cars they're keeping the cars longer and they're using that, they're adding a little tail period of three or four months there where they're now running them into the rideshare networks and that's, that's actually increasing their profitability because they get rid of the less profitable stuff and now they're keeping the cars longer and they're, they're getting a little bit of a longer life cycle out of the vehicles. Scot:    So it's pretty interesting how it's to predict the unintended consequences of how some of these things will, will, will be impacted out there. I know a question I get a lot when we talk about you know, that we're doing preventative maintenance including oil changes is, and you know, I drive an electric car, so I get this question a lot is, you know, why, you know, why would you guys be investing in this oil change thing when electric cars are clearly going to be here tomorrow? What do you think about that? Zach:    Yeah. You know, it's funny cause you drive an electric car. And I owned one for a while too. And you know, I got the same question of you on an oil change company and you're driving an electric car. And you know, what we realized is, is, you know, [inaudible] our main objective is to make sure the cars on the road that are safe, right? And so electric car or you know, a gas powered car, you know, they still need preventative maintenance if that's, you know, tire rotations, brake checks, you know, down to windshield washer fluid, right? They still have fluids in them. The key fobs still needs batteries. You know, there's a lot more than just changing oil. And so, you know, I think that electric cars, there's still the opportunity there and you know, we're getting asked to, to provide preventative maintenance services. Zach:    You know, as the car industries are starting, you know, rental car companies are starting to purchase electric cars, right? I mean, we're, and we've seen it now for the last couple of years and you know, still providing those services. You know, we've, we've gotten calls of, you know, electric cars on the side of the road that are dead. Right. And can you guys go provide, you know, can you guys take a generator out there and try to figure out how to, you know, get these cars back on the road or, you know, maybe they're stuck in the bottom of a parking garage deck and they can't get a tow truck in there to get them out because they're dead. You know, so I, I think that they're, even though they don't have oil right there, still need preventative maintenance and I think the possibility for services is still there. Scot:    Yeah, absolutely. It's funny, we work with some auction clients and one of the auctions had a bunch of Teslas come through and they didn't realize that, you know, they lose a little bit of charge everyday. So they let them sit there for 30 days and then they got bricked and you know, they, they, they didn't have any charging infrastructure. So we got that same kind of a call, you know, do you guys have any capability to come charge 20 Tesla's tomorrow in five hours kind of a thing. We didn't at the point, but it's something we're, we're always thinking about how can we, Oh well, you know, when that happens, how can we be ready for it and provide those types of services as well. How about connected car? We do a fair amount of that here at 50 because of the consumer. Maybe you guys ever kind of run into connecting car. Zach:    Yeah. You know, I think it's something that we're starting to see. Yeah, I think that for the, the rental car companies, you know, having the ability to, you know, connect to the cars remotely, right? To track mileage, to track service history, things like, you know, you always a car check engine lights, right? Can the car give all that data, push that data, the rental car companies instead of, you know, physically having to go out there and pull that information from the car. I think it's going to be a game changer. Scot:    Yeah. It seems like they'd have enough pull though Em's that they would be able to ask for those kind of capabilities in a, in a fleet management kind of way. Zach:    Yeah. I think it's, I think it's common for, I mean, I think that's kind of the next, the next round. Scot:    Cool. And then the last one, and this one's kind of out there, is autonomy. Any, any thoughts around autonomous vehicles? Zach:    Yeah, I mean, I think it's coming, right? I mean, we're starting to see a lot more of it, a lot more testing, you know, with, with, I had a Tesla and, and you know, it was supposed to be, you know, I mean, getting towards the autonomy. Right. I mean, it always amazed me. And you, I think that as, as, as we get closer and closer to fully autonomous cars, you know, we we see LIDAR, right? And all the camera systems. And, you know, I, I think it's going to actually provide more of an opportunity for us to provide the, the proven preventative maintenance, right. Preventative maintenance to me is more than just an oil change, right. It's, it can be LIDAR, you know, calibration. It could be, you know, camera calibrations, you know, whatever that's gonna be, you know, I think that there's going to be the opportunity there. Scot:    Yeah. And the, you know, these autonomous cars are racking up because they don't have a human in there that gets tired. They're racking up a lot of miles. You one of the examples of autonomy it used to be that, you know, it's coming tomorrow and now that they've scaled it back, one of the things that they're doing in Europe that I think will happen here is certain interstates having kind of autonomous truck lanes where, you know, there's, there's a human that kind of gets you to that point and then that's Honami takes over with a human backup. And then so, so it gives like truck drivers more hours. They can drive essentially by, by having the autonomy there. And you guys do some commercial stuff as well, so I could see that being interesting there where you would, you would want a mobile capability instead of, you don't want the autonomous thing to have to kick in and, and you know, drive someone 10 miles out of their way to get a preventative maintenance. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Well, Zach, thanks for coming on the podcast. We're excited to be your first venue. Hopefully this is the start of a very long podcasting career. And we're real excited to combine both spiffy and while L and look forward to working with you and your new role as our senior vice president of fleet business development. Zach:    Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.  

If you’re a bourbon die hard, you’ve probably asked yourself this question, “Do bourbon brands care about me?”. You know what I’m talking about because you join in on the conversation when distilleries increase prices or you get angry because your barrel picking group has been snubbed out for allocation reasons. The Bourbon Pursuit team takes a hard look at many of the larger whiskey producers by looking at some of their past actions. But if you’re the whiskey producer, what would you do in the same situation? Show Partners: Hotel Distil on historic Whiskey Row is set to open October 29th in Downtown Louisville. Book now to experience it for yourself at HotelDistil.com. The University of Louisville now has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/pursuespirits. Barrell Craft Spirits enjoys finding and identifying barrels that contain distinctive traits and characteristics. They then bottle them at cask strength to retain their authentic qualities for the whiskey enthusiast. Learn more at BarrellBourbon.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Distillery 291 is an award winning, small batch whiskey distillery located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Learn more at Distillery291.com. Show Notes: Wilderness Trail Expansion: https://amnews.com/2019/10/03/wilderness-trail-distillery-expanding-planning-huge-announcement/ Toddy’s: https://www.liquor.com/articles/best-bourbon-store-toddys-liquors/#gs.7u244v Glenlivet Scotch Pods: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/05/world/glenlivet-scotch-whisky-capsule-glassless-trnd/index.html Scotch Tariffs: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/03/business/us-tariffs-whisky-wine/index.html This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about line etiquette. What are your thoughts on the Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond relaunch? What do you think Heaven Hill did wrong in that situation? Are we moving away from a $15 price point? What about the Booker's price increase? Let's discuss Maker's attempt to lower the proof. What about Sazerac's strategy? What about Brown-Forman? What's happening with the allocation of barrel picks? Are people or groups getting cut off? 0:00 Hey everybody. If you have a bachelor's degree and live anywhere in the United States, there's now a way for you to take your bourbon education to the next level. The distilled spirits business certificate from the University of Louisville is an online program that can be completed in as little as 15 weeks and will prepare you for the business side of the spirits industry. It's offered by the ACS be accredited college of business, and this certificate was developed in partnership with industry experts to be one of a kind and it's going to prepare you for your next adventure. Learn more about this online program at U of l.me slash 0:35 pursue spirits All right, 0:37 let me see if I can't get everybody to just like Quiet on the set here. 0:41 All right, Quiet on the set. 0:56 Hey everybody, what is going on? It is Episode 220. of bourbon pursuit. I'm one of your host Kenny, and we've got a ton of news to run through. Let's not wait let's dive into it. Eagle rare bourbon is announcing the 10th annual Eagle rare life award. Now Eagle rare has partnered with garden and gun to seek nominations for the 10th annual Eagle rare life award. The award celebrates those who lead a rare life as defined by showing courage, leadership survival, devotion, character and heroism. Past recipients have included Brian Anderson representing USA cares in Jake Clark of save a warrior to nominate a remarkable individual for the annual Eagle where life award submit an application by November 3 2019. The finalists and their stories will be featured on garden and gun calm from November 15 to December 6, and they allows you to go and cast your votes. The winner of this award will be announced in early 2020. We talk all the time about how big players in the industry are always expanding but now we get to see one sort of on the mid size wilderness trail. Now you've heard from Pat heist and Shane Baker back on episodes 121 at 130. They are playing to add three new additional buildings to their site, including a 13,000 square foot addition. This is going to be an expansion of their bottling and administration buildings plus two new brick houses each totaling around 16,624 square feet. They will store 20,520 barrels each and they will be next in line for construction. The distilleries bottling operation is undergoing a $1.5 million dollar expansion right now with a new automated bottling line and warehouse space as they are going to be adding also more headcount in operations and administration. The distillery is currently wrapping up around a $6 million in capital projects for 2019 and as $8 million in projects underway for 2020. But now that you're doing close to 215 barrels of whiskey per day, you can read more about this in our show notes with the link to AM news.com. Back on episode 152. We featured Guthrie McKay of Tommy's liquors. Now this topic is polarizing to some folks. Today Guthrie charges more than secondary prices for his advocated bourbon and with this small shop that has a lot of listeners and shoppers going through, it puts them in a mixed and almost kind of gets you're frustrated and mad. But Guthrie has seen the highs and lows and he was a kind of a key and secret ingredient to helping the whiskey boom. And you can hear some of those stories that we were counted back on that episode 152 but you know Guthrie was also this week featured in a liquor.com article titled The best bourbon store on earth. And that might be a little bit of clickbait, but we've provided a few quotes to give context the story, and you can read that article with the link in our show notes as well. Jim beam's knob Creek is announcing a new limited edition bottling called quarter oak. The new release finishes knob Creek bourbon and quarter oak casks for four years. Now quarter casts are as the name suggests, one quarter the size of traditional 53 gallon barrels. And as we've seen this before, this means that there's an increase in the surface area with the charred oak relative the volume of whiskey inside. You can call it accelerated aging but it could just mean different types of taste profiles that are coming out of it. But when this finished product is going to be dumped from the Quarter Cask. It is then blended with knob Creek and bottled at 100 proof to create the knob Creek quarter oak, this is going to have a suggested retail price of $50. And with more release news heaven Hill is announcing that they are doing their first line extension of larceny, Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey larceny barrel proof released on an allocated basis three times per year. The first release of this weekend bourbon will ship in January of 2020. larceny barrel proof offers whiskey fans the opportunity to taste larceny just as heaven hills master distiller does Connor straight from the barrel. Each release will have varying proofs and consists of barrels aged of six to eight years old with releases in January may in September. This is also going to have the same naming convention that we've seen with Elijah Craig barrel proof. So the first release will be a 120 a representing the first batch of the year one representing the month with this January and 20 representing the year 2020. Each release will be bottled at barrel proof non chill filtered and available at a suggested retail price of 4999. we first saw it with black and which is metallic is new whiskey, followed by collaboration Slipknot with an Iowa whiskey company and now few spirits and Warner Music artists services are announcing a new release called all secrets know which is a new limited edition bourbon distilled by few spirits master distiller Paul help go in collaboration with Grammy nominated and multi Platinum selling Seattle grunge pioneers. Allison chains now whose music has also stood the test of time and pollutes a generation as well as a lot of whiskey lovers out there two bottles will feature a custom design label by artists Justin Helton. For this release few bourbon is finished for six months in tequila barrels bottled at 101 proof and will have an MSRP or suggested retail price of $75. This game this is how bourbon pursuit we hardly ever really talked about scotch, but the Glenlivet has the internet up in arms because they have released something that was new. It was a video and the Internet has coined it scotch pots. They are clear seaweed wraps that are completely edible and have a cocktail in a clear capsule, Glenlivet partnered with a sustainable startup on this new idea, and it has everyone talking about it. Some folks thought it was April Fool's in October, but we'll see who has the last laugh on this one. If they catch on, they will be served during London celebration of college tail innovation through October 13. And you can read about that with more in our show notes. We've talked about terrorists on the podcast before and terrorists, the retaliation are coming back harder and harder. The US is now going to be imposing a 25% tariff on scotch whiskey being imported into the US. This is going to increase the price of scotch for Americans. The US is the largest market with over $1 billion of scotch whiskey being exported in 2018. Well, perhaps this might get more people drinking bourbon in the end, but who knows what the outfall of this could be. You can read more about it with the link in our show notes as well. Now speaking of what things that we have going on, our community took one for the team and selected a barrel at Traverse City which ended up being a seven year in GP, or incredibly fortunate that we get to bring these experiences to our Patreon community and happy that all these whiskey geeks get to be a part of them. We have a new barrel pic to announce which is in addition to our last one week that we announced which is our Eagle wearable are also adding in to 2019 k jack daniels barrel proof that will be taking place in December. This is going to bring our 2019 tally to 19 barrels selected. And we've already got our first barrel lineup for 2020 as well. Thanks once again to our retail partner, keg and bottle out of the San Diego area for making this all happen. You can go check out their website and get whiskey shipped straight to your door at keg the letter in bottle.com. today's podcast it's one for the diehards, you know who you are because you join in the conversation when distilleries are increasing their prices are you get angry because your barrel picking group got snubbed because of allocation reasons. Now the trio of bourbon pursuit we're here to talk about some of the actions that we've seen over the past year and contemplate. Do bourbon companies actually care about their consumers? Or is this just a part of a bigger game that we all have to play? We mentioned it towards the end of the show. But if 9:00 You're a producer and you're listening to us. Just know that we love you. And we do our best to play devil's advocate. But there's some things that we saw that we really feel like we should take the bourbon communities view and kind of really talk about it put out there in the open and see what happens. So hope you're going to enjoy this one. Alright, so let's get down to it. Here's Joe from barrell bourbon. And then you've got Fred Minnick. What's up the char? It's Joe from barrell bourbon. We enjoy finding and identifying barrels that contain distinctive traits and characteristics. We then bottle them a cash rank to retain their authentic qualities for the whiskey enthusiast. Keep up to date with our newsletter at barrell bourbon.com. 9:37 I'm Fred Minnick. And this is above the char, I reached out to my followers on Twitter for this idea, and bourbon West came up with a good one. He wanted to know how we could improve the etiquette of standing in lines for bourbon. And he's speaking in particular of the etiquette towards the distillery, the store owner, the proprietary, he's saying that he sees some disgusting behavior out there when it comes to standing in line for these were bottles. So thanks, bourbon west for this idea. And here's the thing, if we want bourbon so badly, that we're willing to camp out overnight stand in a long line, I bring my kids to these things. So I have to it's it's the only way I can get there because my wife will be out of town or she'll be running. And the only way I can go to a lot of these events is if I bring my kids and so right then and there. I'm kind of like an odd man out people look at me funny because I've got my kids. And I'm standing in line for bourbon. So they're like, there's there's your dad of the year. But you do see people like get very angry toward the store owner, if they are the last in line and they don't get a bottle. Or they're at the front and they can't get what they want. Or they see a bottle in the store and the store owner wants sell it to them. I've seen people yell, I've seen people throw tantrums. And then you see people on social media afterwards, just absolutely tearing apart a business for them not selling him a bottle. And is that right? Well, you know, it's free speech. And people have the they can do whatever they want. But when you're inside someone's property, and you are there as a customer, there are some things that you should do first, you should never really raise your voice to the store owner. That could be you know, considered threatening, and, you know, if somebody wanted to, they could kick you out, and you should be just a good decent human being. You got to remember this whole bourbon thing. It's, it's just a hobby. It isn't something it's not life and death. We're not curing cancer. We're trying to get a nice bottle of bourbon. So treat people with respect. And so there are three rules that I recommend that everyone carry when it goes into the stores. dress nice it This may sound very weird, but people do not act like assholes when they dress nice. Now what is nice now you know I wear an ascot I'm not saying you have to do that, for God's sake. I'm the only person left on the planet still wearing the damn things. But you know, maybe like a like a polo shirt and khakis and a pair of nice shoes. And you'll find that you don't want to be a dickhead when your dress pretty nicely. Number to say thank you. Even if you do not get the bottle you want the store manager, the store clerk anybody you interact with the distillery whoever, just say thanks. And number three, the people who you're around with start talking to them. Where are they from? Some of the best friends I've made in bourbon have been from standing in line at these places. You really do meet some cool people. They'll be from all over the state or country and sometimes even out of the country because it's their only opportunity to get a rare bottle. So just practice those three things. And it seems like little but hopefully it will diffuse someone else from being a dickhead when they're shopping bourbon. And that's this week's above the char. Hey, if you have an idea like bourbon West did hit me up on Twitter or Instagram at Fred Minnick. That's at Fred Minnick. Until next week. Cheers. 13:15 welcome back to this episode of bourbon pursuit the official podcast of bourbon, the whole trio here today. Wow, hoping we don't burn some bridges. Right? I mean, we're going to be bringing the heat putting some people under some fire. But also, I think speaking for the broader bourbon community that's out there, because we're going to be talking and the subject is, you know, do distilleries actually care about their customers? And this is we thought about this idea. Because, gosh, what was it probably six months ago, we had this this concept of like, everything The news was changing. There's people that are taking off products, there's allocations of barrels that are just getting axed across the board from Yeah, as Fred always said, people that took you to the dance. So today, we're going to, 13:57 you know, barrel programs not kind of going he usually just made it him. 14:02 And so that's exactly what today we're really gonna be focusing on is, is looking at and hopefully, you know, I think we're going to take some, put some fire, put some heat and do some people, we all got to play a little devils advocate, right? Kind of will, one of us one of us will kind of take the role of, well, if the distillers that if I'm the distiller here, like, what's my response? Male? Fuck 14:21 it, let's just, whatever, whatever I mean, it this is this is a conversation that we need to have. Yeah, they need to know, we need to have this conversation because they're, you know, I feel like sometimes distilleries live in a bubble. They live in a bubble of their bottom line, and, you know, help benefiting their shareholders. And the informations out there. It's not like they can't go to a social media forum and find the data find, find people conveying their feelings about what consumers want and what they need. You know, their two years ago, they'd spent $150,000, to get the kind of feedback that is free now. Yeah, on social media. And what I have found consistently, is that they continue to ignore a lot of what people want, or what at least what they're saying they want on social media. 15:20 Absolutely. Well, they got short memories. They forget that like, just 10 or 15 years ago, nobody gave a shit about them. 15:27 So before we also kick it off and dive even further, you know, if you're watching on video, you might be hearing some background noise and people shuffling through because we are recording an episode of this podcast from the barrel room at Hotel distil, which is going to be on historic whiskey row here in Louisville, and it's set to open on November 1. And hotel distill is a place that is exciting. It's got a rich history that's happening here. It's now being transformed into this great space. It's designed to really, you know, what they say is ignite your passion for discovery and we'll do this 16:00 Social anchor for Louisville's revitalization and refinement of bourbon culture and you can book your experience now and stay at this authentic little destination at Hotel distil com. Yeah, I think this JTS Browns office they said at one point there Yeah, this is the actual building his office I had no idea Fred you got any insight into Yeah, this is this is the this is one of the I actually have an old photo of of like the 16:28 an old photo of like the outside and said JTS Brown, it was actually out there. 16:31 Yeah. facade. 16:33 Yeah. And, you know, a lot of cool things happened in here. 16:37 It just amazes like 1015 years ago, all this was like a dump. And yeah, I mean, it was it was like a Renaissance. I mean, 16:43 it was I saw what whiskey row was. I mean, I remember one of our first podcast we did was actually saving whiskey row and what it was, and all the effort that went in for historical and preservation societies of what it went to actually save a lot of the buildings and the facades that you do see out here, 16:57 guys, I want you to think about this. You know, in the 1800s, early 1900s, there were fellows walking around and their suits, go into meetings, and they were brokering deals about bulk whiskey. And they were talking about, like, you know, exporting it to Japan or Germany or wherever. I mean, this is where all the action happened. for American whiskey, where it's like, we're right here at the wall street of whiskey. I really don't like using that term, but it is it really is. And it just kind of went away. And level. You know, I and I give a lot of this credit to our mayor, Mayor Fischer. Greg Fischer. I really don't think, you know, any of this Renaissance happens without, you know, kind of like his, his vision to like, improve, improve this part of our culture. 17:46 Well, and I know and it might be a slider, Ryan, you know, he always has this famous line that you know Bardstown as the capital of bourbon, but it still is global is the epicenter of bourbon. Well, maybe now. 17:58 10 years ago, not so much. Nobody cared about down there, down here. They saw how cool it was in barge towns, they're like, Oh, we gotta do we gotta go do it now. 18:05 Absolutely. 18:06 So I'll play a Bardstown can put up some hotels like this, I think 18:10 they missing it. They need this, put a distill and bars down the awesome. Here we go. 18:15 So let's go ahead. And let's dive back into the subjects here. And let's go ahead and we'll take we'll take an easy one, right. I mean, this is one that is a recent news because as people in ourselves live in little boy live in Kentucky, we had access to the white label have six year Heaven and Hell bottle and bond. And it was a, you know, it kind of made. It was pretty big news, right? I mean, when they said they were gonna take it off the market. However, there was no announcement to say that there was going to be a relaunch, there's no anything like that. It was just something that I think it usually kind of started through the grapevine where the distributors found out about it distributors told the retailers, the retailers then told the consumers and then from there, everything went kind of Bismarck, and people just started clearing the shelves left and right. And Kentucky is actually finding this, this white label. And fast forward two to three months afterwards, then a press release comes out that says they're gonna be relaunching with an additional year, and, you know, three x the actual price of what it was before, before you can get it around, what 1215 bucks. And then it was coming back with an SRP of $40. But not only this is also be going out a little bit further outside of Kentucky hitting I think, what 678 states something like that during its first launch. So let's kind of talk about that. What do you think heaven hell did wrong in this situation? 19:41 Well, they, we kind of talked about this on the round table, but you know, that they think we're like stupid or something like they just totally like think, as consumers, like, we'll put out this press release. And just believe what we say. And it happened with the logic, Craig 12. You know, for years, we were like, we're like, oh, we're gonna move the 12 from the front to the back. And you're like, is it going away, no, never, never gone away. And then it goes from the back. It's not no longer and a number, they write the letter 12 or the word 12 on the back. And then after that, and it's like, you think we're stupid, then they do the same thing with heaven Hill, like six year they'd say, Oh, it's going away and never coming back. And then, you know, home to hold. Three months later, get a press release. And so it's like, I get what they're doing, they're going to try to make it a more premium product to the mainstream audience. But like 10 to 15 years ago, nobody cared about you. 20:40 I mean, let's let's also, I'll take their side, little bit here, you know, not even told that that was really happening. Not a ton of people really cared about the white label. I mean, it was always available. It's always there. It was something that was kind of our whiskey geek. Like it was like the thing you knew about like, you're like, that's the bottle that you go, that's 99 or 1099, that you could always count on as a 21:04 great poor at a great value. And like you said, it was kind of you had to be in the know to know about it. 21:10 To answer your question, Kenny, I think the one thing that the mistake they made was transparency. And I I'm very, very close with with heaven Hill, I think their whiskies fantastic. Some of the best I mean, I they do a great job. But I think in this growth of American whiskey, there has been a, there still has been a little bit of this kind of like old school protectionism, of holding on to their ideas and what they're going to be doing, you know, to kind of protect it from, you know, their competitors finding out. Well, really what has happened is that consumers, we feel like we have a right to know, of like, what's happening, 22:00 But what are they hiding? Like? It's whiskey. Like they act like they got like 22:06 you would if they said, We are pulling heaven hills, six year old off the market, to rebrand it, and bring it back as a seven year old bottle and bond at an additional price to more consumers? Would you be? See that's just I think most people would be fine with that. And the last thing I would have been fine with, hey, we really want this to stay available on shelves, we don't want to be like, well, they're 12. So that's why we're going to drop the age statement, kind of do a blend of eight to 12 which, by the way, they 12. So I mean, I was to use Preston van winkles term, I was bought hurt for probably about two years. 22:45 You still don't let it go. 22:47 But it was Elijah Craig 12 years is like so 22:50 tricky. Just like, like we're in it, but the age statement, you know, write it on the back and like had it and then eventually just phase it out and then change it. 22:58 I also so so that that's to me is the only thing the business decision to do it. I don't have a problem with and I don't think it's them not caring about their consumers? I think it's I think it's simply a I think they make a decision and they try to think about the best way to release it. And they're not thinking about necessarily the backlash and the whiskey geek state, we are still very much a very small portion. We are the one percenters 23:23 right, that's that's the one one thing I think, if I keep taking the distillery side of this, and I keep thinking, well, if I'm heaven Hill, I, my goal is to look at the broader market, right? My goal is to focus on that. And when I even put out these press releases, who cares? Except, you know, the 10,000 people that are like really hardcore into this, right. And 23:47 I'm still just flabbergasted by like, they think they have this secret stuff. Do you think like Buffalo Trace gives a shit that they're taking heaven Hill six off year and bringing it and relaunching it like, what do they? What do they think they're hiding? Like, I didn't mean from a competitive stamp, right? Like, yeah, I mean, this, whiskey takes years to develop to what it becomes. And so like, when you announce something, you've thought about it for a very long time, like, somebody just can't replicate it, like a month later, you know, 24:14 let's remember to 14 years ago, when there was like, there were like, two or three of us out there, kind of writing about this sort of thing. Now, I mean, you have a sea of social media, people, you know, finding a bottle, you know, analyzing every single thing, and it's very knowledgeable base. And so we can, you know, people can find out things really quickly. And also heaven hills got a you know, they have a few people in their organization that, you know, will get on social media and or under anonymous handles and say things. So there's that some moles they have, 24:52 they have some leaders. And so does that mean, they all do? 24:55 Nailed it? So I'll take the other side of this. And we had Larry cast on the show, right? You know, before he retired, and Larry is still being even in his retirement. He's actually been very outspoken on this even on social media and Hall 25:07 of Famer, by the way, yes, yes. 25:08 Recent inductee to it. Yeah. And, you know, he goes against the saying is insane. Like, the brand has been undervalued for far too long. True. And it's and it's very true. I think, I think bourbon in itself has been undervalued for this is very true. I agree with all that. But I guess, you know, when we look at it from another standpoint of, you know, if we're going to, is there a market to keep bringing $15 bottles of whiskey or where are we past that because it had been that way for so long is it do we just need to move on. And 25:37 so I've done some research and the studies show that when you raise prices, you actually get more customers. And I've witnessed many people go into liquor stores and my various, you know, book signings and stuff and you know, they're new to bourbon, they don't know anything about it. And the the store rap will try to get someone to buy four roses yellow label, and they'll look at the price. And they say, No, it's too cheap. I want that one. And they'll point to like Jefferson's reserve. And I'm picking I'm picking four roses yellow label every day of the week, over Jefferson's reserve. We still love Trey about Yeah, still. Yes, but but that from a value perspective, you know, I'm saying it's like, that's like, it's, you know, I'm saving pennies, or I'm saving, you know, 1015 bucks. Absolutely. But the the everyday consumer looks at this as a luxury good. And $15 isn't luxury. And that's that's kind of where they're, that's where these these distillers you're coming from? 26:38 Yeah, and understand that from like, if you're buying a gift or wanting to try something special, but if you're wanting like, quality everyday drinkers, you know that you gotta have an affordable option like 30 $30 for heaven Hill balled and bond, I think, or whatever, it's gonna be $40. I think it's overpriced for what it is. I'm, it's me, it's good. But I can drink some great, didn't you? 27:04 Me it was that great. He kept he kept 27:05 himself from 27:08 Above Average? 27:11 Well, I mean, from an everyday drinker to like, Am I going to go buy it at 40. Whereas if I would have it, you know, constantly on my bar, but they don't care about me, they care about the mass audience. And so, 27:22 all right, so here's the here's the sad, hard truth of it. The only line against this is the bartender, the bartender, has to have it at a surf a certain price in order for them to make money. And you can't make a $40 cocktail, right? You gotta it's got to be 10 to 15. So that's why that's why like in scotch, you know, they have like monkey shoulder and Glenlivet, 12 year old, you know, it's very affordable, you know, well, scotches, and the bartender community will always make sure that we have a 15 to $25 bird, because they have to make money on it. And you know, Larry rice is not going to be making cocktails with you know, $55 bourbon. 28:09 Absolutely. So I guess that's the kind of like, makes me think of another question. Like, if one of the main strategies behind bullet and how bullet became so big was because they were able to get behind the bar. Yeah. So in bullet is not a 15 $20 bottle, right. I mean, last time I checked, it's still in the 35 to $50 category. I don't 28:29 know I actually I've seen it for I saw like $18 Cosmo, is it? 28:33 Yeah, well, nevermind. Yeah. bullets in the sub $25 range, we found out what Kenny doesn't buy. 28:41 Just don't pay that much attention, apparently. 28:45 So I think we beat up on heaven Hill a little bit. So I think, 28:48 well not beat up on them. It's just they know, the criticism. And they, they they see it. And it's also stuff that I wouldn't tell them to their face. You know, like, I guess we'll do it on the podcast. back. No one's gonna hear the end day always push back of like, we are. We're a business and we're trying to make money. What I really the thing about it is I also feel bad for heaven Hill, because they get they do get a lot of blowback, and poor Bernie lovers. That guy's doing his job. 29:21 Yeah, but they do it themselves. They do it 29:22 themselves. But Bernie's like, sometimes just kind of left on an island. He's got to be the punching bag, you know? And it's like, I hope they're paying him well, and if not, they need to give him a raise, because that he takes a lot of a 29:34 lot of abuse. And it feels he gotta have a little bit of empathy for him too, because he ends up being like the spokesperson for the brand. I mean, yeah, right. Ryan, do you remember when we interviewed him? We had a two part interview. And we actually asked him, we asked him about Elijah Craig, and the 12 year age statement. And he looked, I mean, he came and he said, and he has no, it's not going away. You know, we're just moved to the back and little blah. And then, like, two months later, 29:57 again, whoops. Yeah, you know, we had to do this because make it available. And it's like, well, two minutes later, it was available and what changed it to 30:05 remember to like, automation, he had, oh, it's not his fault. It's and that's the and that's also the information that the someone gave him had, you know, so, you know, the decision was made that I have no doubt that, you know, they're looking at stocks and they're looking at where the future is and everything, and they make they make decisions in a moment and, and then everyone else is is forced to, like kind of 30:31 catch up to it. I guess. I just don't understand. I understand. Yes, Bourbons undervalued. I totally agree with that. But that's what your logic Craig's your inner McKenna's your Evan Williams single barrels your William heaven hills that's what they're those are brands are for heaven Hill has been a everyday affordable drinker. I don't understand why pivot takeaway from those brands to position this one when it's been like a bomb on the shelf all for all i also 30:58 think so you're thinking one particular thing get to realize when you go to Heaven Heaven hell we've all been in the label room there's hundreds of thousands of labels that they have maybe not hundreds but the definitely thousands Yeah, and I'm pretty sure like a bought every abandoned trademark of Oh, I just don't know that. So let me keep going here because I know when you think about the heaven hell bottom Yvonne that's one thing but you still got Evan lanes bottle and bond. You've got virgin you've got all these things but don't get me wrong I know people are starting to hate on the virgin thing now because they're dropping the age statement off that one as well. So you know it's just a continual progression of what are they going to be able to do 31:32 be honest that was the best marketing that virgin ever had no one knew about that fucking perfect. I mean, we can hear me there's like we knew about it sounded but like i was i was cracking up with like all these people like, like you didn't know about that bourbon. It was a very like I mean, heaven Hill bottle the mom people knew about it, but it's like out of the woodwork they're all a virgin fan. Like Come on. 31:54 Yeah, that was where it was mostly in like North Carolina Yeah. 31:58 There was like a Washington's like, I can't get any worse. Like you couldn't get it anyway. 32:02 Yeah, you know, so not even be tried. But 32:04 it's like I don't know what you're saying they 32:06 still came out. I mean, they rebranded it and came out of quality house right. So it's still still the same box he you know, 32:14 let's mean heaven hills seven years old and bond thousand barrel dump is not a $40 bottle like it 32:24 I get it, it's a rebranding. It's a way to do this. I mean, you can also see this as a way that you know, they they wanted to remove the name heaven Hill, from lower in tears, like, okay, green labels not 32:35 gone away the 90 proof one, you know why? Because someone in the Shapiro family, that's what they buy. Oh, well, so it's on their it's on their bar inside. And so it'll it'll always be there because they that's what they drink. You know, I think it's probably important that we also look at some of the some of the brands that have reacted to consumers pushing back pricing. Like when Booker's announced that they were going to be $100 bottle, you know, they went, they they reverted pretty quickly, because they were like, they were getting a murder. Remember that? 33:13 Oh, yeah, just it was 33:14 11 years ago, they changed it, but yeah, 33:16 they changed it back. And, you know, they didn't have to change any branding or anything. But, you know, they still have a little bit of residual 33:25 in I mean, to be fair Booker's, probably, I mean, it's a barrel proof six year like, really good bourbon. I mean, 33:32 I used to get it for 55 bucks. Yeah. And it was it was 33:37 the most incredible values out there. 33:38 That is a that is to me, that was a more palatable, you know, price increase. You know, they decided change, I think it's 75 or something like that. CSRP now it's about it's probably right where it needs to be and I think people are happy with 33:54 that you were still happy with that. And I mean, I still recommend it to people who haven't tried something and you want to you know, start elevating and trying to go barrel proof and you know, to kind of just take a note off your above the char from weeks ago, you know, being able to experience the different flavors you can get with barrel proof by starting at barrel proof, adding some water adding some ice letting the ice melt, you know, you get you get to experience bourbon five different ways. In a in a barrel proof whiskey like that. So 34:20 some you can always find to, but you know, 34:22 Becker, Booker's isn't the only one remember makers, even what had been five years ago about the 2013? The proof? 34:29 Yeah, the proof debacle, they still won't, they still won't talk about it. So for our listeners out there, this is what happened in 2013, Maker's Mark decided to lower their proof from 90 proof to 84. And they announced it to their brand ambassadors, which is their program that they have for their sir customer loyalty program. So they sent an email to it and people in batch it crazy. It was it was it ended up being front page news, Jay Leno, or one of the you know, the talk shows were talking about it. He was on CNN, it was everywhere. And I got like this. I was I was covering it very, very intensely. And I got these interviews with Bill Samuels and Rob Samuels. And I remember bill saying like, oh, son of a bitch, I guess people really care about our wisdom, you know. And it's like, they say, Bill always has this way of like, making everything sound funny and putting things in perspective. But they changed it back. But to this day, people think people think it's a, it was a marketing ploy, because it was only eight days that they had it out there. But think about it, they had to change their labels, you know, they had to pull. Well, they had they already had products out there had 35:42 a product out there. I mean, and that's kind of I think, I wouldn't say it's a unicorn by any means. But it's definitely a unique bottle that people could have how many 84 proof? maker's marks do you have? I don't 35:52 even think I've ever had it or tried it. 35:55 Not to have you had it, lady? I know. I bet it I they actually I tasted it on the air for a TV station. I was like, yeah, this is it's more watered down. It was like very light. There you go. I mean, really, it's makers is not the I mean, it's nice, but it's not the most complex whiskey. You know, it's it's fine for what it is. But I really did think it was a bad move from a whiskey perspective, because you could taste the difference. You really could. 36:18 Yeah, but I think they've they've been able to rebound and with flying colors. So I haven't really had a problem. 36:26 These companies need like somebody on their team, like they have like bean counters, like making these decisions. You 36:31 know, like, I mean, let's not like in the in the government, they just don't have, like, the government has like someone from like, so the VA has like veterans on committees, to, like have like a veteran oversight committee to make sure that the veterans are getting treated like they should be instead of like the, you know, the doctors want, maybe you want to treat them. And I think you're right, I think that might not be a bad idea. But you know what, they're never going to go for it. And you know, and here's an example I can think of like Sazerac in a lot of people's eyes. They're their public enemy number one. And that's that's because their stuff is highly allocated hard to get. But it's so damn good. Yeah, so I mean, it's same with heaven Hill, their whiskey so damn good. It's kind of like you know, it's kind of like the it's a love hate relationship. Exactly. It's like the the girlfriend you had in high school who couldn't stand but she was so hot, ready? 37:26 Like, I can't help myself, like crap, but yeah, I can't stop 37:31 it. So I guess, you know, will kind of shift the gears a little let's talk about Sazerac. 37:38 As the saying goes, Portland is weird. Perhaps it's something in the water. It turns out that there might be some truth to that. The Oregon capitals primary water source is supplied by the bowl run watershed. It's also the key ingredient and one of the city's most popular watering holes, Bull Run distillery, the boulder and watershed is a very unique water source. It's protected by an act of Congress back in the 1870s. And the city's 38:00 Others got their hands on a beautiful lake up in the Cascade Mountains. And it's been that way since the 1870s. It used to flow through wooden pipes by gravity to Portland. It's that water that gives Voltaren distilleries products, its distinct character. Two bottles are being featured in rockhouse whiskey clubs. Next box. rackhouse was club. It's a whiskey the Month Club, and they're on a mission to uncover the best flavors and stories that craft distilleries across the US have to offer rockhouse ships out to their featured distilleries finest bottles, along with some cool merchandise in a box delivered to your door every two months. Go to rockhouse whiskey club. com to check it out and try some Bull Run for yourself. Use code pursuit for $25 off your first box. distillery 291 Colorado whiskey aims to create a one of a kind bold and beautiful Colorado whiskey, rugged, refined, rebellious owner and founding distiller Michael Myers built the original still from copper photocopier plates, which he used to create in during photographic scenes from Western landscapes to the Chrysler Building. 39:00 on sep tember 11th 2011 10 years after 911 changed his life and the lives of so many others. He pulled the first whiskey off that's still building a future in whiskey office passion for photography. What defines to 91 Colorado whiskey is it spirit passion permeates every sip, find a bottle near you at 291 Colorado whiskey calm, right like you stole it, drink it like you own it, live fast and drink responsibly. Let's will kind of shift the gears a little let's talk about Sazerac. You know, I I will say that the one thing I will I will stand behind size rock. And what they do very well is that they are not pulling the strings of saying like okay, well, we're going to pull something off the market or we're going to just say like, Hey, we see what this stuff trades for we're not dumb, we're going to go ahead and we're going to MSRP our products at x, y, z value, right? They I believe that they are in it for the long game. Like Yeah, I'm they see this is not this is just a quick market blip, where it's going to be something that you know, if you chase after the short money in the short dollar, then that's all you're going to wait, that's that's all it's going to happen. Like you're not going to be able to sustain this for the next 1015 years. So you brought up a good point, because a lot of people distilleries do look at the secondary market, even though say they don't but to especially for limited releases, they really have kind of fell on the secondary market to price things. For me, it's gone up up up and up every single year. And where it says right, it's kind of kind of stay true to like, I mean, I don't me wrong, there's been there's been gradual increases. I mean, if you take it back to 2010 days, you know, antique collection was probably $65, whatever, but going up to 100. Like that's not a that's not a good, that's not a huge ship. 40:48 Parker's was 5575 bucks. And now it's like 400, depending on you know, that 24 years, like 400 bucks or 300 bucks 40:57 retail, and then you take a birthday bourbon, for example, back in 2003, that was a $45 bottle. Now, it's 161 60 out the door at the distillery. So I mean, it's, it's, that's definitely 41:11 something way that the way that says rack operates is basically through the brain of Mark Brown. And Mark is a very conservative, you know, thinker when it comes to business and how they do things. But he's also a long term planner, they have planned out their whiskey projections through 2043. So they are they are that planned out. And they have made the appropriate, you know, business decisions that, you know, to get them where they need to be, I think that the biggest concern that consumers have with the way that company operates is through distribution. Now a lot of it is not anything that they can control. You go into a retailer or an on premise facility. And they will tell you, the only way that they can get Pappy or Buffalo Trace antique collection is if they carry Wheatley, vodka or some of the others as rack brands in large quantities now, that is that is a decision that is made at the distributor level is not. 42:18 That's because I always I always kind of thought like, somehow there's something working in the back the back room over here. And there's greasy palms to be able to say like, you 42:26 know, I'm saying like, if you want this, you gotta that is a very good conspiracy theory to have. But as of right now, it is illegal, you know, to have those conversations for it is illegal for a, a supplier to dictate who gets what, that is an actual law. That is under the federal alcohol administration act. Now, what is happening? I don't know. But I do know that everybody wants that whiskey. And, you know, how does how does the distributor make the decision of who to give it to? Now I've had conversations with people like Joe Beatrice, who's like, the only way you can do this is, you know, top, top level now, you know, customer loyalty. And so it's like, you know, how do they How does the distributor make the decision of who gets the five bottles of Pappy? Is it a? Is it a favoritism thing? Because if that's the case, that's also you know, is that is that fair? Is it you give it to the one who's like doing you're doing your bulk purchases, I've also heard of them like, like the distributors making decisions of like giving using Pappy to get rid of non Sazerac product. So like being would be in their portfolio or, you know, another big brand like that and say like, take up, take all this off of her hand, and you get you get a case of happy. So that stuff happens. And that is not, you know, to my knowledge, you know, I don't know how that you know how those conversations are going. Well, you don't know that's 43:59 the necessarily sighs rags. Yeah. Problem. It's, it comes back to them. But do you think they falsely manipulate their supply? Like to create this allocation? Like myth or because every time I go to Buffalo Trace, there's, they're always bottling blends, and it's always piled up cases? Because it's like what they have done. They got as many warehouses as all these 44:25 other big boys. Yeah, but you gotta realize they're also filling in the hand doing every single one with six people on the line. That's not that's not heaven. Hill level automation. 44:33 Yeah. What a lot of warehouses a lot age juice in there. I mean, this is true. 44:38 What what they do, they do put out, they used to put out an annual press release, about that, and it got picked up everywhere. You know, a smart marketing will say that. But what what Buffalo Trace has done is that they have spread the markets out so much like so let's say, you know, they're trying to penetrate every market in the country. My best friend lives in northern Wisconsin. He's building a Buffalo Trace, really now he can only have one bottle a month, because, you know, because now that northern allocations is moving on over to North Dakota. And so what they have done is they have they're trying to saturate the domestic markets so much that they've spread themselves out of being able to get into the hands of a lot of people so so that allocation that supply is because they're trying to open up bars in Montana, and places like Montana and Wyoming North Dakota. You know, I dare say you walk into a random liquor store there and you might you might find like a gold mine of like Sazerac products. 45:42 Well, where are they? Who are they using their, you know, everyday products like Buffalo Trace or Willer will or 12? To kind of fuel the more premium products like v tak and Pappy, do you think that you know, I mean, most of the most of what they do is they come out with a a lower version of everything that you get stack Junior, you gotta go rare, and then you get the big boys on top. But I know it seems like there's more like 12 year, it's I think it's sometimes easier to get a van Winkle 12 than it is a well or 12 zalando 46:12 you know, well, I think that's this is also just the the rise and the rise of bourbon and the amount of people that are looking forward to I mean, that's we say it's it's hard. It's it's not because yes, I still think there's I would honestly, probably guess that there's probably they're pushing out more product now than they ever have. But it seems still scares to us, because there's still more people now that are looking for it. 46:36 It's I'll put on their hat for a second. They have everybody in the world wants them. How do you how do you decide? What market gets what? 46:47 Yeah, I mean, that's that's it's definitely a tough call. Because you've gotta you gotta take one out of your your your playbook here is is who's been with us for the longest time who are the most loyal customers? Who are the ones with the biggest pockets right now that are really want us? I mean, Money Talks, like let's not be Bernie lovers always said it the best. This is not the bourbon charities the bourbon business. Yeah. And so who's got who's got money? money's gonna talk. And if, if by some chance and Ryan, we know, we've looked at this when we were opening up distribution for pursuit series, and we're like, oh, what state should we go for? And he did a trip down to Texas. And really, I 47:23 always forget that you to like on a brand. Like we're having this conversation. I'm like, wait, you guys hate your customers. 47:30 We listened to our customer feedback. We listened and we go, we go to a snail's pace. But I mean, but but the part was, you know, he said, like, let's look at Texas. And you look at Texas, and he came back from a trip. He was like, Kenny, this is this is so smart. Like why not? There's like, there are more people in the city of Dallas than there are in the state of Kentucky three times as many people in the city of Dallas as there is in the whole state of Kentucky. And then you got states or cities like Houston, San Antonio Austin, and you're like, why would you know, any liquor company would be smart to in they're thirsty. They're thirsty for it, right? And it's like, Okay, well, that's that's an easy target. So you go after the larger markets. 48:12 Dallas bourbon club, shout out to you boys. Yeah. 48:15 Peach MIT. Mm hmm. And so I mean, like, those are the those are the kind of three ways that I look at it. If I'm a if I'm a, you know, brand owner, and I want to figure out if I've got an allocated whiskey, how do I get into the hands of the people? That's the that's the way I'm going to go. Right. Do you have any kind of other thoughts on 48:32 I mean, just going back to what Fred said, like they're trying to get into these new markets, and I think they're trying to position themselves because they're, they're all pumping out a ton of juice. So when the product finally becomes of age, they don't they have us as customers already. So it's like, we need to go promoted other places. So when we do have this stock available, we can spread it out everywhere, not in whereas if they just focused on us bourbon, consumers are going to have a whiskey glut. 48:59 Well, they want to find new consumers too. Yeah. I mean, that's what I mean. Yeah, absolutely. We can't keep selling it to the same three guys here that have more bottles, and they can drink for the rest of their life. Right? They want to find new customers. And that's Yeah, that's really helpful. 49:11 Guys, that's what it comes down to. And you know, what, I saw that in the magazine business, you know, like, one of the big reasons why I decided to go out on my own for with the magazine is because the magazines I was writing for, were pursuing new audiences that would require me to be writing about cocktails, and you know, and not the stories that I wanted to tell. And so anytime you anytime you, ESPN did this to ESPN is inserted VH one and MTV. Anytime you water down, like what was the essence of what you were trying to do. And you're trying to reach a new audience, you're always going to like, appear, like you don't care about your original customer. It's just how it is you can grow 50:00 well, you cannot lose it. Well, to make it appeal to the mass market, you always have to like dumb it down to where like, because you have to make it appeal to everyone versus like a very small niche. And so that small niche that you appeal to at first, you kind of have to break away from them. Because the everyday consumer is not gonna be as passionate as that very small niches. Yeah, we're fairly early adopters. 50:24 Yeah. But you know, people they got a pivot to right now just think of MTV, like, I remember the last time I watched a music video on TV, but if I watch a music video, it's usually on YouTube, right? There's a new platform that takes over and takes care of that. But YouTube's a multi dimensional platform for all that kind of stuff. But you know, I kind of want to 50:40 talk about bourbon pursuit. Absolutely. 50:42 Absolutely. We will never done down 50:46 in Minnick media while we keep doing the shout outs here. Yeah. So let's, let's talk about two more brands. While we kind of wrap this up a little bit. You know, there's there's one brand that comes to mind. You know, we talked about old forester birthday bourbon, but brown Forman, I think they do an aggressive audible job of really not pissing off the consumer base, you know, they've got products that are continually coming out at aggressive price points. And, and really, they've only got it. Should I say, besides all four, it's a birthday bourbon, and they get king in Kentucky, they don't have a whole lot of stuff. That is the super premium, highly allocated stuff. And so they are continually trying to just make everyday solid products. 51:23 Yeah, I mean, the the old forester extensions, like great, everyday like, drinker. I mean, the bottom bond, the 86. I mean, those are like, I could drink the right, yes, they just came out well, but I mean, like these prohibition series, I mean, like the 1910, like, in 1920, just always, consistently blow my socks off. Every time I drink. I'm like, this is really good at 50 to 60. Buck. And one thing, one thing that 51:50 Chris Morris did with the prohibition series, is when they when they are know, when they did the wheat whiskey release with Woodford, you know, they it wasn't prohibition series was with Woodford, they sent the release out and said, We have now released every single type of whiskey that was allotted in the 1935 federal alcohol administration act, and I was just like, oh my god. And I'm like, there's probably not another person in the world who gave that we should talk about that. But I was like, I was like, the fact that you know, and they're released, they're dropping, like, one of the greatest, like legal documents I've ever read. And I was like, I was like, I can't kid in the candy store with that press release. I didn't publish it, but I was, you know, it was very well done. And that the thing about brown Forman is that they overly think, you know, so while they while they are doing a lot of this stuff, I also think they've been kind of left behind in a lot of these conversations of like, you know, you just mentioned you don't have a lot of allocated stuff. You know, so in like, if you are if you're if you're thinking about it, like is that not a good thing? I mean, because now you know, heaven hills got a lot of highly allocated stuff for roses highly Alec a lot of highly allocated stuff, and so does Buffalo Trace. And I don't see why, you know, brown Forman doesn't because their whiskey out of the barrel is incredible. 53:18 And we think it's because they promoted like Woodford so hard out the gate versus and kind of left old fo just a winner and then now it's kind of regain popularity. I think old foresters coming back hard. 53:30 Yeah, I birthday bourbon is highly allocated, by the way. It's very, very much is it but I look at 53:35 at what the resurgence of old forester as the same resurgence we see with 1792, right? Like, how many people were really like gung ho talk about 1792. and still they started coming off with all these extensions of their bottle and bond. Yeah, foolproof. Sweet. Hi, Robert. It's a 53:52 very interesting comparison because they have they both have a very unique note in there that I detect in both of them. No, bananas. Yeah, banana. No. You have to also remember that the beast of brown Forman is the world's number one whiskey and jack daniels. And I tell you what, some of the barrel proof stuff coming out of jack daniels right now. It's fantastic. It's some of the best whiskey you can find. And so, you know, I think what they what brown Forman does really, really well, is that 30 to $50 product, they do a great job with that. And I know a lot of people don't are not Woodford fans. But that's a lot of people's favorite bourbon. Oh, yeah. I mean, I've been I've been on airplanes where I've seen ladies yell at someone sitting next to them for pouring coke with Woodford like How dare you pour Coke? bourbon 54:46 airport. A lot of bourbon consumers that aren't whiskey geeks like Woodford is their premium go to you know, it's like I'm always amazed, not amazed because it is great juice. But it's like you forget that that it is like yeah, the common marketplace that sir like premium go to. 55:00 Alright, so one last gripe before we kind of close this out. And that's one thing that I've talked about at the top of the show. And that's the allocations of barrel pics that used to go to bourbon societies and used to go to people, charities, charities, bodies, everybody that was doing them early on. And now it's like that, sorry, you're not selling enough. And this is we're seeing this at four roses. We're seeing this at wild turkey. And so kind of talk about really, what is the effect of, kind of, from a if you're the manufacturer? Or if you're the the end consumer? Like, do you hate the brand more now? Like do you start to look at other places? I mean, because we're good friends with read an emerald from 1789 be, you know, they they said that their allocations are gone from wild turkey and other places like that, where they used to go and just go in and do barrel pics all the time. And now they're looking at other places. They're looking at wilderness trail they're looking at 55:52 Yeah, just it's opened up an opportunity for these like new players in the game to like, kind of like we've gone barrel pics so many places, but like you're not, you're treated more like royalty, when you go to like new roof or wilderness trails, or Willits, or somewhere, whereas the other ones are like, how can we get them in and out of here as fast as possible? It's clockwork to them. Yeah, it's like, we're going to roll out three barrels, and you have 15 minutes to taste each and then we're gonna go through this and this and get out now. So 56:22 Well, I mean, I still enjoy roses experience and stuff like that I still enjoy the experiences. I mean, when you go to wild turkey, you're there with Eddie and and, you know, you know, it's not Eddie making these decisions, right. You know, this this is definitely higher 56:35 up and then I also I also think that Eddie would make those decisions if he had to, you know, that's something we have to always remember that they're kind of protected like that we always want to give like the distillers a break, but they are you know, they have people there kind of around them to protect them and make them continue to look like the good guy, but don't think for a second that they're not in those rooms having conversations and saying like given their input. Yeah, well, we're about to lose our stock, you know, for 2025 if we keep doing these barrel pics, so they're looking out for the long term and healthiness of their brands and that and that's what I'm like a cop when they're around us, 57:11 then that's exactly 57:12 right. I do not be fooled by that. The niceties from the distillers leave me like someone like Bo Backman. It's as direct. Everybody hates that guy because he's the keeper of the barrels. But he's he's going off of what someone else tells him, you know, and he's got the allocation. 57:30 Yeah. And I'm sure if they if they had unlimited barrel supply, they'd love to keep doing it. Right. I mean, I think I think that's one thing that people don't understand. I don't know if they would they probably 57:40 it's like thing is is a inefficient process. And it's a low margin. Feeling personally, 57:43 are you feeling cut off? 57:45 No, I don't think I'm feeling personally cut off. I think it's Oh, let's let's try harder than us. 57:50 It's harder for us to go to So you mentioned 1789 be Let's mention I I'm a part of a charity that got cut off. what's what's another group that you know of that got cut off? I know about two retailers that got cut out of Wild Turkey? Well, yeah, 58:08 there's there's it's all around, right. I mean, it's there's definitely 58:12 we don't cross the board. We don't see a 58:16 you know, a commonality other than that. They're small. This place isn't getting cut off. MGM and Las Vegas isn't getting cut off. And total wine, liquor barn, they're not getting cut off. So it goes back to this this conversation of like, Who's spending the most money? And, you know, I think it's short sighted to cut out 1789 and you know, people like that, that have incredible connections within the bourbon world. 58:46 And we're the one of the pioneers of actually doing some of this 58:49 stuff. I don't I don't think they cut out some of 58:51 these gaps in a lot of money to charities, like a lot of good comes out of these. 58:55 But there's also been some charities that have been debunked. Right, you know, so you got to remember that to to just like we've seen with the counterfeit, they're always fuck wads that are going to take advantage of the the scenario the situation sounds like that. 59:07 Yes, absolutely. So I think we're going to go ahead and wrap that one up. Because you know, we've, we put some people under fire here, we make sure everybody knows that. If you're brand new, listen to this. We still love every single one of you. We still love the product you're putting out 59:20 we went talk about you if we didn't care. Exactly. I'm 59:23 on the show and join us. 59:24 Yeah, we're looking out for you. We want 59:26 what's best for you actually, they're not looking out for you. And not 59:29 well, we're looking at right 59:32 now they got a brand they're trying to knock you down. So their brand goes up. You don't have 59:35 to worry about 59:37 our toy 24 barrels a year, I think is like we don't we're 59:40 not gonna we're not gonna be stepping on any toes anytime soon. That's for sure. 59:44 Well, you know what I would, you know, I'll talk to you about this off the air. I'll bring this up. Sorry. 59:47 It's okay. So, you know, it was like I said, just make sure that you do have a pretty thick skin if you're listening this from brand, because we do We love you. We love having all the personalities and people behind the brands on the show. You know, we do 1:00:00 kind of look at this from, you know, we see what happens in the Facebook groups and Reddit and everything like that when people are writing blog posts of saying like, oh, like we don't like you anymore. So we're just trying to look at this from the consumer perspective. Don't shoot the messenger. Yeah, exactly. So I will. I will say, though, that I've said this for more than a decade. Don't forget the customers who brought you to the dance. That's it. Absolutely. So thank you everybody, for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode we recorded at Hotel distil hotel is still is located in downtown Louisville here on whiskey row. And for those of thirst new experiences, you should come check it out. It's a home for the connoisseurs of the finest comforts and gracious service. It's a space where you're going to pass through historic risk row facade and joy, a true and authentic global destination. You can book your experience for it yourself at Hoteldistil.com and it's set to open here on November 1 of 2019. So fellows, thank you once again for joining us. 1:01:00 show. Yeah, and we'll have e

How did Jake Neill help B2B SaaS company SocialChimp cut its cost of customer acquisition (CAC) by 95% in 30 days? Jake Neill This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Lead Hounds Marketing CEO and Co-Founder Jake Neill breaks down the 90 day accelerated growth strategy that he and his business partner use to help their client meet aggressive growth goals.  Jake's Digital Experience Roadmap framework can be applied in any business, and he shares the specific story of SocialChimp, a client that he worked with to cut CAC and generate more than 5,000 qualified leads. Highlights from my conversation with Jake include: Lead Hounds Marketing focuses just on strategy and leaves marketing implementation to its clients and partners. The company has a specific customer journey framework that it uses to build 9 day, accelerated growth plans for clients. One client, SocialChimp, needed a way to more predictably generated new qualified leads and customer acquisition. Using their framework, Jake and his partner cut Social Chimp's cost to acquire a customer by 95% in 30 days, and generated a 7.41 return on ad spend. They also generated 5,677 leads at an average cost per lead of $5.15. Jake says there are three things that are key to making any offer successful - the audience, the message and the offer. A successful campaign must be focused on one particular type of customer avatar, and that customer's key pain point. The Digital Experience Roadmap has seven relationship levels: strangers, visitors, leads, qualifieds, opportunities, customers and fans.  Jake generally begins by building out a good lead magnet and finds that with that in place, the rest of the roadmap tends to build itself out. Jake finds that the best lead magnets are hyper specific and able to be consumed quickly - things like checklists, tools, etc. For SocialChimp, Jake created a "real estate swipe file" aimed at realtors that is converting at 84%. Once you acquire a new lead, then you have to qualify them. Jake finds that deep dive content such as webinars and ebooks work very well at this stage. One thing that many marketers miss is the step that involves turning customers into fans. Jake says there are incredible opportunities for upselling at this stage and growing revenue without having to acquire any new customers. Jake uses paid ads to promote his initial offers and get them in front of the right prospects. When it comes to nurturing leads, Jake says it is critical to keep your marketing human and make sure you are using language you would use conversationally and not artificially pushing a sale onto someone who isn't ready for it. Resources from this episode: Visit the Lead Hounds Marketing website Check out the SocialChimp case study Connect with Jake on LinkedIn Connect with Jake by email at jake@leadhoundsmarketing.com Listen to the podcast to get learn exactly how Jake uses the Digital Experience Roadmap to build 90 day accelerated growth strategies for clients like SocialChimp. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Jake Neill, who is the CEO and co-founder of Lead Hounds. Welcome, Jake. Jake Neill (Guest): Hey, Kathleen. Thanks for having me. Jake and Kathleen hamming it up while recording this episode together . Kathleen: I’m excited to chat with you. Can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself and about Lead Hounds? About Jake Neill and Lead Hounds Marketing Jake: Yeah, of course. So, Lead Hounds Marketing is, we're a company of just two people, and our sole focus is on giving people a formula and framework for predictable growth. So, our objective is to put people on a path to doubling their sales. So, we live, eat, and breathe strategy specifically. So, we're not as much... Early on in our company's journey, we were doing Facebook ads, doing all kinds of things, but what we realized was there's a real need in the industry right now for people who are architects. So, what we did was we partnered up with another company in San Diego named Digitopia, and they are a full-house digital marketing company, and they do kind of the SEO, PPC, all that kind of stuff. So, we partnered with them and used their framework to engineer what we call Digital Experiences to turn strangers into fans, and then they do the implementation side, or the client does it in hands, or in-house. Sorry. Kathleen: Nice. I like that you guys have zeroed in on strategy as your strength. I think there's a lot of agencies that try to be all things to all people, and there is something to be said for not doing that and becoming very specialized. I say that as somebody who has been in agencies for 13 years. I used to own one, and now I'm in one as well. Jake: Yeah. 90 day accelerated growth plans Kathleen: Yeah. Well, one of the reasons I was excited to talk with you is that you guys do specialize in working with B2B SaaS, and you have these 90-day accelerated growth plans where you're able to get really great results for your clients. It's not like a blueprint. It's not like a copy-and-paste solution, but you do have kind of a structured approach to how you do this, and I loved that when you and I spoke you were able to share one particular case study that got amazing results, and I thought it would be fun to just use that as the example through which to break down what this framework is that you use, and how it functions. So, let's maybe start at the beginning, and if you could talk a little bit about how you guys think about the customer journey, you have a particular name for it. Jake: Yeah, totally. So, yeah, like you said, I didn't mention that earlier, but we do focus on B2B SaaS. We've done a lot across different industries, and the framework applies across tons of industries. The framework's been implemented for companies as big as Toshiba, and then all the way to startups. So, I'll show you... That's the case study that you're referring to, that we had already spoken about, was a case study for a B2B SaaS startup. I think it's a really powerful case study because it shows that you don't need also these big budgets and an established business to implement these principles. No matter what your size is, you can implement those things today. Kathleen: Yeah, and you have a couple of resources that I'm going to link to in the show notes. So, I think one of them is an example of your customer journey framework. So, if you're listening, and you want to have some visuals to refer to as you listen, if you happen to be in a place where you can do that, head to the show notes, and you can pull that up and actually see it as we talk. Click here to view the SocialChimp case study Jake: Yeah. I would highly recommend pulling up that document, and you can even pause the podcast as we're focusing on each relationship level, and you can even kind of put in your own. How would that apply to your own business? That would be really helpful. That way, it's not kind of like drinking out of a fire hydrant. Customer journey framework Kathleen: I love it. All right. So, let's start at the beginning. Talk us through how you think about customer journey. Jake: Cool. Yeah. Well, the first thing that I kind of want to start with is just the output, because I want people to understand that when you implement this methodology, that it actually works. So, we implemented it for a company called SocialChimp, and with SocialChimp, they were a startup. They were looking for funding, and they didn't really have a way to predictably acquire customers, which is what I see happening across the board. That's the biggest issue, is how do we create predictability. Tons of people are pushing a lot of different tactics, which are vital. Right? The tactics are important, SEO, Facebook ads, webinar funnel, whatever it is that you're trying to implement, but the problem is when you don't have a systematic approach to turning strangers into customers, then you're kind of like a bull in a China shop. Right? You're knocking over everything. You don't really know what's working, what's not working. Sometimes things work, but you don't really even know how it worked, why it worked. So, if you can't measure that thing, then you can't optimize it or do more of it. So, this framework really helps you get the foundation, and when we implemented it for this company, we cut their cost to acquire a customer by 95% in 30 days, and we generated a 7.41 return on ad spend, and we also generated 5,677 leads at an average cost per lead of $5.15. Kathleen: Was this all in 30 days? Jake: No. So, the first 30 days was cutting the cost to acquire a customer. That did happen, and the 95% decrease happened in the first 30 days, but the campaign's been running for a little bit. It's still running to this day, and still producing predictable results, which is really important because with the tools and tactics, they might work also for a period of time, but they only work for a set amount of time. They might be working for the next six months, but they're not really what you're going to build the foundations of a business for years and years to come. Kathleen: Got it. Okay. So, let's walk through it. Jake: Yeah. So, one last thing before I jump into the methodology is there's a couple things that you have to understand, is with all marketing across the board, there's three things that have to be hit in every single campaign. There's your audience, your message, and your offer. "With all marketing across the board, there's three things that have to be hit in every single campaign. There's your audience, your message, and your offer." - Jake Neill, Lead Hounds Marketing So, I know it's very basic, but what I'm going to assume is that you already know who your audience is, and that you can already articulate the offer to that prospect or that customer in a good way to actually move them to action. So, you already have those things dialed in. I'm going to assume that. So, if you don't have that dialed in, then make sure you dial that in before you implement the methodology. Kathleen: Yeah, and I think most listeners of this podcast probably have all that together, because they're generally pretty savvy marketers. Jake: Perfect. So, in order to understand the methodology, the first thing you need to understand is a little bit just briefly about the actual client themselves. So, we implemented this methodology for SocialChimp, and they have a software that automates social media posting for various industries, so real estate, wealth management, insurance, all kinds of stuff. So, what we had to do first was identify and hone in on our target market. This is a big mistake I see people making early on, is they try to create campaigns that funnel in tons of different customers, but you have to... You can build multiple campaigns, but for a successful campaign, it needs to be focused on one avatar. So, what we chose were real estate agents. The last thing, too, before we jump into the methodology is the... When you identify the audience, you need to hone in on a key pain point. A lot of you listening to this are going to skip this step, and you're going to start working on the Digital Experience, and it will fail if you do that, because hyper-specificity is key to the success of building out this roadmap or this Digital Experience. So, for the client that we serviced, their target market was real estate agents, so what we did was we interviewed real estate agents, we spoke to them, we did our research, we did our due diligence, and what we found was their biggest pain point was, how do I build and engage social media presence without any kind of time? So, they're all stretched for time. They want to sell real estate, but it takes a lot of time and commitment and consistency to post. So, we had to build a Digital Experience out of that. So, at this point, if you don't have the Digital Experience map, I'm about to jump into it. Definitely pause, download the Digital Experience, and then follow along with me. Kathleen: All right. Jake: So, on the Digital Experience map, we have seven relationship levels, and you see those on the side here. I'm going to briefly touch on them. There's strangers, right? That's the very first step. Someone has no idea who you are. So, the questions you have to start asking yourself is, what offers are we going to offer strangers to turn them into visitors, and then visitors, to turn them into leads, and then once we have leads, how are we going to qualify those leads, and then once they're qualified, how are we going to turn them into sales opportunities, and then once they're a sales opportunity, how do we close them into a customer, and then from a customer, ultimately, into a fan? So, those are the seven relationship levels that we have to implement in our business if we're going to see the consistency and the predictability. So, at the first level, you've got the blog post here. So, what we have is what we call a cornerstone piece of content, and that's how we turn strangers into visitors. But I want to take one step up to the lead sector just briefly, because that's actually where we start. If you can build and identify a lead magnet, a really, really solid lead magnet, then this experience begins to kind of build itself out. So, what we did for this client was... A lot of you are already familiar with a lead magnet. By the way, a quick note on lead magnets. The hyper-specificity is super important, but also that it can be consumed rapidly. I see a lot of people using things like eBooks, but those are better used for deep-dive content, which is later in the journey, because it consumes a lot of their time. So, at the lead stage, and this would change your business, if you guys can come up with a really, really, really good lead magnet, a lead magnet is... When you're thinking about a lead magnet, think about tools, checklists, things that can be consumed really quickly and solve a problem. So, with a lead magnet, the place that we always start is making a promise. So, I don't even start with the tool itself. I identify what promise can I make to the prospect that's in alignment with the key pain point. So, what's the best possible thing I could promise? So, what we did for this client was we identified, well, they want more social media engagement, and they want to do it in less time. What if I could hand you more than a month's worth of proven social media content to post to your newsfeed? Right? Where most people would go and say, "Well, let's educate them on how to post better posts." Well, the issue is they don't have time, so you're missing the mark. That's why it's so vital to identify that key pain point early on. Kathleen: That makes a ton of sense. Jake: So, what we did was we created the real estate social media swipe file out of that promise. We said, "How can we give them over a month's worth of proven content?" Well, we just went to... I think it was BuzzSumo, whatever the app is that has... You can find most engaged content. We grabbed the most shared real estate content of 2018. We grabbed 40 posts. We put them into a swipe file, into a PDF document, and then we wrote some copy. We wrote some different copy variations for each post and embedded a link. When the real estate agent clicked the link, it populated the social media post into their newsfeed and gave them 40 free posts to post for, depending on how many times you post, a month or more. Kathleen: Awesome. Jake: So, that lead actually to this day is converting at 84%. So, 84% of the people who land on that page are giving us their email address, and it's not because of the landing page design and the landing page copy. That, of course, matters, but it's about identifying an offer that aligns with that key pain point at this stage in the journey. Kathleen: Yeah. It's like the best landing page copy in the world can't make up for that offer. Jake: Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter if you're... Yeah. I mean, you could offer a toothbrush, you could write the best copy for a toothbrush, but I don't know how many people are going to opt in, give you their email address for a free toothbrush. Kathleen: Right. Jake: So, once we identified the lead magnet here at the lead stage, the rest kind of writes itself. One thing to note as we're going to build out this experience together, each stage, as you elevate the relationship, it should be the next logical step. So, I should be able to say, "Because you read this blog post, you might be interested in downloading this lead magnet. Because you consume this lead magnet, you might be interested in watching this video. Because you watched this video, you might be interested in this product." So, it needs to be this logical progression. So, after we identified the lead magnet, we went down to the blog post stage, and this is how we turned strangers into visitors. Yes, you can create tons of different content. You can do SEO, this kind of stuff, but the cornerstone piece of content is this one kind of content that explains the value of the actual tool itself. So, what we did was we created a blog post called How to Repurpose Your Content and Get 10 Times the Exposure. So, if you notice the blog post, once again not teaching them about social media, it's showing them how to save time and increase their social media engagement. It's showing the power of repurposing content, and then the tool, what does it do? It gives you the content, the repurposed content kind of done for you. So, there has to be that logical progression. From the lead stage, now you have an email. So, if you guys know about using automated emails, this is where that would kick in, but don't let... If you don't know how to use automation and the CRM and everything, don't let that hold you back from building the experience. That's just a way to push people to the next stage. So, once you have a lead, you have to identify, how do we qualify this lead? So, this is where we build deep-dive content. So, in the SaaS space, a lot of times it's kind of videos around the product, but in most every industry, webinars work really great. This is also where eBooks can work. So, in this experience we built out a free trial video. We said, "Okay. Well, you just downloaded 40 social media posts. Well, how about we turn those 40 into an unlimited amount of social media posts?" So, that's where the free trial, we showed them the software that curates all these posts for them, and then posts it to their newsfeed every day for as long as they want. So, after watching the free trial video, we had a qualified lead, and then could offer that person a free trial offer. So, we said, "Now that you've checked out our video, now that you've checked out our software, would you like to take a free trial?" So, this is a really, really important step. It's a little more straightforward in the software space, because usually it's a demo or a free trial offer, but the foot-in-the-door offer is essentially an offer that you can give that's a low barrier to entry, so it's not your core offer. You don't want to jump in and say, "Buy my product," yet. You want to say, "What could I offer this person to get them to commit one of two things, either their time or their money?" A lot of people forget the value of getting someone to commit their time. Sometimes it's harder to get a commitment of time than a commitment of money. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Jake: Yeah. Maybe for the viewers who aren't in the software space, just some examples of ways to turn qualified leads into opportunities, let's say you're a brick and mortar. Let's say you're a dentist. People offer $20 teeth whitening. Right? It's not the core offer, but where does a dentist want to have the sales conversation? Where do they want a sales opportunity, when your mouth is open, and they're working on your mouth, and they want to say, "Hey, you've got some loose teeth here, or some crooked teeth. Have you considered braces?" Then that pushes them to the core offer. So, that's an example of an entry point offer that's not in the SaaS space, but if you are in the SaaS space, demos and trials work fantastic here. Kathleen: Yep. Jake: Then, obviously in the SaaS space, software works, selling actual software after the free trial. Now, there's all kinds of practical things about getting people to actually use the free trial. A lot of people sign up and don't use it, so you need email automations and things pushing people to actually use the software, but the software, your core offer, is that next step. Then from the core offer, after someone purchases, the next step is, how do I turn them into fans? So, at the fan stage there's a lot that we can do. What we want to focus on at the fan stage is increasing the lifetime value and the immediate value of a customer. So, what you do here is you offer complementary services to the core offer that would be interesting to the prospect in order to increase that value. So, for them we said, "Hey, you've taken the free trial. You're now using our software to post every day for you. Would you like some more awareness?" So, we offered them paid ads. We said, "You know, we're not..." Once again, it's not costing them time, but they're getting to spread their message out and build their brand and get more engagement to more people, because we're going to manage their ads for them, and maybe do something like a hundred dollars a month, something simple. But that was a really good complementary product, and we had 10% of people took that upsell, and then it allowed us to increase the lifetime value of a customer by 20%, which is extremely important because you can move your entire top line by 20% with one single offer. Kathleen: And without signing any new customers. Jake: Right, exactly. Kathleen: Yeah. Jake: So, that essentially is the framework. I don't know if there's anything that you feel like would be good to hit on in terms of helping people with the more practical side of thinking through any of these offers, but that's just one example in the software space. Kathleen: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like... So, we're talking about going from a stranger to a visitor, to a lead, to a sales opportunity- Jake: Or to a qualified lead. Kathleen: ... to a qualified lead, to a sales opportunity, to a customer, to a fan. Correct? Jake: Correct. Promoting your offer Kathleen: So, really, it's an expanded kind of concept of the customer journey. You guys have a special name for it, the Digital Experience? Jake: Yes. Kathleen: Yeah. It sounds like the key to it, at least what I'm hearing, is really deeply understanding the pain point, because if you get that wrong, it's like Dominoes. Right? You start at the beginning. If you get it wrong, nothing else works. Jake: Yeah, exactly. Kathleen: So, for SocialChimp, you did this exact thing. You walked us through all the different offers and the content, et cetera, that you created. One thing we didn't really touch on too much was, how did you promote the offer in the very beginning? Jake: Yeah. I mean, the way that we promoted it in the very beginning was with paid ads. I mean, there's a lot of ways to promote, and it also depends on your goals. What I see a lot of people missing on as well is the business math on the front end. They don't actually calculate things like, what is the lifetime value of a client? Well, maybe the lifetime value of a client is a thousand dollars, and then you have to ask yourself, well, what percentage of that profit are we willing to spend to acquire that customer? So, let's say typically a business is going to use 10% of two to three years worth of the value of a customer. If you're a startup, sometimes you'll use the whole lifetime value because you want to scale, but most businesses aren't going to use more than 10% of the first two to three years of the value, the profit, not the revenue, the profit of a client. So, it's identifying it early on, how much am I willing to spend? So, if the lifetime value is a thousand dollars, and you're willing to spend 10%, then you know the cost to acquire a customer can't go above $200. Then what you can then begin to do is you can begin to map out your conversion rate at each of these levels. So, you can say, "Okay. What percentage of visitors are becoming leads? What percentage of leads are becoming qualifieds, qualifieds into opportunities," and so on, all the way up to fans. You can then begin to reverse engineer the percentages. So, let's say at the customer stage you are turning 10% of customers... Or let's do the opportunity stage. You go to your sales team, what percentage of opportunities are we currently closing? 30%. Well, if you want to add an additional 10 customers, then you need to make sure you're bringing in another 30 sales opportunities in order to close those customers. So, you can reverse engineer all the way back to the visitors, and I'll actually... In the Digital Experience worksheet, I actually have a business math section, and you can fill that out. We won't have time to go over that in this call, but you could fill that out and identify what is your max cost per click. So, then you can decide what platforms to play on. So, if my max cost per click to drive a customer is going to be, let's say, $1.50 to turn the stranger into a visitor, then I'm probably not going to play on LinkedIn ads, because LinkedIn has a price floor, and you're not going to be able to drive traffic for that $1.50. So, setting up the business math on the front end is really important and vital to the success of campaigns, and it also helps with... If you're a CMO, for instance, and you're reporting to the CEO, it's really important because sometimes a CEO doesn't necessarily have realistic expectations of what should happen on the marketing side, and you can't dispute the numbers. Right? So, what you can do is you can show the numbers and create realistic goals around customer acquisition and what budget you'll need to fuel those customers. Kathleen: Yeah. I love that you guys focus on the cost of customer acquisition, because I think that's a big mistake that a lot of marketers make, especially those that are new to pay-per-click. I hear people ask the question all the time, "What should my budget be?" Right? They think that there's some magic lump sum number, like you're going to say, "Well, if you spend $3,000 a month, you're going to get results." It's really, the premise of the question is flawed because it shouldn't be what should your budget be. It should be how much are you prepared to spend to acquire a new lead or a new customer. As long as you're staying within that amount, your budget could be infinite. Right? Jake: Right. Kathleen: If it's resulting in customer acquisition, then you wouldn't want to cap it, certainly. You wouldn't want to say, "No, I got 10 customers. That's the end of my budget." You would want to keep it going. So, I think that's so interesting, that little shift in mindset that happens, and it's definitely something that you see... The mistake is something you see made a lot by people who are novices with pay-per-click. Jake: Yeah, definitely. So, I'd highly recommend using the business math section on that experience worksheet, and just as you build out your own experience, measure the conversion rate from customers to fan. Well, you can start from visitors to leads, and all the way up, and then measure those numbers, and it's kind of a fill-in-the-blank document, and it'll produce at the end of it what you'll actually spend. It will create the goals for what you can spend to acquire a customer, and that'll inform everything moving forward. Kind of to jump to the original question, I know I kind of went on a side tangent, I think it's an important one, but what we realized was this software was only being sold for $49 a month, so the cost per click that we could drive was on the lower end. So, we chose to play on Facebook. We didn't choose Google Ads or LinkedIn or anything like that. Of course, real estate agents are using Google, but the prices are a bit higher. So, we knew if we were going to get a really big return on our investment, then we needed to really drive home some good offers that could drive low cost per clicks, and Facebook's a great platform for that. Kathleen: Yeah. Now, you also have used retargeting. Correct? So, once somebody gets into your funnel, if you will, or into this Digital Experience, there are ways you can use retargeting to push them faster down it? Is that correct? Jake: Yeah. Yeah. So, that's actually a really important point. I'm glad you brought that up. The middle section on this experience map are the offers that we're going to give someone at each of these relationship levels, but on the outside you see things like retargeting, advertising, SEO, social media, email marketing. These are the platforms and the tools that you use to move people through the journey, and that's where I see most people starting, and that's a very, very, very bad mistake because of what we talked about earlier where you're just going to be implementing content, SEO, retargeting, and you're not going to have a systematic way to predictably bring in customers. So, we did implement retargeting, advertising, social media, all this kind of stuff, but it was to move people through the journey. So, you see, at the first stage, at the visitor stage, we started running ads. Our goal was to push as much traffic to this blog post as possible to build up an audience that we could then retarget. Right? So, retargeting, we retargeted the blog traffic to the lead magnet to get them to give us their email address. Well, now that we have their email address, we have a way of contacting them in multiple platforms. We can speak to them on email and retargeting ads still. So, for people who downloaded the lead magnet, we had email sequences. Kind of just a note on when you're doing this as well, keep it really, really, really human. We didn't say, "They downloaded the real estate social media swipe file. Quickly, buy the free trial. Watch the free trial video. Buy this thing." People can ascend really quickly through the Digital Experience, but we kept it, and our emails would follow normal relationship building, and we'd say, "Hey, because you downloaded this swipe file, I thought you might be interested in watching this video about how you could have a lifetime of proven highly-engaged real estate," and it's just like, "Hey, check this video out, and it's because the action prior to what I'm asking you to do now is you kind of raised your hand and said, 'Hey, I'm interested in this kind of thing.' Let me give you more of it." So, it's really about thinking from a value. It's not this kind of... A lot of people talk about this kind of stuff purely in funnel terms, and they think about funnels and funnel hacking, but a lot of times, people get so caught up in those things that they're just looking to make the sale as quickly as possible. But I think when you... That's why we changed the language from funnels, where people are kind of dropping down in the funnel, to elevating relationships, building experiences that are going to actually earn us the right to do business with our customer, as opposed to these kind of gimmicks that are, "Maybe we can kind of get our customer to buy with this thing." Kathleen: Yeah, marketers are the worst at that. I always say this. We're people, right? We're people who buy things, and we know, as people who buy things, what we like and what we don't like when we're marketed to, but then when we go and put our marketing hat on and become marketers, it's like we throw everything we know about being human beings out the window, and we do the opposite. It's like, the biggest mystery to me of marketing is why do we allow ourselves to do that. Jake: Yeah. I mean, it's wild. I see it happening all the time. I see people, "Hey, you read this blog post. Do you want to get on a call so I can talk about me and my product?" No, I actually don't. I also try to keep things in that human-to-human mindset and ask myself the question, number one, put myself in my customer's shoes, in my prospect's shoes. Would I want to receive this email? Does it make sense for me? Does this thing add value to my life? If the answer is no, if this email... This is a great principle to use. If you're going to send out an email, whether it's automated, eblast, or if you're going to post a blog post, so many people get caught up in, "Well, how many emails do I need in order to push them to the next step? How many blog posts do I need to post each day or each week?" The answer is not about the quantity of content that you're pushing out as much as the quality of content, because when you put something out, it says something about your brand, and if you're putting out crap, then people are going to... They're going to start associating you with, this isn't worth my time. So, if you send them enough emails that aren't valuable, they're going to start... Number one, they're either going to unsubscribe, or number two, in their mind they're going to say, "I don't need to open this email because I'm not going to miss anything." But if you're always adding value, then when they see an email come through from your brand, then in the back of their mind, "I know I'm busy right now, but if I don't read this, I may lose out on something really important to learn." Kathleen: Yeah. My little hack for that is instead of imagining I'm the recipient, because sometimes that can be hard for me, I actually think of a friend, and I think, if I were emailing my friend Abigail, what would I say? I wouldn't say these spammy things, right? I would be friendly. I would be helpful. So, I picture a real person, and I write to them, and that's really helped me a lot make things less marketing-robot-like. Well, this is so cool, and hopefully people have gone in and downloaded the visuals, because it is very helpful to follow that along in this conversation, and if you didn't, go download it afterwards and then re-listen to it again, because you'll get more out of it. The results Kathleen: But I want to recap, go back to the results you got, because this is the exact process you used with SocialChimp, and you guys had crazy good results. So, can you just mention those again? Jake: Yeah. So, when we built out this Digital Experience, we took someone who was getting terrible results, they were spending way more money than they were bringing in. Their cost per trial was $1,147. That's pretty bad. Now, what were they doing? They said, "Oh. Well, we've got a great product, and we're giving you something for free. Do you want it?" So, they were running ads straight to their free trial, but that would be like me walking up into a coffee shop and saying, "Hey, I'm pretty awesome, and I'm rich and funny. You want to get married?" Just because those things may be true, I may be awesome, and we may be a great potential match, but if I come at it with that approach, then I'm going to turn off that person. So, in the same way, I can't come across in that way to my customers. I see a lot of people telling stories about themselves to their customer, but the real question that we need to ask is, how do we change the story that our customer tells about themselves? How do we take them from point A to point Z, where they want to be? So, when we stepped away from that and said, "Okay..." They wanted to hire us originally to run their Facebook ads, and I told them, I said, "I won't run your Facebook ads because you have a much more fundamental problem. If you push traffic to this system right now, then you're just pouring water in a leaky bucket, and you're just going to be wasting money." So, we had to build out that experience, and when we did that, we cut the cost per trial from $1,147 to $56 within just 30 days. Kathleen: Wow. That's crazy. Jake: Yeah, you can see the... We were selling the product for $49, but we also had an upsell that 10% of people took, so it made the monthly payment $59 a month. So, within 30 days, as a SaaS product, they were recouping what they were spending to acquire a customer. It's really, really, really powerful for a SaaS company. Kathleen: That's awesome. Definitely speaks to the value of kind of that whole... You have to slow down to speed up. Don't just try to drive traffic to a bad offer or a bad website. You've got to have a solid foundation. I love it. Jake: Yeah. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Well, before we wrap up, I have two questions I ask all my guests that I want to ask you. The first one is... We're always talking about inbound marketing on The Inbound Success Podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really doing inbound marketing well right now? Jake: Well, besides you, I would say DigitalMarketer. If you haven't heard of them, it's digitalmarketer.com, and my agency's actually certified partners with them as well, they've got tons of resources. But they are phenomenal at this. They really, really, really focus on adding so much value that you almost feel obligated to purchase, because by the time they offer you anything that you have to pay for, you've already learned so much that you know a couple things. Number one, there's this kind of feeling of, well, I need to give back to this person, and then there's also the feeling of, well, I got so much value for free, I can't imagine how much value I'm going to get when I pay them. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah, they are great, Ryan Deiss and Marcus Murphy and the whole team over there. They're just killing it. IMPACT is also a partner of DigitalMarketer. It's a great company. All right, second question. I always hear from marketers that there's just so much changing in the world of digital marketing, and it's really hard to keep up with. How do you personally stay up-to-date and on top of all of that? Jake: Yeah. So, there a lot of ways. I would also say I do stay up-to-date through DigitalMarketer because they are one of the leading trainings and resources for individual companies, marketers, and digital agencies. They're kind of on the cutting edge, and they are certified with so many people like us who are in the trenches, and then we relay that information to them so that they can get quite a large amount of data around what's working, what's not working. So, I use DigitalMarketer, and then that's how I stay up-to-date, but I really think a lost art is looking back at some of the older advertising, like some of the books, like Breakthrough Advertising. If you haven't read that, it's really phenomenal on copywriting. But going back all the way to the people who were writing direct mail and getting people to literally mail... They were mailing something to someone's house to get them to purchase a product from one single letter. It's really powerful psychology and principles to be learned from those people as well. Kathleen: Yeah. I love that whole going back and being old school. I've had a bunch of people mention that, and everyone cites different books. I think the one you mentioned is a new one. But some of these principles don't change, because they just have to do with human nature. So, it's not like there's new advances in human nature in 2019. It's the same basic principles, and I think sometimes we lose sight of that as marketers. So, great insights there. How to connect with Jake Kathleen: All right. If somebody's listening, and they want to learn more about Lead Hounds, or they have a question and they want to reach out specifically to you, what's the best way for them to do that? Jake: So, they could email me directly. My email is jake@leadhoundsmarketing.com. That would be probably the quickest way to get a response. Kathleen: All right, awesome. I will put that link in the show notes. So, if you want to reach Jake, either shoot him an email or head to the show notes and get that link. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening, and you learned something, or you liked the podcast, please leave the podcast a review on Apple Podcasts, preferably a five-star review, but I say this every week, and this week I'm going to challenge you if you're a regular listener to take a moment and do that. Leave a review if you haven't done it already. I would really appreciate it. It helps get the podcast in front of more people. If you know somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because they could be my next interview. Thank you so much, Jake. Jake: Thank you, Kathleen. It was awesome.

Now let's take a look at the immigration polling. 72% continue to support comprehensive immigration reform. Right? They favor a deal which brings together all of these elements of stronger security, eliminating the lottery, giving green cards or work permits to those who are here under DACA. And so we see once again that a majority of the American public supports an across the board compromise on the immigration issues, as month after month nothing moves through Congress.People are divided between is it more important to stick with the relative or family-based system we have versus a more merit based, but they do agree that there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at the border with Mexico. 56%, it's rather puzzling that the Senate including Republican Senators keep voting to take back the emergency declaration, when most of the people in the United States have come to see that there is in fact an emergency at the border in their view.They still considerably underestimate the number of people crossing the border illegally, and about 53% think barriers would be ineffective, 48% think that barriers would be effective. But 67% believe that our current security is inadequate, and 77% reject the idea of open borders. So, when you look at it, Americans have a very sophisticated view of immigration. They know how they want it to work. They don't want open borders. They want compassion for the people that are here. They want some combination of barriers and other techniques to really create an effective border, and to diminish the problem.But if I ask do you support or oppose building a combination of physical and electronic barriers across the U.S. Mexico border, 60% support that. And do you think increased illegal immigration reduces wages to workers, increases them, or has no effect? 42% no effect, 46% reduces, and 12% say they increase it. So what you've got is 46% who think that it is bringing down wages. And they are the counterforce here that makes this such a complex and difficult issue. When asked about crime, 50% believe that illegal immigration increases crime, 41% no effect, 9% reduces it.When it comes to the rules on asylum seekers, 47% think that those rules should be general, allowing people who are fleeing violence to claim asylum here in the United States, while 53% believe that only those fleeing religious or political violence specifically aimed at them should be able to declare asylum. And 45%, not a full majority, but 45% think that asylum rules should be tightened, 25% loosened, and 31% kept as is. As you can see what a difficult issue it is, and how close the numbers are on immigration on issue after issue. But should people with questionable asylum claims be let into the United States for years until their case comes up? Or should they immediately be turned back to Mexico for staging? Here is where the President has an advantage on this issue. 61% say should be immediately turned back, 39% say should be let into the United States.So they prefer compassion. They are divided on what the exact asylum rules should be, but they do think that having people come in, claim a false asylum, if that's what they're doing, and be held here in the United States for years doesn't make a lot of sense compared to holding them in Mexico or other countries.

Now let's take a look at the immigration polling. 72% continue to support comprehensive immigration reform. Right? They favor a deal which brings together all of these elements of stronger security, eliminating the lottery, giving green cards or work permits to those who are here under DACA. And so we see once again that a majority of the American public supports an across the board compromise on the immigration issues, as month after month nothing moves through Congress.People are divided between is it more important to stick with the relative or family-based system we have versus a more merit based, but they do agree that there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at the border with Mexico. 56%, it's rather puzzling that the Senate including Republican Senators keep voting to take back the emergency declaration, when most of the people in the United States have come to see that there is in fact an emergency at the border in their view.They still considerably underestimate the number of people crossing the border illegally, and about 53% think barriers would be ineffective, 48% think that barriers would be effective. But 67% believe that our current security is inadequate, and 77% reject the idea of open borders. So, when you look at it, Americans have a very sophisticated view of immigration. They know how they want it to work. They don't want open borders. They want compassion for the people that are here. They want some combination of barriers and other techniques to really create an effective border, and to diminish the problem.But if I ask do you support or oppose building a combination of physical and electronic barriers across the U.S. Mexico border, 60% support that. And do you think increased illegal immigration reduces wages to workers, increases them, or has no effect? 42% no effect, 46% reduces, and 12% say they increase it. So what you've got is 46% who think that it is bringing down wages. And they are the counterforce here that makes this such a complex and difficult issue. When asked about crime, 50% believe that illegal immigration increases crime, 41% no effect, 9% reduces it.When it comes to the rules on asylum seekers, 47% think that those rules should be general, allowing people who are fleeing violence to claim asylum here in the United States, while 53% believe that only those fleeing religious or political violence specifically aimed at them should be able to declare asylum. And 45%, not a full majority, but 45% think that asylum rules should be tightened, 25% loosened, and 31% kept as is. As you can see what a difficult issue it is, and how close the numbers are on immigration on issue after issue. But should people with questionable asylum claims be let into the United States for years until their case comes up? Or should they immediately be turned back to Mexico for staging? Here is where the President has an advantage on this issue. 61% say should be immediately turned back, 39% say should be let into the United States.So they prefer compassion. They are divided on what the exact asylum rules should be, but they do think that having people come in, claim a false asylum, if that's what they're doing, and be held here in the United States for years doesn't make a lot of sense compared to holding them in Mexico or other countries.

Today is all about Barrell Bourbon. We had Joe and Tripp back on Episode 164, but it’s time we get an update on what’s happening with this team. We talk more about the flavors they are pulling from different states of distillation and how that goes into the blend as well as hearing about their newest release of the American Vatted Malt Whiskey. We then talk about some gripes with the TTB, take another stab at online sales, and then look to the future with new dovetail offerings while potentially phasing out other products. Show Partners: The University of Louisville now has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/pursuespirits. Barrell Craft Spirits has won a few medals at some of the most prestigious spirits competitions out there, but don’t take their word for it and find out for yourself. Learn more at BarrellBourbon.com. The 2019 Kentucky’s Edge Bourbon Conference & Festival pairs all things Kentucky with bourbon. It takes place October 4th & 5th at venues throughout Covington and Newport, Kentucky. Find out more at KentuckysEdge.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Distillery 291 is an award winning, small batch whiskey distillery located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Learn more at Distillery291.com. Show Notes: Bourbon Warehouse made out of shipping containers: https://www.wdrb.com/news/wdrb-video/bourbon-warehouse-made-of-shipping-containers-planned-in-j-town/video_100e2934-e0ca-5335-a956-83f9d9a9150a.html Bourbon Pursuit Yelp Collection: https://www.yelp.com/collection/Si779eiZUmjGomZP2pZLTg This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about barrel proof bourbon. What's new with Barrell? Tripp, what is your role? Do you taste every barrel? What flavors are you looking for? Do you think every batch is significantly different? How many barrels does it take to get the right flavor? Tell us about Batch 18. What is your ratio of barrels from each state? What notes do you pull from KY, IN, TN barrels? Where do you get the barrels? What makes up an American malt whiskey? Is the TTB creating new categories for you? How do you decide what to blend? Why do producers have non-disclosure agreements? How many employees work at Barrell Craft Spirits? Did you envision this growth? What challenges have you faced? Are distributors knocking on the door for the next batch? Any plans for Barrell Vodka? Are you pro online sales? What's next? Is it hard to make a new label for every product? Any plans to phase any products out? Is sourcing rum similar to bourbon? Why rum? What do you think is the next it category? Have you considered using armagnac? Tell us about Dovetail 3. What's the difference between finishing and aging? How much product is left in the finishing barrels? What are you passionate about? Any plans to distill your own product instead of sourcing? 0:00 I love bourbon, but I'm not ready to restart my career in be a distiller. I have a bachelor's degree and I want to continue to use those skills in the whiskey industry. So check this out. The University of Louisville now has an online distilled spirits business certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry like finance, marketing and operations. This is perfect for anyone looking for more professional development. And if you ever want to get your MBA their certificate credits transfer into Ul's new online MBA program. Learn more about this online program at U of l.me. Slash 0:35 pursue spirits when we're live it Kenny's dining room table we get ups man and you know and barking dogs. That's true. News Feed 0:43 is not the same without the UPS delivery and the dogs. 0:48 Were like all right, cut it 0:50 off. It was ok. back at it. 1:05 Alright everyone, it is Episode 221 of bourbon pursuit. I'm one of your hosts Kenny. And as usual, we got a little bit of news to run through. The 2019 bourbon Hall of Fame induction ceremony was two weeks ago, and I completely forgot to give them a shout out here on the podcast. But congratulations to Peggy know Stevens, Larry cast Wes Henderson and Evan Cole's mean on all their accomplishments. If you're interested to hear their stories and their appearances on the podcast, you can go back and listen to episode six 153 157 167 173 181 198 and 204. I guess we've been covering a lot of these people throughout the years. I'm glad to see that or be able to bring those stories to light. A new story was on a local level new station here last week. And it talked about a new bourbon where house being erected in Jefferson town, which is a part of the local area. But this one's quite different. You may remember us talking to music construction back on episode 137. And how their proprietary wrecking system is used in a lot of places that we see on the bourbon trail. But we're now also seeing a lot of palette ties warehouse is becoming increasingly more common because of lowering costs. Well, this new warehouse that has been planned is made of shipping containers. The developer wants to stack shipping containers six stories high and these plans were filed with the local Metro government. But at this time no bourbon distiller has been mentioned for the project. So who knows what this could end up being like because of air flow and other factors that plan that are in place. But the video news stories can be found with the link in our show notes. We talked a lot about the culture that builds around bourbon and the online community is a huge portion of that. Reddit, which is the biggest message board that's out there today has now surpassed 100,000 members in the our bourbon forum. We recently interviewed one of the Reddit mods for an upcoming podcast, which will air here in the next few months. We're continually moving forward with single barrel offerings that we want to have for our Patreon community. And the newest one that we are ready to announce is that we've been allocated a barrel of Eagle rare will be working through the process of nailing down a date and we will select eight Patreon community members to join us as we go to choose a barrel. Thank you to our partner Kagan bottle in the Southern California area for making this all happen. You can find hundreds of different whiskeys and Bourbons on their website and have them delivered to your door all around the country at keg and bottle calm that's keg the letter in bottle calm. And you can also learn more about what we offer@patreon.com slash bourbon pursuit. Are you going to be visiting Louisville soon and maybe looking for the best restaurants or whiskey bars to visit? Well, Ryan and I we live here and we built up a Yelp collection that helps you navigate our favorite places in the city. And you can get that link in our show notes as well. Now today's podcast is all about barrel bourbon, we had trip and Joe back on episode 164. But it's time that we get an update from what's happening with this team. They've been winning all kinds of awards. But we want to talk more about what they're doing inside these walls. We talked about the flavors that they're pulling from different states of distillation and how that goes into the blend, as well as about hearing their newest release of the valid American single malt. We've been talking about some of the greats we all have with the TTP, we take another stab at talking about online sales. And then we look at the future with new offerings. And of course looking at their new future dovetail offering. Now before you hear from Joe and the podcast, you get to also hear from him before above the char with Fred medic. So with that, let's get on with the show. 4:58 Hi, this is Joe from barrell bourbon. Bourbons have won a few medals, some of the most prestigious spirits competitions out there. But don't take their word for it. Find out for yourself, lift your spirits with barrel bourbon. 5:10 I'm Fred Minnick. And this is above the char. I often solicit ideas from listeners for above the char. This idea comes from Don Knotts. And Don is a longtime listener. And I really appreciate this idea, because it's one I've actually done a lot of research on, and I'm quite fascinated with it. And that's kind of the short history of barrel proof Bourbons. Have they always been this popular? And the answer is no. Now in the 1800s, they would actually advertise themselves as barrel strength or barrel proof. Or some would even say that they were fireproof meaning that they would catch on fire. And so that the proof in the 1800s was a way of advertising the fact that they were pure, they were real whiskey versus being adult rated with like prune juice, or water or tobacco spit or whatever the rectifier is a whole sellers were doing. And so barrel proof in the 1800s meant something entirely different. Now we kind of lose track of this barrel proof subject during Prohibition, and hundred proof kind of becomes the standard. And we don't really reset in terms of what has been bottled until the 1930s, specifically 1935 to 1942, really. And you would find some brands who are trying to market themselves as barrel proof or what they would refer to as barrel whiskey. Weller was one that probably did it the best, and they were going in the barrel at a very low entry proof, and it was coming out 108 212 proof. And in fact, the barrel entry proof up until like 1962 was 110. So the barrel strength bourbon coming out prior to 1962 would have been between 108 and 112. But we don't really see the explosion or interest of barrel proof bourbon until really the last 1015 years. But there's one brand we can point toward as being the most important for leading this trend, and that is Booker's. Booker's comes out in 1987, and was really the first to push the barrel proof conversation in American households. And you had Booker know going around the country, saying that you don't want to drink too much of this because it'll knock you back. Now the truth is that we don't really market it for like its strength for alcohol purposes. Today, we market it for the flavor intensity. And that's kind of where we are right now with American whiskey is we're looking at things in terms of how they taste, and people think that they find more flavor in the barrel proof products. But here's the thing. Don't be fooled ruled by the flavor necessarily, that high alcohol can actually mask a lot of flaws. That's why distilleries will cut the alcohol down to 40 proof to see if they find any flaws in the distillate or the barrel whiskey. So if you think you really like a barrel proof product, add a bunch of water, tastes it again, and see if it still has some of those characteristics that you like. Just because it's high in alcohol, doesn't mean it's good. And that's this week's above the char Hey, if you have an idea, like Don did for about the char hit me up on Twitter, or Instagram at Fred Minnick, that's at Fred Minnick. Until next week, cheers. 8:44 Welcome everybody to another episode of bourbon pursuit, the official podcast of bourbon and we're down here at down bourbon bar in Louisville, Kentucky, once again, we're gonna be talking about, you know, barrel bourbon, and they do more than just Kentucky, right? They update, they bring stocks from last different places. And their whole goal is to blend something that's truly unique and different. And it's never going to be replicated again. So each batches is like that. 9:08 Yep. So it's funny. Joe and I were talking before about people in Kentucky are laser focused on Kentucky only. And we were kind of guilty of that, as well. And we had our blinders on and, and then, with Barrow, they, you know, they're introducing a lot of stuff to the market. And you're like, Okay, this is actually good. And where's this coming from? Where else were you know, so it's like, I don't know, they brought a lot of stuff that I never thought I would enjoy. But I really enjoy 9:36 the offerings. They really do. I mean, even at the even the single barrel program that they offer, it's it's something that most people, if it was just anything else, they might stub their nose at it, but barrel is bringing out some killer barrels that are coming through their single barrel program. And you know, most of them are all distilled in Tennessee. And that's one of the things that I think it's starting to change those people's minds of really what else out there and they're kind of on the forefront of it. 10:02 Yeah. And even inspired us to start our own brands. So thank you guys. 10:06 For the catalyst. And not only that, thank you for these killer dog toys. If you haven't seen these are barrel bourbon, dog toys. Yeah, they're awesome beer. We always love having them they bring booze and now 10:20 I can't wait till next time. 10:22 So let's go ahead and introduce our guest today. So today we have the founder of barrell bourbon as well as the master distiller barrel bourbon barrel bourbon. So we've got Joe Beatrice and Tripp Stimson. So guys, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having us. So last time you were on was Episode 164. So Been a while now. And I would imagine that your next certain because you're carrying around all these gold medals that you're getting at all these competitions? 10:48 A little bit. Yeah, but it looks really good. And we go out 10:51 a little flavor. We were a lot of them. Yeah. 10:55 But it means like that Michael Phelps and bourbon. Yeah, got it kinda 10:59 kinda. How many? What did you come away with from from San Francisco this past year, because it was a lot 11:04 of this year, we won. I think it's three gold medals and three double golds. And we also we also picked up the best small batch bourbon over 10 years old and worn. 11:20 That's impressive. Who gets keep the mo 11:23 hasn't been the case in the display case. Yeah. 11:26 This is your week. This is not Yeah. 11:30 So before we start talking about more of the whiskey and some of that kind of things that gets people again, just a reminder, a little bit of your background and sort of where this all built out of because maybe they're not good stewards yet and haven't listened to Episode 164. But or every episode 11:45 or every barrel introduces right on above the char. 11:49 Yeah, I 11:50 should, I should have said that. It said, we're here with our good friend, Joe. Because I say that every single week. I said, listen to our good friend Joe from barrel bourbon. 11:56 He's our good friend because he pays us. 12:00 So I was going for Yeah, yeah. Well, we started this. We started the company. It's now it's stick around our six year and we've just been growing in leaps and bounds. This since we've seen you we have I had to make a list and had to write it down because it's too much because it was too much I was we're we've been really busy. We've done when we were here last time, we did our first release of the infinite barrel project. And since then, we've done 10 bottlings of it and just just remind you, the way that works is we started out by blending a large amount of whiskey. And then every time we bottle, we replace that whiskey. So right now there's, there are these whiskies from five countries and almost 40 different. I think it's 40 at this point, different distilleries, a product that's in there. We were going to talk a little bit about I guess later about dovetail which is which is our one of our new releases. We just finished our third bottling of that. We're in the middle of that. And we let's see, we did three barrel craft spirits products, which was a whiskey of bourbon and a rum. We did 12345 batch releases a new year. Oh gosh. About 250 single barrels and release of Canadian single barrel right, so 13:22 so you haven't been really that busy at all. Just relaxing 13:25 on the beach. playing golf, it just blends 13:29 and dumps itself 13:30 right around around golf carts and Northern Coleman. Yeah. 13:35 I don't have a golf yet. It comes 13:39 to the house. 13:42 So trip, what about you. So what's what's your car about a little more about your role and everything that you're doing behind the scenes here. 13:49 So I'm basically over everything that's operations. Bringing barrels in dumping barrels, putting blends together. I'll pull samples from all the different groupings and going the lab put blends together. and gentlemen, I'll sit around and taste all the different blends, make decisions on what barrels go with each other to create those blends. You name it. I'm involved in just about everything. 14:19 So the blends start with you or Joe, 14:21 like what is going in the blends just kind of it's a conversation. We know we're going to do something we talk about what we have. We fill in the gaps with things that we need. We only we ask each other question, what do you think it needs. And then we go back to our stockpile of barrels and say, well, in the past, we've had good luck with these particular flavors that we're looking for in this particular warehouse from this particular distillery. So then we'll bring those in, and we'll try it small scale first. If we like it, then we'll scale it up. And we'll scale it up step wise, to make sure we don't go too far. And it gives us room to kind of go back and forth a little bit toward the end, to make sure we we really hit it on the head. 15:03 It sounds like not to bring up another distillery. But we, when we do the Maker's Mark, you know, different states to do your own single barrel, it sounds like us, we go in and we're like, All right, we're gonna do all these different ones, and we're going to make our own barrel or whatever. And then you go back and realize that we should just start with something that somebody else did and work away from there, you know, because they have good flavors. So it sounds like a lot like that process for you all 15:27 it is. And it's a very tedious process, it's a 15:32 lot of time spent tasting different things walking away coming back. Again, like we talked about last time, Joe and I have similar palettes, but we're hypersensitive to different things that we may or may not like. So it works very well, when we have the conversation about putting our blends together because I may not get something that Joe gets, or I may taste something that joke doesn't. And we kind of we take each other's word on that and and just keep on pushing forward. Or you take that 16:00 I'm going to say are you tasting every barrel that's walking through this door as well? Because I know that you you're blending on a pretty large scale. So it's Are you like, Okay, well, these barrels represent this lot, and it should have some sort of similar profile. Are you are you really going through and sampling them all out? 16:14 We have, we have to look at him his lot, to some degree, because to taste every single barrel, I mean, we'd never leave, right? So we we spent enough time doing this, some people would think that's really a bad thing. You know, you get to stay there all day and just 16:28 drink whiskey. 16:29 We didn't get I guess it's one thing when you work in it versus actually doing it. It's 16:34 always hard and fast. So I mean, sometimes sometimes there is a lot of variation in a particular group of barrels. And sometimes there's not as much every barrel is unique, but it really depends on on what we on what we're doing. You know, it's sometimes we have tastes more than others. But I 16:47 would say the single barrels we do, we do handpick those. Yeah. But the batches we we try to rely on past experiences from the different distilleries, locations and put the blends good. 17:01 You know, it's a little bit different. As you know, we actually start with what we've started the whiteboard is a clean slate, we, once it's once something is done and packed up, we've been involved we we start with what are we going to do next? And then you know, the The first thing is, we come up with maybe a concept, you know, what is it that we want? What are we going for, we're looking for, what do we like about the last one that we make, we can tease out more and replicate. And that's really the starting point. And and you know, and then sort then the hunt is on between trying to find things that actually deliver that. But we spend, we can spend 17:34 two weeks a month on one particular blend, it's we have multiple projects going simultaneously at any given time. So 17:40 what are some things like he said that some things that trip likes that Joe doesn't and vice versa? What are some of those different flavors that you might like that Joe doesn't like for example, Katie and I, when we go pick our pursuit series, I know Kenny's searching for tannins, oak. And I'm like, let's stay away from those. I want more of the sweet kind of flavor. So what are those between YouTube and new Trump's? You? 18:04 know, there's never never it's always we always agree 100% on we're doing or it doesn't get the bottom. But 18:11 I think a lot of the differences that we talk about is it's not more of what we like and don't like, I think it's what we're sensitive to so certain stringency, these chemical notes. You know, if there are any certain off notes, like, especially in some of the new make stuff, I'm really hypersensitive to like a mildew note. So it's things like that. It's not that we like things that the other does. And it's the hypersensitivity to the different aromas and flavors that might be in there. Gotcha. 18:45 Well, what are those some of those aromas that you guys are really going for when you're when you're creating the blend? I mean, you said you start with a clean slate, but I mean, there's gotta be something you're like, Okay, like, dark cherries, or chocolate? Or, I don't know, carrot cake, like I don't know, like what's like what's like what's 19:01 marzipan, 19:02 bread, bread, bread pudding, marzipan, and the new all like the same sentence? 19:09 It's true. Well, I think one of things we really like our tropical fruit notes, juicy fruit, dragon fruit flavors, we love I love those. We love those. We love those. Anytime we can win him we can blend to that, will will just stop sometimes. And that's one of the reasons that badge 18 is is where it is in the sequence is that we blended that actually last winter, we bonded A long time ago. And it was a relatively small batch. But I love the story. Because as we were blending it, we were we were strips that we step our way up to the volume, like, we come up with the theoretical in the lab, and then we try to replicate it with the barrels. And as we do that, we we taste we stopped and we taste. And this one, we both at the same time said we cannot not add one more battle. And it was maybe two thirds of what we wanted. And we just stopped. Because it was exactly we had those super sweet notes at them in the middle palette of it. We just love that. We I think we look for a balance of the tannins and the grain. And I mean, that's, that's all really important. Balance is really key to us. We don't we try to make it as balanced as we possibly can 20:12 balance but without basically recreating the same thing over and over. So, I mean, there's, there's, there's got to be a lot of barrel junkies that are out there. And have you been able to say like, Okay, well, I think, you know, when we did barrel batch or bourbon barrel batch 12, like that might be pretty close to 16. Or you think like they're, they're all just worlds apart, 20:35 I think you're going to find some similarities in in all of them. Because you know, there's a, there's a, there's a grouping that we like, you know, we talk about complexity, we talk about fruit and flora, we talk about, you know, open battle, and all these different flavors that are out there. And all of those are going to mingle in different concentrations in all of our batches to some degree. So while some may be not day difference, I think you're going to be able to find some of those flavors in most of the batches. I would say something like maybe 12 or 14 is going to be a more traditional representation, which is going to be you know, an oak forward. traditional style bourbon, there's not a ton of fruit, there's not a ton of floral, whereas something like you know, back way back seven be was just loaded with that for floral note. So I think it Yes, the there are differences, but there are lots of similarities as well. 21:38 So when you're like making a blend, and you're trying to get those different flavor notes that you're looking for, how many barrels of a certain type of whiskey to make to get to that flavor. Like is it 21:50 such good? Or? Well, that's a really good question. It could be one yeah, it has to hit the threshold perception threshold of those particular compounds you're tasting. And sometimes one barrel will make all the difference. And that's it. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty incredible. Yeah, I kind of liked this live thing I can get. I'm getting instructions sent to me is ongoing. 22:12 dining room table, and we're live at Kenny's dining room table, we get ups man and you know, and barking dogs. That's true. News Feed is not 22:20 the same without the UPS delivery and the dogs. 22:23 were like, all right, cut it 22:26 off it. Okay. Got it. 22:30 Alright, so I guess back on topic now. So, you know, we we had the opportunity to getting a batch 17 and it was awesome. It was really I mean, it was out of this world as one of my favorite whiskeys of the probably the past few months. And now is 18 getting ready to come out. Is this released? what's what's the time Yeah, we're sold out. 22:50 We're sold on 19 is gone. We're 19 is almost gone. And we're teeing up 24 next month 22:58 Yeah, it's so you're running through the pretty 23:00 quick. We do about four releases a year yeah, for batch releases a year and then a and then the new year so it's really fine. Fine Bourbons give or take 23:09 Yeah, that's fine but sold out to it's it's available it's just it's all been allocated yeah right we still find it 23:17 right we don't have any money so that means we don't have any more with the distribute we've sold everything to distributor and then distributor now is pushing that means you've gotten your check and you've been paying 23:28 like yeah, you want to make sure that it's it's not sitting on shelves either right? You got to make sure you're still out there and doing your marketing and 23:35 we have two customers we have a customer we sell the distributor and then we have the the end customer who's in there so our sales are concerned with our distributor customer I'm concerned with you standing in the shelf or in the bar buying the product that's that's where we look at the world for sure. Yeah. 23:49 So talk about like the blends themselves because I know that a lot of these you're doing a lot of I don't know, tri state the way to really put it you know, you're doing some Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana. what's what's sort of like your ratio when you're when you're looking at these because, you know, is it is it you know, 35% Kentucky I'm sure it's different here and there. But like where where do you start at? Because there's got to be at by now. You got to have some sort of formula that you think in your head like okay, we know this is where we should start. How about you? 24:22 What's your Nashville? 24:24 Well, we stopped in the Nashville because we couldn't do the math on it anymore. Because there's different Bourbons, different Nashville's in from different states or Nashville's and then what percentage of those barrels and it was getting me know 27.2% it was was just the math was too hard, that we really truly don't have a starting point where it really the barrels lead us through at the barrels lead us into into what we what makes sense. And sometimes it will be more Indiana forward, but a lot of times it's Kentucky, it's Tennessee forward. And and then a lot of times we it's surprisingly, sometimes it's only, you know, 10% of 20% of a particular a particular group that makes that influence. So they really, do we have no real standard or no blueprint that we start with, we really do let the barrels lead us to the answer. 25:09 So in your opinion, when you're tasting each one of these different regions, different kinds of Bourbons, what are the notes that you're pulling out? Like if you're tasting something from Indiana vs. Tennessee vs. Kentucky? Do you? Do you think like where the distiller you're pulling from each has their own uniqueness to it? Or is it based by state like what what do you what do you kind of see that as 25:32 I think we have, let's back up and look at it from kind of the production standpoint where you have one, we're all in this same sort of region where we actually get four seasons, which is very beneficial for us. And then look at the different distilleries that are going to use different yeast strains with different grain bills to create these different flavors. And then you stretch those out in warehouses to say, Northern Kentucky, down into southern Tennessee, and you're going to see variations of flavor development across that region. So then being able to go in and say, you know, I'd like to get a spicy bourbon from Indiana, or I want to get a fruity or bourbon from Tennessee. I think you're able to do that. Because of the different again, you strain Nashville and then the difference in the warehousing. maturation. 26:36 Well, you know, the next question people want to know is where are you getting these barrels? 26:40 We go to the barrel store barrel get in place. 26:44 I mean, let me throw something I mean, if you want to go down this road, something completely different than we're working on speaking of different states, is we're about to blend a total different product and American valid multi product, which is so there are a lot of incredible American single malt produces in the United States. can't call it scotch. Because I mean in Scotland, and there isn't even really a category for for malt. It's either malt whiskey, which malt whiskey technically has to be a new barrels. And a lot of times the mall producers want to put it in US barrels. So we're going to be working with six or eight distilleries. We are we are working with six or eight distilleries from around the country. Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, New York, Texas. I think I may be missing one or two. And so we're getting barrels from all over the country. And we blending those. So you're going to see some real incredible regional differences. We when we when we put this together. That's going to be that's one of the next projects we're working on. That's 27:44 what makes up a malt American malt whiskey. Like, like somebody doesn't know. AK me? Yeah. 27:51 makes an American malt whiskey. 27:53 You want to do this? It's it's, it's it's multi barley. Okay. And so it's generally majority is multi barley. And there's and sometimes there's some corn in there. But for the most part, it's distilled malt, the single malt multiplies the 28:09 primary grain I got. Yeah. 28:11 Okay, great. So this is a little bit different than bourbon. Sure. 28:13 And there's some, there's a group that's actually lobbying, to the TTP trying to get a multi category to create something create something for us. us being the distillers. 28:26 What is it that you like about the malt that's going to, I guess, fit the barrel profile or blends or whatever? 28:32 Well, it's, um, 28:34 yeah, I was like, Can this compete with, you know, Forbes whiskey of the year as well? Like, how many medals can this one? 28:40 I don't know. I don't know. That's, that's sort of a nice, it's a nice accolade. We don't it's not our, our gold. You know, we really we love hearing other people talk about our products and, but the goal is to really is to make a product that people really love to drink. I don't know. I mean, this hasn't been done before. You know, but but it the inspiration of it was we we taste a lot of whiskies in and we know a lot of producers and and there is just an incredible amount of really high quality single malt produced in the United States, and they're relatively unknown. I shouldn't say that, I mean, of course, it's about colonies or by knows them and then there's less than a Reno's those guys, but there are a lot when you start getting into the smaller ones are a lot of people don't know. So we really wanted to bring that we want to bring that out. And, you know, and, and, and, and take our cut out, which is to take some of these great products, I mean, the world is our ingredients, and well as our pantry and take them and blend them together into something you know, even greater than the parts we hope will say 29:40 I want to say you keep going down this path and we were you know what, we'll talk about dovetail in a second because you were talking about all the TTV different categories like it seems like you're you're trying to make their job harder by making them just create new categories just for you like blending everything from here and there. 29:55 We're trying to make the job easier if they just go along. 30:01 Well, the difference the valid the valid Malden the malt whiskey is sort of a different, it's a different it's a different problem because there just isn't a category for what they want to produce, which is a a straight malt whiskey that is does not have to go into a new barrel. Because most scotch of all scotch is in us barrels. And there are different properties, different characteristics. And we're doing with this valid project we're doing a combination of whiskey that went into new barrels and whiskey went into us barrels previously as us barrels. But that aside, the whiskey category is is the one that was the category is sort of an really unusual one. because traditionally, a blended whiskey has can have 20% grand neutral spirit in it. So it's a category that's just that it was it was really looked down on a blended whiskey category. Our whiskies every one of our whiskeys is 100% whiskey, so 31:03 we're not doing Seagram seven and seven we're not 31:07 we're not putting brand new show spirits and and whiskey together hollering and all and go food 31:12 but we do 31:13 not you do you really awesome food coloring 31:16 speaking of blended way I found I went to state sale the other day and got a bottle of it's called golden wedding is like from the 30s or some wild and it was a blended whiskey but I was like all this is gonna be great I'm just in it was terrible. You could tell us neutral grain spirits with like, like brown died and it was on 31:35 the ground the Beatles Yeah, exactly. That was an ingredient of bourbon in the know it Yeah. In the early 1900s and it tasted 31:42 worse than that. I wish it was it was 31:44 color these kind of people he's Crisco to little bit but but so the dovetail is I think the dovetail is a really is an interesting project. Originally it was going to be our whiskey number six and so and what's in it, that was the name of that was the original idea. Well we have a series of whiskeys, we are barrel whiskey, and we do them in batches just like the bourbon so it was okay, this is the next one and and what it what's in this product is 11 year old Indiana whiskey that we finished in done vineyards Cabernet barrels done vineyards is is really incredible Napa Valley, hundred year old family vineyard. And they make an incredible, rich lush camber of Cabernet. And so we got the barrels and we and we finished that whiskey and then we took some Tennessee bourbon and finish some of it in in in rum casks. So our rum casks. We bring rum in from different countries usually comes in in a steel container because the barrels will leak over the place. We put it in x bourbon barrels. And then when we're finished, we dump it out and we take those x bourbon barrels that had rum in it and finish some bourbon in it for this product. We also have some special bourbon finishing late vintage board pipes. So there's a combination of different whiskeys in here with different finishes different proportions, we blended it, and sent the label off to the TTP and six months later. 33:14 And for everybody at home, this is what we're talking about the dope. 33:17 So what's what's the is we call it whiskey is a what's the category that this is followed. And so 33:22 this is technically a distilled spirits specialty, okay, which is in the same category that you can have bubblegum flavored vodka, and you could have 100% whiskey, so it's a little bit it's a little bit, it's a little bit of an odd category, 33:35 but it's fine that you have that because this is like the one product that I see like people are like this is actually really good. Like you've got to go out and get some and I'm trying it right now and yeah, I'm kind of floored like how really good it is. I mean you get you get those Bubble 33:50 Bubble Gum notes you get some 33:53 grape airhead you know those like to you come you come as a kid, you know, there's like, driven sort of like fruit by the foot. You know, like, 34:03 like you said, You love those Juicy Fruit kind of that this is like 34:06 get those know that we're happy to get those sugary kind 34:09 of great notes. So, 34:10 yeah, we want to bring you back to your childhood. That's what we're 34:13 I do I try to take everything I've had in my childhood. I'm like, all right, I taste this and that or whatever. So it totally reminds me of that 34:20 is one thing that you know, you just kind of kind of just piqued my interest a little bit when you were talking about like all these different barrels and all these different things you're doing you could almost open up like your own like week long vacation where bourbon nerd to come in. And they could just like, just pay you to be there for a week. And they could just sit there and just play around and experiment with everything and try to like make their own sort of crazy blend. I mean, because this was I gotta ask like how you 34:45 you got to this 34:47 idea that we should blend these two together? 34:49 Yeah, why didn't you stop at the the Indian thing is Evelyn in the Cabernet. Is it because like oh, that's been done whatever. Yeah, once I'm finished barrels, they're like so passe like everybody doesn't know 35:02 what we try we are always trying to try different new things. But we have these meetings where we all get together every every every month two months probably and we just brainstorm ideas what what is what is the most crazy thing we can do? What's the nice little story about the tale of two islands 35:20 so that was that was a meeting where we sit down and we needed some what we what we call it one off projects that we like to work on. And we knew that we wanted to use some of our leftover Jamaican rum from batch one and we want to do a finish so you know what we were going to do and we had like 20 samples set up in front of us and and what do we want to do this texture that finish and at the very end there was a blend of the rum with some scotch and we thought there's no way this is going to taste good. And it was one we liked the best so we put that in a bottle and called it tale of two islands and it was it was phenomenal so you're blending scotch now to 36:11 we do we do we do have we do blend scotch and infinite barrel we an Irish Whiskey Yeah. But these are those casks are 36:21 on but the those cat what I love about those casks is 36:27 it's a Kentucky distillery. So I can't say that which one 36:33 went to great distillery which I can't say that when we get the barrels 36:40 with both their names on there Why do you think that is like in the sourcing like I would think they would want to want to know like or want to be able to tell like hey this came from us like what why do you think they do that? 36:51 Well I think there's there's a lot of reasons why people do it but but part of it is they're protecting their trademark so in other words they wouldn't want us capitalize on their trademark so if we you know pick any pick any Kentucky this is already and if we username they would sue us you know, 37:09 federal bourbon brought to you by XYZ 37:13 and you know, Kentucky is a litigious state so it's sort of 37:16 Yeah, I agree. But I mean this is this is a fantastic blend like this is the first time that I've tried it and and it's definitely something that I was just kind of like Wow, I didn't 37:27 expect it this is the first like whiskey blend or whatever category it is you want to call it that I could eat this with a rebel most like it would go perfect yeah big fatty steak or even a dessert 37:41 yeah or just like a dessert kind of finished like 37:44 every day like really is you can taste it in like current bonds Nixon was big bowl cabs I like 37:49 I'm glad you like it you can you can pairs with so many movies tomorrow night. I'm like bottle 37:57 coffee 37:58 in your flask. Yeah, just part of the at the table there. 38:02 So what's what's next I just got I just got an I should clarify one point which when we when we do our brainstorming it's it's the company it's we all get together it's not just we spend too much time together anyway just doing stuff 38:16 in the company now. 38:19 Let's see 999 people 38:23 did you when you started Did you envision it getting this big do you envision getting bigger? The 2019 38:31 Kentucky's edge bourbon conference and festival Paris all things Kentucky with bourbon. It takes place October 4 and fifth at venues throughout Covington in Newport Kentucky, Kentucky's edge features of bourbon conference music tastings pairings tours and in artists and market Kentucky's edge 2019 is where bourbon begins. Tickets and information can be found online at Kentucky's edge.com from forest to still Bull Run distillery whiskeys are using some of the water in the US. 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Like what are you happy with where it's at? I mean, kind of talk about from a business standpoint. 41:03 We're happy with the growth. 41:06 I we're ambitious we want to be we want to be as big as we can grow. We're very happy with the control growth we've been having. We've been doubling every year and and we're it's where we're on track. We're absolutely on track to where we want to be. 41:21 How tough is it to like, I think you said you're like 100% up from last year? What are some of the challenges that you faced, like, I guess going from, you know, experiencing as much growth because like, for me a 20% growth is like chaos. In my biz I couldn't imagine doing like 100% growth. It still talks about some of the challenges or hurdles that you face doing that? 41:42 Well, we've been, we've been planning for business perspective, we've been really planning on this appointment, we have 10 people in the company. Somebody 41:51 somebody just 41:54 got the list 41:56 getting fired up. 42:00 Nine tomorrow, I keep getting texts like that. 42:03 It's just in. 42:06 But But to answer your question. 42:09 We're we spent a lot of time planning, we we plan our releases, we plan our production schedule, we we we account for growth within that. And so it's so a lot of it is logistics planning, getting the barrels to the right place at the right time getting the bottles, the corks, all that stuff, making sure that everything is everything is is lined up and correct. And we and we plan for our goals, which are which we've been pretty close. We've been we've been hitting our goals and exceeded our goals. So we're already anticipating that growth. So we're we've factored that into into everything that we do, you know, you've been selling through your batches very, very quickly. And our distributors sitting there knocking your door like Joe, we're ready for the next one, like Hurry up, when's it coming? When's it coming? That's such a complicated business. It's incredible, because well, first of distributor is sort of a generic term, we, we've put together a network of distributors across country, where with a couple of that we're in more than one state. But for the most part, we've been very careful about who we align with, because they have that they have to be the right size, we don't want to be too big. So we asked them to them, we don't want them to be too small, because they won't have the capital to buy the products that we need. So it's it's a very, it's a very, it's not such a straight line. And some are better than others, some are better others are planning and some will, will are right on top of the releases and others they need a monthly call to say by the way that you put your purchase order in and then it's not. It's not usually because they don't want to it's because they're they have a lot of products and they're they're torn a lot of different directions. But it's it's a very, you know, it's that whole aspect of the business is just it's just different. It's different from any other business. Because you have it's like you're dealing with 50 different countries. Every state has its own laws, is it is the federal there, but every state, every state can Trump it. And then you've got 13 control states, which, which are all entirely different. And they're all government state run. But each one of those has different regulations rules. So it's and then you have what's called franchise states, which are states that you make an agreement with a distributor, and you can never leave. No matter what the contracts are about. 44:26 This is not fun. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz you gotta be careful. Yeah, you partner with somebody and they kind of screw you over. And you're, you're you're stuck, right? You're contracted in for X amount of 44:35 time we've been we've had good relationships. Yeah. Because our products are selling and so there's, they do well, and then they're happy. But if you don't do well, then they're not happy, then that's a different story. 44:44 Oh, good. Yeah. So you're not going to come out with like barrel vodka yet? And then that's going to be sitting on the shelves is that? 44:49 I see. I think Fred's been telling us that we should do that. 44:52 Go. Yeah, he's an advocate. 44:56 How much he likes. 44:58 T shirts and hands and everything. NET? How much he loves it? Oh, absolutely. 45:03 So from your side of the business, would you guys be for online sales? Or 45:11 is that 45:11 original? My original business model I wrote was all online sales. Yeah. But because it's just and the thing is, the reality is, is it doesn't affect the distributors, it actually helps distributors, it would it would open up another channel and save them money. But they've got to see that point, the connection? Oh, no, the more we do with our do you think that is connected with them? Is it I mean, I guess just anything with bourbon or liquor, everything. So like old school, they don't want to change. They're like, I don't know, they're just stuck in an old nine. So you've got big aircraft carriers traveling. And in order to turn those around, it requires a lot of energy, 45:50 a lot of people and a lot of regulation. It's all that sort of stuff combined. Now, because I think we've, we've talked about on the podcast before we've had on the roundtables to kind of like figure out like, what, what's the discussion of, you know, why can't we open this up, like, when is Amazon finally going to start delivering to your door and prime next day, you know, dovetail next to you. And when people are going to start setting up online scrapers to go ahead and buy allocated products, like soon as it hits on Amazon or something like that, right? So the day could come, it probably will come it's just who knows when it's going to be. But I kind of want to talk about you know, a little bit more about trip, you know, the operation side of this, because I think that really what people want to know more about is is the blends and and everything that's going into this. So kind of talk about really what's next on the horizon for you all, and and are you worried you're going to run out. And because there's a thing that you talked about, before we started recording this, as you were saying that you guys are tripping over barrels at your warehouse, like you've got 46:47 that much stuff going on, you're ready to sell some, we'd be happy to take 46:53 that or we'll just go and make your own blend. Yeah, 46:54 there we go. So there is a blend. But 46:57 the process logistics get a little tricky when you've basically grown out of your space. So all the way back to what we order and when we order it. So Joe, and I'll have an idea what we're going to do. So we're so we're going to have a, you know, a dovetail and a batch of bourbon will have to infinite. And we'll just have a list. And then in our minds, we'll go through and figure out what barrels we think are going to go in each of those plus what we already have in house. So we'll ship everything in order. And as it comes in, it literally comes off the truck, goes to the dump trough gets dumped into the tank, empty barrel goes back out and onto another trip, because we don't have room to keep the empties in there. So that process goes on for an entire day when the trucks delivered, so that that's kind of how we get our base. And then once we have the base for whichever project we're working on, it then becomes the treasure hunt of what flavors are we missing? Where do we find them? And how do we put those together. But it is it's a bit of a logistical mess to do all that in, in a small space. And it was kind of funny the last the last time we got we had three trucks in one day and for our space, that's a ton. And we had to strategically place them in the facility. So that right up front where the tanks are, we had tanks, forklift dumped off, and then we just started working our way back. dumping barrels working because there was no room there was a path for the play. That was it can just 48:33 used to be a two dimensional problem. What was on the floor? Yeah. Now it's literally the three dimensions wrong way. It's like Tetris. I mean, Tetris, we're up for four levels. 48:43 Oh, wow. Just so people know, at least at least from at least I think my knowledge so a truck is about 96 barrels. Is that about what comes in? I'm dependent on how their ship? Yeah, yeah. 48:54 Or depends if they're up or down? 48:56 Yeah. So what up? what do you get for on a pallet, 48:58 what you do six pallets it for based on weight, you can get 49:03 lost, I don't do math, 49:04 okay. But you can do without the pallets, and you can get a few more. 49:08 So you ever more work? That's more human work? 49:13 Are you ever worried when when Joe or anybody else on the team, because we now clarify that there's 10 people on a team, 49:19 maybe 11 by now, 49:22 or none, when with like an idea comes up, and you're like, Oh, God, here we go another label. And like, you have to continue these these product expansion line, because you're still doing your barrel batch Bourbons got your infinite, you've got, you've got your rum. I mean, you've got all kinds of you've got your New Year's Eve bottle. So kind of talk about like, When is that going to end because you know, it's it's like a scale up thing that you're like a scale out thing versus like trying to scale up, that's kind of hard to be able to do, 49:54 I would say that. First off, we love to innovate, we'd love to do things that have not been done, we like to be creative, going, we've got a stack of ideas that if we had more time, we would be able to do. So we love that we don't want that to stop. When we talk about, you know, the batches and expansion and everything. When you look at someone who does a product the same way every single time, which there's something to be said for, they've already got a cola, they already have all that stuff approved, they know what's going into that bottle, it's just a matter of doing the same thing every time. Every time Joe and I put something together, we start from square one. So the bottle doesn't change, the shape of the label doesn't change, but everything that's on the label front and back changes, which means it has to go get cola approvals, and then come back to us. Everything that's in that bottle is going to be different, which means we've selected different barrels, we've come up with new ideas, we put different blends together. And then once everything is approved, we've we signed off on the blend, it gets bought cases shift. So every single time anything goes out from from barrel craft spirits, we've started from square one, to create that. And then on top of that, trying to constantly innovate and and better ourselves with each new product that we release. 51:18 So purposely inefficient, is that the best? 51:22 Well, the one thing that we have that is we spent a lot of time in the original label design, creating the structure of the label. And we have essentially a matrix of product. So and we fill in. So there there, there's, you know, buy type whiskey rum, right now, DSS and rum. And then there are different levels of of that were essentially three price points in all of our products going into those three price points, to make it easy for the customer and the distributor. And so then it's a question of creating the content for the label that fits that particular metaphor of that matrix. So we've we've, again, everything we've done is a lot of advanced planning, there's some things look haphazard, but they're really not. We've actually done a lot of the thinking about this already in advance, we spent a lot of time planning. 52:12 So with with all these, like line extensions and other things you're doing, are you looking at ever phasing anything off? Because it's it's a lot to keep up with everything and to continue blending? You know, great question seven different sort of releases. 52:28 Yeah, it is a great question. And I think 52:31 I think the the the public know, you guys will decide some of that when we when we love doing everything that we're doing right now, he said, but he's upset with it. Yeah, I mean, if you if you decide or the public decided that all of a sudden they don't like something, then we're probably not gonna do that again. But I mean, currently, we're having fun putting all this stuff out there. 52:52 The other thing too is, is if we don't like we have not done rum to yet, because we haven't found the rum that we've done. A Tale of Two islands, which is a limited release. But ROM two isn't out because we haven't found and we've looked at 100 different rooms we haven't found the right ones with it we're looking at we're about to do around project because we we did just buy a lot of ramen, I think that what we have is going to be interesting. It's combination of at least Jamaica, Barbados, Ghana, and maybe even Martinique, we'll see I'm not sure. And when that's right when that's right will release it but we don't feel the need to have it the only the only product we want to have out there all time is our bourbon and whiskey. But if the rye isn't the one we want, then we'll wait. Right three is we're kicking around right three right now. 53:41 That's been the sales like you don't you don't see a whole lot of the right on the shelves. Like that's kind of a really kind of hard to find product and I think correct me if I'm wrong, you were doing a few like single barrel rise this year as well. 53:52 We did we did a fair amount of single barrel Canadian rise. They were 13 years old. And they were they were they were 99 or 95%. Right? They were spectacular. Yeah, we 54:10 we have another Canadian Roz are good we 54:12 came right you know if you leave it alone, and 54:15 you may have a lot of those great big juicy for flavors they do as like, so I'm not surprised that like this. 54:23 Yeah. And then when we were about to acquire a lot of candy, right, and the first thing that trip days was bubble gum on it. It's so true. It's a very bubble gummy. How's that? 54:36 I got a question about source the buying round and sourcing. Is that similar to the bourbon game, like, is it similar? Totally, totally different? Because I know with bourbon, you got brokers and all that stuff. And you don't really talk I didn't. How's that process work with your you just get a one way ticket to the islands and hang out? Yeah, for a few months? Already? Yeah, 54:53 take a few 54:54 hands I figured out you can do. It's very different and depends on it depends on the silver, but but there is, there's a lot of spirits available. You just have to know where to get them in rum is rum. You know, aside for a couple of very specific distilleries, it's readily available. I mean, there's, if you you'll notice there's a lot of rums from Central America, there's run from South America out there now, you know, and and they're all very different. I mean, you know, some of them are just too much sugar. For us. It's, it's not what we want, we tend to really like those pure and kind of a funky Dunder, the fermentation distillation process, or just really heavy duty fat rums. No oily. 55:39 So if you guys do a lot of just bourbon whiskey and itself, then why run? Like why? It's, I guess it's one of those things, it's coming up. Well, now, I mean, look at it. You look at it from a business perspective, and you're like, Okay, like, we're gonna we're gonna chop off like the dead weight, like is from a dead weight to you? Or is it still like that's still like experimentation? Well 56:00 think about it this way. The person who drinks our rum is really a high end whiskey or bourbon drinker. So you're not going to take our rum and mix it with Coke. I mean, this is not a white rum or white rum. This is these are serious, serious products to drink. So it's a there's a natural crossover between some of the high end whiskey drinkers to some of these sort of vintage or really esoteric realms. They're not for everybody. And, and I don't even believe that rum is the next whiskey category. I think that this is that the people who drink the rums that we that we will bottle are a subset of the people who drink the whiskeys. They're not necessarily hardcore rum drinkers. Although they're the people who like rum do drink our rum, but it's not the general population. So we do it because because our customer likes it. And we like it. And you know, our promises. We only put in the bottle stuff that we like, 56:55 you know, you said rums, not the next category. 56:58 What do you think is the next category I think America was he's got a lot of room to go. I think we're, I think we're in the sick. My opinion completely. We're in the sixth inning of bourbon, we got a way to go with that. But American whiskey is there's a long runway on that. I think people are going to discover it the way they discovered bourbon. And that sort of fits our model. You know, we were looking at we look at people want to know what's new and what's different, what's exciting. We're always doing something new and different, exciting. And I think that if you look at that, that's what people like, and we're going to just keep doing that. I'll toss one at you because 57:31 I know that 57:33 you buy your whiskey. 57:35 We all go there. I know we're not going to get that without a chokehold here. 57:39 Yeah, actually, we already know. The 57:44 so a lot of people look at Armagnac as a as a as a kind of a good substitute for whiskey because it's it's, it doesn't have the same kind of flavor profile, but you do get some like very dark and condensed sort of flavors and floral fruity notes. Have you guys even thought about looking at Armagnac as a possible source? 58:04 Okay. new ones flavor? Yes, the answer? The short answer is yes. We don't know we're going to be out there. It's 58:12 3.5. Actually, we're already we just finished. 58:14 Finished, there's three more. 58:17 So So talk 58:18 to talk about talking about three real quick since it's probably going to come out. So kind of talk a little bit about like what was in the blend is a little bit different than we're drinking now. Like, kind of talk about that a little bit about that? 58:28 Yeah, there. The interesting thing about dovetail is that it is going to be a little bit different every time. But we do use you the same similar ingredients in that the barrels are the same. But, you know, grapes change every year. So the one that was in the barrels that we may get next time might be a little different than what we use previously. So there's going to be some flavor differences there, we might use a different number, we might use a Jamaican rum barrel instead of a guy in a Guyanese rum barrel, or all of those things are going to put subtle differences in there. But at the end of the day, when everything's put together, you still taste all of the same flavor characteristics, but a lot of them are in different concentrations. So it's it's a, it's a similar experience, but it's not the same experience. And I think being able to, to put all those compounds in there, in those different concentrations and let them vary a little bit as you go along. It's kind of fun to do it. 59:33 So another thing that you kind of piqued my interest, little bit too. I saw something from another friend of the show Wade wood or today and we're talking about finishing, it was more or less around like finishing versus aging. So you're talking about putting something into the barrel. And now do you all look at what you're doing is finishing like it's just in the in there for a short period of time, kind of marry some flavors you like really aging something in there? 59:57 No, I mean, everything we use is a Yes, yes. Yes, we put it in there for some maturation, but mainly, it's a finishing. 1:00:07 Yeah. 1:00:08 And some of us we have some whiskies. And we have some things we've been finishing for two years. 1:00:13 I mean, you'd have to classify that 1:00:14 would that would be I would consider two years age. Yeah. Well, 1:00:17 the funny thing is, you know, the I would think I think 30 minutes is finished, yours is probably age now the run finishing the run fish we do. I can be as short as two weeks. I mean, it depends on it depends on the particular finishing agent. And for us, one of things that we've really been careful about is we don't want the finish to overpower anything. fact, we, we don't even really want you to taste the finish, we want the finish to enhance the whiskey and make that greater than then either either parts. So you'll pick up some of the notes. You may pick up brand characteristics. But for the most part, what you're really tasting is something that's that is been created from the different finishes and the different whiskeys. So it's a totally different new flavor experience altogether. Yeah. So john, I want you to 1:01:02 taste it and go, Wow, what's that? I'm going to go back and taste it again. And then try to figure out what it is. And I know the bottom. Exactly, and we don't want you to take a sip of it and go oh, wow, that tastes like a big bowl cap. Yeah, you know, we want you to get 1:01:17 that deal. I know. 1:01:20 We actually that's that's probably an exception because that that cab is such an exceptional product. Right? That that it just brings out some beautiful nuance some 1:01:31 people about finishes, I guess there they have a concern that how much product is left in the barrels when your product goes into it. Can you talk about that

This week on the "Dailicast Moment" host Chris Laning offers some cool ideas for formatting your dailicast. Today, he talks about keeping your dailicast locally focused if your business and customers are almost exclusively in your local community. TRANSCRIPT:   With your "Dailicast Moment" for today, I'm Chris Laning from NeighborhoodStage.com. Now all this week and actually all last week too, I've been giving you some cool ideas that you can use to put together your own dailicast, particularly if you just don't know what you want to do your dailicast on. Well today, this idea is specific to people that have businesses that thrive within a community. In other words, your customer base, pretty much everyone that's going to be involved in your business comes from your local community. So I'm not talking about if you're a coach or somebody that has online services that has clients all over the country. I'm talking about a service, a business, again, that operates solely within your community. Now, this could be something like, let's say you're a local baker. All right? You're Joe Smith with Doggone It's Good Bakery. Now, as a bakery, you're probably not going to be drawing people from all over the country unless you ship and then it's not as fresh. So do a dailicast that's not necessarily about the bakery, but do a dailicast that's about your community. Now this can be bringing all kinds of things related to your community. It could be history of your community, it could be current events, it could be items of interest and news. Maybe you partner up with the local news organization to bring that information to the community. The point is your doing a dailicast that provides information to those people that live in your target area, and you do this by partnering up with other people in the community. Find those other leaders, find people with other businesses that you can get out, get involved in this, and then they can bring their people and their audience to it and help you get the word out about it. The thing is you're going to draw ears because they want to hear about their community. Right? They want to hear what's going on. They want to hear people on there that they know. Even if they don't specifically know you, they're going to come and listen. Now, how do you use that to promote? Well, we're not going to throw commercials in there. I mean, I guess you could, but that's not really gonna keep within the spirit of what you're doing. It can just be as subtle as if you're the one hosting it, just simply say, "I'm your host Joe Smith from the Doggone It's Good Bakery" and leave it at that. They now know your name and they're getting to know who you are. This is a really effective way to do a dailicast because people don't feel like you're selling to them. They realize that your providing them a service and if you're going to provide them that service, then when it comes time to need possibly your other services, they're going to be more inclined to give you a try. So if your business keeps it local, then think about keeping your dailicast local as well. And that's all for the "Dailicast Moment" for today. Now don't forget if you're not doing this already, the "Dailicast Moment" is available as an Amazon Alexa flash briefing. You can just go into Amazon, search for "Dailicast Moment" in the skills section, enable that skill. Then all you have to say to your device is "Play my flash briefing" and the "Dailicast Moment" will be played as part of all the other things you select to play in your flash briefing. With your "Dailicast Moment" for today, I'm Chris Laning from NeighborhoodStage.com. Have a great day!

How to avoid losing reliable supporters and donors? Is it possible to fundraise without fatigue? Join Huy Tran, Founder of Megadeeds (https://www.megadeeds.com/), as he cuts through the challenges of raising non-profit funds and the solution that will help make it easier for donors to keep on giving naturally. If your non-profit organization is running out of creative ideas to keep your donors coming back or you're a donor who's just about ready to stop supporting a charity because of donor fatigue, then you wouldn't want to miss this episode! Link to the Megadeeds app on the Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/megadeeds/id1382326748 ----- Dean Soto 0:00 Hey, this is Dean Soto, founder of freedom in five minutes.com. And we're here again with another freedom in five minutes. Episode. Today's topic is this raising non profit funds, the easy way, that and more coming up. Alright, cool. So today's topics actually be really, really cool. I have an awesome guest. We haven't really talked too much about nonprofits at all, but it's something that is is I've been dying to do, because there's so many things when it comes to nonprofits, that man it that in order to build a scalable, non nonprofit, you really have to have some things together. And one of those things is being able to get donations, right. But what happens when you're constantly constantly asking for money or for donations are things like that, you the, eventually your donors are going to start dropping off, right? And they're going to be like, dude, stop asking me for money. So all that being said, there's so I am here with Cui Tran, who has developed a really cool unique way of making it so that does not happen. So we How's it going, my man? Huy Tran 1:29 It's all good in then follow EW at us on the show. Very cool show. And I'm so happy to have can talk to you today about mega hit. Dean Soto 1:38 Yeah, no, I love it man. So you, you are one of the founders of mega mega deeds or you are the founder of mega deeds and like so So first and foremost, what is mega deeds and why did you create in the first place? Huy Tran 1:55 Oh, we make a nice is actually is we call us a marketplace? fundraising like you say earlier fundraising in the same hotel as probably heard year. You know, people thought campaign. And they just keep sending out emails and phone calls over and over. Please donate. Donate, please donate. I think at some point oh, no. Yeah, pretty high of it. Yeah. And we saw make a nice calm our experience is that we undertook we also participate in a lot of charity donation. And, you know, we kind of get high with just here in the same thing over and over. At the same time we hear from our previous and I'll finish Ebola, you know, what, if you have something perhaps you can sell them and figure out how to sell to the otter and give the proceeds to the charity or to the cause? Yeah. So we look at it as an hour. It's not that easy. Because if you need to do the three way facts and the I sell to you, but why do you pay the body and I know that you rz and we look at it and we live but you know as technical as is doable. Even that I used to run engineer DirecTV. One DirecTV so to at&t, I look around our stuff on our farm, you know, people on Facebook, Google Amazon, but like, Hey, you know what, I have some extra cash from the payout on the Mojo. Why don't I pursue our dream. So we spent the last year and a half to be without it wiki. Exactly how we want it to be it's a it's a marketplace where, you know, anyone who wants to help a charity off Bob and raisin can do it. And people can eat body. People can sell service, and use the proceeds to donate either 50% 25% of us are generous, and hundred percent to any charity or any cause of that choice. The family can I love it. No, Dean Soto 3:55 it's great. It's funny, it's funny that you mentioned, like, even the church thing. So so I'm Catholic, and, you know, I just remember like, I mean, I still I we still get it, it's I live in the country, so we don't get it as much anymore. But when I was in Orange County, like oh my gosh, I get literally every every mass, it was like, hey, donate to the past memorial service appeal, pastoral service appeal test or a silver spiel. And it was like, dude, stop asking so much. Like, that's all you're doing. And but if, but if there was like, if there was like, if there was something where they were giving where you can, you can actually get a good service, like maybe like maybe a speaker or something, somebody to come or something like that you paid and then some of those proceeds went to the church, then it's a different story. Because you because because you're getting value from it. And that's, that's very amazing. Huy Tran 4:56 You know, it's funny that you mentioned because our churches few years ago, we have some you know, we got we got some short and sweet on the say, you know what, if you have something that you can sell, who wanted to order and use the proceeds to give it to us, it'd be great. He used to collect item. And you know, price and sell but it turned the church into a garage sale. And unfortunately, people property is all sort of junk, as they thought is valuable. So with this, we call it you sell something, it has to be compelling because else nobody's going to buy it. Yeah. So you can no longer sell your very own computer monitor. The whole TV and thing is what I'm about to go, you know, you cannot bring it to church and say does this thing work to $1 but he can sell it and if you sell a computer monitor on a US iPhone, right? Yeah, with a compelling value. Some people will buy from you. And if you just want to donate half, at least you can keep the other half. Yeah, you donate all send the moment people pay, it goes to the church. So so lot of power where people overvalue thing they give you know how everyone just do it through the pasties on right. Hey, old TV what I have $500 Yep. My old Paul with $1,000 now No, you have to be realistic. Yes. Great, really good marketplace for people to get. Dean Soto 6:18 Yeah, no, you're totally right. Yeah. It's great. Because and then like, because so it's an iPhone app. And they, it's you you have to put something on there that it's not like you can go it's not like a Craigslist, either. It's not like where you you know, it's like I'm gonna just put up like you said, like this computer monitor. And it's and it's good. It's like it literally has to be a valuable goods or service in order when you put that up there and so, like, so, like, how has it been? Like, like, what I'm like what successes have you seen so far with the app when it comes to fundraising? Huy Tran 7:01 Right so so let's look at your first question first. Why is it unlike playlist we all know Craigslist is popular but it's why is I have this new land for scammer Yeah, totally you for go lyst like gab and people offer to pay you with my you know, personal jack Cassie check a lot of them turned out to be fake it you know, we address that. So same way anybody address you know, by Felton faction First of all, we actually use PayPal so you cannot even like fake the check or you know the money. That's the check. Yeah, it's exactly the same but the only difference is that you know, it's not a body just your cells are now the sound against the Wi Fi. Where's the body? Gotta go. Yeah, well, we talked about with eBay. We use eBay benefaction with very secure people don't have to worry about the bank account or anything because they're gonna pay him with a PayPal account. Yeah, the second also they decide to collect money they had to have PayPal. We also provide a rating system to middle of the evening so you know, if you decide to scam people call it you can do it on one, but Eva gonna charge back you anyway. Yep. So that is a YZT that are out and do have all the requirements on PayPal, but we didn't. That's probably the hottest. The whole tape out on out a Brita. Yeah. So you know, you Holly go on the app or website Elijah there's not not fundraising an app on our apples really hot. We go Apple have like, really strictly five. Oh, yeah. Mommy at a fundraiser nap. And, you know, after six months, we finally got approved by Apple. We've been using it popped up all in. I'm all out of all the local school district and I'm all out band. Yeah. And we're excited. It absolutely went away. We had visa when we thought I gave an example. We we tied it to a hospital in Vietnam. Yeah. And you know, it's pretty hot acne, global hard auto, auto nation? Yeah. Well, yeah. A lot of email support. A lot of them have access, access to fashion. Yeah. And, you know, some people want to gather while they eat on a lot of other seaboard and never use. And we raised the model so quickly, because I don't want to tell anybody, I lose our all you know, the call, but I mean it. Yeah. And we reach our goal way the ball out. paga. And obviously, you know, when you feel impossible, but we know we all have a limit on how much we can do with that. Yep. So we got people donate people. On board, we got a lot. me like, nearly impossible. Yeah. Dean Soto 10:06 For sure. For sure. Like that's that, like they like any especially in a church church setting. I mean, people just don't have cash anymore. Just and just in general. Right. You know, and so So to do that, like, like, that's, that's pretty unheard of, you know? Huy Tran 10:22 Yeah. You know, what we found interesting, when we asked for people out on the call, a lot of people have you call? And you know, you cannot copy church. Right? They won't take it. Yeah. If you have $1, you got back by you can do it? By dollar. Yep. Right? Why it gotta get a PT? Dean Soto 10:53 Go straight to the church. That's Yeah, see, and that that's awesome. Like, like you said, like, with a used car, if someone, someone buys like a, so the church doesn't want to, you know, have the have, or any organization really doesn't want to have like a used car sitting in their in their parking lot, all shabby, and you sell that thing for 500 bucks. And then it goes, you know, whatever percentage goes to the church, like, they didn't, they didn't have to do anything. Like they know, no inventory, know what, and whatever. They're just reaping the benefits of it in, like, I can see how organizations could, I could see how organizations could even like, they can promote and say, say, you know, hey, we're doing a used car drive or whatever, if you have a used car, just posted here on mega deeds, posted on mega deeds for our church, any used car that you want to get rid of just posted there, and we get the proceeds. And they literally don't have to do anything other than that. Huy Tran 11:57 All right. And we can walk, we would walk in with a cool little shake off. And right now we walk in with a School District of New York. Where my kids are. Yep. And you know, right. onto the Pamela the PTA off new school. By the PDA school year. PDA. Bye bye, cookie. Woke up. The school doesn't want to the dog. Yeah, but parent and suppose you, you buy you buy gold. And those go straight into the PDA do the school. Wow. Dean Soto 12:51 That's cool. See? That's awesome. Man. I love this. I love this like so. So what are what are some of the things that people I know there's a lot that they can do. Like what are some some of the things that you've seen that have been the most successful? Like has it been services? Or is it more more product type stuff? Like what what do you what do you kind of see? Huy Tran 13:19 We wanted? So we designed the app. And you know, at first we thought Oh, this is so cool. feature. And we launched it and guess what? Nobody can you know, you look at Asia. People. And yeah, we actually had to go back and how do we make it? So? How do we make it so easy for people? Now, you know, a mega nowaday, you know, nobody read the manual. Manual. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, that's us. And we all got it now. So that's number one. Number 2017. Paul, The Guardian, and you follow that law? and Alabama, you know, holy, we had a daughter. And, you know, that's why Apple very strict on that. But how do you? How do you know that? You know, I'm being corny. Yeah. So we had and while we you with that, that, you know, graduate? And you know, the fact you need to make it easy. Right? And I'm a three you actually have to fall by. had to decide that? Dean Soto 15:27 grand? Huy Tran 15:30 earlier? Dean Soto 15:35 Yep. Yep. No, you're right. Like, because literally, they anybody nowadays, because they attend, especially because the attention span is so short. If you don't have good user interface, if you don't have a good user experience, you're done. And so, so like, how long actually how long did it take you to? Like, so you built the first the first version, love it? And then it then people were like, I don't know how to use this. How long did it actually take you to do the second version? Like how long has this been actually going on? Totally. Huy Tran 16:39 And, you know, we, and we will die? We have you know, the user right after we get off the year. E boy getting back to them. So we've had on with apple? And we how do we go? Boy? Wow. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Dean Soto 17:43 Get out. Which is great, though. Like, it's, that's that is still pretty fast. But yeah, but yeah, the that's the great thing about that. I mean, it It sucks without with having to do that with Apple, but you know that the quality is going to be there, you know, that the safeguards are going to be there, which is a huge, huge plus. For for the for the app, and like you said, there's not a lot of apps out there that are able to do what you're doing right now. Huy Tran 18:09 I think we all only wanna we are the only ones that are. Dean Soto 18:21 See. That's where it's, it's definitely a lot harder. And, but that's where, like, the difference is, to me, such a such a big thing. And it allows because because with with the marketplace that you are, it's not the same as just donating, like a like a Kickstarter thing, or a GoFundMe or whatever it is, right? You are adding some kind of value. But then you like you said, you also have to be able to there's going to be people who put who want to put something up there that is that's not actually true. Like so like you mentioned, like the gift card, like if someone puts a $50 gift card, and it's actually not worth, it's actually doesn't have the $50 on it. You have to have safeguards for that, and so on, you know, so so that's, that's a that's a pretty, pretty tough thing to go to go buy like. So you said you, but you sounds like you have an engineering background that I probably made it easier. The like, what were like what was what was like, did you have one instance where it was like a, you had like a really major thing happened where you're like, I'm not even sure if this is gonna work out. Huy Tran 19:43 You know, I hated it. I go back, you know, 1990 a. Okay, yeah. And, and in 2008 Wow. So we will add an ad. You know, do I muted? Dean Soto 21:04 Exactly. Huy Tran 21:06 You know, what do you have? You had? Right? You didn't know? Dean Soto 21:26 Yeah. Yeah, seriously? Like, three months? Three months? That's a long time. Huy Tran 21:34 Yeah. Dean Soto 21:44 Yeah. Wow, that's crazy. I love that. So I always ask this, this question. It's up. It's what I call the five minute mindset shift question, the five minutes like strategy. Question. Like, what's something that like that where you like it? It you, you you made a decision to do something? That if that, that once you did, it completely transformed? Everything you did in your business? Like massively like, where were it? It changed, it changed the game for you or for your team or for your customers? Huy Tran 22:27 Right, so we have our own challenge. You know? Yep. Yep. To off. Yeah. So yeah. So we, Holly, Holly, Holly. Yeah. And, and we don't want to school and just follow them. All right. All right now. And if all you do that, you know, you have to believe it. You can't believe you and your family. You can do that. But as you bad. Dean Soto 25:16 I love that. I love that, like the making money right away. I love that. I love that. No, I love that. It's great. Because it it it. The I love that. I don't know I I'm a big fan of 37. Six knows the guys who wrote base camp. And that's what they always say is that like, you, you don't want to you want to be you want to know how you're making money up front and not be that startup that's like, like, well, we're just gonna get a lot of users, we're gonna get millions of users, and then we'll figure it out. Like, no, you want to know that you said you want to know how you're going to make money or, like you're making money right off the bat, because that is what is going to help build it out and grow what you're doing. Otherwise, it's going to just you're just wasting, especially if you're going for venture venture capital or something like that, and wasting people's money. And eventually, you know, it could potentially crash if you're just hoping to get bought out by by Google or bought out by some big company. You know, that only that that only happens very, very rarely. So it's, it's a great idea to just focus first on like, on how how, how is this going? How's it going to grow? By bringing in revenue? Huy Tran 27:05 Yeah, right. I know, we never want more money. Yep. Dean Soto 27:33 Yep. I love that. So how can people how can people reach you? How can people get your mega deeds app and so on and start start selling things for their charities? Huy Tran 27:48 Right. So you know, that maybe? No, Dean Soto 28:11 that's great. Huy Tran 28:11 Bye. And as a big love it. So Dean Soto 29:05 Wow. Yeah, that's really cool. So So someone jumps on and starts starts doing something for their church or organization or anything. You have a matching like actual matching program. Huy Tran 29:21 Right now? Yeah. Yeah. We go, can you go out and do that? On a minute. That's Dean Soto 30:26 cool. I love it. Man. This is great. This is great stuff. Huy Tran 30:38 We didn't want to go Yep. And then we're gonna be living. Dean Soto 30:43 I love it. That's cool, man. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. And for, for sharing this. I already know and I I mentioned to you before the show, I already know some people that I want to introduce you to because I know they do. They do fundraising. And they they also have a lot of connections with fundraising in general. So I'll be email. I'll be introducing you to them. But man, I just appreciate you being on the phone on the on the show is real pleasure having you on man. Huy Tran 31:13 Thank you. Dean Soto 31:19 Awesome, that sounds good. Cool. Thanks for being on the show. And guys, if you want to check it out mega deeds, go on the Apple Apple App Store and get mega deeds and start supporting your organizations that you that you want to support. I mean, what better way than to you know, just get started, get it on, get on get on there and start doing putting something of value on there that you can actually utilize to just start donating to your church to your organizations, your schools, things like that really, really cool. Really, really cool app. Also good. Go check out mega deeds calm. And yeah, it's you can tell this just this is something that I I truly believe is going to revolutionize how people raise funds. Because I know I don't like when I'm just getting asked all the time for money when I when I know that I'm able to get something of value, and it's going to a charity. That's pretty dang cool. And I know also on my end, I like being able to give value, whether it be a service or selling something and know that it's going to a good cause. So go check out mega deeds on Apple App Store, go to good mega deeds calm and get started with the app. But for now, we are done with this episode of the freedom in five minutes podcast and we will check you out in the next freedom in five minutes podcast episode.

Becoming a Champion Course http://bit.ly/2MYWs1e Champions Table Mastermind http://bit.ly/2YW00Yv Success Champions Podcast https://link.chtbl.com/R76Z4v0O Success Champions Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/Succe... Free Stuff http://bit.ly/2KGWwji Website https://www.DonnieBoivin.com Sponsors https://www.pointblanksafety.com/ https://bluefamilyfund.com/ Transcription: Here we go. Alright guys gonna be another fun episode, which you guys don't didn't get to hear. This is my second time trying to start this show because Bob got me giggling already. So I sound like a little schoolgirl over here, but this is going to be a fun show. So Bob and I talked a few weeks back and we just had a really good conversation and went all over the place. So I was looking forward to this one. But I'm Donnie Boivin. This is Donnie success champions. I almost screwed it up again. Bob say you're welcome to the show, my friend, please. Hey, Donnie, Listen, man, it's good to be here with you. You know, my story is probably you probably don't have enough time on your podcast to hear the long boring parts. Trust me, nobody wants to hear all that anyway. So now listen, you know, I think you're going to find this maybe to be kind of weird, and your guests might find this to be a little bit weird, but Had the the advantage of growing up on the on the border of poor. And you people look at that and go an advantage. And then listen, I don't mean we went hungry or anything like that, but man, there were no extras. And and so that inspired me. I still remember being 10 years old and asking my parents for something and then telling me you wish don't have the money for that. And I don't even remember what it was Donnie, but I remember deciding, well, you know what I want it. So I'm going to figure out how to how to make the money to buy it. And that was sort of that was sort of the start of my ambitious journey, I guess. And I, you know, out of out of five kids, I think I was the only one with an entrepreneurial gene. And I guess some people are just wired differently. But I mean, you know, my sort of entrepreneurial journey started. I spent six months selling new Oldsmobile. That was an interesting business. And frankly, I really didn't like car business a whole lot, mostly because it didn't really fit my core. And I think when something just doesn't fit, kind of your core values, personality, whatever, you're just not going to be as successful as as you could otherwise be. Nothing listeners at all. So long time ago was 1986 when I was in the car business, but one thing that I did like about it was I in that business, I started earning four or five times the money that I was used to earning. And I said, Man, I don't like the car business, but I could get used to making this kind of money. And so the car business led to my really kind of first chance I had to be in charge Myself, which is four years selling residential real estate. And then that led to a 17 year career in frankly, what I thought would be my career portal, which was in financial services, love that business. But I found that I would see both clients I work with, and reps I hired and trained sabotage themselves and their financial success. And the more I saw it, the more bothered me and it but it was kind of the impetus that led to me studying the psychology of what I call the psychology of human action in action. You know, what in the world makes people do the things they do, or not do the things that they don't do. And I learned a lot about what, what really are the drivers for people, and it helped me a lot personally. And so I ended up writing my first book, and after 17 years in that in History, I decided I was going to start my own company strictly to do personal achievement training. And wrote the book, it was sort of a has a basics of what that was all about. It's called discovering your greatness. subtitle, the higher level thinking and action guide. And, interestingly enough, a couple years into running a new company, we're doing okay. But okay, wasn't what I had in mind. And I thought, you know, we need some better ideas here. And I really started studying about creative thinking and innovative thinking. And what I discovered was teaching people how to do that. Help them get a better image of themselves. And when you're thinking better about yourself, and especially if you can have some During that process, it's just a whole different world. And so most of the work that we do now with spearpoint solutions, is really involved with innovative thinking, training on that. I do do some consulting with companies to develop strategies, you're using those principles that I teach. Because I find sometimes, you know, I talk to CEOs or managers and they go, you know, you're pretty good at this stuff. Why don't you just help us develop some strategies and instead of training our people, so either way, it's good with me, and it's kind of a long and winding road to get where I am now, but I you know, what I found there's almost nobody. Now almost no successful person that I've ever met, had a straight pathway and Okay, well, what's your experience been with that? No, it's the same brother. It's the same. Yeah, I'm really fascinated with this whole idea of these kids. Right, you know, because that wasn't me, right? That wasn't my story. That wasn't my journey. I, I didn't think about starting a business until I was 40. You know, I tell everybody, I'm a late bloomer. You know, so I'm really, you know, this whole idea that that you're born an entrepreneur really, really floors me kind of a bit because I don't fully wrap my head around how you got to that space. Do you think it's mean? I mean, I know you said it was because you were 10 years old. Right. And that, you know, there was something that you wanted to buy, you couldn't buy, you know, but how does that translate to years of creation? years ago? Well, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, no, that's a good question. And I don't know that I was necessarily born an entrepreneur. Exactly. But I think some people are common one. wired to be ambitious. And some people just are okay with just being okay. And there's nothing wrong with either, you know, whatever fits you and your lifestyle and your goals. I think what, that's fine, right? I make no judgments. I just know that, you know, for for somebody like me to aspire to average it's just not in my DNA. I love that phrase. Here's why I'm catching a lot of buzz because of something I say on stage. But I mean, you pretty much just said it. It's really just this quote, you either get okay being okay. Or you get in the game, otherwise Shut the hell up. Because because there's a lot of people that keep telling the world I'm going to be great. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But in truth, they're not Taking the action to do the things they need to do, to level up, scale up and go for it. So I, I wish people would, you know, stop taking on the world telling them how awesome they would be and truly just start enjoying the life that they have, versus making themselves feel miserable, because they're not doing the things they thought they should. That makes sense. Well, it does. And two thoughts come to mind as you're saying that I heard a long time ago, a phrase that stuck with me, says, When all is said and done, there's usually more said than done. True. Right. And look, talk is cheap brother. Nope. It's easy to do. It's way easier to do than taking action and getting your nose bloodied. Right, and tripping and falling, that it's much easier. So anybody can talk a good game. Yep. Right. But it's it, but it's people who it's the doers of the world. You know, I talked about a lot about developing better ideas. And I think that's a key critical component. Right? Because a bad ideas even perfectly executed is still a bad idea. Yes, but but, you know, I think you ought to start with with better ideas and better strategies. But having said that, the greatest strategies with the most perfect plan, not executed don't add any value to anybody. So you know, so you've got to have, you know, if I could make an analogy, in physics, you've got theoretical physicists and experimental physicist, and they're both necessary to move That field forward. So, so but the the theoretical, the theories of the theoretical physicists are only proven by the experimental businesses, right. But the experimental physicists are maybe not the best theoretical physicist. So it's sort of like the symbiosis between a songwriter and a gifted performer. A this is a this is a bit of trivia here. You know, Elvis Presley had I think 38 number one songs, or 38, top 10 songs. It was a bunch, right. Okay. And and how many of those did he write or co write? Man I don't and to have an answer that but but since you're asking I'm going to say zero It is zero. Now, you can become world famous as a performer. Right? And you don't have to be able to write songs. But the flip side of that is, you can write great songs and other people perform them. And you can be great that way too. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the way I look at as a at creating winning strategies for people is, you know, I'm like the songwriter, and they're like Elvis Presley. Right? They gotta go perform those strategies in order for them to be great. Yeah, no, I love that. Yeah. Yeah. I there's and you I'm sure you've heard the hero's journey by Joseph Campbell. Oh, sure. Yeah. And I love this because one I grew up you know, watching the fantasy movies and reading the Lord ring books and all that kind of stuff. So I can totally vibe with this whole theory and philosophy out there. But but to what I love about it is this whole dynamic of the guiding the hero. And I think what you're saying is, in a sense when you're working with these companies, you're the guide but they're the hero and the hero is still gotta go slay the damn dragon. Right? They still gotta go execute No matter whatever plan you build out or anything, you know, you put together for them. They still got to put the work in and do the things to make it a successful endeavor. It's like in sales. You know, you can, you know, talk about cold calling all day long, but until you pick up the damn phone and actually dial the number, you know, you know you've got nothing is that pretty much? Hey, listen, that's that's a My apologies. I Hey guys, I failed to put my phone on Do Not Disturb. Let me let me let me correct that now. Sorry about that brother. Okay, so yeah, I should have known better. This is not my first trip around the block on. Oh yeah, we're gonna make this one though. Yeah I know I deserve it. I deserve 50 lashes with a wet noodle at dawn. You know it's kind of like in you in Lord of the Rings. These guys get these special weapons. Right Aragorn got the special sword. Frodo via Bilbo had the the special weapon his size, but they still had to wield those weapons. Yeah, right. So there's no doubt and I think you're spot on on what you're saying and You know, it's like, I've got a new book that's going to be out. By the time this airs, it should be out on Amazon. And it's and it features 101 great, sort of many business strategies. And and it's dinner can innovative thinking methods in there that people can use to come up with their own. But they still got to apply those things right, no matter how brilliant they are. Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm sure you've experienced this, you know, you're standing in front of a room, you're talking to a crowd. And after the you're done talking to them, whether it's a speech or a training, whatever, someone walks up to you and says, that is one of the greatest things I've ever heard. And I take it two ways. One, my ego gets stroked, and I'm like, Yes, awesome. I did my job. And then the second thing goes through my head is wasn't great enough. And I'll usually ask that person, you know, are you going to go back and implement what we talked about today? And it's weird the responses. And I'm curious, you know, one, have you experienced it? And to have you watched the almost shocked reaction sometimes when you've asked that question? Oh, yeah, I listen, I think anybody that's done any, any keynote speaking or any training and you're in front of large groups has experienced that. Look, I think if you're a decent speaker, you can get people motivated. Yes, but the but the challenge with motivation is, is it's temporary, right? It's easy to get, you know, people's adrenaline pumped up and, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think you ought to live your life in an excited enthusiastic fashion but What I prefer to do, and this is where I think, you know, the training on the skill set of innovative thinking, especially the way we do it, where it's, you know, it's practical hands on, it's not standing up in front of a room with PowerPoints, or just about, you know, me being a keynote speaker is, you know, inspire people with, with a mindset of, Hey, you know what, I can do this, because they've actually experienced it right there. And they've, you know, when we do our training with the game I invented, which is kind of a basic innovative thinking game, but it puts it into a competitive format and it's fun and people laugh. When we're doing that. In a training. I say here, two things over and over one people laugh their heads off, and and second is your people go As people coming up with ideas and strategies, like Wow, that's really good. But I'll tell you afterwards dying. People come up to me and some people, they'll tell me overtly, and some people just kind of see by their to change in their physiology. That, you know, they surprised themselves at how they were able to think in a way and come up with ideas that they didn't expect. And, and I can totally relate to that. But they you can tell, right, that it's just like, No, I'm over sharper than I thought I was. Right, I'm all better than maybe I've been giving myself credit for. And when you get that, then you know that you've inspired you sort of, you sort of inspire something that they had inside them all along, but they just weren't aware of it. Yeah, I love those things go ahead is most people have never bet on themselves. Right? So when you can put them in an environment where they are forced to do something they haven't done and I'm not talking about walking across a rope bridge or you know, some tire swing thing or something, you know, but taking an action that will mentally allow them to grow and get them out of their comfort zone. You are, in a sense, forcibly helping them to evolve, and you can see it, and it's awesome. I mean, I it's a really cool change in people. So how does your game get them to do that? Well, the game is structured in a way that I say it has three elements. One, it's got some structure in it, there's a gameplay format to, it feels like fun rather than work. And three, it embraces competitiveness. Right? And everybody, I don't care, the most non competitive person, you know, when they feel like they've got a chance to win, they get competitive. Yes. And so what the game does is a little difficult in just an audio only environment. But you've got two teams. One is the entrepreneur, the inventor, we sort of use those terms interchangeably. Second Team is the competitor. And then the third team who's not competing in that round is the customer. And so each team A and B, gets a set of 10 words, and they use this innovative thinking process to match any of those two words together. And come up with an idea for a product, a service or business. And it gets three minutes to do that you will think three minutes is that long. But people surprise themselves. There's there's great power I found there's great power in have to. Yes. Right you when you have to get something done, you will. And when you don't usually want this Chan. Yeah. So so then each team, you know gets a separate set of words, they're coming up with an idea in three minutes and at the end of three minutes. They each take one minute and present to the customer team, what their product service or business is, how it works and what the benefits of the customer is. And then the customer decides, hey, do I like this team's idea better? Do I like this team's idea better. there's a there's a scoring system and play moves around the board where everybody's playing each Roll, you know, at any given time, and listen, I had a client come up to me after a training session once and he said, you know what the greatest part of this game is? And I said, What says a with David? So let's that David, he said when you when you were and when you lose, you still win, right? Yeah it's a blast. I love that you know, and here's something else that that I think your game is is getting people to do. It's forcing them to make decisions and and you know, a lot of life people get stalled with the inability to make a decision. So when you put them in a group atmosphere and you say you got three minutes to come up with a service, you know, a product or anything else. That's awesome, because I mean, that's a fast decision. And a lot of people struggle with making decisions at that speed and living and dying with the consequences. That's brilliant, but I commend you for for coming up with something innovative like that in a training format that, you know, one brings people together makes them think outside of the cliche word the box but also forces them to make those fast decisions because you know, studies have shown you know, the faster you make decisions, the better you can do in life and business because you don't get stuck. Good. I Where did this whole game evolved from? It was it was it? Yeah, that's no, that's a good question. For most of my adult life, I really didn't picture myself as a creative individual. But as I alluded to before, it's great power and have to and and in aspiring to take our company to a better level. I said, You know what? I don't really think I'm great at coming up with good ideas, but probably some books written on creativity, right? And I've got a book, which I highly recommend you have in mind that's coming out. I highly recommend this one the most. It's called Tinker toys. sinker is thinker toys like the child's toy Tinker toys. Okay? Think toys, and they're probably, they're probably 12 dozen different creative thinking techniques in there. And I tell you, if you are not used to thinking creatively, and you don't really view yourself as being a creative person, some of those look a little bit complex at first, but I discovered one in there called combine a story play, which sounds complicated, but it's not. That I learned later was both Einstein And Da Vinci's favorite creative thinking method. And look, all it is, is combining two things together and seeing what a third four possibilities occur. Do you mind if I give you an example? Please do I'm fascinated. If I let me, I first have to let you know that people don't think in words they think in pictures, true apps, right? So if I say the word dog, you're not thinking about the characters for the letter D, oh, and G you're thinking about a dog that you know, have no right and probably a dog that you owner have. If I say the word kitchen, you're thinking, the the image of the kitchen pops into your mind, right? Yep. But if you start combining words together, especially nouns, if I combine dog and kitchen together, or kitchen and dog together the new possibilities, start eliminating From my imaginative ability, you know, here's what's crazy about that is kitchen dog, I didn't have a whole lot of thought process around. But when you said dog kitchen, the first thing that popped in my head was, could there be a company I know there's our that that could make dog biscuits, or you know, you know, dog food, things in it. I know there's a ton out there, but I would never start one of those type of companies. But that's where my mind went to really cool thought process. And if you have an imagined you had a set of those nouns, right, not just a couple of work from, but if you had a set of those, and you had a direction to work with those. That's the whole point of come up with an idea for a new product service or business or an improvement on something that already exists, right? And some of the stuff that emanates from from just that little simple method and playing that game is It's practically astounding. Have you had anybody come to the game leave their company and because they started a business? I have had, I've had a number of people tell me stories about the things that they're working on. But look, it goes back to the challenges you were talking about before. You know, just coming up with an idea. Even if it's a multimillion dollar idea. It doesn't do anybody any good, even you right? If you don't act on it. Like, I have people tell me all the time when they when they find out. I have written a book. Our company published another one that I curated the content for and I have another one coming out. And so I can't tell you it's hundreds probably people told me Oh, yeah, I'm thinking about writing a book to write right now. How long you gonna think about it right? Now so and yeah, it's it's the inaction and people man it's a we're all guilty in some regards I mean, with our businesses and things we need to be doing, you know, and then help, you know, for me going from an employee to business owner was such a damn leap because I didn't realize how badly ingrained I was, you know, ingrained with this employee mindset before I started running my company, and I still find it, you know, not creating a job versus a business for myself. And, you know, it's it's that when when you get mired down with all the stuff, it's remembering to put one foot forward and start knocking things down. So you can keep moving forward because what, as soon as all those spinning plates like you're the clown with all the plates Getting up in the air. You can sit there and be mesmerised, how pretty all those plates look. But until you start knocking those plates off the frickin sticks. You're not gonna be able to move anywhere and go anywhere, you're gonna stay mesmerised, and action takes care of all that. And the biggest thing people always say, Well, what action do I take? I'm like the first one in front of you. Hey, listen, amen to that. It's hard to steer a car that's in park. Yes. Said. Right. So, look at start taking some action. You know, in my first book, there's a after, after you set your goals, then what should you do when you start taking action and what you think is the best direction, right? Because I found that as you begin to take action, you can Little signals and clues on which way to go. It's like, it's like your goals, the destination you've determined to get to. They act like a GPS that you get off track. You're going to figure that out as you go. Right. But that phrase as you go, is the critical one. Yep. Yeah, yeah. This is gonna be fun. So I love it when people bring up goal setting. And here's why. You ready for this? I'm ready. Goal setting doesn't work is actually a D motivator. And here's what I mean. And I love having this conversation is when somebody sets a goal. They are nine times out of 10 setting a goal they already believe they can achieve then They're going to fake it till they make it, in a sense lie to themselves that they're going to get there. When you set yourself up immediately for failure, not planned failure, but to fail, you lose. So I quit setting goals A while back, and I flipped it. And I set milestones and here's what I mean. I believe you should have a general vision of where you want to go. Okay, General vision, what you want to do. But I'll always take it back to sales. Let's say you've sold $10,000 a month. And you come back to your sales manager and that last year, you sold you know, $120,000, you look at your sales manager and say, this year, I'm going to sell a million dollars. And that manager is going to ask you a cool how you going to do that? The answer is always I'm going to work harder. Right? You know, which never works. Right, you know, so what I would tell if I was that sales manager tell that young sales person is let's do this, instead of setting that million dollar quota let's see if you can do 11,000 Let's get you to 11,000 get there, and then we still do 11,002 months. Can we then get the 12,000 and then 13 and you start teaching incremental growth and start getting people to learn and evolve, how to level up and then start moving forward. And and I'm curious now hearing my philosophy of course, it's my show so I have to be right. Your opinion make it mine. Right, exactly. Right. thoughts. I mean, because I mean, for you We were brought up in this world of set goals, set goals. And as you get this executive area, and it's a big, hairy, audacious goals and all this stuff, but people don't do the work. Right goes back to our whole thought talking around action. They're not doing the work. So that's why I flipped everything over to milestones because people can wrap their head around. How do I just get to my next, my next small level so I can grow? Well, this is my philosophy on goals. goals should be two things. Now, I'm not saying that you should not have a one year, five year 10 year vision. You should, but five years is a long time. Right? Especially in this age, unless there's over 1800 days in five years. So there's no sense of urgency. So I think you should set your You should have a vision for one year, you should have a vision for five years, maybe even for 10 years. But your goals ought not to be any more than 90 days at a time. For the second thing, and here's why, because there's no sense of urgency. If you miss one day out of 1800. That's not that big of a deal. But if you screw up one day out of 90, much more of a big deal, right? Right. So there's a so there's a, there's a an urgency of action in that. But here's the other thing and you you alluded to kind of a 10 x goal, which I know is kind of a catch phrase in today's world. But the problem with a 10 x goal is it's not believable to you right? Right. And I tell people look set stretching Lee realistic goals. And while I say stretching Lee realistic, I use those two terms again. For reason, you know, the most you've ever made in a year. And this funny, I just laid a couple different mastermind groups. And we were just talking about this very concept and in a mastermind group session an hour ago. And I said, you know, it's the most you've ever earned any year. Or let's, let's break it down to a quarter most you've ever earned in a quarter is 50 grand. And you set a goal to make to 50. The first thought you're going to have when you look at that as go, there's no way Yeah, right. funnel, see how I can get there. It's too high of a plateau. But the example that I was using in in that group, I said, you know, $100,000 in a year, used to seem like all the money in the world to me, right? until I got there. And that became anyway Listen, once you hit that, then you can start looking at 150. Right. And once you hit 150, you know, it doesn't seem like that far of a stretch to 250. And you get to 250 and 500 doesn't seem too far of a stretch. Now I have a friend of mine 2018 and I think he made about two and a half million. And I remember years ago, we were together in the financial services industry. And I remember he had he had just hit his first hundred thousand dollar month and income. And he was going to hit over a million that year. Total. And he said, Bill, he said his bill, he said Bob, earning a million it. I don't work any harder than when I was struggling to make 60 grand. Right. But the thought process, the focus, the execution was way different. Right. Right. So, so that I, it's been my experience, you know, everybody has their own philosophy and I think you're, whatever you're doing that works for you. That's what you ought to keep doing. So, I think we're saying a lot of the same things because you were talking about, okay, you know, if you did 50 a quarter, you know, getting the 250s a leap. What if you're going from 50 and 60? Alright, cool. Next back believable right, next quarter, can I get to 70? And, you know, because you have to evolve as an individual because the person you are right now is not the person you need to become to get to where you want to go. You have got to level up or get okay being okay. Because because, yeah, there's so many people that are They're, you know, telling the world how awesome they're going to be, and not executing. And all they're doing is making themselves miserable. Enjoy the life you have. And understand that your income level if you live inside your means you'd have a very happy life. But most people don't want to do that. Right? Yeah, they look, most people would rather grow their income to meet their dreams instead of tricking their dreams to meet their current income. True, was it right? So, but look, so many people are trying to go so far they're trying to make quantum leaps. And I'm not saying that you can't do that because I've done that a couple of times, right? But it's not the quantum leaps that matter as much as the consistent growth. system it can be consistent, small group, right? What if you're What if each month or maybe even each week, you try to get 1% better? Just 1% right mean 1% that it sounds like nothing. And yet over time, if you got 1% better, even a month, right 1% better a month, over the course of a year or two or three. That's massive growth. Very much true. And you know, but people want to believe in the overnight success, which is there's no such thing. They want to believe that there's an easy button. They want to believe that there's, you know, some magic pill or something. They don't want to do the work. You know, and they don't understand that you've got to go through it to become it. Oh, that's a great phrase. Absolutely, I'm gonna get a T shirt, maybe with a habit. You know, but that's it. I mean is people want the soft and easy and sweet and fluffy route when they don't realize that if you go in to fail on purpose, you can actually level up faster. Wow, that's where you learn the most. Right, right. I mean, when you screw up it, I tell people, Donnie, the reason I know how to do a lot of things, right? It's because I've done a wrong almost every possible way. Right? Right. I've screwed up so much. Right. And you alluded to this before. Your most overnight successes take at least a decade. Yes. You know, but people Well, people don't see that right? Or maybe they're willfully blind. And so I will No, I don't see that you know this person. You'll put in all this extra effort that they, they did things I like to tell people look, you got to do stuff to be consistent about about progress, even when you don't feel like it. Yes. Right. Even when you feel like sitting your butt on the couch and watching that episode of Laverne and Shirley that you've seen three times, right? You just age the hell out of yourself. Just so you know. Well, okay, how about that, that that that rerun of Grey's Anatomy. There you go. There Big Bang Theory. Yeah, frankly, I'll gonna make happen. Your audience mad probably I don't get the appeal that show. Oh, I love it. Love it. Yeah, but you know what? That's why they make different colors of car exhaust. Everybody don't like the same stuff. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. I never know this show is gonna go sometimes it's always fun. It's always fun. You know, you've been really doing some cool things on your ride. some really cool things on your journey. I mean, you've done some cool stuff. Where's all this taking you? You know, you got new books coming out. You've had a couple of books, you're doing some speaking. You know what's what's being on the horizon for you. Then the next big thing is happening in 2019. Hopefully in the first half of 2019. I'm not 100% in control of this. So I can just tell you this is my intent is We are launching up to this point all the training that we've done has been face to face. But we are launching an online training portfolio or a portal I should say. That is going to train people up on how to think innovatively. But listen, the, the most exciting part of that is, is we're creating a, an interface where that small business person out there who might have 25 or 50 or 100 people that are working for their company. They'd love to be able to be like Procter and Gamble or International Harvester GM, some of these big companies that have thousands and thousands of employees and, and they can sort of crowdsource innovation internally. Well, if you got a company that has 100 people, you can crowdsource Internally, but it's not a very big crowd, right? So what if what if there was a way for that small entrepreneur to access the knowledge, experience and imagination of this vast army of people that have been trained how to think innovatively and they don't have to add anybody to their payroll? Right? They don't have to, nobody's taken up any more room in their building. They're paying no more benefits, and they only pay for the solutions that fit them. Well, that's interesting. That would be kind of a big deal, wouldn't it? Be that level the playing field for them, it would make them able to compete and have all that talent, access to it, just like big companies do. And on the flip side of that, Donnie is these people that have been Train to think innovatively, they bring their own set of knowledge and experience to the table. And they can look at that and they can exercise that entrepreneurial gene without having to go start their own company. Because it gives them potential extra source of income. So, the win for everybody? Yeah, yeah, no, I like that a lot. Was this was this concept born out of y'all need or you saw a gap in the marketplace? No, I just see that that look. There's a yo you got now this advent of so much automation, especially with AI. that a lot of jobs that are being done by people now are going to be done by people in the future. They're going to be done. And I don't mean the final need mean along the way future I mean, the near term future right, the next 135 years 10 years at the most. And so those people are going to need different skill sets. I think, as I was telling him on his podcast recently, it's temporarily terrible for those people when they lose their job, right? But it's only temporary, right? Because once they acquire the new skill sets needed to do the 21st century work, they're probably going to end up doing work that's more fun. It's probably more fulfilling, and frankly, because it brings more value to the marketplace, it probably pays more. And so they've got to learn these new skill set. And Chief among those, I believe, is how to think innovatively and apply that to practical solutions in business in life. And the sad part is, is our traditional education system isn't doing that. Yeah. So, you know, you can complain about that. But as opposed to complaining about things, I like to do something about them. And I see this big gap that's unfilled that companies like ours, so I'm sure we're not gonna be the only one are going to fill in the gaps there to get people trained in the skill sets that they need, you know, to thrive in the 21st century instead of just barely survive. Absolutely. That's well done. But it's a it's a really, really, really cool concept. I think you're going to help you know a lot of people on their journey level up. Good on you. Good on you. Thank you. We have a goal to help millions. Yeah, I know I should. I know I shouldn't set a goal Donnie, but can be taught this whole time. I wasn't sure but dang just proved. That that's my vision. Anyway. I love it. I love it. I love it. You know You know, here's here's the thing. There are certain individuals in this world that can set a goal, like a guy like Gary Vee Gary V's biggest thing. He tells everybody he's gonna buy the New York Jets. Right? Right. Right, like Gary Vee may very well get there, because that drives him that motivates them that charges him up. But it's such a few minority of people that are that driven, you know, innately to get there. So I like your big vision. Now bust your ass to get there. Well, if you're right, it can do you mind if I throw out sort of another thought in terms of goals? What I have found is that people don't set goals based on what they really want. They don't set their true goals. If they set goals at all. They're setting them based on what they think they ought to want. what somebody else wants them to want. You know, my sales man, my sales manager said, This is my quota. So that's my goal, right? What does that mean? There's no, if you're not setting goals that are your true goals, then there's no emotional power to them. So there's no driver for action. So you're setting yourself up for failure. If that's the kind of goals you're setting 100% agree. Hundred percent agree. Well said, Well said. Well, brother, can you believe it's been almost an hour already? Time flies when you're having fun, brother. Well, you know, I mean, when you're around me, you have no choice but to have fun. So So. Yeah, well, no, I this has been a blast. And by the way, time flies when you're having fun or not, so you're exactly right. Exactly. Well, my friend, how do people find you? How do they get in touch with you? How do they reach out? How do they make funny Yeah, you know, look, LinkedIn. Like my home on the internet, I just I love that platform. If it's done right, I think it's extremely productive. And, and you can meet people from all around the globe. And so LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me. It is linkedin.com slash IN slash Bob Sager VOB SAG on. love it love it. Well, this is how I like to wrap up every show. And I do stump some people on this. So So stand by, if you are going to leave the champion to listen to the show entrepreneurs, business owners, people from 78 countries around the world that tune in Listen to this. If you are going to leave them with a quote, a saying a phrase, a mantra or a motto, something they can take with them on their journey, especially if they're stacked up against it and going through it. What would be that quote or phrase you would say? Remember this? Remember this this is from Arthur Ashe. Arthur Ashe said, start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can Love it. Love it. That's Sage sage advice, my friend. It's been so fun having you on here. I've really really enjoyed it. Thanks for you know, coming in sharing your story and having some fun conversations and some laughs So So thanks for doing this but hey, Donnie, it's been fun being on what you Thanks for having me. Awesome. Well

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You know, my story is probably you probably don't have enough time on your podcast to hear the long boring parts. Trust me, nobody wants to hear all that anyway. So now listen, you know, I think you're going to find this maybe to be kind of weird, and your guests might find this to be a little bit weird, but Had the the advantage of growing up on the on the border of poor. And you people look at that and go an advantage. And then listen, I don't mean we went hungry or anything like that, but man, there were no extras. And and so that inspired me. I still remember being 10 years old and asking my parents for something and then telling me you wish don't have the money for that. And I don't even remember what it was Donnie, but I remember deciding, well, you know what I want it. So I'm going to figure out how to how to make the money to buy it. And that was sort of that was sort of the start of my ambitious journey, I guess. And I, you know, out of out of five kids, I think I was the only one with an entrepreneurial gene. And I guess some people are just wired differently. But I mean, you know, my sort of entrepreneurial journey started. I spent six months selling new Oldsmobile. That was an interesting business. And frankly, I really didn't like car business a whole lot, mostly because it didn't really fit my core. And I think when something just doesn't fit, kind of your core values, personality, whatever, you're just not going to be as successful as as you could otherwise be. Nothing listeners at all. So long time ago was 1986 when I was in the car business, but one thing that I did like about it was I in that business, I started earning four or five times the money that I was used to earning. And I said, Man, I don't like the car business, but I could get used to making this kind of money. And so the car business led to my really kind of first chance I had to be in charge Myself, which is four years selling residential real estate. And then that led to a 17 year career in frankly, what I thought would be my career portal, which was in financial services, love that business. But I found that I would see both clients I work with, and reps I hired and trained sabotage themselves and their financial success. And the more I saw it, the more bothered me and it but it was kind of the impetus that led to me studying the psychology of what I call the psychology of human action in action. You know, what in the world makes people do the things they do, or not do the things that they don't do. And I learned a lot about what, what really are the drivers for people, and it helped me a lot personally. And so I ended up writing my first book, and after 17 years in that in History, I decided I was going to start my own company strictly to do personal achievement training. And wrote the book, it was sort of a has a basics of what that was all about. It's called discovering your greatness. subtitle, the higher level thinking and action guide. And, interestingly enough, a couple years into running a new company, we're doing okay. But okay, wasn't what I had in mind. And I thought, you know, we need some better ideas here. And I really started studying about creative thinking and innovative thinking. And what I discovered was teaching people how to do that. Help them get a better image of themselves. And when you're thinking better about yourself, and especially if you can have some During that process, it's just a whole different world. And so most of the work that we do now with spearpoint solutions, is really involved with innovative thinking, training on that. I do do some consulting with companies to develop strategies, you're using those principles that I teach. Because I find sometimes, you know, I talk to CEOs or managers and they go, you know, you're pretty good at this stuff. Why don't you just help us develop some strategies and instead of training our people, so either way, it's good with me, and it's kind of a long and winding road to get where I am now, but I you know, what I found there's almost nobody. Now almost no successful person that I've ever met, had a straight pathway and Okay, well, what's your experience been with that? No, it's the same brother. It's the same. Yeah, I'm really fascinated with this whole idea of these kids. Right, you know, because that wasn't me, right? That wasn't my story. That wasn't my journey. I, I didn't think about starting a business until I was 40. You know, I tell everybody, I'm a late bloomer. You know, so I'm really, you know, this whole idea that that you're born an entrepreneur really, really floors me kind of a bit because I don't fully wrap my head around how you got to that space. Do you think it's mean? I mean, I know you said it was because you were 10 years old. Right. And that, you know, there was something that you wanted to buy, you couldn't buy, you know, but how does that translate to years of creation? years ago? Well, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, no, that's a good question. And I don't know that I was necessarily born an entrepreneur. Exactly. But I think some people are common one. wired to be ambitious. And some people just are okay with just being okay. And there's nothing wrong with either, you know, whatever fits you and your lifestyle and your goals. I think what, that's fine, right? I make no judgments. I just know that, you know, for for somebody like me to aspire to average it's just not in my DNA. I love that phrase. Here's why I'm catching a lot of buzz because of something I say on stage. But I mean, you pretty much just said it. It's really just this quote, you either get okay being okay. Or you get in the game, otherwise Shut the hell up. Because because there's a lot of people that keep telling the world I'm going to be great. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But in truth, they're not Taking the action to do the things they need to do, to level up, scale up and go for it. So I, I wish people would, you know, stop taking on the world telling them how awesome they would be and truly just start enjoying the life that they have, versus making themselves feel miserable, because they're not doing the things they thought they should. That makes sense. Well, it does. And two thoughts come to mind as you're saying that I heard a long time ago, a phrase that stuck with me, says, When all is said and done, there's usually more said than done. True. Right. And look, talk is cheap brother. Nope. It's easy to do. It's way easier to do than taking action and getting your nose bloodied. Right, and tripping and falling, that it's much easier. So anybody can talk a good game. Yep. Right. But it's it, but it's people who it's the doers of the world. You know, I talked about a lot about developing better ideas. And I think that's a key critical component. Right? Because a bad ideas even perfectly executed is still a bad idea. Yes, but but, you know, I think you ought to start with with better ideas and better strategies. But having said that, the greatest strategies with the most perfect plan, not executed don't add any value to anybody. So you know, so you've got to have, you know, if I could make an analogy, in physics, you've got theoretical physicists and experimental physicist, and they're both necessary to move That field forward. So, so but the the theoretical, the theories of the theoretical physicists are only proven by the experimental businesses, right. But the experimental physicists are maybe not the best theoretical physicist. So it's sort of like the symbiosis between a songwriter and a gifted performer. A this is a this is a bit of trivia here. You know, Elvis Presley had I think 38 number one songs, or 38, top 10 songs. It was a bunch, right. Okay. And and how many of those did he write or co write? Man I don't and to have an answer that but but since you're asking I'm going to say zero It is zero. Now, you can become world famous as a performer. Right? And you don't have to be able to write songs. But the flip side of that is, you can write great songs and other people perform them. And you can be great that way too. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the way I look at as a at creating winning strategies for people is, you know, I'm like the songwriter, and they're like Elvis Presley. Right? They gotta go perform those strategies in order for them to be great. Yeah, no, I love that. Yeah. Yeah. I there's and you I'm sure you've heard the hero's journey by Joseph Campbell. Oh, sure. Yeah. And I love this because one I grew up you know, watching the fantasy movies and reading the Lord ring books and all that kind of stuff. So I can totally vibe with this whole theory and philosophy out there. But but to what I love about it is this whole dynamic of the guiding the hero. And I think what you're saying is, in a sense when you're working with these companies, you're the guide but they're the hero and the hero is still gotta go slay the damn dragon. Right? They still gotta go execute No matter whatever plan you build out or anything, you know, you put together for them. They still got to put the work in and do the things to make it a successful endeavor. It's like in sales. You know, you can, you know, talk about cold calling all day long, but until you pick up the damn phone and actually dial the number, you know, you know you've got nothing is that pretty much? Hey, listen, that's that's a My apologies. I Hey guys, I failed to put my phone on Do Not Disturb. Let me let me let me correct that now. Sorry about that brother. Okay, so yeah, I should have known better. This is not my first trip around the block on. Oh yeah, we're gonna make this one though. Yeah I know I deserve it. I deserve 50 lashes with a wet noodle at dawn. You know it's kind of like in you in Lord of the Rings. These guys get these special weapons. Right Aragorn got the special sword. Frodo via Bilbo had the the special weapon his size, but they still had to wield those weapons. Yeah, right. So there's no doubt and I think you're spot on on what you're saying and You know, it's like, I've got a new book that's going to be out. By the time this airs, it should be out on Amazon. And it's and it features 101 great, sort of many business strategies. And and it's dinner can innovative thinking methods in there that people can use to come up with their own. But they still got to apply those things right, no matter how brilliant they are. Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm sure you've experienced this, you know, you're standing in front of a room, you're talking to a crowd. And after the you're done talking to them, whether it's a speech or a training, whatever, someone walks up to you and says, that is one of the greatest things I've ever heard. And I take it two ways. One, my ego gets stroked, and I'm like, Yes, awesome. I did my job. And then the second thing goes through my head is wasn't great enough. And I'll usually ask that person, you know, are you going to go back and implement what we talked about today? And it's weird the responses. And I'm curious, you know, one, have you experienced it? And to have you watched the almost shocked reaction sometimes when you've asked that question? Oh, yeah, I listen, I think anybody that's done any, any keynote speaking or any training and you're in front of large groups has experienced that. Look, I think if you're a decent speaker, you can get people motivated. Yes, but the but the challenge with motivation is, is it's temporary, right? It's easy to get, you know, people's adrenaline pumped up and, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think you ought to live your life in an excited enthusiastic fashion but What I prefer to do, and this is where I think, you know, the training on the skill set of innovative thinking, especially the way we do it, where it's, you know, it's practical hands on, it's not standing up in front of a room with PowerPoints, or just about, you know, me being a keynote speaker is, you know, inspire people with, with a mindset of, Hey, you know what, I can do this, because they've actually experienced it right there. And they've, you know, when we do our training with the game I invented, which is kind of a basic innovative thinking game, but it puts it into a competitive format and it's fun and people laugh. When we're doing that. In a training. I say here, two things over and over one people laugh their heads off, and and second is your people go As people coming up with ideas and strategies, like Wow, that's really good. But I'll tell you afterwards dying. People come up to me and some people, they'll tell me overtly, and some people just kind of see by their to change in their physiology. That, you know, they surprised themselves at how they were able to think in a way and come up with ideas that they didn't expect. And, and I can totally relate to that. But they you can tell, right, that it's just like, No, I'm over sharper than I thought I was. Right, I'm all better than maybe I've been giving myself credit for. And when you get that, then you know that you've inspired you sort of, you sort of inspire something that they had inside them all along, but they just weren't aware of it. Yeah, I love those things go ahead is most people have never bet on themselves. Right? So when you can put them in an environment where they are forced to do something they haven't done and I'm not talking about walking across a rope bridge or you know, some tire swing thing or something, you know, but taking an action that will mentally allow them to grow and get them out of their comfort zone. You are, in a sense, forcibly helping them to evolve, and you can see it, and it's awesome. I mean, I it's a really cool change in people. So how does your game get them to do that? Well, the game is structured in a way that I say it has three elements. One, it's got some structure in it, there's a gameplay format to, it feels like fun rather than work. And three, it embraces competitiveness. Right? And everybody, I don't care, the most non competitive person, you know, when they feel like they've got a chance to win, they get competitive. Yes. And so what the game does is a little difficult in just an audio only environment. But you've got two teams. One is the entrepreneur, the inventor, we sort of use those terms interchangeably. Second Team is the competitor. And then the third team who's not competing in that round is the customer. And so each team A and B, gets a set of 10 words, and they use this innovative thinking process to match any of those two words together. And come up with an idea for a product, a service or business. And it gets three minutes to do that you will think three minutes is that long. But people surprise themselves. There's there's great power I found there's great power in have to. Yes. Right you when you have to get something done, you will. And when you don't usually want this Chan. Yeah. So so then each team, you know gets a separate set of words, they're coming up with an idea in three minutes and at the end of three minutes. They each take one minute and present to the customer team, what their product service or business is, how it works and what the benefits of the customer is. And then the customer decides, hey, do I like this team's idea better? Do I like this team's idea better. there's a there's a scoring system and play moves around the board where everybody's playing each Roll, you know, at any given time, and listen, I had a client come up to me after a training session once and he said, you know what the greatest part of this game is? And I said, What says a with David? So let's that David, he said when you when you were and when you lose, you still win, right? Yeah it's a blast. I love that you know, and here's something else that that I think your game is is getting people to do. It's forcing them to make decisions and and you know, a lot of life people get stalled with the inability to make a decision. So when you put them in a group atmosphere and you say you got three minutes to come up with a service, you know, a product or anything else. That's awesome, because I mean, that's a fast decision. And a lot of people struggle with making decisions at that speed and living and dying with the consequences. That's brilliant, but I commend you for for coming up with something innovative like that in a training format that, you know, one brings people together makes them think outside of the cliche word the box but also forces them to make those fast decisions because you know, studies have shown you know, the faster you make decisions, the better you can do in life and business because you don't get stuck. Good. I Where did this whole game evolved from? It was it was it? Yeah, that's no, that's a good question. For most of my adult life, I really didn't picture myself as a creative individual. But as I alluded to before, it's great power and have to and and in aspiring to take our company to a better level. I said, You know what? I don't really think I'm great at coming up with good ideas, but probably some books written on creativity, right? And I've got a book, which I highly recommend you have in mind that's coming out. I highly recommend this one the most. It's called Tinker toys. sinker is thinker toys like the child's toy Tinker toys. Okay? Think toys, and they're probably, they're probably 12 dozen different creative thinking techniques in there. And I tell you, if you are not used to thinking creatively, and you don't really view yourself as being a creative person, some of those look a little bit complex at first, but I discovered one in there called combine a story play, which sounds complicated, but it's not. That I learned later was both Einstein And Da Vinci's favorite creative thinking method. And look, all it is, is combining two things together and seeing what a third four possibilities occur. Do you mind if I give you an example? Please do I'm fascinated. If I let me, I first have to let you know that people don't think in words they think in pictures, true apps, right? So if I say the word dog, you're not thinking about the characters for the letter D, oh, and G you're thinking about a dog that you know, have no right and probably a dog that you owner have. If I say the word kitchen, you're thinking, the the image of the kitchen pops into your mind, right? Yep. But if you start combining words together, especially nouns, if I combine dog and kitchen together, or kitchen and dog together the new possibilities, start eliminating From my imaginative ability, you know, here's what's crazy about that is kitchen dog, I didn't have a whole lot of thought process around. But when you said dog kitchen, the first thing that popped in my head was, could there be a company I know there's our that that could make dog biscuits, or you know, you know, dog food, things in it. I know there's a ton out there, but I would never start one of those type of companies. But that's where my mind went to really cool thought process. And if you have an imagined you had a set of those nouns, right, not just a couple of work from, but if you had a set of those, and you had a direction to work with those. That's the whole point of come up with an idea for a new product service or business or an improvement on something that already exists, right? And some of the stuff that emanates from from just that little simple method and playing that game is It's practically astounding. Have you had anybody come to the game leave their company and because they started a business? I have had, I've had a number of people tell me stories about the things that they're working on. But look, it goes back to the challenges you were talking about before. You know, just coming up with an idea. Even if it's a multimillion dollar idea. It doesn't do anybody any good, even you right? If you don't act on it. Like, I have people tell me all the time when they when they find out. I have written a book. Our company published another one that I curated the content for and I have another one coming out. And so I can't tell you it's hundreds probably people told me Oh, yeah, I'm thinking about writing a book to write right now. How long you gonna think about it right? Now so and yeah, it's it's the inaction and people man it's a we're all guilty in some regards I mean, with our businesses and things we need to be doing, you know, and then help, you know, for me going from an employee to business owner was such a damn leap because I didn't realize how badly ingrained I was, you know, ingrained with this employee mindset before I started running my company, and I still find it, you know, not creating a job versus a business for myself. And, you know, it's it's that when when you get mired down with all the stuff, it's remembering to put one foot forward and start knocking things down. So you can keep moving forward because what, as soon as all those spinning plates like you're the clown with all the plates Getting up in the air. You can sit there and be mesmerised, how pretty all those plates look. But until you start knocking those plates off the frickin sticks. You're not gonna be able to move anywhere and go anywhere, you're gonna stay mesmerised, and action takes care of all that. And the biggest thing people always say, Well, what action do I take? I'm like the first one in front of you. Hey, listen, amen to that. It's hard to steer a car that's in park. Yes. Said. Right. So, look at start taking some action. You know, in my first book, there's a after, after you set your goals, then what should you do when you start taking action and what you think is the best direction, right? Because I found that as you begin to take action, you can Little signals and clues on which way to go. It's like, it's like your goals, the destination you've determined to get to. They act like a GPS that you get off track. You're going to figure that out as you go. Right. But that phrase as you go, is the critical one. Yep. Yeah, yeah. This is gonna be fun. So I love it when people bring up goal setting. And here's why. You ready for this? I'm ready. Goal setting doesn't work is actually a D motivator. And here's what I mean. And I love having this conversation is when somebody sets a goal. They are nine times out of 10 setting a goal they already believe they can achieve then They're going to fake it till they make it, in a sense lie to themselves that they're going to get there. When you set yourself up immediately for failure, not planned failure, but to fail, you lose. So I quit setting goals A while back, and I flipped it. And I set milestones and here's what I mean. I believe you should have a general vision of where you want to go. Okay, General vision, what you want to do. But I'll always take it back to sales. Let's say you've sold $10,000 a month. And you come back to your sales manager and that last year, you sold you know, $120,000, you look at your sales manager and say, this year, I'm going to sell a million dollars. And that manager is going to ask you a cool how you going to do that? The answer is always I'm going to work harder. Right? You know, which never works. Right, you know, so what I would tell if I was that sales manager tell that young sales person is let's do this, instead of setting that million dollar quota let's see if you can do 11,000 Let's get you to 11,000 get there, and then we still do 11,002 months. Can we then get the 12,000 and then 13 and you start teaching incremental growth and start getting people to learn and evolve, how to level up and then start moving forward. And and I'm curious now hearing my philosophy of course, it's my show so I have to be right. Your opinion make it mine. Right, exactly. Right. thoughts. I mean, because I mean, for you We were brought up in this world of set goals, set goals. And as you get this executive area, and it's a big, hairy, audacious goals and all this stuff, but people don't do the work. Right goes back to our whole thought talking around action. They're not doing the work. So that's why I flipped everything over to milestones because people can wrap their head around. How do I just get to my next, my next small level so I can grow? Well, this is my philosophy on goals. goals should be two things. Now, I'm not saying that you should not have a one year, five year 10 year vision. You should, but five years is a long time. Right? Especially in this age, unless there's over 1800 days in five years. So there's no sense of urgency. So I think you should set your You should have a vision for one year, you should have a vision for five years, maybe even for 10 years. But your goals ought not to be any more than 90 days at a time. For the second thing, and here's why, because there's no sense of urgency. If you miss one day out of 1800. That's not that big of a deal. But if you screw up one day out of 90, much more of a big deal, right? Right. So there's a so there's a, there's a an urgency of action in that. But here's the other thing and you you alluded to kind of a 10 x goal, which I know is kind of a catch phrase in today's world. But the problem with a 10 x goal is it's not believable to you right? Right. And I tell people look set stretching Lee realistic goals. And while I say stretching Lee realistic, I use those two terms again. For reason, you know, the most you've ever made in a year. And this funny, I just laid a couple different mastermind groups. And we were just talking about this very concept and in a mastermind group session an hour ago. And I said, you know, it's the most you've ever earned any year. Or let's, let's break it down to a quarter most you've ever earned in a quarter is 50 grand. And you set a goal to make to 50. The first thought you're going to have when you look at that as go, there's no way Yeah, right. funnel, see how I can get there. It's too high of a plateau. But the example that I was using in in that group, I said, you know, $100,000 in a year, used to seem like all the money in the world to me, right? until I got there. And that became anyway Listen, once you hit that, then you can start looking at 150. Right. And once you hit 150, you know, it doesn't seem like that far of a stretch to 250. And you get to 250 and 500 doesn't seem too far of a stretch. Now I have a friend of mine 2018 and I think he made about two and a half million. And I remember years ago, we were together in the financial services industry. And I remember he had he had just hit his first hundred thousand dollar month and income. And he was going to hit over a million that year. Total. And he said, Bill, he said his bill, he said Bob, earning a million it. I don't work any harder than when I was struggling to make 60 grand. Right. But the thought process, the focus, the execution was way different. Right. Right. So, so that I, it's been my experience, you know, everybody has their own philosophy and I think you're, whatever you're doing that works for you. That's what you ought to keep doing. So, I think we're saying a lot of the same things because you were talking about, okay, you know, if you did 50 a quarter, you know, getting the 250s a leap. What if you're going from 50 and 60? Alright, cool. Next back believable right, next quarter, can I get to 70? And, you know, because you have to evolve as an individual because the person you are right now is not the person you need to become to get to where you want to go. You have got to level up or get okay being okay. Because because, yeah, there's so many people that are They're, you know, telling the world how awesome they're going to be, and not executing. And all they're doing is making themselves miserable. Enjoy the life you have. And understand that your income level if you live inside your means you'd have a very happy life. But most people don't want to do that. Right? Yeah, they look, most people would rather grow their income to meet their dreams instead of tricking their dreams to meet their current income. True, was it right? So, but look, so many people are trying to go so far they're trying to make quantum leaps. And I'm not saying that you can't do that because I've done that a couple of times, right? But it's not the quantum leaps that matter as much as the consistent growth. system it can be consistent, small group, right? What if you're What if each month or maybe even each week, you try to get 1% better? Just 1% right mean 1% that it sounds like nothing. And yet over time, if you got 1% better, even a month, right 1% better a month, over the course of a year or two or three. That's massive growth. Very much true. And you know, but people want to believe in the overnight success, which is there's no such thing. They want to believe that there's an easy button. They want to believe that there's, you know, some magic pill or something. They don't want to do the work. You know, and they don't understand that you've got to go through it to become it. Oh, that's a great phrase. Absolutely, I'm gonna get a T shirt, maybe with a habit. You know, but that's it. I mean is people want the soft and easy and sweet and fluffy route when they don't realize that if you go in to fail on purpose, you can actually level up faster. Wow, that's where you learn the most. Right, right. I mean, when you screw up it, I tell people, Donnie, the reason I know how to do a lot of things, right? It's because I've done a wrong almost every possible way. Right? Right. I've screwed up so much. Right. And you alluded to this before. Your most overnight successes take at least a decade. Yes. You know, but people Well, people don't see that right? Or maybe they're willfully blind. And so I will No, I don't see that you know this person. You'll put in all this extra effort that they, they did things I like to tell people look, you got to do stuff to be consistent about about progress, even when you don't feel like it. Yes. Right. Even when you feel like sitting your butt on the couch and watching that episode of Laverne and Shirley that you've seen three times, right? You just age the hell out of yourself. Just so you know. Well, okay, how about that, that that that rerun of Grey's Anatomy. There you go. There Big Bang Theory. Yeah, frankly, I'll gonna make happen. Your audience mad probably I don't get the appeal that show. Oh, I love it. Love it. Yeah, but you know what? That's why they make different colors of car exhaust. Everybody don't like the same stuff. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. I never know this show is gonna go sometimes it's always fun. It's always fun. You know, you've been really doing some cool things on your ride. some really cool things on your journey. I mean, you've done some cool stuff. Where's all this taking you? You know, you got new books coming out. You've had a couple of books, you're doing some speaking. You know what's what's being on the horizon for you. Then the next big thing is happening in 2019. Hopefully in the first half of 2019. I'm not 100% in control of this. So I can just tell you this is my intent is We are launching up to this point all the training that we've done has been face to face. But we are launching an online training portfolio or a portal I should say. That is going to train people up on how to think innovatively. But listen, the, the most exciting part of that is, is we're creating a, an interface where that small business person out there who might have 25 or 50 or 100 people that are working for their company. They'd love to be able to be like Procter and Gamble or International Harvester GM, some of these big companies that have thousands and thousands of employees and, and they can sort of crowdsource innovation internally. Well, if you got a company that has 100 people, you can crowdsource Internally, but it's not a very big crowd, right? So what if what if there was a way for that small entrepreneur to access the knowledge, experience and imagination of this vast army of people that have been trained how to think innovatively and they don't have to add anybody to their payroll? Right? They don't have to, nobody's taken up any more room in their building. They're paying no more benefits, and they only pay for the solutions that fit them. Well, that's interesting. That would be kind of a big deal, wouldn't it? Be that level the playing field for them, it would make them able to compete and have all that talent, access to it, just like big companies do. And on the flip side of that, Donnie is these people that have been Train to think innovatively, they bring their own set of knowledge and experience to the table. And they can look at that and they can exercise that entrepreneurial gene without having to go start their own company. Because it gives them potential extra source of income. So, the win for everybody? Yeah, yeah, no, I like that a lot. Was this was this concept born out of y'all need or you saw a gap in the marketplace? No, I just see that that look. There's a yo you got now this advent of so much automation, especially with AI. that a lot of jobs that are being done by people now are going to be done by people in the future. They're going to be done. And I don't mean the final need mean along the way future I mean, the near term future right, the next 135 years 10 years at the most. And so those people are going to need different skill sets. I think, as I was telling him on his podcast recently, it's temporarily terrible for those people when they lose their job, right? But it's only temporary, right? Because once they acquire the new skill sets needed to do the 21st century work, they're probably going to end up doing work that's more fun. It's probably more fulfilling, and frankly, because it brings more value to the marketplace, it probably pays more. And so they've got to learn these new skill set. And Chief among those, I believe, is how to think innovatively and apply that to practical solutions in business in life. And the sad part is, is our traditional education system isn't doing that. Yeah. So, you know, you can complain about that. But as opposed to complaining about things, I like to do something about them. And I see this big gap that's unfilled that companies like ours, so I'm sure we're not gonna be the only one are going to fill in the gaps there to get people trained in the skill sets that they need, you know, to thrive in the 21st century instead of just barely survive. Absolutely. That's well done. But it's a it's a really, really, really cool concept. I think you're going to help you know a lot of people on their journey level up. Good on you. Good on you. Thank you. We have a goal to help millions. Yeah, I know I should. I know I shouldn't set a goal Donnie, but can be taught this whole time. I wasn't sure but dang just proved. That that's my vision. Anyway. I love it. I love it. I love it. You know You know, here's here's the thing. There are certain individuals in this world that can set a goal, like a guy like Gary Vee Gary V's biggest thing. He tells everybody he's gonna buy the New York Jets. Right? Right. Right, like Gary Vee may very well get there, because that drives him that motivates them that charges him up. But it's such a few minority of people that are that driven, you know, innately to get there. So I like your big vision. Now bust your ass to get there. Well, if you're right, it can do you mind if I throw out sort of another thought in terms of goals? What I have found is that people don't set goals based on what they really want. They don't set their true goals. If they set goals at all. They're setting them based on what they think they ought to want. what somebody else wants them to want. You know, my sales man, my sales manager said, This is my quota. So that's my goal, right? What does that mean? There's no, if you're not setting goals that are your true goals, then there's no emotional power to them. So there's no driver for action. So you're setting yourself up for failure. If that's the kind of goals you're setting 100% agree. Hundred percent agree. Well said, Well said. Well, brother, can you believe it's been almost an hour already? Time flies when you're having fun, brother. Well, you know, I mean, when you're around me, you have no choice but to have fun. So So. Yeah, well, no, I this has been a blast. And by the way, time flies when you're having fun or not, so you're exactly right. Exactly. Well, my friend, how do people find you? How do they get in touch with you? How do they reach out? How do they make funny Yeah, you know, look, LinkedIn. Like my home on the internet, I just I love that platform. If it's done right, I think it's extremely productive. And, and you can meet people from all around the globe. And so LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me. It is linkedin.com slash IN slash Bob Sager VOB SAG on. love it love it. Well, this is how I like to wrap up every show. And I do stump some people on this. So So stand by, if you are going to leave the champion to listen to the show entrepreneurs, business owners, people from 78 countries around the world that tune in Listen to this. If you are going to leave them with a quote, a saying a phrase, a mantra or a motto, something they can take with them on their journey, especially if they're stacked up against it and going through it. What would be that quote or phrase you would say? Remember this? Remember this this is from Arthur Ashe. Arthur Ashe said, start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can Love it. Love it. That's Sage sage advice, my friend. It's been so fun having you on here. I've really really enjoyed it. Thanks for you know, coming in sharing your story and having some fun conversations and some laughs So So thanks for doing this but hey, Donnie, it's been fun being on what you Thanks for having me. Awesome. Well

  Wasting time trying to be “good” to bring you more success? Check out this one SuperPower to grow your success without settling for mediocrity or being apologetic… In today’s episode you will hear Satori share your one natural SuperPower. You’ll understand how to dominate your life and business and not let it dominate you.  Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode: Find out what’s costing American companies alone $450-$500 Billion. Find out how to take command of this one SuperPower that’s at your fingertips. Learn how to own the traits of the best to leverage your natural born leadership skills. So listen here to find out how Satori coaches the best and how you can have an opportunity to apply and talk directly to Satori about creating badass results in your life and business. --Transcript-- If you want to know the difference between the best and someone who’s name you’ve never even heard of, you better put away all the distractions and focus your attention right here, right now. What’s up my friends, this is Satori Mateu with a brand new episode of Halfass to Badas.  Today we are going to tap into and understand one of your superpowers. The superpower I’m talking about controls everything around you, your results, or lack of results, what you do or don’t do. What you’re even willing to try.  Before we get into the actual superpower, let's clarify a little bit of a current dilemma. We live in a world of mediocrity. We live in a world of low expectations, and victimhood.  Today, that’s the norm. It's the norm we live in. The estimated annual cost of employee disengagement in the United States alone is $450-$500 Billion dollars. And of course, this impacts company growth, profits, productivity and the difference being made in customers and clients.  If we want to engage ourselves, our teams and inspire customers and clients to make us the logical choice when they make a purchasing decision, and if we want to change how we live, what we stand for,we need to deliberately engage this Supowerpower and stop halfassing things. If we want to truly share our expertise and our knowledge, our wisdom, to be real authentic leaders in this world, we've got to step out of the mediocrity of the world. We've got to divorce ourselves of the low expectations and the victimhood we live in. Which means we can’t be the best in our field, to stand out, be badasses and victims at the same time. The truth is, we can't afford to be victims. Period. What is this thing we're going to talk about today? Own your best. This Supowerpower comes from understanding that you are born the best. You are born a Badass. That’s something to remember. This Superpower is an undeniable truth. Just remember it. No need to question it. Meaning you wouldn't even be here unless you had won the sperm race. We’ve talked about this in previous episodes. You wouldn't be here. It’s just as simple as that. Let's just own that. You were designed and born to compete, to win, to dominate, to be the best. It's in your DNA. Just own it. No need to apologize for it, anymore. But, it doesn’t guarantee your position. Just because you have everything, and you’re perfectly designed to win and you won once before doesn’t mean you can disengage and expect victory.   Let me ask you, what happens when what is given to you goes unappreciated, unused, or even misused? It’s worthless, isn’t it? I know so many people who have lost important relationships because they didn’t nurture or appreciate them when they were in their life. No until when the person got tired of not being being seen and left did the person all of a sudden start paying attention. To own your best, to embrace all of you, means appreciating the miracle that you are.  What else does it mean to own the best? It's to understand that all the human traits, every single one of the human traits, the characteristics, the qualities you have, everybody has. There's no trait lacking in you. Nothing is missing.  With that said, it's interesting, if you look at the word, the definition of a trait; a distinguishing quality or characteristic. Here's the problem with that. We judge and minimize ourselves. We compare ourselves to others as a way to separate ourselves to be distinct. We look to create a unique identity for ourselves, we want to be different.  This can go two ways, we either minimize and crush our worth that way, or we make ourselves bigger, we put ourselves on a pedestal, as a way to feel more important, more significant, more special.  But in humanity, every trait in existence, you and I have. Nothing is missing. We have the trait and the anti-trait. Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down. Sometimes you feel strong and sometimes weak. Inspired and uninspired, authentic and inauthentic. We got it all or you wouldn't even be able to recognize it. Whether we define it as good or bad, it's really more about our own judgment and perceptions, meaning every trait has its value in the right context. The problem is, we falsely believe we lack some traits. We often believe others have things we don't and that we're just born that way. More accurately, our traits come into optimal use when they’re in alignment with our highest values.  I’ll show you persistence, creativity, resilience and dedication when it comes to fighting for our clients well-being and success and our family, but you put me in front of something I don’t like and you will see, lack of engagement, lack of focus, lack of dedication, low energy because it’s not important to me. But I have all traits. Is this making sense?  We falsely believe we're lacking. The reality is, you have them all. To own the best is to own your traits, all of them, because they're all useful in different contexts. When it comes to eating crappy food, not getting sufficient sleep or taking care of my clients, with those kind of habits or behaviors I want to be inconsistent, lazy or procrastinate, you know what I mean? Because I want the opposite. I want to eat healthy food. I want to take care of my sleep and I want to take care of and nurture our clients. Are you following?  You want to know how you can use your natural design, your best, in order to  accelerate your wealth (which really means well-being), accelerate the results you create for yourself, your clients, your family, be able to love and connect and deepening your understanding of the world within you and around you. There's a problem. The problem is that you came out a winner, and as baby people were impressed just by you passing gas, mistaking it for a smile, right? "Oh, look at that cute little smile!" You were even celebrated for pooping. Believe me, that didn't last long. Think about it. Right?  Later in life, after being praised for your mere existence, now people are fast to judge, true? People are inconvenienced by your ruthlessness, your persistence. I mean, this is how you came here. Unapologetically. People started judging it, being inconvenienced by it. They start rolling their eyes, sighing, trying to remove your unapologetic existence. "Oh, don't be so energetic! Don't be so loud! Don't be this! Don't be that!" Right? They try to have you apologize for everything. What happens? You slowly start accepting it and you dim your light. That's the problem and we've got to shatter that problem once and for all. Because if you don't, if we don't, we'll stay mediocre, and there's no growth in that my friend. There's no development. The world will stand still. Think about it, if there were no Steve Jobs, no Elon Musk, no Bill Gates, no Oprah Winfrey, no Richard Branson, and if there wasn't a you.  Can you think about these people? They have the same traits as you. They're just using them differently. According to their values. According to matters to them. They're using maybe their persistence to innovate, being creative in their form. You have yours. They still have the same traits. Maybe they're using their focus differently. They're using their time differently. They are no different than you or I.  How do we take this piece of owning the best and apply it daily? How do we engage this superpower, because it really is a superpower.  What’s the kryptonite? Disowning your traits. When you disown your traits, you disown you. When you disown your traits, you disown your expertise, your wisdom, your knowledge, your experience, you disown your clients because you can't make your unique difference in their lives when you're minimizing yourself, when you are dimming the light of your SuperPower. When you're disowning you. Think about that, because if you get this, if you really understand this at the core, you'll stop minimizing, you'll stop apologizing. You'll stop procrastinating in sharing your gifts, your knowledge, and your expertise. This is how you change the world. This is how you leave a legacy. Changing the standards for those who come after you, this is how we play a bigger, more meaningful game. This is how you apply yourself. The best. How do we do it? How do we engage our superpower? How do we engage you, the born you? The one that is here right now? First of all, I want you to understand, we all have a tendency to dismiss or hide traits. So here is a simple yet powerful way to get going.  Let’s identify and clarify a trait you admire in someone else. Why do I choose a trait you admire in someone else? Because if you admire it in someone else chances are you’re minimizing it in you. It's a simple way of doing it, a simple way of getting clear on it, so we can understand what a trait is. That's how we can distinguish it. We look at something someone else has, someone you admire or respect, a trait you admire, a trait you wish you had or had more of. Think about it right now. What’s the trait? Who has it? You see the trait? What is it? Who is it? You look for when and where and with whom you've demonstrated this trait. Go to a specific moment? Where are you demonstrating this trait right now? We'll talk about this and look through some examples. Thirdly, ask yourself, “Where do I want to demonstrate this trait even more? What would be one area, one context, where this trait could have the biggest impact and meaning for myself and others?” Identify a trait. Let's say you're looking for consistency, or you're looking for persistence, or you're looking to be less apologetic, maybe more ruthless. Maybe you're looking to be more relentless.  If you think about it, when you are being playful and free and being creative, it allows you to be unshakeable. It allows you to be relentless.  If you think about it, when you say something like, "I don't have enough time," you're using that story, that excuse, that you don't have enough time, which we all have used that language. It's a good reason not to apply you, to not apply the best. It's a way to apologize and dismiss yourself but it's also a way of minimizing yourself. When you do are you owning your best or are you back to being mediocre? We've identified a trait, number one. We look for where and when and with whom you've demonstrated it.  I remember when I wrote the acknowledgments of my bestselling book, Unshakeable Wealth. First I thought, "Why am I writing an acknowledgement? Who cares? Who would even read the acknowledgement anyway?" I thought it was kind of a waste of time. Then I sat down and I started thinking about it and I realized that the acknowledgement was really like writing a love letter, like writing an appreciation and gratitude for the people who provided a path for me, that created the opportunity to have this moment.  All of a sudden, I'm sitting there, with tears running down my eyes. When I was done, I'm like, "Wow, this is like a really cool experience." Then I was going to read it to my wife and I couldn't read it without crying because I was so filled with gratitude. It was something I thought was meaningless until I connected to the truth.  If you think about vulnerability as a trait that you avoid, maybe consider the drawbacks of avoiding it. And look at what are the benefits? Where have you been vulnerable?  I was connecting to being vulnerable, practicing that, which allowed me and my wife to be seen. Either way, the trait is there. I decide how much or how little I apply that trait. What traits do you want to expand or want more? It's always existent. You either use it, or you're not. But it's still there. It's not lost. It's not disappearing. It's there. Just because you don't walk around thinking about your heart, your heart is still there. Just because you don't walk around thinking about the blood pumping in your body right now, or the oxygen going through your body or you veins, it's still doing it. You don't walk around thinking about that all day long, but it's still happening.  Lastly, it's to create habits, daily habits, to strengthen the traits.  Strengthen the trait by creating daily habits that allows you to apply the trait on a daily basis, consistently, deliberately, intentionally, purposefully. There's no mindlessness about this. What are the specific situations where you can apply your traits? If you want to make a significant increase to your income, if you want consistency in your revenue every month, what’s a trait that is not only useful, but a must? A must-have trait? If you could only pick one trait, what would be one trait that, if applied, would generate significant amounts of consistent monthly revenue for you? What would be the one trait?  Tell me, how important do you think that is to understand? How important do you think it is to own the best? In other words, own the traits that are yours? If you believe being nice, or being a good girl or a good boy is a good trait, maybe that's one of the reasons you're not achieving the financial results you want, because you're apologizing for your existence.  You're apologizing for your gift, your knowledge, expertise and wisdom that others can enjoy. Apologizing and minimizing who you are, is not how you got here. You were unapologetic, and relentless. That’s how you won the race. Hope this has been a powerful listening session for you, and I hope you will share this with someone you love. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, OWN. YOUR. BEST. Bye for now.

It’s a dawn of a new day. The secondary market is scrambling to find a new home and we look at the impact this has on bourbon growth. MGP stock prices took a major hit after reports came out that aged stock hasn’t been selling and we look at new competitors in the bulk contract game. Missouri is putting itself on the map having a legally designated bourbon, but are there ulterior motives? With Knob Creek re-instating the 9 year age statement, does it make it one of the best values in bourbon? With all of these coming together, how are brands being perceived? All this on Bourbon Community Roundtable #35 Show Partners: The University of Louisville now has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at business.louisville.edu/onlinespirits. Barrell Craft Spirits enjoys finding and identifying barrels that contain distinctive traits and characteristics. They then bottle at cask strength to retain their authentic qualities. Learn more at BarrellBourbon.com. Check out Bourbon on the Banks in Frankfort, KY on August 24th. Visit BourbonontheBanks.org. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: Reddit AMA with the Russell’s https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cme0nf/hey_reddit_im_wild_turkey_master_distiller_eddie/ This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about drinking bourbon how you want. Let's discuss the fallout of the secondary market on Facebook. How do you think the secondary groups will shift? What do you think of the MGP stock plummeting? https://www.barrons.com/articles/mgp-ingredients-stock-aged-whiskey-sales-earnings-51564610232 Is MPG now competing with new distillate like Willet? Do they still have higher age bourbon stock? Let's talk about the new Missouri rules for bourbon. http://whiskyadvocate.com/missouri-bourbon-whiskey-style/ Do you think this will happen in other states? What do you think of Knob Creek restoring their 9-Year Age Statement? http://chuckcowdery.blogspot.com/2019/06/knob-creek-to-restore-9-year-age.html Are Knob Creek picks the best value in bourbon? Is the market oversaturated with Knob Creek picks? Have you seen variances in Knob Creek single barrel picks? How do you perceive brands when they raise prices? Thanks to Blake from bourbonr.com, Jordan from breakingbourbon.com, and Sara from barbelleblog.com for joining. 0:00 Have you held a bottle of bourbon in your hand and wondered how that was made? Sure there is the grains and the barrels and all the science that goes into it. But what about the packages on glass manufacturing, shipping logistics, or purchase orders for thousands of cork stoppers. These are only a handful of things you need to know. But with the University of Global's new online distilled spirits business certificate, you're only a few clicks away learning from industry experts. all that's required is a bachelor's degree. Go to business.louisville.edu slash online spirits. We got the four of us tonight so we're going to like I said a little bit of a skeleton crew but that's okay. Also, just the four of us know Ryan either know Ryan either he's, he's not feeling too We. 0:45 We had it we had a pretty good week. Hey, everyone, 1:00 it's Episode 213 1:01 of bourbon pursuit. And this is a Community Roundtable recording. So we've only got just a little bit of news that we didn't talk about in the podcast. And the first one is there was a Reddit AMA or an asking anything with Bruce and Eddie Russell. There was a lot of talk about the cornerstone rye, which is part of their newest release. But there was one question that came up on the subject of dusty that I found pretty interesting. And talked about if there's any plans to release some older age dated bottles that have a similar makeup or construct a some of the dust sees that they've had before. Obviously, some of the thrill them is that they're no longer produced. And, you know, we've all had a taste of probably try some mid 80s, Wild Turkey, cheesy gold foil and the likes of that. And of course, many of us would like to think that hell that it's never going to happen. No one can replicate dusty, but here's what Eddie said in response to that. He said that there is some stuff development that's as close to cheesy gold foil. As we've gotten since that release. The taste is very similar. Well, that's quite the cliffhanger and that's about the juiciest detail I could find. If you want to read the entire Reddit AMA. You can get the link in our show notes. Today's episode was recorded back on Monday, August 5, which would have been Elmer T. Lee's 100th birthday. We talked a little bit on the show because Jordan gave us a reminder, but what we didn't expect was to see Buffalo Trace distillery, releasing a commemorative bottle in honor of his hundredth birthday. Here's a little information on Elmer that you may have never heard before. On August 5 1919 Elmer t Lee was born on a tobacco farm near peaks mill in Franklin County, Kentucky. Elmer served as a radar Bombardier on the 29 flights with the US Army Air Force in World War Two. After flying Michigan's Japan through 1945 Elmer was honorably discharged in 1940 six. He then earned an engineering degree from the University of Kentucky and graduated with honors in 1949. Upon graduation, he started work at the distillery which back then was known as the George t stag distillery, where he eventually was named General Manager. He worked at the distillery and kind of marking a milestone in his career, he created the first ever single barrel bourbon that was called Blanton's in 1984. He then retired in 1985. Elmer continued to serve as an ambassador for Buffalo Trace distillery, and the whiskey world up until his death in 2013. In honor what would have been almost 100 birthday Buffalo Trace distillery has announced they are releasing a 100 proof commemorative bottling of Elmer t leap, this 100 year tribute single barrel bourbon proceeds from the bottle of this sales will go towards the Frankfurt VFW post 4075 where else 4:00 was a former member. This is once again as you'd think a limited edition one time only release with the same age and Nashville as a standard routinely. But this whiskey is bottled at 100 proof and the suggested retail prices $100. Now, this Roundtable, it goes through a lot of topics where we start from the secondary market Fallout to deciding if bourbon brands care about their market perception. It's it really goes in a lot of different directions and I really hope you enjoy it. But for now, you're done listening to me. So let's go hear from my friend Joe over a barrell bourbon, and then you've got Fred Minnick with above the char. I'm Joe Beatrice, founder of barrell craft spirits, we enjoy finding and identifying barrels that contain distinctive traits and characteristics. We then bottle them a cast rank to retain their authentic qualities for the whiskey enthusiast. Find out more at barrell bourbon.com. 4:54 I'm Fred Minnick, and this is above the char. This morning I made myself a big ol plate spaghetti for breakfast. That's right. I love eating weird things for breakfast sandwiches, steaks, spaghetti, random hot dogs, and so forth. I'm not a guy who typically follows the breakfast train of thought he have to have eggs and sausage. Although if I biscuits and gravy on the menu, it's over. I'm definitely ordering that. And I do like omelets. And you know, I like to play around. But I'm not someone who kind of follows the traditions of various meals. Sometimes I'll want eggs at dinner for example. And the only reason why I tell you this is because I feel like people in bourbon often want permission to drink bourbon a certain way or drink bourbon in the morning, you know before you go out fishing or at lunch when you're out with your colleagues. Bottom line is you drink bourbon how you want to and there are some rules that you should follow like I wouldn't if you spent 1500 dollars on a bottle of bourbon. I wouldn't mix it with coke if you paid $9 for one I would suggest like seeing if you really like it neat in you know, maybe use that as your cocktail mixing bourbon. But there really are no rules you drink bourbon how you want to. I will say that I've also stepped out of my comfort zone with bourbon in the last few years by making bourbon slushies. I think bourbon slushies are so wonderful and they tend to be the kind of wonderful introduction. It's a great way to introduce bourbon to someone who does not necessarily like bourbon or want to drink it neat. So if you have a little bit of time, go check out my bourbon slushy recipe, you'll be able to find it on bourbon plus.com here pretty soon. The irony of course is of just a few years ago, I was making fun of bourbon slushies. So let that be a warning to all of you. Be careful who you make fun of with what they drink is one day, you might find yourself pouring a little bit bourbon with a bunch of ice and lemon juice and sugar and making a slushy yourself. Also try spaghetti in the morning. It's pretty good. And that's this week's above the char. Hey, if you have an idea for above the char hit me up on Twitter or Instagram. That's at Fred Minnick again at Fred Minnick. Cheers. 7:22 Welcome back to another episode of bourbon pursuit, the official podcast of bourbon. This is the 35th recording of the bourbon Community Roundtable. This is something where we get some of the best bloggers and best writers on the scene to come and just talk about what's happening in bourbon culture. And we are chock full with all kinds of things that have been happening in the past three weeks. This is something that we do every three weeks to kind of get caught up on really what's happening with bourbon news. And, you know, we're not going to talk too much about kind of what's on the horizon. Everybody knows that. It's fall season, Fall season means release season. So we might say that one for the next round table after this. But there's a new face of the Round Table tonight. So I want you to Sarah to everybody. So Sarah, welcome to the show. 8:09 Thank you. Thanks. I've been writing a little evil spirits for about, I guess, 20 years now. So I wrote for 15 years at Leo is the barbell and then now I'm over at a inserted level until Wednesday as the culture editor, and that's actually shutting down Wednesday. So if there's anybody in town or outside of town that needs bourbon content, let me know. 8:36 Yeah, she's she's being very, very modest about it. So Sarah havens was like, she was like the bourbon beat writer for Louisville. Like anytime there was a new release a distillery opening or anything like that it by far had the biggest traction that you saw of any sort of local publication. So she did a fantastic job and all her write ups and being able to come with a very journalistic perspective as well. So thank you. Yeah, you're giving yourself not a lot of credit, Terry, you need a little bit more. And so with that, let's go ahead and there's two more familiar faces in here. So you know, Blake, we're going to have you go last because you're you're always 9:18 Jordan, you're up, buddy. 9:19 Sure. This is Jordan, one of the three guys from breaking bourbon. You can find us at breaking bourbon and all the socials. Check out the website breaking bourbon, calm for your latest release calendar and reviews and articles. 9:33 Cheers. Awesome. Fall release seasons coming up. He's going to be a busy man. Very much so but not as busy as this man with his Microsoft paint job. 9:43 Hey, we upgraded they now make a WordPress app for filling in states on a map. So 9:51 they really they do. They've been alive. It's like 9:54 they made it just for you. I know in like a few years ago, I was trying to pay somebody a couple hundred bucks to do. Lo and behold, I found it for free. Even better, because you're in paint on me. So it really, really hurts the release maps. Am I up? Oh, you're up. Okay. I am Blake from bourbon or you can find me usually here every three to four weeks. I'm also bourbon or calm. BOURBO or burbonr.com. All the social medias as well as seal box calm. And we did get cool new seal box hats in. So yeah, I kind of testing out the new logo. And yeah, so maybe I'll give one away by the end or something. Since we're not allowed to do alcohol giveaways on or just we're not on Facebook or Instagram. So 10:47 what? So again right now. 10:50 So check it out. Thanks. 10:52 And I guess that kind of leads us into the first topic tonight is kind of that was the big news. You know, it was actually it was too too roundtables. Beta been three roundtables ago, when we had Craig, one of the admins from the bourbon secondary market, which was the largest Facebook group that was out there had around 50,000 people in it, and they got really kind of the first notice that, hey, things are going to start changing. They tried to change it, they tried to say, okay, we're not going to make this a selling form and try to change the rules. That lasted like three days. And then, about a week and a half ago, there was the the kind of basically the CNN article that went out, broke the news and said, Hey, everything that deals with cigarettes with guns with liquor, everything's gone. And I don't know about you all, but at least in the span of like, 72 hours, like half the groups I belong to, or just disappeared, 11:51 for sure. 11:52 Yeah. And so I guess I kind of work let's talk about the Fallout and kind of what we're seeing in regards of where everybody's going moving to in sort of where everything is, gravitating towards. And since Blake, you have by far probably now one of the largest Facebook groups out there that for bourbon. Is anybody come knock on your door yet? Or is it still kind of like a? I'm still in the clear? 12:17 Yeah, no, we've we've always tried to keep away from that from bourbon or, or with the bourbon or group just because I felt like there were other groups doing it and doing it well. And I there was always that thought in the back of Hey, what if Facebook did decide to care about this stuff. And that's what I think we're seeing now. So we haven't had any issues. But pretty much everyone knows, you know, it's not for buying, selling and trading will still get the occasional post of somebody, you know, they're doing a little fishing. But overall, we keep all that off. So I haven't seen any issues from it. I think it's interesting that, you know, Facebook's deciding to crack down. Buffalo Trace seems to be pretty, pretty outspoken about it as well. You know, but it's just whether you love it or hate it, that's a big part of kind of the enthusiast culture is, you know, even if you weren't buying, selling, or trading, you were still probably in those groups, just watching prices watching what goes on. So that's a big part of the group. And I think we'll get into that a little bit later on some of the MGP stuff. But 13:25 I know that's, that's actual stock markets. 13:29 Sorry, I read that wrong. But no, it is kind of a part of the culture. So it'll be interesting to see where that goes. For me. It's disappointing because you know, whether you had the money or not to buy, it's still cool to see all these old rare bottles in your newsfeed. So 13:48 yeah, I think you're right about that. I think the culture there in just the way that the secondary market have been built around, it is going to take a little bit of a hit. I mean, this is where even people that weren't really into bourbon, they got into it and they see stuff and they become wild and actually kind of almost accelerated the bourbon culture a little bit. 14:05 It's crazy for me why Buffalo Trace hate hates it so much. Because I mean, let's be honest with Pappy Van Winkle really be Pappy Van Winkle if there wasn't a lot of these guys. I mean, it's still be very popular. But how many guys got into it? Because it's like, oh, man, now I could turn around and sell this for profit. And then it just hyped it up even more. And now every article is like, oh, here's the bottle that sells for 20 $300. Well, it wasn't stores, increasing those prices, it was these Facebook groups that were increasing the market perception of it. So 14:41 I think that's going to be interesting too, is even if people didn't trade and they were in those groups, I think they used it to justify buying a lot more bourbon and in their entry into the hobby, quote, unquote, if you want to call it that, I mean, I know a ton of people who have massive collections, they would never sell it. But they always like saying, Oh, my collections worth 20, grand, 30 grand, right? And I'm like, Well, if you're never going to sell it, it's really not worth anything. Right. But I think they were able to justify that because they kept seeing all the all the bottles move on Facebook. So be interesting to see if those folks, you know, go to another platform, find different sites, or if they kind of shrug their shoulders now they go out all right on to the next thing. And I think that's, you know, that's going to be something that's going to take an unexpected, but a bigger see the overall picture of what's going on. 15:30 Sarah, where do you see kind of like how things have shifted, you know, I've seen groups completely changed, like, there's no more buying, selling, there's new, basically, they try to change the name of all the group names. Like that's gonna do it. Like Facebook algorithms are so smart, you know, like, like Blake folded with one or 15:50 Yeah. 15:52 totally missed it, Adam. 15:55 Like, like, Where have you seen people start gravitating towards? 15:58 Oh, I mean, I've been on a lot of those groups, just because I love it reminds me of like collecting and trading baseball cards back in the day. And sometimes you can't always get that bottle that he wants, but you have like, four other bottles that people want. So, you know, I would just kind of use it to trade and stuff. But so I mean, I've seen people flocking to the movie platform. But I do notice that like, it's like probably cut in half. I mean that people might put something up there and there's no comments whatsoever. Whereas on Facebook, you would get instant comments immediately. And it would probably be only up there if it was a good bottle for like five or 10 minutes. 16:37 Even 10 minutes is probably a stretch. I get him a bottle. Yeah, I mean, I'm on the me, we thing now too. And I had to it was just like everything else. I literally had to turn off notifications after like, an hour because like every single new post and I was like, Well, I'm never going to check this now because I go I go to Facebook for my newsfeed, right, I'll go to the Facebook group, I'll go whatever, I'll kind of see what's knew. And that was always one thing that Okay, cool. I'll just see what kind of bottles for sale, but now I gotta go to a whole different thing to do it. So it's, it's going to be tough. You know, I think the I think Sarah kind of you're right there that trying to bring a new crowd over to another platform is, it's always gonna be an uphill battle. And so it's gonna be interesting to kind of see what's going to happen. And at this point, I think people started renaming the groups of things that don't have the word 17:28 bourbon, or liquid or trading or group. 17:34 I think it's, it's interesting to see people's creativity and how to try and get around it. definitely been a week or two. So we'll see if that keeps up. But I do give folks credit, you know, a few different groups that really focus on you know, posting different items. First bourbon, I won't mention what ones, I give them credit for their, for their creativity, that's for sure. 17:55 I think I saw one earlier that said, like, I've got to brown bears for saying that. 18:02 1212 cousins name Weller, 18:06 60 fishes, it'll be go to any of us. It's just like, at some point, you're like, Okay, let's give up on this a little bit. But I mean, there's, I mean, the other thing is, there's there's other platforms, there's me, we, if you really want to do it, there's bottle spot. There's, there's other places that that, you know, you can find stuff, even bottle blue book, you know, we know that people behind their like, nobody will buy your bottles from you. So there's, there's always going to be a market, it's just not going to be as centralized as it once was. Oh, 18:38 yeah. And that's what I was talking to somebody about it, and just, you know, I put this in the chat too, but just the accountability you had, because it was connected to people's Facebook. You know, there weren't a lot of fake accounts. So if something went wrong, you could probably track the guy down and you know, kind of the bourbon mob would be able to take care of a lot of issues that popped up. And you don't have that on the site. Like me, we are bottle spot, which are a little more anonymous. And, you know, you lose a little bit of the trust factor when it goes off of Facebook, which is the disappointing part. Because I mean, you think of how many times how many bottles you see that went or were sold or traded on a daily basis. And how many actual horror stories you heard from people who got scammed or something. It was very small, small percentage. And that's what I think it just opens it up for more of that when you don't have the Facebook accountability. 19:35 Yep. And there was, there was one comment in here. I believe, I can't scroll up and find it now. But there was somebody that said that they didn't really know too much about bourbon until they were introduced into the secondary groups. And that kind of what introduces you to all these other bottles that are out there in the market. That was kind of my first introduction to a lot of this too, is I remember the first time that I was joining this group that I'm not gonna say any names, but when I was into it, I remember seeing like the first bottle of like, will it family state? And I'm like, Oh my god, what is this? Like? How can I get my hands on it? I mean, I went around forever going to try to find it. And I didn't even know the entire time I just had to drive 45 minutes down the road to Barcelona go pick it up. Like it was there was always in the gift shop. So you know, there's there's definitely like there was an educational factor of what this brought to a bourbon consumer. But I think On the flip side, there's also this kind of piece where it says people become a little bit immune to other everyday bottles, because all these see are unicorns and that's all I think are really good. So there is there is a there is a downside to that as well. So, as we kind of like shift focus here, you know, one of the big things that also happened last week was in GPI anybody that is following bourbon is probably listening. This podcast is knowing that it is a huge contract distiller that's out there, and their stock just plummet. This past week, it went from a pretty, pretty good sizable investment, if you're into it about five or six years ago to something where you're like, Okay, probably should think about selling at some point. But whatever it goes, I mean, we're also kind of like in a downturn right now. It maybe if anything, now's a good time to buy. But what happened was is Baron Baron calm, wrote an article and talked about the sales of age whiskey actually fell in the past quarter, at in GPI. And it actually sent the stock down about 26%. Back on Wednesday, July 31. And historically, in GPI has been a big game spirits outfit, like the ALGEO and they decided a long time ago to bet their popularity on building up some aged inventory. In MTP at some points, they were actually getting the the price that they wanted for it nearly three times of their actual cost. But the volumes just weren't there as I'd hoped. And the way this article kind of summed it up was that some customers were having trouble raising the funds to make these large purchases, while others were waiting to see NGP would drop its price. Now, Blake, I'm going to hand this over to you because I know me and you we've seen the MGB priceless before. Do you think this as this is kind of valid, that they really were kind of trying to make it really out of out of the world here that nobody's gonna buy it, if you have the, if you if you don't have the wherewithal to spend that kind of cash? Well, I mean, 22:29 I have no doubt that it's slowed down based on the price list. I mean, looking back, so we bought, it was it was 12 barrels of just under 10 years. So it's nine years. And it was I want to say it was around $3,000 a barrel. Right now the priceless I'm seeing $3,000 a barrel probably gets you like a two year old product. From MVP, maybe, maybe four year old five year old if, if you find the right broker, that kind of stuff. So I have no doubt that people were slowing down on on their buying. And, you know, because you look at the amount of cash that it would take to do because you know, MTP only sells in really big lots, you know, you can't buy five or 10 barrels from MVP, it's got to be, you know, probably a half million dollar buy to buy from them. And so, you know, I just think the appetite for MVP selling probably got a little bit ahead of them and with what people were willing to spend, because then people are doing the math, it's like, all right, how many hundred dollar bottles Can we put on the shelf, because, you know, if we're having to buy at this price, that means our cost is x and we got a retail at at YN. So I imagine there was a slow down. And, you know, who knows? Maybe it is people trying to negotiate or? Yeah, I mean, it is interesting to see that play out on unlike a big scale of a publicly traded company, and, you know, their stock market taking that big of a hit, and one day just from that, but I'm not too shocked at all that there was a little bit of a slow down in there. But overall, I don't think that'll slow down the market, you know, all they have to do is reduce their costs or reduce their price, probably 10 to 15%. And it'll probably pick right back up. And there will still make way more money than they were 510 years ago. So I don't think it's anything but a small bump in the road at this point. 24:36 It Sarah, I'll ask you a question real quick. Because David Jennings of a rare bird one on one just said that in GPS now competing with some good new distillate like will it new riff? Like you kind of agree with that, that the days of you know, thinking that you can just get seven year MVP at a lower price point is is kind of done? 24:56 Yeah, I mean, I mean, we've got like Bardstown bourbon company coming on, I mean, I don't know, that's more for one level up from a consumer or you know, just one dude trying to start a business. But I think more and more competition is coming on the scene. Now, obviously, they're not they're distillate and it isn't as old as MGPS. But if people are willing to wait for the price to come down a little bit, I think I think they should think about that. And like it said, the article said, I think maybe it's talking about it, you know, it's kind of driven people away. So maybe we should just, you know, I thought that was funny. 25:38 shouldn't put all of our secrets out there. 25:41 Thinks what's what's interesting is, if you look at right MGPI stock price, I mean, this really resets, it basically resets all the gains that they made to us. 19, right, because there was a huge, they were building up pretty good in 2018. And then there's a big dip towards the second half of 2018 going into 19, that there's a huge run, and just looks like the markets running figure out what to do with them. Right. I think that a pretty consistent gain up through mid 18. But from here on out, I'm just like in the stock chart, it's it's kind of all over the place, up and down, up and down. Um, so I think the markets trying to figure out what to do with them. I think Sarah's right, there's a lot of new players coming online, right? I don't think they're going to be going anywhere, I think the markets probably trying to see what happens with overseas markets, because that really is the next big area to really put a lot of the source bourbon into. So it's just, it's just buying time and filling it out. But I don't think there's any crisis for them to really worry about per se, if anything, it's probably a good time to buy. 26:36 Thank you. I remember looking at the price list and stuff like that maybe Blake just he's got bigger pockets. And they gave him a better list or something like that. But I remember when I was looking at it, even the stuff that you could get your hands on, like their high right Nashville and stuff like that. It was they only had like, two to three year old age stock like that was really it. Nobody, there was nothing that said, Hey, here's our seven to 10 years stuff like I never saw it. Now, when you want to get into higher ages, they definitely had like corn whiskey, and they had some other stuff, but not just some other regular bourbon mash bill. Blake, did you ever see some of those things of higher ages of just the bourbon stock that they had? That not within the last three years? I haven't. 27:22 And that's what I don't know where it all went? Because obviously they had some 27:29 somebody had some of it. 27:31 But yeah, I haven't seen anything over probably five years. in quite some time. And yeah, so I don't know if they just sold out of it. Or maybe it's the same thing. They're just holding out for that higher price. And you know, I'm it's getting cut a couple times before, you know makes us priceless down to me. So I'm not seeing those prices. But no, it seemed like that all evaporated about two to three years ago and most of the aged in MTP bourbon was gone. So yeah, it is interesting to to kind of see how that plays out. And somebody made another good point in the chat is, you know who they're the distilleries and brands that are buying this. A lot of them were doing it while their own distillery gets ready. You know, somebody like a Traverse City. Let's say new riff there. You know, there's countless others their stuffs ready now? Yes. Smooth Ambler like, so they're no longer relying on it. Now. That's not to say that there's 10 more in line right behind those guys. But you know, eventually you would think it and then you get like a Bardstown bourbon company that's coming on. And they're pumping out a ton of barrels right now castle and keys doing a lot of contract distilling. So so there's a lot of other players in the game. But ultimately, just, you know, how strong is the demand side to pull all that through. 29:06 So but even with all those new players, it's still going to take time for it to come to, you know, to come of age. So it'll be interesting if MGPI actually has more reserved that they're just not showing their hand on and I mean, right now everyone's going right, if you want high age 14, you're going after decal, right? You're going after Tennessee whiskey. And again, there's there's not an unlimited supply of that either. there's a there's a finite amount that everyone can go after so and that dries up either, you know, MGPI has stocks to go for. Or at that point, you're looking at trying to get Kentucky Kentucky distillery to give you some niche stock, but if not, the markets going to be if you have any barrels sitting around, it's gonna be right for the picking. Yeah, 29:44 sir. I'll make you kind of looking at the magic eight ball here because I start thinking about this and I see I see kind of what everything that goes around comes around sort of thing. And so when you look at what happened to the market, where mean if it just not even like go three four years ago, like nobody gave a crap about MZPI everybody used to look at it go in GPI I don't want it and then whatever happened in the past year, six months, whatever it is, like complete one at every single bash it over it. And and now since we have all these new players coming on, yeah, you're going to have this kind of like bulk source market that is Kentucky. It's got that Kentucky name to it. So where do you kind of see like, if anybody's laying down today, and we fast forward five years from now six years from now is MTP is really gonna be able to compete with all these brands are laying down stuff that now says Kentucky on it. 30:40 Right I mean, that's a good question because it's all about marketing. If you think about it, I mean, sure, MTP had knows how to do it makes good juice. But if you want to market your you know, bourbon a Kentucky made product Kentucky bourbon, there's a lot behind that, you know, that MVP can't give you so I think I know it's gonna be interesting necessarily to watch. I think 31:07 that's one thing to think about, you know, think about all the controversy some brands have had because they mislabeled their product because it didn't still didn't Indiana, you know, like the Templeton's and others were kinda adds a little more ambiguity to some source products because of it just says distilled in Kentucky. Who knows where I came from. 31:31 That's interesting. 31:32 Absolutely. And Jordan, we gotta give you a shout out real quick if you just like we come into like a huge batch of Elmer TV because 31:39 it would have been Helmers 100th birthday today. 31:41 Oh, is that what it is? 31:42 Okay, what a turn 100 say so little tribute little shares to Elmer 31:47 Yeah, there we go. Shout out to that. I, I saw him I saw him drinking it. He's got like a case in his background. I was just kind of curious. What was 31:53 this Hello. 31:56 At that if I could get the phone phone call from your local and your 32:00 this is the round tables turning into the secondary market. This is now where it's no 32:06 natural auction. 32:09 Just Just hold up a sign in front of your camera like right now. 32:14 There's a trained auctioneer she's going to tell you 32:20 so so as we kind of like tail off on that last comment talking about like, Where could end up being a few years versus where can talk to me for years, all this other kind of stuff that's coming on the market. You know, there was also something that came out in whiskey advocate this past week that talks about Missouri, is now joining the ranks of Kentucky and Tennessee and actually putting in new legal rules, I guess you could say, to actually have its own silo whiskey, and in this case, bourbon. So according to House Bill 266, that was signed back on Thursday, July 11. Any whiskey labeled as Missouri bourbon must not only meet the federal standards for bourbon, but also must be mashed, fermented, distilled aged and by and the state agent oak barrels manufactured in the state. And beginning in January 1 of 2020. Made with corn exclusively grown in the state. So this law goes into effect on August 28. Now, Sarah, I'll kind of point this one over to you a little bit. Do you see this like as a foreshadowing the effect of we could see other states coming online? I know, we kind of saw this with the Empire right thing before and stuff like that, too. 33:29 I think I mean, right now, every state actually does make a bourbon. Now, Missouri is doing their stricter laws, like kind of like we do, and Tennessee does. I think it's only a good thing to be transparent. And especially they're trying to keep everything within the state. And that on that note helps the agriculture part it helps the they said in the article there was they grow a lot of oak trees so that, you know, their barrels are the best they say, we can decide, agree with that. But they want to make it anything more transparent. I think it's a good thing. 34:07 What about you, Jordan? Kind of get your thoughts on 34:09 this. Oh, this is interesting, right? I think that's a bold move for them to do, mainly because I'm sure I'm sure you can even play. She asked the same question. Countless times a week. Well, if people reach out and say I thought bourbon can only be from Kentucky, right? So I appreciate them trying to trying to, you know, move things forward a little bit. But at the same time, I can't imagine that's going to help anyone by labeling up Missouri, bourbon, because people are just gonna say, Wait a second. No, no, it's not bourbon lessons from Kentucky. Right. So it's great. They want to be state centric. Cool. You know, but no offense, I don't really think that's going to really help anyone. I mean, the good. You know, the good news is local distilleries don't need to choose to label it. Missouri bourbon. But on the flip side, I'm sure eventually there'll be a lot of state grants tied to making Missouri bourbon just making whiskey in the state. 35:00 I mean, you could you could also see this as a as a push for tourism, right? A Missouri trail or whatever it is, like they want to do something that gives a little bit of state pride into into whatever they're doing to 35:14 I think I mean, I think Yeah, exactly. So and I don't think that's a bad thing. Right. Pennsylvania, they recently just launched the the rye rebellion trail, right, the Whiskey Rebellion trail. I mean, so and that's great for Pennsylvania and Scripps in Baltimore a little bit too, but that has a lot of history behind it, like legit history of the whole Whiskey Rebellion, everything else. So it's a little it's a little hard to fathom what type of history they might attach that That being said, if a distillery can come up with some crazy story about the grandfather's recipe, and everything else, I'm sure a steak can come off the story about Wine Trail. 35:49 Yeah, so there was there was a pretty good quote here in the chat. So it came from Blake, first thing he said soon as he started talking about, he said, Oh, I Missouri resident here, I got some thoughts on this. I said, Okay, let's hear it. He goes, the rules do nothing to actually improve the product and the barrel. So I know maybe this is this is this is also just going back to the craft versus everybody else argument. Whereas everything that is coming from the big boys like they've have, they've had time, and they've had stock. And not only that is you've got economies of scale that make it super cheap. So this could be like I said, it might have to be a long play for Missouri to get there. But you know, this is funny when when I talked to Ryan all the time, and somebody says, Oh, you gotta go check out this distillery. It's so awesome. Like, they do this and this, and we're like, yeah, sure, I bet you they ferment some grain of wheat, some corn, and then they probably throw it in a mash tun. And they probably just still throw in a barrel yet, like the process hasn't changed in 20 years. Like we quit giving a shit A long time ago. And so it's it's kind of like, there's there, there's got to be something somewhere where a lot of these states can find that new. I just find find that that angle that is starting to make them. 37:08 Gotta differentiate yourself somehow 37:10 get on the map, somehow just get on the map. I don't know what it is. But maybe this is part of it. I don't know. I mean, Blake, you introduced me to Empire. I like you kind of see this as a move forward for a lot of people in different states. 37:23 Yeah, I mean, but you think how quickly can we burn out on it? You know, we got 50 states that we can everyone can have their own their own bourbon. 37:35 I'm waiting for the Hawaii one to come around. Because I'm going to the barrel pick. Okay. 37:39 I'm heading for that press trip if it comes up? 37:44 Yeah, I mean, it is interesting to see I think it is cool. The Missouri one, I think they've got a little bit with, you know, Cooper edge and everything like that the Empire I, they've done a really great job and making a product. There is some historical aspects best, especially with like, you know, Maryland style rise, Pennsylvania style rise. So it's cool that they designated it brings some more attention to it, and in a little more information, because while we do get a whole lot less of the question, it's still I mean, it popped up for me, like two weeks ago in a comment section of this post I had on seal box. And I was like, Well, you know, bourbon could only may be made in Bourbon County, Kentucky. Like, that's just not right. Like 38:34 that. We're past that. But a lot of 38:35 I mean, the average consumer, a lot of people still think that. Yeah, I go so far as the majority still think about it. I hope 38:43 not the majority, but you're probably right. 38:46 You know, so it is cool. It does kind of give a little more credibility to some of these distilleries. Like Jordan said, I wish there was something that improved the product or 38:57 Yeah, thanks, Jordan. Who said that or no, Clint and Blake, there's another there's another Blake in there. 39:04 Likes always have the most insightful comments. 39:08 But no, I mean, I wish there was something like like a straight days designation estate would do something like that, that says, okay, it's or bottled in bond, you know, something that that has a year state your age statement on it. That really does improve the product where it's cool to say, Yeah, all the the grains, the oak, and everything's from this state, but you know, could still be pretty bad, bad bourbon in those bottles. But it all in all, it's all about marketing. So it gets the name out there more gets more people drinking bourbon. I'm for it. 39:47 I mean, I just think they they took it almost a little few steps too far. I mean, it was literally mash fermented, distilled aged bottled right, Asian oak barrels that were manufactured the state greens grown there. 40:00 Are they gonna do you know, to make it Missouri? You know, I mean, 40:06 well, like I said, I think the part that we're probably ticket, it took it over the edge was like, had to be aged and oak barrels that were manufactured in Missouri, right. Like, there's, we all know that like, 40:16 straight bourbon doesn't Aqua sponsoring that bill? 40:20 Don't talk to trees. OC that Jordan might have something that might be independent state that could have been behind that, right? Because they've got a huge Missouri 40:27 presence. I mean, who really benefits from that, right? So it's going to be it's going to be the barrel manufacturers in Missouri, the people selling trees, Missouri, it's going to be the people growing the grains. It's really meant to benefit the local economy. 40:39 And this is where we get into our hypothesis of things. 40:44 What moves the political? 40:46 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, but like I said, I think, you know, Jordan, you made a really good point there that, you know, it really could be ISC behind that, that really says, like, Oh, this should be a part of it. Because, you know, until I really see getting into this, I didn't really know how many Cooper's we even had really here in Kentucky. And so perhaps there are a few more Missouri that we are kind of not shining the light on. But it's definitely a very valid point that you raise. Yeah, when it comes to it. So as we start moving on here, you know, Blake said something in the last segment really talking about well, if they're going to do something like bring it make it be bottle and bond, but sort of age statement, you got to do something that really kind of Willie wants to make the consumer started gravitating towards it. And this is one thing that is sort of relatively recent that was just announced that it's something that we've been all accustomed to, in the past two years now of basically every label out there losing its age statement. And this is because of the popularity of bourbon and just not being able to keep up with stocks. Nobody could forecast this to ever be where it was, however, beam Suntory came out with a press release saying that knob Creek is going UB restoring its nine year age statement on its on its bourbon. So I'll kind of Jordan like, do you really think that all of a sudden they're like hey, we got stocks. Do you love bourbon? How about festivals? course you do. So join bourbon pursuit in Frankfort, Kentucky on August 24. For bourbon on the banks. It's the Commonwealth premier bourbon tasting and awards festival. You will get to taste from over 60 different bourbon spirits, wine and beer vendors plus 20 food vendors all happening with live music. 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The barrels come from Tennessee get filled with Dragon's milk beer twice, the mature bourbon is finished and those very same barrels. rackhouse whiskey club is a whiskey the Month Club on a mission to uncover the best flavors and stories from craft distillers across the US. Along with two bottles of hard to find whiskey rackhouse boxes are full of cool merchandise that they ship out every two months to members and over 40 states. Go to rock house whiskey club com to check it out. And try a bottle of beer barrel bourbon and beer barrel rye. Use code pursue for $25 off your first box. 44:03 Jordan like Do you really think that all of a sudden they're like, Hey, we got stocks? It's only been like a year like was this like a like a like a safe face sort of thing was this like, 44:14 is interesting. So we just did a one of our newsletters contained a topic piece on this a few weeks back. So you know you're seeing age statements returned in a number of ways, right? So I think the knob Creek might be a little rare in the fact that it may actually return and may kind of stay the same price for the most part. But what you're seeing as we're noticing is age statements coming back with the price increase or age statements coming back on a limited basis. I'll use limited loose quotes right. So the thing about a heaven Hill took off the six year right it's coming back as a seven year as a higher price point. Right Bazell Hayden last very standard A while back all of a sudden is coming out as a 10 year limited release will see more often. right we're seeing this 1780 more and more. And we're seeing those age statements come back and I'm still waiting for the big one. I know this is just speculation on my part. But I'm still waiting to see Elijah Craig just the standard version come back in more premium looking Bothwell bottles in place that are more premium price point, right, because I can't imagine that heaven hills not thinking about that. Right. But I think we're seeing that it's not the fact that age sucks, you know, appeared out of nowhere. It's a business right and I'm the majority of the bourbon distilleries calculated and play this out really well. Because now people do associate age statements and bottles as being higher, higher quality, more premium, and customers are willing to pay for it. So when those demons do come back, they're excited for right and love it or hate it. It's the reality at least people who are bemoaning the loss of age statements have that option, but it's going to cost a little bit more. I mean, they could have just as easily said hey, we're going to come out with a second 45:47 product line that is nine years at an extra like $15 a bottle and just kept doing there. You know NAS seven right here whatever stuff and just kind of had two variations of knob Creek there. So I guess go ahead Jordan. 46:03 I was gonna say you kind of saw that with a heaven hill with the white label bottled in bond right? I mean, you you had my guess it wasn't bottle and bond the one other one but you had the white label and then you had the aged white label and whatever on talk about a lot. So it's kind of like Well, what's the point of doing the non aged you know, the non HD version? So I think people just if there's two options, people are always going to go for the HTML right? It's it's just economics on that one. 46:26 Yes, sir. I kinda want to get your your kind of take on this. I mean, because we look at the market look at what it is I mean, we had Bernie lovers on the show when right 12 lost it and you know, everybody went ape shit and then you kind of talks about like, you know, this is you know, the bourbon is a bird business not bourbon charity business. And you talked about like, well, would you rather just take it off the shelf completely? Or, you know, just bring it back to whatever it is however there you know, I don't know what beam did to try to sit there and try to find these stocks that did this. But they did it without a price increase. So So kind of talk about your you know, kind of your feelings on this one. 47:08 You know, I think people are tiptoeing around idea of the bourbon bubble and if it's gonna burst or what's going to happen so i think i mean it it's probably a way for them to be you know, more transparent it seemed it seems to be my theme but I mean, it's a it's kind of like a an outreach to their fans to saying hey, you know, maybe we were short on this year but now we were back you know, or it could just be like don't leave us you know, there's so much more on the market we you know, we value you here's your age statement back and I don't know that might be kind of naive thinking but I'm glad they didn't raise the price because I like that 47:53 Yeah, well that's what I mean I think one of the things in the press release was talking about how Fred know said when some he wants to order you know, you're at a bar you want to order a knob Creek you expect it to be nine years now I don't know if that's really what is me it's just that it could just be a blanket statement that was given in sent out of course but that was one part of it. Now one thing that was kind of coming up in the chat was people were saying that knob Creek packs knob Creek pics are the best value in bourbon. Blake I kind of want to get your your ID on that because you know most of them are 10 to 15 years old like is is it really the best value in bourbon you're seeing right now. 48:34 Um, so knob Creek pics for me are a little hit and miss at times I've had some that man I'd almost put them up there with like the Booker's 25th release or something like that and then I've had others it's like wow, this is just like knob Creek off the shelf. So as far as price improve go, I can't think of anyone else that would be better. You're talking about essentially barrel proof 14 years old and 45 $50 a bottle whatever they are, I can't think of one that would be better in my mind. But yeah, I mean all in all, I think the more aged options we have out there the better so that's it's nice to see they brought the the age statement back. I'm actually not going to talk about bakers because I just don't want anyone messing with bakers we're just going to stop dabbling with the design and making payroll and leave it I want the nice Devon Black Wax top sitting on the shelf every time I go in so but no I mean to the original question aside from four roses three to four years ago not Craig's probably barrel pics that is not Greeks probably the best value there is right now. Four barrel pics that 50:02 you know it's funny we look at we look at barrel pics we always talk about barrel pics as being one of the things that you know you don't want to go chase after everything barrel pics is where you want to be. However it seems like this is always one of the ones that are so over saturated in the market and Jordan Did you kind of see that as one of those things that were like there's just so many of them out there like it's hard to just barrel fix knob Creek fix you know it's not one of those things that people go crazy for it's not a seven I say 50:32 that Yeah, I agree and I say that with us having a knob Creek barrel pick out there right now for folks for single girl club right 34 through a partner and it's true people I think people have a lot more readily available knob Creek pics at their fingertips than they then they realized in them they want because most stores will have a knob Creek single barrel out there, but they're pretty easy to get. They may not always be like a 1415 year old but they're pretty they're pretty well established is an easy pick for stores to do. Right and for the most part, it's one of the ones that you just get used to knowing that Yeah, for the most part a few times here I'll be able to go to knob Creek where I'll pick right so the excitement factor I think isn't there as it might be for some of the other barrel pics that people do. I'm sure you guys have seen the same thing with your barrel club pics to that you've done them and Blake the same thing Sarah I'm sure if you have a favorite liquor store that you go into often a little knob Creek barrel pics, they're just one of those things that's not sure if it's oversaturation or so much they're just readily available. Even if it's just one or two, you know, a year or two or three year it's more available than you might see some of the other brands out there that stores are doing similar things for 51:45 it, I'll kind of toss it out to the group too. Because 51:50 I don't think I've ever had a knob Creek single barrel pic that is like blown me away. But I've also like when we've done that I pre barrel pics like you go there or you get the sample shipped to you and your tastes of them. There's not a huge very difference between them like they just seem like they seem very they're all the same as me. I mean, I haven't really found like some that are just like crazy off profile like you have some that are like with Buffalo Trace that are just like you never would expect to this be Buffalo Trace versus some that are very sweet. And you can say that about a lot of different brands out there even new riff being one where you get a bunch of different flavors out of these barrels and stuff like that. I'll kind of toss it out to you all like have you seen like a lot of variants in your in your knob Creek single barrel pics. 52:37 So to me, the beam, kind of that funky beam, pod wet cardboard note always shines through. 52:48 Nothing that's a cell point like that, that Yeah, 52:50 no. Bad. That's why I lead with peanuts. 52:57 But I have had a few that I'm like, wow, this is really good. So you know, I wouldn't say they're all the same. 53:07 But you know you think about other Well, I guess pretty much everyone is using the same Nashville same everything. So beam definitely has a lot more to choose from. So if they're going for a profile, they've got plenty of barrels to pick from to find to put into the single barrel program that are all pretty similar. So but you know, I'll defend them a little bit there and say I've had some that are definitely better than others and some I thought were standouts, but I think if you put really anything beam in a lineup and you knows down the line, you're going to pick that pick that out immediately. So I think that plays a role as well. 53:49 Does anybody else get a little like turned off? Sometimes when they only roll out three barrels for you to 53:55 try travesty? It's a 53:57 Yeah. You're like, come on, I'm better at this like that. That's where you bring your own drill and just start walking. 54:06 Because they love that. Yeah, you if you want to get arrested and never invited back again, that's that's the recipe. 54:16 Alright, so let's go ahead, we'll kind of shift it to maybe one of the last topics for tonight as we start winding this down. But it's, it really plays into really well of that last topic, because, you know, Jim Beam is has done a very, very good job at looking at the market looking at its consumers, and saying, like, hey, let's restore this age statement, we're not gonna raise the price, we're not gonna do anything like that. You know, and there's other brands out there that are handling this in the same exact way. So let's talk about the impact of what brand perception really is. So you've got Buffalo Trace, you know, they stated that they will never raise their prices. You've got heaven Hill who did the exact opposite and raise their prices? I'm kind of curious on on. In Sir, I'll kind of let you kind of go first here like, what do you think is the the brand perception people will have when you have, like, that was an example like that, where somebody is raising prices? somebody saying I'm going to keep them steady? I feel like we're running get into like political debates, like, yeah, like, I'm gonna raise taxes like no, you know, it's, it's kind of like that. So kind of kind of talk about, like, how do you see brands in a certain light when they when they do this sort of thing? 55:35 I'm, I think, at the end of the day, people like what they like, and they're loyal. 55:41 I think I mean, the heaven Hill thing, you know, taking it off the market, and then raising it a year. And putting, you know, raising the price on it. That was a little like, you know, like, come on, you know, I'm brand loyal to you. But at the end of the day, like you guys were saying it's a it's a business. And if people are willing to pay it, then then why not? But I think I still think at the end of day you have your favorite and that's what you're going to go to, if you can find it. 56:11 And I have to kind of correct myself a little bit because makki sick in the chat said, well, BT just raised the prices on OWA. And I was like, Okay, okay, they did do that. Some other kind of lower end brands. Yes. They're I shouldn't say lower end but they're some are more everyday consumer brands. Yes. However, sir, more their premium items. Pretty much thing level field, there there be tax in the package in the world, they're really kind of stay in there for at least as least as far as we know. We'll see when the press release comes out in this fall. 56:40 Yeah, I'd be shocked if they raise those prices more than it'll be up. $10 it'll be what are we at now? They're like, 56:46 9999 Yeah, 56:48 yeah, it'll be up. $10. And, you know, I, it is a It's funny how short our memory is on all this stuff. Because, you know, I feel like we pick on heaven Hill a little bit because they've seemed to have done the most with, you know, Elijah Craig 18. Going away, coming back at $110. More, you know, no, we're not dropping the age statement of Elijah Craig. Oh, there goes the age statement. So we're going to pick on somebody else. So like, Buffalo Trace, they raise OWA prices, higher than well, or 12. There's all this you know, if you look at what the what's going on behind the scenes with a lot of the what these stores have to do to get, you know, Sazerac and Buffalo Trace products in that's to me is almost even worse than some of the other people but everyone has a short memory. Am I going to not buy a bottle of George t stag tomorrow? Because my retailer went in debt buying, you know, weekly vodka so he could get that one bottle? No, I'm gonna buy that bottle. So, you know, it's the whole consumer. Not to say that a lot of these distillers are bulletproof. But there's so many new people coming in, who just don't care or will never know, like, the details of stuff that goes on. I think, you know, the brands and distillers feel that a little bit and they just keep moving forward, they increase profits, they increase expansion, whatever it is. I just want to drink good bourbon. And you know, I can't think of one distillery that's done anything that's like a you know, I will never drink them again because of it. I mean, shoot, I tried Templeton a few months back after swore them off because of all their flavoring and no, we don't flavor and all this stuff. And I was like, as not as bad as I, you know, I was thinking it was terrible, but it's not that bad. So um, yeah, I mean, I think there's just a lot of room for for distilleries to move right now, especially with so many new people coming in. 58:57 I think it's a it's on the flip side, it's a fine line, right. So I appreciate what Buffalo Trace is doing by artificially keeping prices low on some of their products, because you have to remember the world we plan, right? We drink a lot of their spirits. But we'll go back to bourbon most often. But the average consumer you're competing not just for for what they buy in the shelves in the bourbon section. But if you piss them off enough, and they start going to discover other spirits, right? Take a bourbon iOS, and he's really into rum. Or he's really into Armagnac, or he's really into mezcal or anything else. Right? They may not return to the bourbon section anymore. And yeah, you may have actually pissed off that person enough that once they found another spirit at a valuable price, they might just be done with bourbon. So it's that fine line that you have to play of capturing the consumers are entering into the to the bourbon world and are willing to spend money, but also those longtime drinkers who are willing and able to switch spirit categories and don't have the discretionary income to just buy everything everywhere. 1:00:01 I'll buy everything everywhere. 1:00:02 Wow. I mean, we might buy everything everywhere. But you know what I mean? 1:00:06 Is if travel takes the right place, you see the right bottle? Yeah, well, of course. Oh, for sure. 1:00:12 Yeah, go ahead, like whole new market. Because there there was the guys who were just completely rien loyal, where they needed bourbon, they walked in and grabbed a bottle of Maker's Mark, and there was nothing else. And now I think it's a little more people are exploring. So I think brand loyalty that's being built and, you know, kind of the goodwill will mean a lot in the coming years. 1:00:37 I think everybody brings a very valid point to this, because when you look at how brands are handling this, they're all doing it different ways. And I think the one thing that people are the brands have to understand is that this is a long game. If you're if you're trying to go out for the short game, you're only going to succeed in the short game. And if you are trying to make a lasting impression that's going to last for decades, you know, making sure that you know, trying to raise prices trying to do this. Who knows it could backfire. You know, we've talked about on the roundtable before, and I think Blake brought it up that we could just be now experiencing the very beginning of what could be a super super super premium market where there will be a need to have $1,000 bottles of bourbon, like regularly on the shelves. As as we try to compete with scotch and stuff like that. So seeing is how it I don't know. And I look at it from two different angles now that I'm kind of saying and I'm kind of flip flopping on myself. It's kind of like yeah, maybe they should be raising prices. And then the other side of me saying like those bastards, why they're raising prices. But I mean, that's that's that's sort of like the, you know, we're in a very transformative time, I think for bourbon, where we see this massive growth, this massive opportunity. And it's either like, what kind of game you're going to play and in where can you either increase profits a little bit that makes makes you have a little more longevity? versus Where are you just basically taking advantage of the market and saying, I've got a 12 year old NGP bottle, and I'm selling it for $250 a bottle. Yeah. Right. Like that's, that's short term thinking. And so we'll kind of see exactly what how that sort of plays out in the the upcoming upcoming pieces here. But, you know, I think that's going to kind of round out a lot of the questions that we had for the night really looking at exactly the market where it is. I mean, we covered we covered a lot tonight. 1:02:36 knockout topics from there's only four people here. 1:02:41 Say I was like we were bam, bam, bam, bam 1:02:45 GP stock prices, Missouri bourbon knob Creek. I mean, 1:02:51 so it was it was awesome to have everybody on here and even huge thanks to everybody that joined in the chat. I know some people were sitting there saying that, you know, you know, Blake it talks about like, yeah, buy a bunch of boxes, so I can buy that and everybody's like, Hey, 1:03:06 I love I love Wheatley vodka. Like anybody's like this is a safe space. Fred's not here. We could talk about vodka. 1:03:15 We can mention it now that 1:03:17 don't save just remember that. 1:03:21 Absolutely. So as we sort of start closing this out, want to give everybody a chance to say, you know, kind of where they're where they're from, where they blog, everything like that. So Jordan, I'll let you go first. 1:03:31 Yeah, this

Ben: Hey everybody! Welcome to Hack That Funnel Radio. Thanks for being here today! We have a special interview with one of the best affiliate marketers in the ClickFunnels community and other communities around. Today’s episode is something really, really cool. We’ve got somebody on who has made $1 million as a ClickFunnels affiliate. Now he’s promoted click funnels, he’s promoted an active campaign, he runs a lot of different products, but he’s made $1 million in that. And so I want to introduce him to you. His name is Spencer Mecham. Ben:                          Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? Why did you even get started in this marketing game? Like a lot of people are in the game and they’d been going for forever and they’re not making any money. What got you started and then what turned you on to affiliate? Spencer:                Ah, yes. I have a great email sequence that explains all this. I’ve written down this story so I don’t forget it.  It all began in Hawaii. Me and my wife were huge Hawaii fans. We love to go there as often and as long as possible. At one point when I was in college, we moved there for, for probably six months. We actually moved in with her parents because they were living there for six months at the time too.                                     It was like this random, crazy thing. They were like, Hey, we’ve got an extra room. And we were like, ah, it’s amazing. We’ve got two extra bodies that can fit in that room. And so we moved in and the goal was to move in and then I’ll get a job and we’ll kind of go from there and then we’ll move out after a month or something. But it was the hardest thing on planet earth to get a job. I’ve never had an issue getting a job, you know, it was crazy. I’d go in and I’d go to apply it like every, like the lowest, most menial tasks I could possibly find anything and nothing. I couldn’t get one interview the whole time I was there. So it was this crazy hard, for a variety of reasons.                                     And so I can actually remember sitting at home and I’m as bummed as can be. I’m like, I can’t even get a job like working as a grocery bagger, I can’t get it down to anywhere. And that’s why I started searching. That’s when like I started searching everywhere online, how do you make money, not in physical locations. And so the first way I made money on my own was- have you ever heard of Mechanical Turks? No? So Amazon has this little teeny thing where entrepreneurs like us go out and they have like these really menial tasks, like crazy, menial. They’ll say like, Hey, I’ll pay you a penny each time you like go into this data sheet and like, you know, select these things and do this. I’ll give you one penny.                                     Right? And you’ll just do it over and over and over and over again. And by the penny you’re making money. And so I was, I can’t remember all the tasks I was doing, what they were seriously like 10 cent, 30 cent, 50 cent tasks where I like take surveys, things like that. So that’s what I was doing because I had nothing else to do. Everybody else was at school or work. My wife was interning at the local preschool. So just me home alone, sitting on the computer, feeling bad. I said, Hey, at least I’m making money. I did that for three weeks. I’m just like, I’m making like 80 bucks a week doing and I’m working, I’m doing stuff once a week much for like five hours a day on your computer, clicking.                                     I also realized I had zero skills to bring to the table though as well. So anyway, I did that for a while and that kind of brought me into the mindset of, okay, now I’m going to Google. Like, how do I make more than like 7 cents an hour online, you know, and eventually I get into the stock market. That leads me to the stock market for a year and the stock market is the way I’m going to make money. I start losing a bunch of money there. That led me into- okay, the real estate business is for me, you know, real estate is how you make money. Not! I’m still terrible at real estate. And I’m like, we’re trying it for years. The hardest part.  And then I didn’t give up but I wasn’t making enough money to live either.                                     So I get a job in an SEO agency and this is where affiliate marketing comes in. This coworker, he shows me one day while we’re doing SEO for clients, you know, and he’s like, hey, check out what I’ve been doing. He’s goes this website. He’s made the reviews, vacuum cleaners- it’s like Kirby and the dust bunny or you know, whatever it is. He’s got this site and he’s like, I made $10,000 last month. And seriously, if you go look at this website, it’s literally the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. Like nineties, it’s ugly. I don’t know where he even got the designs for this, but… so I’m looking at it like, there’s no way. There’s no way I could do worse than this mess and 10 grand a month. And so that was when I was like, I’m going to do affiliate marketing.                                     I’m going to do better than him! And then kind of the rest is history. So then multiple years of me like trying and failing in the affiliate marketing world happened. And then maybe two and a half years ago, things started to slowly click right at that point, I finally have like marketing skills. I’ve spent years building marketing skills and buying courses and trying things and failing. And I started to see little successes and hone in and focus on those little successes. And now I’m a little more successful. So when I got into affiliate marketing, I was like my first sale that I made online. I spent three grand and I made a year or  $297 or $197 you spend three grand to be an affiliate and then I spent three grand on Solo ads. Okay, so you made some money, but I was like, I can not do that again.                                     So that was the pain point now where you are where you are in the affiliate marketing world where you ask, what’s the biggest mistake that you see people trying to do when they start to do affiliate marketing? Are they all trying to throw money at the issue or they all trying to vote wrong? Are they not getting less? What’s the biggest issue that I think they’re not setting up their business and that they need this. You need a system in place before you send traffic to anything and, and not just as an affiliate, right? That’s true for everything. And you need more than just a pitch like, Hey, I’ve got a product, I’m going to throw some traffic towards it. Right. Which is what not only affiliates do, but like most small business owners do the same thing. So I said, I’m selling this and I’m gonna run some ads to it because I’ve got a product, but you need a system, you don’t need a product, you need a system, right?                                     A system of multiple products and a system of multiple channels and avenues of reaching audiences and stuff. And so what I see is most people not setting up a funnel, they’re setting up like single pages. They’re not setting up email automation, they’re not setting up retargeting. They’re starting on the front end and, and sending traffic instead of starting on the back end and saying- okay, I’m going to get a few products, 5 to 10 products I want to promote. And at the same in the non affiliate marketing goal, right? It’s called a “value ladder” and I’m going to get some products and then I’m going to create this some, some version of a funnel where I can capture lead information and then send them on to start selling them. And then I’m going to create an email automation that increases my profits.                                     And once that back end’s in place, then you can go over and say, okay, now I’m going to start throwing as much traffic as possible because I’ve got my system in place and I don’t have to focus on that anymore. I can just focus on traffic and know that like, hey, you know, every bit of traffic that I get, I’ve set up everything to really maximize how much money can be made off that traffic. Now some ads you might have not made much money anyway, but that is the biggest problem. You know, affiliates right now. That makes sense. Cause I built it out and I built a list that I could email once a day and I could do that, but I didn’t have, I have like slightly automated sequence for that launch.                                     I didn’t have anything after that. Like I didn’t know what I was going to do with that. Like I built lists, I’m pretty sure I built like a full list of maybe 10,000 people, which doesn’t sound hugely. This is from my personal visits or my personal is like I just haven’t go that big list I built, I built a big list. But because of like the fact that I don’t email people often like email is dead when it comes into my hands. It’s not the emails that are dead. I suck at email! So I have a thousand people left who kind of listen. That’s so funny cause I that, that now that you’re saying that, it reminded me, that was my first mistake that I made as an affiliate to I, I created a youtube channel that I got lucky in like a couple of videos exploded.                                     I quickly threw in like a random little like thing that pops up, you know, and the youtube video, it’s like, Hey, I’m on this random thing. Then I didn’t have anything in place and I have a list. So that’s still sitting there. The channel is still bringing in traffic. My list is like 2000 people that are sitting in a MailChimp list and they’ve never once received a single email from me because I didn’t have it done ahead of time. And like you said, I’m just, I got too much going on and maybe I’m just too lazy, I don’t know. But to sit there and send them emails every two days or whatever, like I’m just not good at that. Where if I had sat down for like one day and built out a 10 or 15 email sequence that sold them stuff, that’s probably a couple, at least a couple thousand dollars, you know, a months worth of income that could have gone in just by me building that one day sequence. I don’t know. That would’ve been really helpful. And that’s the issue. Like I didn’t, I heard all the things and I had it in my head. But then once you get to that point where like, okay, now I got to start, you don’t, there’s no like, so you have your, your, your course like you built, you built your affiliate business. At what point did you state I need to build my own stuff? Was it like in conjunction with as bonuses? Was it like why, why did you start building your own stuff?                                     My own stuff as in my, like my own list or what do you mean, like my own course or like your own course where you actually started to, yeah. I mean, you start to get this, there’s always in the back of your head is an affiliate. But like what could go wrong here, you know, and isn’t affiliate anything go wrong. Your traffic’s coming from Youtube. Youtube can shut you down if you’re affiliate, you know, you’re number one program is, um, program a or click falls or whatever. They could shut you down or they could sell the company. Or like, there’s a million things that can happen, right? The only thing you really own is that list. And that list is only gonna really respond positively to you if you’ve built that a lot more than just a list, right? If you build out some kind of brand and like they know you and like you’ve, you know, you’ve personalized yourself or your business with these people to where they’re more than a list to you and you’re more than just some guy emailing them every once in a while to them, right?                                     You are a brand that they follow and believe in. So at what point did I decide that? I couldn’t really say like, it’s all been very transitional, you know, the way it is that everybody, like you do this, you see some success and then you kinda just look around like I do like, what’s next? You know? And, and somewhere along the way I was like, well, what’s next is I got to stop relying on other people and try this myself. You know? And so, um, I, you start to see a little success. It really is. Your road just kind of starts to happen, I think as an entrepreneur, right? Like it kind of builds itself one brick at a time in front of you as you’re growing, you know, you see a little success and that kind of opens up some new doors and you just follow it and take the best route as you go.                                     And that’s kind of how it’s been for me. So you literally, you don’t see the whole path, you’re just taking steps and be like, okay, where’s the next door? And you’re just going through all the open doors that open up that are best for you. You’re not like, there’s not some main master plan, just like just take action and it works out. And so I think there always is some kind of master plan in my head, but that’s just never, but then it just changes everything. Weak in my end is always something like, oh, you know, two years from now I’ll be doing this. But like even like 18 months from now, the idea of like being a course creator was never once in my head. I was like, I want to take courses, I want to sell affiliate products, you know, and now here I am like half of what I do is all based around creating courses and selling courses and things like that.                                     And I mean same thing with affiliate marketing, you know I was like I want to be in the stock market. That’s real passive income. And then I find it really marketing starts to work. Like we’ll obviously go all in on a, like you lost three grand in the stock market, you made 10 in affiliate marketing, who cares what you want? Like take that road, you know? Right. Yup. But you had to test all those roads to figure it out and they’re like everyone’s testing all these things. So you’re figuring it out. When was the point where you realized this wasn’t just a fad or easy money? Like this is where you were going to build the foundation. This is where like this is what was going to work and this is how you’re going to set junior family free. Cause like you love the lifestyle, the lifestyle or going back to Hawaii, we’re going to, we’re going to, you know, run an English.                                     So like when did you get to that point where you’re like, we’re at that point, let’s go take a vacation. My big first success, a lot of people might know this, that are listening might not, was the ClickFunnels, uh, dream car. That was like my big first affiliate success. I’d have like a bunch of small ones up until then. But as the background of that, once you get a hundred active ClickFunnels users that have signed up under your link as an affiliate, you get a free car. And so I was at like 20 or 30 when it was like, when it, when it finally dawned on me- oh, I could, this could be real, right? I could actually win this car!                                     Like in the beginning, it’s just kinda like this you’re not really thinking it’s going to happen when you try, but I don’t know. Once you actually start to see success, you think it could happen. And so somewhere around there, I think it’s going to happen. And that’s when I talked to my wife and we actually set up all these plans. I was like, when I hit a hundred, we’re going to go do this. And I think it was Hawaii and I said, when I make my first six contracts, we’re going to go to Europe. And we still haven’t done that yet, but it’s still on the promise. It’s still being planned, I still owe it, so it’s gotta happen. I do think it’s really important to set timelines and goals and things like that, right?                                     Of like, like your goal can’t be all just to make seven figures and retire, right? Like, that can be your long term goal, but, but if that’s like your one goal, then you’re going to fizzle out. So you’ve got to set those little, those little mini goals of like, I’m going to get to 50 and then I’m going to take my family to this place and we’re gonna spend a few days and it’s going to be awesome. You know, and then after that we’ll set up another goal that’s like, it’s close enough that I can see it, you know, and see it coming in the next few months or a year or whatever. So a couple of months ago, I can’t even remember when I went through and I like hacked everything that you’d ever done on all the Facebook, all the, all the pages and all the ads. I think everything was a blast. Ben:                          The biggest key components that makes up all of this work for you is your ecosystem. It’s you got Facebook going, you got youtube going, you’ve got your emails going, like you have this symbiotic ecosystem that’s going. Is that part of like the back system that you need to build before you start doing things that we have multiple communication channels so people actually want to listen to you? Or is that, does that not as necessary?   Spencer:                I think not necessarily, like if you’re, if you think you’re going to build your whole eco system in the beginning, then you’re just going to overwhelm yourself and like you’re trying to like trying to put content in your Facebook group, set up a continent youtube channel, and you just can’t fill it on.                                     You fizzle out. Right? Cause especially most, most people at that point are still at a job, right? They don’t have five hours to create content. So, um, I think you’d start with one. Like I very much started with youtube and that’s all I did for awhile. Right. And then once, once you feel comfortable and systemized in one, then you can add another. So I, I was crushing it. Like once I got through I was like, I know youtube really well. I’ve got a system for putting out youtube videos consistently. Then I added a Facebook group. Well there were no email automation, so let, maybe I’ll go back. Yes, you should build your, you know, automation from the beginning.                                     The first thing you should have an email automation. The way I recommend doing it is building a weeks worth of emails and then adding to your automation every couple of days, just throwing in one marina at the end of it. Um, but then yeah, then you’ll add the youtube or whatever it is for you. And then you’ll add like a Facebook group. And the Nice thing about each one you add is it’s actually much easier each time you add something because you’ve already got content and it’s just a matter of figuring out how you’re going to take that content and reapply it. So I’ve got this channel, I put up this 10 minute video or whatever. Well that’s great. Now I can hop into my youtube, my Facebook group and make a post and like five minutes. I’ve already got the whole outline and everything how it’s going to work for me. I just added the blog. We added our blog like six months ago. We started going all into our blog. Well that’s great. That’s so easy, right? We are already making youtube videos that are like searchable and 10 minutes long and are answering questions. Let’s just add a blog post. So I like that system mimic makes sense because I’m one of those. When I take action, I take a massive amount of action. I’m like, okay, we’re going to build a whole ecosystem.                                     I like doing it all like I know we’re going to go in, let’s dive it like there’s no reason to jump into the kid pool and I have to get out of it to get to the big kid. Cool. And so I’m just like, let’s just throw it in. So I’m, so that makes sense. Going step by step and it does get easier. That’s good to know. When we’re at funnel hacking live, people were walking around and wanting to take a picture with you wanting to get a golden nugget from. And it was weird, right? I was walking with you cause like at that point we become friends to some degree and we were just talking, I’ll take it.                                     And so like we were talking and walking and people would stop me and you’d be like, oh my gosh. Like it was still shocking at one point. When did that happen? And do you think you’ll ever really get used to it? Like it’s a weird phenomenon. When did it happen? The first time that had ever happened and the last time then would have, because I’ve only been to one eight. I’m only in that one tiny circle. Ben:                          Last question is if you had to answer, like if you had this poor starving kid who was like, I need to make money this month, like what is the fastest route to making money that you would suggest? Would it be owning the affiliate product, whether it be creating your YouTube channel? What, like what is the path that you’d be like, oh, just hop on this path and see it ‘til the end. Just push for the next 30 days. Spencer:                I love YouTube, but I love YouTube because it’s passive, not fast. Um, it’d be, I would say it’s Facebook. Like when I look at Facebook’s, the way Facebook is built, anybody can make money in 30 days on Facebook, just through their own personal profile.                                     So like whenever people ask me like I need money now and then we kind of cut out most if we cut out affiliate marketing because the things I teach, cause those are all to not make money now they’re to retire in five years. Right. I would say get on Facebook. Choose your niche, go join 20 groups, go make 5,000 friends. Right? So Facebook is built Facebook hands you an audience of 5,000 people just without that, like without you having to do anything except for like click, add, add, add. Right? And like half the people who have no idea who you are still like okay, um… and then they need to know who you are at that point, right? Like so then you can’t just like, but my crap, you know like who is this? I always say like build that out, go out a ton of friends, go join a ton of groups and then go post and then go post crazy like start consistently posting on your own profile and on these groups if made tons of tons of times a day like to where your name comes to their mind every time that subject is brought up.                                     Like socially, if I was trying to sell my affiliate marketing course right that way I would post five posts a day about affiliate marketing, engaging posts on my Facebook page. I would post in these groups. I go respond to people’s questions in these groups. Right? I’d be like very, very active for I guess if you need to make money in 30 days, I’d be active for 15 days. Right? They’ll take 15 days to where people are like, oh, I know this guy. He’s like, but yeah right. He’s always talking and like posting himself. Um, and then you start doing these little offers, right, where you’re posting lead magnets and then, well, I would say if you need money now, client offers, right? Hey, I’m taking on five people, I’m going to build your funnel. I’m going to set up your ads, you know, something for 500 bucks.                                     And literally, anybody can do that. Like anybody, you can learn a skill in 15 days, that can be enough and you can build your audience in 15 days if you are desperate enough and willing to do that. So the fastest way to hack profits isn’t necessarily to go and create a massive system. It’s just to go and work like a dog and Facebook. If you need speed, yeah. I’d say hop on a Facebook work like a dog. There are so many people willing to hire on Facebook and looking right. And if you could spend 500 bucks, that’s nothing to a lot of these business owners. And while it may feel like a lot to you and, and honestly you just need to be a little ahead of them, right? Like go learn email marketing, go take a course on you to be any on marketing.                                     Go take a course on AdWords. 90% of people I talked to are totally clueless on AdWords, but every single one of them, their business could benefit from it. You could go take an AdWords course in three days and you know, AdWords and you can go grab five clients. 500 bucks a month is, is tiny to a lot of these businesses. So yeah, that’s how I do it. Ben:                          Nice. Thank you. I think you got a cool thing going. It’s like the funnel hacking thing. Like I don’t know how well it’s doing in terms of audience, butbut I think you’ve got a cool idea. Like I keep telling my like I don’t, because I don’t, honestly, I don’t watch any content ever and like I’m terrible at that. But I keep seeing you alive. Spencer:                I want to go in and watch like what this guy’s business looks like right from me and like get a good idea. But then I forget and I don’t, because I seriously don’t ever watch anybody’s content, which that’s all the conversation, but I think you’ve got a good thing I think should build up. I like the same strategy, right? Get 5,000 followers in the dozen friends and the click funnels group and then just start posting like, hey, we went inside this guy’s business today. You know, let me know if you want access and then do those stupid ladder posts and you’ll get, you’ll explode and then go do lives like in other people’s groups. And the funny thing is I’ve been reaching out for interviews because I did those lives for the other, for another business. I’m like, this is funnel hacks because I did those people like, you still doing that cause you do that, my group, like, could you give value to mine?                                     I’m like, yeah, I’ve thought I wasn’t gonna be able to even reach out to you. We’re desperate for, for anything. The youtube video that’s coming out. And so I talked about group owners are desperate, like it’s so hard to like keep pumping out value for these guys. And so interviews as the easiest way. So I would do that. And then all you really need is some is a small lead magnet, right? Like start building your audience. Um, and then, and then for you, like you can just publish your content. You don’t even need an automation in the beginning. You can just can’t email out the content that you’re creating. So yeah, I would say make, make a crick, make a lead man. You probably have like 40 lead magnets. Ben:                          Just start capturing. Yes sir. I will go live in groups and start posting on your own Facebook. Maybe you do a lot. I don’t really know. I can do a lot more. Yeah, I, I’m pretty bad honestly. Like I think my Facebook group is awesome, but I like just hate Facebook. So what I did, and this might take too long now at this point, I’ve created a list of, in my Facebook friends, I have a list of all of the entrepreneurial ones, like my original like 500 friends that I actually care about that are like living around here. And then that’s on a list called entrepreneurs. And when I post, I exclude regular friends and just do my entrepreneurs do, can you do a youtube video about that and pump Thompson up on, on Youtube? Yes. Like that is, that is attractive because everybody’s afraid of being businessy on their, on their Facebook page. Ben:                          And I was talking to Josh 40 and he was like, yeah, you need to delete everybody who is in not your family and friends. And I’m like, that’s painful. But he said, go meet everybody that’s not your family and friends that are your family and friends and dope devoted business. Yeah. I hate when people recommend. Yeah. That drives me nuts. And so I, because like, I’ll even like, I’m ready to do it, but at the time I’m like, I feel like I’m tearing off the bandaid. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don’t know, to me like to me that takes an approach of like, the only thing I care about on planet earth is making money and building my business. And if you’re a friend of mine, I don’t care. I’m deleting, you know, like I want my face or pages just to make money. I got to know that’s what it says to me. Ben:                          So that’s what I did. And it works. It works pretty well. Um, cause yeah, I hate, I, well it would work pretty well if I posted a lot. I never post, but oh, back when I did post, that’s how I did it. I did that a lot in the beginning. Like when I was selling my course, I posted in Facebook groups, you know, I posted screenshots and uh, and I’m just so glad that doesn’t happen anymore. But everyone kind of does that and beginning all right. That’s why I’m getting people all the time. So you’re a crypto guy. Ben:                          So, um, we’re going to ask two more questions. And this is all post the interview. So what we’re gonna do is we’re going to shut this down here. If you want to go in and see these next two questions, but I need you to do is go to hack that funnel, radio.com when you sign up, you’re automatically going to get my master’s pack that teaches you how to hack, but we’re also throwing in the last few questions of every interview, so go ahead and go and often there, I’ll get you these two questions from Spencer. I want to thank you for being on and if you have not done it yet, go sign up. I’m going to go make these answers. So juicy. Good, so sign up. Spencer Mecham:            Nothing. Was that cool or was that cool? Guys, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, but I actually do something very, very special. After the interview is done, I actually record two more questions. Those two questions spark a whole new conversation and I record those and I’m happy to give you access to that. All you have to do is go to hack that funnel, radio.com when you enter your email address there. I will automatically give you access to every single interviews, two extra questions in the conversation that sparks off of that. Go to hack that funnel. radio.com Ben:                          yeah, your access now.

#Hijackals--those relentlessly difficult toxic people--want to define your reality for you. Right? They try to tell you what you think, what you feel, or what you remember or want. Crazy-making! Telling you who you are and what you think and feel is #gaslighting. Sure, you have friends that you might ask, or be discussing these things with because you value their opinion. Whole different story!Hijackals tell you because they want to define your reality, so that they can have power and control over you. Once they wear and tear you down, you may begin to believe them. STOP! They are doing it for all the wrong reasons. Don't let them.In today's episode, I help you hear phrases differently. You might not have realized this is happening to you because #Hijackals are sneaky, underhanded, and undermining you. They want to take away your self-confidence. They want to make you dependent on them. Nasty!I share with you how--and why that 'how' is important--to change your response, and what to say. It can make a huge difference to regaining your self-esteem, and bolstering your self-confidence. Exactly what the Hijackal doesn't want to happen, but exactly what you need to happen!--------------------------------------------------------------------If you want to learn more, share, ask questions, and feel more powerful within yourself and your relationships. Join my Optimize Circles now.Off social media, safe discussion + videos + articles + webinars + personal home study program + group Ask Me Anything Calls with me.WOW! Join now. OptimizeCircles.com Only $5 for the first month at any level.----------------------------------------------------------------------HIGHLIGHTS OF TODAY'S EPISODE:Recognizing gaslightingWhy it is emotional abuseHow gaslighting may sound in your relationshipWhy adults accept gaslighting and what needs to changeHow to respond to gaslighting in the momentAND...here's the link to my video, Healthy Responses to Gaslighting, You'll find that in many other episodes of this podcast, and on my YouTube channel, too.Listen to today's episode, and, if by chance, you're still wondering if you have had a #Hijackal in your life, grab myFREE EBOOK, How to Spot a Hijackal® at Hijackals.com . You need to know what's up now, so you don't make mistakes that will hurt you. Grab it!If you need help with any part of the journey with--and from--a #Hijackal, I'm here for you. Let's talk soon. I make it easy and accessible for you to have your first one-hour session with me for only $97.Make positive changes NOW.Big hugs,RhobertaRhoberta Shaler, PhD,The Relationship Help DoctorTransformingRelationship.com or ForRelationshipHelp.comP.S. Subscribe to my newsletter, Tips for Relationships, HERE.WANT THE PRIVACY AND SAFETY OF MY SUPPORT & GROWTH GROUPS AWAY FROM FACEBOOK?You can have that, and:access to my Optimize Circlesmy 21 Steps to Empowered Emotional Savvy programmonthly "Ask Me Anything" calls, sometimes twoat least monthly insightful videos and access to the libraryYou can get most of this right now for the price of one latte a month! This offer is going away soon, and the prices will double. Join now!OptimizeCircles.comCONNECT WITH DR. RHOBERTA SHALER:Website: TransformingRelationship.comPodcasts: RelationshipHelpNetwork.comFacebook: RelationshipHelpDoctorTwitter: Twitter.com/RhobertaShalerLinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/RhobertaShalerInstagram: Instagram.com/DrRhobertaShalerPinterest: Pinterest.com/TheRelationshipHelpDoctorYouTube: YouTube.com/ForRelationshipHelpYou can also listen to the last 32 episodes of Save Your Sanity on Mental Health News Radio Network. That's a great place to get in-depth insights for shoring up mental and emotional health of all kinds.#Gaslighting #Hijackals #verbalabuse #passive-aggressive #toxicpeople #emotionalabuse #RhobertaShaler #narcissists #borderlines #antisocial #difficultpeople #toxicrelationships #manipulativepeople #walkingoneggshells #mentalhealth #emotionalhealth #abuse #narcissisticabuse #boundaries #personalitydisorders #MHNRNetwork #recognizenarcissism #seeingthecycles #emotionalabuse See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. 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The topic today is eroticism, which is our unique fingerprint of what turns us on. It’s a set of things or the theme of things that really arouses us – that we find highly interesting and erotic. We all have the things that we prefer in sex and things that we find more arousing than others. This is a useful concept and area of inquiry if we’re going to make our sex life as good as we can. Frees Us from Guilt and Shame I find eroticism fascinating. And one of the theories that I subscribe to was developed by Michael Bader, who wrote a great book called Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies. He talks about how our eroticism, what we find especially arousing, frees us from guilt and shame. It moves those obstacles out of the way so that we can be fully aroused. I give a great example of what Mr. Bader means, and if you are interested in learning more, I highly recommend the book in terms of trying to figure out why exactly does your eroticism exist? What does it absolve you of or relieve for you? Why is Eroticism Important? In some ways, you may have been going along having sex with your partner for a long time. It hasn’t been highly erotic, and it’s been just fine, and that’s part of the problem. We tend, over time, to come down to what a colleague of mine called “lowest common denominator sex.” How do we get to this point and what do we do to move beyond this level? It’s important to understand that maybe there’s room to explore what could reenergize your sex life. We Need More Fuel for the Fire Not only is our sex life becoming a little bit more predictable if we’re with the same partner usually, but we tend to need more fuel on the fire to get aroused or to reach an orgasm as we age, as we have more stress, as we have more responsibilities. So, tapping into our eroticism is a great way to up the stimulation because that is mental stimulation. If you’ve ever heard the saying that our brain is our biggest sex organ, that’s what that means to me. I explain it further during the episode. Mental stimulation has a lot of power. And if we add that, we get our brain engaged and highly charged, and that’s a lot of energy for our sex life. That added stimulation makes it much, much easier to get aroused or reach orgasm, especially as we get older in terms of what we need to really get turned on. Your Eroticism is Revealed in Different Ways If you think about the best sex you’ve ever had or the sex that was the most exciting or what you like to do, that might point you in the direction of what you find highly arousing. A place you could also look is in your reaction to sexual or romantic material. There is so much out there, and we don’t respond equally to all of it. We’re going to be drawn towards things that shine a light on what we find erotic. Watch for those things. And if you haven’t noticed that or you’re not coming across it, maybe seek out some erotic material on purpose and test the waters. Another place you can look for your eroticism is in your sexual fantasies. If you fantasize, or if you could begin to fantasize about purely erotic material, your own creations really reflect your eroticism. This works because we don’t put stuff in there that doesn’t work for us. If you want to examine your sexual fantasies, spend a little bit of time there, maybe write some of these out. That can be a great place to identify the themes of what turns you on. Once You Understand Your Eroticism The next step is to share that with your partner. To learn theirs and to share yours with them. I can’t stress this enough – adopt a stance of curiosity without judgment. Set the stage to have a welcoming conversation and start to explore what really turns you each on without any sense that you must do anything about this yet, or that it means that anything is good or bad. Once you have the sort of common ground and this curiosity, you might share your own fantasies and just delving deeper into what really turns you on. Find the Overlap You come out of this process with a real knowledge of yourself and your partner, and I think you’re going to begin to see the overlap. There’s room to put these together. Now it doesn’t mean that what you find erotic, that what you fantasize about, that you want to do it. I describe different ways you can use erotic energy even if you don’t want to do the things in real life. You’re working with another person whose desires and wishes, and their eroticism also matters. And looking for where you can get overlap and you can play together, and you can harness what is wonderful. Figure Out What Eroticism is for You I can’t stress enough how powerful I think this is and how useful I think it can be in your sex life. And again, not every time you have sex. But it’s nice to have some of this to draw on and to have a little bit of variance in how arousing sex is… like there are places to pull it out and make it hotter. And then there are other times where we just sort of want a simple, moderately warm encounter. Right? They’re all okay, but this gives you some flexibility. I hope you enjoy that and thanks again for listening. More info:Book and New Course – https://sexwithoutstress.comWeb – https://www.bettersexpodcast.com/Sex Health Quiz – http://sexhealthquiz.com/If you’re enjoying the podcast and want to be a part of making sure it continues in the future, consider being a patron. With a small monthly pledge, you can support the costs of putting this show together. For as little as $2 per month, you can get advance access to each episode. For just a bit more, you will receive an advance copy of a chapter of my new book. And for $10 per month, you get all that plus an invitation to an online Q&A chat with me once a quarter. Learn more at https://www.patreon.com/bettersexpodcastBetter Sex with Jessa Zimmermanhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/better-sex/

The topic today is eroticism, which is our unique fingerprint of what turns us on. It’s a set of things or the theme of things that really arouses us – that we find highly interesting and erotic. We all have the things that we prefer in sex and things that we find more arousing than others. This is a useful concept and area of inquiry if we’re going to make our sex life as good as we can. Frees Us from Guilt and Shame I find eroticism fascinating. And one of the theories that I subscribe to was developed by Michael Bader, who wrote a great book called Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies. He talks about how our eroticism, what we find especially arousing, frees us from guilt and shame. It moves those obstacles out of the way so that we can be fully aroused. I give a great example of what Mr. Bader means, and if you are interested in learning more, I highly recommend the book in terms of trying to figure out why exactly does your eroticism exist? What does it absolve you of or relieve for you? Why is Eroticism Important? In some ways, you may have been going along having sex with your partner for a long time. It hasn’t been highly erotic, and it’s been just fine, and that’s part of the problem. We tend, over time, to come down to what a colleague of mine called “lowest common denominator sex.” How do we get to this point and what do we do to move beyond this level? It’s important to understand that maybe there’s room to explore what could reenergize your sex life. We Need More Fuel for the Fire Not only is our sex life becoming a little bit more predictable if we’re with the same partner usually, but we tend to need more fuel on the fire to get aroused or to reach an orgasm as we age, as we have more stress, as we have more responsibilities. So, tapping into our eroticism is a great way to up the stimulation because that is mental stimulation. If you’ve ever heard the saying that our brain is our biggest sex organ, that’s what that means to me. I explain it further during the episode. Mental stimulation has a lot of power. And if we add that, we get our brain engaged and highly charged, and that’s a lot of energy for our sex life. That added stimulation makes it much, much easier to get aroused or reach orgasm, especially as we get older in terms of what we need to really get turned on. Your Eroticism is Revealed in Different Ways If you think about the best sex you’ve ever had or the sex that was the most exciting or what you like to do, that might point you in the direction of what you find highly arousing. A place you could also look is in your reaction to sexual or romantic material. There is so much out there, and we don’t respond equally to all of it. We’re going to be drawn towards things that shine a light on what we find erotic. Watch for those things. And if you haven’t noticed that or you’re not coming across it, maybe seek out some erotic material on purpose and test the waters. Another place you can look for your eroticism is in your sexual fantasies. If you fantasize, or if you could begin to fantasize about purely erotic material, your own creations really reflect your eroticism. This works because we don’t put stuff in there that doesn’t work for us. If you want to examine your sexual fantasies, spend a little bit of time there, maybe write some of these out. That can be a great place to identify the themes of what turns you on. Once You Understand Your Eroticism The next step is to share that with your partner. To learn theirs and to share yours with them. I can’t stress this enough – adopt a stance of curiosity without judgment. Set the stage to have a welcoming conversation and start to explore what really turns you each on without any sense that you must do anything about this yet, or that it means that anything is good or bad. Once you have the sort of common ground and this curiosity, you might share your own fantasies and just delving deeper into what really turns you on. Find the Overlap You come out of this process with a real knowledge of yourself and your partner, and I think you’re going to begin to see the overlap. There’s room to put these together. Now it doesn’t mean that what you find erotic, that what you fantasize about, that you want to do it. I describe different ways you can use erotic energy even if you don’t want to do the things in real life. You’re working with another person whose desires and wishes, and their eroticism also matters. And looking for where you can get overlap and you can play together, and you can harness what is wonderful. Figure Out What Eroticism is for You I can’t stress enough how powerful I think this is and how useful I think it can be in your sex life. And again, not every time you have sex. But it’s nice to have some of this to draw on and to have a little bit of variance in how arousing sex is… like there are places to pull it out and make it hotter. And then there are other times where we just sort of want a simple, moderately warm encounter. Right? They’re all okay, but this gives you some flexibility. I hope you enjoy that and thanks again for listening. More info:Book and New Course – https://sexwithoutstress.comWeb – https://www.bettersexpodcast.com/Sex Health Quiz – http://sexhealthquiz.com/If you’re enjoying the podcast and want to be a part of making sure it continues in the future, consider being a patron. With a small monthly pledge, you can support the costs of putting this show together. For as little as $2 per month, you can get advance access to each episode. For just a bit more, you will receive an advance copy of a chapter of my new book. And for $10 per month, you get all that plus an invitation to an online Q&A chat with me once a quarter. Learn more at https://www.patreon.com/bettersexpodcastBetter Sex with Jessa Zimmermanhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/better-sex/

I am on a soapbox today about the politics of climate, so listen in. My take on how the government stifles technology innovation for most of us and why. More on climate coming out of NASA concerning solar cycles and how they point at a coming Ice Age.  Did you hear about this? Listen in Do you use Cash, me too. But I am going to address the dangers of a cashless society.   I am planning a Security Summer for my listeners.  I will have some free courses.  I will also introduce you to some of the software that I use for my clients and how you can use it too.  Also, I have some limited opportunities for businesses who have had enough with their security issues to work with me and my team and put their security problems to rest once and for all.   So watch out for announcements on those. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Transcript:  Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors. Airing date: 07/20/2019 The Politics of Climate Change, Government and why it Stifles Technology, NASA and the Coming Ice Age, the Dangers of a Cashless Society    ---- Hello, everybody. You know, I'm getting fed up with some of this. I don't know about you, but it's just driving me crazy. If you got my newsletter, this morning, you know. Hopefully, you got my email this morning. And I know now I'm trying to send it out when it's most convenient for you to so some people might not get it until Monday. It all depends on when you are typically opening and responding to my emails or send an automated message to me. You know its this whole machine learning which is the first step towards AI, artificial intelligence. That's what we're using now. The entire idea is to make this more convenient for everybody. Okay, this has me so frustrated, politics, right? We've got the left with the whole green thing, right. It's just part of their drive toward socialism in an attempt to take over everything and increase their power and authority. After all you and me, we are only regular people, we all care about the environment. I've never met anyone nor even heard of anyone who wants to destroy the environment. We all want to be comfortable. We all want to pass on a world that's better than the world we inherited to our children. There's not a soul that doesn't. I don't know anybody that is in that boat. The left, the socialists, have glommed on to this whole "green agenda thing." If you ask me it's an attempt to take over control of part of the government. It's all part of the power and control. It's like Hillary Clinton, the smartest woman who ever lived and who knew more than any of us. They're better than us, and they should have control of everything. Wouldn't you agree? I'm sure there's some listening now that don't agree with me. Right. We have a lot of great people who are left-wingers because they've got great heart, right. However, we've got to look at the real motivations behind what's happening. Why are businesses doing what they're doing? We talked about that all the time, right, about the overreach of companies and data mining. They are using it for marketing. Then the bad guys come in and take it much further. So I'm, I'm critical of big business. I'm critical of the Trump administration, and I've been critical of every administration when they did things that I thought were not in the best interest of the people. I don't want you to think I'm some right-wing wacko, because I'm not. I'm somewhat libertarian, and I'm in the middle, frankly, of everybody that's out there if anybody was in the middle of the libertarians, because we agree with some things democrats do and some things republicans do. But ultimately, I don't trust big anything. When you're talking about big government, big business or anything big you're talking about a real distortion of motivations. Big church, there's a distortion of motives, look at what's happened with the Catholic Church. And I'm not picking on them, right. It's every church out there every organized religion, look at what's happened with you name it, Eastern religions, Western religions, they take on a life of their own. The same things are true with businesses, and big business is the same thing. It is true with government. They are the worst, right? They have the guns, the money and the lawyers behind them. Ultimately, they're the ones that put a gun to your head and say, you will do this because if you don't, you go to jail. Right now they're not doing the horrific things to us, you know, solitary confinement is pretty darn horrible. But you know, they're not torturing us here in the Western world, physically torturing us trying to break us down mentally, the way they still do, and some of these Middle East countries out there. But what frustrates me is when we're talking about politics, entering the realm of something that should be common sense and science. And that's what this whole so-called green thing is. That's what the socialists have been doing. They couldn't get their way with the way they were doing things before. So now it's all about the green. I'm going to talk about green PACs. I think that's, somewhat ironic, right? I'm talking about their so-called Green agenda, where their friends who are making electric cars are going to be the winners, their friends that are making solar panels are going to be the winners, their friends, who are making these windmills to generate electricity are going to be the winners. They're not going to allow the free market to decide who's the winner. What's the best technology out there? Hydrogen fuel cells the best? Is internal combustion the best? What's the best alternative? Synthetic fuels? What's the best? We will never know because the government has stepped in before the market could decide? Look at the corn look at the ethanol that they're putting into our gasoline. It is easily provable. How harmful it has been to our environment. But who, who makes the ethanol? Where does it come from, the corn growers in Iowa. A State that the politicians who are running for President for political office need to impress. A State they want to win over on to their side. So yeah, look at all the ethanol, look at how we've helped with the farmers in Iowa. Now, we've got all this ethanol, and we're burning our food. We've got subsidies. You remember Solyndra look at Elon Musk with what's been happening with his cars. Tesla has received it's estimated around $3 billion worth of government money. Is that a crazy amount? You look at this worldwide, my I have a daughter living in Norway, and she's helping to design the next generation of ships. In Norway, if you buy a Tesla, you get a 25% savings. The government is financing 25% of the purchase price. Yeah, it's something to we will look forward to, Right. So they are getting subsidies in Norway through here, where we're giving them hard-earned money, you and me the taxpayers. It is us who are busting our butts supporting these people out in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, that are getting government subsidies, taxpayer money, look at what just happened with Amazon. Amazon is looking for another area for a corporate headquarters. We have all these states and cities saying, hey, we'll give you tax breaks. Well, that's another form of a subsidy. Think about all the things that the government supports through subsidies like Solyndra, battery technologies, solar panel companies, and installers, the windmills. None of them have to compete on an even footing with the rest of the technologies out there. How many just phenomenal, world-changing technologies got buried because they couldn't get off the ground? How can you compete with someone that has $3 billion, effectively in subsidies when you're trying to get a business off the ground? You can't. It drives me nuts when this happens. Now we hear about all about global warming? Well if you are as old as I am you remember, in the 70s. On the cover of Time magazine said we're in for another Ice Age so, the environmental scientists came up with a plan to pour black soil on the polar ice caps to absorb more solar heat preventing a mini ice age. Of course, that didn't materialize. Then it was, well, how can we use and see people, everybody cares about the environment. So let's do this, let's call this green because everybody wants to save the environment. No one doesn't want to have a great atmosphere, right, which is not what I was saying earlier. So we'll use that to gain more control over people will be able to tell people what to do, and how to do it, because they're too stupid to be able to do this themselves. And there's you'll find tons of information about that online. You know, slips of the tongue, things that people the Obama administration said, things that happened with these researchers, where their emails were exposed, where they were fabricating the so-called science of global warming. That one failed on them, right. Now its global climate change. We've to do something about climate change. Now. I agree. I do. We'll you might think, Wow, Craig, wait a minute. Where are these ideas coming from? Here's what I agree with, we should be looking at this, we should be concerned about this, but don't knee jerk. We don't have enough data and the data that we have is badly tainted, as has been proven by these emails and notes from the researchers that are researching it, severely corrupted. Now, we've got the media that refuses to report anything contrary to the socialists talking points. (Socialists being those to the left to of the Democrat Party). Or anything that isn't in line with their education in school. If you want to see some craziness, have a look at some of the campus reforms videos out there. Reporters go out, and they give a quote to the students, and the students read the quote and say, well, that's because Trump's a misogynist, a racist, etc. Then the reporter shows them a little video of who the quote was from and then all of a sudden, they just, it was, wow, I didn't think that was the case. Right? They're not researching. They're not thinking they're stuck in a paper bag known as gaslighting. A study came out last month that I bet you have not heard of This is a study from NASA. I bet you won't hear about this anywhere else, frankly. I'm looking right now at NASA's website, science dot NASA dot gov. There is an article from them. It is being reported, but not in the general news circles that the solar minimum is coming. NASA is predicting that the Dalton minimum levels of the sun's radiation. Now, for some reason, I heard somewhere that the sun might have an impact on the temperature on the Earth. Right? I know It sounds stupid to say that, but today many people are convinced that man is the cause of the temperature increases. Sorry to pop your bubble, but Earth temperatures fluctuate. And, they have for thousands upon thousands of years. Earth has had higher carbon dioxide levels in its atmosphere, and it has had higher temperatures than we have now. Think about this. If it were hotter, and we had higher carbon dioxide levels, we would have more food, and there would be denser vegetation. Everything would be healthier. A month ago, June 18, this article came out, here's what's happening. The Earth is an approaching grand solar minimum. As I mentioned, NASA is predicting this right now. And this came from a researcher with the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center. These researchers have come up with a new way of looking at sunspots using direct observations of the magnetic fields that are emerging on the surface of the sun. That data has only existed for the last four solar cycles (44 years). They used three different sources of sun observations. They looked at these cosmic cycles, which are about 11 years long. There are longer cycles, as well, which our green movement friends seem to forget conveniently. These researchers used these to forecast the strength and timing of maximum solar cycles. It was determined using data from 2000 and again in 2008 to predict the solar cycle coming to an end this year. The next solar cycle is going to start in 2020. Guess what? She was dead-on. So, now, here's what is worrying because this is pure scientific research, not the crap that they keep feeding you on the news, it is the stuff that you're not hearing about even though it's been out for more than a month. It is a reality. And the truth is forecasting a return to what's called the dalton minimum which occurred from 1792-1830. Now NASA is not predicting and not even telling you what happened during the Dalton minimum event. Here's what happened. Brutal cold, crop loss, famine, war, and powerful volcanic eruptions. Because you remember the sun's magnetic field, which is what part of what she measures one of these three measurements affects us here on Earth. Just look at the northern lights to get an idea but yeah, maybe there is an effect from the solar emissions that are hitting the Earth. So Germany had an what was called the overclock station, and it experienced to two centigrade two degrees centigrade. So give or take five degrees decline over 20 years, devastated Germany's food production. Then in the US even we had a year without summer 1816, and it was caused by this, again, solar minimum, combined with the after-effects of the second-largest volcanic eruption in a thousand years. Mount Tambora was on April 10, 1815. So we had some battles going on during this time, the Napoleonic Wars and the Battle of Waterloo. That occurred June 18, 1815, when the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon. Sixty-five thousand men died at that battle. Wow. They were preoccupied with this. There wasn't a whole lot of coverage about the entire Dalton Minimum that was happening at the time. So let's go to some records and back then. In June, this from a resident of Virginia, another snowfall came, and folks went slain. On the Fourth of July water froze in cisterns and snow fell again. With Independence Day celebrations moving inside churches where hearth fires warm things a might. Clothes froze on the clothesline in New England. Northwestern Pennsylvania reported ice in ponds and on lakes in both July and August. Virginia had frost in August. The price of oats from 1815 to 1816 increased almost eightfold. Here are some other stories from around the world. The potato crop in Ireland rotted in the ground resulting in widespread starvation. In England, France, and Germany, wheat crops failed, leading to bread shortages, food riots, and looting. Northern China got walloped with thousands of people starving to death. Southern Asia experienced torrential rains that triggered a cholera epidemic that killed many more. The year 1816 earned a nickname. It was called "800 and froze to death." We've got the politicians out there arguing about whether or not we should have ethanol in our gasoline, whether or not we should be giving another subsidy to Tesla. We are staring at what NASA is predicting, in this next solar cycle, or the one immediately after, as summer that will never come. Now we've heard about "Oh my gosh, temperatures have gone up a little over one degree Celsius." But that is in the last 50 years and those numbers, by the way, are very controversial. And there's ample evidence suggesting that they are not valid. Right now, We have an icebreaker that was that up in the northern waters of the Arctic Circle that was expecting to have full passage all the way through. Did you read about that? There is a new north passage except it is covered in ice and completely frozen now. However, we do not hear the truth all because of politics. There's a lot of yelling and screaming going on. There's a lot of first-world problems, where we're taking the blame for things that we have no control over. And yet the reality is not that it is not being addressed which frustrates me to no end. It frustrates me to no end. Look at this, wow, we're almost out of time. Hopefully, this was informative to you. You know, my friends on the left and I know you're listening, and my friends on the right, I know you are listening, too. We need to stop the political bickering. We have to solve the problems that are facing us right now. We have to get together. Congress needs to work with our President, not stonewall and yell and scream against everything the President suggests. There are some things legitimately the federal government can do, which in my estimation is to downsize itself. We have some serious problems out there we don't even have time to talk about today. Now, if you don't get my weekly newsletter, you got to get it because I never have time to get to everything here on the radio. Go to Craig Peterson dot com. There is a little subscribe box at the top, I'm asking for your name and email. I am not an internet marketer that's nailing you all of the time. Okay, I do have offers, like my security summer summit coming up in a couple of weeks. It's free, it's going to be probably a four-week course at this point, as time slides, and it's gone from six weeks down to about four weeks. In it, there will be multiple sessions every week, and I'm going to try and keep them short. It's on the brass tacks of security, what can you do to meet the Mainstream Security Standard. We will cover what do you need to do for your home or your business. Make sure you sign up for that. You'll also get the newsletter every week when we get them out. I think we got this down now. So you'll be getting the newsletter every week that has all of these articles and more so that you can stay up to date on the most important things out there — the most critical security and tech news. That's where I focus because that's what I do for my clients. A shout out by the way to Rich and Sue, who are new clients this week we're helping them with all of their security. If you have security requirements, make sure you let me know because we can help you out with that too. Whether it's DFARS, HIPAA, or PCI or you want to keep your data safe, so you can sleep at night. Again, Let me know. You can email me with your questions, and you can text me, it's just: me at Craig Peterson dot com, I always answer them, you might have to wait a few days or a week. But I will get back to you. I still do a little research if I need to. So that can sometimes take a bit longer and send you the information that you need to answer your questions. You can text me at any time. And that's simple as opening your phone if you got a question or comment or you want to make sure you get into our security summer, text me. It's simple. It's 855-385-5553, standard data and text rates apply. I'll answer a lot of these questions on the air because if you have it at least 100 other people who are listening, that have the same question. So I will, frequently, talk about it right here. That's where I get a lot of these articles from, from you guys. So you can text me your question anytime. 855-385-5553 and I can help you out. We can do a cyber health assessment for you, you know this, I do so many things for free. And I do that because I care. You see, I got hacked, and it was a lot of a long time ago. A long time ago. I think it was in 1991 that I first my company got a worm. I was trying to build my company. We were building websites were hosting email for people, and it was terrible. We got the Morris worm. If you've been on my one of my webinars, you know a little bit about what happened. I don't want that to happen to you, right. Text me or email me at Craig Peterson the meantime. A couple more articles real quick, and you'll find those in your newsletter this week. Hong Kong protests here are showing us the dangers of this cashless society and showing us that, frankly, a cashless society is a surveillance society. In Hong Kong, they have something called an octopus card, and they use it to pay for everything from the subways transit to retail parking purchases. In China, they have something very similar. It's part of a social media and messaging service called WeChat. It allows for payments. It is easy and effective. In China, you have to use it. In Hong Kong, you don't, but the transactions linked to your identity. Communist Party officials, here known as the international socialists, are using it to track people and zealots. That way they can tell you were in the area of a demonstration when it occurred, and you get tagged. Remember, in China when that happens, you are not allowed onto public transportation, you get barred from using it. Let's keep cash going. Pay with paper money when you can. I think that's important. We don't want to switch to a cashless society. There was a great study out of Montreal, about teams and social media. Again, you'll see links to these in your newsletter. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe because we do not have time to go through all of these but a big surprise, at least to me, in this study that I think you want to hear. I love this quote too from one of the researchers talking about depression with these teenagers social media, and a big surprise about video games. I would almost compare it to smoking in the 1970s where the very adverse effects are still relatively unknown. But they did draw some interesting conclusions. There is a bill in Congress right now. Great article from Reuters that I posted about big tech companies from offering financial services. It's called the Keep Big Tech out of Finance Act. President Trump commented on it. He's demanding that companies that want to get into this cyber currency business, seek a banking charter, and I agree with him on this one. But this whole Facebook thing that's going to be coming out here probably next year is called the Libra. It's a little scary if you ask me. A Florida DMV is selling driver's license information, your personal information to bill collectors and data brokers in Florida. They have made more than $77 million on selling your personal information if you can believe that. That's what I don't like about this whole REAL ID thing is that the State is now required by federal under federal law to comply with Real ID. Thank you, Democrats (tongue firmly planted in cheek) who voted for it in here the State when they took over New Hampshire. I don't want the government having that information because I don't want them to resell it. I'm going to do a special master class around this article from Fast Company. It is about how the hackers are using social media to break into your company and how they're doing it step by step. Keep an eye out for this as well. Take care, everybody. We will be back on Monday. I'm on with Jack Heath during drive time. Check it all out at Craig Peterson dot com. Have a great weekend, everybody. Bye-bye. Oh, and keep cool, if you can. ---  Related articles: The Fertile Garden of Social Media is ripe for attracting Cybercriminals to your Business How DMVs Make Millions – Selling Your License Information Big Tech Banks, U.S. says Not So Fast When Governments Demonetize by Force How Cold? Researchers Predict Large Decrease in Sunspot Activity Increases in Teen Depression — Check their Social Media   ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Oliver is a master at creating systems for business owners.  In this interview, you'll hear how he uses "blank slates" to help businesses automate and systemize just about everything under the sun.  His strategies have been proven to massively grow small and medium-sized businesses. ----- Automated Transcript Below: Unknown Speaker 0:01 It's time for the freedom in five minutes podcast. Powerful and liberating business strategies, you can start in five minutes or less. Now, here's your host, Dean Soto. Dean Soto 0:18 Hey, what is up? It is Dean Soto with freedom in five minutes.com. And we're here again with another freedom in five minutes episode. Today's topic is this you can systemized virtually anything. If you have the right person doing it, that and more coming up. Okay, so I am a here yet again. And I get to have the distinct pleasure, the honor, the privilege of talking with one of my close friends, Mr. Oliver Kelso who has been on this podcast once before he was actually here. But I want this podcast to be specifically about some of the cool stuff that he's been doing. Because last time we were talking about my beautiful nature at my house. So all of our Kelso with grow smart. And I'd love to have you introduce yourself my friend. Oliver Kelso 1:27 Hey, everybody. Hey, man, nice to Nice to be here again. Dean Soto 1:32 Oh, man, that was that it is nice to have you yet again. Over here, you're going to hear some of my kids screaming in the background, you know, every single one of them. Since you were there, you're used to it. But But yeah, so. So last time we were here we were talking about you know, we were we were just chatting about the nature and chart and talking about a couple other things while you were here. But I really wanted to get you on this podcast again, predominantly, because you have a really, really cool business. And one where we've worked together quite a bit. We still do in some ways we have connections and so on. But you've been doing some really cool stuff in the financial services industry and other industries, like real estate and so on. So I wanted people just get to know what is grow smart, grow smart? And what are the results that you get for the people that you work with? Oliver Kelso 2:30 Absolutely. So growth spark is a it's designed to be a outsourced operations company, really, operations consulting company. So we we come in, and we help people solve operational problems. And the cornerstone of that, of course, is the the the driving force behind freedom in five minutes. It's the you know, the VA service that you built from the ground up, that really is the cornerstone of the whole idea. And the reason that's the cornerstone is because that is the probably the single most effective scaling tool I've ever seen at a company. Like hands down, you can have solid software is great. There's a lot you can do with software. That's true, that's fine. But integrating, like a thinking human, that's affordable. That's often better and more detail oriented than the actual employees of the company is unbelievable. So that's, that's why I do what I do, because I love helping companies build and grow. And the only way I know how to do that now really effectively, is with a combination of good software integration, or good software combined and integrated with virtual assistants. Love it. Dean Soto 3:51 Love it. Yeah. Yeah, you're though you're one of the the first people who really adopted the whole virtual systems aren't tact type people, these these special VA is that that will help you to create the systems. And I still remember being in your house while you were creating those videos, and just seeing massive result right away. You're like, Okay, I got this. I'm doing this. And then just seeing all the systems documentation and stuff being made. It was awesome. So like, how did so how did you? Because even when we met you had a varied systems, and technology driven, and systems in the sense of business systems like processes and so on driven mindset. How did you even how did you connect what you were doing at the time to what you're doing now with grow smart? Like, how did you even Oliver Kelso 4:43 grow at the time? Actually, world systems weren't new. I like you said, I love systems. I like efficiency. I like things to work, right? You can ask my wife. The I didn't even know about bird I know about virtual assistants, I tried to actually hire one. And it was a disaster. It's actually exactly what you told me I could expect when I tried to do it on my own. And so I the shift in mindset really was the idea that I don't have to be the sole firefighter, the sole, you know, producer, the one that holds it all together, right? Because anybody that's done operations knows that you integrate the software, you build these things, you have ADD, you're the administrator and everything. And then anything goes wrong, it's up to you to fix it. Yeah, anything needs to be developed, it's up to you to build it. And everything in the process is up to you. Yep. And then what ends up happening for one of that happening for me is I was wanting to run the process the whole time. And that's where it failed. And so the shift for me was integrating that very first VA, when we sat in my living room, which you mentioned, opened my eyes to the freedom, literally freedom, and it actually felt like freedom. So that's why your name is great. me freedom, I felt one of the first time I told my VA like, hey, go, here's a list of tasks you're going to do every day prior to, you know, client meetings, you're going to do these 15 things, you're going to set this up that up, you're handling appointment bookings, all this other stuff, the free of myself, the moment that was implemented was unbelievable. So in the grow smart model, what we're what I'm doing is, for example, the financial services company, right now we're we're actually scaling up a new financial services company, it's a disruptor in the marketplace, super cool what they're doing, I won't get into it in detail now. But the foundation of how the company operates is the virtual assistant architect, virtual assistant model, I love your term virtual assistant architect, because that's really what you become, as the, you know, operations manager, or CEO, or whatever you want to call it. And, you know, in that model, the VCs are now running increasingly complex tasks. So it started with simple things in take forums come in, they can process them, they can move people to the right place, setting up server folders, you know, adding them to software, etc. I mean, to the point that now they're actually reading through client statements, figuring out where where money should be allocated, and why based off of, you know, rule sets that we've developed. So they live, it is like hiring a blank slate, you can teach them to do literally anything, because they are all super smart. They have their own strengths. Like you know, some are really good at data processing, some are really good at talking to people just like any other person, but they are way more of a blank slate than any current employee that I work with at any company. That's cool. Dean Soto 7:42 That's see and that's one thing. That's one thing about you, is that you got that right away with with, with systems in general, is you having that blank slate, which is a lot of people want, well, I need someone with this skill set, I need someone with that skill set, I need that, you know, and you just right away to jumped into, I'm just good at show them how to do something, get it documented and go? And do you still have that kind of mentality? You just you figure out the system? Because you have to actually architect the system? Do you? Do you do you right now just think of the thing of architect in the system? Show them how it's done. They documented and then you go in don't even care about Yeah, capabilities? Like as far as Oliver Kelso 8:26 Oh, yeah, absolutely. And actually, the the overriding decision in the process, when when building out a system now is okay. How do you have someone else do this whole thing. I mean, literally, because when I look at the employees and what they're doing in the office, the most important thing for them to actually do is the hands on stuff, it's the run down the hall and deal with a, you know, an issue or it's the oversee things from a very, very high level perspective, because they can sit in the office with, you know, a strategist who's who's very, very experienced, right in the financial industry, and ask them questions in a way that, you know, somebody sitting thousands of miles away, can't do. Yeah. And so that's why that's the role shift actually, is something that happens a lot in the businesses is they, the employees all have to shift their roles, they stopped being the processors, they stopped being the firefighter, they stopped being the one that that runs, you know, runs everything on a granular level, and they actually have to move into a managerial position, in a sense, because they have to, they have to work with other people. Now, they have to tell people like you go do this. Right, that's, that's not your job. Very interesting. Dean Soto 9:44 Very interesting. I love that. That's, that's great. So you essentially, your your, what you do, is you go in, you make it to where these people who, who are, who are doing just kind of the day to day stuff, you're actually making it to where they can actually be become higher value. employees or have a higher event value, an actual higher value person in the company, kind of making them into a an executive or managerial position. Because right, no longer having to do that day to day type stuff. Like you figure that out. Oliver Kelso 10:19 Yeah. Perfectly stated, people start doing the job role that fits their salary, which is what you always want, you know, you want them you want the employees that are paid the most producing the most. And if they can't produce, because they're filling out paperwork, and all these other roadblocks that are important in a company, but, you know, until now, there was no real way to get them done efficiently. So you know, you hire kids, interns out of college, right? That was the that was the previous model. So I'm going to go back to an earlier point and say, this is a good one, we probably the one of the largest mindset shifts, or mindset, issues I run into, when even talking about this subject with people is like you identified, it's the idea that, number one, no one else can do what I'm doing. And the lack of blank, blank slate thinking. Nobody is trained on like, what do you do when employee comes in that is just pretty good at everything, and you don't, but they don't know anything. Right? They can do anything, but they don't know anything. And I'm an example, as I was working with a with a mortgage broker, and this guy, I'm an associate, yeah, mortgage broker, but he really runs a mortgage processing company. He said, his number one hand hold up, was processing the loan, you know, mortgage process, and right hiring a good processor. And the problem he was running into is he had a couple, he wants to scale up. But in scaling up mortgage processes are very expensive. Yeah, put on payroll, especially out here in Hawaii. Right? We're very, you know, it's very a pro, whatever we call crew, employee friendly. employee. Yeah. So his problem is he didn't have enough business to hire another full time person, you can't hire a part time person because there aren't any. So as I'm talking with him, I mentioned what the VA is can do. And he goes, Well, I'm not I don't want to have to train a VA to do mortgage crossing it's way to details. And I thought, okay, so after I asked him a few more questions, I said, Well, why can't your mortgage processors have the VA and teach them to do whatever they needed to do? So that frees up your time? And he went? Oh, that's a great idea. And it would show in that moment, I realized, Wow, it is a shift in thinking that that not everybody has or we don't want to talk that right? Correct? Correct. It's, it's, that's my other example. Dean Soto 12:47 Like in school, you're taught, you do your homework, you do everything you're you, it's always you, like, I whereas, whereas as an entrepreneur, it's if if, if you you in the business world, you want other people to do your work. So imagine, imagine paying people to write your essays. That's a big No, no. And in in college, I'm not saying that. I've never done that. But but in the business world, that's exactly what you do. Right? And so it definitely is a change, like a big change in thinking, and it's cool how you're like, well, if you don't want to do it, have your mortgage processors just show how to do it, and then they can they can actually create the system for it. You know, like, that's, that's great. Exactly. So So one thing I want to so I want to, I want to ask you this is that give me an example of something that you're super proud of that you that you went into a company, you saw what they were doing, you architected a system, and you saw some pretty amazing results. What what were the results with what you actually brought to the company? Oliver Kelso 14:06 I'm so sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. Give me one second. Dean Soto 14:19 No worries. No worries. This is Denise, you gotta tell him or was that a door to door salesman? Oliver Kelso 14:31 No, that was actually my mom. She needed something. Awesome. Yeah, Mama comes first. That's right. Um, Dean Soto 14:40 alright. So the questions just just in case. So basically, you were you went into a company, and you saw what they were doing? And you're like, dude, there's a way better way of doing this. And you even if it was just one, one thing that that you did for them that completely changed the game for them? What were the results? Oliver Kelso 15:05 Boy, I mean, there's a couple that's why I'm pausing here. Dean Soto 15:13 Whatever is coming to mind, we have more than enough time. Oliver Kelso 15:23 Sorry about that. My phone out. I think. Do you hear me? Yep. No, I apologize. So I would say the the number one that I'm extremely proud of, is probably the current company I'm working with. And the reason is, this is a company that previously I said it was a new financial industries company. It's not actually they've been around for 20 years. Yeah. This is the first time they're actually learning how to scale. Oh, yeah. So last year, they saw a total I believe, was 62 customers, new customers, that boutique firm, right? Every client talk to a person for many hours, you what they need very small business model. Yeah. They wanted to scale up. We actually, like I said before, but we actually take someone through 75% of the intake process. This is complicated. This is like collecting account statements verifying, you know, verifying self reported data against actual statement data, and then figuring out based on tax law and all these other things, tax rules, how to manipulate their situation to give them you know, immediate success. Yeah, right now. We actually have a system where a virtual assistant can literally take them through 75% of that process. I love that. So year to date, we're, we're we're six months in, call it right June. And we now have taken in 200. And I believe it's 215 clients this year, but you can't Dean Soto 16:54 do that. Oliver, how how do they you know, you can't have someone who is you know, overseas. Think of all those complexities, right? They're not going to be able to do what you do or do what the financial strategist do. How are they doing? 75% I always get this man with financial services companies. Oliver Kelso 17:15 Exactly how and it's a great question, because it seems too complex on the surface. But if you I approached it this way, when I was working with the strategist on this exact problem is look, you learn how to do it. You can theoretically teach someone else how to do it. So there's some thinking process that happens when you evaluate a situation. What is that? So we started my only announcement aboard like, what's the first thing you look at? Oh, I look at the tax return. Okay, great. What do you look at? Why look at line 13? Okay, rule number one, look at the pattern, look at line 13. And what's cool is you start small, that was the other thing that you start small. So don't start thinking I'm going to turn the VA to do 100% of my friends process overnight. Yeah, yeah, depending on the complexity of the process. In this case, it's very complex. Instead, it was have the assistant pull out all the important information from the statements, verify it against the statement, and then give it to the strategist so that they don't have to go looking for information. Yeah, that immediately frees up half an hour an hour of their time per client. Yep, yep. Right. You can build on that, right? That though that was your favorite thing done is better than perfect. Yeah, you can build on if you do something you can build on it. So just having a VA that does, you know, step one, step two have a process. Well, then as things smooth out and start running smoothly, then you can have a two step three, then you add step four. Dean Soto 18:41 See, this is that is friggin amazing, you know, in in less than six months, you've pushed 200 clients through this. And, and this is, this is something that you have the the low cost option VC of the virtual assistant architect, there, you have you had you had the change in mindset of the organization there. It was, um, did once once you started doing this, did they kind of did the organization there start to see Oh, holy crap, this is actually like, we trust all of her to just like, what was kind of the deciding factor for them? To see that, like, Oliver knows how to make these systems. We're just gonna, we're just going to let them go wild with with that, because that's a pretty pretty dang amazing in the financial services industry to set something like Oliver Kelso 19:36 oh, yeah, it's huge. I mean, number one, it took someone was some vision at the top right, you have to have someone up there going, look, I understand we can't scale the way we are. Right? If you don't have that, if there's not a commitment, then this is important. That's why I say there's not a commitment at the top to say, look, we know what we're doing doesn't work right now. We need change. Yeah. Right. It's always an update, you're gonna have an uphill battle the whole time. There's no yeah. However, if, when there is that commitment, the next thing is achievable, measurable results. Yeah. Right. So to be able to turn around and say, Hey, we just the aha moment for them was when we on boarded six clients that never had to talk to a strategist, meaning the company actually collected fees on six people, which previously, they would have had to spend one to two hours on the phone with each one. Wow, wow. So we actually turned around and closed feet, the clients still get the same level of service, because they're still going to talk to the strategist. However, they the fees were closed, right, which means the strategies now is actually being paid for their time, they're no longer having to do sales and strategy. At the same time. See? Dean Soto 20:45 That's cool. Because now they can just focus strictly on strategy when it's necessary. And, and these are four to four to five figure fees, right? Generally. Oliver Kelso 20:59 Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, we're talking thousands up to upwards of, you know, 30 k, see. And then, depending on, you know, anywhere from one to $30,000, depending on the situation, so it's Dean Soto 21:11 so Gosh, is I sorry, I, I talked to financial services, guys all the time. And, and one on one, like, Dad, I need to get you in contact with some folks that I that I have, because you're so good at the numbers side of things to that's where we're, you're just so good at at not just the systems, but having everything makes sense for them, especially in the financial services realm. And I know you I know, you touch outside of financial services, but it just, it's just such an older, traditional, or whatever it is, if that's a word, model. And so, right mindset shifts is so different. So all that's been said, like, what, like, kind of walk me through? Can you just walk me through that process? Like, no, normally, I'd be like, starting to kind of walk in the podcast down. But this is super, super interesting. And I think it's gonna be super valuable for a lot of people. What is can you walk me through that process of what you do? It doesn't have to be super detailed, but but where a strategist went from one to two hours of having to sell and I'm I know for sure that it probably is even more than that having to go back and forth on the phone and stuff to zero and just being able to do strategy after they've been paid. What is the process? What was the process? And was the process now? Oliver Kelso 22:32 It's a great question. So the original process was, you know, you give it let's say, it's a speaking engagement, you go to a speaking engagement, you talk. People are interested, right, you haven't fill out a form while they're sitting there, you get back to the office, and then you got to call them all are you scheduled meetings, while you're there, even better, that's great. Problem is, you have no information on the client. At that point, there's no intake process, there's no nothing to sell it unless you're just selling a flat fee. Right, like $500, to get started $2,000 To get started, whatever. And then you have to go collect your documents, right, which is means someone has to send out a document collection link, or they got to fax them in if this is you know, before 1990 or whatever. Nowadays, away the financial services industry. So you bring them in. And that's how the process goes right? Until then you have to talk to them a couple of times to express you can disperse, you got to collect the documents, then you have to understand them, then you have to explain to them what you're considering doing. And then you have to sometimes in a fourth or fifth meeting finally close the feet. Yeah, did actually implement it. The shift, the shift wasn't complicated. This shift was was conceptually simple. It was automate every and by automate. I don't mean literally, I mean, automate with virtual assistants. Yeah. Okay. Um, I don't mean, build some, you know, complex automated pipeline, but automate the entire process up to the point that the strategist talks to a client and figures out what the real strategy is, which is the whole job, their whole job roles. So you want to eliminate everything up until that point? Yep. So that was question number one, how do we eliminate all that stuff? And the process is simple. They've got an intake form. So they self report their data? Yep. Right. Then from that point, the virtual assistant, and the automated system processes the information and determines what the client needs to upload to confirm their data. Yeah. Sometimes there's we you know, they may be a welcome call, and they're from like, an actual sales person, but still not a strategist. Yep. You're not taking your highest paid person and putting them on the phone yet, before the company is collected any money? Yeah. I'm from that, then you move to the document verification center, they verify the documents, and they create what's called an allocation. So they actually detail out where all the money is for the strategists. Again, it's all the stuff that would have had to happen in house or the strategies would have to do themselves. Once everything's documented, once the client files ready, everything set up, then we use a self booking link. That was another big addition. Yeah, so you don't have 6 million back and forth emails, the client books, their own appointment based on the strategist calendar. And then the strategy has their first meeting. So on any given client, it shouldn't, it shouldn't be more than two meetings, well give your first meeting to go over the strategy or your second meeting to confirm it with the client, make adjustments and close the fee. Love it. And then from that point on, there's more involvement, because you know, then you move to implementation. That's a whole nother ball game, which is also would only work in any scale will be a Yeah. Yo, man. And just as a note here, this is all this isn't, you know, revolutionary in the sense that this is always how the process works, right? Do you have an in house employees, they do certain tasks so that your high level person doesn't have to do them? That's not new. What's new, is having someone you're paying, whatever? 950 1050 an hour? Yep. Who's way more capable than a minimum wage, you know, high school employees that you get here? That's the difference. So I can hunger for vas for the same price as one decent employee. Yeah. Decent. And that's, that's the that's the key. That's why, you know, that's the I have to train them not to take a two hour lunch. Break, right. Let's need to like, Dean Soto 26:40 like, because you also you also automate the actual strategist as well, because they have to follow the process. True, right. Like they, they they have to know when it's their job, what they what what parts to work, kind of what their lane is to so you mapped out architect that as well. Right. Oliver Kelso 27:03 Right, exactly. So a lot of role readjustment. You have to be very cognizant that it's a shift, people are going to be switching roles. And like we already talked about, there's training required, even for your employees to say, look, stop being the Savior. Yeah, you're not the firefighter anymore. You don't have to do all of these little things, you get the same freedom that, you know, I'm getting at the top of the company, you're going to get to Yeah, cuz you're at what has ends up happening. Is the employees actually on the front line? Yeah, it's not you. Unless Unless we're talking about like a one or two man shop, which is then everything's you anyway. But if you already have employees, integrating VA is actually it's the employees integrating the VA is unless you're talking about like an admin assistant. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of it's actually working with your staff to improve them. They said, you know, it's like, corporate, it's a continuing education for your staff. Dean Soto 27:55 So cool. I love that. Oliver Kelso 27:57 It's very cool. It's really me, I can't, I could go on forever. I know, we have limited time here. But yeah, it is like literally life changing. Dean Soto 28:05 Yeah, it's cool. Because you you have a great mix, especially in that niche of the systems of the outsourcing as well as the numbers that you understand, you understand the financial services realm, especially from the customer side of side of things, but also from the the the the advisor or securities, security advisor, whatever it might be, you know, the the strategist and so on, you understand their pains, their, their, their desires, and then also you understand how they can best help their customers. And so you have a really good mix of all of that. And I've just seen, just seeing tremendous results from companies that you've worked with. So that being said, How do people find out more about you? And how do people actually start working with you? Oliver Kelso 29:01 Yeah, so thank you for the plug. So what a convenient go to you can just go to grow smart. Got Co. Co, that's my website, I will tell you, I exclusively work with freedom in five minutes, I will not use another VA. That is on purpose. That's not some you know, it's because they work. So I don't care if you can hire a VA for $2 an hour from Croatia. And it doesn't speak English, that that's not going to get you where you want to go. So I'm very clear about that. I'm a boutique firm in the sense that I'm very careful about who I choose to work with. They have to be have to have the right mindset. Right? You know that I mean, you know that better than anybody, I'm not going to sit in and work with a company who doesn't understand the intense need for systems and for and that and that. And I'll just be direct, who doesn't have their ego wrapped up in them doing everything. That's, that's a real a real business owner, a real person that wants their business to thrive and is preferably doing good in the world. Unknown Speaker 30:14 I love it. Dean Soto 30:17 I love it. I love it. It's great. Because, like I said, I've seen I've just seen so much such tremendous results from what you bring to these companies, the ones that are that are hungry for scaling, the ones that actually aren't fighting you, which, where it's where they have that the ones that have the Superman mentality where they're, like you said, they're trying to say that for me, yeah, you, you go in the ones that really truly want to scale, they know that there's going to be some shifting some pain, and so on and so forth. You make it so easy for them to do by by doing those small little things that provide that positive feedback loop that, that I just I just recommend anybody who, especially in the financial services business, but it doesn't have to be in that edge. You work with real estate, for property management, real estate investments, property management, property management, and so on. Oliver Kelso 31:12 Yeah, doctors, lawyers, it really doesn't matter. The industry. That's the best thing about this is the VA architect, the VA mentality and architect in your business, that's not a word I know. To do to perform the way you want to and like you, you know, when when she once said to me getting back to why you started your business in the first place. Right? That's universal. Dean Soto 31:36 Yeah. I love it. And you you you are able to bring that back to them. And I've just seen it over and over and over and over again. It's so cool. So well, Oliver Kelso 31:44 thank you. I appreciate that. Dean Soto 31:47 No problem. So yeah, if you want to go and check it out, work with Oliver. I'm sure do you would you give like like discovery calls like Oliver Kelso 31:56 Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah, well, we always talk first see what you're interested in See? See where you're you know where you're struggling in your business etc. Do a free assessment wherever you want to call that love it and then go from there. Dean Soto 32:11 Love it. So yeah, go check out grow smart.co grow smart co hit up all over us a genius and he will help you if your business if you've been dying to scale he'll help you scale very quickly. Very, very quickly. He's super super smart. And yeah, he's one of the he really is the only other systems and operations guy that I ever recommend to people so so and that's that's so I'm very boutique when it comes to that as well. So Oliver Kelso 32:46 I love it. Dean is amazing. If you're already listening to this, you know, he's amazing, but Dean is amazing. And it turned upon you right back because my life would be considerably less, less amazing. Without Dean, though. Kudos to you, man. Love freedom in five minutes works. It is one of the best shifts you'll ever make. I love it. Dean Soto 33:09 I love it. I love it. Alright, cool. So go check out all of our growth smarts.co go talk to him he will change your life. And if you are looking for a virtual systems architect, if you want to scale your business, the easy way you can go to freedom in five minutes calm if you need help go to grow smart co Oliver will help you and you'll end up working with me anyway. Because he's amazing. And he's he knows where to get the goods. He knows where to get the good so but other than that, thank you so much for listening to the freedom in five minutes podcast. My name is Dean Soto and we will catch you on the next freedom in five minutes. episode. Unknown Speaker 33:51 Thanks for listening to the freedom in five minutes podcast. Now head over to www dot freedom and finally minutes.com and register for our free masterclass and discover how to start systemized and automating your entire business five minutes at a time. We'll see you next time on the freedom in five minutes podcast.  

Could you be supervising your kids too much? Safety is important, but that doesn’t have to translate watching your child’s every move. Annie, Lauren and Jen are joined by parenting expert Allana Robinson to discuss outdoor unsupervised play, fostering independence and life skills and finding more balance as a parent.   What you’ll hear in this episode: Societal pressures around supervision and engagement of parents with their kids The amount of time working moms spend with their kids vs stay at home moms in the 50s What science says about enrichment and play Motor skill development and play How motor skill development affects reading ability Facilitating outdoor unsupervised play through relationship building in your neighborhood The value of small risks in learning to prevent injuries How children's’ injuries have changed with the introduction of “safer” equipment How to introduce unsupervised outdoor play in an age-appropriate way Boundaries and consequences - how to use them Helping kids learn to entertain themselves Judgement and the mom on the phone in the park What happens when you interrupt or correct play Isolation and the need for community of parents and of kids Zooming out from our kids’ behavior and learning to see it in context   Resources: Uncommon Sense Parenting Facebook Page Allana’s Facebook Group Ping GPS The Gift of Imperfect Parenting Your Kids Need to Play Outside Without You podcast episode (Allana Robinson) Marian Diamond Rat Enrichment Study No Child Left Alone study Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance 365 life radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we coach thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. We live in a culture where parents are expected to be with or entertain their kids all the time, but we also have other responsibilities inside the house that need taking care of too, and as a result, our kiddos' outdoor playtime often gets cut short, but today's guest has solutions. She understands the importance of outdoor play for kids and wait for it, she encourages unsupervised outdoor time. Yeah, you heard me right. Alanna Robinson is an early childhood educator and parenting coach for parents of toddlers and preschoolers. She helps parents understand why their children are misbehaving and what to do about it without yelling, shaming, or using timeouts. On today's episode, Alanna, Jen, Lauren and I discuss why your kids need to play outside without you and how to begin implementing that today so your kids can play outside and you can tackle your to do list inside or you can always just relax too. But before we dive in, it's important to note that we have a diverse audience, and even though we don't have immediate solutions for everyone, we want to acknowledge that inequalities do exist and people with different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds may have a different experience with outdoor play. But as always, we don't want anyone to feel left out of this conversation. And if you want to discuss any of these topics further, we invite you to join our free private Facebook group. Healthy Habits Happy Moms. Enjoy. Lauren and Jen, welcome to the show. We have a special guest. Lauren, are you so excited? Lauren: I am so pumped. I'm so excited to learn all the things. Annie: I know. Jen, I know you're excited cause this was a guest you found and you brought and you were like, "She needs to be on the show." Jen: Yeah, I'm part of Allana's, I'm in her parenting posse Facebook group. Actually, Allana, I found out about your Facebook group in our Facebook group. Allana: Oh yeah? Jen: You were, or did someone just recommend your Facebook group to me in our Facebook group to me in our Facebook group. So group to group. So I joined yours and you have said some things that have been so profound and have changed the way I parent and discipline, which is amazing. Allana: That makes me so happy. Jen: And even though you specialize in one to six year olds, I have, well, I've been in your group for quite a while, but my boys are transitioning out of those ages. So I have a five, seven and nine year old. I find your advice still works for my seven and nine year old. And so you just scale it to their level and yeah, it works. It's amazing. And it's taken so much stress out of parenting, right? Especially with discipline because you're always like, "Is this enough? Did he learn his lesson?" Annie: So in other words, welcome to the show, Allana. How are you? Allana: Thank you so much for having me. I'm great. Annie: Good. Allana: Making me so extremely happy because you never know if what you're putting out into the world is actually landing with people and it's just, it makes me so happy to hear when it does. Jen: I don't, I just read along. So I would say I'm a lurker in your group. I've posted once, but I read. And so it's actually a good reminder for me that in even our Facebook group, I'm sure there's tons of lurkers, so nothing you say is ever really wasted. And so I read whatever you write. So whatever you're doing in that group, I'm a step behind. Annie: And then she comes to me and she's like, "Hey, you need to check her out." And then I went to your website and listen to one of your podcasts. And it was about why your kids need to play outside without you. And I was like, "Freedom!" It was amazing. Jen: That was a huge moment for me and you're so open about your own parenting practices and you're not just telling people, "Hey, here's what to do." You're like, "Here's what what you should do. And I'm doing it. And this is what happens in our day to day life." And can I say the comment that blew my mind? It was just from a couple of weeks ago. Can I say that? Am I allowed? You told everybody, someone asked when they can let their toddler play in their backyard unattended. And then all these women were giving advice, right. And it was this huge thing and all of a sudden you swooped in and you said your youngest or you start them out one and a half years old playing independently outside by themselves at one and a half. And your son has been walking down the street to the park from four years old. Allana: Yup. Jen: On his own. And I was like, "Wow." And you said the world is safer today than it's ever been. There's this perception that it's more dangerous and we actually have more things in place to keep our kids safe even though it's safer. But that's killing us as parents. And actually what it's leading to is a lot more indoor time and screen time for kids because it's actually not realistic or sustainable to expect parents to be playing or even supervising their kids 24 seven and so kids aren't even getting the minimum amount of movement that they should be just because it's actually become impossible for families to provide that. Allana: It's an impossible standard. There's also a study that was done not that long ago about the difference in the amount of time working mothers today spend with their children versus stay at home mothers that spent with their children in the 1950s. Working mothers today spend more time on average with their children than stay at home mothers did in the 1950s so this concept that we have to constantly be in their face, we have to constantly be engaged with them. We have to constantly be enriching them. Jen: Right. Allana: Putting this impossible, impossible load on us. And you know where that came from? It came from another study. There was a woman named Marian Diamond who was in the 1960s, she was doing research on rats and how big their brains got when they played versus rats who weren't given the opportunity to play. Allana: And she was a woman scientist in the 1960s and she was playing with rats. So she got ridiculed socially by her male colleagues for being the girl who plays with rats. And in order to try and make her study, her papers more serious, have a bit more aplomb, she removed the word play and she changed it to enrichment. And nobody knows this woman. Nobody has ever heard of these studies before, but they have just trickled through our societal psyche to the point where we believe that we always have to be engaged with our kids or they're going to be stupid. And what that study should have said is the more time the children play, the smarter they get, the bigger their brains get. And that tiny little change in the way that we communicated that idea has had such a prolific impact on North American society. And now we're at the point where it's breaking us to meet those expectations. And we're so terrified that if we don't, that our kids are going to be stupid. And it's, yeah. So this fear that everybody has, and it's a deep seated subconscious fear that we have to be with them all the time or they're going to be taken or stupid. And it's just, it's not sustainable. You can't do it. Jen: Can I just, I'll just add another fear. That they're going to get hurt and someone's going to call child and family services on me and my kids are gonna get taken away because I wasn't there when they fell off their bike, broke an arm. Like, you know, it's just, I'm afraid of what my neighbours are gonna think of me. Not so much anymore because my kids are a bit older. But when my kids were younger, it was, we lived near a park, I wouldn't dare have sent, you know, in my head I'm like, "I'm sure they'll be fine." My Dad used to do some very questionable, like, I mean over the line questionable things. So you know I'd always have my dad be like telling me "It's fine!" Just, but you know, you, you actually worry about your neighbors. And actually I've been on social media for several years now and shared a lot of our family during that time. I think I started after my third was born and I have had many people message me and threatened they're going to call family services on me, like awful telling me I'm an awful mother. Like, if I'm trying to share like our mom life moments, you know, like, there's accidents- Allana: That hasn't happened to me yet quite frankly, because as you said, I'm very open about what I allow my kids to do. And there's more studies. There was this study that was done in 2016 about, it's actually called No Child Left Alone. And it was a study that was done by a small group of researchers and they basically asked a large, large group of people, they gave them scenarios in which a child was left alone and every single scenario was exactly the same except for the reason why the child was left alone. So they varied the reason, like, you know, mom went to go see her lover versus, you know, mom had an emergency at work and couldn't find a babysitter. And what they found was that people assessed a higher risk to the child based on what they morally felt the reason was for leaving the child, even though all the factors were exactly the same. And so what that means is that people don't just think things are dangerous and therefore, and moral, they think things are immoral and therefore dangerous. So, and when I say to people like "I let my five year old walk to the park," they're like, "Aren't you afraid CPS is going to get called on you? Aren't you afraid that somebody?" And I'm not because I know my neighbors. And that is how we combat that, because it's a lot easier to judge somebody on their morality when you don't know them, when you can't put a face to them, when you've never spoken to them. So, and it's awkward, super awkward. But when we moved here when my son was a year and a half old. And so he was just starting outdoor play and he was, he's tiny for his age, like he looks much younger than he is. And so I actually took his hand and we went around and we walked up and down our street and we knocked on everybody's door and we introduced ourselves. And I said, you know, "My name's Allana. This is my son Logan. You might see Logan around, he likes to play outside by himself. I'm okay with that." And people were kind of like, "Okay." And it was, it was awkward as hell. And you know, we have a bit more in depth conversations with our immediate neighbours who can actually see into our yard. But so no, nobody ever, I gave my phone number to everybody and said, "Hey, if you ever see him doing something questionable that you're not sure it's safe or appropriate, please send me a text message. Like I am always, I will deal with it." And what that people call CAS because they see a child doing something that they're not sure is totally on the up and up and they don't have a touch point. They don't have anybody to go to other than the police. So if you go to your neighbors and you say, "Hey, this is who I am, this is my child, this is my phone number, please call me if you know you ever need anything," it removes that ability to have such a quick moral judgment on you because they seen your face. They've spoken to you, they've had a conversation with you and that I think because we don't know our neighbors, in this day and age we move around a lot more. We live in much larger communities. Houses are much closer together. We don't, we don't know our neighbors the way that our parents did or grandparents did. So it takes a conscious effort on our part if we're going to be sending our kids out into the world by themselves that we know we've scoped out the world for them, right? Jen: Yeah. Go ahead, Allana. Allana: Oh, I was just going to say it like, he has, he's walked to the park before and I've had neighbors text me and be like, "Hey, so your kids at the park by himself?" And I'm like, "Yup." And they're like, "Oh, you're okay with that?" "Yup. Thanks for letting me know though." And they're like, "Okay, great." And that was the end of it. And they know him, he knows his boundaries, like, and there's a certain amount of teaching to this. You don't just send your kid out the door and be like, "Off you go." There's a lot of very conscious teaching that has to happen in, right. Annie: Allana, I would love to get into, like, how do you actually implement it in a little bit? Because I know like you can't just take a kid that, like, hasn't had any unsupervised play and be like, "Okay, see ya. Have fun." But I want to back up because you have quite a bit of information about, like, the benefits. Like why does this matter to the kids and why does this matter to parents? Allana: Well, because the outdoors is basically, like, nature's occupational therapy, right? Like the rate of children in occupational therapy has soared since the 1990s and it's because the kids aren't getting outside. When you go outside, first of all, the environment is perfectly sensorially balanced. It's made for us. It's not too loud. It's not too quiet. Depending on where you live is not too hot or too cold. But you can adjust it, you know, generally it's not too bright. There's, you know, very subtle sounds that help you orient yourself in space. Like just the sounds of birds tweeting and leaves rustling helps your brain figure out where you are in space. It has, there's so many sensory experiences, mud, grass, air, everything is a sensory. The heat from the sun even is a sensory experience that helps your brain integrate the input that it gets both indoors and out. It's not controlled and there's things that you have to adapt for which you wouldn't have to adapt for inside because everything is so controlled inside. So our kids aren't getting that stimulus that hopefully we got that our parents definitely got outdoors and the result is that there's a lot of kids in schools right now who have vestibular problems and it's affecting their ability to read. It's affecting their ability to sit down and concentrate. Spinning, spinning has been shown, if you spin for five minutes, it's been shown to increase your attention span for two hours. They've removed every single merry go round. Every single spinning toy. Kids aren't allowed to spin on swings anymore because it's "dangerous." They've shortened the height of swing sets. If you look at pictures of swing sets from like the 1960s, the set itself is super, super tall and the chains are super, super long, which means they got a lot larger range of motion. When everything got scaled down and we got super safety conscious. We literally scaled down the swing sets. The chains are much shorter. They're not getting as large a range of motion. They're not getting as much stimulation. So it's vital not just to, you know, their ability to entertain themselves. It's vital to their long term learning. If you don't have a body that can integrate all the information that you're getting, then it's going to crop up down the road in lots of different ways. Jen: Wow. You know what? We moved from Vancouver, a huge city in Canada to a very small city, in the interior British Columbia, 90,000 people. And then within that community we live in like this tiny little suburb that backs on to, like a provincial park. So just hiking trails and stuff. My children's life has changed. Being so close to nature and having other children on the block, like our doorbell is ringing constantly. These kids are outside all the time, way more than when we lived in Vancouver. When we were in Vancouver I felt like I had to facilitate everything because you're in this big city you like, it's just, yeah, it was, there was just, it was very, and it was very stressful and I don't even think I realized how stressed I was until I wasn't living there anymore. And I have so much more freedom. I, you know, we even live close enough to the school that, like, boys can walk to school and walk home. And then just my free time has gone way up. Like as far as, and the load of parenting has gone way down for me living in this neighborhood and in this smaller city and I just can't believe how the quality of our life has improved. It's crazy. Allana: Totally. And like I have a lot of parents were like, "Listen, I don't have an outdoor space for my kids. Like we live in an apartment building and I can't let them go downstairs and play in even in the public green space by themselves because there's, you know, 60 back balconies that face onto it and somebody is going to take issue with it" and I always say "Some is better than none." Jen: Yes. Allana: Taking your kids to a park and take them to a park where there's no equipment. Right. Don't take them to a park where there's all these plastic climbers and stuff. Take them to a park where there's no equipment, provincial park, national park somewhere that it's more of a natural space and let them play there rather than let them climb the trees, let them walk on the logs, let them go, you know, dig in the ravines and the ditches. That's much more high quality play than the kind of contrived play that happens on swing sets and stuff like that. Jen: Yeah, they, when my kids were young, we lived in New Zealand and they are extremely progressive as far as play there. And this is kind of when all this started coming to me, because I had never heard this kind of talk in Canada and they talked a lot about the benefits of decreasing supervision and increasing risk on playgrounds because for example, our school, our playground no longer meets safety codes anymore. And so our school is paying $100,000 this spring that we all had to fundraise for to put in a new, new safe playground. And I'm kind of sitting back while everyone's very excited, great, but I'm sitting back going like, this is a hundred grand on a new safe structure that- Allana: Is going to do them a disservice. Jen: Right? And so - Allana: Yeah, I know the feeling. My son's play, my son's school, he's in junior kindergarten here in Ontario and they don't even have a playground. They don't have any, like they have a fenced in yard and there's a play structure for the kids who are in grade four and up. But anybody under that isn't allowed to use it. And we're moving schools next year. And his first question was, is there going to be something that I can climb on Jen: Right. Allana: Yeah, dude, that's like one of my top priorities. Jen: Yeah. I see just as many kids in the field next to the school. It's all fenced and stuff than I do on the playgrounds. Right. So it's and then tell me this, I don't know if this evidence based or not, but I often wonder what happens on playgrounds when the kids are bored and there's no risk anymore. Like do they turn? Like is that why they're turning on each other at recess? Allana: When there's nothing to do, you're going to create something to do. And so the nice thing like, and people will often say to me like, "How do your kids play outside for hours on end? There's nothing in your backyard." And there isn't. We literally have a yard and a shed and, but there are things in my backyard. We have lots of loose parts. We have, when my husband built that shed, he took all the off cuts and just kind of sanded down the edges generally so that he wasn't getting any splinters. And so there's, there's a ton of lumber back there. There is sticks, there's mud, there's a sand pit, we have a water table that kind of turns into a pond during the summer because nobody cleans it out. It gets very disgusting but so they have all that stuff out there and they'll take like, you know, an action figure or a car or something, one little thing and they'll build this whole playscape off of it just because toys are built with a very specific purpose in mind and kids know that they're supposed to use them that way, right? You're supposed to use a tool the way the tool is supposed to be used. We're very, very clear about that with young children. So when you give them a toy and it's only able to be used one way, they're going to get bored with it really, really quickly. And then when there's nothing to do, they're going to start disturbing. Jen: Bleeping the child psychologist. Allana: I always have an explicit warning on my own podcast because when I get passionate I run my mouth. But yeah. So, but if you don't give them those things that are closed ended to begin with, if you give them open ended stuff and you expect them to create their own world, they'll do it and it will be so immersive for them that they won't have time to make, you know, trouble. They're going to be so engaged in it.   And that's the other thing is toys generally can only be used by one or two people versus open ended materials. "Okay, you want to come play with me? Great. Go grab a stick. Right?" So that's, it's a lot easier for children to join play when there isn't set materials for them to use, when everything's very open ended because they can modify what they're doing to include more people very easily.   And to come back to kind of what you were saying about the play structure, that's another problem, right? There's usually limits on how many kids can be on the play structure, especially in school environments where they're like, you know, there can only be five kids on the play structure at a time that just hamstrings them. It cuts them off at the knees and when there's children, you know, want to come in, they can't. So keeping things and it's just really, the science across the board just says "Back off! Back off and they'll figure it out. That's what their brains are designed to do." Jen: Right. And that's really what builds a resilient person. Right? They can figure it out in a moment. Right. The other thing that had been talked about in New Zealand I remember is as playgrounds were becoming more safe, they were not just less risky as in, "Ooh, am I going to fall? Or it was also, they were less physically risky in that it didn't require as much strength to go over these different spots in the park. So the upper body strength in children is coming down big time because they are taking out monkey bars. They're taking, you know, they're taking out all these upper body things." Allana: Exactly. Because you've got children in occupational therapy to build that up because they're not naturally getting it, they're not weight bearing. I have so many clients who their child is in kindergarten and first of all they're asking these kindergarten kids to read and write when that's not developmentally appropriate, but they also can't physically do it because they don't have the strength in their muscles to do it. Like fine motor skills starting in your shoulder and they work their way down. Jen: Right. Right. Allana: If you don't use your gross motor skills. You can't use your fine motor skills when you need to. So yeah. And the other thing about reducing risk is that they're reducing small injuries, but the injuries that do happen are much larger. Children are breaking bones more frequently. They're, you know, having huge concussions when they do, because their vestibular system is so underdeveloped, they don't know the limits of their body. And so when they go to try and do something new, they can't tell if they can actually do it or not. Jen: Right. Because they've had no lower level risk that warns them Allana: They weren't able to build up to it. Jen: Amen. Yeah. Allana: We've reduced, you know, cuts, scrapes, minor stitches and we've turned that into breaks and concussions and it's, ask any occupational therapist and they'll tell you that a lot of these things are very easily solved just by sending them outside to play. Jen: Right. That's so interesting to just reframing it, right? These things are good. Like this is good for your kids to make these mistakes, have these small falls. None of them are life threatening, but they're teaching them about their environment and saving them from future. An analogy to that, actually, I posted a insta story a year ago with my oldest son on a little mini quad at his grandparents' farm and he was doing donuts and it was all dusty and I got so many from women that were like, "I would never let my child do that." And he had an accident that summer. He bumped into the side of his uncle's truck and he flew and hit his chest on the handlebars and it really hurt him and it really scared him. I mean, he's wearing a helmet and we've got that safety stuff. And I was like, "Good." I could see the donuts were getting a little out of control. I could see that kid needed some kind of little bump to remind him that he is on a machine and it happened and it was good. And he is much more safe now. And I guess, I guess what, and also my dad's a farmer, so I grew up in, you know, "dangerous" environment of, like, just roaming around a farm and yeah. And it's like, I see now how good that is, but you know, and I moved to the city and I think of all these city kids getting licenses at 16 and like, you know, we're a little, when you grew up on a farm, you're just driving, you drive, right? Like you drive when your dad's lap or you, you're helping, you know, you're way too young. You're 12 years old and you're helping move trucks from one field to another. And then I think of all these city kids getting their licenses and it's like that's crazy that they have no driving experience. And you know what I mean? So it's like- Allana: I was reading something the other day about how it's taking longer. Like when I turned 16 almost all my friends got their license on the first try. And apparently there's some statistics now coming out that it's taking teenagers longer to learn to drive because they're having to develop vestibular and proprioceptive skills that they didn't as a child. And so they're not able to judge where their car is in space. Jen: Oh gosh, that's so interesting. Allana: So yeah, it's, this isn't just about mom getting some breathing time of being able to clean the kitchen without anybody crawling up their back and about the kids being able to entertain themselves. These skills that they develop, that looks like they're doing absolutely nothing are so important. And they will follow them for the rest of their lives. And it's just, it frustrates me so much. Jen: Lauren had a question, I think. Allana: Oh yeah, Lauren, did you have something? Lauren: Yes. Can I, can I? Hello? Annie: Hi. Welcome to the show. Lauren: Hi, I'm over here. I'm trying to get a word in next to Jen. Annie: Good luck. Jen: Classic little little sister moment. Lauren: So I love all of this. Can I ask some practical questions selfishly that hopefully will benefit all of our listeners? I have a five year old and a one year old and I'm wondering like, okay, my one and a half year old obviously is probably going to have different boundaries than a five year old, but the five year old, I mean, I let her play outside sometimes, but I'm usually watching her through like the window and whatever. Like so what are, how do I introduce this concept to both of them in age appropriate ways? Allana: So the five year old, as you said, it's going to have a much longer leash than the one and a half year old. If you have fenced space, it's, that's easiest because it's easiest for us to back off. But generally what I do with little kids is I start by being outside with them but not being engaged with them. So like blowing snow in the driveway. They can't participate in that, but they can be outside while we're doing it, weeding the garden, they might join in but they're going to get bored and they're going to go do something else. Doing things that need to be done anyways, but, and that we're around, but we're not focused on them. We're focused on something else. So that's like step one is generally just getting them used to the idea that you're not going to be watching them all the time. And then step two of that is starting that way and then being like, okay, I'm going to go in and go to the bathroom. I'm going to go in and make dinner. And just gradually lengthening the amount of time that you go in at the end of your play time so that they're not going from "I'm inside and supervised, to I'm outside and not supervised." There's a buildup to that and it's amazing how, like, children are very intuitive. So if we have concerns, if we're scared of them doing something, they're going to pick up on that very quickly. Their limbic system is very connected to ours and our inter brain is going to go, "You're not safe!" And so they're not going to feel safe. So it's a workup for us too, right? We need to feel confident and comfortable leaving our kids alone. So those are steps one and two generally for me is just being outside, not engaged with them but being outside with them. And then at the end of that starting to introduce, I can go inside and you don't have to come with me. And once you kind of work up to a good chunk of time, then you can start sending them out by themselves and lengthening that amount of time so that you're like, "Okay, well, you go out and I'll meet you there. Like I'm just going to go and put this in the oven and then I'll be outside." And starting to get them used to going outside without you following behind them. And then you can go out again, do something else, not be engaged with them, but be around and then go back inside. So you're kind of working it from either end rather than just sending them out on their own. And that's generally a nice good workup for kids. They don't feel scared because they know you're coming, you know that you're not having to like peek through the window to keep an eye on them either because they can sense that too. Windows don't block limbic resonance. Lauren: Do you have tips if your yard is not fenced in, like, do you give them ahead of time, like, boundaries? Allana: Absolutely. So my favorite tool for this is go to Home Depot or Lowe's and grab some of that neon paint that they mark gas lines with when you call and be like, "Hey, I'm going to dig in my yard." And then somebody comes by and like Mark's all your gas lines so you don't hit a gas line when you dig. Go and get that and spray your property line. And I do that every spring with my two, because I have a two and a half year old. And so last year he was a year and a half and he wants to play in the front yard with his big brother, but there's no barrier in the front. So he was getting really angry because my big can let himself in and out of the backyard and the little one can't and he'd be so mad when my big one would leave him in the backyard. So I did. I went and I got the orange paint and I sprayed, just a line right down our ditch and down either side of our front yard. It doesn't look great, but when you mow the grass goes away and he, and I was like, "Listen, you cannot cross the orange line without mummy or daddy." And we walked the orange line and I showed him, "Yes, no, you cannot go on this other side." And it did. We had to work up to it Again, starting with me being outside with them and keeping an eye on them, but not engaged with them, reminding him that he can't cross that line and just very gradually backing away from him and letting him have more ownership over that. Now we can go just about anywhere. Like we have a cottage with a waterfront that we go to in the summer and now I can like walk up and like spray that line along the waterfront and I'm like, you can't cross the dark line- Jen: Take it to your hotel. Annie: The restaurant. Jen: The restaurant play here, don't worry, you can mow it out. Allana: I've done it with orange electric. Try and pick a color and stick to it because kids tend to get that, like, color association. But I've done it with orange electrical tape, like, we were at, actually just this last week, my big one was hospitalized and we were in this waiting room, like, it was like an examination room with the door didn't close. It was kind of like just a triage kind of space. And my little one was kept trying to escape and I busted out my roll of orange electrical tape and put on a hard line on the doorway and I was like, you can't cross the orange line. And he was like, "Okay." Jen: That's so awesome. Annie: it is. Allana: At this point that he's like, "No, we don't cross orange lines," causes problems when they're like, "Here you can go!" Like where were we? We were at Wonderland or something like that last summer and there was, like, a line on the ground to mark where you can't cross to go before you go on a ride. And they were like "Come!" and he was like, "Uh uh, we don't cross orange lines." Annie: So I have a feisty two and a half year old and I'm picturing this like it, like I'm, this is not that I don't believe you, but I mean- Allana: It's not an overnight thing. Annie: Yeah. I'm picturing me, like, getting out, like, rope or a spray can and like her just laughing in my face like, "Yeah, okay, mom. Right." Allana: Right. Well and they do. But that's the thing where you have to very consistently redirect them back to the other side. And- Annie: What have you used as appropriate consequences? Like do you say, like, "Sorry, we can't play outside then if you-" Allana: Yeah, well if you can't, so I often say like "If I can't trust you to stay on this side of the orange line, then we're going to have to go inside. Or if I can't trust you to go stay on this side of the orange line, we're going to have to go in the backyard that's fenced" and, or "if I can't trust you to be playing up" like often when I was starting to do this with him, I would be washing my car because my husband's a car nut and so it makes him very happy when I wash my car frequently. So I was like, all right, this makes him happy. This makes me happy. We're going to wash the car while the kids play in the front yard. And like, I mean it's nice when you have an older child who gets to be the tattle tale, but it was like, "Mom, Owie's going into the road" and I would bring him back. "If you can't stay on this side of the orange line, then you're going to have to come and sit in the car." And he was like, "Uh un." And I was like, "Yeah." And it doesn't take very many times of, like, "Hey," as long as you tell them what is going to happen before it happens. Like you can't spring it on them and be like, "Nope, if can't stay on this side of the orange line I'm going to strap you into your car seat." And then they're like, "Well, I didn't know that was what was on the line." Jen: That's actually, this is another huge takeaway I've gotten from your group is the whole concept of natural consequences, like, life changing. We could do a whole other podcast on it and I'm sure people can find more about it on your podcast. But I, it's just like brought my chill level into a normal range around my kids. And, you know, even, it was in your group, it was something about, it was just like this, right? So it's like you lay out the boundary, you tell them what the consequence is and it's a natural consequence. So it's so it's not like disciplining anymore, right? Allana: Exactly. Annie: It's about getting them to connect to the consequences of their actions. Allana: and kids can tell when we're pulling a power trip, right? Timeouts all that stuff. They know when we're like, "No, I'm just doing this because I can." And so, like, things with, "Okay, if you can't stay on this side of the orange line," the best logical consequence for that would be, "Okay, well then you need to go into the gated area." Like that's, he doesn't want that because he knows his big brother's not in the gated area. He knows that, you know, he wants to be in the front with us. And so that creates a consciousness in him that he's like, "Okay, I need to think critically about this. I'm not going to," and they will test. Kids are scientists. They use the scientific method with much more accuracy than any adult. And they will have a theory and they will test every variable possible, which is why I say, like, try and keep the color consistent because like my son, we were at my mom's once and she didn't have any orange paint, so I busted out some pink. Pink apparently doesn't have the same staying power. It is not an orange line. Jen: Oh my kids would do that. Allana: Because right. Anytime you introduce a variable, they have to test it. They have to, they're so inquisitive. They are scientific little minds. So, and that's where you have extinction bursts where they're like, "Okay, this was the limit before and now it's, there's a new limit. How hard do I have to push until we go back to the old limit?" So staying consistent really is the key to the whole but yeah, keeping, I've lost my train of thought now. Jen: You're amazing. Like you, it's like you're in a child's brain and the way you explain things is so fantastic. I can't wait to send everybody to your podcast and you just, and then suddenly my anxiety in parenting is just gone when I listen to you because I know I'm doing the right thing and it will work out. Right. You sometimes feel like you're just trying whatever, just try it, see what works. But I just have this, like, reassurance from you that it's just consistency. Allana: it's so much easier to let go when you know what's going on under the hood and you know how their brains work. And that's, like, my whole philosophy is if you can understand how your child's brain works, then you can work with it instead of against it. And so many of the conventional parenting wisdom is working against their brain. Annie: Right? Right. Jen: Yeah. Allana: Dominant. It's trying to exert dominance. Jen: Then you get struggles and they feel, yeah, it's- Allana: They feel controlled and nobody likes to feel controlled. You push back and they feel like they're being manipulated and treated like subhuman. So when we just treat our kids like we would not how we would treat an adult, but when we are give them that kind of respect, it's amazing how quickly they come onside. It really is. Annie: And I think from like a parenting perspective, hearing you as an expert in this field, pun intended, it's almost permission giving to say like, "It's fine. Go inside, go to the bathroom, put a frozen pizza in the oven. I mean that's what I would do. Like make a phone call, whatever. There'll be okay. And they need it. It's not just for you." It's, like, it just helps me like do this guilt-free. Allana: Totally. And like I've had clients with 11 year olds who will still make their 11 year old come in from the backyard when they need to go pee. Like when you go to the bathroom. Jen: Like that thread in the group before you came in and laid it down with everybody. I was like, "Who are these people?" Like how long are you gonna be like basically- Allana: And the funny thing. It's like my babysitter, my main babysitter is 11 years old. And when I tell people that they're like, "What?" They're like, "But you don't her alone with them." And I'm like, "Oh yes I do. She can." My 11 year old babysitter can feed my children dinner, bath them and get them in bed and an hour and a half flat. I can't do that. Jen: That's the other thing is that eventually we're working up or my son turns 10 this summer and we've kind of given him the, when you are 10 we will start leaving you a home alone. Like if I'm popping out for groceries or whatever. And it's this thing he's looking forward to and that's kind of the law here. Just so everybody knows. I know the law's different in different areas. But that is, we are law abiding citizens anyways. And so if you can't leave your child, like it has to start happening at some point, right? On a gradual basis. You can't be micromanaging your kid. And then he turns 10 or 11 or 12 and then you go, "Okay, we're leaving you alone." Allana: We don't give children any ability to experience minor risk and then they turn 18 and we're like, "Go out and innovate." Jen: Yeah. Go live alone. Annie: This sounds like- Allana: And they're like, "I've never done this in my entire life. You can't start with, like, throwing them out the door. Jen: And then they struggle. Right. And mental health issues in freshmen university students are just skyrocketing. Allana: Of course, living with their parents for longer and longer because they just don't have- Jen: They're not self sufficient. Allana: Yeah, you don't know how to cope without somebody micromanaging you and telling you what to do all the time. And then when people are like, "Make good decisions," you're like, "I don't know what that means." Because you have no. Jen: Yeah. Allana: Litmus test for it. So it's, it really is, you know, when people say early childhood is so important, it is the foundation for your child's entire life. And if you can't start trusting them when they're four with little tiny responsibilities, how are you going to trust them when they're 16, 17- Jen: Right. Yeah. The other thing I learned from you Allana that I wanted to say was about this bored thing. Cause I think that's the next thing, right? So, okay, your kids are playing alone, but they come back and they're like, "I am bored." I learned this from you in your group. You said it is not your job to entertain your child. And I, so that's just what I say to them. Now they come to me and say they're bored. I'm saying "That's not my job to find something for you to do. Like you, go find something to do." Allana: You are not a clown. You are not the family cruise director. Jen: Right. Sometimes I'll say, "Here's your options. You know, you can get out the coloring stuff. You can go out and jump on the trampoline" or I'll give some options to "Go get your bikes, go down to your friend's house, see if he wants to play." But I tell them all the time that "I am not here to entertain you. That is not my job." And that's been such a revolutionary thing for me too, because I, you know, you feel the pressure around that. Allana: Well, exactly. And that comes again to that pressure of they need to be enriched 24 seven if we want them to be smart. And that the only person that's available to enrich them is me so I have to be constantly engaged with my child and it's just not true. In fact, it's damaging. Jen: Right, right. Lauren: So I have my one and a half year old, like, he'll go play by himself, like, no big deal. But my five year old has always been, she wants to play with somebody. Do you have any tips for like training that'd be like you can, like, she'll go play for a little bit but it's, it's just she's completely different than my one and a half year old and she seems to only want to play with me. Jen: Or what about an only child? Like people that have one child? Allana: Only children I find are actually the best at entertaining themselves because they have no expectation. Like, even my older son is super good. He's really good at playing by himself because he had to, he had nobody to play with. My younger one is not so good at playing by himself because he's always had big brother being his cruise director. I actually find only children are usually very good at playing by themselves. It's not usually such an issue with them. There are children who are just, they're extroverted. They take energy from being around other people. Whereas introverts, that's expending energy, right? So it's a difference in what we find stressful. And so for kids then that's typically how I find kids who are extroverts is when they're like, they always want to be with someone. I'm like, "That's because that refills their tank. That's actually calming. Jen: Interesting. Allana: Versus children who are spending energy. So for them it's actually more calming to have people around and to be engaged with people. And these are the people who when they're in their 20s want to live in those houses with like 40 other people and they're like, "This is fun." And you're like, "No, that's stress. Stress." Jen: Annie, sorry. Annie's been waiting. She's got a question. Annie: No, no, no, no. Jen: She'll try to shut us down, I know it. Annie: I'm giggling because I am an only child and like- Jen: Oh right. Annie: But also, but I'm also an extrovert, so I grew up in a house where, and this might've just been a reflection of my mother and father who both worked full time. And I know that they were just tired when they came home from work, but I always got to have friends over. But I grew up, this supports kind of what you're saying. I grew up in a neighborhood where my, you know, I had three or four best friends within a block of, and we would just skip through the yard to get to, cut through yard backyards to go to the other person's house. And it was like, you just come home when the street lights turned on. That was like our guide and I was, you know, that was probably fifth or sixth grade, but that was there, you know, get on your bikes and you just go, you, you, and, and as long as you're home, by the time the street lights come on, like, we're good. Jen: I'm at the point where I'm like, when my kids are hungry, they'll come home. Like I trust. I've come to trust it. And because you're building this relationship, right, you give them more boundaries and more boundaries and then you as a parent, you trust. You know, it's always a little, once you give them a little more, then it's another trust thing. But then, you know, I've built, like, in our neighborhood with my three kids, we just, there's a lot of trust there with my kids now. And maybe I do, maybe I have my kids have more free reign than some of my neighbors, but I have trust there and I know my kids will get hungry eventually and they will come home and we just, it just works. Allana: Totally. And even like people will say to me like, how can you let your five year old go down the street? Aren't you scared he's gonna get hurt and not be able to tell you or you know that somebody's going to snatch him? First of all, my child is usually low jacked with a GPS. So we do live in 2018, these devices exist. Jen: Oh, you actually have a gps on your son? Annie: I actually have a gps on my son. It's the size of about a quarter or a looney. Jen: What do you wear? Can you tell us about that? Where you put it, how you? Allana: Yeah, so it's just I have, you know, those, tags that they put on merchandise in stores so that when you walk out, if you don't pay for it, it'll beep and flash and all that stuff. So those have a pin that need to be removed with a magnet. Right. So I have just a little fabric pouch. GPS goes in the pouch and it gets pinned to his, he's usually wearing cargo shorts. So we put it inside the cargo pocket and we pin it in there so he can't lose it. Nobody can take it off of him unless they removed his pants. And- Jen: And that's connected to your phone? Allana: It's connected to my phone. It doesn't track him. It just tells me where he is, where the gps is in that moment when I go to look at it. So I can tell if he's, and it's accurate to about 20 meters, so I can tell if he's in the general area that I expect him to be in. It also has the ability to send an SOS. So he just pushes on it and it'll alert my phone that he needs help so then I can go find him. Jen: What brand is this? Could you share that with our- Allana: Yeah, it's called a Ping gps. Jen: Wow. I am getting three. Allana: It is awesome. I love it. There are about 80 bucks and then they cost about five bucks a month US to run. But you can't get a cell phone plan- Jen: Look at Lauren writing. Taking notes. Lauren: Ping GPS. Jen: Lauren lives on a beautiful acreage with a huge, that's why she was asking about the fencing and stuff for kids. She always posts on Instagram these beautiful pictures of her back- Lauren: Snow covered. Jen: Yeah, it's November, but it's gorgeous. So, these would be very handy for you, hey, for your- Allana: Yeah. Jen: Country kids. Allana: It also takes off a little bit of that, you know, CAS call pressure- Jen: What if? Allana: Everybody's so scared that somebody is going to go, "You don't know where your kid is" and you're going to go, "You're right. I don't." Whereas if somebody comes to me and says, "You don't know where your kid is," I can go "Actually, he's within 20 meters of-" Jen: Right, right. Allana: The whole like, and even, I was talking about this on my personal Facebook page where I was sharing that No Child Left Alone Study with just with my friends cause somebody had asked about it and my aunt was actually like, well, like she was the perfect example of where you're not judging something based on the actual risk factors. She was "Never be too careful and the world is a dangerous place." And I was like, but it's not based on the statistics, based on the information we have, it's not. Jen: Right. Allana: We were talking about it because as you said, you know, we always give them those incrementally larger responsibilities. My five year old has wanted to walk to the bus by himself in the morning for school, for months now. And the other day he said to me, "Mommy, please, can I have the responsibility to walk to the bus all by myself?" Well, I can see his bus stop from my front window. It's literally two doors down. Our neighbors all know him. My neighbor who lives beside me is on maternity leave so she's watching him out the front door. She's always texting in the morning like "Good morning," I'm being watched. So I know she's watching him too and she's one house closer to him and I was like, I really had no reason to say no to him other than people who don't know you might think you're too stupid because you're too young. That's not a good enough reason for me. So I let them walk to the bus by himself and one of my neighbors took offence and called the bus company and was like, "I don't think this is okay." And they called me and I was like, "That's their problem." Jen: Right? Totally. Good for you girl. Look at you go. Allana: He's, you say, and it's again, we're, I'm pretty sure the directives we get next year are going to be rewritten because their directive saying that children need to be supervised at the bus stop. I'm like, that literally means they need to be watched. And I was watching him. It doesn't say they need chaperones. So we need to start kind of advocating on the competence of our children too because so many people are so quick to say, "Well, they're five, they're stupid" and no, like you know what your child is capable of and even what they're incapable of and nobody knows your kid like you do. So if you genuinely don't feel like your child can handle walking to the park by themselves because they don't have the awareness of people around them. They're not able to walk on the side of the road. Like I didn't just send my five year old to the park, we walked to the park together for many, many times, almost the entire summer. You know, I would send him to the park and I would stand at the end of the driveway and watch him walk to the park and then I would follow him with his brother. And we would do the same in reverse and like, again, you work up to it so you have to know your child's competency level before you, you try and give them a responsibility, right? Annie: I find it really inspiring and encouraging to listen to you Allana. Like just own your choices even with some pushback from spectators or neighbors or family because I would have, I think that that's something that I get a little nervous about too is, like, my kids, my two oldest run the neighborhood and I really don't, like, I trust them. They've haven't violated my trust. Knock on wood, I have no reason to second guess them that they're going to come home and they're going to be where they are and, but I am always like, what do other people think? Do other people, like, know that like they're okay and that we've had these talks and like there's just this fear of judgment or fear of like getting criticized and then they- Jen: They think you're a bad mom. Allana: Or that I'm just lazy. Jen: It comes down to that in so many situations of decisions we're making and Annie and Lauren and I talk about this around nutrition all the time, right? So it's like you're scared. Do they think I'm a bad mom? Like it's just this constant thing. Allana: And it's that moral judgment again, right? Like do they think that I'm being, that they're doing this because I'm lazy? Does that make them think that they're at a greater risk than they actually are? Annie: I just want to sit on my couch sometimes, and like, don't move. Jen: I do.The thing is, and this, I mean you see it too, like, if you want to take your kids to a park and sit on your phone, I'm like, do it. And I see these posts on Facebook. They're like the mom who just sat on her phone or her kids had to play by themselves and the child was shouting, "Mom, watch me." And the mom didn't look up. I'm like, the child will live, like- Allana: Our parents didn't do that for us. Jen: No. And sometimes it's all the mom has in her day to just be chilled out. Like I had three kids in four years and we lived overseas. So no family and in New Zealand, a lovely thing about New Zealand too is that all their playgrounds are gated. So, and you can't get out. So I could literally go in and just sit and just Facebook or read or whatever, just ignore them. And that was the only time I had and I'm all the power to ya, girl if that's what I'm on. If I see a mom with- Allana: On her phone and I got in it last summer with the mom, cause I do the exact same thing. I bring my laptop generally and I will tether to my phone and like work at the park so that my oldest, my youngest kid run around and ours has a fence but it's not a closed off fence. So I mean if they want to, they can escape. I've walked the perimeter with the many times we've talked about what the boundaries are. If my little one, I've showed him there is a gate, it's open, but that means it's a doorway and you need to stay inside the park or we're going to have to go home and he wants to play. And every once in a while I'll just shout out like "Cubs, where are you?" because we call them the bears and they'll go, "Here, here!" And I'll go, "Great!" And I don't even look up as long as I can hear them I know that they're close. And this woman was like, "Excuse me, do you know what your son is doing?" And I looked up and he was climbing and I was like "On the play structure?" And she was like, "Yes." And I was like, "We're at a park." That's what he's supposed to be doing. And she's like, "But you didn't know that you had to look." And I was like, "That's generally how sighted people determine information. Yes." She was so angry because I didn't have my eyes glued to his butt the whole time. Jen: Oh this busy bodyness is just killing us. Annie: Yeah. Allana: Kids don't need us to be in their face 24 seven. They need the space to play. And in fact, if you're playing with your kid and you're not into it, it removes all benefit of play for them. Both, all the people who are playing something need to be in a place state in order for the play to be beneficial. One person or group that isn't enjoying the play removes all the benefits of play for every single person in that group. So if your kid is forcing you to play trucks with them and you're like, "Oh my God, when is it nap time, I don't want to be here." They're not actually getting the benefit of you playing with them. Jen: Yeah, that's so interesting. Allana: So it's better to find something that you actually enjoy doing with your child and do that so that you're both in a play state, it's a frame of mind. It's not an action. Jen: Brene Brown has in her parenting book The Gift of Imperfect Parenting. They sat down as a family and made a list of things that fill everybody's cups and found the common ones and then that's what they focus their family time around now. And I thought, I thought it was such a good idea, right? Like it's mind. So Brenay Brown said it's mind numbing to play board games for herself and so she's just done. She's not doing it anymore. I was like, "Wow, it's so nice to hear someone like you give me permission to not do these things that I don't like doing with my kids. And I don't, I don't do things I don't like with my kids anymore either." Allana: Like I swim with my kids. That's what I enjoy doing. So we go swimming once or twice a week and we get in our mommy and kid time and that's great. Other than that, I'm like, "Please go do something else." And they're like- Jen: Raise yourselves. Allana: "How are you running a business at home? Mostly by yourself. Two little boys at home." And I mean, my oldest is in JK but he only goes three days a week. And I'm like, because they play by themselves. They go, I feed them breakfast, then I'm like, "Okay, play time." And they go and play in the basement and I'd go work and then they come up when they get hungry and I feed them and the little one goes down for a nap and the big one goes downstairs and play some more and it just gives you so much more freedom. It's actually better for their brain. Jen: And you're happier as a parent, right, having some time. And I guess before we wrap this up, I want to, you know, I just, I guess it's to, it's nice to let parents know that there is detrimental effects to your child by over supervising them, right? So just saying like there's measurable detrimental effects to these kids. Allana: Children who are closely supervised during their play will hamstring their own play. They won't allow themselves to go into a full play state because they're anticipating being interrupted or corrected. Jen: Oh interesting. Allana: So if you are constantly supervising your child's play, they probably aren't getting the benefit of their own play either. Even if you're not playing with them because they're anticipating having you go, "You can't do that. Don't use that that way. That's a firetruck, not a helicopter." And they're not allowing themselves to go into that fully immersed play state where all those benefits of play, all the problem solving and executive functioning skills and all that really get used in that play state. They keep their play very, very surface level when they're being supervised closely. Lauren: That's interesting because I find myself, I can't not correct when they're in view. So I put them out of view. I'm like, "Go in the playroom and play because when you are doing this, I cannot help myself but say stop it." Jen: It's like when I bake with my kids. I, like, can't handle cooking or baking with my kids because I, I just am like, "Don't do that. That's wrong. You're going to break it!" Allana: My mom's a pastry chef and God bless her, she can and I'm like, "Okay, that is your thing, Nana." She is totally into the whole cooking thing. And you know he got all these little, like, real knives and stuff, but they're small so that he can handle them. And the other day we were making, just chopping up potatoes for like roasted potatoes for dinner and he was like making these, like, really, like, random sized chunks. And I was like, "Okay, you're too," Jen: You're like twitchy about it. Allana: One inch cubes, not two, you're holding a knife and you're doing well. You're not killing yourself. Annie: Oh, that's awesome. So a lot of this is, I mean, it's not just about retraining kids to do this. It could be about retraining yourself too, or both or both depending on what you're kind of used to and what your goals are. And, but either way, I mean, just to summarize, this is good for both sides. Both parties, both parents, caregivers and kids when they have unsupervised specifically outside, but unsupervised play. So- Allana: Absolutely. And so many parents, so many moms express that guilt to me cause they're like, "I feel bad making the play by themselves. I feel bad that I'm not engaged with them. I feel super guilty." And it's like, "This isn't about you. This is about them." And it's, yes, it benefits you as well and that's nice, but this really is about them. This is for them. And it takes that guilt away. You don't have to feel bad for making your kids play by themselves. It's good for them. Jen: I want to just kind of leave us with this vision. I'm going to tell you something that really struck me when my kids were younger and was an eye opener moment for me actually. And I was watching, I was in a hard place with motherhood, right? Like these three kids under five, oh my gosh, under four actually. And I was watching The Good Shepherd and it's an old movie that takes place in the fifties. It has Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie and there's this scene where Matt Damon, he's coming home at the end of the day and all, and he's walking up to the house. It was a well researched scene and this is not even what the scene was about. It's just something that I noticed. The moms were all grouped together chatting in one person's front yard and they were all smoking as they would be in the 50s and kids were running everywhere. And I like had this pain in my chest when I saw it because it reminded me of how lonely I was and how parenting must've been so differently back then. Different back then. And not just that, I think moms are more lonely now. It's that kids are more lonely now in a way too, right. Because we are very isolated inside the homes and yeah, I just quite, I really quite crave are return to that and I feel like we've kind of found it in our new neighborhood and like it's just easier and simpler and yeah. Allana: I think, I think once we realize that what children do naturally is, there's generally a reason behind it. We don't tend to trust kids in what they're doing. We want to, we think we know better, but children know what they need and they'll do what they need. And once you can start to trust your kids that way and realize that what they're doing, whether it's a behavior, even if it's a maladaptive behavior, even if it's like what they're playing, if it makes no sense to you, children are doing things for a reason. There is never a child that is doing something just because they feel like it. Like there's never not a reason behind something that a child does. And so when you can trust that and trust that your child is doing what they need, it's so freeing for us. And it does allow us to go back to that, you know, children are allowed to be rambunctious. They're allowed to get hurt, they're allowed to be unsupervised. And you know, people keep thinking, "Oh well, you know, lots of, you know, the good old days didn't exist." Well, no, but we can bring them back in a modern way that is safe and comfortable for everybody. It doesn't have to be the way it was in the fifties for it to be beneficial. Jen: Right. We have tape and our GPSes. Allana: Exactly. That was a hard thing for me because I was like, I have a Bluetooth tracker on every, on my keys and my wallet. Even on my car. I have ev

With a focus on business development, sales and marketing, David is a strategic problem solver who has held several C-level and executive positions in organizations across a number of industries including Food Service, Consumer Packaged Goods, and Technology.  David’s experience includes, President/CEO at Kingsmill Foods, partnering with organizations such as, Tim Horton’s, Nestle, Kraft and Second Cup, Chief Strategy Officer at ChannelAssist, leading programs for HP, Rogers and Toshiba, CEO of XMTrade.ca and CEO of OtolaneSoft Corporation, both leading mobile online auction platforms for auto dealers and founding Sorger & Company Inc., a consulting practice with clients including, OTEC Research/GP8 Sportwater, Teaopia (acquired by Starbucks), XELA Enterprises and MTY Group.   WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE: The role of technology in the success of Domino's Pizza   How David sold his first business for $100K within one week of graduating from college  The deadliest mistake salespeople make 4 business trends shaping  our future today SHOW NOTES [00:24] Intro [01:22] Welcome David [01:39] Business success stories that inspire David [01:51] Success of Domino's Pizza  [03:28] Leveraging the technology [04:23] Starting his first company [05:58] The meaning of ecosystem [07:27] Talking Instead of listening [08:23] How to engage prospects  [10:35] Favourite Sales failure [10:53] Building trust [13:11] Food service, retail, CPG and automotive [14:01] Kingsmill Foods [15:46] Stories that excite David's customers [16:47] Personalization [17:36] Future trends [17:56] Smooth commerce [19:52] Challenges facing today’s sales leaders [20:37] Technology [21:20] Time [22:26] The art of storytelling [26:08] Contact info [27:42] Outro   SHOW TRANSCRIPT Ed Bilat: David Sorger, welcome to the show. David Sorger: Thank you, Ed. Ed Bilat: It's a pleasure to have you. I can't wait to catch up on the stories. We had a great meeting back in April. So thank you so much for coming to the show today. But before we start, let me ask you our traditional question, what business success stories inspire you and why? David Sorger: The one that's most relevant to me based on what I'm doing currently would be Domino's success story. Ed Bilat: The pizza place? David Sorger: The pizza place itself and I'll explain to you why. Approximately seven years ago they were on the verge of bankruptcy and they made a very bold and inspiring decision and that decision was to become a technology company first and a pizza company second. And they claimed that they don't have the best pizza. They claim to this day that they don't have the best pizza, but they wanted to make sure that they would appeal to obviously the growing new demographic that wanted the convenience over anything else. And so they shifted completely and became a technology company and made sure that any way you want to order Domino’s, you could order Domino's. And as of last February, they overtook Pizza Hut to become the number one pizza company in the world. So a company that goes from the verge of bankruptcy to the number one pizza company in the world by doing something that no one would have even thought of doing, which is deviated from what they were known for, making pizza, and pivot to being a digital company that actually built technology and pizza was only the vehicle to showcase their technology. That story is extremely inspiring to me. Ed Bilat: Interesting. And you would think pizza is pizza. Better ingredients, better pizza. David Sorger: You would think so. In the days where that was the only factor, I would tend to agree with you. But I think this speaks to how businesses are evolving, how we need to leverage technology or any of the tools that are provided to us in the current state and future state to ensure that we capture the audience that we need to make successful decisions and impact meaningful change. Ed Bilat: Very cool. Very cool. Thank you for sharing this. So let's turn the spotlight back at you. You've been dominating several industries. The food service, retail, CPG, all of it were the technology components and the automotive dealers. So how did you even get into the entrepreneurial/sales world? David Sorger: If I really want to go back to how it all started. I was in university doing a degree in kinesiology and health science and also studying business at the same time. The first thing I decided to do was to open up an actual company that just went around. I would sell to small, medium-sized, even some corporate businesses and go and set up their workstations, the elbow pads, the Gel pad to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. I would go and set up workstations and give them some small exercises to do some stretches and the proper way to sit. Things of that nature. Ed Bilat: That was at least related to your field of study. Right? David Sorger: It was. But the life lesson comes in this format. About three weeks before I was going to graduate, a gentleman approached me and asked me to buy my business. He said he really liked the concept and at the time he offered me $100,000. Obviously being at that age, I thought I was rich and I couldn't sign up fast enough because I thought he was crazy and out of his mind. A little over a year later, I believe it was 13 months, he sold the business for $1.4 million. Now when I think back about what I could have done differently, given my level of expertise and business acumen at the time, not very much. I mean, if I think back, I think, maybe I should have sold 80% for $80,000, but I had dollar signs in my eyes and I was able to get out of my school debt and I was able to have a little bit of cushioning in my savings account. And so that's what inspired me. That was the beginning of my understanding that I really had to not just have great business ideas, but actually have an ecosystem around me, people that I could engage with to ensure that I could actually have a complete offering and have the knowledge base required to really grow businesses and see where there were additional opportunities. So it really started off the path to what I believe is my entrepreneurial career and I am a serial entrepreneur. Ed Bilat: Absolutely. David Sorger: I've started and sold three different companies to date and obviously working on a couple of additional initiatives right now. So it's not for everyone. Everyone thinks entrepreneurialism is easy. Everyone thinks sales are easy and that anyone can do it. But I truly believe that there is an art and a talent to it. And having to go from making nothing three months in a row to having a great month and making $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 or  $40,000 or whatever a great month means to you and then going back to making nothing again. It's difficult when you're starting things off, but it allows you to… Ed Bilat: Yeah, absolutely. And as my wife says, “whatever you do, entrepreneurship should be spelled with a T at the end.” So that's true. That's very true. It's not for everybody. So with regards to making the first sale for your new business, is there any particular most common mistakes you have seen that salespeople do? That entrepreneurs do? David Sorger: Yeah. They talk instead of listening. I think that’s the best advice that I could give anyone. you really want to engage whoever you're selling. To lead the conversation initially would be my advice. You have a very short window to be able to understand exactly what kind of day that individual is having. Pitching to even the same person at the same company on a Monday versus a Tuesday versus a Wednesday may be completely different and serve different outcomes based on what kind of day that individual is having. Have they just lost the biggest deal of their life? Have they just been yelled at by their manager or by their president or whoever? You really need to understand and really develop that relationship and provide that value and make that individual feel like there's value in dealing with you before you actually start selling your product. Ed Bilat: Hmm, that's a piece of great advice. How do you get them talking? David Sorger: This is the social element of it. Simple questions. ‘How was your day?’ Maybe being aware of certain body languages and seeing if they've had a difficult day. Asking if everything is okay. I've had sales calls in the early stages of my life once I realized that the person wasn't having necessarily the best day, I stopped selling my product completely and wanted to really engage them in ‘how are you doing?’ ‘what kind of a day are you having?’ ‘Is Everything okay?’ ‘Is there anything I can do to help you?’ If you develop that relationship and that connection right away, then when it is time to talk about your product than the recipient is far more likely to be open to what you have to say and to engage with you on a business level with whatever you're selling at any given time. Ed Bilat: Yeah.I absolutely love this advice. And as Confucius said many years ago, “you have to give first before you want to get something.’’ David Sorger: I couldn't agree with you more. So I think everything… this advice was given to me actually by one of my sales mentors, “if you are offered with an opportunity that you either don't have time for or that is not necessarily in your wheelhouse of what you are or are not capable of doing, then you should always recommend the solution to that individual. Introduce them to someone else, tell them that you're not the right person for this, but you have someone that is the right person for this.” Because in my opinion, what it automatically does is it develops a huge amount of trust and when they call you up and you have the ability to engage, then price never becomes a factor. They will always trust you because you had the wherewithal to understand that you couldn't best serve them with something and so you allow them or introduce them to someone else who could, which takes a lot for anyone to do, to give up revenue, to give a business and to say that there's someone better suited out there for what that particular need is at any given time. Ed Bilat: Very interesting. Very good advice. I'm sure that came from experience, like, do you have a favorite sales failure or sales situation which was a complete disaster, but in the end, it gave you all the great experience you're sharing with us today. David Sorger: Yeah. Well, I can speak to that exact last point. Early in my career, there was a philosophy that I had, which always said yes, if you can't do it, find the people who can do it. And unfortunately, if you take on that philosophy, then it can cause you more problems than it's worth because then you're accountable. You become accountable for this situation. It's not about, you know, you recommending someone and them assuming full accountability. You become accountable. So you're managing projects and you're managing situations that you don't necessarily have the expertise to manage and it ends up getting you in a lot of trouble. You end up missing deadlines, you end up providing a product that isn't ideal or isn't what was agreed upon, and that just ruins your reputation. So you're much better off to just understand what you're best at and surround yourself with that ecosystem like I said, of people that are really good at the things that you're not good at. And so then you have either the capability of creating a solution together and knowing who drives that solution, depending on which part of the business is being discussed at any given time or which part of the project is being discussed at any given time. But yeah, no, it's definitely trying to just, you know, accept any offer that comes, it was the catalyst to me understanding that it goes much further beyond that. Ed Bilat: So would you rather say no more often? David Sorger: I think it's less than saying no, it's more of, this isn't what I do best and I only would ever recommend what I do best, but I have some people in mind that I'm going to call on your behalf because you know, you can trust me and I'm going to recommend someone to you that can help you with this particular situation. Because what that results in is an individual having a conversation saying you need to call David or you need to call Ed because they're going to be completely transparent and upfront with you. They'll let you know if they're the best person for the job and if not, they're going to help you find the best person for the job. You will become a confidant to that individual and they will always give you the business without even questioning the pricing of the things that are in your area of expertise. Always leverage your network to be able to help them with anything that is outside of your expertise. Ed Bilat: Very cool. I love that advice. So thank you for sharing. In terms of the industries that you have picked; the food service, retail, CPG, and the automotive vertical, all of it with the technology component. What was the rationale for picking those? How did you get to those industries specifically? David Sorger: I wish I could give you some if I'm being honest, some really thoughtful and cogent answer. But again, I had a mentor early on in my life that once told me that everyone has a product or a service that they need to sell to an end user. The same business principles apply. And so if you take a step back and really think about that because when I was asked to go into food service by actually the president of Kingsway foods at the time, I said to her, I know nothing about food service. At the time I was building infrastructure, again, not my previous industry. I was at the Granite Club building the personal training and fitness consulting section of the actual club. And I was building that out and we went from 3 trainers to 35 trainers in one year. She watched that happen. And the reason she gave me that advice is that she said, all I want you to do for my business is the exact same thing that you have done for the Granite Club. And I didn't really understand it at first. But then when she said that everyone has a product or service that needs to be sold to an end user, it made me realize that I'd like to give it a shot. A lot of the fundamentals about selling are the same. It's really a widget that you're replacing. Of course, you have to be brought up to speed and understand the points of difference that you're offering versus your competitors. But that applies to every industry. So every single time I came up against, oh well I have to educate myself on X, Y, or Z, I automatically correlated it back to something that I had done before. And I was fortunate enough to grow the company considerably and I became President/CEO of Kingsway foods after my first two years of being there because I took a 60-year-old company that was relatively flat in growth and showed them a tremendous growth. Ed Bilat: Congratulations. David Sorger: Yeah, well for every success story there are war rooms that are associated to them. Ed Bilat: So in all of these verticals what type of stories excite your customers and partners, what have you seen? What drives excitement? David Sorger: Personalization. So you always need to be relatable. So the one thing that I would recommend for anyone is, I'm sure everyone has been to these sales pitches that you know, people talk about. And this especially applies to me now in technology. If I go into a room full of CEO’s, non-tech people and I don't even consider myself a technology person to be quite honest with you. So if I go in and I start talking about different programs, different technology stacks and this and that, and it's not something that they can relate to or understand, typically you'll see a lot of head nodding and then you'll walk out of the meeting thinking you did a great job. No one had any questions that they wanted to ask you. Everyone was looking at you and was smiling and you'll never get another phone call. The reason for that is because no one ever understood what you were pitching to begin with. So you have to personalize your content based on your audience. If you are in an audience full of tech people, then absolutely bring your chief technology officer with you or anyone else and allow them to have a conversation at a technical level. If you're not, then you really have to sell the 50,000-foot level idea and concept. In layman’s terms, to be able to make them understand exactly what they're actually either buying or what they're subscribing to or what they're committing to or engaging with you on. That's imperative. So I think that personalization, knowing your audience, personalizing it to the audience is extremely important. Ed Bilat: Yeah. I'm just looking at the notes after our meeting in Toronto. I asked you a question about future trends and I have two notes here. The first one, everybody wants full customization and the second one is nobody wants to cook anymore. David Sorger: Well, that's through my business today. I'm president of a company called Smooth Commerce. We have a very unique customer engagement platform that you can actually self-export either via mobile or web and the mobile or the building app component that we do. The native Mobile Apps is probably the one that we're seeing the most traction with. Thank you very much, Starbucks. Thank you very much Domino's pizza for that. But even if you take a look at the simple things like how they're building condos in downtown Toronto now, there are no kitchens in your condos anymore. You have a wall. It is literally a wall. And in that wall, it is not set up to prep food or anything. Everyone wants convenience. Everyone is busy. Time is the most valued commodity right now over anything else. So people are willing to pay premiums as long as they're getting the service and the convenience. And really the quality, unfortunately, while it can be a differentiator is, in my opinion, moved down a little bit and convenience has taken over. I mean, we go back to what I told you inspires me about the whole Domino's pizza story. I don't think Domino's is the best pizza personally. There are a lot of great pizza places out there that I believe have better pizza, but they are by far the most convenient. And they make it easy for you and they're constantly reminding you whether it's via Facebook, whether they're telling you they're going to deliver with drones, whether they're telling you to order through your Google home, they're always on top of the latest cutting edge technology to make sure that they're satisfying anyone at any demographic. Right? So whether it's your traditional person that wants to phone in and that doesn't have the technology or whether it's the newest person that's coming through it that wants to order through Google home, they give you the option to do whatever you want. Ed Bilat: That's interesting. My next question, what challenges do you see facing today's sales leaders? Would you say that technology and convenience are becoming more important than the actual product itself or service? David Sorger: Yeah. So that's a great question. I think technology without benefits has a lot of downsides to it. It actually can detract from that personalization, from that relationship building. And a lot of the times in a very competitive world, in any industry, everyone's selling roughly the same product for roughly the same price and really the biggest point of difference end’s up being the relationship that you can generate with whoever you're trying to sell to and technology in some cases has taken a little bit of that a way, you know, the ability to really personalize. No one wants to talk on the phone anymore. Everyone wants to communicate via email. No one wants to meet in person anymore. Everyone wants to communicate via webinars and things of that nature. The idea of people listening to podcasts a decade ago would have been laughable. Now it has become one of the major or definitely one of the ways that at least the younger generation engages with any kind of interest that they have. Right? Technology is a little bit of the challenge. Then the other challenge is just quite honestly, time, everyone is in a rush. Corporations are reducing headcounts and the expectations of what people are to do or to accomplish in a day or what they're accountable for is increasing because of all these efficiencies because of all the competition out there. So I think the combination of those two is probably the biggest challenge that we're going to face moving forward. Ed Bilat: Thank you for sharing this. For our podcast listeners, storytelling is the key theme so we'd like to see how you can use storytelling to keep that human component, which allows you to open up and tell the relevant stories and at the same time create the empathy and hear the client’s needs, right? So like how do you keep a human connection open and use the technology, is it like digital storytelling? Like is that the new wave if the technology component is so important? You’ve been in so many different verticals and been so successful, what does the art of storytelling mean to you? David Sorger: It's exactly what you said actually I did. It's bringing the human element to it. So, you know, I do quite a bit of public speaking. I’m a keynote speaker at a lot of events. When I first started doing it, you would think you would go up there and you would present based on the topic that you were given. I always love being in the spotlight. My wife jokes around, she says, I was born with a siren on my head and a microphone in my hand. But I realized, and it really was disturbing to me that, I'd see people in the audience glazed over, not interested, talking to each other. And I really took that personally and it wasn't until I started sharing personal stories, things that actually happened to me that would somehow relate to the topic that I was actually presenting that I really saw a significant increase in engagement with what I was doing. People want to know about you. If you're the person standing up there on the stage, it’s important to talk about industry statistics or where certain things are heading, but you always have to tie it back to a personal experience. If you can get out of the traditional way of talking to an actual product or an actual situation that you're trying to address or anything else that you've been asked to talk about and you can constantly break off and draw a parallel to something that's happened in your own life to support what you're trying to say in the presentation and you'd do it relatively frequently, you'll keep that audience engaged and I think that's really impactful. You know, you get to talk about some crazy things that might've happened to you at the same time as talking about the topic that you were asked to speak about and tie the two together. It engages people up more. It promotes additional questions. After you've done your presentation, people come up to you, they feel more connected to you, they feel more engaged with you. So it really is about, I think, drawing it back to your own personal experiences because you never want the person in the audience saying, Oh, what does that guy know about what he or she is talking about? Right? They’re just reading from a script or reading from a PowerPoint. So I think bringing in real life events that have either happened to you or friends or anything you can draw from your personal life. That's really the key to storytelling. When you look at even comedians today, your favorite comedians.  Comedians are always talking about things that have happened in their own lives. That's how they begin the script. So why wouldn't we as salespeople do the same? Ed Bilat: Yeah, that's a great approach, right? That's what makes you more believable. That's what creates empathy. Because in the end, people want to see people, not, just another blah, blah, blah, like in how many sales presentations you have been through, you just sit there for five minutes and thinking like, why do I have to listen to this for another hour? Like, who is this clown? Like, have you ever sold anything in your life? You just read a couple of books and came to preach. Right? David Sorger: Exactly. It's very obvious to me when you can tell someone is just regurgitating information that they've read versus someone who's telling a personal story as you said, that has a much deeper meaning and connection and then relating it to whatever the topic is. Ed Bilat: Absolutely. That's a piece of wonderful advice. So it's been a wonderful interview. Thank you so much, David. What would be the best way for our listeners to connect with you or learn about the company and learn about the technology components you’re driving so hard in so many verticals? David Sorger: Yeah. The best way would be to go to our website, which is www.smooth.tech or email me directly with any questions, my last name Sorger@smooth.tech. That would be the best way to connect. We are re-doing all the marketing and everything on our website, so for those who want to quickly go on the website now and then come visit us, hopefully, a month from now you'll see a significant change in how we're positioning our product and what we can do to serve the industry and the verticals that we're trying to address. Ed Bilat: Excellent. Excellent. Thank you. We'll make sure to include all the links. I'll include your LinkedIn profile as well. And It’s been an absolutely wonderful experience, particularly from your practical experience because you've lived through this and that's what makes it very valuable. David Sorger: I have lived through it and you know, those who are people’s people will be unbelievable salespeople if that's really the direction that they want to go to this. So much of this is still the human element, like what you said, so much of the opportunity is bringing that human element back, especially in this digital world. If you can be creative even in a digital way to bring that human element back then I think that's the key to a lot of future salespeople success. Ed Bilat: Absolutely. I agree with that point 100%. Thank you so much again for coming to the show. David Sorger: My absolute pleasure and thank you for having me. Ed Bilat: Thank you.  

Imposter Syndrome is a well known condition in IT circles, but it exists in religious contexts too. On this episode, Leon, Josh, and Doug look at the ways in which imposter syndrome manifests in both spheres, and how our experiences combating in one area may help in the other. Listen or read the transcript below.   Imposter Syndrome is a well known condition in IT circles, but it exists in religious contexts too. On this episode, Leon, Josh, and Doug look at the ways in which imposter syndrome manifests in both spheres, and how our experiences combating in one area may help in the other. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone. It's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it, including where you can get a digital or print copy over on AdatoSystems.com. Thanks! Kate: 00:25 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion (or lack thereof). We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life? This is technically religious. Leon: 00:49 impostor Syndrome is a well known condition in IT circles, but it exists in religious contexts too. On this episode we're going to look at ways in which impostor syndrome manifests in both spheres and how our experiences combating in one area might help the other. I'm Leon Adato. And the other voices you're going to hear today are Doug Johnson. Doug: 01:07 Hello, Leon: 01:08 JAnd Josh Biggley. Josh: 01:09 Hello. Leon: 01:10 All right, so I think the first thing you probably ought to do is define impostor syndrome. So who wants to take a crack at that? Josh: 01:18 Well I would, but I'm not qualified, so... Doug: 01:22 All right. We're there! Leon: 01:24 We just, we hit it and we hit the ground running. Doug, that means it's you. Doug: 01:30 All right. I'm just reading a definition-definition from good old Wikipedia." A psychological...", uh, sorry. "Impostor Syndrome is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts his or her accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve all that they have achieved. Individuals with impostor-ism incorrectly attribute their success to luck, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent than they perceive themselves to be. Leon: 02:09 Right. And again, this is something that IT folks, many IT folks struggle with quite a bit it is an aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect. And I first heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect a long time ago, and my immediate thought was, "oh my God, that's me." Meaning that, you know the report that I was reading talked about people who thought they were really good at something. And in fact they were so bad that not only did they not know they were bad, but they looked at people who were good at something and they thought they were bad at it also. So they not only misunderstood their own skill, but they would rate other people lower at it who were demonstrably good. And I thought, "oh, what if that's..." It was my first thought was, "what if that's me?" Doug: 03:03 And of course, there's your impostor syndrome, right? But the classic example of that is, I read a study somewhere that 80% of all people think they're above average drivers. Leon: 03:14 Okay, Josh: 03:14 I mean, I am. Doug: 03:17 And that's the point. 80% can't be above average. New Speaker: 03:21 Even, even if the numbers weren't funny everyone's demonstrable experience says that that's not true. There's, there's another, so there's a Jewish aspect of this, which is a Jewish mysticism talks about a group of people called the Lamed-Vav-niks. Lamed-Vav is simply the number 33. And these 33 people are truly righteous and it is on their behalf - for their sake - that God does not destroy the world and start over again. And if even one were to cease to exist the world would immediately be destroyed. It wouldn't be good enough. And the corollary to that is that if you wonder, in the back of your mind, "I wonder, maybe, maybe I'm one of the lamed-vav-niks?" that is proof that you're not. So there's, there's just all sorts of layers to this idea of impostor syndrome and who has it and how to deal with it. So let's dive into this. When does this occur? When have you seen this in it context? When have you seen the Dunning-Kruger or the impostor syndrome really manifest. Josh: 04:31 I mean when I first started to apply for jobs as a remote working... and I didn't know that I wanted to be remote working... but as a remote working monitoring engineer. Boy, my world got real shaky. I was, you know, I'd come out to Atlantic Canada to work for a company, but it was a small company and I was horrified at the thought that a Fortune 25 company would want to hire me - and hire me sight unseen - and oh my, you know, I just like, "I can't do it. There's, there's no way..." I think that when, when you aren't in that comfort zone of what you've always known in your career, and for me it was making that leap into being a 100% remote worker, you don't know what you're going to do. You feel like the exception to everything we'll talk about later, but I think that there's power and embracing that exception, but yeah. Starting new jobs, starting a different type of job, becoming some sort of, um, you know, change in, in your career trajectory, whether you go from being an engineer to being a manager or vice versa. Those things are, yeah. For me, huge challenges. Leon: 05:46 Okay. So change, like when you, when you're going through major, changing in the status quo, that's when you're more liable to doubt your ability to actually do it, even if you've proven time and time again that "I do this all the time." Josh: 05:58 Yeah. And that goes back to the art. One of our previous episodes where we talked about the consistency of change. Now I just listened to... re listen to that episode today but the only consistent thing in IT is change. Therefore, if I was successful last week, then I can't be successful this week because IT has changed so much that I can't possibly do it. So then if you know, just reinstall it, that impostor syndrome right back into everything. You do it, it's, yeah, welcome to my life. Leon: 06:27 Oh, good. GOTO 10. Josh: 06:28 Yes. Doug: 06:33 Yeah. I mean, on the, on the topic of jobs, I mean, there's nothing like it. I love the IT jobs. "We're looking for a rock star contributor! We're looking for people with a passion to go ahead and change the world." And I'm like, "Really? Um, how about if I'm kind of good at what I do and when things need to be solved, I figure it out. But I don't know whether I qualify as a rockstar." I mean, I used to be a disc jockey. Rockstars bust up hotel rooms and stuff. They don't necessarily do good things. Do you want a rock start working on your IT software? I don't think so. Leon: 07:09 Right, right. "Rockstar" used to be a pejorative, like "You don't want your child to date a rock star, do you?" That would... you don't want to bring home that! Doug: 07:19 But now everybody wants... and you're sitting there going, "Am I a rock star? I don't think I am." I'm good at, I mean, I've been doing this for what, 30 some odd years. I can't tell you how many... I never, you know, clients never leave me. They always get upset when I need to move on to something else, you know, but I don't feel like I'm a rock star. Leon: 07:40 Right. And one would argue that when you talk to folks who are in that business, they don't feel like it either. So, you know, that's, once again, we're right back to impostor syndrome. Okay, so that's one place. One thing that I've seen it is when you're either giving a conference talk, about to go onstage and give a conference talk; or just thinking about submitting for a conference talk, impostor syndrome hits with a vengeance. "Who am I to stand up in front of those, you know, 30, 50, a hundred, 300 more people and tell them anything? Like, what, what gives me the right to do that?" And not to mention the fact that you're painting a big old target on your back and front, but that's one of those places. And a corollary to the conference talk is working at a convention, working the booth at a convention because then not only do you wonder, like people are coming by, it's like, yeah, "I worked for..." Josh to your point, "I worked for a fortune 20 company and we have 9 million devices and I set up things with using, you know, bash scripts and, you know, can you give me a better way to do that?" "Um, no, no, I can't. I don't, I don't think so." But it turns out that I can! Now you're feeling sort of impostor ish and they're coming up with a "prove it, you know, prove it to me. I dare you" kind of attitude. So it just makes things even more complicated. And, um, and that gets even more difficult if you are any sort of minority, you know, people of color, women, women of color, etc. Destiny, who is another of voice you'll hear regularly on this podcast, I remember one of the first shows I went to with her, there was about 10 of us in the booth and somebody came up and was talking to one of my coworkers, another guy and he was pointing over at Destiny's way and he says, "Well, she's not... she's not really like... You just, you just hired her to be in the booth, right? And the guy, without missing a beat he says, "Oh, I think you absolutely should walk over to her and ask her technical questions and see what happens. I think, and I'll watch. In fact, I'm going to film it because this is going to be funny." And he didn't quite get it and sure enough he went over to Destiny and she just eviscerated him. Not, I mean, with a smile and a chuckle and just technically took him to the cleaners. Because that's Destiny. But the fact is that having to deal with that does cause you to question like, "do I really know what I'm doing?" You know, every person who walks up to the booth is another challenge too... you know, another question mark in your own mind. Like "Maybe I've been, maybe I've just gotten lucky so far. Maybe I haven't had real people ask me questions." You know, on the third day of a 27,000 person conference, you still have those doubts. It's amazing. Okay, so that's, that's the technical side of it, I think. But since this is Technically Religious, where does this occur in a religious context? Does this occur in a religious context? Do we have impostor syndrome in our religious life? Doug: 11:07 Oh, you bet. Leon: 11:10 Okay. Doug: 11:11 Well, I mean, in the Christian world, we have prayer warriors. These are people who can call down fire from heaven and can get people healed and just, you know, and, and they're just, they're put up on this, uh, alter. I was gonna say pedestal, but honestly, we're in church, so, there are these wonderful people and you just sit there going, "I can't pray that good... I don't... I... You know?" And, and the reality is they are some of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet. They don't raise themselves up that way, but other people do. And it just makes you feel like, I'll never, I do this, Leon: 11:54 I'll never measure up to that. Wow. Doug: 11:56 And the answer is, and it has more to do with my ADHD than anything else. I just can't sit there that long. Yeah. So TeaWithTolkien, the Twitter handle for the person TeaWithTolkien, said the other day and it caught my eye. She said, "Me: (praying one time and remaining mostly focused.) I'M A MYSTIC!" Like, just that one time. And it's like, "Oh, I see the whole world now!" Just because I can do it one time. And you watch other people who are just praying with such sincerity and wiwth such focus. Like every time you're like, "yeah, no." Doug: 12:42 Wish I could. Doesn't happen. Josh: 12:45 That's weird. I thought Mormons had this... well I thought we had the market cornered on really awkward prayer. So semi annually, there's a huge conference that is telecast from Salt Lake City. It's called the General Conference and it's two days, 10 hours of instruction. And the prayers that open and close these meetings, they're legendary. They, uh, we, uh, we often make fun of the people who say these prayers to open these meetings because they are so eloquent. But it's not like, "oh, that was really good and sweet." It was, "oh my goodness. That was horrible!" So I laugh, I laughed Doug because when I hear those people pray, I think, "Are you kidding me? Like, do you pray like that at home? Because I think you're just putting on a show. I think you're faking it till you make it." Leon: 13:45 Wow. Okay. And I'm holding off on the fake it till you make it, because I have very strong feelings about that, but... Josh: 13:51 OK, we'll put it aside. Leon: 13:52 I was not expecting where you were going with that story. That it was bad. Although we were talking about study sessions, learning, and the number of times - whether it's IT or religion, when I go in thinking, "I don't know anything about this topic and I'm really excited because this person is going to teach me all this stuff" And I walk out and like, "I could have taught that class. I could have done that." So I think sometimes we do fool ourselves. Now in Judaism there's a couple of other aspects to this. First of all, there's the language, Hebrew. So if you're not good at reading Hebrew, and I am not, then, being asked to go up and lead the prayers... Now it's not only lead, not only have a level of eloquence or music quality to it, but also in this language, which has a lot of sounds that English never makes and never should make, and do it quickly. So there's that piece. And then also even in learning, there's, I mean, if you took the Talmud and you read one page a day, it would take you seven and a half years to get through the whole thing, start to finish. Just to give you an idea of the volume. And that's the Talmud without commentary. Then there's commentary. Then there's more and more and more and more. And there's people who have vast swathes of it memorized and, not only quoted but analyze it and dig into it and, and you can't, you just can't fake that. Like there's no, "well you gave it a good shot." Like there's just nothing you can do about that. So again, feeding into the impostor syndrome is when you see a whole community of people, where many, many people are fluent in these ways. I was like, "Yeah, I'm not. I'll just sit here and watch." You know, that's, that's another thing that I think contributes to religious impostor syndrome. Because so many people grew up with this. Now, what I will say, and this is an interesting aspect, is that the judgingness that I feel and I have seen in IT contexts, in a Jewish context is not always or often there. I've watched, you know, 10 11 year olds get up to give a lecture on a piece of scripture and, you know, very - not simplistic - but a very basic reading of it and a room full of rabbis, you know, 300 years of combined experience represented in the room, all listening, very attentively, all focused, completely asking pointed questions, not above the child's level but asking questions. "So when you read this thing, you know who said that again was that, was that this rabbi or that rabbi?" you know, just clarifying things and really giving their full attention to it. And the result of that is that the kid walks away 11 feet tall, having had that room's attention. Feeling validated and justified. Not a whiff of being patronizing or you know, just like, "Yeah kid, just say your piece and, and get outta here. Cause we have important things to do." Never that. And that has that stuck with me that Judaism has that feeling of anybody who's going up there, you know, you give respect to the person, you give respect to the Torah, that really what's being represented is Torah, and that gets our utmost respect, regardless of who's bringing it to us. You know, that's sort of, that's the counter... That's the antidote to impostor syndrome, I think. Josh: 17:39 I do like that idea that that's the antidote. I oftentimes will hear people quote "out of the mouths of babes" as a justification for the things that children say that are insightful, as though we're somehow surprised that children are insightful. And I think more often than not, we need to embrace that idea that children are insightful. I know that we're getting to how do we solve this idea of impostor syndrome? But maybe because I regularly feel as though I'm an impostor in a vast majority of the places that I engage in. I love to instill that impostor syndrome into people. I love to bring people who, for all intents and purposes, have no business being involved in a situation because I do think it democratizes the approach to that problem. I know we've talked in the past about this idea, this challenge that we had or that I had at work, which was to figure out how to make a very large, uh, annual sum of spend go away when nobody believed that it could go away. It was "the cost of doing business." And what we did is we brought together this group of people who really, they were impostors, they weren't... some of them were not IT people. And we asked great questions. And in the end we achieved an 87% cost reduction for something that nobody thought could be done. So I love ... and I'm going to steal that, Leon. I'm going to steal that mindset of "let's get the least among us, quote-unquote, "least" (air quotes", and bring them and let's learn from them. Let them teach us, because obviously their insights aren't clouded. And I know we're solving this impostor syndrome thing, but I think it's actually something we should just be grabbing onto and embracing. It seems to have worked so well in my career. Leon: 19:46 And Judaism emphasizes that the, the highest praise you can get in, in yeshiva, the Jewish school system is, in Yiddish is "du fregst a gutte kashe". (You ask a good question.) That's the highest praise you can get. It not, "oh, that's a really insightful answer." Answers are easy. Like there's plenty of answers, but asking good questions, that's the part that gets the highest praise. So I think that that, you know, to your point, finding people who can ask good questions regardless of what their background is or where they come from is more valuable in both an IT and in a religious context, but certainly in IT context. You mentioned a couple of times "solving it." So one of the things that people talk about solving impostor syndrome in IT contexts is "Well, just fake it till you make it." Like, just pretend you know it and soon enough you actually will know it. You'll be the expert. That bothers me because it reinforces in the mind of the person who's doing it, that they're faking it, that they don't really know. I don't know what your feelings on that are. Doug: 20:54 I'm just not fond of the concept of faking it, period. I mean, fake to me is not a positive description of something. If you say somebody is being fake, it's never good. And the problem is an awful lot of people think that faking... It is, I understand that it's "fake it until you make it," but a lot of people just stop right at "fake it." You know, that's good enough. I don't need to put in the work to go ahead and make this happen. So I'm not fond of the expression. I understand the concept, but I think the faking it part really has a bad spin to it. Josh: 21:45 So when, when I served as a LDS missionary in Las Vegas, this whole idea of "fake it till you make it" was something that we said to each other quite often. Whether you were a struggling emotionally or spiritually or intellectually. People who had to learn new languages (And I was not one of them) often, it was just "fake it." And now as an adult, I look back, and I realize how truly dangerous that was in a religious context. You take young men and women. When I went, it was 19, was the earliest eligibility for men and 21 for women. And you put them out into a situation where they are on their own and you tell them, "you just fake it." And you try to be successful. And if you're not, you just pretend like you are. Now, remember these missionaries are going into people's homes and they're teaching them about the fundamentals of Mormonism. And you just want them to fake it? That is, to your point, Doug, that's super disingenuous. Right? They should not be out saying, "Hey, I know that this is true." if you don't know that it's true. And I encountered friends and colleagues as a missionary who didn't know, didn't believe in the things that they were saying, and some of them did the right thing and they laughed and some of them stayed out and ultimately got assimilated by the Borg, for lack of a better term. Leon: 23:19 And I think, in an IT context, um, it ignores the, the real power of the words., "I don't know." I think all three of us have spoken on this podcast and elsewhere about how powerful it is personally, but also how powerful it is in a team. And for a company, for people to be comfortable saying, "Yeah, I don't know that off the top of my head," or "I don't know that at all, but I'm going to go do some research" or whatever it is. I think that's powerful. What I have found though, in terms of, again, solving for the problem - solving for x where x is equal to impostor syndrome, is, the word "imagine." Now imagine is different than "fake it." Imagine is personal, it doesn't mean "go play pretend," which is similar to fake it. What I mean is that if you feel stuck and you feel like "I'm not equal to this problem, I don't know how I'm gonna deal with this." Take a minute and close your eyes and imagine that you did. Imagine that you knew how to approach this. Not "imagine you have the answer" because if you did have the answer, you'd have the answer. But imagine that you knew how to approach this and what do you see yourself doing? What do you imagine that you would do next? To find out how to proceed, how to address the problem, how to go about fixing it, whatever it is. Right? And imagination, as we know from children is a really powerful tool that we can use. And that helps people get unstuck. You know, to Doug's point, you know, you don't want to fake, you don't want to imagine outwardly. You don't want to just be somebody who pretends to know things and hopes nobody notices. That's even worse for people who suffer from impostor syndrome, but using imagination to get past that, "Oh, I couldn't possibly write that CFP for a talk." "I couldn't possibly give that Bible study class." Well close your eyes for a minute. Imagine that you could. Imagine that you were expert enough to do that. What would that look like? How would you, what would you do next? Doug: 25:20 I've used that multiple times. I used to teach continuing education at the college level and I'd come across a topic that I knew was really, it was interesting and it looked like it was going to be a big thing. So I would write up a course description and I would submit the course description. Keeping in mind that at this point I knew nothing about it. And sometimes, because this was back in the days when it was all print stuff. So I had at least six months before this class was going to happen at the earliest. And I had at least four months from the time it got accepted or didn't get accepted because of the lead time. So I'd come up with this idea, I'd say, "if this course existed, here's what it would teach, and I bet there'd be a really good teacher for it. Oh, that might be me!" And so you would go ahead and I'd submit it and they'd approve it and then I would have to study like heck, because I knew I had to teach this thing, but it's not faking it, exactly. If somebody had said on that day that I submitted it, "Do you know this to... could you teach this tomorrow?" The answer would be no, but six months from now I can. Leon: 26:28 And that's, and I think that's where impostor syndrome hangs a lot of people up is, you know, "hey, I'd like you to do this." "Oh, I can't do that." Well, it wasn't asking to do it now. I was asking you to do it three months from now, a year from now. Are you interested in doing it? And some people implicitly hear that and some people hear when that's actually not true. I really do need you to do this right now. And think that's how personality lays out. So that's how we address in IT. I guess the question is, flipping back to the religious side, does it translate to religious life? Now, I already mentioned that in some contexts that's not true, right? You can't pretend or imagine you know, Hebrew or that you've learned all of Talmud or whatever. If you don't know, you can't make it up. But everyone is a learner. And in fact, one of my big frustrations when I became more religious was that when we were studying text, when I would go to a class, the only verb people would use is learn. "I have a person that I'm learning with." "We're learning this piece of text." "You just have to learn it." And I finally got fed up and I said to an advisor, you know, my rabbi, I said, Why not 'memorize', not 'analyze', not 'read' - any of those other words? Why is the only word we seem to be able to use learn?" He said, "You're missing the point. Everyone is using it in the Hebrew context. In Hebrew, there's only one verb: limud. And it means "to learn", but it also means "to teach". It's the same verb. And that's not just like a cute little happenstance. That's on purpose. Because when you go in to a class, you may think you're the one who's teaching when in fact you're the one who's going to be absorbing information that the other person is giving that you didn't even know they have. That maybe they didn't realize was relevant, and vice versa. You may be going to a lesson thinking "I have nothing to offer, I'm just going to be consuming," and all of a sudden you realize, "Oh, but I do have life experiences or insights or things to bring to the table that the other person just had never considered." And so it, it's, it's intentionally a bi-directional verb. You can't fake knowing something, but at the same time you never know whether you're going to have something to contribute. You can't predict that either. And so you shouldn't hold yourself back from something simply because you just assume you have nothing. Doug: 29:00 We've all had experiences where somebody in the group who's just sitting there, all of a sudden they get this epiphany. This light bulb goes off in their head, they get excited and they share it and then the whole group just comes alive because of this little thing that this person, they just saw it at a completely different way that all of a sudden just opens your eyes. And it can be, it's happened in Bible study. Scripture groups has happened in IT teams where we're trying to solve a problem and then it's just like, it can come from the least expected person there, but if they get that little insight, it can just energize the whole group. Josh: 29:39 When when we see somebody who is struggling, we have two choices, whether we're talking in a religious context or within an IT context, or really within the greater part of humanity. And that is we can see that weakness and tear them down, or we can hold them up. And I love that idea of holding someone up. Now, my Old Testament knowledge is not great, but I believe that there is an instance and it... was it Moses who needed his arms held up? And I think that that is what I want to be. Moses certainly didn't feel as though he was qualified to do what God wanted him to do. And there was a time when he needed others to hold him up. And so if we see that, how do we solve impostor syndrome? We solve it by when we see it, we don't say it, but we act as though it exists and it can be eradicated. I love, I love that imagery. Leon: 30:48 It's a really good point because the three people involved was Moses, Aaron and Joshua, and in that battle, whenever Moses had his arms up, the Israelites would win. And as he got more and more tired, his arms would start to fall down and the Israelites would lose. And he realized that that was the case. And so Aaron and Joshua would hold his arms up for him. But throughout the Torah cycle, the narrative, in different situations, Moses upheld Joshua or Aaron upheld... they would each hold each other up. So, to your point is that, maybe I'm the one who's doing the supporting today with the knowledge that my team is going to have my back, is going to support me later on and help me do that. And I think that's a wonderful image. And again, maybe I don't feel up to it, but if I know that the team has my back when I falter, they're going to be there to help in some way so that I don't fall flat on my face. Destiny: 31:54 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect to us on social media. Leon: 32:08 This podcast is going to be great! Doug: 32:10 Well, it'll be pretty good. Josh: 32:12 Uh, maybe okay? Doug: 32:15 Well if I don't mess it up too bad.

Are we in the Matrix?  Well, An MIT professor says our whole experience could be a simulation thing. So we'll get into that today Are Amazon workers to your Alexa conversations? Well if they are it is for only max 30 seconds. They don't have context. I get it. It may be an invasion of privacy but could they tell anything about the context. We will delve into this more today Why are conservatives (or so-called conservatives) saying we've got to start regulating the internet?  I will be covering the reasons why today. Is China selling high tech tyranny to Latin America? And it's true, and it's scary and we will discuss it. Then there is Malware that is attacking our Critical Infrastructure sites.  Today. it's on our list to discuss.  We've talked about autonomous cars, and about insurance and liability for them before? However, the bigger concern is DATA!  Did you know that a car can generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour, and as much as four terabytes a day? So, who's getting that data?  Listen in for my take on that For all this and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors. Airing date: 04/13/2019 Government Regs Killing Internet - China Selling Tyranny To Venezuela - Russian Malware Infecting Plants Craig Peterson 0:00 Hello, everybody Craig Peterson here. We've got a lot of security and technology to talk about today, including one of my favorite topics, you might not be aware of this. But wow, you're going to love this.  It is from an MIT professor. And he agrees with me about this whole simulation thing. So we'll get into that in just a few minutes. I was watching the news this week. In fact, it was yesterday on Friday. And it was kind of crazy because they were talking about oh, my gosh, Amazon workers are listening to what you're telling Alexa and the, you know, invasion of privacy and all this other stuff? Really? Really? I don't think so. Okay, so we'll talk about that. What's really happening there. Your car? We know we've talked about autonomous cars are about insurance before? Where's the liability shifting? Is it something that you really have to worry about? Well, how about all of the data? It's saying right now, this is an article from Roll Call, that a car can generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour, and as much as four terabytes a day. So who's getting that data? And what does it mean and what's going to happen? We've had more and more calls for government regulations over the internet. Now, we've seen a lot of those in Europe, we're going to talk about what's happening right now in the US. We've even got so-called conservatives, who are saying we've got to start regulating the internet, because, of course, they feel their voices are being squashed. So we'll talk about that. China selling high tech tyranny to Latin America. This is from the Washington Examiner, in kind of an intriguing headline. And it's true, and it's scary. We've got another piece of malware out there. It's called Triton. And now it is infected a second critical infrastructure site. This is a bad, bad thing. And one more that's in my show notes for this week. And we may not get to all of us on the air today, right. So make sure you visit them online, you're going to have to go to http://CraigPeterson.com. And you can subscribe right there to my weekly show notes. You get all of the top articles that I have found during the week, right there in the daily or the weekly newsletter comes out Saturday morning. Craig 2:43  But this particular one's interesting because 16 months ago, researchers were reporting and unsettling escalation in hacks, targeting power plants. This is from ArsTechnica.com. And we talked a little bit about that before. And, you know, we know about some of the compromises that happened, for instance, in Iran that was conducted by the US and Israel. But what's unprecedented in this attack is the use of advanced malware that is targeting the site's safety processes. So it's shutting down all kinds of things that are going to help keep the plants safe. And when you think about gas field pressures, reactors, reactor temperatures rising, it gets very, very nasty, you know. Some of this stuff is designed to automatically close valves to really mess you up. And when we say mess you up, we mean to make that whole nuclear power plant go into a meltdown. Craig 3;48  So what's happening with this? There's some researchers over at FireEye who are saying that this same security firm, by the way, discovered Triton, and it ties it to Russia, that they've uncovered an additional intrusion use the same malicious software framework against a different critical infrastructure site. So I guess the big question here is, Does this mean that countries like Russia, for instance, are using malware as kind of a first strike opportunity? Right? It's hard to trace, it's hard to prove that it's them that that attacked you. Right? How can you prove it? Craig 4:30 Well, frankly, you can't in most cases, it just has fingerprints, like the Russian language, or this is attacks we know, that have previously come from Russia. Those are the types of things that we've got to watch out for. And we now know that Russia has been involved in some this hacking. We know China has been involved in some. North Korea has been involved in some to let me tell you, it's a different world. And the next war we have is going to be a much different war, that's for sure. Craig 5:03  Let's talk about this China story here, where China is selling some high tech tyranny to Latin America. This is, as I mentioned, the Washington Examiner. And this is very, very concerning. Because what we found now is China has been working with these companies like Huawei, which we know about, it's been a very, very big deal. And Huawei's devices have been banned from US military bases, and from others, but it's also saying this ZTE, is tied into this. And we know about the concerns with 5G and ZTE and all of the stuff that's going on all this stuff they're doing. And we're getting really concerned now because what's happening is that China is taking these tools that they've developed in order to monitor their people within China and really displace the United States. They're putting all of the surveillance equipment all around the US and the Western Hemisphere. Well, not so much in Canada, although, obviously with 5G rollouts, we do have some of that Chinese equipment going up there. But they're supporting right now Venezuelan strong man, Nicolas Maduro, the current president who's really clinging to power, after the western democracies, I think all of them said, Yeah, you got to be out of there. And recognize the opposition lawmakers, the interim president, China has been exporting technology that helps a South American socialist to monitor and strong arm the Venezuelan people, which is what he's been doing for quite a while. So here's an example of politics being really promoted and expanded the power base due to some of this technology. So think about that now. China is really now intertwined in the Western Hemisphere and things that are going on. And they're able to surveil, monitor, surrounding the US, that's all part of the Asia Pacific influence that they've been building here for a while. And it's very concerning very, very concerning.  Craig 7:24 Maduro, by the way, paid ZTE as part of this, but to build a $70 million database and payment system for what they're calling a homeland card. Now, what's concerning about this is this so-called homeland card, that ZTE sold the technology to Maduro for is designed to be used to control access to food, to cash, bonuses, social services, a social credit system for a political control mechanism. In fact, it's even used to track your voting. So they know how you voted, it's recorded right there with the card, it goes into the database. This is all part of their smart card thing. And if you don't vote the right way, what's going to happen? It's just like in Chicago, right? If you don't pay the local Chicago thugs in the party that's in control in Chicago, you know, all of the criminal activity that's been alleged there for years, much of it's been proven, in fact, you end up with potholes in your street that won't get fixed, because you've been speaking out against the local candidate for the town, for the city, for the county, for the state. It's just it's still so corrupt in Chicago. It's unbelievable, how bad it is there. Well, it is much, much worse in Venezuela using these Chinese technologies that the Chinese have been building. Have you seen the Black Mirror episode, for those that are sci-fi fantasy, it is a series out of UK, it's a really, really good one. And the whole idea, the whole premise behind this particular episode is that every time you do something, you get social credit, or you get credit taken away from you. And this poor lady just ends up in a downward spiral and, and has no credit left, right? It gets to be really, really bad. Well, in China, now, they have facial recognition technology all over the place throughout all of the major cities. If you jaywalk, you get points taken away, because the computers know who you are. And now you don't have the social credit. And if you don't have the social credit, because you've done things that the socialist, communist government doesn't like, you cannot vote, you can't get on an airplane, you can't get on a train even they block you from those if you don't do what you're told to do. And if you're not politically correct. Free speech is just going down the tubes worldwide and very, very scary. So let's talk about friends speech here for a minute. Craig 10:01 Here's an article from the Daily Mail. And course they are ahead of us in some of this stuff, right? Free speech is outlawed in the United Kingdom. Now, it's legally outlawed in Canada, you cannot say certain things. You can't even ask legitimate questions, legitimate political questions. You cannot have a dialogue about certain things. You know, if you question about somebody's birth sex, and now they say, well, you have to use this gender when addressing me, or you're supposed to go on bended knee to his or her royal highness and request permission to speak to them what's going on? Because in Canada, and in the UK, if you say something they don't like, you can go to jail. And it's that simple. So there is no freedom of speech there. And in the US now, we've got these fascists running around, who are beating people up, threatening people, yelling, screaming, trying to stop free speech rights. And that is the definition of fascism, isn't it? It's a definition of socialism or communism, they all do it. They all try and stop free speech because they don't want the free exchange of ideas because their ideas are right. And the only reason it hasn't worked before is because of what? Well, because the other people weren't smart enough. We're smart, our generation is smarter than all generations that have ever come before us. Right? That is not what they say. So now we're tying technology into this. We're seeing it in China. Big time, big time. And we're now seeing it in Venezuela, as the current president tries to hold on to his socialist powers to control everyone's lives. And of course, people are dying, they're starving, They're digging through trash to try and find food. Right? A socialist utopia, just like the Soviet Union became? Craig 11:57 Well, now we're looking at government regulations. In the US over free speech in places like the public square. Is Facebook, the public square? Is Twitter the public square? Obviously not. But we passed laws in the US that said, Hey, listen, we're going to consider you as a public square, all you have is a faucet. And all of these ideas are coming out of that faucet. And therefore, we are not going to allow anyone to hold you liable for the things that your users say online. And that's the sort of thing that you expect from free and open fair discussions from a democracy, right? You expect that kind of free speech, and you don't want to have regulations or restrictions on the people that are providing those free speech areas, just like the public square. You could go get a soapbox, you could stand up in the public square, and you could say anything you wanted, no matter how crazy it was. Right? That that was the idea of the public square. That was the idea behind the laws that are protecting Facebook and Twitter and, and others online. Craig 13:14  Well, now we found that they are doing various types of censorship, let's put it that way. Google is being sued. And just this week, a big lawsuit was announced, because Google's showing search results that favor them versus their competitors. Now, I gotta say, if you're writing code that's going to give good search results, of course, you have to discriminate against materials that you don't consider to be, you know, up to your standard that people aren't looking at that aren't, aren't popular. Craig 13:52 But if you're looking for an unpopular opinion online, you know, remember, the majority isn't always right. Right? Slavery. The majority of people endorsed it, but it wasn't right. It was never right. So just because of the majority says something should be done. And just because political correctness would lead me to believe that that's what you should do. That doesn't mean that it is the right thing. Well, China's walled off a lot of Western services on the internet, you've heard about the Great Firewall of China before. The UK now is planning to hold executives personally liable for posts on social media that they consider harmful or illegal because remember, there's no free speech in the UK anymore. And this came out in the government white paper on Monday this week. They say this would put the country at the far end of internet censorship and further fuel, what they're calling now this splinternet. This is a term circulated for, you know, more or less a decade here, this gained some popularity recently. And this comes in the tail end of Mark Zuckerberg saying, you know, Facebook's chief, that he wants a common global frame that a framework of internet rules, which is never going to happen, right. Tim Burners Lee, you might remember him, he started the worldwide web's, software. And he came up with what he called a contract for the web that establishes an ethical sense of principles for the internet. A whole lot here. The New Zealand Christchurch mosques, massacre, you remember, this was very recent as well live streamed online. It's a heightened sense of urgency in New Zealand. They just knee-jerked, passed laws within two weeks that change the face of what's happening there. Huge debates in the US and the EU on curbing what they're calling incitement to violence. Now, obviously, you can tie this into, can I yell fire in a crowded theater? Right? There's a lot of things that you could do here. Craig 16:10 In free speech, that would step over lines like that. So how about the line for inciting to violence? What is that? What does it mean? Well, in Australia, there's a law now it's a new one that can jail social media executives for failing to take down violent extremist content quickly. A proposal in Britain that makes executives personally liable for harmful common content posted on social platforms. How do you define this? How do you define harmful content? Where is the line? If someone says, Oh, my feelings were hurt? Is that harmful? Well, of course, it is, because their feelings were hurt. So does that mean we can't say anything that might upset anyone again, refer back to that, that Black Mirror episode of the UK proposal, this is from a White House technology advisor, who's now over at MIT says that it's a very bad look for rights-respecting democracy to do what they're doing in the UK would place the UK toward the foreign the internet censorship spectrum. Craig 17:19 And the UK culture Secretary says, you like that? They got a culture Secretary over there. The Culture Secretary says the proposed laws will not limit press freedom. Okay, so where's the line on the press? Look what's happening right now, the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain. And you have a guy who is now under arrest, who's claiming he is a publisher, right? He published documents that were stolen by two military members, one was a military contractor and one, another military man who was working with secret information. Was he a publisher? Did he help them steal it by providing instructions on how to sneak classified information out? Was he a co-conspirator? There's just so much right now going on. And you know, when we're looking at free speech, I think free speech is almost absolute. Craig 18:23 If it can be shown that something caused physical harm to someone, you know, that's kind of where the my you're right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. Now, obviously, at some point, while that fist is being swung, I'm feeling threatened. Craig 18:42 But where do you draw the line? Well, I think you draw the line at touching me, certainly at hitting my nose. And this is something that the internet pioneer has never really thought about. Remember, I've been on the internet since 83. Of course, it wasn't called that back then. We had different types of networks and things. But since 83, and free speech was always a big deal. We didn't really get free speech until September of 91 online, because it was still heavily controlled by the federal government. Remember it was a federal government research project that funded it, but then they kind of let loose of it in 91. But man, what a world out there.  Craig 19:22  Let's get into this Amazon article right now. I was listening to the news. I was watching a morning news program, in fact, this week, and they were talking about how bad it is that Amazon Alexa workers are sitting there listening to you. Okay, so that's one level. And then they said, Oh, and on top of it now, they won't call the police if they hear something that might be bad. Now, I like it. I like that, right. And I understand the first part. And I like the second part. Because you know, the second part, you don't have the full context, you've got a 3o second snippet. You know, somebody wakes up that that Amazon device, or that Google device, or whatever it might be. You wake it up, it records for up to 32nd, sends it up to the cloud, processes it, and then execute your command. So they're listening to max 30 seconds. You don't have context. You don't know what's going on. And you certainly don't want to destroy people's lives over a vague suspicion. Right. So I like that. I really like that. It's just like as when I spent 10 years in emergency medicine, we were all mandated-reporters. But we did not have to report unless we thought there might be something going on that's reportable. Craig 20:52 So I think that's a pretty straightforward thing. I think that's pretty simple to look at and understand because it didn't think that something was reportable, then I never reported it. And so different people had different bars, right? How high that was. Now, let's go to the first part of this where they were very upset that Amazon employees were listening in. Craig 21:17 It's very limited when Amazon employees are listening in and they're not listening to all of the audio coming from your house. So listening to at most that 30-second snippet, when you told Alexa, that you had a command for her. That's it. That's that simple. And what they're doing is they're using your audio to better the speech interpretation, better the machine learning, so that it understands how people are asking questions, what sort of accents they might have, how it works. For instance, when I talked to Alexa, I get great responses, because she understands me. She understands me speaking, hopefully, you guys do too. But my wife has issues with it. I have a son that has issues with it. And that has to do with your cadence, your clarity of speech, right, enunciation. And how do you improve your software? You improve it by testing. How do you test software, that design that's intended to be able to process human speech and understand what it's going for? Understand what the goal is of that human that's asking you to do something? Well, this is the only way to do it. Right? They don't have these employees that hear the audio don't have your name. They don't have your account number, they have no idea who you are, they don't have the email address. All they have is a snippet of sound, and how the Alexa voice processor processed it. So they can listen to what they can see was Alexa correct in parsing much you said? And was it correct in understanding your intention behind what you said? So it's pretty simple, it's pretty straightforward. Don't get too freaked out about this. And there have been court cases where Amazon has been asked for and did provide under court order, the audio that has been captured. But remember, it's very limited audio. And unless that device has been hacked, and you know, it hasn't happened in at least a couple of years that I'm aware of. If it's hacked, it is possible to make it so it's recording. But the way the hardware setup in that Alexa, it cannot record you, unless that little light is on. It's a physical hardware limitation that they purposely built into it. So it's not as though they can just turn on the microphone and life is good. It's like on your MacBook Pro, the hardware that when your camera is active, that light comes on. It's all designed in one piece. So unlike many Windows machines, you can't just turn on the camera and not have that green light come on. The same thing with Alexa. Now, if you have physical access to the device, there may be you know, there's always ways right ultimately, to get into that. Craig 24:22  Man, we are almost out of time. Three technologies that could create trillion dollar markets over the next decade. I got that from Barons, but it's up there on http://CraigPeterson.com. Very interesting. And they talk about some genetic stuff and quantum computing and material science. You'd find that fascinating, I'm sure and I have it up again along with all of these at my website http://CraigPeterson.com. And if you go to htttp://CraigPeterson.com/radio-show, you'll see my show notes, but you also get those in the email if you signed up. This is the one that I really am interested in. Craig 25:03 Are we living in an illusion? Did you notice back in 99, there were three movies that came out that were implying, inferring, opening our minds to the possibility that we are living in a simulation. And I had a guest on my show about that time. He's just a regular engineer. But he had done a lot of thought a lot of research and put together a book that was specifically addressing that question. Very thick book, very convincing book. And he did all the math behind it. And basically, what he said is that, eventually, any civilization will get good enough to be able to have a virtual reality that's indistinguishable from the real thing. Craig 25:52 And the odds are that within 20, 30 years from now, that'll be true here. You'll be able to plug yourself in one way or the other and live in whatever worlds you want to. Have a vacation in Fiji and just enjoy it and not have any jet lag okay. That's coming. So if that happens, basically he said the odds are millions to one that we are living in that timeline that invented this virtual reality. Craig 26:28 We may be all running this, this whole world, this universe that we perceive around us, is millions to one likely to be a simulation. We are not likely to be that very first time through. And what's interesting is this ties into a lot of religions as well. Because again, God created the heavens in the earth. He did it in six days. Oh, maybe he did. Maybe we're running in a simulation, and on a computer in somebody's basement? Who knows what we're doing? And are we all just artificial intelligence programs? So this is fascinating. When I get this book, Rizwan Virk, I may try and get him on the radio show. He's a computer scientist. Video game developer, he leads PlayLabs at MIT. And his book's called The Simulation Hypothesis. I love it. I love just the mental gyrations you kind of have to go through to think about this and the potential of being a simulation. Craig 27:33  Well, I appreciate everybody being with us today. We will be back next week. And course I've been releasing podcast now, six days a week. Most weeks, it's you know, it's between two and six. But most recent six weeks we have you know, It's A Security Thing where we're talking about current recent security problems businesses have had what could have been done to prevent them what you can do, and then also just talking about all these great articles that we send out in our show notes. So have a great day. We'll see you next week and thanks for listening. http://CraigPeterson.com for more. Bye-Bye   ---  Related articles: Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa Mysterious Safety-Tampering Malware Infects A Second Critical Infrastructure Site Rise Of The 'Splinternet': Experts Warn The World Wide Web Will Break Up And Fragment As Governments Set Their Own Rules To Filter And Restrict Content China Selling High-Tech Tyranny To Latin America, Stoking US Concern Are We Living In A Simulation? This MIT Scientist Says It’s More Likely Than Not 3 Technologies That Could Create Trillion-Dollar Markets Over The Next Decade Your Car Is Watching You. Who Owns The Data? --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

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

3 Reasons Facebook Ads Aren't Working Welcome back to another episode of Chiro Candy. I've got to tell you guys, this has en a little bit bittersweet. I've really missed doing these episodes, and at the same time, I have not, if that makes sense. For several years we did these every Tuesday, 5:00 AM Central Time a new episode came out. And I was unbelievably consistent with getting these done. And as our business started growing, and we got more and more clients, and the stress of just life, and work, and stuff began to add up. My wife would ask, what are some things that are stressing you out? And one was checking email. And she's like, well, look, why don't you have Renee do that? Which is one of our team members that helps out on the Facebook side of things. So she really became my assistant. Not only does she work in the Facebook side of the business, but she started checking my emails, and organizing that, and letting me know, hey, which ones I need to respond to, and so on and so forth. And that really helped. But we went, in January of this past year, of 2018, which is the same month we did the ChiroCandy Cruise, we were at about 60 offices we were working with doing Facebook. That's not including all the offices, and doctors that we help write books and stuff for. But just the Facebook side of things, now we're well over 100 offices we're working with. And that happened in just a matter of months, we just doubled in size. And we hired a lot of new staff, and got our staff trained, and everybody's here local. We don't have anybody in India doing this. As a matter of fact, it's a lot of people we go to church with that work in the business with us now. So anyway, we worked on our systems, and our processes, and getting everything right. But I kind of gave myself permission to take a step back from doing the podcast. And I've got to tell you, for me, and this is a little bit selfish, but it was a nice break. It felt good. And we also had some issues. I don't know if some of you guys who listen to the show for a while may notice that we had some issues with the mic. I'd have people email me saying, oh my goodness, your last episode from 13 minutes to 16 minutes, your audio went almost completely silent. I mean, just issues like this. And so, I'd replace the mic, and then the other mic was having issues, and it was just a stress point in my life that I was like, you know what? I'm giving myself permission to just not do this for a while. And then I've been traveling, speaking at different events, and it really has been great. People coming up to me saying, hey, what's going on? I miss the show. And even some big name influencers in the profession saying, Billy, dude, what's going on? Where's ChiroCandy? And so, we had last week's episode with Tabor, which the first episode we've done in quite some time. And so, now we're back. We are going to start doing these more regularly. And I even have a new podcast that I'm going to be starting, that I'm really excited about also. It's going to be a totally different genre, if you will. It's going to be called, The Blessed Entrepreneur. And it's going to be about, God wants us blessed to be a blessing. And the purpose of wealth is to help spread the gospel, and some really cool stuff we're going to be going over. But it's going to be more of an entrepreneur, internet marketing type podcast with a tilt on scripture. And not at all trying to use God to sell anything. That's not it. It's more this mind set that some people have that you're supposed to be poor. That money is evil, and that's not the case at all. You can bless a lot more people when you have money, you can make a greater impact in the world when you have money. But you do that by serving as many people as you can. So anyway, that's going to be another podcast we're going to be doing here, launching really, really soon. So I'm excited about that. We're actually working on the website and stuff right now. But in this episode of ChiroCandy, let's go ahead and get into some meat. Some of the meat and potatoes. One of the things that I've noticed is, some of our most popular episodes are the ones where we talk about directly some tools when it comes to Facebook marketing, and what's working, and what's not working. And today we're going to cover three things, or three reasons that your Facebook ads are not working. Or whenever we talk to offices, and they're like, look, we tried this before, and Facebook just doesn't work. Well, we see the same things over, and over, and over again. And basically it comes down to these three things. The first one, whenever somebody says their Facebook is just not working. And whenever we say Facebook, we include Instagram in that as well. When they say their marketing efforts just aren't working, it's because number one, there's no consistency. And I like to relate this to go into the gym. Or even in your diet and nutrition. All right? So let's say that you go to the gym, and you say, you know what? I'm going to start a new plan. I'm going to get in shape, and so on and so forth. And so, you go to the gym and you work out for a week. And you're as sore as can be, but you really don't see much of a change the next week. So you're like, you know what? Yeah, I went to the gym and it just didn't work. Because you just weren't consistent. Or you just go every once in a while. And so that's one of the biggest things, is you have to be consistent. Or your diet, right? You decide that you're going to eat Paleo, or Keto, or whatever, and somebody does that for a week. And okay, well I really didn't see that much of a change. So it just, yeah, that just doesn't work for me. Well, you just weren't consistent. And you've got to be consistent. It's almost like, I believe it was Jim Rone who used this example, and a flame, you can take your finger and run it through the flame. And it just doesn't hurt you. Right? But if you do it long enough, eventually you're going gonna get burned. And that might be the negative way to look at this. But when you go to the gym and you're consistent with it, eventually it's going to work. You just have to be consistent. Whenever I graduated high school, I think I weighed 155, somewhere around through there. When Rusty and I got married, 22 years ago, I was about 165. In the majority of my adult life, I have worked out, and worked out, and worked out. Now, not a lot of crossfit type head training, more just lifting weights, trying to put on size. Trying to put on some muscle. And now, just muscle wise, I mean, I've got more muscle on me right now than I ever have. And a lot of that is because I have been consistent. For years I've been consistent with it. And so, it's the same thing with marketing. Your marketing, you have to be consistent with it. But it's not just going to the gym, right? You can go to the gym and then look around and say, okay, what am I going to do today? If you don't have a plan, which is the second reason we see people where they miss it when it comes to their ads. It's just not having a plan. Right? They get on there, and they get on Facebook and they boost a couple of posts. Or they shoot a video, and they boost that video, and then they don't do anything else with it. There's just really no plan. And so that's the second thing, second reason we see people. So the first one is, just not consistent. Second one is, just not having a plan. It's just like one of the things that I do is, when I go, when it comes to weight training. And a lot of people do this same thing. Mondays I'll do chest, back. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays I do legs. Thursdays I do shoulders. Fridays I do arms. And then Saturdays I'll do traps, and maybe a few other things that I just kind of want to touch on, do some more cardio. And I'll also do some cardio throughout the week too. But have a plan. And even if I skip for a few days and then I go in, all I do is ask myself, okay, what's today? Today's Thursday. Thursdays I do shoulders. Even if I missed back that week, whatever day it is, is what day I'm going to do. Because that's the plan I've chosen to stick with. So it's the same thing with marketing. You just need some type of a plan that you can be consistent with, and then stick with it. Have a plan, find out what other people are doing that's working, and do that. One of the benefits that we have with working with so many offices across the, not just the country, really across the world. I mean, clients in Australia, Ireland, Peru, South and Central America. We've got clients all over. But the great thing is, is sometimes we will find something new that's working. Whether we get an idea from a doctor, or just our staff is talking with a client and comes up with a new campaign. We try it, and it works. Then we try it with a few other offices, and it's working for everybody. Well, then we get to take it and move it across everybody's campaigns, and everybody gets the benefit of that. So we find a plan that works, and then we implement it across everybody's campaign. So you want to be consistent, and then you want to have a plan, and follow that plan. All right? So that's step number two. And then the third reason that we see people not having good results with Facebook, is they're simply not compliant. How frustrating is that? Whenever you have a patient and they're like, yeah, this just chiropractic stuff isn't working. Okay. Does chiropractic work every time, right? Whether or not they feel it, we know it's working. But what they do outside of your office, you have little control over. Some patients are just not compliant. Then we've had that with clients before. Somebody will sign up, and we'll use some stock images, so we can get a campaign going really quick. And then we ask them for images, some simple images of them with patients, and we give them samples, and so on and so forth. Just use an iPhone, right? If you have to, you can use an Android. But just use a cell phone, take a picture like the ones we send, and get them over to us, and we'll update your account in those pictures we know work better. And then they never do it, right? They just never send that to us. Or we ask for some specific videos. And one of the cool things that we do for our clients, we have some really cool online training that is some unbelievable tips and tricks on recording really cool videos for your office. And if they go through the training, they don't implement any of it, and they never get us a video. And then they say, well, this just isn't working. Well, no, you're not working. You haven't been compliant. We know what works really well. We want you to have the most success possible. We just need you to do X, Y, and Z. Right? And so, when people aren't compliant when you're trying to tell them what they need to be doing, and they just don't do it, and then they say it doesn't work, that can be really frustrating. Just like it can with you, with a patient. So the three reasons we see people not having results with Facebook that they should have is because they're not consistent, they don't have a plan that they're following, and then they're not compliant. So, if you can learn to be consistent with your marketing. All right? One of the things we do, is we like to have offices do videos. Even if it's just a video, a short video, two to three minutes, do one every two weeks. We have some offices that do one a week. Actually, we have some offices that do several a week. And then one of our staff will get on there on Fridays and look over the videos they did that week. Which one is getting the most engagement? And then the next week we'll put some ad dollars behind that, and then we'll rotate it. But one of our offices in Kentucky, as a matter of fact, he was just doing a video every two weeks. And in two and a half months we built an audience of 9,000 people that had watched 50% or more of these videos. And he had only, at the time, only done four or five videos. If you figured every couple of weeks doing a video. But we were able to take that audience of people who know are watching his stuff, and then run specific ads to them, and all of a sudden his Facebook leads went from screening quality leads, to referral quality leads. Because he followed the steps and stuff that we teach. And so that works really, really well. But it's just being consistent. He was doing these every couple of weeks. So, that's one thing. Be Consistent, have a plan, know what you're doing, know what you're going to be doing in the videos on, know what it is you're wanting to offer, and be consistent with it, and then be compliant. If you hear about certain things other people are doing that's working, or if you have somebody like us saying, look, we need you to do X, Y, Z, do that. Follow up and do those things. That's going to get you the best possible results. All right? So, I hope you found some value in that. If you have any questions, or you would like to see about having us do your Facebook marketing for you, you can go to chirocandymarketing.com. That's chirocandymarketing.com. There's a button on there, you can just click apply and then it'll walk you through the steps, ask you a handful of questions about your office, and then allow you to set up a call with me, or one of our other team members, and we'll just see if there's something that we might be able to do to work things out with you. Because one of the best things about our companies, one is our staff. We have some tremendous support. But we also, we're probably the lowest fees you'll find in the industry, for doing what it is we do. And if you refer three people to us, we will do all of your marketing for free. So you don't even have to pay us anything. It's a really great program. But if you have any questions, even if you just want us to talk, and see, point you in the right direction, and your wanting to do all this on your own, still schedule a call with us, and we will be more than happy to just go through a consulting call with you, and give you some tips and tricks that you might be able to implement to get the best results when it comes to Facebook. So, appreciate you guys. And we will see you on another episode of ChiroCandy.

Boom, what's up guys, this is Steve Larsen.   Today we are gonna talk about recycling stories.   I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today, and now I've left my nine to five to take the plunge and build my million dollar business.   The real question is, how will I do it without VC funding or debt, completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer.   Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business. Using only today's best internet sales funnels.   My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.   What's up guys?   Hey guys, thanks so much for tuning into to Sales Funnel Radio.  I was on stage a little while ago, and I was teaching, and there was one question that comes up every single time when I'm teaching script building, when I'm teaching any kind of story-telling, anything like that.   One of the things that always comes across is, "Stephen I don't know what stories to tell that will break someone's belief patterns and make them want to cause a purchase to happen?".   And I say, "Okay cool cool cool, that makes total sense everyone goes through that first of all. So if you're feeling that, don't worry about that."   Second of all though, what you gotta understand is you don't always need to come up with new stories, right?   So this episode is called Recycling Stories because what I want to do is share with you guys how I do that. So what better way to actually teach you to do that than show you actually me doing that. Does that make sense?   So what I did is, a little while ago I actually decided, this is something I've never done before in front of a live group. I've done a lot of funnel building but live script building!   Guys script writing is hard. Just know that it's one of the hardest parts of funnel building overall.   Putting the pages together, that's some easy stuff man. That's easy stuff. You drag and drop, you're done. Script writing though, that's not easy. And so what I wanted to is...   I thought how cool would it be if I actually went and built a script live in front of an audience, and it made me a little bit nervous - I'm not gonna lie -because it's not an easy thing to do.   We'll spend days coming up with one headline, you know what I mean? And so to write a whole script, not just the headline? That was really challenging for me to do that. It was a lot of fun though.   It took me 12 hours. It was in front of an audience of about 75 people, and I built an entire webinar script from top to bottom. The whole thing, top to bottom. And what I was trying to teach them and share with them in this part, I just ripped it out, and I'm gonna share with you guys here.   I'm building the actual webinar slides live. I recorded my screen doing so and walking through and talking through each slide. So that's actually what we're gonna cut over to in here in just a moment.   But what I want you to understand, see and notice is that for a lot of what I'm doing for that webinar - this is for my product - it's called My Funnel Stash...   "Oh crap, wait just a second. Eh, there we go!" (Stephen goes to get something - he comes back with a fake mustache and some red and green sunglasses - He puts them on and continues to talk).   ...I'm doing it for a product called "My Funnel Stash." It's a play on words. It's all the funnels that I've been building, and that I built over at ClickFunnels.   It's gonna sound a little conceited, kay? But no one really else is gonna have the opportunity to sit next to someone brilliant like Russell Brunson and learn right at the feet of a master for that amount of time.   When I left, one of the things that Clickfunnels did which is brilliant, is Russell was like, well I don't always wanna be just the one funnel builder, so they created an internal agency.   I don't know that ever anyone else ever is gonna have the opportunity to do the kind of thing I did. For that reason I feel a little bit of a mantel to share with you guys some of the things that I was doing over there.   Please note, that's one of the reason why I talk so much about Russell Brunson is because I feel a little bit of a responsibility to share with you some of the things that made funnel building successful. And why someone like me, I was building funnels ahead of that time, but the finer points of it that made it actually work and stick.   This is super cheesy I know, but I actually sent out Clickfunnels colored glasses and a funnel stache, stash with the actual stash of funnels that I used to build 500 funnels next to the guy.   What was interesting about this, after doing the amount of funnel builds that I did at Clickfunnels, I need you to know and hear me now: "Funnel building success has very little to do with the pages, okay?"   You can have a funnel that is limping along on one leg and be totally fine, very successful. Completely fine.   Now please go in and make your funnel tweaks, make them good, but if your funnel is only working because of little tiny tips and tricks inside the funnel, then your offer sucks. Right? Your script is terrible. That's just the fact. Take it from a guy who's made a lot of them. Understand what I'm saying here.   So what I need you to get, this is a longer episode, but I'm trying to share with you guys how I'm recycling my origin story in different products, and how that's totally okay to do.   Scriptwriting, that's really where the rubber meets the road. Before Clickfunnels existed, that was the always the most expensive part of building a funnel with a traditional team - because copy is what does the selling.   I can feel my stache starting to fall over here. I'm getting animated, it's like sweating. Anyway, so guys this a little bit of a longer episode, but we're gonna cut over to a segment that I've chopped out where you're gonna see me recycle the same story for different things, and that's totally fine.   My origin story is still my origin story. So if I'm gonna go sell a product over here, or sell product over there, or sell product over there - those are different products, but I still have the same origin story. I can't change my background.   So how do I recycle my story in a way that fits the other things that I'm selling without making it obvious? And so that's what I'm doing. I'm actually script building. I'm live script building, and I'm taking from a lot of other webinars that I've built to go in and rip out different things and elements to fill out the requirements to make a good origin story.   So again, what is that?   Let's wait again, one more moment. (Stephen goes to grab something)   Okay, a lot of chopping in this one. Sorry. I went and grabbed my copy of Expert Secrets. Anyway this one script inside of your origin story is incredibly powerful. And I know this is gonna be a long episode, but just bear with me.   If you guys a listening on iTunes, if you're listening on the podcast, that's awesome, just know that I'm gonna cut over, and you can still listen, but I'm gonna cut over and literally share my screen as I build out the intro section to my webinar script.   This script did 30 grand in the first week with no ads spend and just a few mentions. Isn't that awesome? That's crazy cool. How did I do that? A lot of it has to do with the script. A lot of it has to do with the way that I pre-framed it and how I built the pressure ahead of time.   You guys are like, "Stephen I can't you serious with this thing on." And honestly, I can't either! I'm trying not to look at the screen over here because I look like a freakin' goofball.   Anyway, check this out. Check this out.   The epiphany bridge script, you guys are gonna watch me us the epiphany bridge script in the wall I tell my origin story.   This is what sets the pace, this is what sets the foundation in the buyers minds so that when you tell the three stories, of secret one, two, three, they're actually in a state to receive them. And this is why it's so important, so powerful. Don't jack up your origin story.   So what I thought, how cool would it be if I rip out and just share with you guys. So it's gonna be like 20, it's like 30 minutes, okay? It's like 30 minutes, but you're gonna hear me explain each slide.   You're gonna watch me explain each one of the steps going through the actual epiphany bridge.   (Steve points to his fake "stache") This thing is actually falling off, but I want you to see how important this is. This is funnel building. The other stuff, I'm not saying...   I'm a funnel builder, I build funnels like crazy. I built two more of them yesterday - which is awesome. They're single page ones, but they're really intense, oh my gosh, they were hard.   But anyway I want you to know at the core of it, if you can't do the thing I'm about to share with you guys, man, choose a funnel style that requires very little copy and/or just learn how to do this.   I didn't know how to do this. I got like straight D's in English. Seriously in pretty much all of high school and a lot of college. I'm not an amazing writer. I'm not. I don't know amazing punctuation. I'm not good at that crap, okay? But I wanna teach you marketing writing. I wanna teach you marketing English, or whatever nationality you're from. There's marketing language.   I'm gonna teach you the language of marketing. It's its own language. It's its own vernacular. It's its own way to present. It's its own way to come across and actually give your people what they should hear in order to cause a buying decision to happen. That's the core.   That is why I can leave an amazing job at ClickFunnels (which did cut me to the soul.It cut me right down to the very core to do that), but it's the reason why three days after I left I had a converting funnel up which made 36 grand without any ads spent. It's because of what I'm gonna share with you in this clip.   So I know this is gonna be a long episode, just get over it. Get a piece of paper and see what I'm doing here.   For those of you guys who are on iTunes, I never normally ask you to do this but come over to the YouTube channel and watch me as I literally record my screen in front of a live audience, fielding their question. Watch me go in and actually build out the introduction section of my webinar   it's what I use no matter what product I am selling. Yes, even for a book.   One of my best funnels right now is this amazing high ticket funnel. Guess what script I freaking used to sell the high ticket thing? The webinar script, guys. I use it everywhere. It's not just for freaking webinars. It's not for something that's only a thousand dollars. I use it for everything.   So please understand that's where my passion comes from. When people read this a lot of times, they're like, "Oh this is about a webinar script" No, no no no! This is the most powerful sales script you've ever seen in your entire life.   I did two summers door-to-door sales, I was a telemarketer, I was good at both of them. This is the most powerful script I've ever seen in my entire life and I don't want you to jack up the intro of it. So again we're gonna cut over here - watch my screen as I do this, bear with me, I know it's a little long. It's not normally this long for these kinds of episodes, but I think you're really getting a lot of value from this, and if you do, please, please, I am begging you, share this.   I'm sick and tired of so much garbage information out there that misleads people. "Oh you're not converting because you don't have the right slogan, the right mission statement," that's bull crap, okay?   You don't know how to sell. That's the issue. And I wanna teach you how to sell. And you're gonna see how I do it inside this episode.   Guys, thanks so much. I know I'm fiery, but this is how I feel about it. This literally saved my family financially to learn how to do this.   And if you wanna do the same, if you're in that same kind of spot...   My stache is falling off.   Learn how to do what I'm gonna share with you. And if you like it, turn around, please share with other people and spread this around. I'd really appreciate that. It convinces iTunes that I'm actually worth my salt. It convinces iTunes that, "Hey, we should actually rank and push up even more." I appreciate you guys.   This is like a thousand downloads an episode now, and I really appreciate you guys checking this out. It really means the world to me to be honest. But man, we're just starting, okay?   And I'm so sick of how much noise is out there, and "little motivated papa Larsen's" coming out right now. Just know that.   But anyways, let's cut on over, you guys watch me actually go and record my screen and share with you guys how I do this. I care about you guys too much to not share this and get a little passionate over it.   Go over, grab a piece of paper, press pause for a sec if you need to. Please share this if you guys enjoy this. I've never shared this part before, and I've never live built what you're about to see in front of an audience ever. I always do it on my own.   Thanks so much and let's cut over now, bye.   I wanna answer the question. Now we dove into pretty deep in the last time I went through and I built this stuff.   I know some of you guys, this is the first time you've been in here, but some of the stuff I'm talking about I've already gone through, so I'm gonna move on....   There's two introductions. I have effectively introduced the webinar. There's two introductions in the introduction section. There's two sections of it, okay?   Section one is: "What is this webinar?" If I don't answer that question, that's a bad question to leave on a open loop. So some questions you can leave on an open loop. That's a bad one. That will cause confusion. Confusion is a no and they run away.   So I have to be able to introduce the webinar and then I've gotta introduce "Who the heck is talking to me and why does he have freaking stache on?"   So there's two sections in the intros.   Section one, intro the webinar.   Section two, intro the speaker.   Now for those of you guys who are pitching other people's products, that is where the issues kinda comes in a little bit. Not an issue, but that's where it gets challenging 'cause you're like do I introduce, for my case funnel building secrets, do I need to spend time introducing Russell, they still gotta know who he is or they're not gonna care what I did. What I used to do. And then I gotta introduce ClickFunnels, and the positioning gets a little bit weird.   That's why I always encourage you guys to do webinars for your own stuff, not that you have to do it but at first it's an easier pitch to go for.   So I like using this slide a lot. I use this slide multiple times." Yeah. Mr. Steve huge eyeball's Larsen, who are ya?" Why am I doing that? It's because I want them to feel like "oh, this guy's just kind of a fun guy." You know like moss. That's pretty funny. This is where you brag about yourself and if you're nervous to do that you kinda have to get over that.   So I say things like I say things like, "Hey what's up, my name's Steve Larsen, I was the lead funnel builder at ClickFunnels for two years, I built almost 500 funnels while I was there. I was Russell's right-hand guy. I helped create the original Two Comma Club Coaching Program which helped a lot of people get a million bucks and a lot of others also make six-figures which is also awesome, right? Anyway, I'm a Two Comma Club coach now and I've left that though to go and make my own Two Comma Club funnels."   And this is where I start, you gotta show off a little bit. I like to go in, now this is where that transition, I use the intro to me, they wanna know the credentials, what's the fast punch, here's the credentials, here's why you are awesome.   But the next thing though, this is why this guy's able to come speak about this stuff. Now the next thing I do though is I use this as an advantage to catapult me into the beginning of my origin story.   So the origin story here: For me, I'm gonna tell the story. Now let's go back, let's consult this real quick. Let's consult, bam. Now here's the origin story for me this is the story:   "Funnels saved my family financially after 17 business tries." This is true story, right? And I'm gonna go in and tell the story. Now I restructured just a few of the other stories in the layout, but I'm gonna use the second slide as far as who are ya as an intro to me. And I found that transition works quite well every time I do that. So this is the outline of it:   "Look, we had no money. Asked dad for money, said no, figure out how to use the resources that you have. It was out of love, he wasn't like no are you kidding, he's a rock star. And I was like crap, so I started studying different asset types and I ran into Rich Dad Poor Dad and he said there's three different asset types. I was like what if I try all of them. I chose business last." This is a true story.   "I chose business last because I thought it meant that I was greedy if I was gonna go do it. That's a real false belief I had. So I did paper assets first. That's one of the three asset types from Rich Dad Poor Dad. That's like the gateway drug for most entrepreneurs. Then next I went into real estate. I did a lot of real estate stuff. And it's not that I didn't have a little success with each one of those things but there were some things that made it challenging like in real estate, like truly, if you're gonna kill it it's best to have some money down.   Same with like paper assets, stocks and options in trading and I borrowed 15 grand. I borrowed 15 thousand dollars to go to some stock classes. I was freaking hustling.   17 tries later I ran into Russell Brunson. And I was like this guy looks like he's 13, I don't know if I'm even gonna trust him." Some of my initial reactions, kay? Just same thing as everyone else says and I was like, "Hey check it out, if you say these funnel things work let me try it. And so I did and started taking on clients and started bootstrapping my way to different things and that's how I bootstrapped my way to the event and became such a fanatic.   "Before I met Russell that they knew who I was when I got there because I was the guy always writing into support, pushing the bounds of their software. Literally their coders would go and try to keep up with some of the things I was begging for them to get done. And so when I got there I got five job offers." So I'm gonna tell that story quickly. And that's the origin story.   But I'm also gonna in and I'm gonna talk about one of the first funnels I built that was actually a good success. So that they see, right, it's a origin story.   The origin story is the backstory of why you are in the thing you are in. I'm talking about funnels so I gotta answer the question: "Why did you choose funnels?" And I gotta answer that question in a way that's slightly emotional - in a way where they can logically, although it's emotional, see how and justify: "oh it's reasonable, I see why he's doing what he's doing. That makes sense."   And when I do that, man the next three stories are really really easy to get good reactions from.   So the first thing I'm gonna do here is I'm going to introduce myself. Right? And I'm gonna talk about how I got a radio show, actually got on the radio, two times in the last few weeks. It was really fun. Oops.   There's the family and I'm like "Oh look, isn't that funny, I love that picture of my little girl putting her finger in her nose. She was supposed to be a flower girl and was walking down the aisle as a flower girl totally picking her nose." Funny picture. So I put that in there. I put that in, I'm trying to be raw. Guys, trying to be real. Why else would I wear a freaking stache right now?   Right, I'm trying to be very open like: "oh man, this dude is real." And I'm trying to help them see that. Bring your walls down, bring em down, bring em' down. That's really what I'm trying to do here. I'm gonna put the other radio show in too. 'Cause it fits the fits the audience here. Let's see. There we go. Bloop. Crazy how many downloads there are on both these now. So I'd probably put some animation in. Here I got a radio show. Gets over a thousand downloads an episode now. How cool is that? Thousand downloads an episode now.   I also have another show. It's not as old but it's already doing about 400 downloads an episode and I am obsessed.   What I want you to know is guys, I'm obsessed. I am obsessed with this game. I eat, drink, and sleep this stuff. My family's been there. They are my biggest support team ever. The whole thing starts with the family. Bam. And that's my intro into how I begin my origin story.   Cool, so it'll be like a little animation. First that one then I'll animate in the others.   Then this is where I'm gonna talk about origin story internal and external desires.   I need to go in and I need to paint a picture over my desires, right? And some conflict, the backstory. So the backstory for us and I like to use this one a lot, guys you might be noticing like, "Stephen you're using the same stuff from other webinars?" Yeah, okay? Your story can be repurposed into other things.   It doesn't need to be this brand new thing every single time.   It's still my origin story. It's not like it changed. All right? So I'm still gonna use it.   Look at that hottie (Stephen looks at a picture of his wife on their wedding day).   I can use the exact same stories. It doesn't need to be, right, and I can sell different products with it 'cause it's still the way I got into stuff. So I go in and, I tell the story:   "We got married, this is how small our apartment was."   So I'm gonna hit a wall here. I'm gonna hit a wall and this is the wall. I need to hit a wall and the wall is we got nothing. In fact look right here at this picture. You guys see this is literally a picture of our apartment. I didn't try to take it blurry on purpose, it just is blurry.   You know those lose weight commercials? Like the before pictures always like black and white suddenly no one can find a color camera anymore and they're like looking all weird at the camera. You know? And after pictures they're like shredded, suddenly the picture's in color. This looks like I tried to set it up. It's how it actually was. Any way. I was like: "Check it out, I actually drew a fireplace on the wall with a crayon. We had no money. We got married weeks before Christmas."   Suddenly it's like oh crap, it's hitting the fan, and it hit the fan. "We had no cash. I asked my dad for money I was like what if I go asked him for money." I have an epiphany. And so I like to use... So I went an I started asking, I was like "Man student loans are on the way."     We use pictures to depict different aspects of the story, okay? The pictures are just guiding the major elements in the story. You know what I mean? Let me save this quick. The pictures are guiding the elements in the story, that's all.   "So I asked for money and that's the very room, that is the building where I asked my dad for money, and he said "no, can't do it." And I was like "Crap, all right, what's my plan?" So that's the next part.   Remember guys I'm just following this thing. We're right here. We're almost done with the intro, kay? Is this making sense? You guys with me? You guys seeing how this could apply in your business? Just keep going. A bunch of trial closes all at once.   We've got 74 of us on now, this is awesome guys. Appreciate you guys being on here. Hope you guys are liking the stache. Can't wait for you guys to get yours.   So right now I gotta go plan. Here's the plan. The plan is, this thing is like falling apart. "The plan is I gotta start studying how on Earth am I supposed to make money? I don't know how to make money? I've been studying business in school, but they're not actually teaching me how to make money. So I started studying. I started studying and started learning.   One of the guys I started studying was a guy named Robert Kiyosaki. And he told me about the three different asset types, and I still got his voice in my head: "Well, the first thing you gotta do is the three different asset types."   I don't know if you guys ever listened to him but his voice kinda sounds like that.   "The three different asset types and if you're wise you're gonna go and you're gonna get one of these kinds of assets and just stick with it." And he sounds like that. And I was like, "Well, I don't know what to do. What if I try all of them? But I don't wanna try business, that sounds way too hard, I'm not gonna do that." So I was like "Ah, so I started running, running, running, and I started acting." - meaning I started, I should clarify that 'cause in one of these I say I started acting, but that sounds like I actually was an actor.   I'm gonna hit some conflict here. Now you see I'm just following it. I just make a slide per epiphany bridge script. Or epiphany bridge step here.   Boom, first thing I did is I started taking action. I should change it to that. Started taking action. Whoops. Action. Started taking action. And I went through, and I borrowed 15 grand and went and started doing this and anyway...   I know all you guys are very focused entrepreneurs here, but none of you guys have ever had shiny object syndrome? Well yeah me either, so I went ahead, and after a while, I was like "This is hard!" I was whiny.   I was whiny and I went and I checked out real estate. And I got 300 phone calls in one month. I was putting those little paper signs up all over the place. Again this is all true, I'm not making any of this up. I put those paper signs up all over the place. Looking for buyers, looking for sellers.   I got 300 phone calls and started matching buyers with sellers and doing a double escrow. I'd up the price a little bit during close and take my money, anyway. And that's what I was doing. Until I realized there really are limited options when you really still are completely broke. Flipping in that way, it's not that you can't make cash... Anyway, right?   And I need one more conflict slide here. I'm almost done with the intro, and then I'll come over here to your guy's comments and your chat, okay? If you guys got anything come let me know.   And so you see how I came up with a plan, and I walked myself going through the plan, but there's an issue with the plan. The plan was to try these three asset types, and the reason why I'm doing that is because they can logically see how that is a logical thing to do. "Yeah, why wouldn't you try that?" It's because I'm trying to them as the protagonist in my story.   They're not even gonna experience the same things that I did, but the power of story is this:   "Right now I'm sitting in my office, downstairs my little girls are playing. I can hear them right now. I can actually smell the aroma of some good food. I think my wife is making some food and if I were to walk downstairs right now we'd have our kitchen table there, and the countertop and she usually likes to put food right on the countertop, and we go serve up and then go sit at the table together." Okay, stop! How many of you guys just imagined your own office? Wait a second, and you imagined your own house? Oh, baby! Wait a second, but I'm describing MY house. But you thought about your house? Did you think about your own kitchen? I was talking about my kitchen. My kitchen table is completely perfect square, and it's brown, it's made of wood, it's beautiful. I was talking about my kitchen though. But wait you thought about your kitchen? Huh. And the countertop, did you think about the aroma of food? Did I even describe what food it was? No, but you thought about food. And you thought about good food. You thought about little kids playing and hearing them squeal around and stuff. Right. Wait a second, but I'm talking about MY story! Isn't this fascinating?   This is the power of stories. The reason stories are so powerful. If I can logically, inside the epiphany bridge script, get them to get inside my story, they will effectively have experienced, on an emotional level, the very same story that I experienced.   Even though MY kitchen's different than their kitchen. Even though MY dad told me different things than your dad might of, or regardless. Does that make sense? The power of story is that it takes the backgrounds and the experiences of each listener and it combines them emotionally even though the scenes are different - the facts are the same. The emotions can be the same. That's the key, and that's why stories are so powerful.   So what's my plan? "Oh I'm gonna, I don't know, I gotta make money," and I guarantee everyone's thought that who's been on the webinar, right? "Oh man, I gotta make money too somehow." So I gotta come up with some kind of plan, so I'm gonna do what he said, "Business assets, real estate, paper assets." So I just started doing it, and I didn't wanna seem greedy so I actually purposely didn't go for business first. Guys, that was a really stupid thing that I did, but anyway. I went straight to paper assets, and I borrowed cash.   How many of you guys have borrowed cash to go to some person's course before? Right, I know, me too. That's crazy I found out that he's actually teaching stuff he knew was outdated. Now I call that dishonest. Right? They're walking through with me: I guarantee I'm not the first person they've spent money on and not been successful with.   So then I went off on my own I just started doing more real estate stuff. I finally turned to business. I went 17 tries over the next three or four years going for these different kinds of business. How many tries have you guys gone through? Right? Have you counted them? Anyways 17 tries later I was doing two summers door-to-door sales, telemarketing, ebooks, diamonds, that was an interesting one, websites, traffic driver for Paul Mitchell, right? Anyway, and I thought the issue has gotta be me.   And I want them to say that about themselves. That's why I bring this up. You guys liking this? I was the issue. So I'm gonna use some of these same slides from a few other webinars because they work and the origin stories, it doesn't matter.   I'm still gonna change some things in the notes here and customize it based on the audience that's listening. But I can lead them down the psychology and why things are the way they are there. Kay?   "The issue must be me. 17 tries later, still not enough money to actually support us, it's gotta be me. There's no other reason. I can't even think of another reason why I haven't been successful at this game yet." Why am I saying that? How many of you guys right now there's 75 of us on right now. How many of you guys right now have asked yourself that question? Kay?   This is me doing this old story, if I know what your false beliefs are when you see this new opportunity, I use what you're saying to yourself inside of the new story. Inside of the new story. That is what combines, that is the bridge when you join in the conversation inside the customers head that's what that means.   That's why if you don't know who your customer is it's really hard to know what stories they're telling themselves and it's really hard to tell effective new stories. Very challenging.   All of this game starts with the who. Who, who, who, who, who, kay?   Anyway, I'm sure, I know, I'm positive, 99% of people have asked that question. Anyone who's successful has asked themselves that question. How come this isn't working? And they start doing this self-defeating thing, and that's fine - it's a natural thing. Every one of us has done it. But when I say I've also been through it oxytocin hit. It's the chemical of connection. It's the hardest one to get. "Man, this guy gets me."   Man we're going freaking deep. Deep! So I think through, and one of the things I wanna ask myself is what are these top entrepreneurs right, so I'm gonna pose a question here and at this point emotionally I've got them in this place where they're very open to me. They're very open to me. They've come through very similar to what  I've gone through.   I've answered questions about who this is? I've stepped to the side with them. Side by side. The positioning I'm taking:   Look little testimonial of people who've actually done what I'm talking about here so you know I'm not crazy. "Now who am I" Cool, here I am. There's some credentials now, it's actually going to the origin story itself. "Oh man, this guys actually all right. I connect with this guy. I've had the same questions in my life." Yeah, that's why I freaking talk about the stuff I do. That I came up with a plan. Have you ever done any one of these things ever? I guarantee it, right? So I have them in a point right now when I ask a question, this is very key, very key moment inside of the origin story. Where I ask the next question, and the question that I ask myself is "So is there a new way?" New way. Now I haven't brought in much of the new way yet.   . Anyway, we're almost done with the origin story here. Section one here. I haven't brought in too much new way yet. Still kinda focused on the old way but I'm gonna describe the old way through another mini story:   "So I started asking myself, what are the top entrepreneurs actually doing to make cash? Are they doing the real estate thing? I know some of them are. They're doing paper trading, paper assets, I know they are. Right?" And so I ask this question because it means they are gonna ask the question to themselves. If I pose a question, that's like cool mind control. If I said," I wonder what's in this orange bottle?" You just asked the same question, kay? I just literally entered your head - 'cause the human brain can't stand open loops. We gotta close the loop. "Wow, what is inside of this?" Right?   "How does Stephen have so much energy?" It's me entering your brain. Oh yeah. All right. "What are the top entrepreneurs actually doing to make cash?" And I wanna guide them through the section called old way. If you don't know what I'm talking about, page 114 in Expert Secrets talks about this.   Long journey. I'm sorry, this is part of plan. Right there. It's part of the new plan. And especially in a webinars this is very key. When we compare: "Look how crazy it was compared to what's happened now. Do you wanna know how?" Awesome, the rest of the presentation's about that. Does that make sense?   This is one of the ways you hook them to the end. Right here:   "So I said, man, what they weren't doing as I started looking around what I started noticing is that every one of these guys, none of them, none of them had websites. None of them did. Right? Not ones that are cash flowing 'cause no one could get them to cash flow. They were doing VC funding. They didn't have business plans and this went against everything I had been studying and learning, went against all my marketing degree. Everything that I had been doing up until that point."   Now let's see where we are right now. Conflict, right? So for me, I'm trying to help them see logically where I'm coming up from. And "I started studying I realized what they did have was this thing called a sales funnel." Kay?   And we're not on new way yet I'm just duplicating the slides here and honestly by the time I get through origin story on a webinar I'm typically around like 30 minutes. "Guess what they did have? Sales funnel."   All right I'm leading them through this epiphany as I go through it, kay? I was like "What's a freaking sales funnel? What's a sales funnel? That looks like a website. I don't know, I got a website, I know what to do. But I started studying all these different guys, and I ran into this guy..."   Okay, and this is where we start getting into again plan. New plan again: "I ran into this guy that looked like he was 13 years old. Is he even old enough to shave? I don't know. Should I even trust what he's saying? And I started studying his stuff, and I became a fanatic."   I like to have these things pop out as I talk about it.   So I'm like, "I ran into this guy named Russell Brunson I didn't know who he was. Is this dude even? I wonder if he's legit? Does he shave?" You know what I mean? And again I'm entering the objection that's inside their head. Right? They might be like, "He looks really young..." so I'm gonna say that "He looks really young."   It's interesting how much you can control this stuff. I'm gonna ruin you guys, I'm gonna ruin you guys.   Last night my wife and I were talking late, we were just chatting, and she's been asking a lot about sales psychology stuff and it's been kinda fun and she's getting into a lot of real estate stuff. I actually truly love real estate still. It's something you use a lot of, anyway.   Funnels are a great way to get a ton of cash real quick. What do you do with it once you got it? So real estate is the way we're moving. So she's diving into real estate guru-ism, and I'm being the funnel guy. Dance like a monkey in front of the camera guy.   So anyway, and I make these each pop up. And I was like: "Man, let me show you, so you guys know what I'm talking about. I saw this guy and his name was Russell Brunson and I was looking at him and I was like there's no way this guy knows what he's talking about. So let me... Let's see if it works? Like, check this guy out. I saw this course he had called DotCom Secrets, and I got it. Remember I've gone through 17 tries here. Suddenly things started working. I was like what the heck and I became kind of a Russell fanatic. I got his book DotCom Secrets then I went through Dot Com Secrets Ignite. Then I actually went through 108 Split Tests. I carried it in my backpack for months. Then I got the Perfect Webinar, this guy's crazy. I'm actually making cash from this. And again I was keeping it small 'cause I kept testing with all these little clients I was getting, but lo and behold stuff started working."   Anyways, so that's kinda how I roll it out like that as I'm saying it.   "And the biggest thing I learned from him was exactly what he was talking about which is this..." And this is where I really dive into new way/case study.   Now in this scenario I've actually done new way and case study, I'm doing both. So for the first one here I'm actually gonna do here's the new way, then I'm gonna walk through a case study just to destroy any additional false beliefs that people might have, kay?   This mustache is starting to get a little itchy.   The biggest thing I realized is that, all right, you guys I'm gonna start right there, again I'm using things from other things I've already created before.   A lot of things, if you've already made something like it's an asset forever, not just for just that business you're selling or whatever: "The biggest thing I realized is that funnels make me money and websites make me broke" Later on, I talk about a website, one of my very first websites and I show it to you. It's very funny. Anyways that's coming up in the plans. It's terrible. It was completely awful. It was for an artist. And so what I'm gonna talk about in this next little bit here is I'm actually gonna walk them through a crappy funnel that I had at the very very beginning.   We are now in case study. We've just gone through new way so now we're gonna dive through case study. Let me just clone this a couple times here. And I'm the case study, that's fine. Again if you don't have a bunch of testimonials, it's okay to be the case study on your own. So I'm the case study in this case. Which I have been. And I'm walking them through my origin story. They're still logically following me:   "This is one of the first funnels I built that was actually quite profitable. This is my crappy CD funnel. And I went through and I actually creating these different funnels and literally funnel hacking Russell. This is, I made this, I don't know, I got a ClickFunnels account very shortly after ClickFunnels left beta like a month or two afterwards. And that's one of the first ones I built. So this is like three and a half years old. But this is what I did. I literally modeled what he did. And so I went through and I just modeling exactly what he did and I went in and I bought everything in his funnel. Everything. All right so you guys can see this. I bought everything in his funnel. Every little piece in there."   And remember what I'm going through right here is I'm going through origin story to break that down a little bit more:   "I had no money so then I starting studying assets then I started building funnels."   I'm gonna compare a then versus now and that's what's coming up. That's why I'm doing this. A then versus now which is very powerful:   "I bought everything inside of his funnel, and I saw exactly everything that was in there I was like 'crap,' this might as well be my business model, why would I do anything different?"   "This is the beginnings of one of my very first funnels ever, and next thing I did is I sketched out the funnel itself. I don't like the little, I like centering it. I sketched out the funnel itself. Sweet I did the 7.95 thing, a 97 dollar thing, a 297 thing, and that was it. I was like sweet. I did the exact same thing literally. So my funnel after I went and did it looked exactly like this. This was it. Looked exactly like this. Then I built the entire funnel. And that was it, that was the funnel."   And so remember this is a case study so now the results need to come on in. So let's talk about the results:   "And the results are in. I was like what the heck. I made 18 thousand dollars in student loans my first year of marriage. And this funnel in a year did 60 grand with no ads spend. What! Completely changed our life. Totally changed our life you guys. 100%. This completely changed our life. That make sense?"   Kay, now I got them in this really interesting spot, and I'm like what if... Let's go back here to our assets. Conflict:   My funnel sucked, and I'm gonna talk about that:   "Guys, it did not do that at first. It was terrible. It was only after I modeled what I saw that Russell guy doing."   So the old way, right, the old way I don't build the funnel first. So that's one thing I didn't talk about up here is I went:   "he first time I went, and I built this thing sucked! Sucked! Everyone say sucked! It was terrible. I lost so much money.  It was crazy kinds of money. Time, I lost a lot of time. I didn't know what I was doing and this did not sell well at all. And I'm like well I might as well go in and free plus shipping funnel, right? The results are in, and we made 60 grand from that but how cool is that?"   Now I'm gonna do a then versus now. That's what this is called in script building. I'm gonna do a then versus now. Let's go back over here. New way/case study. Then versus now, right here. I'm talking about results so we're right here so then versus now so I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna grab the results from and those are pretty good. Not bad, not bad. That was okay:   "But you've gotta understand I did way better  - in a years time I was doing about four grand a month:   "The funnel's success had everything to do with the way I built funnels after this."   Had nothing to do, meaning literally the order of the way I built things in and what I wanna go through for the remainder of this is to show you this, check this out:   "The first time I went, and I launched it we did 60 grand, not bad. I know you guys are like "oh" but check this out: "This is the first month of the new way launching the exact same product. Look at that. Almost exactly the same amount of money in one month with no ad spend. That was in one month. So you guys, isn't that interesting? So I wanna share with you guys, alright so here's old way..."   Again we're pulling old way verse new way. So let's grab a text box. This making sense? It's making dollars. Alright, this is the old way. What! Let's make that text white, we'll make shape fill that red. Bam old way. Here. And that's pretty good, awesome. What! I wanna talk about the new way, though. And I'm gonna have this automate in at the exact same time. (Stephen finishes working on the intro to the script.)   Oh yeah!   Hey, obviously a funnel's already dead if you can't even get anyone to opt in, right? So I spent four hours teaching an audience how to get high opt-ins. When they work, and when they don't.   If you want access to that member's area where you can watch those replays, just go to freeoptincourse.com to create your free members account now.  

Listen in as the group travels to a few places they never thought they would find themselves in! A simple task to gain information may create a few more enemies and friends than ever expected. It'll be fun. Right? They are smart enough to find what they are looking for. Right?

What do Bono, Nev Schulman, Ne-Yo, TED and SXSW have in common? They all rely on visual storytelling using Prezi to deliver impactful presentations. On this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Prezi Head of Creative Services and Chief Evangelist David Hooker shares his process for taking a presentation topic and building a narrative and visual story around it. In addition, he goes into detail about the science behind effective presentations, and how that influences the ways in which the best public speakers deliver their talks. Listen to the podcast to learn more about David's approach to visual storytelling, and learn how to apply these lessons to your own presentations. Transcript Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. Before we get started today, just one quick announcement. As you may have heard if you've listened to the last few episodes, the podcast now has an Alexa skill. So if you have any desire to hear me in your Alexa speaking once a week about inbound marketing and talking to really interesting practicing marketers, simply go to your Alexa app, under skills search "Inbound Success," and you'll find us there. With that, I'd like to introduce my guest for this week who is David Hooker, is the Head of Creative Services and Evangelism at Prezi. Welcome, David. David Hooker (guest): Hi, Kathleen. Congrats on being Alexa compatible. Kathleen: Thank you. I'm not sure anybody actually wants to hear me talk for an hour every week on Alexa, but it's there for those who want it, right? David: Yeah. Slowly Alexa's starting to do everything around my house, so I can see myself saying, "Alexa, play that podcast." Kathleen: Yeah. It's pretty neat. It's fun to play around with. Well, for those who don't know who David is, or don't know what Prezi is, David is with Prezi which is a cloud based presentation platform. And in addition to being their Head of Creative Services, he also is the cohost of Prezi's podcast which is called The Narrative.  One of the reasons I'm so excited to talk to you, David, is that you have such an interesting background. You've worked with some really interesting individuals and brands to convert their stories into a more visual format, and you've given a TEDx talk. So I feel like we have a lot of ground to cover. Before we jump into it, can you tell our audience a little bit more about yourself, your background, and maybe a little bit about Prezi? About Prezi David: Thank you very much, Kathleen. I'll be more than happy to. As you mentioned, I am the Head of Creative Services and Evangelism at Prezi. And what that means on a day-to-day basis, what I do on a day-to-day basis, is that I'm making presentations. So, I'm making them obviously sometimes for myself, like you mentioned the TEDx talk, but more commonly I'm making them for the speakers that we work with. The wonderful thing about being a marketer for a product like Prezi is that Prezi has this inbuilt plurality, right? It's a presentation tool. Most of the time you do a presentation, you are presenting to people other than yourself. There aren't many mirror-based presentations. There's usually two or three people in the audience. So, we work with some really great, fantastic speakers. We've done around 30 talks with TED. We've worked with people like SXSW. I've been lucky enough to work with likes of Bono and Nev Schulman on MTV. We know that Ne-Yo is a big Prezi fan, that's the singer who's still pretty popular but was really popular in the 90s when I was growing up. And so yeah, I'm working with them to take the narrative or the story they want to tell and build the visuals that go with that presentation. The creative services part of my title means that I'm doing that exact same thing but with our top clients which are many of the Fortune 500 companies who have a message, a story, a product to sell. And we do do this same activity with SMBs -- smaller companies who come to us who have a message, story, or product that they want to sell, that they want to get out there. And we work with them on the narrative of that. In particular, we work with them on the visuals that accompany and tell their story. And of course we do that with Prezi. So, the unique thing about Prezi is that rather than taking the slides "A, B, C, D, E, this happened, then that happened, then that happened, then that happened, then that happened, then that happened" approach to presentations -- that very linear based way of thinking -- Prezi uses an entire canvas, and you can lay out all of your information on one canvas and then move around it in a way that makes sense. That really helps your audience remember. You don't have to take my word for that. We actually were lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a study from Harvard which shows that when you take a Prezi presentation and compare it to no presentation or a PowerPoint presentation, we actually came out on top as more than 25% more engaging, which I think everybody wants to be more engaging, so that's super cool. And so yeah, that's me and that's what I do, and that's a little bit about Prezi. Kathleen: Prezi is fascinating to me because I've done a lot of public speaking in my time, and it does get really, really boring after a while to do PowerPoints, and you sort of feel like the creative life is getting sucked out of you. I've used Prezi, and I remember looking at examples. I don't remember if I saw them on SlideShare -- I'm not sure exactly where they were at the time. But what fascinated me about Prezi, at least in the way that I was looking at using it, was that when you zoom out, you can create one larger picture or image if you will. In my case, I think I wound up using the image of somebody hitting a baseball out of a baseball park. And then when you zoom in, you can take each element in that bigger image and turn each element into almost like the equivalent of a slide, like it's own individual message or thought. And I just thought it was so interesting how it's almost like these layers. I think of it almost like the Russian dolls that come one out of the other. And the way that I had seen Prezi used and that I really loved was in particular those presentations that had the big image where you zoom out, and then every time you zoom in, it revealed something new, which I thought was so interesting. But I'm sure there a million of other ways that people have used it. David: It's wonderful that you should think of it in that way because what you've done is you've associated Prezi with a metaphor. In your case, it's the Russian dolls. I'm sure there's proper word for that but I honestly can't remember it at the moment. The dolls that come out of each other, you've associated it with a metaphor. That's one of the great things about Prezi is that you can build that visual metaphor. On a really simple level, that can be, "I want to talk to you about this product that we made, and here's the journey that we went on to make it." Or, "I want to talk to you as a customer and establish empathy with you and here's the journey that I see you on." The journey, if we're gonna relate a visual metaphor to it, the most common one that we would do with that is something like a mountain. You start at the bottom of the mountain, you get to the top of the mountain. But by showing everybody the whole, and then like you said, zooming to certain parts of it in a way that makes sense to the story you're telling, it helps people remember because they associate the visual with where you were at the time, and they're like, "Oh yeah, I remember this because I was at this point in the mountain, and I've gone up this far but I still have this far to go." It's a technique that memory champions ... I'm sure everyone's heard of techniques like the memory palettes or the method of loci. Memory champions don't just associate a visual with something they have to memorize, they associate a series of visuals in a space. Commonly it's their house or their front room, it can be their kitchen, whatever it may be. And it's the fact that you remember where one thing is helps you remember the thing next to it. Kathleen: That's so interesting. I think about the types of conversations we have on this podcast, and I'm always interviewing marketers. And sometimes they are dealing with challenges like we're going to have somebody speaking at a conference, how do we make an impact? How do we generate leads? How do we take away value from this talk that someone's giving? And then other times, I've done plenty of interviews with people who themselves are thought leaders and they're building personal brands and going out and speaking, and they want to be different and they want to stand out from the usual boring crowd of PowerPoint, the sea of PowerPoint lameness. I think that this topic is gonna resonate with a lot of people listening because there's a massive chasm between throwing up a PowerPoint template with five bullets and going to what you're talking about. And I think what fills in that chasm is an understanding of how to tell a story. You kind of touched on that. It's not just about changing what something looks like visually, it's about weaving a narrative. How to Build Visual Stories Maybe you could just start by talking about when you work with some of the clients that Prezi has. The people like Bono that you've helped, how do you start? I assume they come to you with, "I need to give a presentation on X." Where do you go from there? David: Yeah. Commonly, and I think probably the people listening to this podcast are in a little bit of a different life situation from Bono ... Kathleen: Maybe not. David: Maybe not. Rock stars of the world, if you are listening, hello. But I'm gonna make that jump and say that they probably are. So, someone like Bono would probably come at it in quite a different way. Another common question I receive a lot is "What's the one thing that you've attained about presentations?" And for me, it's the apathy with which people approach their presentations generally speaking. It's getting a little bit better, but there are still so many people who approach a presentation with, "If I can just get through this without embarrassing myself, that will be enough." And the problem is when you set the bar there, where you set the bar at acceptable or okay or not so bad, then you're never gonna get above that. I understand why people do do that. Presentations and public speaking, they're scary things to do. We've done a lot of research into phobias because we know that people find public speaking scary. And I've seen studies where public speaking has been listed as a phobia on the list above death, which when you think about it is really silly, because the worst thing that can happen to you on stage is that you die. So it doesn't make sense to be more afraid of public speaking than death. But somehow, irrationally, that is what happens to us. So, that's what leads to the apathy. So to make that comparison back to someone like Bono, Bono is approaching his presentation with ... and it was TED presentation, with TED obviously having a huge platform, but he was approaching it with, "This is my opportunity to make that ... my opportunity to have that impact." If we were to approach every presentation with, "The reason I'm doing this is so that I can make an impact. This is an opportunity. I have to stand out." As marketers, so much of what we do is about telling stories and it's about standing out, but we don't always take that same approach to our presentations. So the very first thing that I try to work with with any client is, "Why are you doing this? What's your motivation for doing this?" And some people really commonly come to us with, "Well, I kind of have to and I just wanna get through it." And we try and get rid of that. That's the first place we get rid of. "Why are you doing it? What impact do you want to make? What do you want the audience to walk away with? Let's just focus on that." The other common kind of secondary mistake that people make is they think a presentation is all about them. "This is my time to shine. This is my time to stand out." That's better than being apathetic and just wanting to get off stage, but the best presentations are about the audience. You can be a really super engaging speaker, you can be funny, but if you don't achieve the thing that your audience want to get out of this presentation ... I can walk into a sales pitch, be super funny, engaging, people think I'm cool, but if I haven't talked about my product at all it's a waste of their time and my time. So, always start there as well. What do you want the audience to get out of this presentation? What do you think that they're coming into the room wanting to hear and how are you gonna change their mind or influence them or any of that stuff? You start with that, build your presentation from that point of view, always come back to that. And you'll find that you'll end up shining because you've put them at the center. Kathleen: And how do you shift from presenting to storytelling? David: Well, I think there's this kind of ... I don't know the right word, there's this mystique now that's being increasingly attached to storytelling. I see lots of storytelling as a title, we're seeing more and more chief storyteller or storyteller-in-residence. It's a skill linked on LinkedIn. Everybody is a storyteller. It's a democratized thing that everybody does on some level, except for maybe teenagers who are going through that phase that we all went through where you don't really talk to anyone. My point is when you come home at the end of the day at work and you talk to your significant other, family member, child, brother, sister -- whoever it is, and they say to you, "How was your day?" -- that's an opportunity to tell a story. Unless you just go with, "It was okay ..." Kathleen: Which a lot of people do. David: Which a lot of people do. The moment you do more than that, you're a storyteller. The moment you meet up with a friend and you tell them about what happened last week, you're a storyteller. What I would encourage people to do is those moments where you're having a great conversation or someone is reacting really positively to what you said, what is it that you're doing there and taking that and translating and putting it into your presentation. That's what people want. They want stories. They want anecdotes. People love stories. There's this common misconception that we have that our attention span is shrinking. You've probably seen that stat that our attention span is now down to eight seconds. A goldfish's is nine seconds. All millennials are, therefore, worse than goldfish. Kathleen: Yeah. David: I don't think this is really true. I had a goldfish when I was younger, and I never really had that much of a great conversation with it, despite some trying late night. Kathleen: Yeah. I wonder how they get the data on how long the goldfish is paying attention. Really how are they measuring that? David: Yeah. The point of that stat is that you've got eight to nine seconds to make an impact. The amount of time that you have at the beginning of a presentation to really capture people's attention is shrinking. At the same time, I mean do you have a subscription to something like Netflix or Hulu? One of those. Kathleen: Oh yeah. Yeah. David: Yeah? What's your favorite show? Kathleen: I'm going to answer that a little differently and tell you what my husband's favorite show is, because he's so obsessed that he's taken over our television. Currently, he is binging on Vikings. David: Okay. How many episodes of Vikings does he watch in a night? Kathleen: I mean three or four, depending upon how early he starts. David: Okay. I'm saying probably he's spending about four hours of his undivided attention on Vikings, right? Kathleen: Yeah. David: That's not an eight second goldfish amount of attention. Four hours is a long period of time. I bet if you watched something like Vikings -- I've never seen it, but the things that I'm binge hooked on -- what they're really great is that first eight to nine seconds will be fantastic, will be captivating, will hook you in and keep you there. We are really, really looking for great quality content. We want to be engaged. We want to hear these stories. The thing that we're up against is that there's more competition than ever before. Your phone in your pocket right now, people listening to us speaking right now, if we're not interesting enough, they can take out their phone -- don't do this people listening -- you can take out your phone and start looking through Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, news app, whatever it maybe, for something more interesting than what we're doing now. It means that we have to raise our level and be more engaging. Don't blame the lack of attention on phones and the way it's trending. You need to up your game and really come at it. Storytelling is one great way of doing that. You story tell all the time. Think of those times when you're storytelling and watch what you do and watch what other great people who tell stories do, and learn from it. Nick Hornby is one of my favorite writers. I was once at a recording of a podcast in London and Nick was reading from his new book. People had the opportunity to ask him questions. Inevitably, the first question was, "Nick. How do I become a better writer?" The first thing he said, "You need to read more." Kathleen: Yeah. Becoming a Better Storyteller David: That's the first thing you need to do, you need to read more. If you feel that you're not a great storyteller, it's not something that you do often, start by consuming. Yeah, you can watch things like Netflix and movies and -- Kathleen: TED Talks. David: TED Talks. Screenwriting books are very good places as well to look at techniques for things. I would also encourage you that when you're out with your friends and you notice that one of your friend's stories are better than other people's stories, what is it about that friend that's engaging? How are they structuring their story? I bet you that that story that they're telling, it's not the first time they've told it. It might not even be the first time you've heard it, but you love hearing it. What is it about it? How are they structuring it? Which elements do they bring in when? Are they using comedy? Are they building up drama? Are they using juxtaposition between one thing and another? Just analyze it a little bit. You don't have to do it openly. Please don't do it openly, you'll just ruin the story for everyone. Think about it yourself. Kathleen: I wonder if people don't spend more time on this because they get intimidated. What I mean by that is that, for example, I've seen so many articles on storytelling and talks on storytelling and, a lot of the time, what it focuses on is you need to create these story arcs. You have to understand the construct of the hero's journey and apply it to what you're talking about. These can be fairly abstract concepts. I think sometimes people hear that and they think, I don't have the time to learn all that. I'm just not even going to start. Whereas what you're saying, it sounds like it's really more about, think about what's happening and working in your real-life and just start to test some of those strategies out. Would you say that's accurate? David: Yeah. That's definitely a way you can look at it if you do find something like that intimidating. I would also say that things like that are not quite as intimidating as you think they are. If you actually get into them and read them, you'll see that they're telling you to do things that you've seen before, like you've seen that in a movie or you've heard it in a bar conversation. Just because they've got technical language attached to them doesn't mean that you should find them frightening or difficult. Try and look at them as a way of enlightening yourself. This is getting back to that point about apathy, that people try and approach their presentation as "this is something I just want to get done." If you just want to get it done, then don't bother doing it. Put time and effort into it. It always amazes me. I've worked at, for example, startup pitch competitions, some of which have had huge prize money available to get pitching. I've seen people walk in and they haven't got their slides ready and they present the next day. You're like, "This could change your life." They're like, "Yeah, but I just kind of want to get it done." You're like, "How? Just how about taking the time to think it through and put a real conscious effort into it? This is really, genuinely the moment that could change your life." Kathleen: I would 100% second that. A few years back, I participated in a program through Goldman Sachs, because I had a startup at the time. They ran us through pitch coaching for a three slide, three minute rocket pitch. Not only did we go through pitch coaching, but then we had to do successive rounds of almost competitively pitching leading up to the big event. What I started with, in terms of my presentation and my verbal delivery, was so dramatically different than what I ended with. It was like, unrecognizable. I couldn't agree more. It's amazing what advance preparation and vetting things in front of other people and getting feedback etc, what that can do for refining your delivery. David: Most things we do in life benefit from putting hard work into them. Books go through endless iterations and rewrites and edits on them. Movies, the same. They go through focus groups and all of that stuff. I think what happens is that we see some of our favorite speakers speaking on stage and they have this magnetism or charisma, and we mistake that for thinking that they just have that. It's just that mystical X factor that they just have. If I don't have it, then there's nothing I can do. It's not true in any way, shape or form. I think one of the big favorites of business pitching and product pitching is, of course, Steve Jobs. If you look, even do the smallest modicum of research into how he put his pitches together, they were rehearsed within an inch of their life. They were done again and again and again. He insisted on doing them in the space. He would get part of the way into his pitch presentation, do something he didn't like and do it again from the beginning until he did like it, again and again and again and again. He put a lot of work and effort into it. Like you did with your three minute thing, when I did my TEDx presentation, I wrote 14 versions of the script. I did one general pitch. I then practiced in front of people on Skype calls and in person. On the day, I was pacing around the venue practicing again and again and again. If you want to be good and if you want to do it well, you've got to put the work in, and don't think that other people who look effortless got there because they didn't work. That's not true. There are very, very few people who can get up on stage and just wing it. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. Turning Stories Into Visuals Kathleen: Now, shifting gears for a second, one aspect of this is preparation and the work that goes into creating a great presentation and being able to deliver it verbally in a way that is flawless and that is tight. I would love to talk a little bit more about the visual aspects of this. One of the things that you do so well is help people take what's inside of their head and instead of vomiting out 10 slides full of bullets, you help them turn it into a more visual story. Can you talk a little bit about how that process works? How do you start to transform these concepts into visuals? David: We always start with narrative or story. We start with the scope of the content, like, how many things do you have to say within this talk? I've got three things, I've got four things, I've got five things... We always start with knowing what that is and what the milestones you want to hit along your journey are. I want to talk about the product, I want to talk about how it's going to help you live a better life, and I want to talk to you about the pricing. Then, I want to talk to you about the timeline should you choose to go for it. Okay, I've got my four things. Then, when you know the scope of content, you start thinking about the hierarchy of content. This is more important than this. That's more important than the other. Even my graphic visual designers, people who spend their entire lives in visuals, start that way. There's different ways to plan. I follow like an essay plan kind of thing. I spent a lot of my time in university writing English and history papers. I'm used to planning my content that way. My designers use Post-it notes and put things up on a board. Some of them do really rudimentary sketches. Don't think to be a great visual designer or a person who is really great with visuals you have to know how to draw. I can tell you, I have some designers on my team whose drawings are really laughably bad. That's not really about it. Don't think that you need to be an artist to be a good designer or a good visual person. Then, once you know the scope of the content and the hierarchy of the content, then you can start looking for visuals that fit that. If you start with a visual that you like and then try and make your content fit that visual, you're going to end up in a world of trouble and it won't work. My point here is that visuals supplement narrative. They don't dictate it. Then, when it comes to choosing, that's the part of the process that we invest the most amount of time into. We look at an incredible amount. It's getting back to that Nick Hornby part about consumption, we look at a lot. We make mood boards. We scroll through Google Images, through things like Getty and Shutterstock and Unsplash and all of these wonderful resources. We look and look and look and look and look. Then, we try and match it with the scope and the hierarchy, this fit, the mood of this is the same. Almost every company has a mood that they want to hit. You'll be surprised what you can do with typing an adjective into Google Images and seeing what you find and seeing what other people are doing. You're not going to really change the world with graphic design. It's a wonderful place to be a non-designer designer, like someone who hasn't been to school, because there's so many resources open to you. So many of them are free. Something like Unsplash is just free photography that anyone can go use, and it's just beautiful. We spend hours just looking through, just seeing what there is and becoming inspired and using what you like. There's so much out there that you don't need to go back to 1980s clip art. The world has moved on from there. Things like The Noun Project do icons and iconography on a much better scale than anyone has ever done them before. Kathleen: Yeah. There is so much available these days, it's really true. Between icons and illustrations and photos and clip art, what have you -- I mean, there's almost no excuse not to have great visuals because there is so much out there to pick from. There is a lot of free stuff, but there's also a lot of very low priced imagery. David: Yeah, absolutely, and there's so many great libraries of content. For example, if you're an email marketer and you want to make a really nice looking email, there's a website called Really Good Emails, and it's free to use, and you can just look through what other people have done. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. Everything is stolen from something else somewhere along the line, more or less. Usually, it's very difficult to be truly original. It kind of doesn't matter. I mean, not copy it like pixel for pixel, but be inspired, for sure. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would think it's in some ways the same as telling stories. Don't they say there is no original story? David: Absolutely. Kathleen: Every story follows some kind of a pattern that's been used before. David: Yeah, absolutely. Kathleen: Yeah. I was talking with somebody the other day about this. It's somebody who's a mentor of mine. I have an idea for something I may want to pursue as far as writing and speaking about, and I said to him, "But I feel like people have talked about this before," and he's like, "Let me just tell you. There is nothing new that anybody is talking about." He was like, "It is all about the delivery. It is all about how engaging you are, and if you can tell the story better than anybody else, then it feels like it's the first time it's ever been told." I do think there is definitely something to that. David: Yeah and some people like to hear stories more than once. I think it's that's why people who watch Game of Thrones also love Lord of the Rings. Right? Kathleen: Yeah. David: There's not a huge difference between them. Lord of the Rings and Game of Throne fans are probably throwing stuff at walls right now. Those are very common themes in there, like of feeling and mood. That's why people say, "I'm a sci-fi fan," because they enjoy that kind of thing. So you can tell the same story again if you just put your slight tweak on it, for sure. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the things that I think would be really interesting for people listening is if they could see examples of what you think are some of the better presentations or some of the better Prezis they have been done. Is that something that we can include in the show notes, some links to some great presentations? David: Absolutely. How could I turn down such an invitation? Kathleen: I mean, I want to see them. I'm sure other people do as well. David: Sure. Sure. I'll definitely send those over. It's as simple as going to prezi.com/gallery. That has a "greatest and best." Some of our most famous ones are on there and that would be a great place for anyone to start. Kathleen: That's great. IMPACT has a big conference coming up in August, and I'm going to be doing some talks there, and so your timing is really good because I have a feeling I'm going to spend a lot of time in the gallery getting inspiration for my own talk, so that's great and I can't wait to check those out. David Answers Kathleen's Two Questions Now, before we close, two questions I want to make sure to ask you that I ask all of my guests. First is -- and you work with lots of marketers and brands doing marketing -- company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? David: For that I think I'm probably going to have to kind of go with something that has had an effect on me personally. The world has changed. There's a lot of new apps and things out there, and we do things very differently, but I think the one that's had the kind of most profound effect on me is Airbnb. It's really changed the way I travel. I don't think I've stayed in a hotel for quite a while, and I travel a lot for my job because I love travel. I've lived in Asia. I've obviously lived in Europe and, now, I live in the U.S. A really great travel experience for me is one where you feel at home. Right? It's almost like cheating. I'm here in Italy now, and I'm kind of Italian because I live in a flat above there. I live here. I'm not a tourist, right? People hate to feel like a tourist, and I hate to stand out as a tourist. Airbnb has really helped me achieve that feeling. What I love about their inbound marketing is they realize this. Right? They know what it is that I love about being there, their campaigns, their hashtags, their recommendations that come to me, not just for homes, but for experiences as well. It's all done very timely, very well, and very accurately. Whatever they're doing is really working. Kathleen: Yeah. You know, it's very interesting because that notion of the recommendations, and these brands that are able to feed things to you that they can tell that you love. One of the things that I've really begun to notice more is just what a game changer the use of artificial intelligence is, and having a great recommendation and it's the same thing you mentioned, Netflix earlier or Hulu, or I see it on Spotify. These platforms that are able to watch your behavior and then feed you things that are great matches to what you're already consuming. They develop such an innate virality, and they're so sticky because you can't help yourself, and I think there is an opportunity there for marketers who are not maybe in that same kind of an entertainment world to apply that same principle. I think Airbnb is a great example of a company that's gone that really well. David: Yeah. It's another thing that people put a lot of effort into. You mentioned Netflix. Netflix have the fantastic blog on Medium where you can read what their growth department are doing with thumbnail images, geo locations, all of that stuff, and they can have a dramatic effect on how much of the series you're going to consume just by that first thumbnail image that they show you, and they're spotting patterns and things like that, and that put a lot of time and effort into that. So that doesn't happen by mistake. Kathleen: Well, now, I'm going to have to dig up the link to their Medium blog and put that in as well because you have me intrigued. I haven't read that. David: It's fantastic reading, and they're very transparent about what they can do. It's honestly quite frightening about what influence it has. Everything from whether it's a man's face, a woman's face, certain series. I can't remember the specifics, but there are certain series which do better in certain locations with a woman's face versus a man's face. It's really impactful to read that and see our inherent biases at play. Kathleen: Fascinating. Yeah. It's fascinating. That's a rabbit hole that we could go down for an entire other podcast. David: Yeah. We should probably get someone from Netflix on to do that. Kathleen: Yeah. I would love that. Netflix, if you're listening, I would like to talk to your growth hacker. So the second question I want to ask you, and this is the perfect segue because, I mean, things are changing so quickly in the world of digital marketing, and it's so technologically driven in terms of the data that's available. How do you stay up to date? How do you keep abreast of all of that? David: I'm going to have to admit to being a little bit lazy. I'm not the only one, though, to say I really do wait for content to find me, and I think that goes back to the point we were making before about recommendations engines and stuff. I'll open up my feed, and trust that the right thing comes in, but I do consume those feeds a lot, especially my LinkedIn feed is something that I spend more time on than I ever used to. I think they're getting better and better at feeding me the right stuff. I spend a lot of time there and Facebook, and wherever it is, news apps and that stuff, waiting for things to come in. Personal recommendations that come in from colleagues play a big role in what I get, but I know that they're consuming content in the same way. We did a study recently into the way people get their content, and that percentage of people who wait for it to come to them is growing, and growing, and growing. I think that marks an opportunity for us as marketers that the people are almost sitting back and saying, "Okay. Give me what you got." Kathleen: Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned LinkedIn and I'm a big LinkedIn fan, but I'm also a big Twitter fan. When it comes to feeds, one of the things that I've observed is, regardless of where you are, there's a lot of people out there who will say things like, "LinkedIn doesn't give me any value" or "Twitter doesn't give me any value." I think the other element to how much value you derive out of those feeds is like the quality of what you're putting into it. If you're somebody who's going out and just following everybody and anybody, then your feed is going to be cluttered up with all the information from anybody and everybody, whereas, if you're more selective, if you curate the people that you follow, et cetera, I think you can really construct a very high quality feed of information. David: Yeah, absolutely. If I think about it, when I'm looking for things on Twitter for that, I will commonly go to the Prezi feed because we curate that and we see what's coming in. My own personal feed probably has more of my own personal interests, so things like the World Cup, which is going on at the moment. If I were to read that, it's just endless amounts of that. The point you make about being selective over who you follow I think is a very valid one. Kathleen: Yeah and I've seen LinkedIn making a big resurgence lately. You're one of many people recently who's been mentioning that more when I ask that question, so there's definitely a lot of good buzz going on with LinkedIn these days. David: Yay! I'm not alone. How to Get In Touch With David Kathleen: Yeah. Well, this has been so interesting. I can't wait to check out the gallery on the Prezi website. If somebody wants to learn more about any of this or get in touch, tell us the best way to find you online. David: So you can start with LinkedIn. I respond to everybody who writes to me, so it's David Hooker Prezi on LinkedIn. I'm the only David Hooker here. I checked again this morning. It's just me. At Twitter, I'm @HookerDavidJ, and then if you want to check out Prezi, you just go to the Prezi.com website. Kathleen: Great! I should also mention before we go that David does have a podcast himself. He and a cohost are the faces behind The Narrative, which is all about storytelling and narrative strategy, and data visualization, et cetera. So some really good stuff there. If that's a topic you want to dive more into, check out his podcast. If you liked this podcast and learned something, I would really appreciate if you would consider giving it a review on iTunes or Stitcher, or the platform of your choice. And, finally, if you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work, please Tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thanks, David. David: Thanks, Kathleen.

Why Dave Decided to talk to Tony: Tony Grebmeier is man of passion and the true definition of a team player. Although his journey to self-fulfillment wasn't easy- he has managed to turn his company into an eight-figure business: ShipOffers. Alongside his two best friends, Doug Roberts and Gil Gerstein, Tony shares his wisdom on how they are able to manage their business and friendship simultaneously in a healthy manner. Tony elaborates on company integrity being the fundamental importance when starting a business. He also goes on to discuss the importance of building healthy company culture, and everyone understanding the value they bring to the table . His vision to help others achieve more is what makes Tony happy. Tips and Tricks for You and Your Business: Communication with partners: (4:27) The keys to communication and the importance of having an honest relationship. Getting to know them. Prioritizing your teams strengths  (5:35) Structuring team player roles to fit his/her strengths, optimizing performance. How to build and develop a team: To Do’s  (21:00) Quotable Moments: "The most important thing about being an entrepreneur is figuring it out. Not being the person willing to quit when it gets tough." "Your imagination is the only thing that your limited by when it comes to ship offers. If you can think it, and you need help creating it, we have a team of people that we work with, that can get you to that next level." "If you want something bad enough you will find the time, or you will find an excuse." "People are following a leader and you are the leader of your organization, so go first!" Other Tidbits: Going into business with friends: (1:55) What Ship Offers is and provides. (10:15) Ship Offers Products: (12:46) Drainersanddrivers.com (19:52) Links: FunnelHackerRadio.com FunnelHackerRadio.com/freetrial FunnelHackerRadio.com/dreamcar ---Transcript--- Speaker 1:     00:00           Welcome to funnel hacker radio podcast, where we go behind the scenes and uncover the tactics and strategies top entrepreneurs are using to make more sales, dominate their markets, and how you can get those same results. Here's your host, Dave Woodward. Right everybody. Welcome back. Speaker 2:     00:19           Mrs [inaudible] gonna be fun, but different types of podcast of things. At times I have the opportunity of interviewing these amazing guests I have on my show and sometimes I think the actual pre interviews are better than the post interviews. But with that said, you can't hear what I just spent time talking to most amazing man in the world. I love this guy to death. He's helped me personally in my own life going through some crazy stuff right now. He's the CEO of shipoffers. Shipoffers has been around for 17 years and uh, been inc 5,000 company for last four years. I want to welcome to the show, Tony. Welcome. Welcome, welcome. Speaker 3:     00:54           Thank you so much. It's absolutely an honor to be here and yeah, sometimes you get those recordings from the beginning show and you're like, I just want to share with the world, but let me just give you the good stuff you're in for a real tree because I'm honored to be on the show and I can't wait to see where we go. Speaker 2:     01:07           Well, thanks Tony. Tony, Tony, I've been one thing I can tell you about Tony. This is a man who is probably the most honest and pure guy with massive integrity who works from the heart and yet who runs a huge, huge company and yet at the same time is always out there giving and I know you guys are listening, are going to infer a super treat, but first of all, I would encourage you guys to go look at Tony on facebook, connect with them. Tony, Greg Myer Dot com. It's t o n y g R E B Mei e r.com and shipoffers.com. This is a guy who I'm excited to have you on the show today and really one of the things I want to dive right into his, one of the things you've started this company 17 years ago and the part I most fascinated by is you started with to your other good friends and you're still friends today. Speaker 3:     02:04           So many people don't go into business with their friends because they've heard everybody say like, it's never going to work out. What's really crazy is if I back up even earlier, 1996, one of my friends who's my business partner called me and said, hey, uh, silicon valley, I was working. He was working for a company designing websites. The first website I ever designed was for Pixar. It was called toy story and it was 1996, 97 and he goes, Hey, do you want to meet in Vegas? I got an opportunity for a business I wouldn't see if you're interested. I didn't even have a chance to hang up the phone today. You'd be like, what are you trying to sell me? Is there something that you're going to pitch to me like, you know, it's so different in the times. So I met in Vegas and one thing that was true was he said, Speaker 2:     02:47           Hey, I bet you we could figure this out. Speaker 3:     02:50           And that's exactly kind of my path to being an entrepreneur is just trying to figure it out. My two childhood business partners and friends I with one of them growing up when I got kicked out of the house for getting my ear pierced when I was 15, 16, he was the friend that I went and moved in with. Um, we started our company with $5,000 in Van Nuys, California in 2001. And uh, I've always, I think that thing is the most important thing as an entrepreneur is being willing to try to figure it out. Not being the person willing to quit when it gets tough because as you know, running click funnels in any kind of engagement or environment, things get crazy. Like software doesn't work the way it worked one day and then all of a sudden you're like, I didn't change anything to be willing to figure it out. Speaker 3:     03:31           And so for 17 years we've been figuring this thing called business together. Um, we have a tripod philosophy. All three agree or we don't do it. So have to say yes. One says no, we still don't do it. Um, I think there's only been two fights and I started both of them in and they're childlike stuff. Like, Hey, close the gate at the end of the day. And I'm like, no. But I was the first car out. Like, yeah, that's probably why you need to stick around and close the gate. I'm the real basic stuff. Um, my best man was the guy who called me up in [inaudible] 96 and my wedding coming up on 20 years of marriage, 17 years in business, watching my kids grow up here. And everything that I get to do is about connection. And you know, getting on this morning, you know, we, we talk about the tough stuff, we talk about how to let an employee go today. Speaker 3:     04:17           It's the toughest stuff, but that's life and what can we do from it. And we talked about the most important thing is communication and that's what we have to have is clear like perfect communication with partners, especially when you're in a business and making money and honoring and serving your customers who believe in you. And so, you know, it's the tough conversations that have to be had, but the thing that has lasted 17 plus years, as I say, if you find good people that you're honest with and they're able to be honest with you, why not go into business with them? Right? I've, I've got my nice, great playing basketball with them. They never, they never dated my girlfriends. So like the part I love most about Tony is just how poor you are. You're just so real. And I just want to. Things I loved hanging out with. Speaker 3:     05:05           You have the option of spending time with your tmc and live. And to an extent, it's all about people and people's what matters most to you and business to just kind of a byproduct and things that takes place on the back end. Yet at the same time shipoffers has been extremely successful. So if you don't mind, can you kind of help bridge the gap from how do you work with your best buddies and everything else and yet still have a lot of success in business. Sure. We all knew exactly what we were good at going into it. So I'm. Doug was really good with finances Grad graduating from pepperdine with his MBA and so he knew that he could handle the funding side of the business. I'm Gil was, you know, working in a, at a company that designed websites. So he was designed. He had also worked at mattel designing hot wheels. So I knew that he knew specifically what to do to design really cool products and services for us. And then I was like the guy like if you needed it done, just give it to me. Right? There's something to be said about that if you want to do and give it to a busy person. I've always been a salesman. I think that's the thing that I remind myself up. I was fired from one job, gave my brother an ice cream cone at the boardwalk. That's a whole nother story. Speaker 3:     06:16           And I've tried so many different things and I always love seeing how I can grow as a person. And so when we all get into a room, we all have strengths and we all have opportunities to grow and I really work at, okay, doug and be transparent. Where is it that I need to improve and help me because I can't see my blind spots, but you guys can see you and share with me and highlight them for me. And then all right, I need to go do the work, you know, go to a seminar, go read a book or pray about it, go do the work. And so for 17 years we've been doing that. Um, I don't see my business partners a lot when we're outside of the office. I mean, they spent 40 hours by the time I'm, I want to go home, I want to spend time with my kids and my wife, um, I live in the neighborhood with one of the, one of my business partners, Doug. Speaker 3:     07:02           I've seen him twice in six months in my neighborhood and just kind of tells you like, we all have different lives. My, my generation is 10 years ahead of where they're at, raising their kids. They're like eight and under my kids are 17 and 19. Almost going to be leaving the house soon. But the one thing that's been so easy for us is we just roll up our sleeves and get dirty and the end of the day love each other. And I think that's the lesson of life that I would love to encourage anybody in a business relationship is, you know, there's this little simple principles, you know, love God and love people. And if I remind myself to love people no matter what, even when it hurts, um, what lesson is somebody teaching you today is that maybe I need to ask deeper questions we were talking about before the show of what's really going on when there's a problem in the office. Speaker 3:     07:47           When someone comes to the office, Sat, did I even ask how their weekend was? And then go deeper from that. Like, Oh, you know, I went to a couple of birthday parties, ask questions. Like, was it fun? Like, did you enjoy it? Like how many times did you want to leave? And like start getting to get them to open up because we all show up with a bunch of stuff that we're not talking about. We just show up. And then Monday morning it's work mode. Friday, it's like paycheck times go celebrate. So I spent 40 hours a week of really looking at my business partners through a unique lens which their wives don't get to see them, vice versa. Like, it's. So I, I love it and I've always encouraged my friends if you can trust them as far as you can, throw them, if you, if you know their mothers, got to know your partner as well and you got to meet them so that you understand them because uh, my one business partner, his mom calls me his elbows, my one business partner, his elbows and another one that says, hey, you know, I like this kid. Speaker 3:     08:44           He's good. And I lived with them. So I've gotten to know my business partner's families and that's, I think is a really important thing to kind of funny. I actually was at a, I met Russell's parents, gosh, probably about six years ago was the first time and then we happened to be together just this last weekend that dad is Salt Lake City. When Russell received the entrepreneur of the year for a tech company down there, it was just fun sitting next to them at that table. Sharing that moment were six years ago. It was like, man, if my kid ever going to figure this thing out. And so we've been through a lot together and it's been fun. It was neat seeing his dad. I remember when two years ago we started with doing some work with Robert Kiyosaki and Russell. His Dad really could care of lead but really wasn't as excited about what Russell is doing as much as he was about rich dad. Speaker 3:     09:34           It was the very first book that his dad had given Russell to read and so I had the optimum getting his dad and Russell and rich dad's podcast and that was like the highlight of Russell's dad experienced with his son as far as business goes. They'd spent a lot of time to get as far as wrestling, all that kind of stuff. That was the first business. And those are the things that matter the most. And you're right, it's nice when you know, when you know your partner's families and the parents is just an added bonus. So I appreciate your mentioning that. So tell me, for those people who aren't familiar with ship offers, tell them what ship offers is. I mean obviously we integrate with you guys love working with you. What, what is it that ship offers? Does ship offers, provides products and services to marketers online in the health and wellness space or Bible space and personal development space. Speaker 3:     10:22           So we even started printing books on demand, so just give you some of the ideas of the services that we have and what do we do is we provide you the opportunity to test. Just think about like having somebody to test something without spending a lot of capital upfront to go see if it's gonna work or not. So we have a bunch of products that you can incubate and test to see if you can sell online, back in funnels a lot of clients through click funnels and we give you the chance to put your label on them and we ship them to your customer and at the end of the week or whenever our payment terms are set up with you, we send you a bill and we do those transactions every single day. A couple of million times a year for our customers worldwide. We're in 34 different countries that we shipped to and it's just one of those companies that I love like so many people need money upfront, like tons of money, like no, and I'm like, no, I actually know this service works and this industry works because I was on the other side in 2001 when we launched. Speaker 3:     11:15           We were taken from a lot of fulfillment companies and products based companies that they could care, you know, nonetheless about us. All they cared about was the money and we made a decision to say, look, why don't we create a business that gives people tools and resources to help them to win? And that's like the click funnels thing, right? You're giving tools to people to win and then you developed all of these assets to support it because you believe in it. So for 17 years we've been pouring assets and infrastructure in to helping our customers to win. And you said something very big in the very beginning that you gave me praise. I'll take it, but I don't deserve it. What I do deserve is that at the end of the day, my integrity matters and I have to remind myself that I'm a a business based on integrity and I have to show up that way. Speaker 3:     11:58           So when you call us on the phone and you're like, Hey, I'd love to integrate with you. We say, hey, tell me about your business and I need you to be transparent because the reason is I'm going to bet on you once we say it's a good fit for each other, like I need to know that you're thinking tomorrow. You want to be here and five to 10 years down the road, so many people in this day and age just need to make money today and they move on and I don't have time for that, so don't waste my time. Don't waste your time. We'll figure you out. Just be the person that says, I want to be here tomorrow, next month and next year, and I want to build something that I want to leave as a legacy. I don't think click funnels is just a once and done business. It's a legacy business and that's what ship offers is really as a business that's helping so many people, not just the people who work here in our team, but people all around the world running small, incubated small businesses, medium sized businesses, and larger outfits as well. Speaker 2:     12:45           So more detail to it as far as what types of product. Actually Speaker 3:     12:49           testosterone boosters, Krill oil, fish oil, if you're looking for weight loss products, if you're looking for workout products and you can literally slap your name, we have 50 products. You can put your name on 50 different products and we'll mail into to your customers today. Um, it takes us about a week to integrate. If you're doing a lot of volume, it's because you know, you have back in restrictions and things that you need. Um, our, our Apis, adaptable to pretty much any system on planet earth. But the products are easy. I mean, when I look at it, we just launched Quito. Quito is like the hot new craze, right? Um, so everybody wants Quito products and then we have Quito products and tomorrow if it's Garcinia back to what it was four years ago and we can create anything to. So if there's something that you're selling and you're like, oh, I'd love to do this. Speaker 3:     13:35           We have the ability to formulate products where you knock off products, custom formulate. So I mean it's really like your imagination is the only thing that you're limited by when it comes to ship offers. If you can think it and if you need help creating it, then we have a team of people that we work with to help you kind of get to that next level. And I, I mean I've seen some pretty amazing stuff. I mean I, I've been around this industry since 96 so I've seen a lot go on online and I love the fact that everyday I come into the office to play and get creative and see what we can do together. Speaker 2:     14:07           Basically I had the opportunity to either white labeling your products or formulating their own products or basically just trying to figure out what they can do next and that work in your team to kind of create something if the camp. Speaker 3:     14:17           Yeah, and you can send us your products, like we don't even have to make it. You can send it to us and we'll do the fulfillment for you. I mean that's what I've always loved is that people just send me products that are like, I'm totally happy with my manufacturer. I love where I get my products from China. I just. I'm looking for a reliable fulfillment company and I'm like, logistics is what we do. Send it to this address. Tell me how many pallets are coming and we'll take care of. Speaker 2:     14:37           Oh, I love that. I think the part that these days is we see a lot of people who are trying to do the Amazon thing, but once they grow up and they move on from the Amazon and they figured out, you know what? I got to find some way of actually owning my customers. I got to find a way. Actually controlling the product, controlling the delivery that a service like yours is ideal for that because that's their whole game is to own the company, to own the product and the client and to be able to work with a company like yours to fulfill that. Speaker 3:     15:05           Yeah, and we don't market to your customers and a lot of companies are using this as a scare tactic, but there's a lot of companies out there. If you go look in their privacy policies and their statements, they're reusing your data to retarget and market to their customers. That's not what we are. We're not marketers. That's why our slogans easy you market. We do the rest. Speaker 2:     15:28           I love that. So as you take a look, as far as you know where you guys are going in, and I know he kind of started off in health and fitness thing. You also mentioned pod, so you're. You're doing print on demand as well. Speaker 3:     15:38           Yeah, we're playing in the book or Eda, which has been so interesting. People who were in his inner circle are using our services and one of the things I've realized that I'm like, you guys want this stuff cheap, Russell's hey, get this book out as fast as possible. So we're playing in that arena and it's so much fun. Um, I'm writing a book, so obviously I've been spending a lot of time, money and resources trying to figure out how to do it. And our team's like, hey, we figured it out. So we've been printing books on demand. We drop them in a poly bags or if you needed a certain type of way to show up, we do high end stuff and low end. So meaning your budget really dictates what the delivery looks like on the other end. But I'm a believer in helping you to showcase your customer and give them a really amazing experience. So you create the wow effect. So you want them to come back. So many marketers are like one and done and move on and I'm like, you can do that, but if I could show you and it doesn't cost you much more, you can actually create a customer returns often and is coming back and sharing with their friends once you be interested in learning how we do that. Oh, I love that Speaker 2:     16:39           golden nugget secret. So I think the key here is if you are not familiar with ship offers, reach out to ship offers. So S, h I, p o f f e r s.com. Reach out Tony and he's more than happy to connect you to help you guys out. I know it's only one thing you were talking about is you've created a course, a click funnels page. Speaker 3:     16:57           Yes. What's the course called? It's called drainers and drivers. And if we just talked for like 30 seconds on what does drainers and drivers look like or mean to you? It's going to be different for each and every one of us. However, if you ever wake up Monday morning and you have to go into an office, that could be a drainer, but what happens if we could actually figure out why it's a drainer and turn it into a driver and realize that the end of it, you're making more money, you're having more fun with your friends and your family and life looks better. That's what drainers and drivers is. It's an opportunity for us to go through a five day mini course videos, worksheets. You just go through it, grab some information. I'm with you for five days and then hey, at the end of it, now you have some framework that you can use for all areas of your life. Speaker 3:     17:39           I use it for hiring people. When I'm interviewing somebody to come in and start a new position, I say, Hey, can you list your last three drivers and three trainers that your last business so you get them to open up and start talking as tools so you can begin to see, and I love it. That drainers and drivers flip all the time. Something that's driving you today will be a drainer tomorrow, and you're like, I'm going to quit my job. No, you're not going to quit what you're doing. I know that your click funnel's experiences. Amazing. Moneywise yet, let's take a step back. What's really going on is that you've got a lot of stuff in your life that's kind of not on the right course and we just need to bring some awareness to it. Once you get awareness, then you'll say, all right, now I've got a six month plan. I can't wait for that date. Now I'm going to go full time in my click funnels life and my business and things are gonna. Be Better. So we help you to map out that plan so that you don't feel overwhelmed when you look at your life. Speaker 2:     18:30           So how does a guy who's running the logistics company create a program called drainers and drivers? Speaker 3:     18:36           Great question. So I'm all about community. And so what was really clear three years ago was, um, I had a lot of people around me who wanted to figure out how we could work together and, and I, and it was too tough because I have only so much throughput during the day. So I created a community which is called a be fulfilled. I created a podcast around beef fulfilled and that slogan has been on our wall in our company for so many years, which is be fulfilled. And that's all about being fulfilled in your life. And what I also came to the conclusion was, as people were struggling and we, you know, you look online and you hear about it, things are happening in our world. And I found the time because I made it intentional. I set time to say no, what's the biggest way that I can impact the world? Speaker 3:     19:22           Because my time is limited. So I wanted to use one of the most amazing platforms in the world, which is click funnels. I wanted to use it. I had something live in about an hour and I've been able to play in that world so often that I'm working on my second course or they're called purposeful living for success and that's, you know, built as a six week program and I realized that if you want something bad enough, you'll find the time or you'll find the excuse and the time for me is now the time for you is now, so I just got drainers and drivers.com one day called my graphics designer and say, can you design this? Yes. I said, I want to live like this. Yes. I was in Cleveland at a mastermind, 2:00 in the morning. I couldn't sleep. I recorded 10, 10 videos really, really quick. I scrap five, put up five. The course was live. Took down the next morning and gave everybody a handout saying, the course is live because if you want something bad enough, you'll find a way or you'll find an excuse and I'm tired of making excuses and I want to help people not make them in their life. Speaker 2:     20:20           Oh, I love it. Thank you again. I appreciate your giving that out to everyone here. Again, drainers and drivers.com. Definitely go check that out. Um, I know that I literally could spend days talking to you. I've had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with you on a boat. Let's be realistic. Stuck in the middle of the San Diego Harbor. Couldn't do anything, but I think one of the great things about the way you communicate and work with people is even in your own team. I haven't, I haven't, I don't know all of your team as well as I met some of them, but you're always about as a CEO, helping build them and, and develop them and if you don't mind those who are listening, who are trying to build their own team, what are some of the things that you've used in your life? They'll build your team to where you have such. You have a lot of a players on your team which is tough to come by. Speaker 3:     21:11           So first and foremost, which may hurt to hear this is what are you waiting for? You need to be the example because remember people are following a leader and you are the leader of your organization. So go first and I heard this many years ago and it never really, really, you know, like went off for me, but I was at a seminar and they said, be the first to pop in the room. Don't be the last kernel to get burned, right? Be the first pop, go first and just go. And so I admit a lot of my faults to the world, you know, you follow me on facebook, you know that I've, I've struggled with suicide. I've struggled with alcoholism and struggled with marital issues, have struggled with finances. I struggled with a lot of things and I realized that my path isn't the same for everybody, but the one path that I know to be true is you have to be the example. Speaker 3:     21:59           You need people to like see you. Like I'm not jumping on a camel until I see someone jump on a camel. Like it's just not something that I want to go and try to do. But if you show me that you bring out a ladder and you show people how they get on top of a camel, or they show the people how to get top of the elephant, you lead by example. So you have to be the example and that's the one thing that I tell my team how I lead in my house. That's how I work with my wife and my friends. I'm like, you look, I know there's days that I don't want to show up for life. I really just want to sleep in bed, pull the covers over my eyes and say somebody else do it. But I signed up for this opportunity and people are counting on me and when I know that and I draw strength from a lot of amazing places and resources, I have great coaches and mentors around me who in constantly. Speaker 3:     22:43           You're encouraging me. That inside me is greatness. And that's what I want to encourage anybody listening right now. You don't have to be a leader of a big organization. You can be a leader of yourself. Just remember that you have greatness inside of you and that for you to activate it, it's Kinda like saying to yourself, today's the day, now's the time, let's go. And, and even if your belief is 100 percent solid, it's least something to draw from. And so I, I love to tell people just like I'll tell you that I love you man, and I know that at times life is not fair and we go through some seasons and it's ups and downs, but I know one thing to be true is that you're not alone and that there's tons of people and resources at your fingertips. Numbers you can call and if you've heard anything today from how I speak and I know I don't necessarily always follow every question to a team give. Speaker 3:     23:33           The perfect answer is that I really care about people and that's the one investment that I've made to make sure is very clear in the organization that we run, is that my commitment is to. And I signed that today as a declaration when we were talking about vision as a company. I said, my commitment is to you. What's your commitment to and then everybody got up and wrote their commitment on the board and I said, I hope that you understand what vision that what you wrote should be the same commitment you have here as you do in your life, and if not, then let's begin the process. My door's open. Walk in. Let's figure that out. I'll roll up my sleeves. All invest my time will come in early. Stay late. You've got to be willing to invest in your people because why do people leave? Because people investing in them in other places and they're beginning to lose interest in you and I love having people that have been with us 17 years and I love having people who have been with us six months and I love having people who have a story along their journey to share is that the company stands for something. I asked you, what do you stand for when you're looking at your people and put them first and watch how everything else begins to fall into place. Speaker 2:     24:43           Drop the mic on that one. The one. I appreciate that. It's been one of the things we've looked at click funnels, it was we met a couple of weeks ago and we're basically doing a full org chart thing. No rustling sitting there going around 180, 190 and at the time it rolls it out and it's two, oh five and the next three weeks it was like, whoa. All of a sudden you find this little tiny idea that we got started with his grown, but the thing that we've held true to is what you mentioned and that is you gotta invest in people and we try to make sure we always hire just a players the best we can. We try to make sure that it's a culture fit. We're really big on its culture. You don't mind just next few minutes here, could you just help us kind of identity you take one a matter of time. When you talking about culture, what's it mean to you and how do you make it work in your business? Speaker 3:     25:40           Remember how we were talking a little bit about going and meeting the parents, hanging with them and getting to know them. I actually want to get to know you outside of work and my mantra and my philosophies are simple. The way that I think my methodology says says something really, really basic and I want you to get this date because I think it's applicable to you and then your org chart and everything that you're doing, turn your org chart upside down and where do you stand? The bottom, supporting this massive, you know, infrastructure, right? Yes. It started out as a little idea, but it's grown. It's blossomed just like every year when the Golden State Warriors, because that's my team. Congratulations. Thank you. They think about the season. They don't go, well, let's go take this year. Right? They think, okay, we have all of these people and what makes up the Golden State Warriors is not just the players that you see on the court. Speaker 3:     26:30           It's all of the coaches, the staff, the trainers or the people back the tickets, like everybody doing everything that you can't see and that's the thing that I have to remind myself about shipoffers is I may be the CEO and I may have great partners that give me the platform, but behind the scenes I have a team and that's like the team aspect that has helped build our culture. Our culture is built on vision, clarity, so we have kindness, we have improvement, right? We have integrity. Like I don't want people who don't want to be here, so I have a statement. If you have a clock in, clock out mentality, this isn't the place for you because some days it may be early in some days and maybe late and along the way we've make it last and I may have to pull up my compass and figuring out the direction we're going again. Speaker 3:     27:14           And if you really want to test your people, don't pay him for two weeks and see their integrity. See if they should go up, see if they're going to give you their time, their consideration and everything they've got for you and then do it for another two weeks and then now you've got a month. And. All right, am I really the right person to lead this? So I'm all about culture. I'm all about getting to know my people. I love to take them out to lunch. I love to text them on the weekends. I've had a couple people who've dealt with death in the last couple of days, family issues, and I want to know my people. I want to know the people who actually signed up to go and jump on board and See our vision right and where we're headed and what we're doing. So my buy in has to be just as much as your bio in mind. Speaker 3:     27:59           Maybe have to be just a little bit more because I have some experience around it. The people here come from all walks of life. They've been through all difficult situations growing up in the ghetto, growing up fatherless, uh, you know, environments and, you know, didn't know their mother. And I've seen, I've seen it come from different countries, worked oddball jobs to get here and I don't care who you are, I care about what you do when you're here. I don't care what happened to you, I'd love to get to know it, but I need to know who you are here and what is it that you want help with. So the last piece that I tell everybody that we hire, everybody we bring on, I said, we're a stepping stone for your greatness. We're here to help you learn enough stuff. And when you're ready, you'll take steps to go where you need to go. Speaker 3:     28:47           Um, I told every person that has ever worked for our team. I said, I'm a stepping stone to where you want to go. Allow us to be that and give us what you can while you're here and I'll invest everything I can into you while you're here as well. And, uh, I love it. I mean, I'm a new guy. Just came on as our director of sales. He left the company that he was at for nine years managing 109 people. And uh, my friend Vinnie Fisher and his company helped us find this person and it's like, I found, I think I really do. I think about like, I'm going to be an empty Nester here in a year replacement, I don't want to say it too loud because he's in the other room, but there's something magical about when you invest in people. And I asked him the other day and I said, you know, how you doing here? Speaker 3:     29:37           He goes, man, I can't believe it. I go, why? He goes, I actually remember that I have a life again. And it's not that there was anything wrong where he was at. He just sometimes we get lost along the way. And so culture for me is, is really talking to your people, talking about the good stuff, talking about it, the bad stuff, and getting ugly with them and talking about the stuff that really matters. And uh, you know, when you notice that a person is not doing their job, pull them aside and tell them. And I've been known to do that and I've been known not to do that. And I kicked myself when I realized, man, if I would've just had another heart to heart, maybe it would have mattered. But culture is it. I mean if you don't have good culture, you, you're definitely probably have some other issues in your company. Speaker 2:     30:15           Well, I appreciate that. I know we joke around all the time as far as this idea as far as cold and really trying to build that type of a really tight knit organization. Not only here at inside of a company but also with our customers. So I appreciate that. I totally understand that. Speaker 3:     30:33           Do you have an iphone or do you have an android? Iphone. So I can only address iphone users because that's all I have. So if you're an android maybe you should tune out some of the stuff. I have a big believer in. It may not be the best product in the world, but it's got some amazing things that have created culture. The facetime, the quick easy swipes, the shareable stuff, the things that are easy to attract, their store looks amazing. And then other companies try to, you know, copy their store, like how many people have tried to go and copy click funnels throughout the years. But you can't be click funnels because there's a culture there when you went to funnel hacking live, when I've been out of the last four years and I'm so happy that I got a chance to showcase this last year. You're looking around, they bought into culture. They believe in what you guys are doing. That's why I said yes to the podcast, why I say yes to this because it lines up with my culture, my fit of like I want to do things where I know the people on the other end are going in the same direction and they have a buy in 250 staff. It's phenomenal, but it still took one, two, three, four, five to come up with a vision to go then implement the vision for the rest of the company. They all had a buy into your culture. Speaker 2:     31:45           Well, I appreciate that. I again, I can't thank you enough, Tony. I become a dear friend and I appreciate especially just how just raw and pure you are. Speaker 3:     31:58           That's why my podcast that I launched last week and talk inside my other podcast is called raw and uncut. I think. I think we need less editing. I think we really just need to go and try and be okay that it didn't work out, but be willing to get back up, fail fast, get up. If it doesn't work and you know eyeballs aren't buying what you're selling, then maybe it's time that you just figure out why. Why it's not selling? Is it really it's not converting or maybe your message isn't very clear and I want my message to be clear to anybody listening today. No matter the path that you're on, no matter where you're at in your life, know that you matter. You have greatness inside of you. People like myself and Dave, Karen, love for you as a human being. Know that we want to support you on your mission and your journey, but I need 100 percent buy in from you. First. I need you to believe in yourself and if your stock Speaker 3:     32:52           maybe just go take drainers and drivers.com and allow that to be the highlighter that just begins to show some of the things. I'll find a way to connect with your audience. I'll find a way for them to reach out and connect with me. I'm a big believer in community is essential. I think we were created for community and connection and so many of us as entrepreneurs, we sit alone in our room and we're building something for the world and we forget that we are very disconnected and slightly making some adjustments. We start connecting and then when you go to funnel hacking live, you've realized that you have a huge community around you. Go ask a question in the facebook group sometimes watch how fast that thing fills up with answers. You are not alone, so stop sitting in the stands waiting for somebody to come along and save you. Speaker 3:     33:39           Go do it yourself and know that you need to ask questions like when you needed to go to the bathroom and elementary school you raised your hand. I want you to get back to raising your hand and know that people are willing to help you, but don't be an asshole. Be the person who actually does it. When they say that's what they want. So remember, you're at where you're at for a specific reason. Now if you don't like where, yeah, do something about it. You're not a tree, as Jim Rohn said, you can grow and I want this message that I share with the world every single day of my life is I want you to be empowered to know that it's opportunity is now no opportunity wasted, so don't waste anything that we're talking about today and saying, oh, I'll do it someday. There is no Sunday. Today is the day. We're not promised tomorrow. We're not promised next week or next year. We're promised right here, right now. And what you can do in this moment Speaker 3:     34:28           is Russell says, is your one fall away, right? You're one funnel away. You're one phone call away, your one email or a text from changing your entire life. So allow this podcast, this message, anything that you've heard today to resonate with you and if you don't resonate with you, guess what? I don't resonate with everything I hear either, but I think about one thing when I'm listening to somebody. What's the lesson that they're sharing? And I hope my lesson today has all been about awareness. Getting gaining more awareness in your life is the essential ingredient to living a fulfilled life. Well, with that guys, we're going to let this end checkout shipoffers.com and make sure you also go to, yeah, drink drainers and drivers.com. Again, drainers and drivers.com. Shipoffers.com. And by all means fine Tony on facebook, reach out to him is one of the most amazing men you'll ever meet on facebook. I'm on facebook, so yeah. Speaker 4:     35:30           Hey everybody. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to podcasts. If you don't mind, could you please share this with others, rate and review this podcast on itunes. It means the world to me where I'm trying to get to as a million downloads here in the next few months and just crush through over 650,000 and I just want to get the next few 100,000 so we can get to a million downloads and see really what I can do to help improve and get this out to more people at the same time. If there's a topic, there's something you'd like me to share or someone you'd like me to interview, by all means, just reach out to me on facebook. You can pm me and I'll be more than happy to take any of your feedback as well as that. There's people like me to interview. I'm more than happy to reach out and have that conversation with you. So again, go to Itunes, rate and review this, share this podcast with others and let me know how else I can improve this or and do to make this better for you guys. Thanks.

In this episode we are talking about our remote work tools that enable our distributed team across the world to collaborate, design, and build software. Throughout the episode, Todd, Ken, and Jamon touch on their favorite tools—from Slack, Zoom, and Google Sheets—why they chose them, and the ways they have added custom features to really make the remote experience special. Show Links & Resources Slack Zoom G Suite BlueJeans Screenhero RealtimeBoard InVision Trello Airtable Shush Dropbox Bigscreen VR Taking the Pain Out of Video Conferences by Ken Miller Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: The topic at hand today is remote tools, and all of the different ways that you have built a remote company. Where do you even start when you're thinking about what tools to pick when you're going remote? KEN MILLER: This is Ken Miller, by the way. It happened very organically for us. To be honest, I don't know that we could've done this company this way before Slack. Because the tools that came before, Hipchat and IRC and Yammer, even though I worked there. Sorry, Yam-fam. They just didn't quite do it. Right? They didn't quite create the online atmosphere that we need to work the way that we do. Does that sound accurate to you, Todd? I feel like once we found Slack, we were like, "Holy crap, this is epic!" TODD WERTH: I think there's a few alternatives. Hipchat, at the time, wasn't good enough. There were a few alternatives we investigated. I would like to mention at the beginning of this ... This is Todd Werth, by the way. I would like to mention at the beginning, I imagine that a lot of companies in this podcast will need to be paying us an advertising fee. Like Slack. JAMON HOLMGREN: We actually adopted Slack before we were remote. We had ... I think we were using Google Hangouts or something. Or whatever of the myriad Google chats there are out there. They have like 12 apps. We were using something else in person, and then we started using Slack organically right when it first came out. TODD: Sorry about that noise you all heard. That was me throwing up a little bit in my mouth when you said "Google Hangouts". (laughter) KEN: We'll talk about video-chat in a minute. JAMON: By the way, this is Jamon Holmgren. It was ... Initially, we jumped onboard. They did a really good job marketing themselves. We had used Hipchat a little bit, but it just wasn't what we expected. We started using Slack. That was in early 2014, I think it was? I don't think it's a coincidence that within a year and a half we ended up going remote. I think that was one of the enabling tools. We got used to it in the office, but it enabled remote work. TODD: To talk about chat apps or chat services is important, but on a more general standpoint, I would say how you approach it is actually try 'em and do it. A lot of companies seem to just use whatever is available and not look for optimum solutions. If trying three or four different chat systems is too onerous for you, that's probably the wrong attitude, in my opinion. KEN: You think, "don't settle". Don't assume that the first thing that you try is the only thing, and then conclude that remote isn't gonna work because the tool that you tried sucks. JAMON: We tried a lot of tools at ClearSight, before the merger. We tried ... I can't even name them all, to be honest. Part of it is because I like ... I'm a gadget guy, I like to try new things and see how it goes. There was actually a lot of skepticism around Slack because they're just yet another tool that they had to log into and pay attention to. "We already had the email, so do we really need this." It was kinda funny, when I went back and looked at our inner-company email, just tracked ... I think I used the "everyone@clearsightstudio.com" or something email address to track how often we were using it for company communications. It just dropped off a cliff after Slack. The amount of email, the volume of email that was flying around went way, way, way down. In fact, I remember we used to send GIFs in the email threads, and stuff. There were elements of the culture that we have today in Slack going on in email threads. Slack was just so much more well-suited to that. That actually came about very organically. We had tried a bunch of different things. We tried Slack, and it just picked up steam, picked up steam, picked up steam. TODD: I don't ... I'm not even exaggerating, I don't believe I've ever sent an email to anyone at Infinite Red internally. I don't think so. KEN: Unless it's a forward from someone external. TODD: Correct. I think there's people on our team who probably don't check their email very often because they don't have a lot of -- KEN: Yeah, if you don't do sales or any kind of external outreach -- TODD: Yeah. That was a sticking point a few times, when people were sending out the emails, and we had to ... They were wondering why people weren't responding, it's because the variety of people never check their email. JAMON: It is funny, because email does still, it is still a tool that we use for remote communication with outside clients, especially people first coming to us. But as soon as we can, we get them onto Slack because we've found that that level of communication is the least friction, it's very seamless. Slack is definitely featuring very centrally in our remote-tool story, for sure. TODD: Rather than just ... I'm sure a lot of people out there use Slack. If you don't, give it a try. But rather than just gushing on Slack, I do wanna say that the important part here is we did go through a lot of different chat services. You have to give 'em some time. At first, for example ... We do love Slack, but at first it didn't seem that different. There wasn't a bullet list that's like, "Oh, this has feature X", it was a bunch of little, subtle things that made it work especially well for us. KEN: Part of the meta-point there, is you have to treat your tools really seriously. Right? Google and Amazon and all these big companies, any well-funded start-up, whatever, they're gonna lavish a lot of attention on making an office that works for them. Right? TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: They're gonna create an office environment very thoughtfully. I've been to a lot of these offices. A lot of them are very thoughtfully considered. Right? They're designed to create a certain atmosphere. For example, I was at the Square offices once. Huge, cavernous room designed to create a sense of energy. That's the open-office mantra, that sense of energy. They had these little cubicle ... nicely designed cubicle things where you could go if you wanted quiet. Clearly, noise was the default. That architecture creates a culture. At least it reinforces a culture. As a remote company, your tools are your architecture. You either need to buy them from people who design them in a way that works for you, and Slack seems to work for a lot of people, or you build things that work for you, or you create norms about how they're used that do the same thing. We've done some things on Slack, we've done some things on Zoom, to create that sense of being together. Todd? TODD: I would like to add emphasis to what Ken just said. Imagine a time that someone puts into an office: architecture, the layout, the furniture. Rearranging it multiple times, placing stuff. Now think about the time that companies you've worked for put into remote tools. Anyone out there with their hands up saying they spent about 30 minutes on their remote tools -- KEN: Ever! TODD: Yeah. It's not surprising that one is superior to other in those organizations. I would pile on, like Ken said, and take the same amount of effort and consideration of your tools as a remote company as you did with everything else in the physical space if you're a commuter company. CHRIS: I'm interested, too, because as you're talking, you're talking about the difference between physical architecture and the architecture of your tools that allow you to do remote work, and if everyone's using Slack, and it looks and functions the same way, what brings the sense of uniqueness to a company that's using the same tools? TODD: Me. Just me being around makes everything unique, wonderful, and amazing. To answer the real question, you have to take Slack ... One of the great things about Slack, 'cause it's highly customizable, you can add plug-ins, you can add all sorts of integrations. We're gonna talk about other tools than Slack. They literally just pay us a crapload of money just to talk about this. JAMON: I wish. KEN: I wish. TODD: You don't take the vanilla. The point of a tool like that is you take it and you make it your own. JAMON: I did see someone tweeting about switching remote companies. They quit one company and they got hired by another. They did mention, actually, how similar it was. You go into the same place; you sit down at the same chair; you have the same computer in front of you; you log in to a different Slack, and you start working. Right? There is some level of consistency there. In a way, that's a very good thing. You can be comfortable very, very, very soon. There are plenty of things to learn about a new company without having to also learn new office layout, new office norms, policies about who can put their lunch in the fridge and who can't. I don't know what else. It's been so long since I've been in an office, I don't even know. I think there is some level of normalcy there because people do use similar tools. Like Todd said, you can customize Slack to work the way that your company needs to, and you can customize other tools as well. Since we're programmers, since our team has a lot of programming capability on it, we do actually build a lot of glue code in the scripts and things that will help tie all the tools together. KEN: In most organizations that have adopted chat tools, whether it's Slack or something else, they are usually billed as an internal supplement replacement for email. It is great at that, don't get me wrong, but I think something that gets lost in the way people talk about in the way we communicate now is that ... Let me tell a little story. I used to be a big fan of Roger Ebert. Rest in peace. Brilliant writer, right? Super enthusiastic. He was very critical of the way people write online. Very critical of things like emojis and emoticons. I think, while I respect him a lot, I think he completely missed the point on that. The point of that is, although, yes, we type to communicate online, it's not really writing. Not in the way our English teachers taught us. Right? It's typed speech, really. Right? It's a register of communication that's closer to the way that we talk than it is to the way that we would write if we're writing an essay or a blog post. One of the things that I really like about, Slack for example, is the rich way that you can communicate without it looking junky. It doesn't look like something awful or 4chan or some of the other really junky-looking message boards that have that level of expressiveness. It gives you the level of expressiveness so that you can substitute for the lack of facial expressions and body-language, but it's not writing. You don't write ... you don't type into Slack the same way you do. It's much closer to the way that you talk. For a remote organization, where we're not on Zoom all the time, although we are a lot, it's super important that you have that level of human expressiveness in your medium, in the medium that you're using to replace spoken word. TODD: Three comments. One: Zoom is the video conferencing tool we use, and we'll talk about that in a second. Two: I don't spend much time on 4chan, Ken, so I'll take your word on that one. (laughter) Three: just to give an example, talking about customization and you might be asking yourself, "Okay, Todd, I've used Slack. I've used chat. What're you talking about?" Just give you a few flavors. The simplest is creating your own channels that have some sort of cultural significance to your organization. One of ours is called "Rollcall", where we ... It's the digital equivalency of walking in and out of the office. "I'm here this morning." "I'm gonna go get my car worked on." "I'm back." It's not just status, it's also ... not just whether you're working or not, but it's a way to communicate basic, little life things in a short way. We have another one called "Kudos", where we give kudos to people. Which, at first, I thought, probably, wouldn't take off, but it actually did. It's where you give kudos to people for things that they did well, and I'm really shocked how many people give kudos and how many people respond. That's obviously just using the base tool and choosing what content to put on there, and how to organize. There's other things, too. Obviously there's things like code-repository integration, a code bug-reporting integration. We integrate with other companies' Slacks. They have a Slack channel, we have a Slack channel, and they connect so that we can do that with our clients. All the way to we have a custom Bot we wrote for Slack. Her name is Ava. She does a variety of internal processes for us. She's kind of ... In the old days, you'd have a database and you'd have a Windows app written to connect your database for your company, you'd do things in there. We have a lot of internet SaaS-tools. And then we have Ava that integrates a lot of them together. JAMON: Todd, can you give an example of something that Ava does for us? TODD: Yes. There's some basic things that a chatbot might do. For instance, you might wanna ask her where Jamon is, and she'll tell you the information she knows about Jamon. It's a lot of operational stuff. For instance, our Project Manager, Jed, has to produce weekly reports for clients. Ava produces those for him. Stuff like that. Stuff that you would normally do, like I said, in the old days, in a desktop app personally. JAMON: Todd came up with Ava quite a while ago, actually. It was sort of a toy to start with, just playing around with it. He had some ideas where it might go, but over time we've actually invested more and more resources into this internal chatbot and it's proven to be quite valuable. It's saved a lot of time, reduced the amount of overhead that we have to have tracking things because it's able to do a lot of process things. KEN: So far, she has not escaped and murdered us. (laughter) TODD: Not so far. I'm working on that. JAMON: That's a win. TODD: There's some tiny things. She's just a way for us, if we need to program something that we have a sticking point like, here's a very simple thing that took me five minutes to ruin. We do a lot of things on Mondays, and constantly wanna know what last Monday was, or Monday three weeks ago. You can literally just say, "Ava, what was Monday two weeks ago," and she'll tell you. That's a very tiny thing. Generating project PDFs or generating project reports is a bigger thing, obviously. JAMON: Another tool we use to communicate, non-verbally in Slack, is "Reactions". Someone'll post something and we react to it. I think this is pretty common in Slack teams and this is something that Slack did a good job of coming up with a cool idea. Usually you think of up-voting and down-voting, but when you have the whole range of emojis, including custom ones and animated ones and things like that, it can be a very cool thing. One interesting example of this: we have an integration with ... Ken, what's the service we use for Chain React tickets? KEN: Zapier. JAMON: Zavier. Zapier, yeah, and it connects with Eventbrite, and that basically will post any time someone buys a ticket to Chain React, which is our React Native conference, of course, happening in Portland in July. You should buy a ticket. (laughter) We get a notification, and it pops in there, says who's coming. When we're getting down there ... We were getting down to the last few advanced workshops that were available, someone started putting a number emoji underneath it. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, like that. You can see then, at a glance, how many were left. It was very cool how we were all collaborating on that. When someone would buy the advanced workshop, Kevin VanGelder, who's our resident Windows guy, he would put a little Windows emoji on there because that's part of the advanced workshop. It was just a cool way to communicate and collaborate without even using words. TODD: I think the important part of using reactions or emojis or Slack Responses ... Reactions, if you're not familiar, Slack is ... It's simply, someone posts a message, and instead of responding to it, you can post a little image on it, like heart, or a thumbs up, or a vote-up, or whatever. Slack Response is an automatic system that, when you say X, it outputs Y into it. One Slack Response that Jamon hates is that when you say "I'm not a big fan", it posts this picture of this really, really small fan. It's hilarious. I love it. (laughter) JAMON: Really hilarious. TODD: Every time someone put ... We had some that we had to remove, 'cause they just came up too much. Every time you'd say "founders" it would show the Three Stooges, which is "Accurate", but... KEN: It was "founders' meeting". TODD: Oh, whatever. KEN: But still, yeah. TODD: It was accurate but a little too much noise. The point is, it's very important. We've probably added a huge number of Slack Responses, a huge number of our own emojis, and the emojis you can use for Responses. A lot of them have become very cultural. Just to give you a few examples: my cat, Calle, that's short for Calle Berry, I took a picture of her paw. And, of course, cats, if you just do the front part of their paw, it looks like they have four fingers instead of five because their fifth one's back further. We came with this emoji and this thing where, if someone does a really great job, they get a "high-four", instead of high-five, and that's Calle's Response. JAMON: I didn't actually know that was Calle's paw. TODD: Oh, yeah, that's Calle's paw. JAMON: That's cool. TODD: So that's a cultural thing that I created one day, and it just kinda stuck. It became a "high-four"; it is an Infinite Red thing, you get a "high-four". We have other things like that, too, that are very specific to our culture, where you have to explain to people who come in what that means. I would definitely customize it, make it fun. We don't worry too much if clients see it. We're not doing anything inappropriate. At first, there was discussion, "Is it professional if they accidentally trigger one of the Slack Responses?" "No, but does that really matter?" "No," in my opinion. KEN: It depends on the Response. (laughter) TODD: Of course. KEN: There were some that were a little over the line and that, without context, could be a little startling. We removed those. TODD: Yeah, that's true. KEN: But for the most part, yeah, just something that's quirky. Hopefully, we all have clients that, at least the people who are in the Slack room are able to appreciate that. TODD: Another one that's totally part of our culture is, there was this early picture of me looking into the camera with a stern face. That became the "shame" emoji. That's been used ever since. Every time someone wants to throw shame upon someone, my face is there. I don't know if that's good or bad. JAMON: There's another one that's quite disturbing, of you, Todd. TODD: Oh! When you say yes "yis", Y, I, S, yes that is disturbing. JAMON: "Yis dream." TODD: You have to work here to ... KEN: You had to be there. KEN: Some of the things that came from my experience at Yammer, where a lot of the company was run internally on Yammer, there's a couple of really big advantages to that. Especially, at an all-remote company, where the vast majority of conversations happen there. One is that there's very much less pressure to include people in meetings just because, just in case they might have something to say about it. Because if you've having a conversation in Slack, you just pull 'em in. Right? After the fact, and they can catch up. But the other was, there was an ethos at Yammer that was, there was this pat question which was, "Why is this private?" "Why did you make this group private?" "Why is this in a private chat?" Making closed conversations justify themselves, rather than being the default. Particularly when we invite other people into Slack, I notice there's a little period of training, where people will instinctively start DMing, 'cause it's like "Well, I need to ask Ken this question." Say we brought our bookkeeper in, right? They would ask me 'cause I was the contact. I'm like, "Ask this question in Finance." Right? "Ask this question in the Finance channel." Which happens to be one of the private ones, for a variety of fairly obvious reasons. By asking in the channel, then the other people who might be interested can just observe. That's one of the ways that you compensate for the lack of that serendipitous, overheard conversation that people are so fond of in a office. CHRIS: In Episode Two, we talked about the philosophy of remote work. Todd, you actually made a comment that was really interesting to me. You said, "When the leadership uses the remote tools, they immediately get better." Why do you think that's the case? TODD: Human nature. I'll answer your question with a little story. I worked for company ... This is circa 1999. I don't know. I didn't work for 'em; they were a client of ours. For many, many years they were very much a Microsoft shop. They had no interest in testing anything on other platforms like Mac or whatever. We worked for them for nine years, something like that. So this is all through the 2000s. It was frustrating for people who wanted to produce websites that were universal. If someone opened 'em on a Mac, it would actually look good and not look horrible. One day, one of the VPs who was above the software group bought an iPad. I think, about a year later, he bought a MacBook. Once he had that iPad, all of a sudden, it'd become very important that things look good on his iPad, which is funny and horrible at the same time. It is just human nature. If you use something, it's much more front of mind than if you don't. Even the best of people suffer this. If you have a mixed company, meaning you're part remote, part commuter, one of those groups is gonna be a second-class citizen. Period. If 10 people are in a meeting, and eight are remote and two are in the office, the two in the office are gonna be the second-class citizens. More often, it's the vice versa, right? Getting everyone on the same page gets rid of second-class citizens. If you wanna make the best remote environment, either getting the majority or getting the people who have more power in the remote situation will increase your tools' quality big time. JAMON: That's for sure. We've seen that internally at Infinite Red, as well. When we use the tools, which we do, leadership team is probably the heaviest user of the remote tools in a lot of ways. There are situations where they're just not good enough, and we make sure that they get changed, for sure. Zoom is a good ... Zoom, the video chat, video call system, is really an interesting one because it has worked the best for us in terms of video calls. We've used a whole bunch of them. We've used everything from Google Hangouts, Skype, Appear.in, which is pretty decent. Pretty frictionless, actually. I like Appear.in for how fast it is to jump into it, but the quality is still a little bit sub-optimal. A few others as well. The nice thing about Zoom is that it allows you to put everybody into a grid pattern. It has a gallery view, which is really cool because then you feel like you're having a meeting and not doing a presentation. That's something that came out of us doing sales calls and internal meetings where we kinda felt like, "I don't wanna be the person on the big screen," right? Feel like your giving a presentation. "I wanna feel like this is a meeting with everybody in an equal place." It makes people feel more comfortable. That was a situation where we were using the tools for various things and found the one that, I think, has worked the best 'cause, as a leadership team, we needed it. TODD: Yes, as far as video chat or video calls ... We actually need a name for that. What do you say if ... It's not really video chatting. JAMON: Video conferencing? TODD: I don't like ... KEN: It's not exactly "conferencing". TODD: I don't like the term. JAMON: Video meeting? KEN: Video meeting. TODD: Yeah, there needs to be a term for that. We need to coin a term for that, at least internally. CHRIS: Zooming. TODD: Zooming. Well that's ... That's not tool-specific. KEN: Slack as a tool is much stickier, in the long term, probably, than Zoom is. At the moment, Zoom is, by far, in our experience, the best quality. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: But that could change. Slack ... there's a lot we've invested in customizing and it would be harder, but ... Although, we have invested some in Zoom, which we can talk about a bit. TODD: I would say Zoom is our favorite for our situation. One of our clients is BlueJeans.net, which is not really a competitor, but they do video conferencing. BlueJeans is really great for many things. One thing is they do every platform well. KEN: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep. TODD: Which, Zoom, and a lot of the other ones don't necessarily do. Now, we're all mostly on Macs, and it works really well on that, so that works out well. Also, BlueJeans.net has a lot of additional features. Where we basically just need video conferencing; Zoom is so superior. Google Hangouts is horrible. Please, please stop using Google Hangouts. KEN: Don't use Skype. Don't use Google Hangouts. TODD: Well, Skype -- KEN: Skype has gotten better, but -- TODD: Skype's quality is great, but it does a max of six people. We have 26 people. KEN: I disagree that they're quality is great. TODD: I was being ni -- KEN: Even domestically, I've had problems with it. (laughter) JAMON: We have Microsoft people listening. TODD: I was being nice, Ken. JAMON: It crashes a lot on Mac. KEN: The point is, here, you should demand rock-solid video 99% of the time. TODD: Yeah. KEN: If that's not what you're getting, look at another tool. JAMON: This extends to the internet bandwidth that you have available at your place of work, too. Some people that were really scraping by on 20Mb or something connections, and it was impacting video quality, and -- TODD: On what tool? KEN: No, their connection. JAMON: Their internet connection, yeah. That was something that we, overtime, got everybody to upgrade to faster and faster internet. I think that was a success for, pretty much, everybody. They have pretty acceptable internet, now, at this point. TODD: Some aren't as much. We have a person who's a nomad and travels around. We have someone who's in extremely rural Canada, up above Toronto, Tor-on-toe, I'm told is the proper way to say that. Zoom does very well in bandwidth, so the people that do have limited bandwidth, that works very well. We actually have meetings, 26 people in Zoom, which before would have been crazy. Skype limits you to six, which I'm not sure how useful that is for most meetings, but good for you, Skype. KEN: The only thing it's not so great on is battery-life, if you're using a mobile device. JAMON: It sort of trades CPU time for bandwidth. KEN: It does, yeah. JAMON: One of the things that Zoom doesn't do, that we've sort of built a system on top of, is permanent conference rooms. We've found this to be very useful to say, "Hey, let's jump into this 'conference room A', or 'conference room B'." We have better names for it. We name them after rooms in the boardgame Clue. TODD: Trademark Milton Bradley. (laughter) JAMON: There's a billiard room, there's a conservatory, there's a study, kitchen, et cetera. We have different uses for those different rooms. Some are for sales calls; some are for ... One is called Kitchen, which we use for the kitchen table, it's basically where people just jump in there, and work together in relative quiet. It's a cool little concept. We actually built an online, like a website, as well as a desktop app that shows a Clue board with the different rooms that light up when people are in them, and then it puts avatars of who's in that room, including guests, which is very cool because I can go in there and say, "Hey, look! Chris and Todd are having a meeting over there. I'm gonna jump in and see what's going on." I can just click in there, and it opens a Zoom window, and I'm in their meeting. TODD: For example, currently, Chris, Jamon, Ken and I are in Study. We have Kevin and Ryan in Library, and we have Jed in the Billiard Room by himself. I'm not sure what that's about. Maybe playing a little pool. KEN: This goes back to the notion of tools as architecture. Consider the experience of being in an office, and you want a meeting. You say, "Hey, let's meet in Fisherman's Wharf." I was in an office where they named things after San Francisco neighborhoods. "Let's meet in Fisherman's Wharf." Everybody, after they've been oriented into the office, knows where that is and they just go. That's it, right? That's the experience, right? Furthermore, if you wanna know where somebody is, you walk around the building, look into the rooms, and see that so-and-so is in Fisherman's Wharf, so they're in a meeting, they're busy. Now let's look at what it's like to be remote, without a tool like this. "Where's the meeting? Okay, I gotta ask somebody. Oh, okay. Oh, did someone start the meeting? Oh, no, no, okay, somebody needs to start the meeting. Alright, gimme a second, I'm gonna start the meeting. Here's the Zoom URL." TODD: Oh, God! KEN: "Okay, you gotta invite somebody." "Do you remember the Zoom URL?" "I don't remember the Zoom URL." "Okay, hang on. Okay, I got it. Here you go." That's the UX, right now. JAMON: Yes. KEN: Of the base ... TODD: Oh, jeez. KEN: ... video conferencing tool, and it's no wonder people hate that! JAMON: Yep. KEN: Right? TODD: Can you imagine? KEN: Yeah. It turns out ... We've had to increase the number of rooms over the years, right? But how many do we have now? Eight? TODD: Eight. KEN: So we have eight rooms now? TODD: Eight current rooms. KEN: That's pretty much fine. TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). For a team our size, that works well. JAMON: We usually don't fill all of ... I think, yesterday, I looked in there and there were six in use, which was kind of a anomaly, but ... KEN: In an office, we can keep adding those as long as we need to. JAMON: That's right. KEN: This is a case where I think we've created something that is actually better than what people who have an office have. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Right? Because you can, just at a glance, see where people are. Nobody has to even tell you what room they're in. They just say, "Hey, we're meeting." You go look at the Clue board, and you see where the people that you're meeting with are, and you join the room. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: It's just one more little piece of constant friction that we've eliminated. I love it. I think it's a fantastic tool. TODD: Yeah, I keep the Clue desktop app open all day long while I'm at work. It's also cool to see the little avatars and stuff. Makes me feel like I'm at work. When we first started, you did have to push ... This is a very common interaction. "Hey, Todd, I need your help with X." And I'm like, "Let's have a meeting" or "Let's jump in Zoom" or whatever. "Which one?" "I'm already there. I joined a room as soon as you said it." "Which one?" "Open Clue. (laughter) Look for my name. Click on it." JAMON: Yeah. TODD: That only took a few weeks, to be honest, of constantly just needling that to the point where, when someone says, "Hey, I wanna jump in a room," they look and they see where you jumped in. KEN: That brings back the importance of having the leadership on the tool. TODD: Yes. JAMON: That's right. This tool actually came out of a side-project. I think Gant and AJ, two of our engineers, came up with the idea and built a prototype, and put it out there. It was ... I remember being, initially, a little bit skeptical that it'd be useful and it's turned out to be a really key part of our remote experience. TODD: That's actually an important point. No one asked anyone to make that tool. No one asked for permission to make that tool. They made it. They turned it on. Now, we've had tools that people've made. For instance, my tool Ava, which, now, is very useful, originally was Dolores, which is from HBO's great TV show, "Westworld". Dolores never caught on. She didn't do enough important stuff, and so she just kinda died. Later I resurrected her as Ava, which is from the movie "Ex Machina". Excellent movie, by the way. KEN: It's still kind of a disturbing allusion, though. TODD: It is, but it's ... It's a great movie. And then the next movie he did, which was "Annihilation", was fantastic as well. Anyways, not important, obviously. The point is, no one needs to ask for permission. They can make tools. They do. They put 'em out there, and they live or die based on whether or not they're actually used. We do sunset things that just never really took off. CHRIS: You're mentioning a lot of tools that enable remote work, that enable productive work. What are some tools that you're thinking about or are in place that help with focus and eliminating distractions? 'Cause sometimes, people new to these environments can look at these tools going, "Man there's so many distractions. How do I work?" JAMON: I actually think that's one of the biggest benefits of working remotely, which is kind of counter-intuitive. You think, "Oh, there's so many distractions when you're working remotely." Actually, you can turn off Slack. You can turn your screen to "do not disturb". You can shut off Zoom. You can turn off you're email. You can close all of those applications and just have the app that you're doing the work in, you're writing a blog post, you're writing code, you can just have that open. You can turn on a "do not disturb" mode in Slack that'll actually tell people that you're currently away. If you use the tools that are available, remote work can actually be much better, because what happens in an office? Someone can't get a hold of you on email or Slack, so what do they do? They hop up and they walk over to your office, and they're like, "Hey, did you get my email?" (laughter) "Okay, I will check my email, eventually, here. Is this really important?" One of the things that we do is ... This is kind of funny, but we'll actually say "I'm going offline for three hours, 'cause I'm gonna focus on this thing. If it's really important, text me." Our phone numbers are there, right? Nobody's gonna text you, 'cause that just feels like a complete intrusion. Right? KEN: It does happen. Like, if it's a genuine emergency. JAMON: It does happen if it's like an emergency. But that is so rare. That is awesome, because you're adding a ton of friction, but you're still giving them some way to get to you. I think that's a good property of remote work, that you can actually focus more in those situations than you can in an office. TODD: Yeah, try to turn off all the noise in an open-concept office. Good luck! KEN: Yeah, an office is distracting by default. You have to use technology to get some focus. I can't think of any tool that we use just for focus. Right? It's about human habits around how they use the tools that are already there. TODD: I think there are some, Ken. I don't personally use them. KEN: Yeah, yeah. I mean there are things, but there's nothing we use as a company. TODD: No, but there are people here that use, for one thing, they'll use the various timer apps that tell them to stand up, or if they set a timer for focus -- KEN: I've used the Pomodoro timer. TODD: Yeah, there are things. What's cool about remote work as opposed to depressing cubicle work (laughter), is you can set up the environment -- KEN: Soul-crushing commute work. (laughter) TODD: Soul-crushing commute work, SCCW, I like it. In those situations, you have to go to the lowest common denominator. If 50% of the people are very productive and get focused with music, and 50 can't at all, you're gonna have no music. When you're sitting in your own environment, whatever that environment is, whether it's your home, or a café, or co-working space, or whatever it is that you've chosen to be most efficient in, when you're sitting in that environment, you can control and make it perfect for you to be able to focus. Personally, if I'm doing design work or visual work, I play music. It gets me in the groove. If I'm programming, I cannot have any music. Or if I do have music, it can't have any lyrics in it. That's a focus thing. I tend to like to work more in the dark, strangely. I love light and I live in a very sunny place, and a very sunny house, but I have noticed that I tend to get more in the zone in dark and often late at night, for me personally. CHRIS: I'm the same way, Todd. I have to fake my brain into thinking it's late at night by closing all the blinds and turning the lights off. And it actually helps productivity. TODD: Yeah, that's interesting. I used to have this problem at every company I worked at. Even, say, I shared a room with four other people. One office, and four. I would wanna have all the lights off and have a desk lamp so I could see. No one liked this. Having the fluorescent lights on ... I didn't take cyanide, but I do believe I shopped online for cyanide, just saying. (laughter) KEN: So this is in your browser history, now, forever, man. (laughter) There's a FBI file on you. TODD: Oh, there's been a FBI file. Come on. If you don't have a FBI file on you, what are you doing with your life? (laughter) JAMON: At the old ClearSight office, we had some fluorescent lights, and one by one they would burn out. Nobody would tell the maintenance guy because they just liked that they were burning out. (laughter) Eventually it got quite dark in there and everybody, they just wouldn't even turn on the light. TODD: I would like to make a confession. I have purposely broke some lights in offices. KEN: "True Confessions with Todd Werth." (laughter) TODD: You don't want true ones. No, that actually -- CHRIS: That's Season Two of the podcast. (laughter) TODD: That actually is very true. Sometimes you just have to ... KEN: Civil disobedience? TODD: Yes, I like the way you phrased that. Makes things more noble and less selfish. (laughter) KEN: Yeah, right. Guerilla productivity. JAMON: We have some other tools to talk about, too, right? TODD: Oh, yeah, we have other tools to talk about. JAMON: Should we talk about some of them, or ... TODD: Yes. KEN: But enough about Todd. (laughter) TODD: I'll be here all week. Do not eat the veal. JAMON: One of the tools that has been really helpful for us is Google Sheets. Obviously, that's the spreadsheet program in Google Apps. We ... We're having trouble ... Again, this is pre-merger. We're having trouble figuring out how to schedule people. It was just a real pain. Eventually, my Project Manager at the time, came up with a system that involved sticky notes on a board that were, across the top were weeks, and down the left side were the names of people. We could just put sticky notes. My wife went out and bought a whole bunch of different colored sticky notes. We'd put the same project as the same color across the board. You could, at a glance, see who was working on the same project. You could see how long it was going to be, as far as number of weeks, and every week we'd move 'em over to the left and add another column. That eventually migrated onto Google Sheets, 'cause, of course, that doesn't work so well when you're remote. The collaboration tools on Google Sheets are extremely good. It's very, very responsive to having multiple people on it. When we do our Friday scheduling meeting for the next week, and beyond, we'll all pull open the sheet, and we look at it, and we can all update it ... If we see something that's wrong, we can update it. We can change colors of the backgrounds. It's worked really well for, now, two and a half years. I think that's a remote tool that has actually been quite useful for us for quite some time. Not only does it give us forward-looking data, but it also gives us backward-looking. We can look at previous years and see what projects were we working on at the time, who was working on what, all the way throughout. It's been a very cool tool. We're just repurposing Google Sheets to use as a scheduling tool. TODD: Another tool we used to use ... Jeez, I can't remember what it's called. What was the [inaudible 00:43:17] tool we used to use? JAMON: Screenhero. KEN: Screenhero? TODD: Screenhero, yes, of course. I remember when Screenhero was ... It was eventually bought by Slack and is being integrated into Slack. We used to use that a lot, but truthfully, the tools in Zoom for screensharing stuff became superior and so I think almost everyone pairs with each other Zooming. TODD: Another tool we use is RealtimeBoard, which is a sticky board analogist tool; the designers -- KEN: Designers love it. TODD: The designers used it a lot, but we also use it in leadership and the developers, I think, are starting to look into it. It's great for brainstorming. It's a real-time tool, kinda like Google Docs or Google Sheets, where everyone can use it at the same time, and you see everyone using it. That's been really great. The designers use the heck out of InVision, which is a wonderful tool for showing designs, getting notes, and collaborating with clients, collaborating with the rest of the team, and that kind of stuff. Another tool we use for project management a lot is Trello. If you're not familiar, with it, it's a great project management tool. It's a Kanban board, if you're familiar with those. Not only do we use Trello, we also integrated ... Ava connects to Trello, produces reports from ... Ava connects to Airtable, which is another interesting mix between a database and a spreadsheet. We use Airtable and Trello. Those are some other tools we use. KEN: Something to mention, also, is that between Slack and Zoom we have some redundancy, because Zoom has rudimentary chat and Slack has video conferencing. It's not as good as Zoom's, but it's there, and we already have it. For example, when Slack is down, we have Zoom channels that we can all do basic communication in. That provides a certain amount of resiliency for the work environment, and that's very helpful. TODD: Yeah, it does go down every so often. It's funny because our company comes to a screeching halt when Slack goes down. KEN: Yeah, and that's a valid criticism, I think, of remote working. We do have the redundancy so that people can at least, basically, keep going. TODD: We all know now, if Slack's down ... It was, actually yesterday, coincidentally. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: If Slack is down, we go into Zoom chat. That took a while to get people ... It's funny 'cause we don't use email and stuff, and we use that so much. We could jump into a meeting. We've done that in the past, before we had this redundancy we would just jump into a meeting room and kinda like, "Hey, what do we do?" It was like the lights went out and everyone was confused at what to do. It's actually kind of amusing if you think about that. A bunch of virtual people wandering around in the dark wondering what to do. JAMON: We have a lot of redundancy of internet connection. Someone might be having internet issues, but not everybody is having internet issues. That's a pretty big deal. I remember the office internet would stop working and, even though we were all in the same place, yes we could collaborate, no we couldn't work 'cause we couldn't access -- KEN: Couldn't get to GitHub, can't get to... JAMON: ... Dropbox, whatever. Which, we do use GitHub, we use Dropbox. There's a little tool that I use that, I would say, about a third of the company also uses. We're on video calls a lot. When you're on a video call, sometimes it's nice to have a cough button: you hit a button and it mutes you for just a second, so you can cough or whatever. This one's called Shush. It's a Mac app. You can buy it for three bucks or something. It turns your function key into a mute button, so you just hit that button and it will mute you for a short amount of time. Or you can double-tap it and it turns into a push to talk button, which is nice when you're in a big group. TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I don't use Shush, because I use a hardware version of that. I have quite a lot of audio equipment and video stuff. Pretty sure, in the remote podcast, we talked about the importance of having good equipment and spending a little money on good equipment. You cheap managers out there, stop doing that; you're horrible people. (laughter) JAMON: Also the background of your video call is really important. That was actually something Todd really emphasized when we first started. I will point out that he has the messiest background of all of us, right now. TODD: Well, to be clear, I have two cameras. One is a wide angle which I use for the team so I can move around and stuff; and I have a tighter angle I use for clients, in which case, what's behind me is very specifically chosen to be a background, and I keep that incredibly clean. JAMON: I just say that to tweak Todd, because he's the biggest champion of having a good background. TODD: Yes. Jamon's horizon, right now, is extremely tilted, and it's been driving me crazy the whole time, but I'll get over it. (laughter) KEN: I know. I can't unsee that. TODD: In my 46 years on this planet, I've learned not to mention that, even though I really, really want him to straighten his camera. KEN: It doesn't help, Jamon, you've still got a vertical line that is -- TODD: I'll tell you a funny story about backgrounds. Poor Ken. Ken had this very nice ... I don't know what it was. What was it, Ken? KEN: It's a bookcase, right, (laughter) but it's IKEA furniture, so it looks -- TODD: It's IKEA? KEN: It looks like a dresser. Yeah. TODD: This whole time it was IKEA? We thought it was important. We felt bad for making fun of it. 'Cause it looks like a dresser. It was right behind him, and it looked like Ken was sitting in bed (laughter) with his dresser behind him. KEN: Yes, reinforcing every stereotype about remote workers. (laughter) TODD: Right. We kept on bugging him, and he said, "It's a really nice bookcase." I didn't realize it was IKEA. KEN: I didn't say it was a really nice bookcase. I said it was a bookcase. (laughter) TODD: It looked like a dresser. JAMON: It really did, in fact. KEN: That's because it's IKEA furniture, so it's looks like that. TODD: I guess the point is, how things appear is more important than what they actually are. This is something a lot of people aren't familiar with. We have different people with different levels of quality of what they produce as far as visually or audio. I think the general takeaway is take some time. You are almost doing a mini-television broadcast, and you wanna be ... I wouldn't say the word "professional", because it's not stuffy, it's fine if you're wearing your tie-dye and your shorts, but you should make it a pleasant experience for the viewers. KEN: Yeah. You should look inviting, and it should look intentional. TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: And kept. JAMON: We have some other tips for remote video meetings that, I think, are on a blog post that we created. Was that you, Ken, that wrote that post? KEN: Yeah. We could do a whole podcast, frankly, on how to have a good video meeting. JAMON: We can link to that in the show notes. KEN: We can link to that for now. TODD: That is a podcast I wanna do. I do wanna point out to the audience who can't see us now, we're recording this for your listening pleasure, and I put pleasure in quotation marks 'cause I don't wanna oversell it. But, we are actually on Zoom, so we can see each other. Jamon, thankfully moved his camera so we can't see the horizon any more, which is crooked, but right over his left shoulder is a door-line that's incredibly crooked. I appreciate the effort, Jamon, but come on. Have some dignity. JAMON: I will point out that I'm moving out of this rental in a week because I had a house fire, Todd. (laughter) TODD: Oh, jeez. You can't pull a house fire out every time there's a criticism. KEN: The only thing in my background is my Harvard diploma (laughter) because it's all that anyone cares about. JAMON: Yes, exactly. Over my shoulder, I'm thinking about putting my not-Harvard diploma. KEN: "Narvard". JAMON: It'll just say, "Not Harvard." TODD: Sometimes we just invite Ken's Harvard diploma, instead of Ken, to meetings. (laughter) KEN: Yeah, I just put it in frame and then I walk out. (laughter) I'm like, "I'm just the janitor." CHRIS: I do have one final question, as we bring this episode to a close: Is there any tool that you use outside of remote work or in your daily life that you wish existed as a remote tool. KEN: Blow torch. (laughter) CHRIS: Elon's got that for ya. TODD: Not a tool, completely, but here's something ... I have ideas for tools that'd be cool in the future. We have the concept of "kitchen table". This is a real quick story; please, bear with me. The three of us ... I don't know if Ken was, but there was multiple of us of the company who were speaking at a conference in Paris. We rented a large Airbnb apartment in Paris, and a bunch of us were staying there. It had a very large kitchen table. When we weren't doing stuff individually, we'd all sit around the kitchen table, and we'd work together. We would just sit there, like you would at a library in a university or something like that, and work. We wanted to recreate that in ... virtually. The simple solution is we dedicated one of our Zoom rooms, the "Kitchen", to the "kitchen table" and you can't use that for anything else. If you just wanna be around people, but you're working, you're not really saying anything, as if you're in a library ... I guess we should do the library, but whatever ... you'd go in the kitchen table and just be around people. Sometimes people say things and have little conversations, like you would in an office, but typically you're just sitting there working together. That's cool. It's missing a few features which I'd love to see. For one is, if you're not ... Say there was a group of people working in an open office, and they're in the center and you're on the perimeter of the office. You see them working together there, the "kitchen table", now we have that, with our tool, we can see who's in the "kitchen table" and they're there. Great. But you can also, even if you're far away and they're dim enough ... not dim, but the volume's low enough that it's not disturbing, you can still hear them, and sometimes you'll pick up on little words that may interest you. They'll mention a project you're on, or they'll mention a personal interest that you're interested in or whatever, and you can choose then to go walk over and join them, because of that kind of low-noise but informational thing you're getting by being in the perimeter. I would love to somehow integrate that into our tool, where you could have a low-murmur of people in the background of the meetings that you're not in, and listen for things that might be interesting, something like that. KEN: I don't really know how to think about that question. TODD: I find it very interesting that none of us can really come up with a tool that we wish we had. That's a fantastic answer. KEN: I mean ... JAMON: I think there's probably tools that, eventually, we'll get that will be like, "How did we live without this?" But I don't ... I can't think of one. KEN: I can imagine in the future, basically a VR setup. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes. KEN: If VR gets to the point where it feels natural; it's comfortable to wear the equipment, it's not a burden just to have the stuff on your head, and the resolution is to the point where you could have a virtual monitor in space, and you can have that feeling of actually being next to people. Then you could, in theory, have the best of both worlds, where you can drop out and leave the space if you want to. You can also be in the space and be available for that. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: I think that would be pretty nice, but ... JAMON: There is a tool out there that's ... I think they're, maybe, in beta right now. It's called Bigscreen VR, it's by a guy that I know, Darshan Shankar, who's on Twitter. I met him on Twitter. He's doing this Bigscreen VR system. It's very much what you described, Ken. Right now, it's only on Windows, and of course the VR headsets are still evolving. But apparently the new Oculus Go or Oculus Now, or something, is apparently quite good -- KEN: Yeah, they're getting better. JAMON: It's also likely, they said that within the next year, that it'll come to Mac 'cause they're working on it. KEN: I think another threshold, though, is the quote-unquote "retina" threshold, to where the resolution of the headsets is such that you can't, in terms of resolution, anyway, you can't tell the difference between that and something that you're looking at. JAMON: Yep. KEN: You could actually make a projected display without any compromise. JAMON: Yes. TODD: I agree, in the future that's gonna be wonderful. I do have some current ideas on how to add spacial stuff to our tools to give us proximity information of each other, virtually. Kind of what you would get if you were in a VR situation, but without having VR. Anyways, there's some interesting things there. KEN: Yeah, we've talked about making an ambient audio device, something like that, that can just sit there and ... Kind of like "kitchen table", but without the video. There's a bunch of things we've talked about, but not of them are things that exist today. They're just things that we've thought about creating or ... yeah.

In our first B-side episode, we sit down with creative entrepreneur Deun Ivory and discuss her current projects and her thoughts on Living Corporate's mission. Length: 00:19:23Host: ZachDeun Ivory Contact:http://www.deunivory.me/https://www.instagram.com/deunivory/Shout outs: Luvvie https://www.instagram.com/luvvie/?hl=enBlack Girl In Om: https://www.instagram.com/blackgirlinom/?hl=enAlex Elle: https://www.instagram.com/alex_elle/?hl=enHanahana Beauty: https://www.instagram.com/hanahana_beauty/?hl=enAdrienne Raquel: https://www.instagram.com/adrienneraquel/?hl=enCrwn Magazine: https://www.instagram.com/crwnmag/?hl=enTRANSCRIPTZach: What’s up y’all? Welcome to Living Corporate B-sides. So B-sides are essentially random shows we have in between our larger shows. These are much less structured, and somehow, even more lit, if you can believe it or not, than our regularly scheduled shows. Now you may ask “What do you mean by more lit, Zach?” Now watch this - sound man, give the them horns. [air horns] Zach: See what I’m saying? For these shows it may just be the Living Corporate team talking about the last episode and more recent events. It may be one of us, it might be three of us, or we may have a 1 on 1 with special guest to talk about their perspective on the latest topic on our show and plug their stuff… you know, just kick it. The guest may be a corporate professional, they may be an entrepreneur, who knows? Right? They may even one of the fastest rising stars in the world of creatives, especially around holistic wellness for black women. Yes, we have her here folks: Deuncye AKA Deunbra AKA “momma, there go that woman” AKA D.I. AKA your fave photographer’s fave photographer, AKA kween, AKA “whoa why you do em like that sis?” AKA Essence AKA Crwn Mag AKA VSCO Vixen AKA I’m saved but don’t push me AKA “whoaaa is that her?” on the poster at your apple store AKA IG Influencer AKA your intern wishes they could work for HER! Y”all! *the* DEUN IVORY! What’s up Deun? Deun: [laughs] Oh. My God. You are literally a boost. You are literally a boost. Oh my god, I am completely done, I’m about to fly out of here. That was - wow. That was an amazing introduction. I feel great! Zach: I’m really glad. So off top, major love to Deun because she was actually encouraging me to start Living Corporate like last year and she been told me I should be doing podcasts. For those who don’t know you, Deun, would you mind sharing a little bit about yourself? Deun: Yes absolutely, so once again my name is Deun Ivory and I am a creative entrepreneur AKA a woman who does the most. I am a photographer, I’m an illustrator, I’m an art director for Black Girl in Om, which is the number one platform for women of color on their wellness journey. I do brand consulting and brand design for women of color who start their own businesses. I’m an influencer, I do brand partnerships, I do a little bit of modeling. Ooh lord, it’s just- I mean the list goes on and on. Like, I do a lot and I really love what I do because it’s primarily focused on how I can help black women thrive. How I can help black women live their best lives and be unapologetically themselves. So I affirm you, I love on you, I celebrate you through a series of creative practices and I love it and I feel like I am created to do this work that I’m doing. So yeah. Zach: So Deun, we’ve talked about the fact that your space is holistic wellness for black women, right? So talk to me about what it looks like to be mindful of yourself and to take care of yourself and to practice wellness within, let’s just say, like the corporate context. Like if I’m sitting at my desk and I’m stressed out. I got a funky email or someone’s really riding my back -- What are some practical tips that you could give us around just taking care of yourself? Deun: Yes, so one thing that I think is really really important is to be mindful of the breath, which is something that we highlight all the time in Black Girl in Om. Like breathing easy? What does that mean? What does that look like? And I think that a lot of time we aren’t aware of how important a breath is. Like when you’re angry, you know your heart is racing, you’re breathing really fast, you’re just really upset, you know? And sometimes it’s good to just sit and meditate. In meditation? You are focused on breathing in and breathing out. You are bringing your focus to this one thing, which is breathing in and breathing out. And within that sitting still, that time of sitting still and breathing in and breathing out, exhaling, right? Inhaling love, exhaling anger. Inhaling growth, exhaling whatever it is that you’re trying to release. You kind of become more balanced and grounded in your own space. You’re able to think more clearly without being driven by emotion, y’know? So I think it’s a beautiful practice and beautiful space to create because you can access it or do it anywhere. You don’t have to pay any money for it, you know, god gave you this breath, use it, be mindful, be aware of it, and meditate as much as you can. And that can be for two minutes. Breathing in and breathing out. What do I want to release, what do I want to I want to bring in, you know. Kind of like aligning yourself with how you want to feel. So, that is one thing. Journaling is so important because it’s a brain dump. And I think it’s really important to release, especially - I was talking about this with a friend today - black people internalize so much, right? And I think it’s important that we begin to externalize, you know? I mean obviously don’t do anything that’s gonna harm other people, which is why you can turn to writing. You know, you can write out your feelings, try to get to the root of why you may feel a certain way about something. Writing is so important for your self-care journey because you’re able to keep track of like who you are, where you are, how do you feel at this moment, okay? How can I realistically and practically get to this next level or this next whatever in my growth. Also gratitude. Gratitude is something that is talked about a lot because it’s so powerful. When you just sit and you really just immerse yourself in the blessings that surround you, you can change your mindset and perceive things differently, and look at things just like god trying to show you something. Or you may be mindful of the fact that you are living in abundance despite the fact that you may be lacking this or might be lacking that. Yeah so I would say meditation and breath, journaling, and gratitude. Zach: Man those are great answers. And it’s funny, you said it at the beginning but you’re absolutely right. The tips, the advice that you’re providing here- it’s free! All it takes is intentionality and making sure that you actually do those things, but it’s not like I need to go sign up for something way out here. Deun: RightZach: That’s really cool, and I think it’s funny because the other point you made around us internalizing things like black people we do internalize things like as a culture. And when I talk to other people, like other minorities, those experiences are not so exclusive to us, right? So I think that’s really good advice. Man, thank you for that. Deun: Definitely! I’m happy to have shared it. Zach: I love your story and I’m excited because we’re really just still at the beginning of it. Now I know you’re not in Corporate America, but you have friends who are and you’ve done partnerships with actual Corporations, so it’s not like you’re completely alien to the concept of Corporate America. I know that you have been listening to Living Corporate, can you kinda talk to me about how you feel about the show so far?Deun: Yes absolutely! I mean when you first brought this idea to me, I was like “hey, this is definitely a space that needs to be created” because there are black people who, you know, have these narratives that need to be shared about their experiences in the corporate world and from my understanding, there was no space like this, especially for black millennials! So I think that this is very beautiful, very necessary, very transformative. I feel like it’s a safe space for people to feel like ‘I can come here and talk about everything that I’ve gone through and help other individuals who work in corporate america get through what they’re going through’. And although I have the blessing of not working in corporate america, you know, like you said, I do know a lot women, and work with them often through Black Girl in Om, to talk about being in corporate spaces where they’re the only black woman, and you know, they need to know like “how do I practice meditation? How can I cultivate a self care practice?” It’s all necessary, it’s all connected, and I’m happy to help in any way that I can and I’m so happy that you guys have created this space. Zach : Man, thank you for the love, Deun! And straight up, this is heartwarming, it really is. The thing about it is, it’s just so funny that because of the space that you engage and some of the work that we’re doing. So we actually have a show coming up in a couple weeks around mental wellness in corporate america, so what I’m really excited about as we get that show going is really pointing people to some of the resources and some of the things you’ve been doing, right? That you’ve been working on around wellness and just holistic wellness for in your case, specifically black women, but I think a lot of the things you actually create will be helpful for any non-white person in majority white spaces, right? And so when you think about what we’re doing is we’re trying to, to your point, create that safe space and beyond a safe space, a courageous space. Like for people to really lean in and be themselves, and to be affirmed and built up. So for those who don’t know, we’re in Houston, we’re in my home. We are in my abode Deun [laughs] Okay. Zach: And I noticed, I’m looking around, and I see art, right? And for those who don’t know, I’ve been a fan. I’ve been a Deun fan. Deun: This is true Zach: Right, and I’m looking around and I’m looking at artwork adorning my walls and it just leads me to ask, you know, who was your first true blue client? Who was your first client? Deun: You are so extra. YOU, Zachary Nunn, was my first client. And I thank you so much. You had me design a custom illustration for you and your beautiful wife, and man, you know, that really just started something special. Because, I mean I really started poppin then, people were like coming to me, requesting me, and it was amazing, so thank you! Zach: [laughs] Self serving on my side for sure, and jokes and stuff aside, I want to thank you for taking the time to sit down with me today. And I know you’re busy, right? So talk to us about what you got going on right now. Get your rounds off. Like, what are some of the brands that you’ve worked with, who are the favorite celebrities, I know that I saw recently that you worked with Luvvie, but just talk to us about some of the things that you’ve got going on and some of the things that you’ve recently completed. Deun: Right, so like I told y’all from jump, I always have a lot going on, and I’m just so blessed and so eternally grateful for that. Speaking on previous achievements or goals or whatever you want to call them, I was featured in Essence in their April issue for Black Girl in Om, which is really really beautiful. If you have not been to an Apple store, you need to go their right now because you will see my face and my work shown all throughout the display monitors, on the phones, on the little gallery wall, on the iPads, all of that good stuff. And so that was really beautiful too because I was reached out to by the creative director of Today at Apple personally, who told me that he was a really huge fan of my work and I was like “dang, this is crazy!” You know, so he had me create and curate these beautiful images on my iphone, and so I had a chance to put my friends on, you know, and so they’re in this international campaign which is crazy, and my self portraits! So that was really beautiful. And recently I became one of VSCO Voices grant recipients and I’m gonna be taking on this 6-month project about sexual abuse within a marginalized community, specifically black women. And that is a story that is very personal to me because I too am a woman who is now thriving in the aftermath of such a traumatic event. So that’s something that I am currently doing right now and yes I did have a chance to shoot Luvvie for the cover of this magazine with Design Sponge that will be coming out really soon. I have some amazing things in the works for Black Girl in Om, you know we have some retreats popping off, some live podcasts, I’m going to be doing my first keynote address at a photo conference in Palm Springs next year in 2019. Be sure to follow me on instagram and I will keep you updated with tickets and all of that.I mean, I don’t even know. Literally the list could go on and on and on, but those are some of the major projects that I’m doing, and I’m so excited about them, so. Yeah, that’s what I got going on. Zach: That’s really cool, so you know, you said something about your Instagram, so where can people connect with you? Where can they buy your art? Where can they engage with you further? Deun: Yes, absoutely, so you can follow me on instagram @deunivory. I’m on that on instagram, I’m also on that on Twitter, and Black Girl in Om, you should follow us on instagram as well because we curate and create amazing experiences and art Zach: yes y’all do Deun: Thank you. Oh yeah, I have another baby, Ivory and Ashe Life on Instagram which is a company that I founded with Lauren Ashe who is also the founder of Black Girl in Om. It’s like a mindfulness goods brand for women of color. And Hello G&G which is an activation series that I just started with my friend Abena Boamah, who is the founder of Hanahana Beauty. If you are in need of some lotion that’s gon get you your entire life, and have you glowing and shining like none other, you need to check out Hanahana Beauty on instagram. So I know those were a lot of handles, but I got a lot going on, and I’m pretty sure you’re going to be receiving so much beauty and affirmation from all of these platforms. Zach: Oh absolutely, and you know, I can specifically vouch for - well fist of all, Black Girl in Om is super dope. I visit your website, I visit your IG page all the time, beautiful work there. And then also I can vouch for Hanahana Beauty because I’ve actually met Abena a couple months ago, and she gave me some of her cocoa butter. Deun: The shea butter Zach: The Shea butter, excuse me, that’s right the shea butter and it was fire Deun: yeah! Zach: Yes my fingers were very very supple Deun: HA! Zach: My skin was lustrious Deun: [laughs] that’s literally - yes, like that’s what it is, it’s just what it is. And she’s been featured in essence and numerous other platforms because this stuff- it’s the truth. Zach: So the thing about it is - this is our inaugural kick off for our b-sides but eventually we definitely want you, Abena, Lauren Ashe, we could make it just like a Black Girl in Om party because we really want to talk about entrepreneurship while being other, and you know, like you guys have really burst on the scene, and yall - the space that you guys are inhabiting, you guys are really rocking that domain Deun: Thank you! Zach: No problem, I mean, thank y’all. Let’s do this- before we kinda wrap it up, do you have any more shout outs? Deun: I wanna shout out to everybody! I mean relationships are such an integral part of my success, for one. You know, I would not be here if god had not blessed me with the relationships I have with these phenomenal black women who are intelligent and brilliant and who celebrate me and have shown me how to celebrate others. So definitely my creative partners Lauren Ashe and Abena Boamah, my best friend in the whole wide world, Victoria Banjo. My good friends in Houston, you know Eunice and Selma and Unique and everybody from Good Hope, my amazing husband Eric Michael Ward, who is also an amazing photographer and is the reason why I’m in photography now. He’s so dope. Oh my god, who else? Alex Elle for really just trusting me to create her logo and allowing me to be on her podcast, which gave me great exposure and also the reason why I have so many clients and you know, people who kinda know me, yknow, I’m grateful for that. And Sarad at Essence for reaching out to Lauren and I for the Essence cover, well not Essence cover, but you know, I’m manifesting that- Zach: Yes, c’mon Deun: -for the Essence Feature. Crwn Magazine for always putting us on, if y’all need to be in the know of like a black magazine that caters to black women, our hair, our experiences, Crwn Mag, C-R-W-N. They are legit. Adrian Rochelle who is another phenomenal black woman. Just-- Brilliant! Ahead of her time. Please follow her on Instagram, she’s amazing. If I have missed you, please know it is not on purpose. Okay, I just came back from a memorial party, it was real lit, I was eatin real good and I’m tired, but know that I love you and I mean well. But thank you to everybody who has been supportive, who has loved on me and shown me support and held me accountable and also been very honest with me from the jump, so. Yes, those are my shout outs. Zach: Dope, well, we’ll make sure to include all the @’s and links for all that you’ve referenced so that folks can make sure to connect with you. Definitely shout out to you ma’am, shout out to your wonderful husband, E-Mike, who is my best friend, right? Best man at my wedding. Shout out to LaurenAsh and Abenah and HanaHana and Grow & Glow, and shout out to Black Girl In Om! Deun: yes! Zach: Okay, well look, I think that might do it. I think that does us for the show. Again, guys this is our first b-side, these are just gonna be loose,laid back, more fun episodes, and you can kinda meet friends of the show and kind of just get to know some of the hosts and some of our guests. You know, we don’t typically do it like this on the regular shows, but Deun would you mind signing us off?Deun:... okay! [laughs] alright, thank you for joining us on the Living Corporate Podcast. Make sure to follow us on instagram at @livingcorporate, twitter at @LivingCorp_Pod and subscribe to our newsletter through. If you have a question you’d like us to answer and read on the show, make sure you email us at. Aaaaaand that does it for us on this show. Once again, my name is Deun Ivory! Zach: my name is Zach, peace!

It's been said that 80% of success is just showing up. If you haven't made a sale yet... that may be the issue! What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today. And now, I've left my nine to five to take the plunge and build my million-dollar business. The real question is, how will I do it without VC funding or debt? Completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me, and follow along, as I learn, apply and share marketing strategies to grow my online business, using only today's best internet sales funnels. My name is Steve Larsen and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. What's up guys? Hopefully everyone's doing great. I've been outside today, it's a Saturday, putting together this episode. Been outside. A lot of you guys might know this, actually, most of you probably don't: I actually really like yard work, which sounds weird, as a teenager I would have never said that in my life. But I do. I was the oldest, which meant I did a lot of the yard work. Oldest of six kids, so growing up I did a lot of yard work. And for a while I hated it and then, realize though, for whatever reason now, especially too, it's almost therapeutic, for me to just get outside, work with my hands. Almost all my jobs growing up were labor jobs; physical labor jobs, things like that. I like working with my hands. Anyway, so I was outside, I just chopped a tree down in our backyard, which is awesome, I'm doing a whole bunch of stuff. Anyway, I'm fixing our pond, a lot of stuff. I really love doing that kind of stuff. Anyway, I was outside just a few minutes ago, maybe like two hours ago, but I was outside. I was mowing the lawn, I was trimming the hedges, all the stuff I... Usually I'll either listen to music and just zone out, which typically for me is just as advantageous as me listening to a chorus: the chance to have nothing going on in my head and just let my mind drift. And that's one of the reasons why I like it so much. Anyway, so I was out there and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the most incredible opportunity start walking up to me. I love it when this happens. There was a door-to-door salesman, he was walking on up, all awkward like. We saw each other, he was trying to ... does he call out from far away? Does he kind of sneak on up? I love talking to door-to-door salesman because I was one, right? So he starts walking up, and I'm listening to Foo Fighters. I'm blasting Foo Fighters, I'm trimming up the sides and stuff, and I'm just ... I was thinking ... I was thinking about a lot of different stuff. I was thinking, you know I'm a full-time nerd, and I'm very proud of it. I was thinking about offer creation and different things like that. Anyway, bunch of fun... Anyways, he walks on up, and he hands me this flyer. He just, I hate it when people just put things directly into my hands. Most people will take it, I don't. Whenever I'm in the mall, or whatever, and someone just walks by and just hands something to me, I don't take it. I put my hands up, I'm like, "What is this?" Anyway, so I did that... I was like, "Well, what is it?" He goes, and he starts talking. He's like, "Well, yeah, I do spot removal on like carpets, things like that. We're going to be here real soon, and want to see who else in the area wants to get it." I was like, "Sweet, that was very similar to the pitch I used to give, and it worked really, really well." And I was thinking about it, I was like oh my gosh, this is so cool. My wife and I just barely were talking about how we want our carpets cleaned. Right, we've lived in this house for a year now, we should clean the carpets, you know. We got a new little one on the way, in like a month, and ... Or month and a half-ish. We're just trying to prep things around the house. This our third kid, we know everything kind of goes into a coma. You're just trying to survive the first month or two with a newborn. Sort of like, hey, we should have the carpets cleaned. Oh, sweet. That's awesome, do you do full service? And he said, "Yes, yes, I do actually." I said, "Cool, how much do you charge?" And he told me very briefly in just like one sentence what it was that he does, what's different about him, and how much he charges, and I was like, gosh, thank you for getting right to the point. I'm asking a buying question. The guy identified it, and he immediately gave me a very fast answer of what I wanted, and let me started asking the questions. And finally, which is super cool, because he did not turn around, and he did not lead with his, he did not lead with this super expensive thing. And even then it wasn't actually that much money. He's gonna clean the carpets, and such, soon. And I almost was selling him on it, 'k ... He lead with what was the lowest barrier thing that he had, spot removal. Right, it's not an even full out carpet cleaning. Spot removal, that's it. That's what he was doing, and if you think about it. That's really fascinating. We're talking about different value ladder steps, right? Selling this really high ticket thing in the backend, that's awesome, but usually you got to sell it to really hot people. Hot market, right? Middle of the value ladder stuff, that's more usually the core of your business, but if you lead with something that's super pricey you cut out this whole other market, right? Which is eventually why we will go, and we will start doing smaller ticket things. Well, when you're talking face to face with people, or even in a trip wire funnel, we don't lead out saying here's all the money that you're gonna spend in this funnel. We lead out with the smallest barrier, the lowest barrier, free, plus shipping. That's super low bare, even though the average car value could be 50, 60, 70, 80 bucks, right? Right, it is free if that's the only thing they get. That doesn't mean we're not gonna take the opportunity to pitch them on other stuff, right, but we're leading with the lowest barrier product we have.... Anyway, I started talking to the guy more. Turns out he and I actually had a lot of stuff in common. I did door-to-door for a long time, so, did he for a while. He's around my age, and he's like, "I was working for this other company, I graduated only a little bit ago, and I just got to do my own thing, so, I'm just doing carpet cleaning for people." And so, I was like, "Sweet, I can totally relate with that." He's like, "Yeah, I had a sweet job." I was like, "Ah, me too." I just got this thing inside of me says, go do your thing, and so, I did, and it's been freaky. Yeah, it totally freaky... Anyways, we start talking for a little while, and struck up a good conversation. Anyways, he's coming back. I'm totally gonna talk to him about funnel building. It's what I do. I always talk with people. Talk about that with people. Gonna get my haircut, I always talk to the haircut person about funnels usually. Anyway, so, here's the whole lesson though. This podcast maybe a little short. The lesson is ... I've been teaching a lot of people lately, right? Obviously, You guys know that one of the things that I ... One of my isms is to just publish. Just publish, and one of the reasons why, is this principle about just being present. Did this guy have to sell me at all on carpet cleaning? No, no, he didn't. He didn't have to sell me at all. I literally, I basically, sold him. I had to ask him like two times. So, you can just come do the full thing? He's like, "Yeah, totally." I was like, "Sweet, so, you will, when can you come by?" I was selling him, why, right? You have to understand that one of the things that's always shoved down our throats when I was a door-to-door sales guy is that, if we go out and we knock on a hundred doors a day, or if when I was doing telemarketing, if we called a hundred people a day, one or two of those people, of those hundred, there's just gonna be one or two that just say, yes, just because they're just interested naturally. They're just ... You didn't have to sell them. This is the part of the market who likes to buy stuff. This is the part of the market, who actually was just talking about getting something similar that you actually sell, something similar to that. Right? This is the part of the market who just, you know what, yeah, I would, sure, whatever, come on, do it. Does that make sense? There's this principle... There's this principle of just being present that I feel a lot of people miss. They get this façade of needing to be perfect. That's actually ... It's good enough to just be present to your market. You don't even have to be a hundred percent right. Your offer doesn't even need to be a hundred percent the best. Right, just being visible is huge power, massive power, and it's very, very important for people ... For example, right, I always tell you guys, right, go publish. Are you serious about this? You go publish. There's this correlation I'm finding between those who actually have successful funnels, and those who don't. Those who do, 90% of the time, they also, go figure, are also publishing regularly. Whether that's a podcast, a blog, whatever it is. They're regularly getting out there. Why?... Why? Even if I'm just putting this stuff out there, right now, this episode, this very one I'm recording right now. I know that it is getting in front of people. I'm getting about 500 downloads a day right now. I've got this cool strategy to go grow bigger, and I'm excited about that, but I've got this cool ... Right, I'm gonna go stay present. I'm staying in front of you right now, right? And I know that next episode, you are going to want to listen to it. It is incredible. It is an interview I did with somebody who is very prestigious. You guys all know who he is. He's an absolutely amazing. It ended up being an hour long. Tons of fun. I had lots of fun with him, right? Salting the oats, letting you guys know what's going on, but that's the very point of what I'm trying to make. Just being present, just being in front of people. There will be lay down sales. There will be people who walk up to you. That's the reason why I hardly ever work with a startup ever. The answer is pretty much always no. And the reason is because if someone is a startup, and they're not getting any sales, and they've never sold ever. To me that means that they're not even trying because if they're just being present to the market that they're trying to sell to, they should get with enough repetition some sales. With zero sales skill. With zero, even marketing ability. Just by finding people, talking to the right people, who are like, "You know what, yeah, I was thinking about carpet cleaning. Yeah, I was just talking about this. Yeah, totally." And I was like, "Price? Yeah, okay, let's do it awesome. Hey, can you come back in like six months?" He's like, "Yeah." He actually said 12 months. Oh, yeah, I'll come back in a year. I was like, "No, I want it faster than that. We've got kids. There's like ... Our Carpets are nasty a lot. Yeah, right. Come faster, right? I was selling him. How interesting is that? Think about this, right? We always teach, right? That a new offer, like a new opportunity, goes and it sells to the masses. An improvement based offer, sells to those who are ambitious, and since most people are not ambitious. We don't create improvement based offers. Right? We try and we go and create new opportunities, but you have to understand that just by being present, you will find people like myself, who are ambitious, and asking to be sold. Does that make sense? We always knew those people who were slacking off on the phone. Those people who are slacking off on the door ... Because there sales just totally stopped. Just by them walking around with this pest control badge on their shoulder, right? People would ask to buy. Right? Be seen. That's all I'm trying to tell you. Be seen. Be in front of people. Be there. Be visible... Right? Now, there might be a lot of people out there who are not quite at the opportunity ... The opportune moment in their mind to purchase. Right? They should buy from you. They should buy from you, but they're like it's not quite time yet. Right? I've got a few other people that are trying to sell me stuff right now, and I'm like, well, it's not quite time for me to get this. It's not quite time yet for me to do this. Right? But there's a huge market, right? Out there. Bigger than I know. I shouldn't say huge, but bigger than I realize, right? Who are the ambitious people, who are just gonna say yes, frankly because they know it's an improvement, frankly because the opportunity is there, frankly because we are just talking about getting our carpets cleaned. Is this making sense? Are you guys getting this? I hope it makes sense. And so, I'm like stop obsessing so much over the actual product, and just be out there talking about it, selling it, right? Even if the pitch isn't perfect. Who cares. Just be out doing it. Right? That will perfect your pitch faster than you sitting in a room days for doing it. Okay. It's funny because I'm in this cool place in my webinar building right now, where I'm actually recreating the entire thing. Okay, and that's what I've been doing basically this last week. I feel like my momentum has been a little bit slow, as far as output because I'm solely focusing on my webinar script. I am destroying it. I did it live quite enough times, talked to a lot of customers, talked to a lot of people realizing that, oh, my gosh, this is what they liked. This is what they didn't like. This is what they didn't buy. This is why they did buy, right? And understanding what those things really were. This is a progression beyond a simple ask campaign to people who have never bought from you. I'm talking with people who have bought from me, right? People who did start filling out their credit card, but end up pressing purchase, right? Those people. That's way more amazing data, and I'm going to them, right? And I've just been present. I know my pitch wasn't perfect, but my funnel is still limping on a single leg. I know it is. There's so much that's wrong with it, okay, but I've not obsessed over it so much yet... I know I will... I know it's gonna be amazing, but what I'm waiting for is this awesome blend between what I know people are struggling with, right? Not just there needs, but what they want, and what I'm offering, and the sales message that delivers that offer. And it's coming. It's real close, it's real close, okay? I just spent six hours yesterday going through and ripping apart my webinar. Ripping apart the script. Tearing apart my offer. I'm basically restructuring the entire thing. I'm very, very excited. Probably in like another week, we're gonna be gone for a little bit here, but probably in a week, I'm gonna turn back around, I'll redo the whole thing. All that mattered for me, phase number one though. Right? If you're like "Steven, I don't get it." When you say "Steven go out, Steven go out and just start selling first," but I don't have the product totally perfect yet. Another way to think about it is just go be present. Just be there when people are looking. Some of the power of publishing. Some of the power of you being out there, is just merely, right, just whenever their eyes look when they're like, okay, I'm finally ready. Okay, I'm looking. You know what? We just talked about how it'd be cool to do this, you know what I mean. You know what we talked about ... You know ... You know what I mean? Boy, if somebody walked around here and says "Hey, we do sprinkler service." I'm hiring them on the spot. Right? There's stuff I need done with the sprinklers. I know how to do it, I don't want to do it. Okay, I dug sprinkler trenches by hand for a whole summer. I put up false sprinkler lines up, that was, I know how to do it, I don't wanna. Okay, if some guy walks up, does that make sense? There are things that I see inside my life that I just not need, but also want. And same with you, and you're actually selling stuff, guys, it is ridiculous how many people are asking me for my product right now. Coming to me, asking me, without me selling them. That means I have found a want, not just a need. I am hitting directly on the pain point. I am hitting directly on the spot where it is an insatiable blue ocean. And just by me publishing, just by me being present, I am getting sales... That's the whole point. If you still have not had any sales yet, I dare say you are not present. No one knows about you. No one has any clue that you exist if you have zero sales and you have been in business for awhile. Just be visible... It doesn't matter if it's not perfect, it doesn't matter if it's not ... anyway... Okay, that's all I'm trying to say in this episode, be present. Okay. Publish. Okay. Be out there, be talking with people, be understanding who you're actually selling, okay. Your dream customer, not who could buy it, the dream person of who you want to buy it. Okay? And actually get intimate with that individual, understand who they are, understand that their needs, wants, and desires and go forward that way. Anyways, guys, hopefully this was helpful to you. Hopefully it simplified things and it's keeping you from, I don't want you to over complicate things. I don't want you to over ... okay, because there's a lot of stuff we teach, especially those of you guys who came in the Two Comma Club Coaching Program, the new batch that we just got, right? You guys represent my now twelve hundredth person, that I've taken through this process, okay? And understand that, the way the whole game is played, there's so much that we put out there, we know that. I don't want overwhelm to happen. Keep it simple, understand that just being visible with something imperfect is going to be so much better than waiting for something to be perfect. Every time, bar none, every time. Anyway, there's a cool book, just the title that even says what it, it's call "The Consuming Instinct". That's exactly what this is playing in to. I'm actually looking at it right now. But it's called "The Consuming Instinct," right? Just got it. Very, very excited to start reading through it. Right? This is another reason why you go and sell wants, because eventually you walk into somebody and they're like "Oh, yeah, I've been wanting that lately. Yeah, I really do. I've been looking for something like this." We've been looking to get our carpet cleaned. Right? It's a consuming instinct. People want to buy from you. So half you guys just aren't talking about your stuff enough, and being loud enough... Final thing I'll say, there was a teacher that I had, a professor that I had. He was one of my first real mentors. It was probably about four years ago. He and I were chatting', a lot of you guys heard me talking about him, he was the CMO of Denny's, and of Pizza Hut. He invented stuffed crust pizza. I was running a business at the time, we were doing three grand a week, and it was cool. You know, it was a fun business, it was like training wheels for me, for a lot of different things. Anyway, I started talking to him, and I was like, "Yeah, you know, I feel like I'm just annoying people from what what I'm doing. I'm saying the same things and I'm getting the same messages out there. And I feel like I'm just trying to annoy people." And he brought me to the side and he goes "You've got to start understand that like" ... It's funny that Russell started telling me this too, but this is the guy that I learned it from, and he goes, "You've to to understand that you're going to get so much more tired of your thing before other people. Like when you start being annoying, when you feel you're being annoying, that's when people are even starting to notice you exist. Right? You're gonna get tired of your stuff way before the market is, because the market really has no idea who you are for awhile. Right? You've got to shake them, you've to to grab their shoulders and say "I'm here." Right? I'm here. When you, right, even if there is no pitch or sale, right, you're just being open and present. Anyway, just know that this is going to happen to you, and expect it to. And if it's not that way, you're not marketing enough, right? I'm tired of the things that they teach over and over again. Okay? I am. But I know that people barely starting to know from me, or know me for what I do. So why the heck would I ever stop? Right? I'm just being present. It takes awhile for a whole mar...it takes, right? To think that an entire market will have your attention, too, is also ludicrous. It's ridiculous. I'm not gonna sway 100 percent of the market. To think that I'm going to have 100 percent of the market, that's not true. I'm just looking for my sliver, that I can go serve, that I can effect positively, that I can bless in their life. And in turn, they will support my life. Right? Like 90 percent of it is just getting out of the door and just talking about it. Just being where people are looking. Anyway, you guys are awesome. Thanks so much for listening and I appreciate you guys being on here. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the last podcast. That topic, oh man, Questions that Invite Revelations is one of my favorites. I got a sweet one coming up for you next, as well, It's ready, it's ready to rock. I'm just salting the oats, here, okay. Get ready to listen to it, it's very, very good. It's one to take out a piece of paper and listen with. It has blessed my life immensely. As soon as I learned what you guys are going to learn in the very next episode, I ran home and taught my wife, and I taught tons of people, because it was one of those things I learned that I said "Oh my gosh, this, this is life changing." And it has been already. So, anyway guys, thank you so much, and I'll see you on the next episode... Hey, thanks for listening. Please remember to rate and subscribe. Want today's best opt-in funnels for free? Get your free opt-in funnel pack by going to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to kick in your opt-ins today.

Interview - Jay Kinder In today’s episode we have Jay Kinder, who has been in real estate for 20 years and started his own independent brokerage company prior to transitioning to eXp Realty. We hear about Jay’s previous experience, why he chose eXp Realty, how eXp differs from other companies and how you can learn more about opportunities with eXp. Learn More about eXp Realty - Click here to watch a quick 7 Minute Intro Video. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content discussed within this podcast are the opinions of Kevin Cottrell and/or the guests interviewed.  This information is intended as general information only for listeners of the podcast. Listeners should conduct their own due diligence and research before making any business decisions. This podcast is produced completely independently of eXp Realty and is not endorsed, funded or otherwise supported by eXp Realty directly or indirectly.   In this episode Recruiting and retention challenges as an independent brokerage or large mega agent team Why Facebook comments are not the best way to reach people How many agents the number one franchise system in the world is netting vs. how many agents eXp Realty is netting Agent attraction Importance of speed to market Company culture Roadmap for vetting Want to Learn More about eXp Realty? If you are interested in learning more about eXp, reach out to the person who introduced you to eXp or one of the contacts below to inquire or ask questions. If you are seeking further information, eXp has Lunch and Learn opportunities, weekly live webinars and other resources such as pre-recorded videos that can be sent to you. YouTube videos are also available online. Contact Jay Kinder, email at Jay@Jaykinder.com Contact Gene Frederick, text 703-338-1515 Noteworthy “It just seems more real so we just thought all in all it is a better platform. It just made sense to us to be at eXp.” “I think people think, you know, it's all about how much you're putting into it. It's incredible how quickly it grows underneath you with people that you're not talking to every single day.” “Essentially, if you look at a cloud-based brokerage like eXp Realty your single cap gives you access nationwide because it's a single brokerage, not each office is independently owned and operated like in a franchise system.”   PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION KEVIN: Welcome to the show. Jay how are you. JAY: I'm doing great. Kevin how are you doing buddy. KEVIN: Fantastic looking for this conversation. I think a lot of people are when they listen to this. Before we get into sort of the meat of the topic on the eXp for agents that may not know your background why don't you give a quick bio and background before we jump into the details. JAY: Yes sure. I've been doing this 20 years now so I got into a real estate a pretty young age. My dad owned a, bought actually in 1997 a Coldwell banker franchise from being an independent. And then I got into a real estate late that year. And so about 20 years now that I've been selling real estate I was very fortunate to invest in myself go to every conference anybody who sold anything for real estate agents. They have my credit card. That's for sure. I was fortunate to be pretty successful early on. My first you know four five years were pretty good. I ended up I think number two in the world for Coldwell banker for several years. Selling I think at the peak of my career five hundred and something homes kind of went on to start a coaching and consulting company with my business partner Mike Reese who is also a real estate agent. I kind of got him into real estate and we just found that we really enjoyed helping real estate agents grow their business. That was something we were very passionate about. We started our own company together as well probably in 2014. I think officially we restarted up and brand new brokerage together. We both had our company separate but we put one together and started growing that in about 2015 16 17 and then obviously last year we joined the eXp. KEVIN: So for listeners I want to give some context to this Jay and I think first met we were trying to figure it out before we started recording somewhere around 2004. We were both in Austin, Texas. I was living in Austin at the time. Jay was down from Lawton, Oklahoma and Chad Goldwasser had put together, I can't remember what Keller Williams event it was but there was an event and there were about 15 or 20 of us at dinner and Jay happened to be sitting across from here next to me because I remember you made this comment and I think it's very very apropos for the conversation today which is you've been successful like you just talked about Coldwell banker. You made the comment. You said I'm happy to come learn. I get invited every time there's an event. It may have a mega camp or something like that by Gary Keller. You never changed and I want for listeners to say that again. I mean from 2004 when Jay and I first met he had already been courted by Keller Williams and Gary Keller personally for years and now it's 2017 all of a sudden after what you just described and the coaching and consulting business you and Michael launched a brokerage business. You made a hard turn and double down so to speak on the eXp realty. Let's talk about why. What was the genesis for that decision. JAY: The genesis for that decision was you know as an independent you know of course if you would asked me if I was interested in joining any brokerage I would have been adamantly opposed to it. I consider myself lucky that I was even open minded enough to consider it as an option because I wasn't certainly looking to join any other brokerage once we went independent and 2011 and then we started our own brokerage that was independent. There were just you know that was a direction that we were going and we had a brand that we were building and we wanted to expand that brand across the country and we weren't looking to join a brokerage that wasn't a problem that we were trying to solve what problem we were trying to solve. And I think what really made us have to really consider eXp was the recruiting and retention challenge that you have as an independent brokerage or as a large mega agent team however you want to look at us was something that we just consistently fought you know year in and year out. And when we look at the eXp model it really was just a better platform for us to kind of expand our real estate business across the country as we were intending to do. It just made a lot more sense to do it at the eXp. There was a better value proposition that we could align to what we were already offering in terms of value. And there was just a better business model that was already in place with publicly traded company, having shares and ownership in equity which we wanted to incorporate into our model that we really didn't have a good way to do that. And I think most agents don't really buy in for the long term of an independent because there's never really you know what's the true value of that independent. You know if you were to even implement some type of equity you know opportunity or whatever there's limited value to that because it's not real. And I think eXp became very obvious which the stock trades for you can go look that up and sell it you know. Obviously after you've invested you can go out and sell that stock. So it just seems more real so we just thought all in all better platform it just made sense to us to be at eXp. KEVIN: You know it's interesting. I ran across the same comment from an independent broker in the Portland area that converted his 30 plus agents in the eXp and I had originally approached him to look for potential acquisitions and or people that might be interested in eXp. Not initially even on his behalf. In other words he made the comment to me send me the information. Let me understand what you guys are all about and what was interesting I sent to him on a Friday. Even before Monday arrived I had some text and call saying hey I'm going to get another call with you. And I got on the call and his comment was the same thing you said which is I don't know how I remain viable as an independent when there is this alternative value proposition. I think that is the big wave that's coming. I know you're seeing it not only with mega mega agents and teams but the independent brokers people that have built solid businesses and we already have numerous examples. I've got a number of them that I've already recorded and will be recording of independents coming into the eXp and everybody says the same thing. And something like to this effect not only retention but the guy in Portland said when I started doing my due diligence I started calling people and when I got to some big franchise recruits that I thought I could get into my firm within the next 12 to 18 months. These are the people that you typically have to court for a while. Every one of them either was already in play for eXp or told them if I move anywhere I'm moving to eXp and that's happening every market across the country. It's an interesting prospect. So Jay if you look at this from the standpoint of equity and you know most agents and I want to kind of let you expand on that. Most agents have either been sold a bill of goods of especially recently that you want to be part of a private company not a public company. I will make the comment I did nine startups out of Silicon Valley including two that went public. That is the most asinine comment by that leader that I've ever heard. I mean unless you are passing out equity like a law firm does two partners where they divvy up the pool of income and profit at the end of the year you're being sold a bill of goods. There's no easier way to say it. If you're drinking the coolaid so strong that you're waving the flag now. Yeah yeah. Private private private. I am so sorry. Go run around Sandhill Road and talk to the venture capitalists and the entrepreneurs that tried to do it privately. Competing with companies and that's not to mention in the real estate space all of the venture funded entities. If you're the lone private entity who is run by the largest shareholder that's trying to tell you that private is good, just go do some due diligence. Go talk to somebody that works for a law firm that's highly profitable that is private and ask them how they participate in that profit and then go back and see if you have an opportunity do that because the last time I checked there is no profit other than profit share being handed out in that large franchise system. I come from it. It's a great company. But Jay, don't you think that once agents do their due diligence and some of them are doing it in a week some are taking 6 months but when they look at this and they start thinking about building wealth and they start thinking about retirement, other streams of income there really isn't a second choice in this. Is there? JAY: There's not a second choice and it's fascinating to me. If you go back and live 30 years ago it was "Keller who" you know when they were first taken off as an example the influences really kind of drive the growth of the company. And I got two messages today literally since right before and probably in the last hour or two that are agents that you know they basically watch the webinar, a they are interested in. One guy said he's 95 % there and the other guy actually said something very similar to that in his comments. And I think when people you know what's really you know we're just at the you know the tipping point you know getting close to 10,000 agents and you know I've always heard that is the tipping point but I've never felt anything like a tipping point like this. I mean it is incredibly interesting how many influences, mega agents, independents see the value proposition they see that's real and I think the other agents you know that are leaders maybe in their marketplaces but they're doing a good business and they're happy where they're at. You know that's going to be the next big wave in the next 12 to 18 months of agents that just this is obviously there's a lot of smart people that moved over here. I get it. I'm moving over here. I mean I can only expect that that would be the case. KEVIN: Gene Frederick and I have coined the term super influencers. We're going through a phase now and you certainly qualify in this category Jay where you get people that have both on their network and also on their social media following Super influence. They're disrupters, when they move especially in the context of what I said about you were you being courted for more than 10, 15 years and then you made a move and those people in the industry that didn't realize that was even a possibility. It was highly disruptive in the market. I know that you've had some huge success. You've had a bunch of people come over afterwards and I think that last time I saw your numbers and I'll just ask you for an update it's been about 100 days hasn't it? When we recorded this and how many people are in your revenue share group? JAY: We partnered obviously me and Michael and Stacey who brought me on board and I think you know all together we are now at just under 300 in total in our revenue share group. And I believe like my personal line it's something like 25 or something like that 27 I think actually now. So yeah. I mean it grew super fast. I think people think you know it's all about how much you're putting into it. It's incredible how quickly it grows underneath you without you know.. with people that you're not talking to every single day. I've a lot of conversations about eXp every single day. I'm happy to have the most fun I've ever had in my life. Having those conversations all day. The bottom line is people tell people who to tell people who tell people and your revenue share grows without much effort beneath you is what I experienced thus far. KEVIN: It's the viral nature of real estate. Now people have people in the real estate business that they are personal friends with or they are in their network. It could even be in their city or their part of their referral network much like what happened to you when a brokerage change occurs. They're like well why did you go to eXp or what's up with eXp. And like you were discussing you'll have them watch a quick intro to eXp or a webinar. It's a little crazy silly. How much traction there is. Because as a former team leader for Keller Williams I can tell you I haven't tried to recruit Jake Kinder but trying to recruit a Kapper or a mega agent was a six months to a six year arduous process. In other words it was a huge win. If somebody like Gene Frederick or I got a mega mega agent and you just look at the last seven days at eXp you know and there's like 500 million dollars worth of production and teams coming in in a week. And for context and the reason I bring that up is it's easy for people to get confused especially because there's a lot of noise and information in the market that it's not very very viral. I know of a franchise office I was told about on the East Coast where not only the team left but all 1 through 5 left in one week. And this is happening for context for listeners to this without Nine hundred team leaders, without managing brokers going out and doing recruiting on a basis. Now you've got people like Gene Frederick, Jay, myself and a whole bunch of other people including agents they're just talking to as Jay described agents in their network. You know maybe somebody did a cobroker transaction with and then they decide to join. But it's very viral at this point isn't that sort of the feeling that you were describing earlier as never felt like it. JAY: That's exactly what it is. It's a completely viral. I found it interesting. There's kind of a unique balance of people who still have never heard of eXp which is a huge opportunity because most people have never been even exposed to what it is and then it seems like there's another subset of the market that were exposed to it didn't really probably weren't properly exposed to it or maybe they weren't exposed to it in a way that they actually listen closely to what it was or looks closely at what it is. There's the people that had been watching closely bought this stock and are just waiting here just waiting for the right person to come on board it so that they know that it's a good decision. Maybe they're fearful or maybe it's just timing. You know those are the kind of the three different tiers that I tend to run into. It's just incredible opportunity. I think still with age I still really don't know anything about eXp or haven't even really heard much about it in some markets. KEVIN: And I would echo that I just had a conversation with about a 10 or 12 million dollar producer in San Diego and I happened to run across her and asked her if she had ever heard of the eXp and we were on a phone call much like the calls that you do Jay. She said it's the wildest thing I see it all over social media. I see it. You know when somebody post something about changing brokers in a Facebook group about real estate and there's 300 comments she said but I've never seen anybody talk to me about what it really means. And that's the opportunity. And you know I want to put a footnote in here and I know you'll probably echo the comment which is commenting for those of you that are already with a eXp and we'll have a lot of people listening to these interviews just for tips and thoughts and be able to frankly share it with other agents that are not here yet. The time to jump in and a 300 comment thread on Facebook is not the right way to get somebody's attention. It's about the one on one conversations. It's about building a relationship with somebody. It's about being purposeful about value and it's not a perfect fit at the eXp realty for everybody I'm sure you've had plenty of conversations like I have. Were the parties mutually agree that OK well it's either not fit now or just you know what. Thank you very much. Or not. I can tell you that I don't jump in those comment streams but I can tell you that invariably when I have a conversation with somebody about eXp that is active in one of those groups, they receive them fairly negatively. In other words I would encourage people if you're listening to this and you're with the eXp to stop the cheerleading in the comments and you know touting revenue share in these 300 comment threads and these Facebook groups. Get into a one on one relationship with people including people who are active in those groups and have a phone conversation. Let them watch the webinar and let them learn the true facts because all it comes across as is overly aggressive. People didn't like this when it happened at Keller Williams. Like I said before, I was a team leader for a long time I ran several market centers Gene Frederic was a team leader, the number one team leader in the country and we never did that. In other words there's plenty of agents that are all excited and you just talked about having somebody just this weekend. Reach out to you. I had two people this weekend as well. And it wasn't because I posted a comment on Facebook right. I don't never see you do it either Jay. JAY: All we've done actually.. we haven't done anything and of course we're you know by the nature of our business as we market the real estate agents all across the country and have been doing that since 2006 so I haven't sent an email talking about eXp or our move. I haven't done anything on Facebook other than doing Facebook Live to announce it and then using you know Facebook Live to interview other people have made the move as well. That's pretty much all we've done so far. And you know that's a good way to get the message out if somebody wants to tune in it can and will have to. But the thing you know that way you're not you know in their face you know trying to force it. I think you want to you know again it's age and attraction agents that are interested in it keep hearing about it are going to be more likely to snoop around a little bit more maybe ask a question are private messages or something like that. But you know just go out there and jumping into a forum using making comments you know about eXp definitely not the right approach in my opinion. KEVIN: I would agree. Now Jay let me ask you a couple of questions. Obviously one of the big things that I see a lot of people asking about is there's a lot of focus on multi market operations and expansion. Right? You know some franchise systems you know like to think that they pioneered this but if you look at the eXp value proposition because you do deal with in your business and I know you're relationships with a lot of the teams that either are already multi market or that's part of their business plan. How much of a game changer do you think that the two things ,the one the single rainmaker cap nationwide for eXp is and then to the fact that they have the team concept in terms of the capping including the mega mega team program how big a game changer in the industry do you think that is going to be? JAY: It's super interesting. For us, it's a huge deal I mean because we were independent so we didn't have you know I guess you know if you look at other systems or other franchises that have something similar. I mean there's way more cost associated with trying to you know expand into new markets with that business model then there is at eXp. There is clearly you know a huge advantage as far as making that an affordable opportunity. And it's interesting because I have got on a few conversations that probably my third or fourth weekend where I had an agent in Virginia that wanted to join my team. She had been on some type of an expansion team somebody at Keller Williams. I'm not sure who it was you know she was looking for some lead generation and things of that nature but she wanted to join on a 50/50 split. I had not been thinking about it that way because most of my conversations have been with influencers and things of that nature so I was just looking at you know I've been sharing over and over and over conversation after conversation you know just the business model and I wasn't presenting it from a here come join my team perspective and it kind of hit me is like my goodness. I mean there could literally be you know you could have a thousand agents on your team. I think you know 15 years of my career. Everybody was focused on how do you get to a thousand transactions and I think now that the opportunity for someone to have a thousand agents on their team that wants to control lead gen and bring agents in under a little bit stronger value proposition than just whatever the eXp is offering in order to help them be successful. You know that's a real possibility. It would be something that you know that I've never seen done before that's for sure. KEVIN: And I think that that is something that inherently, I have some people I'm interviewing about this but is inherently in some of the franchise systems the conflict right. Essentially if you look at a cloud based brokerage like eXp realty your single cap gives you access nationwide because it's a single brokerage not each office is independently owned and operated and franchise system. So the conflict that I see coming down the pike is you can have a national conference like happened recently and announce that you're going to do a virtual cloud based operation. Right? They didn't give a lot of details but now imagine you own the office in Oklahoma City and you're the franchisee and you used to get a cap when the expansion team opens up in your market right. You're going to get some amount of company dollar. Now income is virtual and you're not getting that anymore. I think it's going to be I guess I'll give it a nice pleasant turn but it's going to be very messy for the franchisees in the franchise or to sort through all of that. Silicon Valley approach to this, speed to market is the winner. You know and I think a lot of people are starting to wake up. Most people including a lot of people listening to this don't realize what a big ramp up that eXp is going through. Frankly Jay a big part of it is the momentum that you brought in because if they were running at 300 agents a month in September-October and they hit 988 in January that's a big part of what Gene and I have given the moniker super influence effect. And there's going to be a lot more of that. And for context the number one franchise system in the world netted 908 agents in January. You probably didn't never hear that figure before but I've seen it so with 900 offices they netted 900 agents. eXp did 988 without team leaders with a single nationwide footprint. And so what's ending up happening is what used to occur as they expanded in a franchise system. You know Gene and I did this. You get a bunch of agents excited. They want to join and then they have to wait till the franchise is awarded. They have to wait until the bricks and mortar acquired they have to wait until the office gets a core group and mix application including with the person who gets approved as the franchisee to run it. That takes 12 to 18 months. So flash forward Jake Kinder comes on board in October his phone rings off the hook for the first 30 plus days. Somebody is in San Diego. You know they have 15 agents. Hypothetically they get excited to watch the web an hour they want to join that maybe talk to some of the senior people who are accessible at eXp especially for people that have a substantive business that's a big deal like a list for you. And I know you did talk to Glenn and others before you came over. They come over and it takes 10 days, not 18 months. So for listeners that have been told especially if you work for a franchise system there's no way they can sustain this growth at eXp realty. Here's your wakeup call. It takes as little as a week to 10 days to bring over mega teams. In a franchise system especially if it's an expansion effort and there's a new market center involved is you're talking 12 to 18 months. That's their Achilles heel both for the virtual market center aspect as well as the other aspect we talked about earlier which is the direct conflict. For those out there that are wondering and scratching their head of how did this brokerage go from you know 800 or so agents to 66 hundred at the end of last year to break through 8000. Now as Jay mentioned at the top of this interview close to 10000 that's the clock speed that it's running out. There's no reason I'll put a stake in the ground. I don't what your prediction is but I think that will be at every bit of 22 to 25000 agents at the end of the year. What's your number. JAY: That was the number that I had been thinking to January. And I want to say I had a conversation with Glenn in December. The thought was maybe 13-14000 at the end of 2018 and then at the end of January I think that number is going up considerably closer 20000. I believe there would be more than 23000. The only question that I have is the onboarding process and it's super scalable what they're doing now. So it would stand to reason that they could continue to scale out that apartment and manage the you know the pace at which we're growing. There are some estate broker things that probably come into play there that need to be dialed in there to get more than 23000 but I would definitely bet my left arm on 20000 unless there's some type of internal reason for us to not grow that fast. I can't imagine not hitting 20000 at the end of this year. I just don't see any way especially with the influencers that I know that are on the new on the transition right now and the ones that have already come on board. It's just got too much momentum to not do that. KEVIN: Absolutely and my take on it to Jay is the fact that we've hit critical mass. In other words some in the marketplace and this is some of the noise and misinformation is that they can't keep scaling the eXp realty. There's no way they can do this. And there is a demand portion of that which we've been talking about right the super influencers, the influencers the momentum even down on the agent level worry they'll join and then two or three people will join and then they know two or three people and that's that frankly there's more agents joining from that than just the super influencers right. You look at since you've got here you know if you add 2500 agents and you talk about having 300 in your revenue sharing group. It's still growing much faster than even what you're doing. So the demand side is there. If you look at and I've worked for nine startups in Silicon Valley, the stuff that the marketplace doesn't understand is the systems will all be scalable. They're always going to be periods of time when demand outstrips the capacity of the entity. The difference is if I've got to open up bricks and mortar and hire people and stick them in offices and do things physically there's a meter on it as to how fast I can grow. So if you're just talking about building systems that are scalable that are cloud based, the cloud based model beats the bricks and mortar model every time. So Jay if you look at where you are getting most of the interest from obviously it's across the board right independence you get people from the big franchise systems when you look at an agent that's maybe listening to this. You remember they were involved with your association or something else like that. What's the advice you can give them as far as you know due diligence and vetting and the whole purpose of this podcast is to get it out in your words but also to give them a roadmap for vetting. What would you advise them to do? Obviously they listen to this potentially. Now they need to you know dig in and make their own decision on the eXp Realty. JAY: Do your due diligence. I would say you know talk to agents. One thing I would say not to do is you know don't look at just the agents in your marketplace that are have currently joined eXp and make a decision based on that. There's still a lot of marketplaces where the agents that came on board were super early adopters and maybe they were not doing a lot of transactions or whatever the case may be. I would say get in contact with you know someone that's at a high caliber and talk to them definitely keep listening these podcast. Definitely watch some youtube videos and things of that nature but talk to some agents that are here eXp now and that are doing production and ask them what you know. It's everything it's cracked up to be. I think that's one of the things that you can do that that the easiest and you know see what the truth is out there would be what my advice would be. KEVIN: Absolutely. That's good advice. Another thing I would say to echo what Jay said... We still have markets at the eXp where there are a look like Texas was three years ago when Gene Frederick first approached me about Texas. I want to say they had less than 25 agents in the entire state of Texas. eXp at this point has 1800 agents, they're adding way over 100 per month. The complexion of it and the difference in the brokerage operation is like night and day. Not only is the brokerage infrastructure in terms of the state broker and all the State Administrative brokerage team and I think it's close to 10 people at this point. Completely different. And that's the scalability as well of the business. That's the only thing that I'm glad you brought it up a run across. More people say well I can't look at the roster in my market and there's only a handful of people and I'm not sure you guys are going to do what you do in my market that you've done in other markets. Well it's just a matter of time in my opinion and that's what you just said Jay which is raise your hand and the other thing I would say as far as vetting is that you should, whoever brought eXp Realty has an opportunity to you. Ask them to get you in touch with some other people from a reference standpoint. The culture of the business is such that even if somebody is a fairly large producer or mega agent or they're in a different market if somebody pings them and says hey I've got this prospect, they're really interested in the eXp. They're a little concerned about their market versus what we've done in other parts of the country. We will absolutely get you connected with somebody. It doesn't matter if they are in our rev share group I would do it for Jay. Jay would do it for me. Anybody would do it. We can get you in touch especially if you're a larger independent brokerage and you know you're thinking this is strategic for me. I've got 30 to 50 agents, I've got 100 agents. We had one in the southeastern United States that approached us with 350 agents and five offices. If you're out there and this is strategic, you're listening to these podcasts episodes and you need help. There's plenty of help it's the culture of the business that's in our DNA. And I see you doing it all day long Jay. I mean you raise your hand and say look let me help you Gene and I do the same thing. We don't care and Gene frankly is the evangelist and the ambassador for eXp, he's out there running regional trainings and events all over the country and every once in awhile he'll say to me he goes I think they're in my downline. I think they're in my revenue share group but he doesn't really care. Most of us don't care. We don't care anymore. I know you don't care either. JAY: The culture is just incredible and you think OK well it's not you know there's no brick and mortar attack and you really have culture. This is probably the most culture rich organization I've ever been apart of there really is... It's just engineered into the DNA. When you come on board the eXp to help one another and you know there's not this oh well you're not my downline that's not at all the feel which is something I didn't necessarily expect but I've been really pleased to see that it really is truly you know a lot of givers in this company that are wanting to help one another grow and are willing to help anybody in the organization no matter where they're at. And that starts at the very top with leadership. Now all the way down to you know any agent in the company that's very special to be you know to be able to kind of see that and experience it. It's very rare I would say. KEVIN: Great. Well Jay this is another example of you giving in terms of coming on the podcast I appreciate it. Before we let you go any other final thoughts and then I'm going to have you give out your contact information in case I wants to reach out to you. JAY: No I don't have any final thoughts. I mean if you've been thinking about it you know take action. I think this is you know one of the better opportunities that I've seen since I've been in real estate and certainly think that you're going to be better off here than not being here. KEVIN: Fantastic. Jay if somebody wants to reach you and connect with you how would they find you either on social media or on the web. JAY: You could probably just Google me that's probably an easy way to find me but if you want to e-mail me you can shoot me an email it's my name. Jay@Jaykinder.com. KEVIN: Fantastic thanks for coming on the show. JAY: You got it thank you.

Hello, welcome to Debbie's Tips. I thought what we should probably talk about today is e-blasts and video, and using that in your marketing. People ask me a lot, because they see me do a lot of email marketing and a lot of video marketing, “Is it really appropriate, necessary, to do much of it for my real estate clients? You know, do I really need to do that with my database and my lead pipeline?” And the answer absolutely is yes. Now, I do want to say though, that direct mail marketing to your great groups is super valuable. Because, think about it. I read somewhere the other day that the average person gets like, 110 emails a day, even if they only open 20%. And, even of the ones they open, they don't even read them all, right? So, we know that our impact on an e-blast is not as great as someone driving up in their driveway, going to their mailbox and taking out four or five pieces of mail, and right there is your fabulous mail piece. But of course, that's expensive. So, if you're looking at your mail marketing, we want to be marketing to our best groups, your geographic farm, past clients and sphere of influence. We want to stay top of mind.  And as you're doing that, we also want to look for any way we can to cut costs without cutting quality. So, in a geographic farm, I think you guys know about every door direct. Every Door Direct Mailing, EDDM, very cost efficient. And we also want to make sure that those messages are setting you up as the wise advisor and have a call to action. Now, on your e-blasts - you know, I often ask my marketing person, Pete Mitchell, so, what's too much? And he said, well, weekly is not too much. The rule, though, is just don't be boring. So, on your e-blast you're going to pick a variety of topics. Maybe it's updating them on new listings, maybe it's community news and information, maybe it's sharing an article on home improvement. If you're one of our coaching clients, you have access to our lifestyle advisor newsletter, which you can tear apart and turn into different e-blast messages. But at a minimum, I would suggest at least once a month, get an e-blast out there. More frequent if you can. Now, what about video? I remember when video for real estate first became a thing, and people would spend thousands and thousands of dollars on these professionally made and professionally edited videos. And you may feel you need to do that, and you certainly may have that and it's working fine for you. And yet, you know what people love? Organic. Right? They love the interesting things you're doing out in the field, or the great new hot property that you have, or a quick little message and market update that you have for them. I guess you'd say it's kind of like reality TV, right? They love that glimpse into the real world. But agents avoid video, because they don't feel like they have a good script, or they don't feel they look good enough on camera, or they don't know how to do it, and I would really encourage you to stop over thinking it. When you're making those videos, be yourself. Here's what I mean by that. I'm not excessively comedic. You know, I can tell a couple jokes or a funny story if I'm speaking or doing some kind of conference call. I can do it. But I wouldn't say I would call myself a funny person, so I'm not going to try to make videos that are comedic because it would fall flat. It's not me. So, when I make my videos for the coaching company, it's very much about content because that's my groove. I know the real estate industry. We're a real estate family. I talk to some of the brightest and best across the nation every day. So, it's about content for me. So find your groove. Find your niche. Get a couple of simple tools and technologies that make it easy for you to make your video, or to send that video out to your clients. You know, when an email has a video attached, or a video email versus a regular, written email, I have read, and I've also noticed it on our marketing material, that the open rate, the rate of engagement, increases dramatically. In fact, if we attach a video, we'll see our open rate go from 20% to over 50%. So, e-blasts and video. Let's make sure you're utilizing your tools to have even greater connections with your database, your farm, and any of your past clients. Alright guys, have a great day and I'll talk to you soon.

Intro: 00:00 We were in the right place at the right time and we got our sales strategy right and got our marketing strategy right. Intro: 00:05 All the while you must tell your story and you must be focused on serving them. It's not really necessarily outcome with the knowledge that you gained while you're facing these issues, we get so caught up in trying to do everything at once. Where success is simultaneous, not sequential. Show Overview: 00:21 Welcome to the Ajax Union B 2 B marketing podcast. On this podcast, we interview ceos and the fastest growing companies in the US. Our goal is to find out what they did to grow so fast, what business and marketing strategies they used to have explosive growth. And now your host for Joe Apfelbaum, CEO and founder Ajax Union, a B 2 B digital marketing agency in Brooklyn, New York. Joe Apfelbaum: 00:49 Curt Bashford is the CEO of GD, formerly general devices, a medical device and software technology company whose core purpose is to improve the health and well-being of the public at large. Curt shares with us what he did in order to secure him a spot on the INC 5000 this year. I'm really excited to have a fellow EO member join me on this episode. Let's begin this amazing episode and find out how Curt grew his business. Welcome to the Ajax Union B2B marketing podcast. As you know, we're interviewing dozens of ceos and leaders of INC 5000 businesses and your business was featured on the INC 5000 to the year as number 2503. Congratulations. That's amazing. Curt Bashford : 00:49 Thank you. Joe, Appreciate that , Kinda at the halfway mark there. Joe Apfelbaum: 01:37 The halfway mark. You're in good company, so it shows that your 2016 revenue was 6.1 Million which is three year growth of 142 percent. That's a pretty incredible growth for business. Curt Bashford : 01:51 Yeah. Yeah. Now the trick will be sustaining that, right? Joe Apfelbaum: 01:54 Yeah. We'll talk more about that. I'm so glad that you can join us here today. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us about your business, your growth, your marketing strategies. Are you ready to share some insights on this program? Curt Bashford : 02:05 Ready to roll. Joe Apfelbaum: 02:06 All right, let's do it. So you mentioned earlier about getting out of your comfort zone. Do you feel like you get out of your comfort zone when you talk about your business? Like when you tell the story of your business? Curt Bashford : 02:15 I used to, um, not so much anymore. You know, it's, it's a muscle memory a little bit. I'm wondering what I could do it in and can just roll in and talk. I think about it too much. It's harder. Joe Apfelbaum: 02:28 So let's try to test some of that muscle memory. Tell us a little bit about your business. What do you do and why do people do business with you? Curt Bashford : 02:35 Right. So, so, you know, is uh, y, you know, we also needs out there for hospitals and emergency medical services. So we created some invasive innovation where, which we call response innovation to solve problems and help those two entities communicate better. Um, ultimately to save time, save money, certainly for, to save lives and help healthcare. Joe Apfelbaum: 03:01 That's awesome. So you're supporting hospitals by creating technology that helpS them be able to do what they need to do faster and better Curt Bashford : 03:10 ambulances, emergency medical services communicate with those hospitals better patient care. Joe Apfelbaum: 03:16 so what do you attribute your growth over the past four years? Do you have something specifically that you did? I mean, because you where your business was founded when I was born. Curt Bashford : 03:26 Yeah. ANd I've been here, this is my thirty first year here now. So I started when I was two w we've gone through a few different evolutions. I'm probably the biggest pivot point. Um, you know, we went through and we went from becoming a design manufacturing from a design contract from into a manufacturer that was one pivot back in about 1990. Um, and then we had our own products, but I mean we're, we, we had some moderate growth but we were kind of really a operationally centric company. I'm an engineer by background. The founder is an engineer, so we're very engineering technically order oriented, which means we make cool stuff, how to sell it, Joe Apfelbaum: 04:08 which is a comical stuff, but you don't know how to sell. So what changed? How did he start selling it Curt Bashford : 04:12 to um, you know, w we had some processes and we did well in, in some niche, you know, territorial markets and such like that. Um, but we, we hadn't broken that ceiling if you would, um, in [inaudible] I'm founder retired and myself and my two partners for you could say his exit strategy that kind of opened the door for us to make another pivot. You know, there was a good Company, he had a great foundation here, but we kind of wanted to go a little bit bigger, a little bit different direction. so we started to make some changes. Um, firsT senate changes was on salesforce. We only had a few direct guys so, um, where we had boots on the ground we did well and where we didn't have boots on the ground, we didn't do so much. I'm so we put some by practices in place here linked up with a manufacturer's rep organization, gets more boots and that gave us a little bit of growth, a little bit of working capital to start to do some other things. Curt Bashford : 05:08 IT thrust me into a new role. So I went from being, you know, in operations, but more technically oriented to being the ceo to run a business. My fi, my deGree undergrad and masters in engineering. What do I know about running a business? So, uh, you know, I kind of, it hit me like a lead balloon, I guess, that I got to go learn some things. So, um, uH, I got a business coach that helps set things off and then kind of like you, I believe, um, in 2014 I got bob would l so remember, you know, New Jersey and you know, between those two, that kind of thrust me into the world or were others learning the other, but he's got the same issues and problems and how do we do these things. And so I got into a kind of a learning Mode then, um, applied some of that here, meal from the culture up because before then I didn't even believe culture was a real thing. Right. And again, an engineer, we don't have feelings, we don't have the emotions. What do you need culture for? Joe Apfelbaum: 06:07 That's pretty incredible. Yeah, no, I'm a technical person myself. So I totally, I totally get that. Like what do you need foster for? Let's just get the work done, let's find a solution. RighT? So, so since you got a business coach and he joined eo, you grow your business significantly. You were your feature on the [inaudible] now that you grew the way that you grew, like what's more important to your business right now? Is it now? Are you looking back and saying, ok, now I'm focusing on pre-tax profit. I'm focusing on ebitda or I'm going to continue to double my business over the course of the next three years. Like what is your, what's your approach now? Curt Bashford : 06:43 Good question. Um, I think we're still in growth mode. So we had some evidence by, by the awards, and we want to continue that. I don't know that we quite want to double our beehag is to hit 10,000,000 revenue now again, by self we know means nothing. Arabia, revenues, vanitY and, and all that. But that's kind of our target. So it's really comes out at a book and if you look at the progression and companies, how they're majority companies, ninety six percent are somethings in that no less than a million, four percent in less than five. And we want to get to that point four percent. That's kind of a, a lofty, beehag target for us that we'd like to get to, um, we'd like to make some profit along the way, but we've been kind of reinvesting that into the growth because as, as you know, as you do grow, you find that you need to do a lot of things differently, processes, systems and people and you have, uh, you know, growing pains along the way that you got to take care of. I think we're still in that mode. Joe Apfelbaum: 07:48 You look at revenue per employee or profitability per employee. Do you look at a per head count or anything like that? Curt Bashford : 07:54 We haven't done that. Um, you know, our head count along with the growth, we've, we've, they will more than doubled in people too and they're probably already are having looked at revenue in those terms though. Joe Apfelbaum: 08:07 Cool. Cool. Let's talk a little bit about your marketing, because in order to grow, you need to have really awesome, incredible marketing. What marketing strategies do you use? You mentioned boots on the ground getting salespeople. Did you do any like search engine optimization? Curt Bashford : 08:22 The paint, we're finally just getting down to doing things properly that we need to do as part of our growth balloon. Part of that was related to a, um, a replacement market of our own products that I gave us, kind of a bump them give us some working capital for that. Um, I would say at best and being generous, you know, a lot of our marketing in the past, it was kind of a ad hoc, you know, what's, what's the quick fix to the day, you know, where do we need to throw something out there? Um, I, I very, very little strategy. Um, we are now. I actually hired our first full time marketing person last year before that and kind of we learned some bad habits. He, along the way being engineers, we tend to do everything ourselves, right? Technical people or we can do that. Curt Bashford : 09:08 Why do I need an outside person? And then you find a ceiling in. Yeah, your limitations that you really want to do it. Right? So I got a good guy last year and he's taken us in new directions and things differently outside the box. So we're starting to slowly now. Yeah. In place. The things we need to do. You mentioned seo, so we're, we've got the foundation work, we just started an ip retargeting program. I'm more looking more critically at shows because we used to do too many, too many shows. Anthony's, he used to do full coat color ads in magazines in the. We get, roy said, now we've got an hour. Certainly we're measuring uh, some of that and trying to direct it smarter and really got to start planning for 2018 and stuff. Just doing this, Joe Apfelbaum: 09:54 not just doing the do and expecting different results. Call. So. So who is your most ideal client? Is that the ambulances or is it the hospital's like who actually buys your product? Curt Bashford : 10:04 So it's a little both. We have a few different product lines. So core product goes in the hospital, emergency department. So there are our prime contact. That's a majority of the bills, the kids a lifetime. Um, so that's, that's our main target, but it does tie in with emergency medical services. So there's some ambulance services actually want in your backyard. And why is the customer first? Wow, they are good hands. um, in w were out there were probably in four or five hundred hospitals around the country. Wow. That's doing well. And then the ambulance side of things, the product, there is a more mobile telemedicine. Mmm. you know, using the technology that we all carry now for doing live video and audio and what can we do to take care of this patient better and maybe not go back to the hospital. Joe Apfelbaum: 10:54 Right ryan? So even asking them do we need to come back to the hospital or can I just give them an injection of an epi pen or whatever it is. Curt Bashford : 11:00 Yeah. And then that'S where things are done here in healthcare is evolving. It's too expensive. And you know, eat emergency departments are overcrowded. So there's programs go mobile, integrated healthcare and community paramedicine or bore you with details, but it's different ways of thinking and not everything needs to go back to the emergency department. There's sometimes more appropriate places for care. Joe Apfelbaum: 11:22 So by hiring a full time person to help you with your marketing, do you have now like an inkling of what you're going to want to invest to continue to grow profitably? Is it based on, because you're starting to measure roi so you thinking based on profit, based on gross profit based on revenue, like a lot of business owners I speak to are not sure how to measure return investment or how to measure like what marketing budget they should be spending. Do You have any ideas? Curt Bashford : 11:47 So, so I don't know that we have a great idea. We know that's where we want to get to, You know, a typical, it's a, you know, some percentage of, of acts. I'm working towards it. I think we're having to put some foundation pieces into place so that I don't know that, you know, the more of a startup phase, the dollar amounts would be the same as if we already had it up and we're maintaining or they're tweaking along. So we're kiNd of evolving that way. We got some work to do, but I think we're in the right direction. Joe Apfelbaum: 12:15 Cool. And especially because you're cutting back on some of those traditional stuff that didn't work. Let's talk about some of those things that some people call it mistakes. What mistakes did you do from a marketing perspective where you throw a bunch of money at something and it just flopped. Curt Bashford : 12:28 So one of the first ones you know is to not measure it. So how do you know if it's working and you know, you do a trade show and you get some leads out of it, but who's, who's tracking those? And then before you know it, ten months have gone by and you have to decide, are you going to do that same show again? How was it? Well, I think it was ok. I think we got some leads that. And it's a lousY way to do it. Know it's, it's not smart, it's not how we should be doing things. and you got to fight those inclinations of uh, well, you know, we're more noticeable if we don't, you know, appear at the show and um, and balance all that out. And sometimes that's, those are tough decisions. Soda demetrick. She should help us to some degree on that. Joe Apfelbaum: 13:08 Wow. That's powerful. Yeah. Now totally like winging it and not measuring it. Somebody recently came to me and said, joe, how'd you lose eighty five pounds and keep it off over the past three years, and I said, well, how much do you weigh? And they're like, I don't know. I don't measure. It was like, if you don't measure it, you don't set a goal, then like there's no way for you to get there. You're not gonna know if you're succeeding or not succeeding and not succeeding, not gonna know who did it or didn't do it. Curt Bashford : 13:31 Right. Goals for everything, and that's about those metals and that's part of goal setting. If I say I'm going to do that race, and I tell people on, I sign up and I do it, then I got to finish and then you get that sense of accomplishment. You've got a goal and do that. Joe Apfelbaum: 13:49 Cool. If somebody who was entering the world of healthcare and the way that you are these days, what would. What advice would you give them from marketing or from a growing perspective? Wouldn't you tell somebody that wants to solve a problem Curt Bashford : 14:00 for hospital over at mom's healthcare stuff? Business is growing in a thing is a great one to get involved with. Um, the real thing comes down to, and this is a marketing sales saying off the right value. What is the value you're providing? Um, there's a million shiny objects out there and cool devices and technology. So the real question is, will they buy it? And that comes down to do you solve a need to solve a problem addressing their pain points, their needs, um, their busy places. They're frazzled customers. Then they're doing things because that's the way they've always done them and they may not have time to look at something for a change. And you really have to demonstrate the value. You've got to do that through your marketing. Joe Apfelbaum: 14:47 Cool. that's really awesome that we spoke about your growth. We spoke about your business. We about your marketing. Let's talk a little bit about you. What's the driving force behind the business? I know that you're going to start it, but you were there from the beginning or from a really long time ago. Like what's your purpose now to be able to get to that big hairy, audacious goal of practically doubling your business? Again, Curt Bashford : 15:08 so many things. I'm kind of self driven, um, but I'm actually kind of competitive. I, it comes out in different ways and, you know, I don't want to lose. I don't want to fail. Um, I want to succeed. I am not so much janet for status or anything like that. Um, but I want to do good. So I liked the industry that we're in, um, you know, but it's not just about me also, right? It's all the employees and the company and their families. And uh, that hit home. We just had our company picnic outside on sunday and you sit there and you look around and so it's not just me, it's not just my family, it's the employees but their families and you see that there and we're all, you know, together we're in this together and responsible for that and that, that's a big driver. Joe Apfelbaum: 15:59 It's cool on from the metals on your wall, I can see that you're competitive and you like to win just like me and many other entrepreneurs. We like to win as a leader of a fast growing business. As you're growing your business, sometimes things come up and get you bent out of shape, get you stressed out. What do you do to deal with that stress? Everybody has a different way of doing it. What's your unique way of dealing with stress? Curt Bashford : 16:21 Equal for the night guy? Yeah, it's amazing and I hear it's a common problem, but those, those stress type things tend to hit me at about two or three in the morning. Um, it's, it's, it's, you know, the day I tend to grind through and work on what I need to work on and it's, it's at night when my mind just kind of wanders when the stress starts to hit junior and you, you go to those negative places and dark places of, you know, what happens in and what do I need to do and then you start the next day and uh, somehow get through that push through. Um, but it's getting input from the coach and from my wife and for my partners and my teammates here, how to, how to solve problems in a really don't get past that stress until you dive in and really understand the problem and start to fix it instead of just worrying about it. Joe Apfelbaum: 17:10 Right? They say the best way to extinguish feaR is to distinguish what you're afraid of and that will diminish the effect of it by. What's that bell behind you? Is that like when you want lunch, Curt Bashford : 17:26 that is a part of what you mentioned, right? So scoreboard and measuring into how do we measure success, so where we would get a, a new customer ordered as a relevant order. I put my speAker phone on, hey joel around the building and we ring the bell on. Everybody in the company knows that we had success. So we share that. Joe Apfelbaum: 17:45 Wow, that is so awesome and so unique. Totally going to share that with other people. That's really, really cool. So what are some hobbies and passions? You mentioned you do these competitive runs. IS there anything else that you're personally involved with? Curt Bashford : 17:59 Personally, I had been a lot more, my kids are now, my daughter's just finished college. my son's been out about three years and working in his career, marriage, my daughter just started her, so it's given us, my wife and I find to do more things for us. Um, so we'd like to do some travel and we actually still do family trips. We just did a one in san francisco and until yosemite park and went on a hot air balloon ride over napa valley and doing some things that we'd like to do together. And so that's one of them, but you know, doing the obstacle course races and my son and daughter and my friends get involved with that as well and kind of push each other and have a lot of fun out there too. And I find that from a goal point of view is helpful, but it's also about being comfortable with being uncomfortable. Joe Apfelbaum: 18:50 That's something I get out of it. As an entrepreneur, we get asked a lot to do things, especially in eo, were being voluntold to do things. How do you say no and what are the things that you specifically say no to in your business and in your personal life? Curt Bashford : 19:05 Yeah, so I'm not good at saying no and actually did it today. I was supposed to one of your podcasts on away way and I kind of give me, there was a segment in there about saying no and I kind of gave me the rationale yet. Yes I can do that. It makes sense to say no at times. It is hard with the team because you know, you get ideas, you get the different directions, a squirrels shiny objects, right? That you want to go in. Um, and we'll play with them to a certain point, but at some point you have to say no. Um, but it's a challenge and something we really have to remind each other about it and it doesn't come naturally. I would say. Joe Apfelbaum: 19:43 Awesome. On leveraging this prestigious award of being on the inc five thousand. Curt Bashford : 19:49 Good question. Um, I think this podcast is an example of that, right? So I think that's probably how you found me. Um, although I think we've crossed paths and, uh, at an eo event or two, um, and we have some mutual acquaintances in that, but um, yeah, it's a, it's part of the networking and in recognition and um, you know, when I talked to others, um, you know, people kind of know the debt means something. Um, being on that list. It's not everything, but it's a piece in it. It may open some doors, it leads to other networking business activities that you might not otherwise. Joe Apfelbaum: 20:22 Yeah. What learning or advice from others was most helpful to you? I know that you started your major entrepreneurship learning journey and 2014 by getting a coach and joined the l. Were there any books or business gurus, a mentor? Is there anything that you'd like to share? Curt Bashford : 20:37 Yeah, there, there, there's a bunch. And, and before the eo, I really didn't do any reading. Right. I went to school for all those years. What do I got to keep learning? Um, and then the woman who interviewed me for the application, she asked me an innocent question, much like you just did what is a theory? And I had flaws because I really had no answer for that afterwards, that embarrassment. It guts me. It's like, you know, she's right, I should be doing this. Why am I not doing this stupid? So I, but she put me onto a tip because my excuse was I don't have time. Um, but I do sit in the car and commute. She said try what are your books? And I did and that was three years ago and I'm up to about forty five business books now. So, um, that, that was helpful in that. And I think that the team here hates it when I started. No, because you know, you always grab a couple of nuggets and you got to share with everybody else and we're going to try something different. But you, if there was a couple in there, I really liked it. Pat lencioni books, the five dysfunctions of a team because I'm trying to get the team involved in learning and growing is because there's stories behind it that helps relate to others. Joe Apfelbaum: 21:48 Yeah. That's a powerful book. Powerful story is really, really great. Do you consider yourself smart or lucky? And why? Curt Bashford : 21:58 Good question. I think I'm smart. I don't think I'm overly smart. Um, yeah, maybe a little above average and net luck is about putting yourself in into the right positions and, and, uh, you know, what's that intersection, right? Of a looking for opportunity and success in all that. Joe Apfelbaum: 22:20 Yeah. No, definitely. And one final question to wrap this up with a little bow. We feel successful when we get recognized. How do you personally measure success in your life and your business when you don't get recognized? Curt Bashford : 22:34 That's a good question. So when you Don't get recognized, but you know, you maybe have some internal satisfaction with that. Maybe you know, you feel good about it and you know, you did the right thing or are you accomplish something? So maybe some others didn't see it as a little bittersweet that way, but if you know you did it, you can sleep on that. Joe Apfelbaum: 22:55 Ok, awesome. Thank you very much. Curt Bashford : 22:56 I appreciate the opportunity to hear and look forward to meeting you in person at some. Joe Apfelbaum: 23:00 I look forward to that as well. All the best have a wonderful day. Thanks. Take care. Joe Apfelbaum Outro: 23:05 If you enjoy the podcast, please share it with a friend or two or three and remember to leave a five star review so other people can enjoy the podcast as well. You can reach me, joe, at amazing@ajaxunion.com Where you can send what questions Joe Apfelbaum Outro: 23:23 you want me to ask the next batch of ceos that I'll be interviewing. I look forward to hearing your feedback and remember, stay amazing.  

What's up guys. Hey. Hope these days going fantastic, and you're killing it, and you woke up smiling. If not, I invite you to do so. It's amazing what it does for your day. Hey, so ... Hey. When, I first joined ... It was the very first MLM I ever joined, and I got into. I ran into a problem really, really soon and imagine that you've probably run into this too, at some point in your MLM career, if you're still in one. What's funny is I actually learned that a lot of people who are listening to this right now, are not in MLM. They're just looking for one. I didn't know that. How you guys doing? Anyway, great to have you. Anyway, so the first time I ever joined an MLM, I ran into this issue, where I was excited to be a part of it, and I was running. I was literally going door-to-door down Main Street. I was trying to recruit friends and family. I was doing ... You know what I mean? I had not learned a lot of things that I know now, where I actually am ... I treat it very differently now. I actually value. I actually put stuff out there. I actually qualify leads. I auto close. I've got a lot of tools and stuff like that for my down line. The whole purpose, again of this podcast is to help show you what I do, so you can do it in your own business. I don't care whatever it is you're in. As long as you love it, great. That's awesome. Go kill it and crush it. That's great. The other purpose of this podcast is to go through and show you, kind of documents the journey of me creating this next product for the MLM industry. There's no talk of me trying to recruit you. You won't even know the name of the MLM that I'm in. It's literally just to help you see how someone like me ... I have a heavy, very strong internet marketing background. I was the ... I still am, the right hand funnel builder to Russel Brunson at ClickFunnels. Sat right next to him for about two years. I'm about to leave that job, in about four weeks here, which makes me a little bit nervous, but I'm excited to do it. I'm literally leaving to do this full-time. If that's any kind of testament that what I'm trying to teach you, works. I have two kids. I have four year old and two year old, and a pregnant wife. I would not leave my job, if it was not actually being successful. Okay? Please know that what I'm teaching you guys throughout this entire podcast, and especially in the course I have coming up, works. It's real. It happens. You guys are living testaments of it right now, also, that ... Anyway. Anyway. Moving on. The first time I joined an MLM, I ran into a problem quickly, which was, after I had ... You know, I was doing it the old school way. I made the list of the friends and family. I called a bunch of people. I annoyed lot of people. I went through and I was going door-to-door. I was hustling. I still did it the best that I could. The problem was, when somebody else finally joined my down line, I didn't know what to do with them. Right? They were just sitting there, and it was like, "What do we do now?" I'm like, "Oh crap. Uh. Sorry for sounding like a broken record, but I'm about to tell you the same thing my upline told me to do. Go bug your family members and friends. Go hustle like crazy. Go the next thing, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." I just started regurgitating all the stuff that I was hearing. Does it work? Yeah. Yeah, it works. It's effective. It's not very efficient though. You know what I mean? It'll work. It's a terrible experience though, and I ruined a lot of relationships with it. You know what I mean? Anyway, that was part of the issue that I was running into with the whole thing. I didn't know what to do with them, after they joined my down line. I was on this call once. I'm not sure if you guys know who Stu McLaren is. Stu Mclaren's a very amazing guy. He makes millions of dollars every year, running membership sites. Amazing value, but he only spends a couple week a year actually building them. The rest of it's all on auto pilot. Amazing stuff. It's the world I come from. Built a lot of membership sites in my day. And so, one of the things that he teaches in one of his courses, is this concept that ... Have you guys ever bought a product before? You've bought the product. You get it and you realize ... You what, there actually is a better example. Christmas is right around the corner. Right? Christmas is right around the corner. Let's say you buy a toy for a kid, and you get this toy and you have to assemble it when you get it. You open up those instructions and the first thing you notice is, it's not a simple set up. Right? You kind of get completely overwhelmed by the amount of steps that it's now told you to do. Let's say you have done this for a kid. Fine. Whatever. A piece of furniture. Let's say you go buy a piece of furniture, and you're like, "Oh my gosh. I'm gonna spend the next two or three hours of my life building this thing. I had no idea." You know what I mean? It's that feeling, you like, "Oh crap. There's that much stuff to do? Oh jeez. Oh, uh. Gosh dang it. I didn't want to go through this today." You know what I mean? That's kind of the feeling you get. It's the feeling of pure overwhelm. Well, what's funny is that it's been learned, it's been noted that the number one reason why people will refund from memberships sites, is become of overwhelm. There's just too much stuff. There's not enough places to go. There's not enough ... I'm sorry, there's too many places to go. There's too many things to do. There's too many options. There's total overwhelm and the person just wants to get out. A confused mind is always a no. Right? The answers always no for a confused mind. A lot of times that ends up happening, when you join an MLM, or when one of your people joins a MLM. When you recruit somebody, the tendency is just to barf all over him. Here's the comp plan. Here's all the specs to the product. Here's how we're selling it in the script behind it. Here's your duplicated website. Here's the events coming up. Here's all the books coming up. Here's what the president has said about x, y, and z. Here's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You go and you barf all over these people. Total overwhelm. No idea where to start and it makes someone want to quit. What Stu Mclaren teaches as the way around us, is something called a success path. Okay? A success path. These success paths are genius. I use them in my own MLM recruiting now. Their amazing. Okay? When somebody joins my MLM, what I do is I think through the success path that I want that individual to go down, meaning, what's that number one? All right, well, we should probably have learned about the product a little bit more. Watch this video. That's it. Don't think about anything else. I'm not out to tell you about the [inaudible 00:07:08] plan even more. I'm not about to tell you about all the 12 million events coming up. I'm not about to tell you about the stuff that's going on, and have you re-introduce the 1400 of my upline people. You know what I mean? Just watch that one video. That's it. What else? Don't worry about it. Did you watch the video? Nope. Then, watch that video. That's all. I write it out. I put stuff down, so that they understand what is expected of them, in order to be successful. Right? Both from a business standpoint and a recruiting standpoint and a sales standpoint. I just, I figured it out. I do through. I just simplify it. Okay. Here's all this crap. Let's put it into an organized manner that you can actually digest it, and that it's not gonna stress you out like crazy. That's what I've been building this last little bit here is ... I've built a lot of members areas on the internet. It's one of my specialties, really enjoy doing it actually. I thought, how cool would it be .. This is something I just barely started doing right now, as far as the members area form. It's a dedicated members are that's just for my down line. Not just for the tier that's directly under me. I'm totally fine if it's like, they bring in the tier under them, and they bring the tier under them, they bring the tier under ... It's still all essentially my down line. Why would I not want them all to have a success path, to have training on how to sell each specific product, to have training on all the leads and things you can do out there that's all automated. You know what I mean? Why would I not want everybody to have that? What I've been doing and building, is putting together a members ... When they join, you know I give 'em the option to have the entire members are to themselves too, to duplicate it that way. It's legitimate true duplication, because I know I can build it awesome. That's my actually job, which I'm about to leave soon. Once I build it, I can comb the thing over to 'em. Now they have it for their down line. You know, or they can just give access to the current one too. I'm completely fine with that. Anyways, all I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to just illustrate the fact that, one of the reasons ... This is the case that I'm posing, which is that I really believe that, one of the major reasons why somebody will not join your down line, or when they do join it, then they do nothing, is just sheer overwhelm. They have no idea what to do next. They have no idea what to start on next. There's a lot of information, which is great. There's so much information, that it's completely overwhelming and they just don't know what to do. Create a success path. What is the first logical thing you would have any person who joins your MLM do? I can't answer that for you. That's up to you. Okay? I've answered it for myself, and my team. We're putting those things even more together. I go and I survey people and I say, "Hey. What are you struggling with? How can I help?" We do live calls frequently. We go through a lot of cool trainings. We go ... You know, and we ... The upline is not their only support. The content from the MLM, you know, the corporate MLM is not their only piece of guidance. It's not their only source of training. It's not their only source of, here's how you actually sell. They're getting it from me too. Right? Actually, way more in-depth, than my MLM provides. Right? And so, anyways, that's what I'm super stoked about. I'm very, very pumped to get this piece done here. I've created a lot of "success paths." This is the most in-depth one for an MLM, my MLM down line that I've ever built. Excited to have it. Excuse me. Anyway, super pumped to be able to send that our to 'em. I think what it's gonna do is it's gonna help keep believability. This whole games about beliefs, right? Someone joins your down line, because they believe that it's possible for them to be successful, which is great. They're right. They should. They need to have that belief otherwise why are they do anything. All right? The belief can get killed when they realize that they've got to ... When they feel like they don't just have to read the owners manual alone, but they also feel like they gotta write the thing. You know what I mean? When it's that much stuff. I actually feel like it's actually been preserving some belief patterns, has actually created more, not just of a path that had to be successful, but just like, overall peace. You know, overall well-being. What's neat about it too is it's trained people where to go to get information and they collaborate amongst themselves now. It actually helped duplicate me, and slightly removed me. Not that I'm trying to be removed, but it's mainly that I'm no longer the bottleneck. You know, cause the trainings there. The stuff that I said is there. It's all in there. The success path is there. They know the path from A to Z, how to actually be successful with this thing. Because I'm being transparent about how I'm being successful with it. I'm showing 'em exactly what to do. You know what I mean? It's hand holding at the coolest, but without me having to actually do it, because it's all done through videos and you know, PDFs and ... You know what I mean? All of these different things. Anyway, start thinking through the major sticking points of your down line. Again, I pose the belief that part of that is just straight, sheer overwhelm. If you can't figure out what those pieces are either, just ask your upline. "Hey. What are the things that the people who joined, actually with the first." And then you start thinking through what that success path looks like. What it is that the person is actually asked to go through. Here's an example. You can be like, "Here's what the first 30 days of your life here looks like." I know a lot of MLM's have that, but from corporate they have that. It's so much more powerful if you, the leader gives that to the down line. Hey. Welcome to the team. This is a legitimate team. I'm not just saying it, cause that's what we we're told to call it. This is an actually team, meaning, here is an actual success path we found. It actually made us successful with it. Here's how it's duplicatable, and you know. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If it comes from you, versus just corporate ... Corporate probably has something like that, but if it comes from you also, it's gonna be a lot more powerful and it's gonna go a lot further. Anyways guys, hopefully that's helpful. Go create the success path. Fight overwhelm and I'll talk to you later. Bye. Hey. Thanks for listening. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Would you like me to teach your own down line? Five simple MLM recruiting tips for free? If so, go download your free MLM Masters pack by subscribing to this podcast at secretmlmhackradio.com.

Debbie Scheer is a successful Denver humorist with a penchant for telling the truth about her life, no matter how raw. Edgy but warm, she catches audiences off guard and then they fall in love with her. On this third episode of One More Shot, she tells the story of how she used the worst moment of her life to reinvent herself and become the courageous comedian she is today-- and how we can find courage in our darkest moments, too.   TRANSCRIPT   Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:00:07] Debbie Scheer was a stay-at-home mom with two small kids and a secret drawer full of jokes. Then her life fell apart and after she stopped crying she found a way to reinvent it. Debbie Scheer: [00:00:19] I'm going through something so scary, I should probably find something else that's even scarier to take my mind off this really scary thing. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:00:31] And that's how Debbie Scheer became a standup comic. She is my guest on this episode of One More Shot, the show about taking a spark of an idea and making it real. This interview was taped before a live audience at Setting the Stage, a women's concert and networking event in Denver, Colorado. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:00:59] Debbie Scheer, Welcome to One More Shot. It's so great to have you here.  Debbie Scheer: [00:01:03] I'm so excited to be here. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:01:05] I should say also that I left my notes behind. And so forgive me -- I'm not actually taking phone calls. What I'm doing is looking at my notes so that I can introduce Debbie properly. She is a comedian. She's an auctioneer. She's an emcee and a public speaker and she's performed all over Denver and regionally and I have to say you've got to catch one of her shows because she's hysterically funny. She's also the single mom of two boys who are six and nine. And this is the kind of courage that Debbie has, and the kind of comedian Debbie is -- she's created several new shows, including one called Sex Com, the show -- a funny forum about sex in which the audience's questions fuel the show. So what I want to dive into right away, Debbie, first of all is the spark. So you said your spark was finding humor in places that people don't usually find it - Tell me again how you said that. Debbie Scheer: [00:02:04] Right. I think finding that the nuggets of humor that sometimes live deep deep deep beneath the surface deep but they're always there and they might be microscopic, but they exist. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:02:17] And very very deep beneath the surface, and that's what I want to do is just talk about your story, and this spark for you becoming a comedian because you certainly haven't been a comedian, at least not, you know, outside of maybe your dining room table, all your life, right? Debbie Scheer: [00:02:33] Correct. That's correct.  Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:02:34] So you came home from a trip a few years ago to some news that really jolted you. Debbie Scheer: [00:02:43] Right. Right. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:02:44] Let's talk about that, what happened? Debbie Scheer: [00:02:45] I had gone to visit a friend in California, and it was four years ago this past February, or a few months ago, last month. And I came home to my partner, at the time, telling me, "I'm not in love with you anymore." This was after almost 11 years and two children that we adopted and saying that she didn't want to go to couples counseling, she was moving out, and, and that was, that was it! Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:03:16] And you had quite the visual image when you told me this story before for how you felt. How did you feel? Debbie Scheer: [00:03:22] It's not a, it's not an attractive image, but I felt like if you, if you walk into your kitchen and you round the corner and someone's standing there with the biggest cast-iron fry pan and they just hit you in the head, that is literally what it felt like. It was such a shocking gut punch. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:03:42] And the other thing about it was that you were a stay-at-home mom. Debbie Scheer: [00:03:45] Correct. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:03:46] And so here you are, you're a stay-at-home mom, your kids are, at that time, how old? 5 and 1? Debbie Scheer: [00:03:52] 5 and 2-ish. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:03:53] 5 and 2. And so you don't have an income of your own? Debbie Scheer: [00:03:56] Correct. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:03:57] And you've got little kids?  Debbie Scheer: [00:03:58] Correct.  Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:03:59] And she left and you didn't expect it?   Debbie Scheer: [00:04:01] Correct. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:04:02] And so what was going through your head? What happened? Debbie Scheer: [00:04:04] I -- I was terrified, because I felt so wildly out of control, like most people do when they're delivered news like that. And I just didn't know what to do. My identity had been wrapped up in being a mom and I had left a job that I loved at a nonprofit and I felt just like I was out so far out in the ocean and there was just nothing anchoring me. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:04:33] You know, I --I've been divorced like probably some other people in the room, and it, it jolts your whole life, you know, even if you're the one who chose it, I think the bottom drops out.  Debbie Scheer: [00:04:43] Correct. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:04:44] And you don't know who you are, some days. Some days you feel great. Other days you don't. You know the whole career thing. Everything has to get reinvented. Is that how you felt? Debbie Scheer: [00:04:54] I did. I, well, for a while I felt like I'll just live in the fetal position and cry and allow my friends and your support system to come over and do what they do. Right? They nurture and take care of you but that only can last so long. And so I, I had this idea that I don't recommend people do, but at the time it seems logical, and I thought, "I'm going through something so scary, I should probably find something else that's even scarier to take my mind off this really scary thing." And it was stand-up comedy. Mostly because I'm terrified of heights, and so jumping out of a plane, I was a mom, I didn't want to get hurt. So I thought that's off the table. I'll try standup. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:05:47] OK. So. Debbie Scheer: [00:05:47] I should have jumped out of the plane! Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:05:50] All right, so we don't have a ton of time, but I am curious, like how on earth did that idea come to you? I mean most people don't think, "I'm terrified; I'm in the fetal position; I'm crying. I don't know how to get to the next day. Oh wait a minute. Let me do something even scarier. Let me figure out what that could be." How did that come to you?  Debbie Scheer: [00:06:06] That idea or comedy itself? Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:06:09] The idea that I should do something scarier than I'm already in. Debbie Scheer: [00:06:13] I think because I'm a person that loves to have control. And I had none of it. And so I was just clawing my way back to try and find something that, that would -- ground me. And once you had that idea you said, "Yeah, that's it. Let me go do...?" Debbie Scheer: [00:06:30] Well, it was interesting. I love comedy. I've written comedy and never showed it to anybody because I was so insecure about it. And I I had a friend who owned a bar and they would do, they had a comedy showcase. And I went in to chat with her and I met the host and the host was so gracious and said, "Absolutely I'll give you five minutes," which was amazing. And it just took on a life of its own. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:06:54] So you have your first show. Debbie Scheer: [00:06:56] Right.  Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:06:56] And you're walking out to the stage?   Debbie Scheer: [00:06:58] Yes. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:06:58] How do you feel?  Debbie Scheer: [00:06:59] I was actually walk -- I remember this. I don't remember my set but I do remember this. I was walking up the stairs and at one point I thought, "I'm going to throw up." And then I took another step and I thought, no, "I'm going to poop my pants." And then I thought, "No, but they're going to happen at the same time." And then I got on the stage, and it was the most frightening -- truly frightening and exhilarating experience of my life -- and after those five minutes I remember leaving and going back down the stairs and thinking, "I'm still here. I'm actually relatively OK. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:07:41] As in, you didn't die? Debbie Scheer: [00:07:43] I didn't die or do either of the two things that I mentioned before. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:07:47] Right right right. Exactly. So from there, it wasn't like smooth sailing, right? You still have to make a living and you're still dealing with these two kids who are probably in some trauma themselves. And so so what was, what was the low point after that and how did you come out of it? Debbie Scheer: [00:08:09] I think the low point was just this this, creating this new identity. Who am I? I had been a stay-at-home mom, prior to that I worked in non-profits, and now who was I going to become from this point forward? Which has its ups and, and, like most ups, has several downs. And so it was just trying to figure it out! Trying to, yeah, I don't know. I can't say there was a specific low point. There are many scary moments there. Yeah. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:08:41] But scary moments. And what do you think got you through -- toward this new life. I mean from, from nonprofit executive to stay-at-home mom. To being left, now you're a comedian, and more. And a lot more. [00:08:55] Right. I think what got me through and I told you this and I'll make it so brief but I was doing standup one night and I was doing comedy about my divorce and I looked out into the audience and if you're a comedian you're picking up on the energy from the crowd and the facial expressions and hopefully the laughter and people were laughing but there was one woman who wasn't and she looked miserable, so that's of course who I focused on. That's how we operate. And I was so in my head about it. And then after the show I was standing there and I felt someone tap me on the shoulder and I turned around and it was that woman. And she said, with that same look on her face, I loved your set. And I, and I giggled, because that's what I do when I'm uncomfortable, and I said, "Truth be told by your body language, it seemed like you hated it. And I'm so sorry." And she said the one thing that kept me moving forward. She said, "I just want you to know that I -- I recently went through a terrible breakup. I feel like I'm in a similar position and I feel like I now know it's going to be OK." And I thought, "Oh, that's why I need to keep doing this." So that was the spark. [00:10:04] So in that vein I want to talk to you about something that you have shared very publicly in a great forum you can talk about the name of that, talking about mental illness. And you have an anxiety disorder and she does a very hysterical monologue about this, I have to say. But it was also just incredibly, incredibly honest and out there. And, and so, she listed her skills.  [00:10:28] [VIDEO TAPE OF COMEDY SHOW] "I have these amazing skills, like really awesome. And I don't want to brag too much but if I could figure out a way to transfer these skills into a powerful resume I would land the most perfect job for me. Let me share with you some of these skills. I can walk into any environment, convention center, airport, restaurant, concert venue, Ikea, and within seconds I know where every single bathroom is. Thank you IBS. And every single exit. Because you always need an escape plan. I can travel down the rabbit hole faster than any rabbit you've ever seen and I can stay there and set up camp and really truly overstay my welcome. I can create scenarios in my head, images that are so dark, so intense and so very frightening, Stephen King would be jealous. I know, it's totally impressive. And many of you might also be familiar with these skills, if you live with anxiety. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:11:36] So I found that fascinating, because I have anxiety and also because when you have anxiety, the last thing you want to do is tell people that you have anxiety. So you're -- here you are telling the world about it. How do you do that and why? Debbie Scheer: [00:11:52] I am transparent to a fault. If you ask my parents they'll give you a long history of that transparency. But I do feel like what connects us, is that ability to say, "I have this. Maybe some of you have this, and we're all going to be OK." And so it's like the story about that woman who came up to me after the show and talking about anxiety or whatever it is, it's a way to connect us all together. And that's why we're here. Ultimately I hope. [00:12:25] Great. So tell us a little bit about your next show because it is next Wednesday at Lannie's Clocktower Cabaret. [00:12:32] Yes. So I started a show with my comedy wife -- I call her. She's an improv comic. I'm a standup comic. And it's called "Broadsided Comedy, an Estrogen-fueled Comedy Show." And our goal was to create a show that would peel back the layers and topics that society would rather have us not talk about. And we really wanted to talk about it. And so the show on Wednesday is about self-care and it's at the Clocktower Cabaret, and its sketch comedy and stand up and improv and all that yummy stuff. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:13:06] Debbie Scheer, thank you very much. Debbie Scheer: [00:13:08] Thank you so much. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:13:14] So what I love about Debbie's story is that, you know, we all have one more shots at some point in our life where we decide to do something, some great idea we had, and sometimes it comes from a really positive place but sometimes it comes because we're forced. And a lot of us are forced because of a variety of things, divorce or an illness, or whatever. There's all kinds of stuff. And that sort of Phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes story is so helpful and so real and so positive and it's just really wonderful to see. So I was very inspired by it. I appreciate it. Elaine Appleton Grant: [00:13:47] And I want to end the way I've ended before which is just to say to all of you, when you walk out of here tonight, think about that. What's your one more shot? And write to me and tell me the answer and that is Elaine@Onemoreshotpodcast.com. You can hear the last two episodes -- the first two episodes -- of the whole series also at onemoreshotpodcast.com. Eventually it will go up on iTunes. Well, thank you all for listening and being here.  

There are a lot of people who want to change their career later in life. They want to do more challenging work, earn more money, and have a better lifestyle. Given the growing need of technical talent in the US, it would see like a technical career would be a great choice, right? Unfortunately despite the dearth of technical talent, many people are wary because of the misconception that transitioning into a technical career later in life is just too hard. Another is, as you start to fall behind on your technical skills, it’s hard to play catch up! Hence, a lot of people struggle to stay relevant. Piling on career pauses like parenthood make it even harder! However, the growing number of retraining programs, bootcamps, and online education options are looking to cater to busy people who are eager to transition into a technical position. In today’s episode we’ll talk to Tina Lee, who is actively is working to change these misconceptions with her nonprofit MotherCoders, which helps moms on-ramp to technical careers in the new economy. You’ll learn from Tina: Why people get put on the mommy track and how it does a disservice to women who want to continue to pursue their careers Why technical skills are crucial for employment and why Tina is focused on helping mothers acquire them Why companies shouldn’t withhold investing in a retraining program and how it can benefit employees and employers attract and retain top technical talent Show Notes Check out MotherCoders at http://www.mothercoders.org/  FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).   Full Transcript Poornima:         Welcome to another episode of *Femgineer TV*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker, the founder of Femgineer. In this show, I host innovators in tech and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building tech products and companies. One common misconception I come across a lot is how challenging it can be to pursue a technical career midway through your career.             Another is that it's really hard once you've lost track of your technical skills, or they've gotten rusty, to get back on track. One woman, Tina Lee, is working to change this misconception. She is the founder of MotherCoders, a nonprofit, that helps moms on ramp to technical careers in the new economy. Thanks for joining us, Tina. Tina Lee:            Thanks for having me. Poornima:         Yeah. So, I know you and I met about a year ago at a conference, but I'm not too familiar with your background. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about how you got started. Tina Lee:            So, I started this journey towards having a technical career when I became a management consultant coming out of college. I helped implement large, enterprise-level IT systems and from there I kind of had this epiphany that tech was going to play a major role in business, and it was just a matter of time before the rest of the world was going to be transformed by it as well, and then after that I did technical recruiting. I spent some time in grad school studying education technology, and then ended up working on behalf of nonprofits and government and helping them use technology better to meet their goals. Poornima:         So that's great that you've had all this exposure to technology in your career. What ultimately inspired you to start MotherCoders? Tina Lee:            Well, like a lot of people who are inspired to make change, it came from a deep place of pain. Poornima:         Yeah, what was your pain? Tina Lee:            So, I had been trained to do simple things, build simple things: HTML, CSS, a little bit of JavaScript. I even tried learning Ruby for a while. And it was fine until I had my second child, right? The programs that are available to beginners usually happen on the evenings or on the weekend or online. And I felt like because I had just had a baby, my second one, I felt very isolated. So, doing it online felt very lonely and I couldn't make these in-person classes anymore, so out of that I had this vision of like, you know what? I cannot be the only mother, a new mother, who’s experiencing this. I should just organize kind of an informal meet up because my grandmother had met me.                             I had envisioned maybe some grandmas here on the corner and then we'd be doing our thing here. And ultimately what happened was I had so many women that filled out this informal Google Poll that I had about their interest level that I said, "OK. There's enough there to do something more organized." So I ran a pilot out of a co-working space that was empty on Saturdays and just happened to be next to an onsite child care facility center. Poornima:         Wow. Tina Lee:            Yeah. So that we were able to run the classes in the conference rooms and then have the kids be cared for by professional caregivers in a setting that was set up for them. Poornima:         That's awesome. So you really saw the opportunity. One as like a personal pain point that you experienced but then after you do this experiment there were a number of women who were interested. And then from that point, how did you transition into making it the nonprofit that it is today? Tina Lee:            So, I'm all about failing fast and rocket prototyping. So that was kind of my way of experimenting with this model. And because so many women had reached out, ones who could not participate in the pilot for one reason or another, I knew that there were moms out there that were hungry. And once you dig deeper into the numbers it collaborates that, right? I know you had Lisen Stromberg on the show recently and you look at the numbers about how many millennia women are about to become mothers, right? A million a year for the next 10 years or so. And then you look at how millennia women are going to be the largest and the most educated demographic ever, right? And then you look at who’s already a mom now.                                There's just tremendous opportunity to help moms who are either stuck on the sidelines and they want to get into tech but can't. Or they're in a job where they're not touching it and they want to move up. This is a great way to activate them and give them a skill set that will help them stay competitive. And we even have entrepreneurs who feel like they need a bigger tool set. They want like a wider understanding of how the ecosystem’s working so they can really launch their ventures. They come to us for that understanding and then also the community, too. That's a big part of what we do is the community because like I said being a mom is very isolating. Poornima:         Yeah that's fantastic. I'm sure some of our viewers out there who are entrepreneurs will be interested to learn a little bit more. So it’s great that there are going to be all these millennial women who are becoming mothers but I know there's still a problem when it comes to leadership, and as you and I have noticed, within tech itself only 26% of women hold computing jobs. So, how do you think MotherCoders is helping with that? Tina Lee:            Well, couple of things. One, we've kind of discussed this a lot which is a pipeline issue. Yes. We could be graduating more women with degrees in computer science or engineering but we also do a terrible job as a society of helping women thrive once they become mothers, right? No one ever says the term “working dad.” We just assume that— Poornima:         That's true. Tina Lee:            —you're going to be working. Poornima:         Yeah. Tina Lee:            But for mothers, I think as a society, culturally, we're still very ambivalent about how we feel about women working outside the home once they become mothers, but if you think about it, mothers are the people that you work with, right? They're the people sitting around you and they're your cohort next to you that's going to be taking over this role. It’s just the workplace is not set up to help women succeed, right? The IT worker is all in, all the time. Poornima:         Right. Tina Lee:            And if you have caregiving responsibilities, that's impossible, right? And women are kind of pressured to make a choice because there are not...there just aren't the social support systems, right? School lets out at 3. Poornima:         Yeah. Tina Lee:            There's no paid parental leave, right? And a lot of companies are just starting to experiment with flexible work hours, right? So all these things make it very difficult for women who feel like they want to prioritize their families and of course at the same time they're made to choose. Poornima:         Yep. I do remember in Lisen Stromberg's interview we talked about this caregiving bias. So it’s great that you touched upon it. I think you also mentioned in a talk earlier the mommy tax versus the fatherhood bonus. Walk us through why this disparity exists.   Tina Lee:            Oh man, we're going to get sad. OK. So, because of this ideal worker model, right? You're expected to go in all the time. Once you become a mother, everyone knows what that means and what that looks like, right? Based on our certain circumstances. Our current set of circumstances. So, automatically men and women will think, "OK. So this person is either going to be downshifting their careers or they're going to drop out altogether." Right? "And if they do stay they're probably not going to go all in. So let’s put them on the mommy track." So, women aren't left with that many choices right? So the way I frame the mommy tax is that automatically you're considered less valuable.                                 Right? And that will represent...that will manifest itself in salary negotiations, in having projects that will help you reach the next level, in helping you maybe make connections or professional development that will bring you to the next level. So there's a tax not only in real terms in salary but also a tax in terms of the opportunity cost.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            Of what you could have done if you didn't become a mother in the eyes of the employer. Now it’s such a powerful bias that women who aren't even mothers get hit by it right? I mean how many stories have we heard of women walking in to pitch their companies or trying to get a job and they say, “Are you going to be pregnant?” Or, “You're married, do you plan to have kids anytime soon?” Not only is that illegal.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            That automatically kind of primes everyone in the room to think like, "Oh, right. You're a woman. There's a high chance that you'll become a mother and you're just going to peace out at some point and why should we invest in you." Right? So that's the motherhood penalty. On the flip side, the opposite is happening to men. "Oh! You're going to become a dad? This means you're going to be...you're going to be going in even harder because now you're responsible for caring for a family, right? You should be given the best projects because you really need to get to the next level. And you really should get a salary bump because now you're responsible for all these people."   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So it’s just a very unfair situation where women are getting hit by this mommy tax and dads are not. And women are already a lot of times behind because of the gender pay gap that they came into before all this even happened.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            Oh and for every child that you have, additional child, you get hit a little bit more.   Poornima:         What can we do to sort of alleviate this? Or what...what can people do to sort of empower themselves?   Tina Lee:            Well, I think we need to talk about it in several levels, right? One is the individual level. One may be at the company level. And then one at a society level. So I'm going to start personal. Personally, I think one of the strategies that I've employed is you really have to take stock of your own capacity.   Poornima:         Mm-hmm.   Tina Lee:            What are my goals? What are my passions? What do I want to do? What capacity do I have in terms of caregiving? Do I have family to help me out? Do I have friends? Do I live in a community where there's support systems? So all of these things have to be taken into consideration. And I specifically stayed in a neighborhood in San Francisco that has a high density of in-home child care providers, and preschools, and great elementary schools to kind of situate myself where I would have these resources available to me. Other people move in, their parents.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Other people move closer to their parents. Everyone has a different situation, right? And I'm lucky in that I have a great partner. So all of these things help me succeed. But on a company level, what would make it even better, as I mentioned earlier, some flexible schedules. If I have a role where I pretty much can do work without being physically in the office, I should be allowed to do that, right?   Poornima:         Yep.   Tina Lee:            And if I happen to work with other people who are caregiving, not just kids but for their parents, or they happen to do other things in the community, they should be given that right, too. So having this flexibility actually benefits everyone in the company.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Paid parental leave is huge, right? And also really thinking about how to combat that implicit bias against women and mothers, right? And that kind of speaks to the larger problem of the societal expectation that women are expected to provide caregiving and men are not, that women should stay home after they have kids, right?   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            And the reality is that our society's changing, women are more educated, they're working. Forty-five percent of families with kids under 18 now have two working parents working full time to stay afloat, right? And so the reality is that we need to change some policies around how we support parents in general, caregivers in general. And I'm really glad that people like Sheryl Sandberg through *Lean In*, Emily Slaughter through her books, and then Lisa, too, are really tackling this societal piece because we can't change. We're not going to see change until we have culture change and I think that's a long-term thing that needs to happen.   Poornima:         So let’s bring it back to the struggle to stay relevant, right? You take a pause for parenthood, or you downshift, or maybe you don't even downshift, but there's this perception that you are downshifting. So I think it’s great that there are retraining programs like yours. How do you see these programs evolving overtime?   Tina Lee:            I don't know.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            That's the honest answer.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            I don't know, because—   Poornima:         But you see people embracing them?   Tina Lee:            Yes, people are embracing them, but I think we're at the beginning stages of just having this consciousness that tech is moving really fast.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            We live in this world where you have to continuously learn in order to stay relevant whether you're a caregiver or not, right?   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            That's why companies invest in professional development budgets and provide access to online training courses or learning plans. So I think we as a society know that people need to stay fresh on top of the skills and understand how fast things are changing in the industries, right? And that's why they invest in the professional development piece, but they also will have to come up with new ways of providing those to people who may not have the capacity to go to the one-week conference.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Or the “take three months off to learn how to become a full-stack web developer” type of programs, right? Those all-in programs are going to be very challenging for people with caregiving responsibilities and that's why you don't see an influx of caregivers in those types of boot camps or in online learning, right?   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Because as I spent time in ED School, I know that learning is very social and I'm a big believer that context is important. It’s great if you learn how to speak French by yourself, at home, in front of a computer but if—   Poornima:         No, I tried that. I have a terrible accent.   Tina Lee:            But yeah it would be better if you had actually visited France.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            If you understood French culture and maybe even had some French friends and had a French meal. So it brings it all together and that's kind of the experience that we aim for because it’s not just the skills. It has to happen in context.   Poornima:         Yeah. So why teach these technical skills? Why not just get people to get better at management skills or some of the other softer skills? Why do you want to focus on tech skills?   Tina Lee:            I think tech is transforming our economy. It’s just going to be one of those things that we take for granted, right? And having that literacy is going to empower you to think about your own industry differently. And it’s going to impact the way you approach a problem differently. And I think once moms gain that level of tech literacy, it just gives them a level of confidence to approach this new phase in their life differently because a world of opportunity will open up, right? I think before in the beginning, when things were still very technical to the point where you had to have a bachelor’s or a master’s degree to understand it, then it was less accessible.                                 But now we're at the point where we've automated a lot of these things and made it a little bit more friendly. And I think if you're really going to innovate, it's just as important to understand the problems in the industry and then figure out the technical piece that goes along with that. And I think there's enough room for everyone to participate in that exercise.   Poornima:         So why don't we talk a little bit about the type of people you see coming to your program, other coders—are these people that are outside of tech? Or are they people within tech who maybe were on the business side and then wanted to transition into the technical side?   Tina Lee:            So, after running five cohorts now, some patterns are emerging, right? We mainly see women who are working moms and they want to get technical but can't find a solution that works with them because of scheduling or child care issues. They know that their path to career advancement requires them to gain this new skill set, right? So they want access to it and we provide that for them. Another group of moms who come to us, like you mentioned earlier, they may have stepped out for a little bit. A year, six months, some even 10 years, right? And they're just looking for a refresh. To figure out a way to connect their passions to a path forward.   And then the last group, these are entrepreneurs who have an idea for an app or they are already on their way to building a company and they just realize, like, "Hey, I'm kind of stuck now and I can't proceed without a grander understanding of what it is I'm trying to do and how to go about it." And so they come to us. So those are kind of the three groups that we see. In terms of industry background, they just run across the gamut. We have moms who worked in a startup only on the operations side. So they wanted to get closer to moms who were scientists, who are working in a lab. And they're like you know what? I actually want to do something else because it enables me to be more creative. So just really all over the map in terms of industry background.   Poornima:         And how do you go about doing the teaching?   Tina Lee:            So, we have a three-pronged approach. As I mentioned before, it’s not just the technical skills.   Poornima:         Sure.   Tina Lee:            So, we teach a little bit of code. All the moms are taught HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build a basic website and how to launch it, but the goal of that really is to give them a taste of it, to see how it feels to build something and put it out into the world, and to really check themselves. “Do I like this enough to keep going?”   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Right? Or, “Is this enough? Or do I pivot?” The second piece that goes along with that is the community piece. So we bring in women from the field, like yourself, and we create this community not only of people who could mentor them, but people who provide access to job opportunities. And then of course they have each other.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Right? They can go to conferences together. They can just go to a café and help each other. And having that nerd mom comradery is really essential to success because, sometimes in the middle of the night and there's no one else there, you can feel like you can ping someone.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            And then the last piece that we do, right, technical, community, and the last piece is the childcare piece, right? And that childcare piece really helps moms figure out in a safe space if this is something they want to go further. Right? And I would also argue that another piece of it is context. Although it’s hard to explain to people what I mean by that. What I mean by that is all of this is happening within context of what we see in everyday life and that piece of context is provided by the community, right? You come in and explain we use agile and that's what it means in our shop.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Or we believe in rapid prototyping and design thinking and that's how it works in our shop. Right? So all of these things are relevant. Not just the building part or not just the hanging-out-with-your-people part.   Poornima:         So that's great. So how do you pick a cohort?   Tina Lee:            We pick a cohort the way I would build a team.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            So because...before I used to be a technical rep, I spent some time being a recruiter, and having that safe space for learning is really important. And I realize how hard it is to do this when you are a mother as well. So I work with my board and we have several steps to our application process, the last one of which is an in-person interview.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            Where we really talk to the moms. “Are we right for you? Are you ready for this?” Because a lot of learning will have to happen outside of the classroom too, right? So they have to have capacity and they have to be really clear about why they're doing it because otherwise you're not going to stick to it and it's not going to feel like you achieved something at the end, right? So we walk them through that. And it’s worked out pretty well. All the moms come together and I think because being a mother is such a democratizing experience they all show up as people who are there to support each other, and want to learn together, and move forward together.   Poornima:         So walk us through what a day in the life of MotherCoders looks like.   Tina Lee:            Sure.   Poornima:         For your students.   Tina Lee:            So, Saturday only classes right? You would go...you would drop off your baby. So we have a half an hour transition time. It takes a while to explain have they eaten, have they slept, all that stuff.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            So you hand off to the caregiver and you're in your seat by 10:00 right?   And then you learn until noon. And then we have lunch together. We always have lunch catered because it's such a special time and they have to bond. And a lot of times we'll have speakers there too, right, who will stay and hang out with them. So it’s a great time to just kind of network and talk. And then after lunch they learn some more. And then around 3, we leave half an hour for reflection. So I'm big on you learn, but at the end of the day, you have to pause and really connect what happened to how you're feeling about it and how it connects to your own understanding of the work, OK? And then after that they pick up their kid and then they go.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            In terms of content, it will vary by day. We have specific build days where people just get together and they build and we help you work through your wireframes and your issues. There are days when we have lectures. We don't really have a lot of lectures. We have “discussions,” I should call them. And then there are other days when we have guest speakers who come in and they talk about a topic that they want to talk about, or they do a workshop, or something I've been doing is I've been pairing a cyber security info sec expert with data scientists.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So on one side you have data scientists who want like all the data, and then the other side you have people who are in charge of the data or making sure they're following the rules about data and saying, "Whoa." So that's been a very illuminating conversation, too. So we've been doing stuff like that.   Poornima:         That sounds great. So how many people have you graduated? You mentioned you have five cohorts coming who have gone through the program?   Tina Lee:            Thirty-four so far.   Poornima:         Great. OK.   Tina Lee:            Yeah we're really delighted because 34 moms represents families, right?   Tina Lee:            And there is over 50 kids. And another way to think about this is we've placed 34 stem role models.   Poornima:         Oh, great.   Tina Lee:            Right? Into homes. They are inspiring our next generation of kids. Right? So not only are these women changing the trajectory of their own family like right now, their kids are going to be impacted, too. So we're really looking at this from a multi-generational perspective.   Poornima:         Yeah. That's fantastic. So what are some immediate outcomes that you see from them graduating in the program?   Tina Lee:            Jobs!   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            They're getting jobs.   Poornima:         Good. OK.   Tina Lee:            They're getting jobs in tech, right?   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So we have moms who have become front end engineers. We have moms who have become mobile app developers. We have moms who have become user experience designers. Some have been promoted, of course, because now they have this new tool kit. And then we have other moms who are proceeding with their startup dreams. So potentially, right, we have entrepreneurs out there. So, this has been really exciting to see them grow.   Poornima:         That's great. So it’s a lot of variety of outcomes but all pretty positive.   Tina Lee:            Mm-hmm.   Poornima:         So how do you measure success for MotherCoders?   Tina Lee:            Right now the way we're measuring success is completion.   We're also looking at how diverse we are in terms of the people that we have in our classes. Right? I'm an intersectional feminist.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Eighty-one percent of women become moms and if companies are really worried about diversity? I'm like, “Come to me, because we have queer moms, we have moms that emigrated from other countries, like just everybody.” We just think about it racially, religiously, geographically, right? So the way we measure success—there's a piece of the diversity piece, and then there's a completion piece, and then we're starting to track not only who got jobs or who got promoted, but how much did they increase their income?   Poornima:         Oh, great.   Tina Lee:            Or earning potential? Right?   And that's been tricky because we've been running cohorts and it takes time. And different moms have different capacities, as I mentioned. And some of them have kids, again.   Poornima:         Sure.   Tina Lee:            Because moms do. So, we're trying to figure out a way to tell that story better but just anecdotally because there are only 34 moms, I keep pretty close tabs on them.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            I know that they are making more money because some are buying new homes.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            Some are buying new other things.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            And they're updating their LinkedIn profiles and LinkedIn tells me that, right?   Poornima:         Sure.   Tina Lee:            So we know that they're getting skills, getting new jobs, buying homes, and on top of that, starting businesses.   Poornima:         So I love that you care about this diversity piece, and I do, too. So I'm going to ask you this question: What about Father Coders? You know there's a lot of stay-at-home dads that's becoming less and less of a stigma, but would you ever be open to allowing men to come in and participate in your program?   Tina Lee:            Not in the foreseeable future.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            And here’s why, right? The reason why we don't do Father Coders is exactly the same reasons why we do MotherCoders, right?   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            Think about it from a kind of a cultural perspective.   I have actually gone to meetups and programs. They're very friendly. Not that they're not friendly to women, but in terms of belonging, I think women have a harder time feeling a sense of belonging in those spaces, right? And you walk into a room and you don't see anyone who looks like you...it's very intimidating and there's a lot of trepidation around going back again.   So we create this safe space where we know that women will find inviting, right? And I think mothers specifically have a very unique set of challenges, right? That go beyond just being a woman, right? The scheduling, the feeling of pressure to be the perfect mom, and the perfect spouse, and the perfect worker, all the perfect things, right? And then on top of that picking up skills and working in an industry that's predominantly men is very intimidating, right?   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            So all of that comes together in MotherCoders. And I understand that fathers have the same challenges with scheduling, but I bet you they would feel less trepidation walking into a space that was designed more for someone without the challenges that moms have.   And we actually have had conversations with women who come up to me and say, "I'm not a mother but I care for a family member. Can I come?"   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So I can see at some point that we rethink our structure.   Poornima:         Oh I see. Right.   Tina Lee:            But we exist for the same reason that Hackbright exists and Women's Colleges exist.   I graduated out of a Women's College. So all of those things still stand and until we kind of break apart some of those barriers to women I think I need to keep doing what I'm doing now.   Poornima:         Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we end?   Tina Lee:            Yes, I would love to share with you kind of my pie-in-the-sky kind of vision that I'm working towards, right? Women from all all over the U.S. and the world reach out to me and ask when we're coming to their communities.   Poornima:         OK. Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So I know there's a desire for this type of training program all over and we're trying to figure out a way to get there. And we envision ourselves being in any community that wants to have a MotherCoders but, because, you'd know, technology varies by geography, and industry, and all these different things. We want to design a program that's thoughtful enough and flexible enough where they can design it to fit their local conditions, right? To fit the needs of their local employers so that moms will have a place to move to. So we are moving towards that. We are actively fundraising towards that.   And the reason that we're a nonprofit is because we're committed to helping women who cannot afford to pay $10,000 for Bootcamp or they're not sure if they want to invest in that even before having tried out something more preliminary. So we are working towards a vision where we're all across America, if not the world, so that we could help women everywhere as they transition into being moms and thrive in the workplace.   Poornima:         Great. So how can we help you with that?   Tina Lee:            Well, help us get our word out. This is great, right?   Help us send moms who are interested in taking our program to us. I would also love it if employers who are worried about retaining moms that they have to provide professional development for them through us. And then also figure out a way to maybe work with us to develop programs or return ships where women who may have stepped off want to get a refresh and then go back.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So those are great ways. And then of course, we're always looking for donations, always looking for sponsorships. So many ways to partner with us and everything can be found on our website.   Poornima:         Wonderful. Well we'll be sure to include the link to it.   Tina Lee:            Thank you.   Poornima:         Thank you again for joining us, Tina. Thank you for tuning in today and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode of *Femgineer TV*. If you've enjoyed this episode, then please be sure to share it with your friends, your team, your employer, and of course, all the mothers that you know to get the word out. And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode of *Femgineer TV*. Ciao for now.    

Roberto "Let's Try to Make Work Difficult" Booker Show Notes: What's the fastest way to solve a problem? Could it be ... not doing anything about the problem? What's the problem with stops? There are two types of traders. One type of trader uses a stop. The other does not. Usually, these two types of traders hate each other. Haha. Right? They argue. They fight. They seek followers to their particular brand of trading religion. I want to talk about a few ways to make each side correct. 1) If you don't want to use a stop-loss, then reduce your trade size. You will immediately find happiness and peace of mind. You will immediately start winning. You will immediately forget what it is like to be frustrated that you picked the right direction but you got stopped out before you could make any money. 2) If you want to use a stop-loss, then increase your trade size, and extend your profit target, and protect your profits. And scale into the trade, or scale out of the trade. One way to immediately improve your trading (if you use stops) is to slightly increase your profit target. 3) If you don't want to do either of these two things, consider a time stop. I've been playing around with this idea for years. Here's one way to look at it. For example, I'm looking at the open order book at Oanda, the forex broker. I'm looking at this cool graph that shows me where all the orders are. You can actually see in real time, where price is now, and where people took their trades. And guess what? Price is moving up, and most people are short the EUR/USD. That means that as price is moving upward, traders are increasingly staying in sell positions. Maybe those trades will work out. But probably not. Most people will bail on those short positions before they turn profitable. What can we do? We could build a system that waits until a lot lot lot of traders are short, while price is moving up, and then we can short it, too, after they've all done that. And then we could hold for 24 hours. Or we could wait for the first sign that traders are accumulating sell positions while price is rising - when sell trades outnumber buy trades - and then we can trade against the crowd, and hold those trades for 24 hours.

Click above to listen in iTunes... Garrett and Danielle White Family, Russell Brunson, and TONY ROBBINS... What's going on, everyone? This is Steve Larsen. You're listening to Sales Funnel Freaking Radio. Whoo! Hey, this is actually a special episode. This is part 3 of 3 in my review day-by-day of Funnel Hacking Live Event that Russell just threw in Dallas. I'm actually in Dallas right now recording this. I didn't want to leave the hotel room before doing this and spiting it out and everything was fresh on my mind. So, I'm just sitting inside here in the actual hotel room itself and just getting these podcasts out to you guys. These are kind of a review. Today, will be a bit shorter than the other two. The other two were a bit long, but I wanted to go in-depth so you guys felt like you were getting some values from the podcast itself. Again, and just as the others, if this is the first episode of this 3 part series that you're listening to, go listen to the other 2 first. The whole event was meant to build on itself, so I would go listen to Day 1 first, and then Day 2, and then come back to this one. Really, the last one, but this is the one where Tony Robbins came in and it was so cool. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. Where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow you online business, using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. Again, thank you to all you guys that I was able to meet, and talk with, and take selfies with, and all the gifts you guys brought, which I was not expecting that. And it was very, very humbling. Anyway, guys, thank you so much. Again, my voice is totally shot still and talking as much as I am is not helping. But it is what it is. The very first person who came in was Garrett White with his wife. Now okay, Garrett has spoken every single time at the Funnel Hacking Live Events. The reason Russell likes to bring him in is because he also helps people implement. Now you think about, Garrett made this point as well. He's like, "Okay, I know you like coming to Funnel Hacking Live and you get a whole lot of extra goodies and nuggets, and things that you don't get anywhere else. Think about it, if you would just freaking read the book, watch the tutorials, and do it, you're going to be farther along than the majority of the people who are out there." It was really funny to listen to, but it was like, "Okay, okay, that makes sense." There is a lot of stuff that you can't get from a book that you do get at the event. It was actually really cool to listen to him and hear him say that. He was there with his wife though and we've never done that with him before. And his kids on the stage. Garrett was the same Garrett, swearing like a storm, but he went through and he started teaching us more about, like an echo of what Setema taught. But even more depth on certain areas; it was really cool. He was banker actually and in 2008 when the economy really tanked, he lost everything. He realized that he had no idea who his wife was. He had no relationship with his kids. He realized that the life he was living was pure crap. He hated it. He realized that a lot of it was because, again similar, was the story he was telling himself. Which was kind of cool because, Tony came in and talked about "the story we were telling ourselves." There was kind of a theme there for many, actually several speakers, not just those three. At least, that's what I picked up. Maybe that's what I needed to hear. You know what I mean? You guys might have picked up something different, who were there. Anyways. So he said, "You need to choose yourself." I don't mean that in like a freaky-deaky way, like weird. Meaning you got to create yourself, okay? Know who you are. Know the story you are telling yourself. He had us turn and scream, at the top of our lungs, at our neighbor that, "I am a marketer." Number 2, you got to live in the land of yes or no, none of this maybe crap. "Maybe I'll get this done." That means no, you're not going to do it. It was interesting to hear him say all that stuff. "Got to live in the land of yes or no. No more maybes." So, he had us turn to our neighbor and scream, "I am a closer." So, number 1 is, "I am a marketer." Number 2 is, "I am a closer." Number 3 was ... He said a lot of times when we get in these businesses, we start getting followings and we, guys I've been totally guilty of this and it's been cool to hear him say this. Because right now, sitting here right now, as I'm recording this podcast there's probably 400 messages, collectively, between email, tons of Facebook messages ... Oh my gosh, I can't even handle it anymore. It stresses me out. I want to give, and give, and give, and give, and help. I feel guilty that I can't give, and give, and give, because I have to live too. You know what I mean? I know a lot of you guys listening to this, you guys get the exact same way. We attract like people and you're listening to my podcast. We're probably really similar. You start to feel guilty that you can't help everyone and their mom at all times, for free. You feel guilty that you can't get out there and do that. I was like, "That's so true. I've totally had that experience before." Now, Russell has since been teaching me that it is your moral obligation to sell people. It's your moral obligation. It's actually the name of the last section in his new book, by the way. After he and I talked about it, because it's such a huge deal. People feel guilty about talking other people's money. He goes, "No dude, think about this ... Russell told me this and then also Garrett White was saying this on the stage too. He said, "Okay, think about it. You've gone through, you've done the epiphany bridges with people. You've been selling like crazy. You've helped them realize the need for the product. You've gone in. You've changed their paradigm of the world. Then you don't sell them something?" A. The worst thing you could do is give it to them for free. When you give something for free to somebody for free for too long ... Number 1: it can bring in these feeling of well you gave it to me for free, so everything you give me should be for free. And I'm not talking about your base. All the things you're putting out there for people, that's fine. But if you're giving your actual bread-and-butter product and service away for free, for too long, it jacks up the value that they see of what you've built. You guys know that I built the funnels for Marcus Lemonis on the tv show, The Profit. That was like 11 funnels in a day; it was nuts. Marcus saw the vision. Marcus caught the benefit of the funnel. He understood it... He had the epiphany. Because he talked to Russell about it and it was super cool. He's like, "Every business needs a funnel." And we're like, "Yeah, that's why it  exists. This is freaking cool, right?" He's like, "Oh my gosh, yeah." Then what happened is, I went out and started building all these funnels for all these peoples. That was my role in the company shortly after I got hired. I was building these funnels and I was putting them together. It was all these companies. You guys probably haven't heard of ... A lot of them were tv show episodes of the show, The Profit. I was going back of all these episodes he'd done in the past and building funnels for these companies. I'd build them and I'd put them together and the whole way, the whole way, I had to keep selling these people on why they needed the funnel. They didn't have the epiphany. We built these beautiful funnels. Oh my gosh, these guys could be making so much extra money and they came in and were like, "Cool." And it sat for like months and months and we're like, "You're not doing a dang thing. Why not?" And they're like, "We don't even know what this is. What do you do? Why is this" ... And I was like, "I've been telling you. I've been showing you. I've been coaching you. I've showed you so many times how this thing works." And they're like, "We don't want to do an internal launch to our list. Why would we do that? They've already bought from us." And I was like, "You are idiots." Oh my gosh. So what was hard and what was challenging is, if people have the epiphany and you don't sell them something, then you are actually doing them a disservice. If people pay, they pay attention. Right? They need to put some skin in the game, psychologically, to actually go in and digest and get after something. There is something you have to pay, whether with time, or with money, or with some sacrifice in order to actually get stuff. Understand it. Implement it. Push forward on it. Everything is bought with your time, your thoughts, anything. Right? And if you go in and you say, "Hey, here's this really cool product and I'm giving you this awesome offer and I'm going through and I'm ... Guys, the funnels I give for free on my site, I should charge for my full 10 grand price for a lot of them. I don't though. The ones that are 100 bucks or a 127 bucks and people come back and complain about it. There's only been one person who's actually complained about it. It's because they didn't know ... I don't even know how they got on the page. I don't even know what they bought. I mean they probably don't know how to turn on Facebook. Anyway. There's only one person complain, I couldn't even believe it. But no one else has complained. But then I'll go back and realize that some people have just not implemented it. I'm like, "I wonder if I charged more money, if people would implement this harder." Like half of the people get it and they push forward. The other half don't. Interesting. That's what Russel's been teaching me, is like if you've gone through this whole thing and you've taken away their ability to pay with money, they have to pay now with something else. Does that make sense? It's the moral obligation to sell. Right? So, Garrett White had us screaming, "I'm a closer! I'm a closer! I'm a closer!" at each other. Because we need to live in the land of yes or no. Charge the money. Charge the money. And get out there and make the sale. Because, then they're motivated. They've go skin in the game. You've changed their mindset and you've actually given them a way. The product is the path. Right? The service or the product is the path for them to actually get done what you were just saying they could. And it scratches everyone's back. That's how it happens. And people who can't afford it? That's okay. It means they're trying to figure out how to afford stuff. That's the phase that they're in. That's okay. Anyway, I shouldn't keep going about that. So, he had us screaming at each other, "I am a leader, not a savior." And then we whispered it. And it was really interesting to feel that. I have a vested interest, you guys, in your success. You guys know that, listening to my podcast, but there are just some people that I just can't help. And I can't do it for free anymore. I did it for free for three years just so I could prove myself to the market that I knew what I was talking about. That I was motivated enough to get it done. All right? That I was getting it done. That I was getting real results for the companies. And I gave it free, and free, and free, and free, and helped, and helped, and helped, and helped, and helped. But what really brought more people success, was when I started charging. And I didn't realize that until Garrett came out and he said that. I was like, "Oh my gosh. That is true. I am a leader, not a savior." Right? I am very religious and I believe in Christ, but that is not the point of this podcast. But it was interesting to think about that on that level. It was like, "Gosh, very fascinating point, my friend. Thank you very much." He's like, "There's no hack to work. Quit looking for an excuse to suck." All right? He's like, "Just suck. Just freaking do it. You're going to suck. And then you'll suck less. And you'll do it even more and you'll suck less. And eventually, you'll suck less, so little that you'll actually be good." He's like, "You just got to start. Just freaking do it." And his little daughter came up and she wanted to be on stage with him. And he's like, "Well, it's going to cost you." This is the backstory of how she got on stage with him, his little girls. "Well, you've got to make $1000." So, this little girl followed Russell's path; read the book as a punishment for time-out for something she did. Garrett makes her read Russell's book. So, she finished the whole book... She went through and made a webinar. She made $1200 on her first webinar as a 10 year old girl. It was so cool. And he was like, "Now what do we tell people who are just bad-mouthing us?" She immediately knew what he was asking and she started yelling, "I don't care about you. You probably don't know how to do half the things that I'm doing." It was really funny. Anyway. I'll stop on that. It was a big epiphany that I had for the event. That was really cool... Then Russell came through and we have a sweet traffic course. I mean you guys are starving for traffic. So, what we're doing is flying in the top experts. The people who don't sell courses. Right? These are the people who are so freaking good that you can not attain them unless you pay ridiculous amounts of money. We were like, "What if we paid the ridiculous amounts of money. They train us as a team how to do it and you guys get a camera on the inside watching us do it and how to get trained and how it worked for us. It's really just such a freaking good offer. There's a table rush. That was the first time I ever experienced a table rush. People go up before he was even done and just ran to the back, because it was gosh it was so good. Then we had a big break and Tony Robbins's security was there... And we didn't know it, but they were testing us to see if we were actually bouncing people. I like to fight, so I was like, "Make me a bouncer, please." I look like a softie and I smile and hug like one. And I'm always pumped and excited, but there's this other side of me that really likes to fight stuff. Which is why, I think, that I got drawn into the army. Anyway. So, apparently they were testing us. They were like, "You guys are doing a great job. We're really impressed with your staff." We're like, "Yeah, we're totally freaking security guard. Yeah, what." Anyway. So, Tony Robbins came in. I have got a full page of notes, and graphs, and stuff he was saying. I don't even know where to begin on this, you guys. It was so good. Gosh, it was so good. He was like, "Hey, raise your hand if these three days, while you're here, you're kind of stressing because there's things in your business that you know you need to get done, but there just not getting done without you. Raise your hand, if you're that way. Now, repeat after me, keep your hands in the air: I am a business operator, that sucks." It was really funny. He was like, "Okay, you guys are business operators, not owners, if three days is making you freak out. Time to expand it a little bit." He was like, "I'm not trying to be cheesy. A lot of people think of me as a happy, happy, thinking, go-lucky kind of guy. That's total bull crap. I am more of a strategist. Realize when I say that 80% of success is your psychology, it's all about your state. What state are you in, if someone tells you bad news? Act like you're having bad news right now and go make the sounds and noises you would next to the person. Shoulders slouch, you know, and face kind of gets upset. You know? And he's like, "Okay, now stand up and introduce yourself to someone like you're scared of them. Notice how your body is. Now, let's go talk to people like we're excited to see them, like it's a long-lost friend." And the room was like ... It was ridiculously loud. You could hear it basically out the hotel doors, way in the back of the hotel. It was so cool. So we were jumping around like crazy and it was really, really cool. We went through three different forces of creation. He talked about us, you know, who we're spending the most time with. Life is decisions not conditions. He told us his story, which was very, very humbling. He said that success was the result of good judgment... How do you get a judgment?... By failing like crazy... He's like, "You get good at judgment by learning what bad judgment is, because that's what you make." Anyway, guys, I don't want to keep rambling on here. But, gosh, it was so freaking good. It was about how you kill your fears and people stood up. He's like, "What is really the most scary to you? I'm not going to make you guys share it. So, just he write it down. And then he's like, "Let's share." It was really funny. "I lied to you." And he pointed at one girl and he said, "Stand up. What do you fear most?" And she said and it had to do with, I can't remember, insecurity or something like that. And while she was describing it, he was like, "Okay, raise your hand if you can identify with this." Tons of people raised their hand, of course, the feeling of insecurity. He was like, "Oh man, ma'am I want you to know just how alone you are and how no one has ever experienced that ever in their entire life." We are all laughing. He was like, "Understand, you guys, that there is the mind, which is the organ in your body, in your head. Then, there is your mind. And so many thoughts of the mind control us, you know feelings of insecurity, feelings of this, or this, or that, or that, or that, or that. Realize that the mind can produce lots of stuff for the body and persuade you." He said, "I realize it was fascinating to have the epiphany that the mind is different from my mind. Although it's happening in the same place." And we had people from so many countries there and different religions, different languages even. People all of the world came to this event. So he was like, "Interesting. So people from all over the world, different languages, different backgrounds, totally different places they came from. We all feel the same feelings, though. And yet we are so our own person and think that all our problems are our own and no one else is thinking them. That's total bull crap. So, understand there is the mind and then there is your mind and you need to separate them. And when a thought like that comes in, just know that it is the mind. You can dismiss it and you can move on. It was really cool. It was really cool, guys. I don't even know what else to say on this huge page of notes. I got nowhere else to go on here. He talked about motion determines emotions. If you're feeling sad or depressed or bored, freaking start moving. Just get up and already your body is going to start changing. Your biochemistry will change. You'll feel happier just by moving. Stop sitting. We are a sitting culture now. We just sit. We don't do anything. Just get up. Do stuff. You'll feel better and you'll be happier... It was really cool actually. Anyway, guys, that's all I got for you on this one. Those are the huge, key take-aways that I got from those three days. Thank you so much. I just want to point out to you guys. Thank you. I really appreciate all the awesome stuff you've done and meeting you guys. I had to step out a little bit on Tony Robbins at the end, because we go pictures with him. I'm sure I'll post that as soon as we get back. You guys get to see that it was kind of cool. It was the whole Click Funnel team that was there with Tony. It was really fun. All the inner-circle people got their picture with him and it was really fun. And it was cool to go through those experiences together. It was very, very bonding. What I do know is that Click Funnels is far more than a software company. It is a marketing company, but it's ... I mean, do you see Russell as a standard CEO? No, this company is so much more than just CEO from some competitor that we have. By the way, he totally took the gloves off and we were 100% fighting and trying to destroy Infusion Software and Leap Pages now. Everyone got their own comic book. It was really cool. It was totally over-delivered in true Russell fashion. Anyways, guys, I will talk to you later. I've got some cool, special announcements in the following podcasts here that I'm going to be doing, because I want to take action on my own business and the things I do with you guys based on what I learned at the actual event. So, I'm going to do that. I've got some cool things going on that are going to be coming out here. And things that I'm no longer going to be doing or offering so that I can focus and help out where it's needed right now. Oh yeah, hey, one thing that was cool, before I get out of here. He brought us to this place called Medieval Times as a staff afterwards. Crazy cool. You go inside and you sit down and it's one of those dinner theaters. You go inside and it's like a big arena and there's real, live horses jousting in front of you. It's the craziest thing. The guys are riding at each other. They literally joust each other. Splinters of wood going all over the place. It was the craziest I've ever seen. They were sword fighting and sparks going all over the place. It was really cool. Anyway, it was awesome. I was actually really impressed by that place. It was funny because we are the Click Funnels Team and we were walking around trying to funnel hack them. Okay, they got this many seats. They're probably pulling this much revenue. Overhead is probably this much. We were figuring out their whole business while we were sitting there and they were serving us. We were looking up all these different words, medieval vocab. So we were like yelling. Someone did something wrong and we were yelling, "Forfeiture!" It was really funny. Anyway. You should totally go there. It was totally awesome. It had nothing to do with the event. It was really fun, though. Anyways, guys, you are awesome and I will talk to you later. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please, remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnels for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.

Click above to listen in iTunes... Russell Brunson, Todd Brown, Brandon and Kaelin Poulin, Jim Edwards, and Stu McLaren... What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen. You're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Now, for the next three episodes, I'm actually going to do ... This episode will be day one of Funnel Hacking Live, and I want to go through and show you the lessons I learned, and kind of what some of the speakers were doing and sharing with us. And then, obviously, next episode will be day two, and then day three. So the next three episodes are going to be a bit of an overview of the things that I learned. Let's kick it off. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. All right guys, now the first thing you'll probably notice is that my voice is shot. I am completely humbled by the number of you that I met who listen to my podcast. It was so awesome. But I met so many of you. I was totally touched, also, by the number of you ... I mean, I was not expecting gifts, but a lot of you guys ... Anyways, I'm saying thank you to those of you did that. That was very nice of you and I appreciate that a lot... I pretty much talked for three straight days and my voice is totally gone. I was going to do these last night while it was all even more fresh in my brain, but I was like, "Gosh. I can't even ... I can't even ..." You know, anyway. I was like, "Maybe if I go to sleep, everything is going to be better, and I'll wake up in the morning, my voice will be better." It's not. It's actually worse. I'm probably going to lose my voice, 100%. Anyway, that's okay. Here it goes though, all right, so you just have to, I guess, deal with that. I'm going to go ahead though, and I'm going to let you know the things that I learned, the big takeaways from Funnel Hacking Live. Now, understand that what I'm going to do here, it's not going to give justice at all for what really happened. But, this is more the tactile stuff that I'm going to go over. The very first day that we had ... Gosh, it was such a good event. Oh my goodness. Everyone was going nuts, so crazy. Totally got my picture with Tony Robbins, which was crazy cool. That guy is huge. Anyway. I'm not a small guy either, but man, he was like a full two heads taller than I was. Anyway, all right. So hey, the very first day we had Russell Brunson speak, obviously, then Todd Brown came in and spoke. Russell spoke again about something so good, and I could see everyone going like, "Crap. I need to redo how my whole product works now that I've heard Russell speak." Brandon and Kaelin spoke. Jim Edwards spoke about copies. Stu McLaren came in and taught about membership sites and how to make millions of dollars with them, it was fantastic, it was amazing. Then we had huge round table discussions, and honestly, that's ... I really lost my voice from the majority of, really, two things. When people walked in the door for the very first day, I mean, music was bumping. I mean, it was so loud, it was awesome. The stage looked incredible; it was so much bigger than last time, which none of us could really believe. We were like, "Oh my gosh, this is just amazing." Melanie and our team did fantastic. It really, really went well. Just, I can't even ... It's hard for me to describe everything that went on there. But I ... As people walked in the door, I was screaming, "Yeah, what's up? It's game day baby," as loud as I could, slapping, giving hand-fives to everyone that came in. I'm pretty sure I started bruising my hand; it actually really started hurting. But it got everyone jazzed up and in state as they walked into the door, which is awesome. We wanted the energy levels to go up, because it pulled them out of their comfort zones. I try and do that a lot of times when I'm learning things, even on my own. All right, so Russell first spoke about creating a mass movement. These are really chapters that are hardcore in his new book. But the main point is that you really need ... You got to have three things in order to create a mass movement. The first one is, you need a charismatic leader. Second one, you got to be able to have ... There needs to be a cause. Then the third thing, I think it was a following... Crap, I should have brought all my notes with me as I was doing this. But, anyway, it was so good, because he started talking about ... This is way beyond product creation, right? Most of our audience speaks, and talks, and is focused solely on, "How do I create the funnel? How do I create the product?" Right? He's like, "Okay that's good, and you guys are getting really good at that as a community. But the next step is really, how do you get people to it." Right? Joe Polish, this reminds me of one of Joe Polish's courses, but he's talking about how marketing ... You think about sales, sales is what happens face-to-face, in front of people. I think that I've mentioned that before in this podcast. Imagine standing in front of somebody, that's how you sell them, right? But marketing is what gets them in front of your face, right? That's what turns their feet and gets them standing in front of you, and that's really what Russel talked about first. Very tactile, how to do that, how to construct the message, how to get it and put it all together. Really, really cool. Then we had a quick break. Then Todd Brown came in and he talked more about the big idea, and this idea that you could latch, go back in history and look at other marketing messages that were killing it, and just tweak those messages, and he showed you how to ... Again, the whole thing was extremely tactile. I saw someone post, and they were like, "I learned no actual hardcore strategy." I was like, "Man, you must not have been freaking in the room then, because you're the only person who said that. Ever." I don't even ... Everyone I've been talking to is like, "That was the best thing I've ever ... That's the best event I've ever been to, related to business, ever. Across all business, not just marketing, in general." I was like, "Yeah, it's pretty cool." We worked our butts off for it, so we're super glad that you guys liked it. But Todd Brown talked more about how to actually get that big idea, right, the one thing, and how to construct it. The big takeaway I got from him is that the creativity that your business requires is not in you. It's not. He said, "You have got to be obsessed with the market that you're in. As you dive into the market, and as you figure out what pieces are missing, the creativity comes from the market, not from you." If you're sitting there and you're not reading books, and you're not digesting things, and you're not there trying to get better and get your craft down, you cannot conjure the amount of creativity needed, that your business needs. I was like, "That's so key. My gosh." I started thinking back, and I was like, "Holy crap. He's totally right." Any time I've ever made a product that really has done well, it's because I have been obsessed with that market. I found out exactly what the pain points were, which essentially told me what to build. It didn't come from me. There was ... I actually wrote an e-book when I was in college, and I talked all about this, that man, essentially you don't need to be creative. That is the number one thing that entrepreneurs come out and they're like, "I got to create something totally new." It's like, "Ugh." Anyway, I'll talk about that some time later... But I wrote an e-book that talks about ... I call it "Product Big Bang Theory", which is where these new ideas ... I was like, "Oh, I got to create something totally new," and it's like, actually the market might not even be ready for that. Let's say you actually did pull that off, which is super rare, that something you just made was totally new, not influenced by anything else, that's rare. That doesn't happen very often, right? It's more about product evolution. Right? You look at current states of things and you make an improvement on the way things are, and sell the solution. Then the next person comes along, he's like, "Well that's cool. That brought me up to here. But, now let's go ahead and let's elevate it again." Why are there so many freaking iPhones? Right? That's exactly what product evolution is. That's how huge money is made. Not by product big bang theory; half the time the market doesn't even accept it, you know what I mean? Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked, but ... Okay, that was the first half of the day. It was so good. Then Russell came back on and he gave a speech about how to sell pretty much anything, without selling anything. That was his headline. "How to sell almost anything without actually selling anything." He talked about this concept of ... Okay, right now, you listening, right, think about the industry that you're in right now. Think about it, and think about what it took for you to become an expert in that industry. If you don't feel like you're an expert yet, just keep learning. Right? Keep learning, and the fastest way I know to learn is to teach. Right? This podcast also helps me, guys. It helps me sharpen my craft. Right? Sharpen the saw and get better, and better, and better... I always tell people to get a coach, because it accelerates your learning, and then be a coach, because it solidifies it. Get a coach, be a coach. Get a coach, be a coach. Get a coach, be a coach... That's what I gave my closing speech on at graduation, when I graduated. Anyway. He goes through and he starts saying, "Look, as you came into this industry, whatever it is that you're in, you loved it and you started learning all the vocab from that industry." Sales funnels, auto-responders, SMTP, right? All this crap, no one know what that is if they're not in here. You go out, you get so excited, and the first person who you think is even remotely a good fit for a sales funnel, let's just use that as an example, you run up to them and you're like, "Sales funnel. Auto-responder. SMTP," and they're like, "Ah." You know, we call it technobabble... Technobabble's this thing that will kill the sale, always. The point of Russell's speech on that is that he said, "You need to go back to the time where you had the epiphany, personally. Right? That you needed a sales funnel, and you have to tell that story in a way that gets them in the same state, to have the same epiphany that you did. And then you don't have to be selling anything." Suddenly they'll have the epiphany. They'll realize, "Oh my gosh. I got to have a sales funnel now." You know what I mean? For me, because of the origin story, right? My origin story ... I've said this before, so I'm not going to go into it, because it's a big story. Right? I was in college, I was trying to make a lot of money on the side, and I was doing all right at it. I was getting hired by Paul Mitchell, the hair school. I was driving tons of traffic for them. We were building websites for some of their rising celebrities. Funny, because it was in the middle of my marketing class. We walked up to the teacher and I was like, "Hey, I don't want to come back to your class ever again. I'm already doing this stuff." He's like, "Cool. Just show me a deliverable at the end." So I went and I worked for Paul Mitchell during those hours, three hours a day, driving lots of internet traffic for them, and I could get huge volumes of traffic. I was getting all these people, all these ninja waves, white hat and gray hat stuff. We were getting lots of website visitors for Paul Mitchell there. I realized I could get tons of traffic. But I kept looking at the numbers, and they're like, "Okay, we're spending extra money on this traffic that's coming in. We know we're targeting okay, but why aren't people converting? How do I actually know that these people are making me money?" Right? It's a brick-and-mortar story. That was the big challenge, bringing them from online to offline, and walking into their stores. Right? That's when I realized, there was a skillset out there that I did not have, and that's what ultimately led me to getting all over the internet. I was like, "Oh my gosh. How do I do this? How do I do this?" That's when I ran into "DotCom Secrets" and Russell Brunson. That's how I did it. Anyway, that was the whole point of that though, is that you need to go back to ... start categorizing, start ... Sorry. I'm getting ahead of myself. Start indexing. I should say that, that's probably a better way to say it. Start indexing your stories. Okay? Russell told way over 40 stories in each one of his presentations. It's not because he's just sitting there telling stories, it's to help us. Now that you know, okay, watch what he does, watch what he does in his Snapchat. That's a huge, long, slow story that's going on. You see behind the scenes of what he's really doing in his own personal life. Right? That gets the attractive character up... He tells stories in his podcasts. He tells stories, and it's to help people have the same epiphany of need for what he's selling. Right? That's exactly what it is. That's exactly what he's doing, because he doesn't like hard closing people. He's not even that good at that. I'm not either. I'm not very good at hard selling... It's like, when I was doing door-to-door sales, that was one of the things I sucked at. I was like, "Man, I could come up with a sweet offer, but the best way to sell without selling is story selling." That's what we call it, instead of storytelling... Anyway, so we're going to keep going on. Then Brandon and Kaelin Poulin came up and they talked about social webinars, and they talked about how they spend a thousand dollars getting Russell's Funnel Hacks class. I'm sure you guys have had the Funnel Hacks class, you've gone through it, you know what it is. It's the, "My weird niche funnel that's currently making me 17 grand a day," which, that's very low compared to what it is now. But, anyway, they went through, though, and they started saying, "Hey, I got the thousand dollar thing, and all we did is we played Russell's thing for five seconds and then we stopped, and we implemented exactly what he was saying. We paused the video." He's like, "Sometimes it would take us hours to get through this set that he just showed, and we'd play the video for five seconds, then stop." Russell wanted them up there ... Sorry guys, my voice is shot. I'm trying to do the best I can here. Okay? But Russell wanted them up there to show you guys that you can go just follow Russell's path, and just pause the video. Just pause it, do what he said. Pause it, do what he said. The first year they did that, they turned that thousand dollar investment into 300 grand. The second year they did that, which was 2016, they turned it into 2.3 million. Right? Every time they saw Russell do something on social media, they paused the video and immediately did it. Right? I mean that day, they got it done, and that's how they did it. They didn't know anything about tech stuff. I know way more about click funnels than them. Right? The point was implementation, was getting out there and just doing it. Right? They used social webinars to do that. That was the name of their speech. They would stand up, and one of the cool takeaways I got from them was they said, "Hey look, if you can do it afraid, you'll be able to make it." Meaning, it's scary sometimes to do this stuff. You're like, "Oh, I don't want to do the webinar. I don't want to get out there. I don't want to be myself. I don't want to do a podcast when my voice sucks." You know what I mean, like right now? They said, "If you can do it afraid, people will sense that, they'll bond with you even more, and you'll be able to just take action and just get it done." It works out for everybody. Let me keep going here. Then there was a break, and then Jim Edwards came in and he taught about copy. Now, he is the creator of Funnel Scripts. If you guys have never used that software, fantastic software. You go in, and he basically says, "Hey look. Look, copy is not written, it is assembled." All the top copywriters in the world understand that there are elements, there are fill-in-the-blanks, for whole sales letters. Right? Everything. If you need to change your sales letter a little bit, he's like, "Think of it like Legos. All right? You take one little Lego out, and you stick another one right there to complete the sentence." You know, how to blank without blank. You know, how to make a million dollars without leaving your house. You know, how to blank without blank. Over and over again. But that works for all copy, it's not just for headlines. It works for ... He said, "I became a great copywriter when I realized that, that copy was assembled, it's not written. You are not a copywriter, you are a copy-assembler." You might think, "Okay, wow. That's not ... Is that a big enough golden nugget to actually make a speech on?" Well, then he started going through, and he started showing us how ... I mean, this is how Funnel Scripts works. If you ever used the software, it's these inputs that you toss in, and it spits out all your sales copy. At the end, he said, "Hey. The best copywriter that I ever hired, ever, is me." He's like, "If you really want to get amazing at copies, Funnel Scripts is a great launch pad. It will get you there very quickly, but you have got to learn how to assemble it on your own." He gave all the funnels, and all the scripts, and all the fill-in-the-blanks that we would ever need for any type of copy, ever, while we were there. It was a really huge value. Most the speakers gave something ridiculous at the end. It was really nice. Just, tremendous value the whole way. Okay, then Stu McLaren came in. Guys, if you don't know who Stu McLaren is, this guy's one of my heroes, second to Russell, okay? What Stu does with his time, is he goes out and he has something called World Teacher Aid, and any time you ... Some of you guys ... We were actually shocked at the number of people that did not know this. When you click 'Add New Funnel' in ClickFunnels, and you build the funnel, as soon as 100 visitors hit that funnel, a dollar automatically gets donated to World Teacher Aid. Well, we presented him with a $76,000 check while he was here. Literally 100% of all the money that comes into World Teacher Aid is used for building schools in Kenya and Africa. They've built like 11 of them now. Anyway, it's really, really cool, really touching. But we were like, "Holy crap, 76,000 funnels with 100 people came in." That's what that means. Oh my gosh. But he came in and he talked about membership funnels. What he does, is he goes through and he says, "Okay, I'm going to make a sweet membership site, but I'm only going to spend 2 weeks out of the whole year running it." You're like, "What the heck?" He goes in and he says, "Okay. I'm going to go in and I'm going to, on week one, let's have an expert come in and teach something. On week two, let's do a live Q&A about it. On week three, let's do some kind of blog or post, or something like that, some other tangible item that they can go learn from. Then on week four, we'll do some other behind-the-scenes video. Like, 'Hey, this is how I really do it. These are the little hacks I learned.'" And that's what he does. If you look at those, week one, two, three, four, the only two pieces that you have to do ahead of time are getting an expert to come in. He flies everybody in. In two days he interviews, back-to-back, to back-to-back, to back-to-back, to back-to-back, 12 of them. Right? Pre-loads 12 months of content, gets it transcribed, puts it in the membership area, puts it on a drip thing so that it goes out for them after 30 days, after 60, 90, the whole way through the year. Then he creates the blog post for it, same thing. He gets the whole thing set, and then he presses go. The way that he makes $7 million a year off of membership sites, where he only runs them a couple weeks a year, is by the way he handles the cart. He does not leave it open cart all the time. He leaves it as seats. He's like, "Look. I treat you guys like students. I really do want you to know." So rather than these huge ups and downs in his membership sites, he will literally just ... It's like stairs, steps. It's a little up, and up, and up, and up, and up, and up, and up, because while the cart is closed, while people can't get in, there's a waiting list. If there are times when he knows he wants a little boost in the revenue or he might lose some numbers, he just goes to the waiting list and says, "Hey. Look, a seat is going to open up. If you guys want to jump in, go for it," and he'll get a little boost in the sales. That's how he handles membership sites. I thought that was a really great takeaway, and I just wanted to share that over to you guys. Anyways, after that, Russell is taking people to Kenya if they buy a school. We're just trying to raise money for charity. But we don't any of that, obviously. That's literally straight for charity. Then there were huge round tables at the end. It's like non-stop talking. It was awesome. It was really fun to talk to you guys, because half your questions are tactile, "Hey, how do I do this in ClickFunnels?" Then the other half are strategy like, "Hey, how would you sell this?" I got to sit down with so many of you and draw out funnels, and show you how I'd do this, and the ways we've seen it work. You guys know I've built over 140 sales funnels with Russell in the last 11 months. Way more than half of them have been all on my own. You know what I mean? Right at the beginning it was like, "Hey, build this funnel," and then I'd go out and I'd build it, he'd destroy like 90% of it. Well the percent that he's destroying is going smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Until finally, the last six months has been like, "Okay, cool. Hey, just change the headline just a little." That's it. I was like, "Holy crap. That's so cool." But it's really fun to sit down with you guys and just start showing all these cool things we've been doing. Hopefully next year we get a round table. That's what I'm hoping for. Don't tell Russell, but tell Russell if you want to. Be like, "Russell, Stephen, why aren't you speaking? Why aren't you at a round table?" I was like, "Well, it's not my company or my call, so I'm not ... " Maybe next time I will. Anyways. Guys, that was the first day. We were there until midnight, and then we got back up. We had our meeting at 7:30, and then huge hand-slapping times the whole way, high-fives coming on in. It was awesome, again. Anyways, that was the first day. Hopefully something in there I said was of use and of value to you. Very, very awesome. I want to encourage you guys right now, if you want to ... I think we sold several hundred tickets for 2018. We sold almost 100 for 2018 right before this event actually started. But then during this event, we sold another couple hundred tickets. Anyway. There are 35 tickets, 35 seats, available for our next conference in 2018. It's going to be at Disney in Florida. We already got the resort, everything's done. The contracts are signed. We are going to freaking Disney... The early-bird price right now is 697. I think you can go to funnelhacking.com ... Well you can, I built it. Go to funnelhacking.com. You can only buy single tickets right now, not two. But, just so you guys know, a little inside track here, they are going to raise the price significantly higher for this one. Half of it's just because of demand, and because we bring in people like Tony Robbins. You know what I mean? That is not cheap. I am legally not allowed to tell you how much money it was, but holy crap. Get your ticket now, is what I'm telling you to go do. I'm not pushing an affiliate link, I'm not telling anything else, I just would love to meet more of you guys. About 75% of the room raised their hand when they asked if this was their first event. I think it's because you guys were listening. Anyways guys, fantastic time, and again, next two episodes, I'm going to go through the next two days here. I think you guys are going to like this. It got even cooler. I can't even believe the first day was just so freaking awesome. The first day, when Russell and I were talking about it and going through it, we were going through slides ... I made so many images for his slides. It was a lot of fun doing it with him. But, we realized that the first day is so foundational for the remainder of the event. All right? It had less to do with, "Hey, make this tweak on your funnel here and get an increase in conversions." That's not what the event is about. The event is about how to sell. The event is about how to actually be the business owner. It's about how to outsource. It's how to craft your message. That's really what this was all about. Okay? I saw a blog post from some guy, Billy Gene, and he was like, "This was the worst thing ever. Day one went by, and he didn't go through any tactics." I was like, "Are you freaking kidding me? What he just laid down there means you don't have to strong sell anybody else ever again, ever. All right? I don't like doing that. I'd rather put that on autopilot through a funnel, and he just told you how to do it." No tactics, my butt. Anyway. Okay, don't get me started on that, because what he put out there, there's nothing else from that event ... There's nothing else you could learn that was so valuable. It's pretty much more important than the offer. I have watched Russell ... Just so you guys know, and then I'll end this podcast. I have watched Russell, many times, not know a thing about the person's product, but because he asked certain questions, he knew how to sell it. Did you just have an epiphany? Because you should, about your own products. Some of you guys are so obsessed with your product, but you are not obsessing on how to sell it. They're different things. They're totally different things. Right? One, you've got, let's say ... I was asking someone at the event, I was like, "Do you know what's in a Campbell's Soup soup? What are the ingredients?" He's like, "You mean like all of them on the back?" I was like, "Yeah." He's like, "I don't know." I was like, "Then why'd you buy it? You don't know everything that's in it? Oh my gosh. You're crazy. You're nuts." I was like, "Now is that really that crazy or nuts?" He's like, "No." I was like, "You are thinking that everyone is going to look at all the ingredients in your offer, and all the little pieces, and all these things. That's true; the offer needs to deliver, it needs to be awesome. It's got to be amazing. But, just as important, if not more, in fact, I would say even more, you have got to obsess on how to sell it." I say, "Okay now, can you tell me what a Campbell's Soup label looks like?" He's like, "Well, yeah," and he goes through. I was like, "Okay, now why is that?" He's like, "Because they spent so much more time ... Okay, the ingredients list is on the back of the can, even. Right? That's not the highlight." However, it is the product; it's got to be there. But the message, what people see, the thing that pulls people in, right, the message they put on TV of you drinking this soup while you're sick ... Those are stories. That's how everything's sold. Anyway, I was trying to tell some of this, "Understand what I'm saying to you, that the product is important, but you have been obsessing over your product for the last several years." I knew he was. I was like, "Stop. Okay? It's time to obsess on the message. It's time to obsess on your culture. It's time to obsess on all the little analogies you're going to tell, and inventory your personal stories so people get attracted to you. Let's say your product got shut down, or you lost something, or whatever, that way people still know who you are." Does that make sense? That's the important of this, and that's really what day one was. Anyway, it was a long podcast guys, but hopefully you guys liked that. Hey guys, seriously, again, I would go get the ticket if you haven't. I'm so excited to show you guys day two and three. Holy crap. All right guys, talk to you later. Bye. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.

Ayelet Waldman, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and activist, talks about her new non-fiction book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, in which she describes a month long experiment treating her unstable moods with minuscule doses of LSD. Finding psychotropic med prescriptions of little help, Waldman became intrigued by the work of Dr. James Fadiman, a psychologist and researcher who has chronicled the positive effects of microdosing LSD. Waldman is also a lawyer, an accomplished former federal public defender and former teacher at Boalt Hall, U. C. Berkeley's law school. Her legal career includes working to rescue women from prison and advocating for drug-policy reform.TRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:Method to the madness is next. You're listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs show on k a l expertly celebrating bay area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer, and today I'll be talking with novelist and essayist. I yell at Wildman. We'll be talking about her new book, a really good day. How microdosing made a mega difference in my mood, my marriage, and my life. Chris, your pleasure to be here. It's great. After I first [00:00:30] got lost on campus, which I will probably do till the end of time, it's on your used to teach on camera. Speaker 2:I taught here at the boat law school for seven semesters yet I want to talk about your new book. I really liked it and so glad the superficial level of it. It's a diary of you microdosing for 30 days, but yes, it's so much more than that. It's about how the war on drugs has failed drug reform policy. It's about psychedelic research. It's about your family. Yes. It's about mood disorders and how they affect family. So you're a legal professional. Yes. And you are a a federal public defender. A criminal defense [00:01:00] lawyer. Tell us the journey of how you got to a schedule one illegal drug for your mood disorder. So it was really a matter of desperation. So I have a mood disorder, but I have a mood disorder that was for many, many years, very well controlled. You know, I'm not one of those people who doesn't take our medicines. Speaker 2:I took my medicine and I took it regularly. My mood disorder was diagnosed as premenstrual dysphoric disorder and the easiest way to understand that is just pms on steroids. It took a while to get the diagnosis. I had a lot of misdiagnoses [00:01:30] first, but eventually I got the diagnosis. I was treated by a psychiatrist who had an expertise in women's mood and hormones and she put me on a very easy to follow very specific medication regimen. I took a week of antidepressants right before my period and for many years that worked great. It was life altering. I mean it was amazing there. I was one month, didn't know what to do, cycling uncontrollably the next month, popping a pill and feeling much better. But then of course I got older [00:02:00] and when you hit your forties when you're a woman, you enter into this protracted period of peri-menopause, which isn't menopause when you stop getting your period, but it's kind of like the build up to that and there's so little literature on it. Speaker 2:Yeah, I thought you'd just like some, one day you're stopped getting your period. I didn't know that. For years I would get two periods a month, three periods a month, no periods, skip a bunch, get one, skip four again, another one, you know, it was just completely unpredictable and crazy. So your mood is fluctuating madly because your hormones are fluctuating madly [00:02:30] and my specific medication regimen required me to know exactly when I was going to get my period and I didn't know anymore and that catalyze this kind of mood disaster. I became a very, very depressed, but my kind of depression is an activated depression, so it's not like I crawled into bed and went to sleep. I was still very productive, but I was very quick to anger, very irritable. I was very difficult to live with and I would get into these spirals where I would be horrible to the people in my family and then I would feel shame and depressed [00:03:00] and I ultimately became suicidal before I began the microdosing experiment, I had left the place of ideation and was more into a kind of more planning phase. Speaker 2:At one point I was standing in front of my medicine cabinet, kind of evaluating its contents to see what was the most dangerous drug in it. Spoiler alert, Tylenol. I have a lot of stuff in my medicine cabinet, but that is a dangerous drug and that's when I decided to try this crazy thing. That's illegal schedule one. I decided to try micro-dosing with LSD. Tell us how you did that. You, you met [00:03:30] James Fadiman. I reached out to James Fadiman. I use an old time researcher on psychoactive drugs. The 60 60 the sixties he, yes, he was a Stanford t and a couple of other people had a study specifically designed to evaluate the effects of LSD on creative problem solving. Fadiman and his colleagues invited these 28 engineers, architects, people in those sort of beginnings of the computer industry because this was like 1966 right? Right. Speaker 2:Yeah, right. LSD was illegal. Right? They said to these people, bring a problem. You're not, [00:04:00] we're not, we're not inviting you here to seek God. We're asking you to bring, you know, a math problem and engineering problem, a design problem, something that you've had really a hard time figuring out. Bring your intractable problem to this experience and we'll see what happens. And so these people came in and they got dosed with LSD and the researchers watch them. And what was remarkable is that many of them not only solve their problems, but went on to have these profound insights into their work. Very few of them had kind of spiritual awakenings. [00:04:30] The study was, he said to bring in to problems that you have been unable to solve for one reason or another. Exactly directed it to problem solve. It was all about sort of set and setting. Speaker 2:It was like intention, right. You know that stupid thing they say before you do your yoga. Having the intention to solve your problem actually resulted in some number of these individuals solving their problems, going on to file patents and and create in some cases, companies based on these. Then of course that research was shut down and if adamant describes it, he says that he had just dosed [00:05:00] a subject group. The LSD was about to hit and they get this letter informing them that their specific permit was going to be rescinded. And so he looks at the letter and he looks at his colleague and he says, I think we got this letter tomorrow. But you know, it was really, it's a shame that that research was shut down because I think what we're seeing now with this resurgence of interest in LSD and particularly micro-dosing, which are to define it for your audience, a microdose is a small dose, a dose that's too small to elicit [00:05:30] any perceptual effects. Speaker 2:But so sub psychedelic thing. Yeah, new tripping. But it's large enough to have metabolic effects. So in a sense we're looking for something that can act in a way that you almost don't notice. If I had slipped it into your coffee right now, you would not know that you were micro-dosing except at the end of the day after our interview, after the rest of your work, you might go home and think, Huh, that was a really good day. Okay, so, so, so I know [inaudible] yes, she's written a book by Psychedelic and spiritual journeys. I said, but that's [00:06:00] not the kind of book that I'm likely to read because I'm not a particularly psych psychedelics or spiritual personal. Great is you're not. So I'm very practical. I was raised by atheist parents whose atheism was as dogmatic as a Hasidic Jews, Judaism. I mean we were, my parents raised me to have disgust for religion and for spirituality of all kinds, which I struggle with, you know, I'm trying to overcome. Speaker 2:We all try to overcome the biases of our parents. So I'm, I'm looking on the Internet. I'm in this place of profound depression, Anhedonia. [00:06:30] And I see this talk that Jim is giving and he talks about microdosing and he says that at the end of the day, people report that they had a really good day. And I felt like I'd been hit in the head with a mallet, like a real echos all. I wanted a really one really forget really good. I just wanted a good day. I wanted a day where I didn't feel this kind of sense of despair and inability to take pleasure in my family and my husband did my [00:07:00] marriage and my surroundings and so I reached out to him and he is the most loving, generous man. I mean, look, I'm a person with daddy issues. I get that. I have a very typical, my father's much older than my mother, and you talk about this in the book. Speaker 2:I was 40 when I was born, so he was older, which in the 60s that was really old, but he was a very uninvolved father and he also had his own mood disorder, so he was, it's hard to live with a parent with a mood disorder as my children can likely attest. Dr Fadiman's generosity, his warmth is his willingness to [00:07:30] talk on the phone with me for hours about my issues, about my problems, about, you know, what I tried was really, it was an, it was a novel experience for that's what you wanted. Yeah. In a, in a way or my dad and I have known one another's mood disorders forever and we've literally never spoken about it once. So one day I'm a visiting my parents and my father comes out of this room, this kind of junk room and he hands me this stack of micro cassette tapes and he says, here, do something with these tapes of my [00:08:00] psychotherapy sessions from the 80s so I have this pile of tapes of my dad's therapy and for years I just couldn't even look at them. Speaker 2:I was just like, Ugh, you know, you want to tell me how you're feeling, just talk to me. But then eventually I actually did a whole story for this American life about these tapes cause I did eventually listen to them hoping for great profound insight and got nothing. But what you did get, it's so hilarious in the history of communism, all my dad will ever talk to you about is like the history of Zionism, the history of communism, [00:08:30] Stalin's five year plan, like seriously anything you want to know about Stalin's agrarian policy. And so I put in the tape, you know what I really wanted to hear as I love my daughter, I was expecting to hear insights into his problematic relationship with his children, his terrible marriage, all that stuff. But what I ended up getting was, let me tell you a little about Stalin's five year plan. Speaker 2:I mean, he, his therapist just sat and talked about that for hours at a time. You know, you talk about how you don't get so worked up about these very issues. You just mentioned that your father, you're more circumspect [00:09:00] during that 30 days. I certainly was during those 30 days, I had a capacity for equanimity that I had not had before. I had a resurgence in my ability to enjoy beauty, my family to feel loved, to feel connected to the world. Um, I was less irritable. I didn't less judgment, less judgmental. I didn't lash out. It was really like cognitive behavioral therapy in a pill. You know, I had been in cognitive behavioral therapy, I had been in all these treatment modalities and they just hadn't worked [00:09:30] because I couldn't make myself do them. And with the LSD I was more receptive and I was more able to do that work that was necessary to maintain my mood. Speaker 2:I also incidentally, and you know this hearkens back to Jim's work in the 60s I was more productive, way more productive. This was not hypomania. This was like sit down, get to work, focus, make interesting connections, which is again not a surprise. We know that large doses of LSD, sort of more typical [00:10:00] doses cause different parts of your brain that don't normally communicate to communicate in new ways and they want to talk about that. The default mode network. Yes. So the default mode network, I mean in the most simplistic way, this is that part that like Rut that you are in your head that tells you to react in certain ways and it's kind of that directive mode. That was the voice in my head that told me I was worthless and I was useless. I was unlovable and it was a very old, very familiar set of reactions [00:10:30] and patterns, patterns and thoughts and beliefs. Speaker 2:And you know the brain develops patterns. It's what the brain likes to do. An LSD in a large dose takes your default mode network offline. It allows new patterns to form an old patterns to be kind of exploded. I'm too afraid to do an LSD trip. I was still too afraid, but in micro doses, based on my experiment and based on all of my reading and based on the research I've done on the neurochemistry of LSD and on the anecdotal evidence of many, many, many people who have now been micro-dosing [00:11:00] is that a similar function seems to occur with regular micro-dosing. It doesn't take the default mode network offline, but it allows you to develop new thought patterns and new ways of reacting. It takes you out of those traditional unproductive reflexes. And that's the neuroplasticity that you know, neuroplasticity means, you know, the way that your brain grows and changes. Speaker 2:You want a neuroplastic brain. A neuroplastic brain is a good brain. Babies' brains, very neuroplastic old ladies [00:11:30] brands, old dudes, brands less neuroplastic. You want your brain to change and grow and to constantly be, be able to think in new ways. And so you can teach an old dog new tricks with microdosing as an old dog. Look, I always resist anything that comes off as a panacea. You know, anytime you go to like a new age therapist who says, I'm going to work on your job muscles and that's going to solve your ankle pain, your back pain, your issues with your father and your flatulence problem. I see. I always [00:12:00] feel like that's the sign of a charlatan if like one thing can solve all your problems. So I, I'm very careful about making claims about microdosing, but I do think that the way that LSD and other psychedelics work on the brain holds great promise for mental illnesses that are particularly related to patterns of thinking, which, you know, a mood disorder, depression. Speaker 2:There are studies going on now, and I'm curious where they're gonna go with Jeff sessions as I knew both, uh, UCLA, NYU [00:12:30] and Johns, John Hopkins there, I think clinical stage two, two and into three. So they did a very smart thing in those research facilities. They said, we're going to study depression and anxiety in people with fatal illnesses confronting the end of their lives. And it's still Simon, not LSL Simon, not LSD. First of all, most people don't even know what psilocybin is. It's actually the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms. But LSD, you know, LSD. Ooh, everyone's scared of LSD. It has terrible connotations. Timothy Leary, Ken Casey, you know, summer of love, blah, [00:13:00] blah, blah. Siliciden what's that? Nobody really knows that I, I can't spell it. I mean, yes, I'm dyslexic, but seriously, I wrote a whole book about this and I cannot spell silicide, but to saved my life, it was easier to get permission to study psilocybin and is a lot easier to get permission to give a psychedelic drug or any schedule one drug to someone who's dying anyway, so the studies were designed not because there's something unique about the depression at the end of life, but rather because that was the way that permission could be granted from the FDA and DEA. Speaker 2:The results have been remarkable, really remarkable. [00:13:30] I know they're unprecedented. Michael calling radar. The New Yorker about a couple of articles can is coming out with a book. I said to Michael Dell, I wonder if it's okay that like, I'm, my book's coming out before yours. He's like, oh no, no baby. You go ahead and let's see what happens. First. Mine was constructed as this experiment and then it goes off into the research, into the law. I mean, I, I talk, I spent a lot of time talking about the law and the war on drugs and I want to talk about that. Let's talk about the, the, the racism. I mean, there's never been a war on drugs that hasn't been race based in this country. It's all, I think [00:14:00] the best way to think of the war on drugs as it is a warm people of color. Speaker 2:The very first drug law in the United States was targeted at Chinese opium dens. At that point in time. There were a lot of people using opium, but the typical opium user was a white southern woman who tippled from her laudanum bottle all day long. That's opium mixed with alcohol. People gave opium to their babies to make them sleep. You know, there are all of these medicines, patent medicines that were opium based, but the law targeted Chinese immigrants in opium dens and it was really about [00:14:30] them. It wasn't about the opium per se. If you're of, you know, a wave of immigration, it's, it's characterized as, you know, fear that they'll rape white women, but it really is just, it's financial panic as xenophobia. Marijuana got tied closely to Mexican Americans. And you can see all this rhetoric at the time in the Hearst newspapers about how marijuana crazed were raping white women. Speaker 2:Alcohol is closely correlated with sexual violence in our culture but not marijuana. So again, cocaine [00:15:00] gets tied to African American communities, not because they used cocaine more, absolutely not, but it's a way to target and link and criminalize you're, there were these myths that cocaine use made African-Americans, although of course at the time they said Negroes immune to lower caliber bullets. So somehow, you know, snorting some cocaine would make a person immune to a bullet. And so that's why police departments, at least the theory is to police departments use higher caliber guns. That became the standard. So again, and [00:15:30] again, you see the war on drug tied to criminalizing communities, communities of color. And the latest iteration of this, which began in the 60s and which I thought was ending or at least drawing to a pope full close, was this rabid began with Nixon, went through Reagan, amped up with Clinton. Speaker 2:Let's be very clear targeting of communities of color with draconian prison sentences for drug crimes. So in a world where white people [00:16:00] use drugs more than people of color, you had far more people of color being arrested and incarcerated. You know, in America you go to jail for longer for marijuana in some cases, then you go to jail for murder in Europe, I mean our drug laws are out of control and we saw this massive increase in incarceration rates as a result of people of color, but also women suddenly, you know, women have had very rarely been incarcerated. The numbers were very low because women don't commit violent crimes. There's one genetic marker that you can pretty much use to evaluate [00:16:30] the likelihood of somebody committed and violent crime. And it is the y chromosome. The population of women in prison increased dramatically because of all these drug laws in these mandatory minimum sentences. Speaker 2:And I thought we had started to understand that, you know, across party boundaries, I've, I've had conversations with Senator Orrin Hatch about the injustices of the mandatory minimum sentences and the over incarceration rate. But with the election of Donald Trump in this, most schizophrenia of elections were, on the one hand, there are a bunch [00:17:00] of states that decriminalized marijuana for recreational use. Marijuana is a schedule one drug. At the same time, we elected Donald Trump who put a as attorney general, the most retrograde, racist, malevolent, incompetent, cruel and vicious white supremacist. He says he's going to go after marijuana. Yeah, that's what he's going to do. If I were in the legal cannabis business, I would be terrified to ask you about that. We don't really know yet what you're going [00:17:30] to die or what about those clinical trials that we were just tying back? Will they be shut down? Speaker 2:I don't know. I don't know if they're flying under the radar enough. If they have DEA, you know the results that you know the subjects are white. By and large, people are much more inclined to be sympathetic when the subjects are white. I don't know. But here's, I do know the United States has imposed its drug policy on the world through a very aggressive campaign that involved pox, Americana treaties and a kind of putative moral [00:18:00] leadership. So we've dictated to south and Central America. We've dictated to Europe. So when England for example, began a very small but very, very effective heroin distribution program that cut overdose rates, cut crime, and also incidentally got people off heroin. But the United States put so much pressure on the British government that they shut that program down. All the people that participate in that program, most of them went on to die. Speaker 2:So we've managed to impose our draconian prohibitionist view of drugs on the world. But the only benefit that I can see [00:18:30] to having a Cheeto, dusted mad man is our president, is that we have no moral authority. We have no claim to moral authority. Portugal, which decriminalized drugs is not going to pay any attention to a Donald Trump said the American war on drugs has destroyed Latin America. In rich, the cartels, Columbia for a long time was a country that was simply controlled by more in cartels and people lived in this kind of state of incarceration and terror [00:19:00] and this was all caused by the United States war on drugs and now countries have started to reject it. And I think that that is the one benefit of having this America first platform is that the rest of the world can go on and do good cause we haven't used our moral authority very well. Speaker 2:We spend so much money on this war on drugs like up to a trillion now or something. This lunatic for what drugs are cheaper and easier to get, which tells you that they're coming into the country more often. You're not winning a war if drugs are easier to get. You know, LSD is a non-addictive [00:19:30] drug in the entire history of LSD usage. There are two cases, human fatalities that have been attributed to LSD and those are actually suspect. So basically there's no fatal dose of Ellis, no addiction, no addiction. But you know what's more dangerous right now is that we have a situation where we have an opioid crisis in this country. Many of the states that voted so vigorously in favor of Donald Trump are littered with bodies of people dying from opioid addiction, and that is a direct result of the failed war on drugs. Speaker 2:If [00:20:00] you want to treat people and save people's lives, you have to have a harm reduction approach to drug addiction. Not at not a prohibitionist approach. You have to get in there and provide services and help and safe injection sites and safe drugs. This is typically what happens. Someone gets a prescription for O for Oxycontin, for say back pain for which it is not useful. They take it, they take it, they take it, they get addicted. Then their doctor says, well you can have any of oxycontin anymore cause you're an addict. And then they don't have any oxycontin. [00:20:30] So they go out on the street and maybe first they try to buy some pills and they get some and, but eventually pills are hard to find. They're harder to buy. They're more expensive, you know, it's cheap heroin deep, you know, it's fast, heroin's fast, then their heroin addict, and then they're criminalized. Speaker 2:Then they're criminalized. Then they're in the underground market. Then there's no FDA checking the quality of their drugs, and now heroin is quite often cut with much stronger fentanyl, hundreds of times stronger, and people are overdosing because they take an amount of drugs that they, [00:21:00] they think is a heroin, but it actually turns out to be fentanyl. It is a white epidemic in many ways. There are many, many white victims. Certainly the vast majority, maybe Jeff sessions will be willing to listen to some reason. Although again, this is a man who said that no good person has ever smoked pot. This is a man who made a quote unquote joke about the KKK, which he said he was until they, he found out I had smoked. He went there. He was fine with them until he found out they smoked pot. I wanted to ask you about how you approach drugs in your family, but you used the term harm reduction. Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. [00:21:30] So we have, that may be the most radical thing in my book, not the taking of the LSD. I have four kids who range in age from 13 to 22 so these are our rules. We don't lie to our children about drugs ever. And they know we never lie to them. We don't allow others to lie to them. So when they are given misinformation in school programs, school programs on dare, which for many, many years taught all of this ridiculous and misinformation, it's now been improved. But you know, it basically said to kids, you know, marijuana will kill you. And then a kid will hear that message and [00:22:00] then think of their cousin who's a freshman at Yale and an ace student and a wake and bake smoker. And then they reject the whole message of dare. But anyway, they're better now. But like we educate our kids, we inundate them with information and then we have some very specific rules when it comes to pop. Speaker 2:For example, we talk a lot about the effects of marijuana on the adolescent brain. I think there's compelling evidence that the, that that that is not great that it, it does cause damage to developing brains in particular. But we are realistic. They live in Berkeley. There's no way they're going to wait till [00:22:30] their frontal lobe is fully formed before they smoke pot. So after much negotiation, we reached the agreement that nobody could smoke pot. So there were 15 only on the weekends. And if your grades drop at all, you are not only grounded but I will drug test you and you get your drug tests from Amazon, right? Yes. I can test my kids urine. I buy your intestines. I tested my LSD from a kit that I bought on Amazon. Basically I have a supply cabinet in my house that's full of MTMA testing kits. Speaker 2:Cause MTMA is the drug that I'm most concerned [00:23:00] with right now. It, it causes your body to overheat and if you have heart issues or high blood pressure, it's, you shouldn't be taking it. Basically the stupidest place to do it is like in the desert while dancing. Yes. Or at a rate where there's some thousands of people and you don't want your body temperature to be raised. And it also does this peculiar thing. It makes me more susceptible to water toxicity. What people are selling is MTMA isn't, most of the time kids will buy drugs and they'll think they're buying Molly. And it turns out that they're buying something much more toxic. So my daughter's a student at Wesleyan University and [00:23:30] half, 11 kids, I think ended up in the Er having taken something they thought was m DMA that turned out to be a synthetic called Ab Fubu, NACA Spice or k two. Speaker 2:And it was very toxic. And one of them had to be intubated and defibrillated before he, um, and he, he survived thankfully. So I keep testing kids in my cabinet and I say to my kids, those are there, if you ever are inclined to take a pill and put it in your body, first you have to test it to make sure that what you're taking is what you think you're taking because it is not safe to [00:24:00] just, and this has been a success in your household. Yes, and and in fact there have been instances where pills were people, not my own children, but others have taken a testing kit and then reported to me that it was not in fact what they thought it was threw it away. I count that as a life save. If your kid ever overdoses on heroin year, will you want your kid to be around my kid? Speaker 2:Because if your kids around a kid who has him had this kind of harm reduction education, what they're probably going to do is throw them in the bath tub with some cold water, maybe dump them in the parking lot of [00:24:30] an er and they're going to overdose and die. My kids, they know exactly what to do. They make two phone calls, they call nine one one and they say, comment with Narcan. Now we have a heroin overdose and that can cure an overdose instantaneously and they call mommy and mommy comes and deals with the legal consequences. Your last book, love and treasure was about the Holocaust. There is a character in your memoir about your microdosing Laszlo, who I think you met when you were working on love and treasure. Yes, that's such a beautiful [00:25:00] story. So allowing lowered design, his real name is a holocaust survivor, a Hungarian holocaust survivor who became very wealthy in America. Speaker 2:Very problematic relationships, difficult relationships. I'm very depressed and he went on a an Iowaska journey until I met Lazo. I, I never understood the appeal of Iowasca, but Laszlo had this incredible experience. He went to Latin America, I don't know where he's okay, but he had a guide and they had a guide and it was all very safe. So [00:25:30] his father died in the Holocaust. He and his mother survived and he had always felt this sense of, of shame and guilt for having survived. And in a way was angry the way his child was angry at his father for not having said because saying goodbye to him and had felt, even though he knew his way, he wasn't abandoned, that his father was murdered by the Arrow cross in the Hungarian fascists. He still felt the sense of, you know, a child's feeling of abandonment. Speaker 2:And he spoke to his father and he had this incredible spiritual experience that resolve that [00:26:00] pain for him. To this day I became obsessed with this idea of like, did you really speak to your father or is it saw in your head? I mean, and when I was talking to researchers about this, they would always say to me, why is that the question you're asking? I mean, isn't the interesting question that this experience resolved his pain and yet you're obsessed with whether it was real or not, and what do you even mean by real? And that's when you know, it's like, look at the results instead. I have high hopes. I think micro-dosing is kind of, it's like training wheels, right? [00:26:30] I mean microdosing for those of us who are not interested in tripping, we're talking about using a medication, the way people use antianxiety medications, but it's a medication that's actually much safer. Speaker 2:Say yes and less addictive my, but it's not an option. And that's the sad thing, right? And my message for this book is we need decriminalization. And we need research. And first the research, let's do the microdose study at the University of South Carolina. Mike met Hoffer's doing research on MTMA and PTSD with patients who have treatment resistant PTSD [00:27:00] and he has had astonishing results, which makes sense, right? MTMA is a drug that works on memory. It disconnects traumatic memories from the trauma so that you can explore the memory without the the traumatic feelings associated with it. And instead from a place of love and support, empathy, empathy, the MTMA research has the tentative preliminary support of the VA because they know that soldiers are committing suicide at astronomical rates and they have to do something. So my hope [00:27:30] is that the Pentagon and the VA will look at this research and say, we can't afford not to continue this. Speaker 2:You know, my husband and I have used MTMA at the suggestion of Sasha and an Shogun to Sasha was, it was a chemist, a local Berkeley chemist who was famous for bio as saying different drugs or synthesizing drugs and then taking them on him to himself to sort of assess their facts. And though he wasn't the first person to synthesize MTMA that honor goes to Merck. He was one of the first people to try it on himself. [00:28:00] But, um, my husband and I have used MGMA as a marital therapy tool, which is what we would, and it was initially used as, as a therapeutic tool and it's very profound and very effective and it allows us to sort of discuss the problems of our, in our relationship in a supportive and loving way. So I've been doing a lot events around the country and at every event there are a bunch of people come up and tell me they're microdosing and they say it loud and they say it proud and they're not ashamed and they're micro-dosing with LSD or psilocybin. Speaker 2:And that's great. And then there are a bunch of people who come up to me and they asked to speak to me privately [00:28:30] and they confess with great shame and embarrassment that they have a mental illness. And the idea that in our society, you don't need to be ashamed about using illegal drugs, but you need to be ashamed about being mentally ill. That's heartbreaking. And that's something we need to change. So that's one of the things that I as a person with a mental illness feel like it is my job to be public because this is not something to be ashamed of and I won't allow others to experience that shame. [00:29:00] Okay. Running out of time and I wanted to ask you, what is next on your plate? The Vallejo novel to my publisher, I'm working on a TV show that it's based on a true story but it's an it's narrative. Speaker 2:It's not documentary and it's basically about why we don't believe women who have been raped even when they do everything right and I'm working on another TV show about the first women combat soldiers in a legal combat soldiers in United States military history team, lioness in the Iraq war and because I feel like now for the next [00:29:30] four to eight to forever years, the work that I do has to have meaning and it has to have greater purpose and I'm trying to figure out what that means for me right now. If somebody has a about your book, they can go to our website, which is ILR, waldmann.com and there's lots of resources there. There's lots of articles about the research, and I have lots of resources for people with mental health issues, and I have lots of articles about the drug war, all sorts of things. Twitter, Facebook, email, and I'm easy to reach. [00:30:00] That was, I yell at Waldmann, novelist, SAS, former federal public defender and criminal defense lawyer. We'd been talking about her new book, a really good day. How microdosing made a mega difference in my mood, my marriage, and my life. You've been listening to method to the madness. We'll be back next Friday. Speaker 3:Yeah. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Wes Goldberg (@wcgoldberg) and David Ramil (@dramil13) can't hold themselves back! Dion Waiters has finally delivered, becoming the player they always knew he could be. Right? They talk about how the Miami Heat were able to beat the Warriors, from Waiters' clutch performance to Erik Spoelstra's marvelous coaching and the team's impressive defense. Then they speculate wildly as to what this means for Waiters, and the Heat, after this season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are so excited to introduce you to Rhonda Burgess, one of Jay's fellow spiritual entrepreneurs and BFF. Give her a few minutes and you will want her to be your BFF too! Rhonda is a beautiful human being and brings joy wherever she goes. And she is also the Queen of Making Stuff Up!  The stories we create in order to make sense of what is happening around us control our lives. Example: Your significant other doesn't take out the trash. So now it is time to Make Stuff Up. Right? They didn't do it because they are mad or trying to make a point. Maybe they didn't do it just to spite you. After all they KNOW how annoyed you get with the trash isn't taken out. URG! Or...maybe, just maybe they simply forgot.  The reality is the only thing we know is that the trash wasn't taken out. Everything else we make up.  So what do you do? Especially when the stories are so TRUE. Stories we have carried with us a long time can be hard to discard let alone actually allow yourself to see as made up. Jay and Rhonda walk us through her process and how she has discovered how to get her life back from the stories she was creating.  We invite you to join us in our private Facebook group, Doing the Work with Jay and Becca. Are you struggling with a specific situation and can't see the "Story" for the trees? Let us help! Or perhaps you would like to share a breakthrough you have had around the stories you created. Sometimes it is hilarious once you can really see it.  If you are currently struggling to achieve a goal, manifest your dreams, or just get over the hump in an area of transformation--we are here to help! Contact us through the contact form or via Facebook to sign up to have a coaching session on a future episode. We would love to help! And a free coaching session from Jay is pretty darn amazing too. Thank you for listening! We appreciate you! Don't forget to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher to get your episodes automatically sent to you each week! We would also love for you to submit a review on iTunes! A few things mentioned in this episode... Lean Inside: 7 Steps to Personal Power by Jay Pryor Thank you for listening. We are so honored to have you with us each week. Please note that some of the links are affiliate links through Amazon. We get a little money if you end up purchasing the item through the link. This money helps to keep our podcast on the air! We do not link to anything that doesn't naturally come up in our podcast interviews/conversations. We are not asked to link to any specific product or service. 

Click above to see in ITunes... If you've never met Liz then there's a little spark missing in your life. She's one of the most inspirational and hard-charging people I've met. Here her wisdom now.. Steve Larsen: Hey how's it going everyone? I am super excited today because I have a special guest on and it's not too often that I get to go interview someone as amazing as Liz Tennyson. How are you doing?  Liz Tennyson: I'm amazing, hi everybody.  Steve Larsen: Good, good, good. I'm laughing still because a lot of people that I interview, it's kind of early in the morning, and their either kind of half dead still or just not very lively and you're already making me laugh. T his is good. Liz, I was wondering just right off the bat. The first time I saw you online, I think it was in the ClickFunnels certified page and you were like just dropping these huge value bombs and I was like, "Oh my gosh, who is this lady? She's killing it." I was wondering, could you tell us a little bit about how you got involved with funnels in general. Liz Tennyson: I was going to say I'm glad you didn't mention, but then I'm going to mention it. My first post in there was me with my silly, I guess it was one of the physical products, the book, that Russell sends out with one of his products. I can't even remember which one, but I never get mail and so it was so fun to get something like in the mail and so then I posted it in the certified partner group and people were laughing at me. The way I got started with the certification program really just started this Spring, I was struggling with- I had my funnel set up but I was using so many different systems and so frustrated because it was taking me forever. I'm one of those people that I like to figure it out on my own. Especially even before I'm hiring somebody to do it, so I was still trying to figure out how to get everything up and I found ClickFunnels. I can't even remember who said, "Liz, you need to get your head on straight and simplify."   That month I moved all my funnels over and we had a really fantastic month and so then I started kind of going, "This is pretty incredible how fast I can create things." I'm an action taker and so then from there-  Steve Larsen: I noticed that... Liz Tennyson: From there it just kind of progressed into I was telling people about it. I was telling people really they should be using ClickFunnels and then the opportunity for the certified partner came up and it just seemed natural. Steve Larsen: Yeah. Liz Tennyson: It wasn't the best time. I have so many things going on with my book and my actual business, but it really, it's on of those things that I just had to do.  Steve Larson: Now what is your actual business? What is it that takes your time? Liz Tennyson: I am a holistic health coach and a personal trainer. I run an organization called I'm A Fit Mormon and so my niche is obviously Mormon woman. Mom's that I help stay healthy and fit. Steve Larsen: Cool. That's awesome. Now obviously ClickFunnel has played into that a lot. Russel and I have been talking a lot about this. It's so hard to define what a funnel is to someone who has no idea what the are you know? Liz Tennyson: Yeah.  Steve Larsen: It's a challenge to do this. Was it for you easy to make the transition over? Liz Tennyson: For me it was. I think I've been doing business for so many years. Even when I owned a FedEx franchise in my 20's.  Steve Larsen: Geez.  Liz Tennyson: It was the same thing in real life... You have to know how to transition a client throughout your process so once I understood how that worked, it just was kind of putting it into the online forum. Even when I help my clients, you know, I know exactly step 1, step 2, step 3. I think that if somebody can get that concept, kind of step back from ClickFunnels for 10 minutes and say, "What do I actually want to do for somebody? What am I actually doing for somebody?" Then you can build a funnel that can do that process. It kind of seemed natural to me... I take about, I don't know, I think last week I took maybe 2 to 3 hours and kind of wrote out you know the process I really wanted... Where I could really serve somebody better, if I was to create this type of funnel. If I was to create a really good sales page. It has to be good because then I want them to use my product that can actually change their life. I think if you step back for just a little bit and do that process. Then the funnel building is a lot easier. Steve Larsen: That's so interesting you say that because I- "What am I doing for someone else and how can I serve them?" That's such a good question to start with cause so many of us, I mean, we all want to make money, but when somebody makes that the pure focus, it's really really hard to actually make the money on there. I almost feel like it's a dog smelling fear. Everyone can tell when you're just there to pull their credit card out of their wallet...  Liz Tennyson: Yeah and you end up with a sales page that's like "buy from me" and nobody knows like where did I find this guy that's just selling- you know? Like just selling me his stuff and that works if maybe you have- I could do that with my community because they love me and they know I put out good stuff, so could build a page that says like, "hey buy my next thing." But it's taken me 2 years to be able to do that and I don't do that because I want them to understand what the products actually going to do for them and the... it's going to take them from. Even though I could pitch a product and make money, it still doesn't serve my community the best and at some point that's going to start diminish if I'm not actually serving them in some way. Steve Larsen: It seems like every entrepreneur goes through that though. Cause obviously you get in to make the money but you're say that it sounded like there was a point where you bridged the gap between you know, "buy buy buy buy buy" and then over to help.  Liz Tennyson: I go through a lot of different scenarios, when I started, I thought it was going to be like a non profit right? Cause I'm like, I felt like "oh I'm such an amazing person and I'm just going to give" and I know that doesn't really work if you don't actually go to be a non-profit and there's no money coming in from like anybody that wants advertised. You have to figure out a new way that I could serve people and that was like writing programs and being able to coach people through the process. At some point, even if it works on the front end, it at some point, you have to cultivate. That's what I love about ClickFunnels too is the culture. It's really, I'm pretty loyal of a person. I've been married 19 years, I have my 4 kids and I've been a member of my church my whole life. I feel like I'm pretty loyal but its hard to get me in. A lot of people pitch me, I have great energy, I really love people so a lot of people pitch me all the time. It's hard to get me in a community. It's hard for me to commit to a community.  I was on the phone with somebody that was actually pitching me this weekend and saying, "Oh, Liz, you would do so much for our community and we really want you." And I said, "you know what? I was just at this incredible event for ClickFunnels and I'm in and I can't really commit to something else because this is where my heart is right now and this is where I want to be and this community is growing really fast. I feel like that I have so much that I could give to the community and people that are coming on to learn how to use ClickFunnels and build their own businesses and that kind of stuff." I just feel like the culture that you build around your product, even if the culture is we build great products, right, so you can keep putting out great stuff that functions well and serves people well. I think is the main bottom line that actually pays so much more on the tail end if you just look at it that way. Steve Larsen: That's awesome. That's really awesome. What about the ClickFunnels community made you that loyal? Most people are in the community but you usually don't go vet communities you know what I mean? That's not something that most people go do. Liz Tennyson: Like I said at the very first, I wasn't really looking for anything, it's not a really if I were to look at it logically, even my husband's like. "Liz, you have your own book coming out." Like in book stores in January. We have a book tour, I am upper level management of my MLM company. I'm traveling around teaching and so it's not like a great time for me to even do this or commit or anything like that but I don't know what it was. It was way before the event this weekend, there was that feeling like this is kind of my, a lot of these people are going to be my family is kind of how I felt. I think maybe in the certified partner program, Nora's done a great job of creating that community with those people and then when I got there this last weekend, I felt so home. I don't know what it is and I'm not saying it's that way for everybody.  I normally don't do that but I felt like I got meet Randall who was the second person after Derek that I was on the phone with for the certified partner program and he has the coolest job to sell to collect. From that conversation, I sent him a card and all this kind of stuff. I'm sure he thinks I'm a total psycho because I keep telling him thank you but to meet him in person was, it meant so much to me. I don't know what it is.  Steve Larsen: Yeah what is that? Why would that- Liz Tennyson: I think, well, so I've worked really hard, I guess I'll tell you my back story. I've worked really hard... I got married at 19. Obviously I've been married 19 years so we can do the math. We immediately started having babies. When you're 19 and you start having babies, you can choose two paths. You can choose college and take in a whole bunch of student loans to practically live. Or you can become and entrepreneur. Those are the two choices. I guess there's a third choice, to like live with family and-  Steve Larsen: Die a slow death.  Liz Tennyson: Totally. My choice was to become an entrepreneur. Miraculously I was hired as a manager at a bank. I don't even- really looking back, I was 20 years old with a baby and they hire me. I worked graveyards while my husband worked days doing construction and we were trying to figure out like what type of business we were going to start. From that process we bought a franchise, we've done a whole bunch of different things. I love the process of MLM. If it's done correctly and I've been building businesses for a long time... Really ... after 19 years ... gosh you got me all excited. Having Randall on the phone I don't know what it was but it was like the universe is just confirmed your hard work matters, you know? You built up to some really incredible things and that phone call was like one of those pivotal things that he told me on the phone he says, "I don't tell people all this all the time" and he just said, "I can tell Liz that your life is going to completely change." And my life was already changing... I'm already a hustler. I'm already doing amazing things... I already create that balance between a mom. I'm there for my kids all the time and I create incredible businesses. I'm able to keep that balance and do some pretty awesome things. Then when he said that and I don't normally, it's so funny, cause I don't normally care about if somebody gives me a compliment you know. My ego isn't really connected to a lot of things and so for him to say that, normally, I'm used to people pitching me so normally I'm like, "yeah yeah". Whatever, yes, like I know I have charisma and I know you want me on your team. You know?  Steve Larsen: This is the only time I've been able to do this. Liz Tennyson: Exactly. There was something, I don't know if it was really ... him or if it was just like everything was cultivated up until that point and I was just completely vulnerable and my heart was open to change. At that moment it was like, "okay here we go, I shouldn't make this commitment but I feel like it's right so I'm going to and I'm going to let everything else ride after this."  I'm pretty good at making business decisions, I don't chase the shiny object... You know, I'm pretty solid and loyal and to the commitments that I make. It was like it was, "yeah lets just do this" I wasn't all in. I just I don't know what it was. It was good, solid people. I guess. Russell's built an amazing team and this weekend begin able to meet so many of those people, really, I don't know if you can call it, changed my heart, I don't know. Steve Larsen: Yeah yeah.  Liz Tennyson: It just felt so solid. Steve Larsen: That's awesome because most people do not want to meet their salesman. You know what I mean?  Liz Tennyson: I know and it was so funny because my husband was like, "maybe he's just really good at his job Liz, like maybe he's just a really good salesman." And I said, "Well he is a really good salesman and I respect that about him." But he also like- Steve Larsen: But he's a real person too, he's not being fake with you. Liz Tennyson: The connection we have, like he listened, which is really important to me if somebody listens. He listened to every single thing. He even asked me, "Liz, you're a really exciting person... ...Are you a shiny object type?" You know?  Steve Larsen: Yeah. Liz Tennyson: He really wanted to build with the certified partner program people that are committed. People that were a good fit for ClickFunnels and so he was vetting me to make sure that I wasn't flighty and gonna take off after I got really excited. Cause I want people that are gonna finish and actually become certified. I was glad that he did that. Steve Larsen: You know I remember ... I have two thought here. Trying to figure out which one to go for. I remember when I went to that last event. That last funnel hacker event. I was actually in college and it was my last week of college and I didn't have a way to get there and so I traded someone a funnel. I built a funnel for them and they paid for my plain ticket, a ticket to get in and two nights of a hotel and so I kind of just fended for myself for the others and stayed up all night in the basement of the Sheraton the last night there. What was funny was I remember getting on the plane just going there and for some reason having that feeling like, I feel like my life is going to change. You know?  Liz Tennyson: Yeah. Steve Larsen: I didn't work for ClickFunnels at the time. Russel had no idea who I was, anything like that. That's not even how it changed it was just something inside though for sure that I don't know what it was. I came back and that was actually the first time my wife looked at me and she goes, "You seem happy." I was like, "Was I not seeming that way before?" I didn't know that I wasn't appearing as happy beforehand but I guess she was like "it was a physical difference."  At the time I was going to go work for another guy. I won't say the name or anything in case he listens to this but she goes- As soon as I came back there was some other issue with this other guy I was going to go work for and she was like, "It was like this switch that flipped and you immediately went back to this other person and I realized that unless we go try and get you, find a way for you to work for Clickfunnels, I want the version of my husband that came home from that event." I don't want the other one.  Anyways, not to digress on that, I'm just completely agreeing with you. It was a life-changing thing for me. It's a very special thing for sure. I wanted to point out and say congrats by the way. At the last event, you won the best funnel right? Liz Tennyson: Thank you thank you, I'm raising my hands right now. Steve Larsen: I can see you actually. Woo. Liz Tennyson: Taking my virtual reward. Steve Larsen: Tell us about it. That's awesome. That's a big deal. Liz Tennyson: That was really fun. I knew that we would have some type of funnel hacking. The people from June's event kind of told me about it but until you get there you don't know what it really is. You don't know who the business owner's are... When you get there, you know, you go through the day and then business owner's tell you a little bit about their business. Then Nora says, "Okay, you have until tomorrow morning to build them a functioning funnel."  Steve Larsen: Woo. Liz Tennyson: Right?  Steve Larsen: That's exciting. Liz Tennyson: Then tomorrow you will present it to the owners and they'll pick a winner and hopefully we'll get some really great stuff that they can actually use. Then there was two owners and she put names in a hat and pulled out names who had which owner and so we were lucky enough to get ... he owns a flooring company in Idaho and he was incredible. His name was Matt and we got to pick a partner so somebody had come over and Michelle said, "Hey do you want to be my partner?" And we were super excited. Then that night you get the opportunity to just sit and talk to the owner. What was really cool is because I love to listen, right, to what the needs are, I had to ask him- He's incredible person and he's a genius and kind of he already knows about ClickFunnels. He had five ideas. Five funnels that he wanted built, but we had to create one. The night pretty much consisted of, "okay what funnel is most important? Let's get very clear on what funnel is most important to you." It turns out the funnel that was most important to him was to get people from the area, from Boise, Eagle and Meridian into his store. He said that numerous times that that was the most important. I love, I know how to do Facebook ads and I know how to do targeting and research for that.  With those skills, we created a funnel that was for him that was getting people into the store and it was only for those three areas and we him do a video for the front page and a coupon that they could bring in to the store that after they opted in, they could download the coupon. Then we showed him a little bit of how to target those homeowners. We showed him how to target different home values with people so he could run some new ads to get people into his store.  It was really fun... We had a tough competition though. There were so many talented people there and when they would go up, I was pretty com- I don't like to think I'm competitive, like I'm okay if I lose, if somebody does an amazing job to beat me. Steve Larsen: You're okay losing, but not really.  Liz Tennyson: I'm like a good loser. My husband is a terrible loser. I often just lose on purpose so we can just stay married. Steve Larsen: I've totally done that before. Liz Tennyson: We almost got divorced like after year one from playing Monopoly. We can not have this game in this house.  Steve Larsen: It's chess with us. I purposefully have lost many times to that game cause otherwise- Anyways, anyways.  Liz Tennyson: Anyways, besides that. There were some really talented people and as they were going up I thought, "Oh I want to be able to do this in the next funnel" because they had some really great ideas and really great converting processes. Then the owners chose the winners. That was really fun... Steve Larsen: Do you mind taking us through the funnel that you built and why you did that? Usually focus so much on the funnel side and you're like funnel funnel funnel you know its hearing more about the Facebook ad and how that moved through the funnel. That might be kind of cool if you don't mind? Liz Tennyson: For me, I have a lot of people, especially in the last couple months, I have highly converting funnels for myself and so people will say, "Okay can you do that for me?" The first thing I say is, "Do you know who you're selling to? Do you know who you're going to target? Because if I build you a funnel and you don't know who's going to see it, you're not going to make any money."  Steve Larsen: That's true.  Liz Tennyson: Right? If you can't direct traffic to it, Russel even talked about this in the first session of the certified partner. If you can't drive traffic and actually have people see your funnel, it's going to be really hard for it to convert because there's not going to be anybody to convert.  For that process the first thing we did is find out in the Facebook ads insights there's a way that, obviously this is like a whole class of itself. You can search home owners, you can search people even that want to do home renovation. Those types of things, we searched house values so we did, I think it was 150 to 275 and then 275-500 are the two different groups that we had we targeted women cause they're usually the ones making the choice of changing the flooring in the house. We did create because this business owner, we're going to figure out him how to target and speak it correctly without it hurting anybodies feelings but a lot of moms that are nesting that are having their first baby, he finds that they come in and want new flooring, they want to change their house.  Being able to help build him a list of pregnant moms in the area, own homes I think is a pretty targeted group that if you can get the message clear then it would be a really highly converting funnel for him. Going through that the most important thing for him was that he is amazing. That he gives out spot cleaner. You can go in for the life of your carpet you can refill the spot cleaner from him. That is an amazing bonus.  Steve Larsen: Is that a front end or something?  Liz Tennyson: It's a back end to get people to know that's the service- that's like a bonus that's like unannounced that you just get from him. Steve Larsen: Awesome.  Liz Tennyson: The biggest point of the funnel from him was social proof. He is big in his community. His mom started the company so they've been around for years. Right now all of the traffic that they get is from referrals, they have amazing reviews. He has done, before he came to the event, he had some great SEO done so he ranks #1 on Google and he just has a ton of reviews on there that are all amazing.  Social proof is a big deal... We needed him on the page. Him because he represents the company and he really wants to be known in the area as the expert. To make a video just about flooring would not have met his needs. So putting him on the video to introduce himself to start to cultivate that relationship, to start to cultivate that trust, was really important. Then at the top of the page, it said, "Do you live in" I'll have to look at the funnel again. I think it says, "Do you live" or "Are you from Boise, Meridian, or Eagle?"  Steve Larsen: Mm-hmm (affirmative) cleaver. Liz Tennyson: Because he doesn't want any leads from anywhere else.  Steve Larsen: That's awesome.  Liz Tennyson: If they get to that page and they're not from that then they'll go away right?  Steve Larsen: Yeah. Liz Tennyson: He's not going to get leads that are not targeted, he's not going to get leads that are going to waste is time and waste their time. Right? If they're not from that area, they're not going to need his flooring. He doesn't want to expand because he knows that they area that he lives in is big enough that he doesn't have to expand to different areas, besides those three.  Then below that was just an opt in that was "Hey get your free coupon, come in to meet Matt for the flooring needs." The things it had on the opt in though that were required was name, email and it had a drop down that they could tell him, "I am from Eagle, I am from Meridian, I am from Boise." He would have that info so then he could create a segmented list for just Boise people. That kind of stuff. That was really really really important to him.  We didn't get the chance to do it but in our presentation we talked to him about, "you know obviously we would be doing Facebook pixels and stuff like that to do retargeting just to those people" and then the coupon. Then at the very very bottom was-  Steve Larsen: Was this like an opt in page then or? Liz Tennyson: Yeah its just like a video opt in page and then at the very bottom was a really cool thing for people that are creating social proof. It was connected to his Facebook page so when people even go to that page, it will start to collect to those comments and just create more social proof for him which is really important. Steve Larsen: It was kind of like... now would he go and follow up after? Cause this sounds like a really simple, but powerful funnel. Was it two pages?  Liz Tennyson: It was just two pages and then the download that they could click to get the download for the coupon.  It was just an opt in and a thank you.  Steve Larsen: The reason I bring that in is because some people think like these funnels have to be huge just so many things you've got to put in it and you've got to have three up sells and a down sell and often, no, you don't. I've been building for real estate and they're just 2 pages but they're so powerful. It's the way you use them. The messages. I love that that's what you focus on. The messaging. Liz Tennyson: Yeah well and the most important thing for him, once we figured out, this is what I want it to do. This is the most important thing. Of course you can build other funnels for different functions right? Steve Larsen: Yeah. Liz Tennyson: You could say like, we could've made like a sales page or send them to sales page like "hey and we have a carpet sale" right? Steve Larsen: Yeah. Liz Tennyson: He didn't want to do that. That was cheesy to him. He wasn't interested in putting anything on sale because his stuff is highly valuable and he doesn't have to put stuff on sale. To drive traffic a lot of time ... even for me and this is a really good thing that people should be writing this down right now. For me I built a Facebook page for my community because I am a social, like I am building a community. I started building this Facebook page and I was just on my Facebook and was like "hey we have a free support group" and people were going there and then I realized I don't have anybodies information. Everybody in the Facebook group, yeah it's cool if they see my post in my Facebook group but I'm never going to be able to get in contact with them. At all, besides that Facebook group. Then I created literally one page, right? That is for me, that says, you know they go there and they put in their information and then they get to click the button and it takes them right to Facebook page where they can ask to gain access. Then I have the information and I have a list that's like my Facebook group people that opted in for the free support group and I can build a list on that.  Having that functionality I think a lot of people discount the value that that can actually bring you in your business. It works great for social proof...  It works great for anybody building in a community or a lifestyle business. A lot of times people just go to "it's really important to sell." Just do like an opt in, take them straight to a sales page and for me it's been so much more profitable to do this lead page, add value, then more people buy. When they actually see my up sell and my down sell. That's like a totally different funnel and a totally different product that serves a different purpose. Steve Larsen: How are you breaking even on ad costs usually? Cause that's something usually that as far as funnel methodology goes is usually pounded into us upfront. I guess it sounds like you're putting them in a normal Facebook group itself.  Liz Tennyson: Yeah so I put them into the Facebook group itself but I also sell. Steve Larsen: Mm-hmm (affirmative)  Liz Tennyson: Right from my page I do have a running ad, for me, for my lifestyle company- Steve Larsen: Oh cool. Liz Tennyson: That is you know a recipe book, I have my- I even run ads to get people to know my page exist. I spend money on that every single day that doesn't make me any money except that it gets them to my Facebook page which then they can have a social group and....  Steve Larsen: I'm sorry we've got someone right out the window. Liz Tennyson: I'm looking around my room like, I don't think that's me.  Steve Larsen: Nope so I'm using, maybe I'll pause it in actual recording right here cause. It's the same lady, anyways yesterday, Russel was on a call with someone and he ... this lady always comes at the exact same time that we're always doing anything that has to do with recording at all, ever. She's always like trimming the hedges. It's never like she's mowing the lawn or something like that. She's trimming hedges- Liz Tennyson: On the other side of the window.  Steve Larsen: Literally- and she gives us the dirtiest looks on the other side of the window.  Liz Tennyson: Yeah, it is funny. You know if people don't know this is the way business works, they haven't been in business long enough. Like to have just like ... really? Like this is happening right now? That's just the way it works. Steve Larsen: She just stepped back into the parking and she like put her hands on her hips and she's like tilting her head making sure that it's all level. She doesn't know I'm in here right now looking at her.  Liz Tennyson: I'm pretty sure that she sees that you're in there. Let me see, is he still on that call? Let me go back and try it again.  Steve Larsen: I don't know she's wearing sunglasses and it's like dark out still. We're almost done, we're not done.  Liz Tennyson: That's just amazing. I feel like you need to go get a picture. Steve Larsen: And ... woo okay we're done.  Liz Tennyson: Okay she's done awesome. Steve Larsen: So for a 1:38, for a while. Anyways ... so- Liz Tennyson: I'm going to just really finish and say that I think that a lot of people, so they try to make things complex for two reasons. One they really don't, they just want to make money. Right? They're thinking of all the different ways. How are all these different ways that I can break even and make money right? Or two, they don't really have that idea of like, what is this function going to do for me? Like what is, if I build this funnel, what is it going to do for the person observing and what is it going to do for me? Where am I going to lead them? I think that that, being able to target correctly, saves me tons of money. Being able to do that research, spending time doing the research, if you don't want to spend the time yourself, pay somebody to do it. Right? Because you will save so much money on ad spent. Because I target the exact person that wants what I have.  Steve Larsen: Yeah.  Liz Tennyson: If you're not targeting that and you're just like "ah I don't know, like women would probably want this." You're going to waste so much money. Being able to target more specifically will save so much more money on the back end. Steve Larsen: That's awesome. I know we've been going a little while today and I just want to thank you so much for this. I actually wanted to ask, where can people find your book? That's not a small thing to go through and write a book. Liz Tennyson: So awesome. I want to tell you, although it was ClickFunnels that wrote the book. It was because I built an incredible funnel. It was before I even knew, like I didn't even know about free plus shipping. I just did a JV with somebody that wrote an original book and nobody had read his book and so he pitched me on it and I was like, "yeah that's exactly what I teach, that's what my books going to be about."   I built a funnel and I built it into a really easy group coaching program, that they got the book and they got the program and that first month, that first two weeks, I didn't even know how to like- we had it on Amazon. I didn't even know how to get it to people. When they were buying it, I literally using a gift card to in my Amazon account that was like shipping to someone else, so I have like 500 names in my Amazon account with their name addresses. Cause I didn't know. I didn't know how awesome the funnel was going to be... We sold over 580 books in two weeks and the only reason we didn't continue it is because I literally, I had two teenagers on different laptops, placing orders. I wasn't set up to be able to have 500 people buy. Because of that, the publisher was like, "Okay, we need to publish your book." They contacted me, which was awesome because two years ago they didn't care what I had to say. It was fun to actually prove like, "Hey I do know what I'm saying." I can help a lot of people and my book needs to be on bookshelves. That will be in mostly the Utah, Idaho area. Barnes and Noble does our book, Sams Club, Costco in the end December and in January. Of course it will be online, so I'm A Fit Mormon is the community and then of course I have my own personal Facebook page which is Liz Tennyson and yeah that's how they can find me.  Steve Larsen: Now what's the name of the book? Is it I'm A Fit Mormon.  Liz Tennyson: No so it's called Fit For Good. It's not even specifically for Mormons I just obviously have that niche that I speak to and help but it's Christian based, it's really with the premise to take anybody, not just women. Anybody from the idea of like weight loss and eating low calories right? Cause that's what the world tells us is part of like heath... To actually what's the intention behind wanting to get fit, what's the intention for me, I want to serve as many people as I can and I need a ton of energy. I need to feel good, I need to think clearly and so for me, that's my intention. That's the reason I stay healthy, that's the reason I stay fit. Taking people from the way the world tells people to be healthy, like the world tells you- Steve Larsen: A weird way to do it. Liz Tennyson: And to sabotage your body and beat yourself up and then don't eat anything, to okay, eat with intention with consciousness, pay attention to what you're doing functionality wise to be having your blood pump in your body and letting all your organs be able to do their own job. It's not like a boring holistic book, but it is a Christian based book... I talk a lot about being able to serve more people and being able to really feel and get inspiration from God that we can really go out and do a lot of good things and be healthy. It's called Fit For Good and it will be ready at the end of the year. Steve Larsen: Why is she back? She's looking at the same bush. Liz Tennyson: I just can't. Steve Larsen: This is crazy. Anyways, I want to thank you very much for jumping on this... I always take notes, I literally have a full page of notes. All the stuff that you said, "you focus on what is the actual funnel going to be doing for people", "build a culture around the product is really important", "do you know who you're selling to specifically and how it saves lots of money", you mentioned, which is awesome, "don't chase the shiny object", "stop, don't be so complex, be simple". Russell actually sat me down and had to talk about that a while ago cause I was all over the place. As soon as I did though and focused stuff started happening. It's fantastic.  Liz Tennyson: Yeah.  Steve Larsen: Anyways, thank you so much for all you've done. Fit For Good is the name of the book, they can go to I'm A Fit Mormon dot com  Liz Tennyson: Dot org Steve Larsen: Dot org. I'm a Fit Mormon dot org. Cool is there anywhere else people should go to follow you?  Liz Tennyson: Just on Facebook. I do all my stuff on Facebook or Instagram. Under Liz Tennyson and then I'm a Fit Mormon. Steve Larsen: Thanks so much Liz I appreciate you taking your time.  Liz Tennyson: Thank you. Steve Larsen: This was super fun.  Liz Tennyson: Thank you have a great. Steve Larsen: You too. Liz Tennyson: Bye bye.  

steve larsen: All right everybody, hey. I'm super excited for today. This is the first interview that I've actually done on, Sales Funnel Radio. It's actually one of the main reasons that I started this podcast. There's so many cool, silent, unspoken entrepreneurial heroes out there. I really, I just wanted to go expose a lot of those stories and share with you guys how possible it is to make a profitable sales funnel. Today, I have, actually one of my good friends, Ben Wilson, on the phone here recording. Ben and I actually have quite a history together. I'd say that I first got into sales funnels online with him, doing products with him. Anyway, I'm excited. We want to go through our story a little bit and share with you guys things you guys can do in your own business. Ben, how's it going? ben wilson: Absolutely good, man. Great to be here. steve larsen: Awesome, awesome. I was thinking back to the time when you and I first met. That was ... We were in college, that was back, what class was that? ben wilson: I think we were probably, Marketing 101, something wasting our time. steve larsen: Yeah. ben wilson: I remember leaning over and you were looking at Stripe, and I was like, "Most kids aren't looking at Stripe in class. Why is this kid looking at Stripe?" Then I leaned over and I was like, "Hey man, we should totally set up an API for you. We could get that going." You're like, "What do you know about Stripe?" I was like, "Yeah, man, I've set up Stripe." That was the start. steve larsen: That was the start right there. I remember I was making an e-book. ben wilson: Yeah. steve larsen: Yeah. That was my first attempt ever at making a landing page on WordPress, and I had spent two days trying to get this stupid theme to do what I wanted it to do. Yeah. That was funny. That project, I think I've sold two copies of that thing. It's on Amazon. ben wilson: That was a good book though. steve larsen: How did we get together after that though? What did we do? I actually can't remember. I just remember... ben wilson: I think we started bouncing ideas off as to what had done in the past. You started sharing to me about, I don't think you called it funnels at the time, you really started looking at affiliate marketing, and how to push products online without necessarily being attached. I think, I don't know if it was a clash, or some type of beautiful art piece. I always got attached, like, "Well, we have to brand it. We have to be attached to some level at what we're doing." You're like, "It doesn't matter what it is. Let's do it and we're moving forward." Just like a rubber band. Sometimes we'd have the snap, but the snap wasn't a bad thing. The snap was like, okay, I'll give up that I don't have to be that attached. You're like, "Okay, we can kind of brand it," and something would actually happen. Then we convinced our teachers. steve larsen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. ben wilson: I was describing this to someone yesterday. We convinced our teachers that what we were doing was a lot more beneficial. steve larsen: Than in class. ben wilson: Yes! steve larsen: I remember that. That was our internet marketing class itself, man. ben wilson: We missed ... I mean, we convinced several teachers... steve larsen: To not go to class anymore. ben wilson: To [call up the class 00:03:52] the class, and they're ... Oh man. I can't believe we actually pulled that off. steve larsen: Me neither. I was thinking about it. We drew up that plan. We got in our internet marketing and they were doing that stupid, SEO old school stuff. We both wanted to shoot ourselves. I noticed you were the other kid in the class that was just pounding their head on the wall. Like, "Oh this crap is so old. It doesn't work." ben wilson: Yes. I remember they were trying to teach WordPress, and they were like, "How do you do such and such?" I was like, every answer, both of us just raising our hands. steve larsen: Yeah. ben wilson: I was like, "Do we really have to sit here the entire time and build you a website? Can't we go build ourselves a website?" steve larsen: Yeah. That's funny. Then we wrote up that plan. It was basically a flow chart for pages. ben wilson: Yes! steve larsen: He said, "Yeah, go for it. Just bring a deliverable." Then we started meeting every morning for two or three hours. Way more than the other kids in class were doing it. I remember we made that first affiliate product. I think it was, Click Bank. Right? ben wilson: [inaudible 00:05:00] was it? Was our first one the weight loss supplements? steve larsen: It was something like ... No, no, it was the social media producer thing. We put a landing page together using some guys weird generator and put 50 bucks on it and woke up the next morning, saw that 50 bucks had come back, and I was like, "Holy crap! We didn't lose money!" We got 17 people to opt in, and we sold it. ben wilson: I was so stoked the moment we didn't lose money. That was the first accomplishments of, like, no way! steve larsen: How did we get with Paul Mitchell after that though? ben wilson: I think he was assigned to our class, and I had to go over ... steve larsen: That's right, you closed him. ben wilson: He was trying to do something with Facebook, and I noticed he had a lot more other issues than trying to do Facebook advertising through our class. Then we had an assignment that was to get 10 people to fill out the survey. You and I looked at each other like, "We could get a lot more than 10 people, but I'm not calling anyone." Right? Let's think hard of a way to get a lot more people. I think there ended up being, was there 1100 people we got to take the survey? steve larsen: Yeah. Everyone else got 100 or something. ben wilson: Yeah. I think they called their 10 people. steve larsen: Yep. ben wilson: Yeah. steve larsen: That was hilarious. Then we started driving traffic for them. Which, I can't believe we did that. Oh, and then the [Arhenis 00:06:32] Project. ben wilson: Arhenis. You and I were out for what, 72 hours straight building a website, and then come to find out, the guy didn't even mention his website that we had built for him after being asked by him to build this website. steve larsen: Gosh, that whole thing was so weird. ben wilson: We were like, "There's a million people watching right now, and the only way you're going to further your career is by sending people to this website, and you got 2 hours to do it." We sat, I sat, we sat there and even Paul Mitchell watching. They're like, "Okay, any time now, any time now." steve larsen: Mention, just say the URL, just say, and he never did. ben wilson: We're like, "We do not have to run any type of funnels. If you just by chance mention this email address that you paid $1800 for, if you could just mention it once." steve larsen: It would be great. Those of you who are listening, Paul Mitchell asked us to come build out ... They basically said, "Hey, we're getting on tv in 2 days, we need a website people can go to, and we need a lead capture system and all this stuff." This was ... Just mapping the same time, this was when ClickFunnels was still in beta. It was a while ago. It was way longer than that ago. Man, how long ago was that? That was 2 or 3 years ago now wasn't it? ben wilson: We're coming up on ... I mean, it's been 18 months since I graduated, and that was before my last semester. Yeah, at least 2 years. steve larsen: Yeah, yeah. Paul Mitchell, they hired us ... I think we're okay. I'm going to say names. This is a while ago now. They wouldn't pay us, and this is what I love about Ben. Ben looked over at me, and I can't remember the exact phrase. You know, I won't say the phrase he said, but you had this crazy look in your eye. You're like, "Dude, I'm going to go put one period in their code." I was like, "What?" I remember just watching you, and we were in the library on campus. You opened up the back end code, and you put one period in their PHP, in their code, and it white screened the entire website. I was like, "This kids a cowboy. This is awesome!" ben wilson: Like, that's it. Your website's done. You're not paying us, you don't get our benefit. Then, we set out to make Beauty School Index. steve larsen: Yeah. ben wilson: Do you remember that? steve larsen: Yeah. ben wilson: We were like, "We're just going to just give out free leads to every other beauty school for free, and not Paul Mitchell." steve larsen: We scraped 100, what was it like, 1,000 email addresses for them? ben wilson: A thousand email addresses. We ran a campaign to get beauty schools on board with us of how we were going to give them free leads. Our open rate was through the roof. steve larsen: We did a 77% open rate. ben wilson: Yeah, and we had a really big return. We asked people to fill out questions. I don't even remember the questions. I remember you coming back and being like, "We got to get them involved and we need their feedback. That way they're contributing and they're loyal to whatever we're going to do for them. That way they value the leads that we give them." I think one of them was, How is it, or what are you struggling with and how can we help you? steve larsen: Yeah. ben wilson: That's everything we have been doing, and everything I do now always stem from that question that you ask them. We've got to provide a value, so if we listen to them, they're a lot more loyal. We're like, if that's what you want, let's give it to you. steve larsen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. ben wilson: It started from there, and then I moved to Colorado, and it seemed out of sight and out of mind. That's where my life got dark Steven. No longer with you. steve larsen: I got obsessed with sales funnels at that time, and I started dueling for different companies in the area. That was good times man. Talk about a walk down memory lane there. That's awesome. Now you, I mean, it's funny. I can't remember, you sent a message over to [inaudible 00:11:04], would you look at this site. I was wondering if you could just tell everyone who's listening right now a little bit about your website, and what is it you do, and how you came about with that. It's pretty genius. At first, it was like, I had never heard of it, and then you were like, "Oh I have 2,000 subscribers a week later." Oh, now we've made a butt load of money already and not spend a dollar on ads. It's like, what the heck. I thought it would be kind of cool if you want, this is totally your brag moment. Just tell what happened. ben wilson: No, you're good. It's similar, I guess backtrack a bit. Steven and I also once ... Remember when we launcHed [SWOG 00:11:38]? Some of it stemmed from that. There's this new concept of Trilify stemmed from what we were doing at SWOG when you and I came up with a business, entered into a business competition, and we've really been doing it for a week and half. A lot of it was just driving traffic and getting, running people through a certain type of funnel which is so funny because it wasn't ... Neither of us knew what ClickFunnels, at least I didn't and I didn't never think of it necessarily like ClickFunnels, but everything at the time was exactly what is going on at ClickFunnels. We were running people through a certain cycle getting a certain amount of information each time. That way there was creating this loyalty. Similar process as to what you and I were doing with SWOG, is running through certain sales cycles. The concept is only running through affiliates. Affiliates, typically there is the affiliate program that you send out, and anyone can join and sign up. steve larsen: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- ben wilson: Where as, what we're doing is approaching... steve larsen: Like, specific ones? ben wilson: Very specific people who have followers already. Right? When they send out a tweet, they've already gained a genuine sincere following. We don't have to worry about traffic when they send out tweets, or a Facebook post, or making a YouTube video, or anything of that nature because they already have the followers. There's a certain amount of followers that we're trying to gather as well as a certain age group of people who haven't done affiliate marketing, they're not seeking to only do affiliate marketing. We're looking at it at a more of a, how do we provide value to them? They don't recognize how much value they can provide. Millennials are a perfect target because a lot of them are seeking more fame and if they can get fame and money without having to go through the typical college and Corporate America, and they can continue doing and being famous, even it's to several thousand people, they still consider themselves like a taste-maker. We look at those people, try to run some ways of how can we provide value. A lot of it is creating a brand for them or running through certain memorabilia designs that they don't have to worry about their backend. It's like an agency coming to a talent and saying, you keep doing you, and send people to your new "Websites." This is what's going to drive a lot of traffic. We just launched on June 9th. steve larsen: Just a month ago? ben wilson: Just a month ago. Came up with a concept and 3 weeks later we just threw together a Shopify because we didn't have to deal with PCI compliance. steve larsen: Sure, sure. ben wilson: Or any of the other reasons of our design. Easily threw it together, found a bunch of products that we could have drop shipped that looked pretty cool that we didn't have to necessarily have any products on hand. We weren't going to lose out on any up-front costs. It was simply, "Hey, it's brand new. It's going to take 3 weeks to get to you, and we're sending it to you from our Chinese suppliers." steve larsen: Right. ben wilson: Which was the beauty behind it. Suddenly everyone didn't have to care about Trilify, they cared about the person, and the person who had a brand within Trilify. steve larsen: You effectively have gone, and you created an e-commerce store, based around clothing that is totally outsourced to China? ben wilson: Completely. steve larsen: That's amazing, dude. ben wilson: Completely. We've got no products on hand, and we don't have any storage cost. We're not shipping anything, we're not wasting our time. steve larsen: So it's a huge drop ship operation basically? ben wilson: Completely. Now, we could definitely make a lot more money per product if we were to buy upfront. However, we also had, we wanted to come out with a hundred products and then start narrowing down, and then selecting which products are being purchased and obviously moving forward looking at finding a new fulfillment service that we could buy in bulk and then have someone else fulfill it. We're run ... We'll scale it as it needs to be but, we had a hypothesis of how much traffic would come, and our traffic was a lot more than we thought we had. We ended up doing 50,000 by the end of the month. steve larsen: 50,000 people? ben wilson: 50,000 people off of 1 tweet and 1 Instagram post. That was simply it. steve larsen: Wow. ben wilson: From there, all we were doing was, we needed ways to capture peoples information, filled up a MailChimp account within a week. That was when I called you. I didn't actually ever run into that issue before of not necessarily ... We had a lot of names before, we had a lot of information. We just had it on hand and we had scraped it and stuff. steve larsen: Right. ben wilson: More so of, I've got to now start dumping names out of this because I'm not, I don't want to start paying for MailChimp quite yet. steve larsen: Right. ben wilson: I was just exporting names so that I could continuing running a map free account. We're up to 10,000 names at the moment of emails, of people who've opted in. steve larsen: 10,000? Dude, a few weeks ago, you were like, "Dude, we're already at 2,000 subscribers." You've grabbed 8 more thousand subscribers in the past 2 weeks, or whatever? ben wilson: Correct, yeah. steve larsen: Oh my gosh. Man, that's amazing. Okay, so you're "attracting," people through authority figures. Pulling them in and then ... What's causing someone to subscribe? ben wilson: We want all of our, I'm going to call them a brand ambassador, that's probably the best way to say it. We want all of our brand ambassadors to take ownership of what they're doing. That way it's not a 26 year old guy behind the computer who's actually running. I got 2 other guys that are running this with me, and one's in production, and the other is an actual talent agent so it's a lot easier to contact a lot of these people because he's got the experience. steve larsen: Right. ben wilson: He knows what to say. We run through and have all of them take full ownership. This is something that they created, therefore, when they send people over to the sites, and there's this taste of that person. Right? This goes back to that branding. It's got to be branded. steve larsen: Right. ben wilson: Everything comes back to how this person is perceived by their audience and not how they think they are perceived. steve larsen: Interesting. ben wilson: It might be a little confusing so we look at, what is this person actually wearing in their posts? What is that they are into? Then, find similar pictures that we can gather to create the same aura, so it's another, on the social media means to finding more information about this person, or how this person that they already admire, that they can further their knowledge of someone that they look up to. That's kind of the approach behind it. steve larsen: You go and you ... What are you asking for, I guess what are you giving for someone to subscribe. You know what I mean? What's causing them to subscribe. From the 50,000 that have hit so far, I'm sure it's way more than that now and 10,000 subscribe, what's causing them to do that? Just to follow you? ben wilson: Literally, yeah. 10% off, and it says something quirky that probably a millennial would be really attracted to. Right? They're looking at this thinking, "This person I admire who's 18 years old, what's their lingo?" The lingo that pops up right away is, we've got an A/B split test. One of them is, "Let's be BFF's. Sign up here and we'll shoot you a 10% off discount on your purchase." The other one, a little more risque, but I like it. Which is working is, it pops up and says, "Let's be friends with benefits." It also has a 10% off discount. That one is killing it. steve larsen: These people are signing up for a 10% discount. That's not only saying, A: Follow us and we'll give you cool stuff. A 10% discount is implying that they're going to make a purchase in the future obviously, very near future. You're really knocking out more than one bird with the same stone. That's amazing. ben wilson: Yeah. They've all got on a drip campaign. We've got a ... Shopify is really nice, and I know ClickFunnels does a lot of similar things where you can do other affiliates, or similar products, or similar brands, and you can keep sending people to where they want to go. Right? Listen to where people want, follow their clicks, understand your analytics. We set up cross sales and up-sales where people are purchasing certain products with, and they're looking at other products. steve larsen: Right. ben wilson: Everything is an up-sale and that's really where we're making a lot of headway is it's all in the up-seller, it's moving people through a funnel. steve larsen: Yep. ben wilson: If they have a ... In a cart, we send out an abandoned cart. If they didn't do it from there, I would figure out what products that they had. All of this, there's a lot of programs out there that can help you understand what your customers want, and you just have to listen and find out ways to remind them as to what they came for initially. steve larsen: Absolutely. There's a, I can't remember if it's called the secret formula or what Russell Brunson calls it, but he said, "Basically all you need to do is find a raving niche who is willing and able to make purchases and then just give them that thing." It's as simple as that. It's not that hard, especially online. You create these virtual pieces of real estate and they just work for you. That's amazing. Do you mind, if I ask sales? Things like that, like numbers? ben wilson: Yeah, go for it. steve larsen: Of the people that are coming in, what percent are opting in right now? ben wilson: Percentage wise, it's low. steve larsen: Okay. ben wilson: Which is the humble pie I'm eating at the moment. I know it should be a lot better. We've had ... Dealing with Chinese manufacturers is a lot more time consuming than I initially thought. That's where I've got a lot of time. In this regard, out of ... Boy, percentage is dramatically low. If we've had 10,000 people who have opted in, we've had 50,000 to the site. steve larsen: So, 20%? ben wilson: 20% which... steve larsen: That's awesome. ben wilson: That should be better, Steven. steve larsen: I mean, it should be, but when you think about other industries and ... People get stoked. Most people have a 5% off on their rate, 20% is crushing it dude. I mean that really is awesome. ben wilson: I appreciate the lift up, I need that. Definitely, I know ... You know when you are doing something, and you're like, man, there's so much more I could be doing? steve larsen: Yes. ben wilson: That's I guess where the justification comes from. Definitely, 20%'s a good number in looking at what the [inaudible 00:24:13] rate is, but it's always that inner feeling. You've definitely got to trust that movement of flight. I could be doing more to convert. steve larsen: How many customers, purchasing customers have you had? ben wilson: We've had 175 as of yesterday. steve larsen: 175 customers purchased ... I'm pulling out my calculator on the phone because my brain doesn't do all those numbers. ben wilson: That's okay. steve larsen: Here we go. That's awesome. From all the subscribers, the people that actually do subscribe, you have about a 2% conversion rate. That's good. ben wilson: Yeah. steve larsen: I know you look at it and say, we need to do better, but you're not even paying for traffic, man. That's amazing. That's what blows my mind about this. You have a 10,000 person list. I mean, you go drop an email to those people, 2% go and purchase, and you make all this money on the backend also after you acquire the customer. That's amazing. ben wilson: I appreciate it. Yeah. We're starting to run some more campaigns on testing single products as oppose to just sending people to the whole store itself. steve larsen: Yeah. ben wilson: Which we're really excited about launching. We've got something coming out this Thursday, which is more of this memorabilia take on the individual, like you would going to a concert. Right? steve larsen: Right. ben wilson: We're testing out the single product that's more branded and specifically to the person with their name on it. We're excited to see if that changes anything. If the name now suddenly on the clothing as oppose to just similar items of clothing that the person wears. steve larsen: Yeah. ben wilson: We may have to do a round 2, Steven. steve larsen: Yeah. ben wilson: Thursday. steve larsen: That would be awesome. That would be awesome. It's trilify.com, right? ben wilson: Trilify with one L. T-R-I-L-I-F-Y. steve larsen: Okay. ben wilson: .com. steve larsen: Trilify.com. ben wilson: At the moment it's just at an MVP. It's just testing out for our, I guess our test run of an individual person, and then we've got a lot more affiliates in the pipeline who are watching what we're doing. We're keeping them up-to-date as to how we're doing it, and that gets them excited. They can see that we, that their influence is going to provide them with a lot more sustainable of a future with the amount of followers and they can continue doing what they love doing with us basically running the show. steve larsen: Yeah. ben wilson: Yeah. steve larsen: That's amazing. I'm looking at the site right now. I mean, this is fantastic. It looks really good. Yeah, definitely applies to or appeals to millennials and what they love and stuff also. Do you know what the average cart value is for someone who purchases? ben wilson: We're running an average of $40 a purchase. steve larsen: Oh my gosh. That's so cool. ben wilson: Our hypothesis, or our reasoning I guess, within our justification of why we think it's 40 is we set free shipping at $35. steve larsen: Okay. ben wilson: Which is pretty low, but yet again, our average purchase is $40. We think a lot of people are taking advantage. We're going to start creeping that number up and seeing if that actually changes and test the hypothesis that, that is the reason why the average is up. I mean, it can really only benefit us if we can average each purchase to $45 or even 50 and start seeing if that's going to move any further purchases. steve larsen: That's awesome. That'd be an interesting split test and this is super cool. I just want to recap just in case, because I get close to projects and I forget the coolness of them or something like that. You got 50,000 people by asking 2 people to drop a tweet and something else, right? ben wilson: The same person. steve larsen: The same person? You're out there tweeting people. ben wilson: An Instagram post, yeah. steve larsen: 10,000 opt in, you get a 175 purchase, average cart value of 40 bucks, so you've pulled around 7 grand for this thing and you haven't paid a dime in advertising. This is the classic awesome story. It's cool. ben wilson: I appreciate that. We're excited. we're testing each social media to see what kind of pull. Learning Instagram, at least of what we've seen is that there's not as much traffic. We've got a speculation it's because there isn't a link. Sometimes, or link in each picture. It's in the bio. Then at the same time, we also figured out that there isn't as much text that goes below. If you're describing the pictures that you have posted, we've learned put it in the first sentence, in the first line if you're going to try to get someone to do something. Below that, they typically won't see it in their feed. Twitter has driven most of our traffic which was more surprising than we initially thought. We're excited to, like I said, we're also dropping a vine and a YouTube to see how that affects our traffic as well. steve larsen: That's awesome. Hey, I don't want to take all your time. I just want to thank you for this. This is fantastic. Guys, this is Ben Wilson. After one month, one month! People try forever to get profitable, and after one month he's got this awesome result and awesome site. I guess, where can people head? It's trilify.com. Go ahead and opt in and you can see his sales process. Ben, I want to thank you for this. This has been awesome. ben wilson: Absolutely, man. Glad I could come chat and reminisce about the good ole times, man. Definitely miss those time for sure. steve larsen: I look forward to seeing your face all over The Wall Street Journal, soon. ben wilson: It'll be the millennial Journal. steve larsen: Awesome, man. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you later. ben wilson: Absolutely, dude. Bye.

Highlights of my conversation with Tejasawi Raghurama Growth Save 300 administrative hours per month Automates accounting for ecommerce stores Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India Increasing monthly recurring revenue and reducing churn Transcript Heather:    Hello. It’s Heather Smith here. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you are doing well. Today I speak with Tejasawi Raghurama which I’ve probably pronounce incorrectly but I refer to him as Tej. Tej is a growth hacker at ZapStitch. ZapStitch is a data integration platform for small business to automate data flow across cloud business solutions. They are automating accounting for a thousand plus e-commerce business from North America, Australasia, Europe by integrating Shopify, Bigcommerce with Xero. ZapStitch automatically imports sales orders into your accounting application’s invoices. Discounts, taxes and shipping rates are sync’d seamlessly which is something he emphasises in the show. An average business using ZapStitch saves 300 plus hours every month spent in manual accounting, freeing up their time so they can spend it with the customer and family. ZapStitch is the number one ranked and rated accounting add-on in the Shopify app store. Tej believes no human should do a machine’s job and small businesses can grow huge with automation. He places part by educating and working with customers. When not learning from business, you’ll find him watching South Park. He joined ZapStitch in February 2014 as one of the first employees there. He was inspired by the vision of the founders, the fundamental impact the way businesses manage tedious processes. I started by asking Tej who was his favourite South Park character and why. Tejasawi:       Awesome. That’s a great question to start with. I think Cartman because I’m fascinated by climatic and realistic people. I always look at the world around me, “That is good.” “That is bad.” But there are people who actually recognise it and live through it. I would see Cartman in South Park as being the most pragmatic and he is who he is. He doesn’t mould himself according to the people around him and he has his originality intact. Yes, he is cruel, I don’t recognise that spirit but I think he’s on his own. Heather:        Sensational. I don’t watch South Park so I don’t know the character but I thought that our listeners might find that interesting. I know that my son watches South Park but I don’t. Tejasawi:       Okay. So Tej, can you tell me a little about ZapStitch. Tejasawi:       Sure. ZapStitch automates accounting in commerce stores. In simple English, what we do is we create platforms like Shopify and Bigcommerce with accounting apps like Xero, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       ZapStitch enables seamless data syncing between those apps. We sync data for all the customers and anything related to the invoice and sales tax automation. What we enable at the end of the day is exponentially faster reporting in accounting and accurate data and peace of mind. I mean the most common feedback we get from our accountants and from business owners who use ZapStitch is peace of mind. At the end of the day, accounting shouldn’t be an intimidating step in the process, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       That is one feedback we often get. At the company level, our vision is to automate business apps across verticals. When we were founded … we are a cloud integration platform, so our long term two year or three year future is to integrate at least 300-500 business apps on the cloud. Heather:        Oh okay. Tejasawi:       We are starting with e-commerce and accounting because we believe there are immediate gaps in between them, and we want to solve as many problems in accounting as possible, and go in depth in accounting automation. Who are your typical customers? Tejasawi:       Typical customers are twofold. One is an e-commerce business owner or the business team of a 10-man or 15-man e-commerce team. The second end user is the accountant who has multiple e-commerce tools as clients or is working part time as the bookkeeper. Those are two end users but our business is somebody that’s doing let’s say a $2 million dollar revenue per year and who actually feels the pain of data entry, right? A typical business of where we work with spends at least 500 hours in accounting per month. If we can solve that pain point, I think that’s where our end customer is. Heather:        That certainly makes … if you can resolve 500 hours at your price point, then that certainly is of benefit to the client. Tejasawi:       Exactly. Where about are you actually based? Tejasawi:       We are based out of Bangalore in India. It’s called the Silicon Valley of India, so it’s the Bangalore start-up hub in India, yes. Where about are your servers based? Where are the data for your company based … for the client data based? Tejasawi:       We are based … we built it on EWS, the server side across EWS in Singapore if I’m not wrong but I need to get some technical knowledge there. The servers are on EWS and we don’t locally store data. Heather:        Okay, so it’s not locally stored. It’s always a question that people ask us. Tejasawi:       Yes indeed. Heather:        It’s an unpleasant question I guess but the customer is always going, “Well, where is my data?” “Is it in the clouds?” “Where is it?” So it’s important to know. Tejasawi:       Yes, just to add to that point, ZapStitch believes in transparency, so we don’t store any local data on any server for that matter. We only move data from A to B. there will be apps and I’m sure you’ve interviewed and talked to some where they’re stored locally and in the app they show the data, right? We enable seamless syncing of data and not storing of data. Yes, that’s a belief we are in right now. Maybe going forward when we add features like reporting inside the app we will look at storing data but right now we are only moving data and storing metadata like number of orders … Heather:        I thought it might be like that. What’s your internet connection like in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India? Tejasawi:       Internet connection is a problem maybe sporadically but we have good broadband speeds in Bangalore. We have a speed of let’s say 22/30mps. That serves our purpose and we haven’t felt the pain of internet speed at all. But sometimes the sporadic connection is due to the team load rather than the internet speed. When we grew as a start-up, there were logistical issues which were solved of course but yes, there is no problem with the internet. We are not consciously aware of the speed, yes. Heather:        Tej, you describe yourself as a Growth Hacker.  What does that mean? Tejasawi:       I mean that’s something I’m figuring out. Heather:        It sounds very impressive. I actually like that title, ‘The Growth Hacker’. Tejasawi:       Right, so how growth hacking works, it’s a term by an accounting marketer called Sean Ellis who is inbound marketeer and he has a start-up. What he says is like when you build a start-up, that is a predictable good … you can achieve. You can draw a straight line which is not a hockey stick but is like a 45 degree angle, right? What a growth hacker does or growth marketing is like it recognises certain bursts in the marketing cycle and exponentially recreates it. If the growth hacking is successful, you find an unconventional way of growing and you make it repeatable success. So that’s how you differentiate your start-up from the rest of the competition. You actually blow the competition off because you have tested and repeated success with an unconventional method. That’s what growth hacking, the term is coming from. Heather:        That’s interesting. I should mention in there … I’m guessing I’m right, you’re referring to grass hockey rather than ice hockey for our North American listeners which is … actually would he be referring to ice hockey rather than grass hockey? Tejasawi:       He’s an Australian guy so I don’t know. Heather:        Because they’re two very differently shaped sticks, I know that. Tejasawi:       Indeed. I think I get your point now because … Heather:        So I think it’s actually the ice hockey stick he’s referring to isn’t it because that’s the one with the 45 degree angle, whereas the grass hockey stick is actually quite … very, very short. Tejasawi:       I know it looked like that. Heather:        I’ll go and Google it and see if I can work it out afterward. You have, in the first year of launch, you managed to attain 250 paying customers with inbound marketing. How did you go about doing this? Tejasawi:       We have an install base of 1,000 stores but when the free trial ends, that’s how the paying customer starts. We are a SASS based B2B company, product company. At the beginning we were very clear that we were targeting certain markets where these platforms have good penetration. For example, US, Canada, Australia and UK, right, where the amalgamation or the integration can serve a purpose immediately. We targeted those and we founded the channels which were the app stores. As a company, we didn’t invest in a sales asset team. We didn’t hire any sales persons. We only invested in customer success. When I joined as a third team member in February of last year, I was straight away sent to customer support as a role. I didn’t go to marketing for the first four months. So what we learned from that is if you actually delight your customers from day one, they sell the app themselves. They write reviews. They talk about you. They recommend you to users and the Shopify system is pretty vital in that sense. People talk about their issues. So we actually focused on two things. One was the forums, community forums, across the business apps and the second is to actually get good reviews on the platform. People read reviews before they read features actually, often. Heather:        I completely agree with that, yes. Okay, let’s examine that a bit further. In terms of the forums you were looking at, what forums were you looking at? Was there a specific Spotify forum? Tejasawi:       Shopify and Bigcommerce … Heather:        Shopify sorry. I said Spotify. Shopify, yes. Tejasawi:       No, they’re very similar. Shopify has a very active business forum which is Shopify.com\forums. Even we actually got the business idea thanks to those forums because customers were talking about specific data, manual data problems, manual accounting problems. When you go to the forums, there will be these customers who talk about, “How do I move my data from Shopify to Xero?” “How do I manage accounting?” “What are the best practises of accounting?”                         We position ZapStitch as a thought leader in those forums saying, “We know your pain point and we know how accounting can be a pain sometimes and how our solution solves it.” So rather than out-selling, we out-educated our competition in the forum. That’s a philosophy we believe in is that if you related the pain point, we talked about how you can move data seamlessly between Shopify and Xero, and automate the reporting and just focus on business reports rather than actually entering data. The forums were a great place where people were actually talking about the problems and we just plugged in ourselves as somebody who knows what they’re talking about and we can solve it. Heather:        I think going on the forums is very smart. Also as well as it being authentic, I think it also probably gives you really good SEO because people go … I know I personally, I go in and search there, and I know people who have a high level of credibility and if they’re supporting a particular product I’ll go, “Okay, I don’t need to do extensive research on it because this person has said it’s okay, so I’m sure it will be okay.” Tejasawi:       Right. How did you encourage your clients to give you reviews? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good question. Many companies, product companies especially, have a way of irritating the customer in terms of reviews. They keep bugging the customer saying, “Why don’t you write a review?” “Give a link,” all those things. What we did innately or subtly was have a live chat support in our app. When the on-boarding happens, and TradeGecko is a great example where the onboarding is seamless, but when we started as a company we didn’t have that leverage of a beautiful design, an amazing out of the box design. We focused on simple and subtle design, and when the onboarding happened, the user got delighted and our automatic chat would plugin, “How did you find the experience?” “Do you need any help?” “What is the next setting you want?” All those things. As the engagement happened in the live chat, we started to see the customers delighted and we can actually ask for review. It’s about instant gratification rather than sending them mail or calling them and saying, “How did you like the app?” The live chat client helped us a lot. I would recommend it to any product company starting out because that’s a great way to learn from customers on the spot and also solve the problems instantly and also, of course, write a review if the user is delighted. Heather:        Yes, it sometimes amazes me that some of the companies are not as receptive to talk to an individual person. They’re like, “If you’re not a partner, I’m not going to talk to you,” and you’re like going, “Well, I need to talk to you before I consider becoming a partner.” Now, in terms of reviews, it sounds like you’re not focused on getting reviews on other sites. I know that Xero has an add-on marketplace and actually encourages people to review there. Are you directing people to go and review there? Tejasawi:       Yes, so with Xero, we just launched that Heather. We want to get as many reviews there but it’s just two to three weeks old and we actually started getting paying customers as well from Xero. I mean review becomes a natural … Heather:        Progression in the cycle. Tejasawi:       Yes, by-product of success. We want to ensure product success with Xero first and then the review I’m sure will be there but we are not biased in any platform as such. Heather:        So for our listeners, we’ll just share with them that ZapStitch is now on the US Xero marketplace but you’re also looking for approval on the other country marketplaces. Is that correct? Tejasawi:       Yes. I should give credit to Xero because they are one of the most active developer support forums out there. They’re very transparent in how they deal with partners like us. Heather:        That’s sensational. Tejasawi:       So unless customers actually say that sales type automation works with ZapStitch, they will not approve it. We have seen other apps which you are aware of, where community is like … you like your app, the customers like your app, okay you’re globally approved. Here it’s more like every country has a specific use case and unless you actually meet them practically and the customer talks about it, you are not approved. We had beta customers from the US and UK, so we got approved and UK should be very soon right now, and we want beta customers from Australia and New Zealand which is the biggest Xero user base, to approve it as soon as possible. That’s our main focus in February. Heather:        Yes, sensational. How many customers does ZapStitch need to be successful? Tejasawi:       As a B2B company we are focused on two metrics, right? One is MRR  monthly recurring revenue, and second is to reduce churn. Rather than talking about the number of customers, we’re talking MMR in at least our philosophy, so we want to get to at least 100,000 MMR by end of year or by next year, early next year. That’s how we are growing and our month on month, at least to reach that, would be 35, we are at 38 this moment. We are going at a good speed but that’s how we look at our growth. Heather:        Excellent. You’ve targeted multiple markets to penetrate the cloud based software specifically in e-commerce and accounting, what have you observed through that and what have you learnt through that targeting of the different markets? Tejasawi:       Right, so when we actually launched the beta product in 2013 end which is like December or November if I’m not wrong, I was not onboard. The founding team had tested it with Indian customers. The problem with Indian cloud or cloud eco system is they’re not very progressive or they haven’t understood the impact a cloud app can bring to their business. We still are believing in manual bookkeeping or CD based software of accounting, Excel sheets. The penetration was getting harder and harder so we naturally went to the most progressive marketplace which is the US. They already know the pain points they have and they do actually look to build a multi-million dollar business within one or two years. The e-commerce stores there are built on Shopify or Bigcommerce were looking at, “How do I grow faster?” Accounting needs to be fast, needs to be painless. “How do I find the solution?” “Okay, ZapStitch is there.” We got our first paying customers from the US, then Canada, so we started progressing in those geographies first and then UK and then Australia. So in terms of progressive eco systems for cloud software, we thought and we have analysed that US is by far the leader. Heather:        Oh really? Tejasawi:       Yes. In terms of multiple processes … they don’t look at one process to automate, they actually want to automate the whole business and focus on customer success, focus on sales, marketing, and the data is a burden to them. Right? They look at multiple apps to automate multiple sites of their business. Australia was a close second to that and Canada is very close to Australia. Heather:        I would have thought from speaking to people, and I don’t have any stats behind me, it would have been New Zealand. Tejasawi:       Yes, in terms of user base I’m talking. Heather:        Okay, so in terms of user base, I completely agree because they’ve got such a bigger number. Tejasawi:       Indeed, yes. I appreciate that because I was talking not in philosophy of approach to the business but in terms … I meant that, yes. Heather:        The user base number, yes. As soon as you get the US buying into anything, you expand exponentially don’t you. Tejasawi:       Yes, and I’m sure with Xero, we would test the New Zealand market much better because with Shopify and the other accounting app, we didn’t have much user base in New Zealand so we couldn’t get real data measured with that. But I’m sure Xero … I have seen the data that Xero is more in Australia and New Zealand already so that should be good data to work with. Heather:        Yes. How can customer service be a differentiator for start-ups in a competitive market? Tejasawi:       When you look at cloud based business, there’s no geographical limitation. For example: we are an Indian company but working seamlessly for a US audience, right? We work in their time zones. Our support team works at US and UK time zones. When you come to a company … company to a marketplace, you have to find a differentiator. It cannot be price always. You can’t be the cheapest solution out there. That’s not a good business model to work with. Heather:        Absolutely. Tejasawi:       What you want to do is you want to delight your customers and if your app is not at the self-serving mode in the initial days, customer success or customer support is the easiest way to get that because as I said, businesses want to talk to a human at the end of the day. They don’t want to just write them email and get a response. They want to talk to a human. They want to relate to their problems. They want to talk about their problems. Our initial days or initial growth has to be credited to seamless customer support and of course a great product which enables delight.                         I think from our learnings we can safely say that if you actually put in place tools to automate customer support, to have things like live chat, email automation, and then actually have a product which is centric to the user and not to a developer. You don’t need to be a scientist to use an app. If you look at those three verticals as customer success, you are already in a good path to grow outwardly so that would be our learning in that space. What tool do you use for your live chat? Tejasawi:       We use Olark. We have been a huge fan of Olark. Heather:        Olark, okay. What email automation do you use? Tejasawi:       For customer support we have two things. One is the support which is on Freshdesk and for customer interactions we use Intercom. What Intercom does is it gives you the app usage of every user, you know, “Has he done a sync? What type of data did he sync? Is he actually happy with the product?” All those customer analytics. We use Intercom and we send trigger emails based on the actions inside the app. That’s how our customer support cycle works, onboarding works. If you’re dealing with people during business hours in the US, it sounds like you’re not getting much sleep over there. Tejasawi:       No, we don’t work 18 hours a day. How we divide this is like the marketing and product team works in Indian hours and the support and the customer success team works in US hours. Heather:        Okay. Tejasawi:       As we expand into markets, I’m sure the whole team will find a challenge in the one or two weeks but we are a global company so we should act like one. Heather:        Yes. Do you have staff outside of India? Tejasawi:       No, we are a 15 member team in Bangalore in India. Heather:        That’s really large. That’s a really large team. Do you attend any of the Xero roadshows or Xerocon events, the big Xero conferences? Tejasawi:       Yes, we would love to because there are these industry specific events. I know as you mentioned people like you hang out there but right now we are not focused on that. That’s one differentiator we have … Heather:        Your support is online rather than showing up at those events. Tejasawi:       Exactly, we don’t have a sales team. Yes. Heather:        Sensational. Can you share with us some of the businesses using your solution? Tejasawi:       Sure. One of the most successful businesses who was an early adopter of Zapstitch  is Bolder Band. They won the Shopify build a business competition last year. Do you know about the build a business competition? Heather:        No I don’t. Tejasawi:       Okay, sorry. I’ll give a brief … what they do is Shopify promotes businesses who grow to a million dollar business every year. Heather:        Oh, and of course they’d know wouldn’t they. Tejasawi:       Exactly. It’s like a cross promotional activity. Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       What the build a business does is like you need to sell as much as you can in year one of your business, after launching your business. So whoever sells the most in that calendar year becomes the winner. Bolder Band is a Shopify store who launched in late 2013. When they adopted us, we were just one month old. Heather:        Wow. Tejasawi:       They had at least 200 orders per day, right? We were like blown away. Okay, this is a great store. This is a large store. They also became our product evangelist and they gave active feedback how to make our product better. How they function is like they have a very niche segment of customers. They sell head bands for people, you know, gyming and sports personalities? Heather:        Okay, yes. Tejasawi:       Who like anything – jogging, hiking and everything. They sell headbands and they grew to a million … I think they are now $3-$5 million dollar business within one and a half years. Heather:        Wow, I didn’t know headbands had come back in … had made a comeback. Tejasawi:       Yes, so they were one of the most successful lead customers and then Pop Chart Lab is one of the most creative businesses we have. They create charts on any topic. For example: how did Nike involve their shoes? How did [Wine? 00:27:15] evolve from 1800 to 2000. Heather:        So people then buy the chart from them? Tejasawi:       Exactly. Heather:        Oh okay, that’s interesting. Tejasawi:       So these two were the most [ugliest? 00:27:29] and biggest customers. There are many but as customer successes, these are the first two that come up to my mind. Heather:        Did you find yourself in the developer stage reacting to their needs? Tejasawi:       No. Heather:        They said, “Okay, we need this,” and you were able to implement something like that? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good question. As a product company building a cloud app, we necessarily don’t go by feedback from just customers. What we go by is data and market need. When we talk to let’s say five or six customers and they want sales tech automation, we build sales tech automation. But it’s not like building a customer solution for big clients or working with them over time to see what do they want and going in depth to their needs. We want to serve collectively as an ecosystem for Shopify users, Xero users rather than just a multi-million dollar business. Heather:        Yes. So if someone has your product in place, they’ve got Shopify, they’ve got Xero and they’ve got ZapStitch in place, what additional financial information can they attain through having that integration? Tejasawi:       Good question. How ZapStitch works is we don’t store any local data. We don’t generate reports in the app but what we do for example is let’s say … I think this is one of our differentiators is that the sales tax, the other apps, don’t go to specific sales tax and invoices. What these apps do is they have one sales tax rate and they apply it to all the invoices they sync. What ZapStitch does is it actually breaks down the taxes as is from the invoice and maps it to the Xero accounts for those sales taxes. That is automated and an accountant or a business owner just needs to go to the sales tax or account in Xero and just generate a report within a second. If you go to the manual side of things or non-automation, it would take at least five minutes to do for every invoice: entering the sales tax, mapping it to the right account and everything. So maybe one or two minutes is saved on every order. If you look at a growing business like let’s say Bolder Bands, they get 300 orders per day that would be 6,000 minutes, right? If you click a button, we can automate the data sync in ZapStitch, so they don’t even have to login sometimes. That happens seamlessly and the accountant just focuses on generating reports and accurate data and non-duplicated data. Heather:        Excellent. Tell me what the start-up scene is like in Bangalore. Tejasawi:       Bangalore is a hub of start-ups in India. It’s maybe the most popular city in India in terms of start-ups and of our national capital New Delhi is a close second if I’m not wrong. Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       How Bangalore works is a lot of product companies exist here. Product companies need investment early on, right? There’s a huge oversea and [internal? 00:30:58] investors community here that is eco systems like incubators and accelerators. We are still learning in the entrepreneurial eco system globally but in India at least, Bangalore is very progressive for start-ups and there are lesser challenges I would say. I’ll put it like that. Are venture capitalists coming from India or are they coming from overseas? Tejasawi:       Venture capital firm is mostly Indian who invest in Indian start-ups. They have global investors who are in contact with them and they actually scout talent but they don’t actually actively invest in Indian start-ups directly. As in an early investor but if a huge Indian venture capitalist has invested, then they see the talent, they scout it and the foreign investors come in. Heather:        Yes. I think you’ve told me this but I’ve forgotten. How old is your company? Tejasawi:       We launched our product of February 2014 and we launched our company in December or November if I’m not wrong. Heather:        So you’re coming up to your one year anniversary. Tejasawi:       Yes, my own and companies as well. Heather:        That’s amazing growth for a company that’s been around for a year. What have you learnt in that time of growing the start-up in India? Tejasawi:       One of the central things is if you want to build a fast growing or any growing start-up which doesn’t die in the first year, you need to focus on customers. One skewed emotion any start-ups have is they want to build a perfect product, right? What we had learned very early on thankfully is that if you actually build a minimum viable product for, let’s say, our market, actually the customer will do the rest of the thing. They will give it the requirements. The market will drive your product rather than you building the perfect solution. If you focus on customer success and actually giving a damn about them basically, they actually give you back and more than you actually ask for: so in terms of advocacy of the product, advocacy of your customer success, giving active feedback in terms of their product needs. I think that is one major learning and second challenge and learning is the marketing side of things. You want to build a repeatable engine of bringing customers, bringing progressive e-commerce businesses who want to try automation, who want to solve this problem. That has been one major challenge, you know, where do these guys hang out? Where do these guys talk about their problems? So building an inbound channel of customers is a challenge and we are still figuring it out but I think if we do our thing right, it’s just another start-up challenge. Heather:        That’s certainly interesting. I totally agree with you in what you’re saying in the focus on the customer. It does seem to be what a lot of people are saying these days is, “Focus on the customer.” I know sometimes I’m speaking with people, like I’m going into the start-up places and I’m like, “Have you sold this? Is anyone using this?” “No, no, I can’t show it to them until it’s perfect.” It’s like, “Aww, that looks like you’re putting a lot of money in that.” Tejasawi:       Also one thing is like no assumptions. We don’t assume that your customer is happy. You need data. You need customer interviews. You need everything to consolidate and, you know, actually generate actionable data rather than assuming you know customers are happy or you know they like this feature. Tools are important to measure everything actually inside the app. Heather:        Can you explain what some of those tools are that you’re using? Tejasawi:       Sure. For example, a classic case is Intercom. Intercom helps us analyse the product functionality: What is the customer actually doing inside the app? For example, let’s say our early customers came into the app, they set up the sync settings but they never ran the sync. If we see that the data shows that there is a time of login, there is a time of sync, and if their time between those two events is let’s say 15 minutes, we are on the wrong side of things. We want it to be less than 3 minutes or 4 minutes. He sets up that account and runs the sync.                         So the product team looks at the data and wants to change the design, and then the design team comes along and says, “Okay, this is the button that’s not very inherently …” Heather:        Intuitive. Tejasawi:       Yes. “So let’s make it intuitive. Let’s iterate on the design and make the onboarding time less than 3 minutes.” Heather:        That’s really smart. Tejasawi:       Also one thing it allows you to do … any such tool like Intercom, it triggers emails or contact touch points with events inside the app. For example, let’s say you have an error in the app, a chat will automatically come and say, “Okay, I saw you had an error in the app, how can I solve it? I am your customer success manager.” So rather than relying on the customer to get back to you, you have to be proactive in customer support. These apps let you do that because they can trigger events based on customer actions. Do the customers freak out that they think big brother is now watching them? You know, “Oh, I’ve made a mistake and then you’ve sent me an email telling me I’ve made a mistake.” Do they freak out about that? Tejasawi:       No. I mean it’s complete contrary. The most successful of our customers actually understand that we are thinking for them, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       Because when you deal with data integration, it’s sensitive data. If something goes wrong, you have to fix it immediately. So they are happy to let us fix it immediately rather than worrying about transparency or how did they know about it? Our customers are actually surprised in a pleasant way that as soon as they get an error, they are figuring things out and we are right there the solution. Are you able to actually jump in to actual individual accounts and sort things out if necessary? Tejasawi:       No. we don’t log into any accounts. What we do is we look at the metadata. For example, let’s say in an order case, the order didn’t sync. The development team looks at the metadata and sees okay, this is the date the order came from, this is the shop the order came from, so let’s read on that sync. That’s all we do from the backend. Heather:        Sensational. That’s really interesting. I think people will find that really interesting to listen to. I completely agree that it’s good to have the automated identifying of errors. I just know that some people are like, “Oh my goodness, they’re in my data, they’re in my data,” and their freaking out. So it’s good to have that conversation and be open with them but like I say to a lot of my clients, I just say as part of the sign up, “I’m letting the company automatically access your data.” But it’s not accessing your data, it’s accessing … if there’s a problem it will get sorted out a lot quicker than if we actually have to go through that manual process of getting it out there. Tejasawi:       Yes, but the more ideal case would be like … and that is a very common case. An ideal case is, for example, let’s say you are selling in multi-channels. You have multiple sales taxes across different regions, so you don’t know which setting to have in the app. What you want to do is like you are figuring out settings and you can ask the live chat support saying, “Okay, how do I solve this business problem with integration?” That’s the automation we have built in rather than just error resolution because that’s a very common case. The support is more proactive in business cases, how to integrate for your business rather than just broadly integrate to apps. Heather:        Yes, sensational. What does the future hold for ZapStitch? Tejasawi:       We were born as an integration platform. Our vision is to build a cloud integration platform across business verticals. For example, the next logical would be CRM or marketplace automation, for example: Amazon and EBAY. We want to logically progress through the verticals and integrate the most progressive apps and the most popular apps in those verticals. In a two year, three year time line, we see integrating 200-300 business apps across email marketing, CRM accounting, e-commerce. Heather:        It would be interesting to see because I know some of them … like I know I’ve worked with Amazon and it kind of works in an interesting way in that 10 of the transactions are normal and then one kind of like is a summary transaction and it never comes across properly and you’re going … and the client sets it up themselves perhaps and they come to you and they’re like, “Wow, 90% of it looks fine but then 10% of it looks like it’s going to take me hours to fix up.” Tejasawi:       Exactly. You know, you’re coming to the exact problem which ZapStitch is solving, is the reconciling of data. When you have different types of invoices, reconciling becomes a pain. What ZapStitch wants to do with Xero is become one of the very few solution providers which actually enable faster reconciliation and not just data automation. When we talk to one of our biggest customers, he had an Amazon store as well. This was the first point that he brought out that, “Bring support for summary invoice when you build integration because that is one of the major use cases in Amazon.” Heather:        Yes, absolutely. As soon as you have something in place that makes it easy to sell, it means you can sell so much more. Tejasawi:       Exactly. Heather:        Like when I was dealing with this client, I was just like, “Stop selling stuff because this is a nightmare.” It was just like creating this bigger and bigger and bigger mess. Definitely installing a solution that simplifies the accounting process means you have the capacity to sell more which is exciting for the business. Tejasawi:       Yes, and we know one of the … I followed the name of the customer once, this guy sells iPhone batteries. Most of the successful businesses we have are niche businesses: iPhone batteries, headbands, wine collections. Heather:        That’s the joy of the internet, isn’t it, that someone can go out and go, “I think headbands should be brought back into fashion and I’m going to sell them.” Tejasawi:       Yes, so this guy told us that his accounting team is spending money on watching Netflix movies more than accounting. He was very happy that we solved this problem but he was pleasantly not happy that his accounting team is now having a lot of fun which is good but … Heather:        Oh okay, so they’re under capacity now. Tejasawi:       Yes, he was saying, “I don’t want to fire people but this is how our team is, they’re having fun, I’m spending more time with my family.” I think the data is just a part of the business end. It shouldn’t become the business. When you actually integrate well, your customer should do what he likes doing, selling, customer success, or spending time with the family. Heather:        I think this is part of the integration process when it goes in. I’m not sure whether … do you have cloud integrators come in and assist with the integration process or are you doing that yourself? Tejasawi:       We have partnered with Shopify and Xero, so their APIs allow us to pull in and integrate any data we want for our customers. There are limitations of course. There are API limitations in terms of business use cases. Heather:        But would a consultant like me come in and do the integration or would a consultant like me come in and watch you do the integration and just sort of sit in the background? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good point actually. As a strategy of building the right product, we want to onboard experts and consultants but when you actually run the thing, use the app, it’s like the click of a button. But in the backend when we build features, for example summary invoice, we can’t know about the requirement unless I talk to somebody like you. We bring experts when building the product but not when using the product. The using is like click a button . Heather:        And they should be able to do it on their own. Yes, fair enough. Tejasawi:       Yes. Heather:        Thank you very much for speaking with me today Tej. I really appreciate it. Tejasawi:       My pleasure. Heather:        I’m sure our listeners have gained a lot from hearing you talk, especially if they have a Shopify client or are considering a Shopify client as something they’ll definitely look at. Now, I need to ask you before you go to see whether you know, what are the birds making all the noise in the background? Do you know what bird types they are? Tejasawi:       No, actually not. My mum is a bird enthusiast but I’m not. Heather:        They sound like seagulls but I didn’t want to be that bland and suggest that they would be seagulls. Are you near the water? Tejasawi:       No, so how Bangalore works, it’s a bustling city. Heather:        Okay, so it’s not going to be seagulls. You can send me an email sometime and let me know what the birds are. Tejasawi:       Sure. Heather:        It’s normally when I have these sessions my birds are noisier than anyone else’s birds. Tejasawi:       Yes, I think I heard in one part, yes. Heather:        My birds stayed quiet today and your birds went off on a racket. Thank you so very much for speaking with me today and I’ll leave links for how to get in contact with you in the show notes. I really appreciate it. Tejasawi:       My pleasure Heather. If I’m not pronouncing correct – Heather? Heather:        Heather. Tejasawi:       Great. I mean you are an inspiration. I want you to know that because when you maybe record and publish the podcast, very few people actually talk to you about it, right, I mean physically. So I wanted to thank you that you’re an inspiration to all of us and our team actually looks up to experts like you, your stories and the podcast is an inspiration. I wanted to make that very clear. Thanks a lot of taking the time out. Heather:        Thank you very much and hopefully it gives you an opportunity to hear the other add-ons and perhaps connect with them and learn from them and to move you from sort of cold to warm with these guys. Tejasawi:       Indeed. Heather:        Because we’re all in it together. Tejasawi:       Thanks a lot Heather. Heather:        Thank you. Cheers. Tejasawi:       I hope the seagulls were not too noisy. Heather:        No they weren’t. I like birds. They weren’t too noisy, I just wondered if you knew what they were. Tejasawi:       No, I’m sorry. I’ll get that. Thanks a lot Heather. Bye. Heather:        Thank you. Tejasawi:       Have a good day. Heather:        Same to you. Cheers Tej. End of Transcript Mentions ·        ZapStitch - http://www.ZapStitch.com ·        Bigcommerce - https://www.Bigcommerce.com ·        Xero - https://www.Xero.com ·        Shopify - https://www.Shopify.com ·        TradeGecko - http://www.TradeGecko.com ·        Sean Ellis http://www.startup-marketing.com/ ·        Emera ·        Olark - https://www.Olark.com ·        Freshdesk - http://Freshdesk.com ·        Intercom - https://www.Intercom.io ·        Bolder Band - http://www.bbolder.com   Contact Heather Smith Click here to sign up to my newsletter http://bit.ly/SignUp4Newsletter Listen to my podcast : http://cloud-stories.com/   Read my latest blog post : http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/blog/ Visit my website : www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com  Book time with me heathersmithau.gettimely.com/book    Subscribe to XU Magazine : http://www.xumagazine.com/ Subscribe to my YouTube channel : https://www.YouTube.com/ANISEConsulting Follow me on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU Join my FaceBook page : https://www.facebook.com/HeatherSmithAU  Connect with me on LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/HeatherSmithAU