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2 episodes with scott there
2 episodes with scott there
Live from Nelson Ford in Grand Forks, host Scott Hennen dives into a jam-packed episode filled with local power moves and political fireworks. Mayor Brandon Bochenski shares bold updates on economic growth, value-added agriculture, and a $450M potato plant (yes, really). State Senator Scott Meyer joins in to unpack legislative wins on property tax relief, infrastructure, and why Grand Forks is quietly becoming a national defense and innovation hub. Oh—and things get spicy when listeners challenge Scott's “establishment” credentials. From tariffs to EVs to whether Red Lobster's closure is the end of civilization, this one has it all. ⏱️ Standout Moments: [2:08] – Mayor Bochenski: “Let's make Grand Forks great again” and how he's actually doing it [12:17] – The $450M Agrista Potato Project: from Fufeng flop to French fry future [17:24] – Grand Sky defense campus: 900 jobs at $120K/year and counting [29:57] – Fred Wing's passionate definition of “Republican establishment” sparks debate [41:49] – Scott Hennen's fiery defense: “I've taken no marching orders—ever.” [57:49] – Senator Scott Meyer on the property tax cap and what voters need to know [1:21:00] – Adam Nelson explains the impact of tariffs on car prices and why EVs haven't paid off yet [1:30:02] – Scott: “There are two kinds of people: friends and potential friends.”
In this episode, we discuss the complexities of the energy transition with experts from Azerbaijan, Germany, Singapore and New Zealand. We hear from Peter Struck, Senior Project Manager at HPC, Ilkin Haji, Founder & Executive Director, Sustainera Solutions, Andrew Young, Group CEO, Envirosolutions & Consulting (ESC) and Scott Thomas, Solar Sector Lead and Geotechnical Consultant, Tonkin + Taylor. They discuss the unique aspects of their energy projects in their respective regions, helping to paint a picture of this nuanced topic across the globe. ---------Guest Quotes“I suppose Aotearoa and New Zealand is in a slightly different place to others in the world. We've got a reasonably high proportion of our energy currently classified as renewable. We're looking at 80 to 85 percent. So our energy transition isn't so much a transition to renewable energy, it's more of a continued growth in our renewable energy sector as we see a demand increase.” - Scott“There's a big project, for example, from Australia that will have the world's longest cable, about four and a half thousand kilometers, which will run from Australia all the way to Singapore. So you've got these sort of regional cooperation things beginning to happen, and that's all really being driven by this energy transition.” - Andrew“When we talk about the transportation, it is not a task of one country, right? In that sense, you need to work closely with your neighboring countries or the transit countries. One example, we are now planning to export green hydrogen and also gas to the EU. The route is that the pipe starts in Azerbaijan, it passes through Georgia and through Black Sea, it arrives in Romania, and through Romania it goes to the EU.” - Ilkin“In Europe, oil and gas companies, they are one of the main investors in renewables.” - Peter---------Time Stamps(00:00) The current energy transition landscape (02:06) Panel with Ilkin and Peter(26:43) Panel with Andrew and Scott(54:37) Key takeaways ---------Sponsor copyRethinking EHS is brought to you by the Inogen Alliance. Inogen Alliance is a global network of environment, health, safety, sustainability and ESG consulting companies working together to provide one point of contact to guide multinational organizations to meet their global commitments locally. Visit http://www.inogenalliance.com/ to learn more. ---------Links Follow Phil on LinkedInFollow Ilkin on LinkedInFollow Peter on LinkedinFollow Andrew on LinkedInFollow Scott on LinkedinHarnessing Renewable Energy Responsibly: The Role of Environmental Impact AssessmentsExplore Inogen Alliance's resources
In this special summer series spectacular, we unravel the fabric of reality with a deep dive into the mind-bending realms of time-altering films. From the thrills of 'Dreamscape' to the complexities of dream invasion, join us as we explore the fringes of fantasy and sci-fi. Whether it's discussing the nuances of '80s classics or contemplating the influence of these films on modern cinema, this episode is a must-listen for any film aficionado. Get ready to have your perception of time and reality thoroughly warped! lay another man's instrument without permission dream to rescue him --
https://www.somewhereintime.tv/insite.htm If you are a member if INSITE, apologies for our critique of this film as a Time Travel Movie. We are genuinely curious about your fan club and especially your Grand Hotel Shenanigans. While this movie had its flaws in our estimation, cult like dedication to a film is something we can all get behind. timepoppdo@gmail.com Please Like, Subscribe, and tell a friend about Time Pop. Want more Time Pop? Check out patreon.com/SoundsAwesome More Podcasts at whatsoundsawesome.com/ Now Available On YouTube @whatsoundsawesome Send Questions, Comments, and Recommendations to timepoppod@gmail.com Right now for $3 you can listen to many exclusive podcasts and be in prime position to receive an exclusive episode every two weeks. Thank you Patrons, please tell a friend where they can get more Time Pop. Get inspired by our Top Ten time travel movie lists Check out @time_pop_pod on Instagram, Twitter, & TikTok Strap in for a journey through the heartstrings and the space-time continuum in this emotionally charged episode of "Time Pop: The Time Travel Movie Podcast." We're diving into the 1980 romantic drama, "Somewhere in Time," where Christopher Reeve's quest for love transcends the bounds of time itself.
What is MySQL HeatWave? How do I get certified in it? Where do I start? Listen to Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with MySQL Developer Scott Stroz, answer all these questions and more on this week's episode of the Oracle University Podcast. MySQL Document Store: https://oracleuniversitypodcast.libsyn.com/mysql-document-store Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! For the last two weeks, we've been having really exciting discussions on everything AI. We covered the basics of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and we're taking a short break from that today to talk about the new MySQL HeatWave Implementation Associate Certification with MySQL Developer Advocate Scott Stroz. 00:59 Nikita: You may remember Scott from an episode last year where he came on to discuss MySQL Document Store. We'll post the link to that episode in the show notes so you can listen to it if you haven't already. Lois: Hi Scott! Thanks for joining us again. Before diving into the certification, tell us, what is MySQL HeatWave? 01:19 Scott: Hi Lois, Hi Niki. I'm so glad to be back. So, MySQL HeatWave Database Service is a fully managed database that is capable of running transactional and analytic queries in a single database instance. This can be done across data warehouses and data lakes. We get all the benefits of analytic queries without the latency and potential security issues of performing standard extract, transform, and load, or ETL, operations. Some other MySQL HeatWave database service features are automated system updates and database backups, high availability, in-database machine learning with AutoML, MySQL Autopilot for managing instance provisioning, and enhanced data security. HeatWave is the only cloud database service running MySQL that is built, managed, and supported by the MySQL Engineering team. 02:14 Lois: And where can I find MySQL HeatWave? Scott: MySQL HeatWave is only available in the cloud. MySQL HeatWave instances can be provisioned in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure. Now, some features though are only available in Oracle Cloud, such as access to MySQL Document Store. 02:36 Nikita: Scott, you said MySQL HeatWave runs transactional and analytic queries in a single instance. Can you elaborate on that? Scott: Sure, Niki. So, MySQL HeatWave allows developers, database administrators, and data analysts to run transactional queries (OLTP) and analytic queries (OLAP). OLTP, or online transaction processing, allows for real-time execution of database transactions. A transaction is any kind of insertion, deletion, update, or query of data. Most DBAs and developers work with this kind of processing in their day-to-day activities. OLAP, or online analytical processing, is one way to handle multi-dimensional analytical queries typically used for reporting or data analytics. OLTP system data must typically be exported, aggregated, and imported into an OLAP system. This procedure is called ETL as I mentioned – extract, transform, and load. With large datasets, ETL processes can take a long time to complete, so analytic data could be “old” by the time it is available in an OLAP system. There is also an increased security risk in moving the data to an external source. 03:56 Scott: MySQL HeatWave eliminates the need for time-consuming ETL processes. We can actually get real-time analytics from our data since HeatWave allows for OLTP and OLAP in a single instance. I should note, this also includes analytic from JSON data that may be stored in the database. Another advantage is that applications can use MySQL HeatWave without changing any of the application code. Developers only need to point their applications at the MySQL HeatWave databases. MySQL HeatWave is fully compatible with on-premise MySQL instances, which can allow for a seamless transition to the cloud. And one other thing. When MySQL HeatWave has OLAP features enabled, MySQL can determine what type of query is being executed and route it to either the normal database system or the in-memory database. 04:52 Lois: That's so cool! And what about the other features you mentioned, Scott? Automated updates and backups, high availability… Scott: Right, Lois. But before that, I want to tell you about the in-memory query accelerator. MySQL HeatWave offers a massively parallel, in-memory hybrid columnar query processing engine. It provides high performance by utilizing algorithms for distributed query processing. And this query processing in MySQL HeatWave is optimized for cloud environments. MySQL HeatWave can be configured to automatically apply system updates, so you will always have the latest and greatest version of MySQL. Then, we have automated backups. By this, I mean MySQL HeatWave can be configured to provide automated backups with point-in-time recovery to ensure data can be restored to a particular date and time. MySQL HeatWave also allows us to define a retention plan for our database backups, that means how long we keep the backups before they are deleted. High availability with MySQL HeatWave allows for more consistent uptime. When using high availability, MySQL HeatWave instances can be provisioned across multiple availability domains, providing automatic failover for when the primary node becomes unavailable. All availability domains within a region are physically separated from each other to mitigate the possibility of a single point of failure. 06:14 Scott: We also have MySQL Lakehouse. Lakehouse allows for the querying of data stored in object storage in various formats. This can be CSV, Parquet, Avro, or an export format from other database systems. And basically, we point Lakehouse at data stored in Oracle Cloud, and once it's ingested, the data can be queried just like any other data in a database. Lakehouse supports querying data up to half a petabyte in size using the HeatWave engine. And this allows users to take advantage of HeatWave for non-MySQL workloads. MySQL AutoPilot is a part of MySQL HeatWave and can be used to predict the number of HeatWave nodes a system will need and automatically provision them as part of a cluster. AutoPilot has features that can handle automatic thread pooling and database shape predicting. A “shape” is one of the many different CPU, memory, and ethernet traffic configurations available for MySQL HeatWave. MySQL HeatWave includes some advanced security features such as asymmetric encryption and automated data masking at query execution. As you can see, there are a lot of features covered under the HeatWave umbrella! 07:31 Did you know that Oracle University offers free courses on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure? You'll find training on everything from cloud computing, database, and security to artificial intelligence and machine learning, all free to subscribers. So, what are you waiting for? Pick a topic, leverage the Oracle University Learning Community to ask questions, and then sit for your certification. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 08:02 Nikita: Welcome back! Now coming to the certification, who can actually take this exam, Scott? Scott: The MySQL HeatWave Implementation Associate Certification Exam is designed specifically for administrators and data scientists who want to provision, configure, and manage MySQL HeatWave for transactions, analytics, machine learning, and Lakehouse. 08:22 Nikita: Can someone who's just graduated, say an engineering graduate interested in data analytics, take this certification? Are there any prerequisites? What are the career prospects for them? Scott: There are no mandatory prerequisites, but anyone who wants to take the exam should have experience with MySQL HeatWave and other aspects of OCI, such as virtual cloud networks and identity and security processes. Also, the learning path on MyLearn will be extremely helpful when preparing for the exam, but you are not required to complete the learning path before registering for the exam. The exam focuses more on getting MySQL HeatWave running (and keeping it running) than accessing the data. That doesn't mean it is not helpful for someone interested in data analytics. I think it can be helpful for data analysts to understand how the system providing the data functions, even if it is at just a high level. It is also possible that data analysts might be responsible for setting up their own systems and importing and managing their own data. 09:23 Lois: And how do I get started if I want to get certified on MySQL HeatWave? Scott: So, you'll first need to go to mylearn.oracle.com and look for the “Become a MySQL HeatWave Implementation Associate” learning path. The learning path consists of over 10 hours of training across 8 different courses. These courses include “Getting Started with MySQL HeatWave Database Service,” which offers an introduction to some Oracle Cloud functionality such as security and networking, as well as showing one way to connect to a MySQL HeatWave instance. Another course demonstrates how to configure MySQL instances and copy that configuration to other instances. Other courses cover how to migrate data into MySQL HeatWave, set up and manage high availability, and configure HeatWave for OLAP. You'll find labs where you can perform hands-on activities, student and activity guides, and skill checks to test yourself along the way. And there's also the option to Ask the Instructor if you have any questions you need answers to. You can also access the Oracle University Learning Community and discuss topics with others on the same journey. The learning path includes a practice exam to check your readiness to pass the certification exam. 10:33 Lois: Yeah, and remember, access to the entire learning path is free so there's nothing stopping you from getting started right away. Now Scott, what does the certification test you on? Scott: The MySQL HeatWave Implementation exam, which is an associate-level exam, covers various topics. It will validate your ability to identify key features and benefits of MySQL HeatWave and describe the MySQL HeatWave architecture; identify Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) requirements and the different methods of connecting to a MySQL HeatWave instance; manage the automatic backup process and restore database systems from these backups; configure and manage read replicas and inbound replication channels; import data into MySQL HeatWave; configure and manage high availability and clustering of MySQL HeatWave instances. I know this seems like a lot of different topics. That is why we recommend anyone interested in the exam follow the learning path. It will help make sure you have the exposure to all the topics that are covered by the exam. 11:35 Lois: Tell us more about the certification process itself. Scott: While the courses we already talked about are valuable when preparing for the exam, nothing is better than hands-on experience. We recommend that candidates have hands-on experience with MySQL HeatWave with real-world implementations. The format of the exam is Multiple Choice. It is 90 minutes long and consists of 65 questions. When you've taken the recommended training and feel ready to take the certification exam, you need to purchase the exam and register for it. You go through the section on things to do before the exam and the exam policies, and then all that's left to do is schedule the date and time of the exam according to when is convenient for you. 12:16 Nikita: And once you've finished the exam? Scott: When you're done your score will be displayed on the screen when you finish the exam. You will also receive an email indicating whether you passed or failed. You can view your exam results and full score report in Oracle CertView, Oracle's certification portal. From CertView, you can download and print your eCertificate and even share your newly earned badge on places like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 12:38 Lois: And for how long does the certification remain valid, Scott? Scott: There is no expiration date for the exam, so the certification will remain valid for as long as the material that is covered remains relevant. 12:49 Nikita: What's the next step for me after I get this certification? What other training can I take? Scott: So, because this exam is an associate level exam, it is kind of a stepping stone along a person's MySQL training. I do not know if there are plans for a professional level exam for HeatWave, but Oracle University has several other training programs that are MySQL-specific. There are learning paths to help prepare for the MySQL Database Administrator and MySQL Database Developer exams. As with the HeatWave learning paths, the learning paths for these exams include video tutorials, hands-on activities, skill checks, and practice exams. 13:27 Lois: I think you've told us everything we need to know about this certification, Scott. Are there any parting words you might have? Scott: We know that the whole process of training and getting certified may seem daunting, but we've really tried to simplify things for you with the “Become a MySQL HeatWave Implementation Associate” learning path. It not only prepares you for the exam but also gives you experience with features of MySQL HeatWave that will surely be valuable in your career. 13:51 Lois: Thanks so much, Scott, for joining us today. Nikita: Yeah, we've had a great time with you. Scott: Thanks for having me. Lois: Next week, we'll get back to our focus on AI with a discussion on deep learning. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off. 14:07 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.
Joining Mark are: Landon HarrisErik PetersonTate LitchfieldScott ToddThey cover:The first passive income wall and what to do when you hit itHow to get to the next level in your businessWhen you need to add to your resourcesHow to get unstuck from numbers and comparisonWhen to stop and think and when to keep movingOther business challengesScott also provides inspiring anecdotes and pearls of wisdom to help your mindset when things get hard. TIP OF THE WEEKLandon: It's hard to answer the question about what we are automating in the business. However, one thing that I think is standard to automate is leads. I found a blog post about how to use Zaps (automated with Zapier) for email or Slack for your teams.Mark and Scott:There is a Zapier alternative. It's called Pabbly Connect. You can pay for lifetime access. You can Google “Lifetime access for Pabbly.” It's a bargain. WANT TO LISTEN MORE?Did you enjoy this episode? If you did, check out another AOPI episode to learn how to generate passive income through rental properties..Are you ready to learn more about land investing? Just click HERE to schedule a call. Isn't it time to create passive income so you can work where you want when you want, and with whomever you want?
This week on the Get More Smarter Podcast, Republicans are losing municipal races across the country as Donald Trump continues to destroy the party, and one of those races is in what at least used to be Colorado's conservative stronghold. Friend of the pod, Senator John Hickenlooper, seems to share our ranking for our 8th favorite member of Congress from Colorado -- and he has a banger OpEd in the Grand Junction Sentinel this week to prove it. Scott “There is No" Bottoms, who is either our 18th or 19th favorite Republican in the Colorado House, gives up the game on GOP obstruction. And someone with a podcast less popular than ours is lying to his audience, himself, or more likely both. But first...perhaps we could call this his exit interview...Alan Salazar, Chief of Staff to Denver Mayor Michael Hancock and the godfather of top Democratic Staff in Colorado comes back on the pod to talk all things local government -- including the final days of the race for Denver Mayor.
Upcoming Event!How Can Mindfulness Give You a More Abundant Retirement?Are you ready to let go of anxiety and find the peace of mind you seek as you prepare for your golden years? Your Answer Lies in These 5 Critical Retirement Questions: Am I on track for financial independence?What do I need to do to get on track?How do I design a mindful investing portfolio?How do I manage that portfolio and my income over time through changing markets?How do I prepare non-financially for retirement? What are the dominant variables in a happy retirement?Learn more: https://courses.mindful.money/mindful-retirement-review-workshop/Scott Jacobs has been a financial advisor for twenty-eight years. He's done this work with lots of clients who have privately held businesses, pre-IPO stock, options, and RSUs. Prior to joining EP Wealth Advisors in 2021, Scott worked for a number of the largest Wall Street firms, including UBS, Prudential and Wells Fargo. He's been serving LGBTQ families, technology employees and small business owner clients since his days at PaineWebber in 1994. Scott loves educating the public in a way that's down to earth and jargon-free. Today, Scott and Jonathan discuss what the modern-day financial advisor does, the difference between an advisor and a fiduciary, questions to ask a prospective financial advisor, and best practices for correcting bad financial behaviors.
Today I'm talking with Dr. Scott Griffiths. Scott is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He leads the Physical Appearance Research Team, a multidisciplinary group of researchers and health professionals who investigate body image, appearance related stigmas and discrimination, appearance enhancing substances, appearance enhancement and appearance related psychological disorders such as eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder.I wanted to talk to Scott about the phenomenon of muscle dysmorphia, a disorder that sits somewhere between a body dysmorphic disorder and an eating disorder that tends to impact cis boys and men. It's sometimes characterised as the male anorexia. Of course cis boys and men get anorexia too, but muscle dysmorphia is a bit different. It's sometimes known as Bigorexia. It's when an individual doesn't believe that they're big enough or sufficiently muscular to the point that they devote their lives to gains and progress in the gym. They might follow extremely strict diets which prioritise protein and cut out a lot of carbohydrates, and in some cases men can turn to using anabolic steroids, which have some really serious long-term effects for both physical and mental health as you'll hear us talking about. A lot of Scott's research is about the ways that social media, and particularly TikTok feeds people who are vulnerable to eating disorders or muscle dysmorphia, more and more content that upholds unrealistic body and image based ideals, and actually fuels eating disorders.It's really interesting research to hear about, but as a parent and as someone who works with eating disorders, it's really terrifying.Find out more about Scott's work here.Follow his work on Twitter here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here's the transcript in full:Scott: When you're on your feed and TikTok is delivering videos for you to consume, all of the reference points you are getting from content that it's popular and influential and that people are responding to it. It's so divorced from reality that you've got a greater pool of people comparing and feeling poorly about themselves and now investing in the general necessity of looking better.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome to Can I Have Another Snack? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet, registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. We're having conversations about how we nourish ourselves and our kids in all senses of the word in the hellscape that is diet culture.Today I'm talking with Dr. Scott Griffiths. Scott is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He leads the Physical Appearance Research Team, a multidisciplinary group of researchers and health professionals who investigate body image, appearance related stigmas and discrimination, appearance enhancing substances, appearance enhancement and appearance related psychological disorders such as eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder.I wanted to talk to Scott about the phenomenon of muscle dysmorphia, a disorder that sits somewhere between a body dysmorphic disorder and an eating disorder that tends to impact cis boys and men. It's sometimes characterized as the male anorexia, which of course cis boys and men get anorexia too. But muscle dysmorphia is a bit different. It's sometimes known as bigorexia. It's when an individual doesn't believe that they're big enough or sufficiently muscular to the point that they devote their lives to gains and progress in the gym. They might follow extremely strict diets which prioritize protein and cut out a lot of carbohydrates. And in some cases men can turn to using anabolic steroids, which have some really serious long-term effects for both physical and mental health as you'll hear us talking about. A lot of Scott's research is about the ways that social media, and particularly TikTok feeds people who are vulnerable to eating disorders or muscle dysmorphia, more and more content that upholds unrealistic body and image based ideals and actually fuels eating disorders.It's really interesting research to hear about, but as a parent and as someone who works with eating disorders, it's. Really terrifying. So you'll notice that this episode has a slightly different vibe to some of the other episodes this season. I'm asking Scott more about his research on muscle dysmorphia rather than his, you know, personal story. And I'm curious to hear what you think of this episode and get some feedback from you as to whether you'd like more interviews with academics, researchers and practitioners with a particular kind of expertise or on a particular topic like this, in addition to hearing people's lived experience. So if you want, you can drop me a comment over on Substack underneath this episode, um, which you can find at laurathomas.substack.com.And while I have you here, just a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is entirely listener and reader supported, but in order to be able to cover the costs of admin and people and pay guests and contributors. A lot of my time is devoted to other work outside of the newsletter. That means I have less time to bring deeply researched essays as well as thoughtful interviews here on the podcast. I'd love to be able to devote most of my time to the work and the community that we're building here, but that means I need a lot more of you to consider becoming a paid subscriber. I also know that that's a big ask right now. So for the month of March, I'm running a one off spring sale on Can I Have another Snack subscriptions. They are 20% off, so for this month only, if you subscribe, you'll pay four pounds a month or 40 pounds for the year instead of five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year, which is a bargain. I'm not going to be running this good a deal for the rest of the year, so now is the time to cash in. If you've been sitting on the fence it's time to make a move. I'll put a subscription link in the show notes. You can also gift a subscription to a friend or family member or a coworker and get that same deal. And remember that if you want to sign up with some pals or like your NCT group from five years ago, you always get 20% off of group subscriptions. So I will also link to group subscriptions in the show notes.Okay, team, I appreciate your support and hopefully one day we can make this work more sustainable, so I can give up my side hustles. Thank you so much for being here. Here is my interview with Scott Griffiths.MAIN EPISODELaura: All right, Scott, I would love it if you could start by telling us a little bit about how you got interested in studying appearance related psychological disorders like body dysmorphic disorder and eating disorders.Scott: When I was a teenager, I worked at a cinema and someone who worked there who was kind of a friend of mine, a young woman, she had anorexia, and I remember at the time being completely mystified by her ailment and predicament. And it's probably quite stigmatizing in retrospect because it seemed to me as a, you know, kind of a fool, that the solution to her problem was readily at hand.Like she was really thin and, and just needed to eat. And that kind of set my thinking in motion about the really complex feelings and beliefs that folks can have about their body and their eating, et cetera. And it was when I was in undergraduate doing a, a Bachelor of Psychology that I had a couple of friends, both young men who would say things to me that would remind me of that young woman who had anorexia in the cinema and things they would say were similar, but the manifestations of them were different. The kinds of eating and, and training and the bodies that they wanted for themselves were all different, but it's core, it seemed like the same kind of issue and disorder. So I think that was what got me interested. And it's developed a lot since then.Laura: Yeah, it's so interesting. I think you know that I work with people with eating disorders and something I often hear from them is like, well, it just, how misunderstood that the disorder is, and from the outside, especially to anyone who knows nothing about eating disorders, it seems like, yeah, it's really simple just to eat more food.But I think you've been on your own learning journey with that and, and come through the other side and realized it's, it's a lot more complicated than that. These people would, you know, if, if it was just, just as easy as eating food, they would do it. But unfortunately that's, that's not the case.Sorry, that was a little tangent cuz I think you were touching on something that I know is really important to those with lived experience of eating disorders. And then kind of moving further along, it's really interesting that you saw the parallels between anorexia nervosa and then what I think you would probably characterize as body dysmorphic disorder. Which is the same but different. And maybe the same is too much of a stretch. But it's similar, but also different. So I'm wondering for people who are unfamiliar with body dysmorphic disorder, can you tell us what exactly it is and maybe some of the, the des describing more of the parallels between something like anorexia nervosa or what we would consider to be a more traditional in inverted commas eating disorder versus what we see in the BDD presentation.Scott: When I was talking with those, those friends, those young men when I was at university the disorder that would best capture what was going on for them is something we call muscle dysmorphia, which is a subtype of body dysmorphia disorder, which kind of sits alongside eating disorders. They are distinct, but they're often comorbid.They both have body image often as a central element. So body dysmorphic disorder, the cardinal symptom is you believing there is a defect in your appearance. It can be completely imaginary or it can be real, but the severity of it in your head is almost always much more severe than it is in actual objective reality.And in the context of muscle dysmorphia, which many people, including myself, see more as an eating disorder than body dysmorphic disorder. The defect in appearance is guys, some girls, but often guys who objectively are, are very large and muscular, but when they look in the mirror, what they see reflected back to them is someone who is scrawny, out of shape or overweight.Just a big difference to how they actually are not at all dissimilar to anorexia where we have people, often young women predominantly, but also some men who look in the mirror and see someone reflected back to them who is very different to how they actually look.Laura: It's interesting that you said that you characterize muscle dysmorphic disorder as more similar to an eating disorder than to true body dysmorphic disorder, and I'm curious to hear a little bit more about why you feel like it fits more into that category.Scott: Yeah. To be fair, when people debate about whether muscle dysmorphia ought to be a body dysmorphic disorder as it currently is classified or an eating disorder, it feels a little bit like a semantic exercise.Laura: Absolutely.Scott: The real push and importance in research as far as I'm concerned, is trying to understand both disorders and develop better treatments and trying to figure out which, which category where there's so much overlap between these two categories already, it belongs to, feels a little like a moot point, but to, to answer the question. For me, it's because when you look at the central pathology that motivates folks with muscle dysmorphia, the low self-esteem, especially around appearance, the kinds of things they believe with respect to why they have to look a certain way in order to have worth and be loved.The attention given to dieting and to exercise and the inability to tolerate deviations from that, the need to constantly progress, the perfectionism, it's all there. It all feels like different sides of the same coin. And when I speak to people, including yourself and your audience, it feels to me like explaining away muscle dysmorphia as one manifestation of an eating disorder, kind of like anorexia, or the reverse of it is just an easy way to see how it is that eating disorders are so much more than just thinness, that they can manifest in all sorts of different ways depending on the types of bodies that people feel compelled to achieve for themselves.Laura: Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. And I'm, I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about sort of, you know, maybe not with going with, without going into tons and tons of detail that might be upsetting to hear, but just tell us a little bit about, a bit more about you know, how would you know if someone had muscle dysmorphic disorder? You know, I'm thinking about parents who, you know, what are the signs and symptoms that someone might want to look out for that are sort of red flags, if you will.Scott: Got you. So, when you're trying to identify red flags, some muscle dysmorphia, a useful starting point is to recognize that almost everything that is common in muscle dysmorphia can exist and be benign. So you can train five, six days a week every day of the week if you want. And it's completely fine, as long as it's working for you.You can diet right, and it can be fine. Not a psychological disorder if it's working for you. It's not encouraging people to go and do it, but it's not a psychological disorder to do it in muscle dysmorphia. It's when there is a preoccupation and that preoccupation is causing impairment. So it could be that your training and dieting have become so strict that when you feel that your training or dieting are about to be compromised in some way, maybe there's an important social occasion that you have to attend, and it means that you don't get to stick to your diet or go to train or something unexpected comes up, and you have to prioritize that other important unexpected thing.If that brings you anxiety and guilt makes you angry at yourself, then you are in the territory of massive dysmorphia as opposed to just behaviors that are otherwise benign with respect to disorder.Laura: Yeah, so you're just highlighting here that you know, the behaviors in and of themselves are not pathological. You know, plenty of people go to the gym, you know, they are super careful with their diet. Where it runs into kind of hot water is when, you know, that becomes almost like all encompassing.It takes over your life. It doesn't allow for any flexibility. It becomes very rigid. You can't go to your mates birthday party or just like, go pick up a pizza after work because it's a mess. So that flexibility in eating, that flexibility in your social life, but also I suppose kind of the feelings of guilt, remorse, stress, that might come up if you do do those things.Scott: That's right. And the deteriorations tend to come from many places. They don't just come from one. So maybe you find that on the days where you have to rest where you can't be in gym training, cuz you've gotta have a couple of rest days to recover, you don't feel so good on those days. Maybe every time you don't progress in the gym, so you're not adding on to the weight, you're not getting stronger, it makes you feel like rubbish.Whereas when you first started out, maybe all of those things made you feel really good. Maybe your relationships are starting to suffer. Maybe your partner has had four or five conversations with you now about how they don't like how it's so challenging to go out to a restaurant, et cetera, etc.There's going to be no one thing, but the things tend to all come. Together. And what's challenging as you would well know in the eating disorder space is that the person who is in the thick of it is sometimes not the best judge of how extreme and rigid what they are doing is, and not uncommon at all to have folks who've come out the other end of these disorders look back and say, oh man, I can't believe I didn't see just how crazy it was for me at that.Laura: And that's a really important point, and I'd like to come back and think a little bit about how particularly a parent might address this or raise their concerns with you know, maybe their teen who they know is becoming super fixated on the gym and really rigid around that.Maybe we could come back to that because I feel I still wanna characterize a little bit more of what might be going on for people with muscle dysmorphic disorder. And a big piece that I feel like we haven't talked about yet is the use of anabolic steroids.So yeah, could you tell us how that and maybe any other kind of diet aids and things fit into the picture of muscle dysmorphic disorder?Scott: Yeah, sure. So, if you wanted to be thin and skinny and you were going to abuse drugs to get there, you might use laxatives and diuretics. If you wanna be big and muscular the drug that will typically be abused is anabolic steroids. So the most basic anabolic steroid is just a synthetic form of testosterone, the sex differentiating hormone that men tend to have more of than women, and it helps to synthesize muscle. So if you wanna be bigger muscular, if you've been influenced by, you know, famous fitness influencers, many of whom are using steroids, it may be something you're tempted to turn to and unlike with laxatives and diuretics, where if you take them, they don't have any substantive impact on the calories that you absorb (another way of saying they don't work very well). anabolic steroids, unfortunately do work very well. It's a bit of a public relations disaster, really.Laura: Can I just put a tiny caveat that for people who abuse laxatives and diuretics, in terms of, I just wanna highlight that they are still really dangerous and they can cause electrolyte imbalances. Just because I know people with eating disorders will listen to this podcast and I've worked with eating disorders for long enough to know that they will hear that and think, oh, okay, that means they're safeSo, I just want to highlight that it can cause problems in terms of your intestines. There can be problems with, I'm forgetting the terminology now, but basically twisting your intestines because it just messes with your digestion so much.I'm thinking about laxatives here, but also it can cause dangerously low electrolyte levels in the body, which can cause fits and seizures. So they're not benign, and I don't want anyone to walk away with the message that they're benign. But that's aside from what you're talking about, which is that yeah, you know that people with muscle dysmorphic disorder are more likely to abuse steroids.So, yeah. Could I pass it back to you now?Scott: Of course, and steroids on top of being effective, which makes them very attractive in terms of, you know, as a temptation they also have rather significant health consequences, especially in the long term. But why I bring up the fact that they are effective for building muscle into such a significant degree that you have outfits like the International Olympics Committee who test for doping.The use of things like steroids in sports is because once you're on them, you will experience the progress that you've been craving and to a very significant degree. So folks will get on them, they will put on a lot of muscle, they might even lose some body fat at the same time, which is incredibly challenging to do if you are not on these substances.And of course, they feel. for a time, but they still have the core beliefs and attitudes and thinking so that high doesn't last for very long. But now not only are they not satisfied with their current size often, but to drop in size by coming off would trigger the kinds of intense feelings and distorted thinking that you also see when folks with anorexia are going through recovery and are, you know, weight restoring.So it's incredibly challenging. And what ends up happening is that you have to then treat both the muscle dysmorphia, which is very much a psychological disorder, and the anabolic steroids and their effects, which is an endocrine impactor. And dealing with these in combos is challenging.Laura: And, I was just wondering if you could talk a little to the, the longer term side effects of of the steroid use.Scott: Sure. So the longer term side effects tend to focus on increased mortality and morbidity from, from cardiovascular events, heart attacks, enlarged hearts. The endocrine effects focus predominantly on the capacity of your endocrine system to resume a normal amount of testosterone production endogenously, so from within, subsequent to stopping steroid use.Because when you flood your system with anabolic steroids or synthetic testosterone, the reason men's testicles shrink is because most of the function of testicles is to make testosterone. So the body says, oh, I'm full of testosterone. Now I'm not gonna make any more myself. But when you doing the injections of the tablets and you don't have that testosterone coming in, the body has to restart that system from scratch. And as we've learned, it is not very reliable at doing that. And it is very unpredictable how well that is gonna happen. And there's many, many, many instances of men as young as 23, 24, who will be on testosterone replacement therapy for their entire life, and who have their fertility are greatly compromised now because their bodies have not resumed normal testosterone production.Laura: Yeah. What you're describing is really similar to what happens when once this women are taking the contraceptive pill and then they come off of it and they might not restart their period for five or six months after, hopefully all going well. But what you're talking about, I think in muscle dysmorphic disorder, where there's an abuse of these drugs that those, as I understand it, the doses are much higher than a typical physiological dose.And so the impact, the effect is much, much greater and could last a lot longer, you know, if function is ever fully regained.Scott: Yeah. To give you some context, a beginner's of anabolic steroids, a beginner steroid cycle, if you will, might prescribe something like 500 milligrams of testosterone enate, a really commonly available steroid. I'd wager a bet that it's most widely available in the UK, certainly is in Australia. That beginner's dose is already five times higher than the maximum that a healthy male would produce on their own. And that much testosterone, flooding a system is beyond the bounds of what the human body is used to dealing with. Laura: Yeah. And, and you mentioned you know, the UK context there and there were headlines a couple of years ago that suggested that first of all, that predominantly steroid users in the UK were were using steroids as an appearance or an aesthetic related, you know, for aesthetic reasons rather than for purely like bodybuilding lifting reasons.Although I, I can imagine those things get kind of murky to tease apart and. At that time, I think this was about 2018 the, the reports were that there were about a million steroid users in the UK for, you know, for aesthetic reasons. Is that an accurate reflection? Do you know? Like, is that likely an underestimation, an overestimation, or do we have any, any real sense of what's going on?Scott: I'd say there's a great chance that's an underestimate. Steroid use is incredibly stigmatized. It's heavily criminalized and users are extremely loath to admit even to health professionals that they use anabolic steroids. And you see these schisms even in fitness communities online. So Instagram, TikTok, where there's this constant accusations that someone is using steroids or is natural or bloody for short. So, it's all very underground and it means that whenever you do get an, an estimate based on data that is credible. So in Australia that would be visits to needle and syringe programs as one example, to get injecting equipment for steroids. You can be almost certain that that's just a fraction of what's actually going on out there. And all the evidence we have, at least in Australia suggests that anabolic steroid use is increasing in prevalence and it's gone from something that used to be the purview of just athletes through to professional weightlifters to now those only being a minority. It's very much an aesthetics driven thing.Laura: So tell us what we know about who Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder impacts. You've alluded to that it's mostly cis men. But can you elaborate any further on that?Scott: Sure. So itt's mostly cis men because cis men are the largest pool who would want to be muscular. But you see certain subpopulations of men who are more vulnerable. Gay men are more vulnerable to muscle dysmorphia and to using anabolic steroids because of the heightened appearance pressures in that space. Younger men. So it does tend to be something that has its onset in younger years similar to anorexia.Laura: Sorry, I was gonna ask you, we know kind of what age do boys start becoming vulnerable? Because we know in anorexia it can be as young as like eight or nine sometimes, and that age is getting younger and younger.Scott: Yeah. And you see the same thing in muscle dysmorphia. So the first vulnerability factors can appear there. Studies have been done with action figurines and you have young boys asked which one do they prefer more? And they're able to, to, they have their preferences in line with what you'd expect, and they'll expect a preference for their own bodies to look certain ways, as you'd expect, given media messaging.So the vulnerability factors are there. In terms of muscle dysmorphia on setting tends to take quite a while. You'd be familiar. It's not the case that you hear a couple of messages, you get a mean comment about your appearance, and then suddenly you have it . It's years of internalizing and a bunch of factors that come along, and then it might strike in your teens or your early adulthood.And we see that in muscle dysmorphia too. Steroids often come into the piece a little later, so early adulthood to mid, and it's because they're expensive and they're hard to access.Laura: Yeah. You need to be kind of savvy also. Yeah. I can imagine kids who have figured out the whole cryptocurrency thing. I'm sure that they, you know, would get in there if they could, if they had the means. So you're saying gay men are more at risk. What, are there any other sort of subpopulations that you know, you're particularly worried about?Scott: Men who are in sports for which body weight or some aesthetic element around body weight is a key part. So not uncommon to have guys with muscle dysmorphia say that a lot of some of these thoughts came about because they had to weigh in for their sports. Maybe they were, they were boxes or fighters, something like that. So it just primed them to be in the space of being anxious about the number on the scale and how their fitness was progressing. Things like that.Laura: Do we know anything about racialized groups and, and who might be most at risk?Scott: There is some evidence though, it's not great in terms of its quality as of yet, that folks in predominantly white countries who are not white themselves may be at greater risk for both muscle dysmorphia and steroid use. Data we produced in Australia that was specific to gay bisexual men of, of various races suggested for example, that, you know, if you were an Asian gay man in Australia, that you might be more likely to use anabolic steroids and to succumb to muscle dysmorphia.And in talking with Asian gay men in interviews in qualitative research, part of it is because, you know, if you are an Asian gay man in Australia, then you are often stereotyped as being more feminine. You're not able to be part of the masc for masc subculture, which is still quite dominant and exclusionary and anabolic steroids are a way to compensate for those other aspects of your appearance that are diminishing your masculine capital. You can see something similar happen for men who are shorter. If you go to spaces online where men are complaining about being short to other men, they'll often see, just hit the gym, just get jacked. It's a way to compensate for those other elements that are not helping you to embody that masculine archetypal, conventionally attractive male.Laura: Hmm. Okay. A while back, you talked about pressures from the media. And that has, you know historically, particularly in anorexia research, been held up as a huge antecedent, I suppose, to eating disorder precipitation, but now there's this whole other layer of social media on top of things. How does, and I'm thinking about the fact that young people in particular hang out on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and maybe less Facebook these days I don't know. I don't go on Facebook. So what do we know about the influence that social media is having on aesthetic and appearance based pressures?Scott: Social media makes people more vulnerable to eating disorders, including muscle dysmorphia. And if you are vulnerable, it can make the transition to having one of these disorders shorter. It can intensify it. And I think it can also assist in maintaining them for longer as well. So the reason why media messaging can be so problematic and damaging in terms of vulnerability for and experiencing eating disorders is because you end up with all these idealized reference points and what social media does is expands that limitlessly so that when you're on your feed and TikTok is delivering videos for you to consume, all of the reference points you are getting from content that is popular and influential and that people are responding to. It's so divorced from reality that you've got a greater pool of people comparing and feeling poorly about themselves and now investing in the general necessity of looking better.Laura: So this is an area that you've been researching. Am I right?Scott: Yeah, that's right.Laura: Can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, specific studies or experiments that you've done, that you're excited to share a bit more about?Scott: So, you know, studies of social media, including of TikTok, generally what they will do is have an experiment and you'll show people some images or videos from social media platforms that you're worried about and see how people respond. Or you have people answer a survey question that will amount to, how often do you use, say, TikTok, Instagram, and you correlate that with some measure like how you feel about your body.And that's all well and fine. But where the real explanatory power is, in my mind, is in big data and getting access into exactly what people are seeing and viewing so you can map their social media experience. So what we've been able to do is to take a group of people with eating disorders and a group of people who, we call it our healthy controls, that don't have eating disorders. And see their entire TikTok algorithm from the day they installed it to the day we requested the data. And that means we can track exactly every video that's being delivered to them, the comments, the likes, all with their consent, I'll just say, of course not being done without that. And we can see what is happening.What it means is we can show things like if you are someone with an eating disorder, your TikTok algorithm that decides what videos you see every time you log in is 50% more likely to deliver you an appearance oriented video for each and every video that you see compared to someone without an eating disorder.And the amount of videos that these folks are seeing, the average is around 2000 a month. So if you are someone in weekly therapy for an eating disorder, If you're a clinician and you have someone who you'reLaura: Oh my God. I'm just sitting here thinking about like some of my clients. I'm like,Scott: That's 500 videos on average that they are seeing between each session. And when we run studies to compliment these on new phones with fresh TikTok accounts that we manage, it only takes three minutes to get an appearance oriented video.You get 17 in the first 20 minutes. So it's not that people are seeking this content out. It happens anyway. And when we look at the rate of liking that folks with eating disorders have for this content versus folks without. It's not that the folks with eating disorders are looking for this content, they're liking it at the same rate because what's algorithm is doing is not taking what you like to determine what you want to see. They're interested in engagement, whether it's Facebook or, or Instagram or TikTok. It's what keeps you looking and what keeps you looking isn't just what makes you happy. It's what makes you anxious or what makes you upset. It's what makes you mad. And if you are someone who is really unhappy or worried about the way you look, it knows which videos will make you look more. And that's exactly what happens. And you can see over time how the algorithm becomes more echo chambery as people get sucked into the vortex of this content.Laura: I think the scariest part for me both as someone who works with eating disorders and as a parent, like my child is obviously not on social media right now, but will be one day I'm sure, is the fact that they know, like the social media companies know exactly what they're doing because wasn't it a couple of years ago, but there was a whistleblower at meta. Who said who, who said, we have all of this information that shows that our algorithms are making body image and eating disorders worse, and yet they're not doing anything about it.Scott: Yeah. And then they downplayed and discredited their own data generated by the star researchers they themselves hired which is absurd. And the reason that they don't wanna do anything about it is because the..Laura: It's capitalism.Sorry, go. Scott: No, you, you're exactly right. The money is made from engagement. And I think the faint that the social media companies do is to imply that what they're doing is giving people what they want, community connectedness. And when it comes to advertising that they're connecting people with the products that they want to buy. And through being able to like things, you can get the sense that, oh, the social media companies are just sitting back and people are doing what they want in there.They're getting what they want, but certainly, the controls that you think you have over what your algorithm, especially on TikTok is sending you is less. And it's about engagement. And engagement doesn't care how you feel, if it's positive or negative, it just cares that you spent the time. Whatever it takes to get you to do more time is what it is going to send you. It's worth noting also that when you look at the proportion of appearance honored content that your algorithm sends you, so how big this echo chamber is, that correlates strongly with the eating disorder symptoms. So the more your algorithm becomes, you know, polluted by appearance, honored content, the worse the eating disorder becomes in tandem. And why wouldn't it?Laura: I have a question, and you might not be able to answer this. One of my clients uses the term recovery porn in eating disorder recovery, which are all of these images of usually women who claim to be in recovery or recovered. Have you looked at the impact that these recovery accounts have on eating disorder recovery?Scott: I've not looked at that specifically, but I'm well aware of the phenomenon your client has described. And unfortunately, lots of social media phenomena and hashtags, like for example eating disorder recovery, body positivity is another good example.Laura: Yeah.Scott: They are not clear paragons, they're not at all as clearly useful as we would like them to be if someone went searching for them. You go looking for ed recovery, you might find an account that is extremely thoughtful in the way that that content is presented right alongside content that is clearly not being very helpful. Just like with body positivity, you might get someone who hearkens back to the, the fat acceptance movement, who's really preaching the fighting the good flight right next to someone who is perhaps well-meaning, but still thin, skinny, and they're pinching a tiny little roll of fat and going body positivity, which as I can tell from your reaction is missing the point.Laura: Yeah. Okay. Maybe, maybe something for a future research agenda then, Scott.Scott: Absolutely. It's a great suggestion.Laura: I'm curious to, because, and I think what it comes, what it comes back to you articulated it there really well. I think something that I tried to unpack with my clients, you know, is thinking about, okay, well, is this image, they might have the message on point, right? But if there's an image that is still highly focused on aesthetics, it's highly focused on their body and, you know, showing off their body in a particular way, then that really completely undermines the message that they might have been sending with the best of intention.So just a little interesting aside, but you know, you've talked about how social media, you know, there might be some benefits to social media. I think there's definitely some work that has shown that coming out of the center of appearance research, but it's murkier and less clearly defined than, than maybe we would like to think.So you painted this really dark picture of social media and, and how it contributes to muscle dysmorphic disorder. So I'm wondering what we can do both from maybe a clinical perspective, or maybe a public health perspective as well as maybe a parenting perspective to protect our kids from internalizing these messages because they're gonna be exposed to them. Right. We know that for sure. So how do we buffer the impact, both maybe at the broader public health level, because this is a public health issue clearly, but also maybe in our own parenting in our own homes. Scott: Yeah. And okay, you're absolutely right. You cannot start from a base of let's not use social media altogether. That's, that's the arena. That's where youth culture is driven in, telling young people not to use it is just not practical. So they're going to use it. Encouraging your child to be a critical consumer of media generally, including on social media, is really useful.I think if you feel confident enough to talk about it, explaining to them that what they see is delivered to them by algorithms can be useful. That's something we're exploring in our own research where we want young people to have a better understanding that what they're seeing in their feed is not a one-to-one reflection of reality to the world as it actually is.And that's beyond the, you know, manipulation of photos and self portrayals that go on, but like the algorithm just feeding you with whatever activates your emotions. Part of that is this tool we're developing that can visualize your algorithm for you so that you can know and compare it to others just how biased it's become. And this can be for clinicians too, because if you have a client walk in the door, you need to know if 70% of their feed is appearance oriented, which is not a number I picked out of thin air. That's an actual number from clients we had with anorexia nervosa. And then you can have a productive conversation with that person around, okay, your algorithm is not only not reflective of reality, it's doing you harm and this is how we can work to remediate it.Laura: I would definitely, like sign me up for that tool. I will test it for you. Whatever you need me to do.Scott: Lovely.Laura: So, so yeah, having conversations that, you know, that there's obviously, the images themselves have been highly altered, stylized, potentially photoshopped, all kinds of different things. But then there's this whole machinery and infrastructure behind that feeding you more and more and more of these idealized images.Scott: Yeah, that's it. And you know, when social media, the way we use it, a lot of the time, like a lot of the time when people are using TikTok, people's guards are down. It's incidental. It's minutes in bed when you first wake up, it's bed when you might be trying to go to sleep. It's when you're on a bus, it's when you're bored, it's when you're tired.It's not active consumption of content. And before you know it, you can have scrolled through or mindlessly watched tens and tens of videos that have appearance oriented content and, just like with how people think that advertising isn't working on them, but the reason that so much money is pumped into it is because it does have cumulative accumulative impacts on, on purchasing decisions. The same thing happens with social media, so it's about getting people to recognize that and to try to minimize what's happening in those spaces because it all adds up.Laura: You know, you said kind of towards the top of the interview that people who are deep in their eating disorder, whether it's anorexia, whether it's muscle dysmorphic disorder, bulimia, orthorexia, whatever form that takes, they are, you know, the least clear in what's going on, right? They're the least easily able to see what's going on. They are definitely aware that there's a problem, but they might not be able to identify exactly what that is. So, with that in mind, I'm wondering for, for parents particularly of teen boys, tweens and teens, it sounds like are both vulnerable and kind of heading into adolescence.If a parent notices more protein powders coming into the house, more you know, concerns about lean protein and less carbohydrates on the plate and more time working out or conversations about being fit, about being healthy, and they're, they're noticing that, that's becoming increasingly rigid and perfectionistic. How might a parent approach this, do you think? Scott: It's a very common question that has never had an answer come easy to me, as I'm sure it wouldn't for many parents because teenage boys are notoriously challenging to talk to and get to open up to, especially about these,Laura: Yeah, but you're a psychologist so you ,Scott: So I'm obliged to have an answer and I I have you. So I think the way we approach folks who we think have muscle dysmorphia, but who are perhaps reluctant to talk about it, is to emphasize those parts of their training and their dieting that aren't working for them. We don't say, “Is it making you sad or anxious?” and, “what's not working for you?” because often whether it's a young boy, a teen, a young adult, they're just thinking about progress. They wanna progress. It's, I want my lifts to get stronger, my body to get better, etc. And the things that we think of as the symptoms of the disorder, the things that we're worried about, they're not worried about them per se. They're worried about their progress. And it's those things on the side that are making it hard, right? So we frame it as, okay. What's, what's getting in the way of you being able to train and diet and be like this and, and that maybe it's, ah, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't train today. I had to go and do this.It's like, oh, okay. So like, how did it make you feel? It's like, you can try to get them to see that it's the rigidity that is being more unhelpful than helpful. We deliberately keep it above the level of feelings for a while until that is more approachable. Often with our young clients, we'll just pitch it as, look we don't want to change your training and your dieting. We're not gonna tell you not to go to the gym. We just want you to be in a space where you can get back to making the progress that you wanna make. Then you've got your foot in the door and you go from thereLaura: You're getting them on side. You're telling them I'm on your team. Yeah.Scott: Yeah. Because whilst you can say the term body image to most young women and they intuitively know what you're thinking about, if I try to say, “are you worried about your body image?” to a young man, even if I know they are, it's so super clear as day, a lot of the time they'll say no.Laura: Yeah,Scott: Like straight up, they'll say no to you. Because it's just not the language that they speakLaura: Yeah, yeah. But if you can talk to them in terms of gains and what's getting in the way of theirScott: What's getting in the way? You know, you're not talking about feelings per se. That's just the best way I can describe it. It's a very tactful and challenging spot to be in, I think.Laura: Yeah. I mean, my hope is that I never have to broach this conversation with my kid, but fuck parenting is hard, man.Scott: Yeah, I certainly empathize.Laura: And I really hope you don't say CBT right now, but what do we know about treatment? What is available to help young people, older people, whoever is impacted by muscle dysmorphia to help them recover?Scott: The evidence-based for effective treatment for muscle dysmorphia is extremely limited. It's nowhere near what we have for the other eating disorders. There is nothing in the way of an RCT or anything like that. I have a PhD student now who is running the first manualised treatment for muscle dysmorphia, so we'll see how that turns out.Generally speaking, the approaches that work for eating disorders will also work for muscle dysmorphia, in my opinion, because again, the core maintaining factors of the disorder and precipitating factors are very, very similar. And what has been encouraging as a first port of call, the major eating disorder charities that run helplines, so certainly the Butterfly Foundation in Australia perhaps BEAT over in the UK, they are increasingly cognizant of muscle dysmorphia and the helpline staff are better equipped to, to talk about it, which is perfect.Laura: I noticed the other day that there's even an NHS page, which, you know, you and I spoke a couple of years ago for Don't Salt My Game, and I'm pretty sure it didn't exist even then. So there is certainly more recognition and awareness, but it sounds like people are more equipped to have these conversations, certainly in the eating disorder space.I worry more about kind of general practice in terms of medicine because there's even and, and don't get, this is not GP bashing . We all know how much pressure GPs are under, but there is a lack of awareness even about more traditional eating disorders in that space. So yeah, I reckon BEAT would be probably the best first port of call there.But in terms of treatment, it sounds like we don't exactly know yet. Your sense is that probably some of the modalities that we use for other eating disorders are probably gonna be successful because of, you know, the same underlying maintaining and precipitating factors. But I guess we need to wait for your student to do their research before we have more clear answers on that.Scott: Yeah. But even then for the really convincing answer that yes, you can confidently send someone for this treatment and there's a great chance they get better years and years away from that. But what I find promising is in talking to eating disorder clinicians, in training them when it comes to muscle dysmorphia, it's not a case of, oh, how am I gonna do this?It's, oh wow. There's all the parallels are all there, which is great because it means that the tools are there, it's just a matter of education both on the part of the clinician and on on people and young men so that they know they can go and seek help and that help will be there to meet them.Laura: Absolutely. And I just wanna go back to the TikTok algorithm thing, which is super disturbing to me, but, but just to kind of close out, I wonder, you know, from your perspective as a researcher, what do we need to be doing both in terms of a research agenda, but maybe also like a public health policy agenda in terms of tackling some of these, like really problematic systems, I suppose, that young people are up against. I don't know if that question makes sense, but like, where do we go from here? What do we do with this?Scott: No, I've thought about this. There's the organizations I'm working with in Singapore, we've been talking about that at length and the broader conversation that needs to be had moving back from TikTok to algorithms and data generally is we need greater oversight and control of how our data is used to deliver us content of all kinds.Because people cannot bat an eyelid when they think of, alright, I wanna clean my house and I'm on Instagram and I got an ad for a cleaning product, cool. And in your ideal world, advertising connects you seamlessly to the things that can make your life easier. What you don't want is for an algorithm to see and know that a young person has been looking at a lot of videos that are around weight loss and now a targeted ad comes up for a weight loss supplement, cause that is how that data gets used also.And we need tools, I think like the one we're developing so that people can see what their algorithms are sending that. You should know. You should know if your algorithm is sending you three times more toxic masculinity content than someone else, if it's sending you more eating disorder content, if it's sending you more plastic surgery content.Because the first step in a battle is knowing what your algorithms are sending to you. And this issue only becomes more important because let's say you or I wanted to find out something factual, we go to Google.Gen Z uses things like TikTok for search. 40% of Gen Z prefers to use TikTok than Google for search, which means you are down the rabbit hole of the algorithm from day dot.So you need to know, but of course that information's never released to you. So it's pushing back against the opaqueness of the data that we provide and how that data is used to send us content because it's not in our, in the service of our health and connectedness and community. Again, it's in the service of, of money, and, and engagement. So I think that's the broader conversation, right? The data collected from us is not benign.Laura: Oh, absolutely. Wow. All right, Scott, on that cherry note, um, at the end of every episode, my guest and I share something that they have been really excited about lately. Um, So something they've been snacking on, either literally or metaphorically. Do you have something picked out?Scott: I do. So in Singapore, my favorite breakfast to have is kaya toast with some rather runny under soft boiled eggs with soy sauce and white pepper. It's a very common breakfast here, and I love it. It's so, so satisfying. I had it this morning. I'll have it again tomorrow.Laura: Sorry. What is the kind of toast did you say?Scott: It's called Kaya Toast. So it's like thick cuts of toast with butter that's called kaya butter. And it's slightly sweet. I think it has a more fun and complex flavour than regular butter. And you can dip that in eggs that are loaded up with white pepper and soy sauce.Laura: Got it.Scott: I love it.Laura: Oh, it sounds like they have a really amazing food culture over there. Like I've heard from people that they have like, you know, lots of different kinds of street food and stuff like that, so yeah. That sounds awesome. Mine is also a food so it's, I mean, it's only February at the time of recording, but like all the Easter stuff is now showing up in the shops and so I demolished a pack of like Doisy and Dam, which is like a brand of chocolate over here, mini eggs the other day. And they were so good. Like, I don't know if you get mini eggs in Australia, they're like solid chocolate eggs with like a candy kind of coating shell around them. And they're like all different kind of pastel kind of colors. Like yellow and pink and green and like eastery kind of spring colors.Scott: It's possible we do, I can't recall 'em off the top of my head,Laura: You're gonna tell me like you don't like chocolate or something.Scott: No, no, no. I love chocolate I'm not sillyLaura: So I think you would like, I know you would recognise them. So maybe you don't have them. You don't have them over there. All right, Scott, it's been really great to chat to you again. Can you let everybody know where they can find out more about you, your research group, or any of your publications? I will link to the study, the TikTok studies if they're published yet? Scott: They're in the process of being, so the best place to follow along with the research my team does, including the TikTok work, is at my Twitter. It's @Scott1Griffiths. Or just search Google. Scott Griffiths, Scott Griffiths Body Image Research or something like that, and it will come up. That's the easiest way.Laura: I'll link to it so that it saves people the minefield of Googling stuff.Scott: Yeah.Laura: But yeah, so that's the best place to follow along on your Twitter and get updates about your research. I can't wait to read that. Well say. I can't wait to read it. I'm really depressed after talking to you about the state of social media.I mean, I was already bummed out about it, but this has just solidified that for me. So thank you for that. But otherwise, it was really great to talk to you and it's obviously really essential and important research that you're doing. So thank you for taking the time to share it with us.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. 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Scott Peppet serves as the President of Chai Trust Company LLC, the private trust company that serves as the family office for Sam Zell (https://www.egizell.com/people/sam-zell/) and his family. Equity Group Investments (https://www.egizell.com/), a division of Chai trust, provides investment management services on its behalf. From 2000 to 2018, Scott was a professor of Law at the University of Chicago where he focused on Bargaining, Dispute Resolution, Translational Law, and the complexities of multigenerational family enterprises. Scott speaks regularly on Family Offices, Private Trust companies as well as Intergenerational Leadership while also maintaining an active website (https://scottpeppet.com/). Scott is a G2 family member. He is Sam Zell's son-in-law, having married Sam's eldest daughter. Standout Quotes: * "Business works on short wavelengths and family works on very long wavelengths" - [Peter Evans, Scott] * "What does it mean to try and help family members really develop and really take ownership, so they can figure out how to deploy what they have?" - [Scott] * "There are many different kinds of wealth… you probably aren't put on the earth to grow the financial capital, there's lots of professionals who can help you do that" - [Scott] * "Too often, the implicit message sent to family members is 'this system is really here to steward the money" - [Scott] * “Families rarely fail for taking too much risk, they fail for taking too little risk” - [Scott] * "My goal is to create a family-focused office, not a family office, and a trusted company, not a Trust company" - [Scott] * "If you want to succeed you have to have a family that understands what you're doing" - [Scott] Key Takeaways: * Scott is the President of Chai Trust Company, LLC, the private trust company that serves as the family office for Sam Zell and his family. Equity Group Investments, a division of Chai trust, provides investment management services on its behalf. From 2000 to 2018, Scott was a professor of Law at the University of Chicago where he focused on Bargaining, Dispute Resolution, Translational Law, and the complexities of multigenerational family enterprises. He speaks on Family Offices, Private Trust companies as well as Intergenerational Leadership while also maintaining his active website. Scott is a G2 family member, as he is Sam Zell's son-in-law. * Scott got married to Sam's older daughter 20 years ago while he was already teaching as a Law professor. Since then he got increasingly curious about family enterprises till he fully transitioned into working in the family enterprise. After a few months of knowing each other, they started dating but Scott had no idea about her family wealth till she opened up about it. * About Sam Zell: Sam is a serial entrepreneur, who first built a business in Real Estate, following which he turned to distressed Corporate Investing in the 80s, and then in the 90s, he created some of the largest REITs in the US today. He has continued to work on REITs and corporate investing since then. He has done several businesses over the years. Sam is also known for his straight talk, always making his stand clear in any discussion. He is also very astute and broad in his thinking. * As a Law professor, Scott worked on conflict intervention with corporations all over the world. When he started having kids, he got curious about how the family wealth could be managed productively for the family, especially for the kids. Sam encouraged him to work on it. Some authors that stood out in Scott's study were Jay Hughes and John Davis. * Scott describes the family structure; at the time Scott joined the family, Sam was 59 years, his 3 children were in their 30s, and as of now, there are 9 grandchildren. There was a form of governance structure, a board with his 3 children which wasn't functional as Sam made most decisions. However, now there has been a need to rebuild the structure as the company has evolved and this has been a huge part of Scott's focus since he moved full-time into the family enterprise. He has had to put in a lot of work to fully understand how the family enterprise functions; to make things change in a family system that often moves very slowly, you have to know where you're going. It involves a combination of urgency and patience, while thinking long-term, steps need to be taken early and consistently. Most of the family members are not employees, some of them are on the board. There is one board with both independent and family directors. * The business continues to be eclectic, investing across all kinds of sectors, especially with the benefit of permanent long-term capital. At the same time, complex actions and decisions can be taken quickly. Also, family learning and development are being built as the kids grow to become adults. * In the inflationary period currently, the business finds smaller companies that need capital and expertise to grow to the next level; companies that would rather grow their equity than sell to a PE company. These companies are great partners for the business since their interests are already aligned to grow the equity. * While most families would rather have more joy over more money, the reality is that many family members Scott has met around the world don't have that much joy or self-possessed ability to do things in the world. They often feel enmeshed in a family structure they have little control over. This is not good for the family or the external world that could be benefitting from the good such families could accomplish. * Laying the foundation for the next generation practically, Scott uses some rules. The first is based on the 5 Capitals; Not everyone is supposed to grow financial capital but they can add to the overall well-being of the family by building on the other forms of capital. Unfortunately, the experience in most families is that stewarding the money is the main goal, which is an implicit frame that must be dissolved. The second one is that each family member should participate meaningfully in every learning experience. Doing this means creating activities or agendas that are not solely about financial capital or the enterprise, although as the kids get older they get interested in the business itself. * To assess how well you're building human capital, score how often you were talking about money over the last few years in your family meeting. Most times it forms a huge percentage of those meetings, but in a setting where money isn't the focus, there is a push to find other topics that can help people open up. Scott's family has started experimenting with these kinds of meetings interspersed with other activities. * These kinds of meetings expose several overlapping purposes, help family members connect, offer a chance for content transfer, and contribute to self-development and self-growth. Different topics are often discussed and it becomes obvious how they are related. Listeners are encouraged to check Scott's curriculum diagram on his website. * There is often a dichotomy between responsible stewards and lazy inheritors, however, managing inherited wealth can be complicated. The general goal is to cultivate engaged owners and integrate financial capital into their lives productively, but there is no concrete formula on how to do it. * Most family offices should just be Money offices because all their time is focused on financial capital and legal risk such that the family itself is secondary. On the other hand, a family-focused office is there to grow the family's human capital as much as the financial capital. * Trust companies around the world have become ubiquitous in wealthy families although they often don't have much life in them. However, a trusted company is a part of the family ecosystem which goes beyond managing money to a level of trust-building with the family. That forms the basis of how Scott decides on whether or not progress is being made; 'what is the level of trust in the system?'. Not to downplay the role of financial investment, but there has to be synergy within the system. * Over the long term, families rarely fail for taking too much risk, they fail for taking too little risk. They focus so much on preservation because they are afraid of taking risks, and they wither in the end. Sam Zell still takes as much risk as he used to, not as a gamble but with a critical assessment of each situation. It is important to preserve the investment company with its risk-taking culture, and at the same time grow a family that can continue such activity over time. * The family enterprise avoids governing by committee, especially on the investment side, so as to move quickly. Having family members behind an entity is not a bad idea but there's no point in having many family members making every investment decision. In Scott's family enterprise, this bureaucracy is avoided by ensuring decisions are narrowed down to the exact professionals. Other bigger family questions can be discussed by the family as a whole. Mike's family employs Adhocracy which encourages a culture to challenge the slow slide into bureaucracy. * The team behind the family enterprises consists of about 85 people and functions as one entity that is the trust company, the family office, and the investment management company. There are investment professionals, lawyers, a family office and operations group, and accountants. All of these are interdependent. The company is mostly focused in the US but there are also real estate investments in other countries. * As an outsider joining the family, it is easy to simply be a critic which will result in pushback from the family. From the onset, Scott acted from a place of love for the family and was concerned with how to continue to build productivity within the family. He intentionally took time to study the family business all the while continuing his profession as a Law professor. He advises inlaws to keep their jobs for as long as possible till they are sure they can add value to the family enterprise. He also understands that being an inlaw comes with restrictions from certain roles, but rather than get overly perturbed about it, he focuses on the ways to be helpful in the family. * Scott has a background in communication, mediation, and negotiation which has been pivotal in building consensus in the family business. Ultimately, there is no playbook to navigate the complexities in a family enterprise. * A typical day in Scott's life involves some time spent on investments, working with boards or committees, family learning and development, as well as time spent on management. He has come to understand that his job is to get a grasp of the system as a whole; Sam explained to him that it will change from obligation to opportunity. * There are a few family heirlooms and the family has also documented some of its history like the story of Sam's family leaving Poland for the US. They do this mostly by putting together short films. It also serves as a way to communicate family values; Sam has always used art to communicate. * Scott's letter to his kids: We have the capacity as humans to grow into something greater, more awake, and more alive than we are now, into a different kind of existence. This is the uniqueness of being human; the constant evolution makes life wonderful. Episode Timeline: [00:50] Meet today's guest, Scott Peppet. [02:00] Scott's relationship with Sam Zell. [04:54] How would you describe Sam Zell? [09:18] Did you develop an interest in how family enterprises function before or after meeting the Zell family? [12:35] How complex was the family when you joined? [16:44] Did you have to contend with people with multiple hats in the family business? [19:04] What does the office look like today? [21:40] Is there any particular industry that has growing potential now as regards investment? [24:40] How do you plan to raise the next generation in the family enterprise? [35:17] Going beyond stewards' first inheritors. [37:35] Creating a family-focused office and a trusted Company. [42:10] How do you manage risk in the family ecosystem? [44:37] How do you fight bureaucracy as the office gets bigger? [49:05] How big is the family enterprise team? [51:50] What was it like joining the family and navigating the complexities of a family enterprise? [55:20] How helpful was your career in Law and conflict resolution in the family business? [56:55] A day in the life of the President of Chai Trust. [01:00:50] Is the family intentional about keeping things for historical sake? [01:05:02] Scott's letter to his kids For more episodes go to BusinessOfFamily.net (https://www.businessoffamily.net/) Sign up for The Business of Family Newsletter (https://www.businessoffamily.net/newsletter) Follow Mike on Twitter @MikeBoyd (https://twitter.com/MikeBoyd) If you feel it's appropriate, I'd so appreciate you taking 30 seconds to Leave a Review on iTunes (http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1525326745), I receive a notification of each review. Thank you! Special Guest: Scott Peppet.
HIGHLIGHTSThe concept of sin as a legitimate driver of human behaviorJon's view on cultural sinJesus making the biggest deal on sinHow postmodernism benefits and falls apartJon's personal journey of uncertaintyJon's personal journey of sufferingManaging suffering and griefThe concept of abundanceQUOTESJon: “So again, I come from this, this Christian worldview, and, and sin has become, I think, almost a central topic in this world view that I come from. And I think it's really an old story. I think we're fixated on the brokenness and depravity of man.”Scott: “There has been I think people would argue this and extreme obsession. With the sinfulness of people like me, meanwhile, being perfectly fine with trashing the entire planet, or eating animals that have been tortured, you know.”Jon: “I think we make sin, I have to speak from within my worldview, at least initially, I think we make sin far too big of a deal. And so it's it, he's made the biggest deal of it, he can, so we don't need to anymore.”Jon: “Tolerance is a beautiful concept, but I think it went too far as to mean, tolerance means acceptance of every single worldview is equally valid. And pretty quickly, you and I could come up with some worldviews that we'd say no, that's morally evil, and should be opposed.”Jon: “Again, I think some of my current worldviews to some of my goal is to live as humanly as possible. Part of that humanity, humanity means I will suffer, it is a given I will die someday I will get sick someday. So suffering is a given.”Jon: “Grief is one of those moments where we just need someone to sit with us. There will come a time to give answers or to talk or to give perspective. But usually, the power we have is in the power of our presence, not in our words.”Jon: “I don't want to miss a moment of it. I want to fully experience the sadness, the loss, the suffering, the saying goodbye because death is a part of life.”Jon: “The concept of abundance starts to push my thinking back into that kind of negativity versus positivity mindset. Because we don't believe there's a an abundance, we're out there taking everything we can as quickly as I can, and to hell with the people who are going to drown and die.”To find out more about Jon, please see the links below.Website: http://www.jondillowcounseling.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-dillow-a3618b161/To hear more of Scott Mason and the Purpose HighwayⓇ podcast, join our community at https://purposehighway.com/ and subscribe to get notified when new episodes go live.
Scott Couvillon is CEO and Executive Strategy Director at Trumpet Advertising, an agency that strives to create purpose-aligned, believable ads. Scott says that companies succeed with their advertising, not only because their creative product promotion is compelling, but more so when the ads “compel an honest connection between a person and a brand.” Scott says there is a lot of talk in the advertising industry about purpose. What is more important is “What do you do with it once you've got it.” Scott holds that advertising needs to be aligned with a company's core beliefs. Organizations need to think holistically and ask, “If you put purpose in the center, how do you: Get the company culture aligned with that purpose?” Get the advertising and communications pieces aligned with that purpose?” and Get the customer experience aligned with that purpose?” Advertising agencies typically work on communications – but may neglect a company's culture and customer experience components. Focus on product characteristics does not build relationships with customers, instill customer loyalty, or keep a company's product from becoming a commodity. Trumpet clients have a common understanding – “They will sell more product by selling that product within the context of what they stand for.” Scott explains, “Brand connection is an invitation to participate in a culture that is very intentional.” Holistic alignment is what sells premium brands like Apple phones and BMW SUVs. If you don't have holistic alignment, Scott says, the best you can hope for is that people will not dread the absence of holistic alignment. The product is okay . . . and the customer only hopes the experience won't be bad. Because transformational organizational alignment involves a deeper client-agency relationship beyond mere “communications management,” Trumpet typically engages with organizations in one of two ways: High-level management will bring Trumpet in to force “purpose alignment” on its marcom operations. Trumpet will start out working with marcom. Once Trumpet has proven itself, it uses its analytical performance to talk with the leadership team about a more holistic brand and organizational alignment. Scott presents the example of one client, a “very profitable credit union” that Trumpet turned into “a very meaningful credit union.” “Meaning” made the credit union “even more profitable.” Although increased profit wasn't the first goal, it was the result of the client's focus on purpose. He refers to Raj's Conscious Capitalism, and these “firms of endearment,” as “the companies that we don't dread.” Communications should be locked in with company culture and customer experience, all three driven by clairvoyance and purpose. Scott asks key questions. “What is the core belief?” “What would the world lose if this company went out of business?” and then delivers an indicting punchline to the last query: “If the answer is a product, then you're a commodity and somebody else can do what you do. He warns that commoditization often happens when companies internalize the advertising function, communicate on self-serve platforms, and focus more on selling product than on “what they stand for.” Scott can be found on his agency's website at: https://trumpetadvertising.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Scott Couvillon, CEO and Executive Strategy Director at Trumpet Advertising based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Scott. SCOTT: Nice to meet you, finally. ROB: Yeah, awesome to have you on here. Sometimes these things can take a little bit to schedule, but this is the moment. Why don't you start off by giving us the rundown on Trumpet Advertising and what your superpower is? SCOTT: I guess the thing about a superpower is normally the world can either see you running really fast or a human flying, and ours is maybe a little more backstage than that. But it's nonetheless clear to us and to the clients we're working with. It's pretty simple. It's the focus on believability and being purposeful as an organization as an underpinning for the things that we actually do every day, which for us is being an advertising agency. For them, it's running operations and trying to grow their organization. We just try to do that a little bit more meaningfully than I would say agencies that we've all worked for, and even in some cases the agency that we were 10 or 12 years ago. The idea that agencies are responsible for compelling creative is a prerequisite, and let's just assume that all good agencies can buy media and do the analysis and reporting and optimize and come up with great ideas for that engaged attention. But there's a difference between compelling creative and trying to compel an honest connection between a person and a brand. The most successful companies right now are doing a better job of that. Advertising works. We know that. Analytics tell us. America being overweight and in debt, advertising is alive and well. But not every business is able to truly create the connection that allows month over month growth to be sustained in the long term. That requires a more fundamental relationship than just window to window promotion success. ROB: That sort of strategy, to really execute it, it seems like that would require necessarily partnership from the client as well. How do you think about that and that initial client-agency dance of figuring out if they're really interested in that level of connection and genuineness in what they're doing? SCOTT: There's a lot in that. How do we proactively go after business? What is our posture or the conversation when we're, for example, answering an RFP or an open call for agencies? The reality is that if we are dealing exclusively with marketing communications, it would be very difficult to think so holistically about the spirituality of an organization in order to bring some level of alignment between what we're saying externally through communications and what the experience with the company is ultimately going to be if our only connection to the organization is marcom. So yeah, frankly, it requires involvement and buy-in from the leadership team. The relationship's got to go a couple of ways. Either we have a very legacy-oriented, thoughtful, and extremely intentional CEO that brings us in and forces us upon marcom, or we'll work within the marketing communications sphere for a while, really prove our practical worth, that we have good ideas and good tactical execution that shows that we know what we're doing, and then we almost use analytical performance with the leadership team to start having conversations about more of a holistic brand alignment at the organizational level, not just within communications on its own. And again, it clicks for some organizations and definitely not others. ROB: If we can, let's get a little bit more concrete with an example. Is there a particular client you can talk about that typifies what the engagement looks like, what the structure is, as well as the go-to-market message? What's that look like? SCOTT: We are not category specialists. This is a methodology and a perspective that is applicable to a very specific mindset of an organization. What our clients have in common is that they believe they will sell more product by selling that product within the context of what they stand for. They're not constantly just putting something to buy out there; they're being clairvoyant on what people are buying into via that purchase. Structurally, from a relationship standpoint, we have a big financial institution in Texas and expanding out into more and more markets every year, it seems like; we work in healthcare, we work in tourism and destination management, hospitality, but what they all have in common and the structure that's the same is by identifying the purpose of the organization – what is truly the core belief? Our industry has beaten the tar out of “figure out your why and your core motivation” and all that stuff, but what our industry has done a very poor job with is getting beyond the cosmetic application of that “why.” It's easy to turn why we exist into beautiful brand creative, but if the brand, if the company, isn't living that in any real way, it's disingenuous at best and a lie at worst. Our scopes are focused on articulating what that belief is, getting that right and bought into by every level of the organization. When we were working with that financial institution, it was very much led by really, truly an unbelievable CEO who pulled his executive team along with him and really got them all bought in. There were years of internal transformation about “Look, this is the organization that we were, and this is the organization that we are going to be. We're going to move from a very profitable credit union into a very meaningful credit union, and that meaning is going to make us even more profitable.” The profit didn't come first. It got relegated to a result. That became really, really clear, because there became a spirituality at that organization that employees, stakeholders, customers, everybody was truly able to validate and then buy into. They were more than just checking account for a free toaster. The way that process went was getting very clear on that narrative, figuring out what the utilitarian expressions of that narrative were going to be – what products were they going to stop offering? What were the kinds of products they were going to develop? Because their product offering was going to be truly a manifestation of what they stood for, not just different ways for them to make money for shareholders and stakeholders. That kind of internal, truly product holistic thinking first prior to a total renaming and a new identity, new uniforms for employees – how are we going to retrain those employees in the new spirituality of the company while we're handing them a new shirt, as opposed to just handing them a new shirt? That's really how these things, in a perfect sense, go when people are buying into it wholly. There's been plenty of clients that we've talked about this upfront, we've gone through the purpose identification in each standpoint, and it inflects in some of the product expressions and some of the customer experience in a retail sense – certainly we're talking to it from a content standpoint in advertising, marketing, and social media stuff – but never really get invited into the inner sanctum of operations and HR practices, orientation and internal transmission to every employee at the organization. As an egomaniac, those aren't my favorite scopes because we're not able to do the true holistic alignment with every element of the business with a core belief. But it's better than just offering free shipping and extra cheese and hoping for month over month improvements. ROB: Right. It's necessary for you to have the conversation at a higher level in the organization, which is usually where you want to engage. Maybe not sometimes; sometimes the CMO has tons of power and big org. But when you're talking about essentially a credit union, a bank, it's a commodity to people, just like an airline can mostly be a commodity to people unless you are let's say Southwest and you do the work over time to sustain a differentiator. Even when everyone else is charging you for a checked bag. SCOTT: I think you look at the companies that get put into a very specific cohort that we pay a lot of attention to. It's really these believable, more purposeful companies. Raj Sisodia, great TED Talk, talks about conscious capitalism, talks about these firms of endearment. It's the ones that always get talked about at ANA and every conference in our industry. It's the Caterpillars and the Starbucks and the Disneys and of course the Apples and Intuit. It's that category. It doesn't have to be consumer. But these are organizations that are truly aligned, inside and outside, with an idea, not aligned more practically with an IP or a product or a manufacturing process. You bring up Southwest; identical equipment, flying from the exact same building as other companies. It's as commoditized as rice. But there is an affinity and a preference for airlines that we all have and that we use for specific purposes. Yes, there are times that we pinch the nose and it's the cheapest or it's the only one going where I need to be, but we're dreading that experience. And when we go in as a consumer with dread, the best you can have is the absence of dread. I defy you to find a leadership team whose mission statement is “Let's provide an absence of dread to the world.” That's not going to make our stock price soar. But that's where they're landing, whereas Southwest, as you bring up – JetBlue I'd say is another one. They've got a commodity product, and they've really focused on the only thing that there is to focus on, which is the morality and the spirituality of the organization and allowing people to really buy into it. Their turnover is lower. Vendor relationships are better. It is an easier company to run because there is alignment beyond the practical. Don't be late and don't lose bags. ROB: How disruptive – you talk about that feeling of dread. Names pop to my mind. Airline names pop into my mind when you say “dread.” What a heck of a brand. You're the airline of last resort and of dread, but hey, it's cheap. But let me digress a little bit from there. Walk me through the origin story of Trumpet. How did Trumpet start and get to be where it is now? What's that journey look like? SCOTT: Trumpet was founded in '97. It fell out of another agency. Just three guys took the phones and ran and opened up a new agency. That's kind of the late '90s agency founding story. It was a designer and a writer and an account guy, and they started with some real clients, and despite being in a Tier 3 city like New Orleans, over the years they've done some great work for clients like Gatorade. Not nobodies. Launched FreshDirect in New York. It wasn't just car dealerships and plaintiffs attorneys. In fact, those are the two categories we won't work in. They really grew into a creative powerhouse when I was exposed to them in the late '90s and met the founders. At the time, I was in San Francisco. I'm from New Orleans, but I was working out there for years and was loving that, and every day being the dumbest guy in the room and just trying to stay on my toes and not get discovered. But then when I came back to New Orleans, I got reintroduced to Trumpet. The idea at the time was they had amazing creative, but really not a strong, or as strong as it could've been, strategic underpinning. So I joined, maybe narcissistically, thinking that there was an opportunity to bring some strategic scaffolding together with the creative superiority they were wielding. It took a while to be heard and understand it and figure out how our personalities were going to coalesce, but getting into about the last four or five years here, we were on a clip, winning advertising agency accounts like an advertising agency does, talking about case studies and making result promises and case studies that are completely non-verifiable. But we didn't really have a perspective that made us different. We were frankly commoditizing ourselves with all of the other agencies that are able to execute, come up with ideas and get them into the market. But the development of this perspective – and not only adding the brand consulting mindset, if not the brand consulting scope to our scopes of work with clients, but that shift of perspective to, how do we stop lying? How do we stop running ads that test well and analytically prove in the near term that they work better than the old stuff? How do we let advertising be not a short-term tool, but really have a long-term impact? And how do we stop talking about things like brand ads as unmeasurable? How do we start talking about brand ads as being really the only promise we're making? Advertising, when it's seen as a trigger or stimulus for sales, if that's how you see it, that's what it's going to be. That has become the most ignorable stuff in a consumer's day to day, when they're seeing on average 3,600 ads a day in different format. And we're calling three from the day prior. There's a ton of waste. Advertising agencies say, “Yeah, but the waste is so cheap, you can afford it.” But when you look at advertising as truly an invitation to participate in a culture of a company – even when you're promoting, even when you're doing something of a more retail nature, but definitely when you're doing it in a brand sense – you have to be making plain and clear what experience you're going to have if you were to engage with this company via a product or social media visit or whatever those things may be, so that that experience can actually validate the promise we made in advertising, because that's when you get the connection that Raj is talking about in Conscious Capitalism. Those are the companies that we don't dread. In fact, those are the companies that we re-purchase from. The Apple phone that costs twice as much as a Samsung is not twice as good. It just costs twice as much, but we don't think twice about it because we have an affinity. We have a preference for that company, and if they tell us we need a watch – I didn't, but many people did go and get one. People don't want an SUV from BMW. They want the ultimate driving machine. They want the connection with BMW, and they just had too many kids. That brand connection being meaningful isn't throwaway, unmeasurable stuff. It's frankly the most important stuff, especially when the organization sees it as an invitation to participate in a culture that is very intentional, because the leadership that's approving the ads is also using the same idea that's easy to capture in ad creative and doing the harder work of trying to figure out how to keep that alive or to program that into the organization itself and into the customer experience itself. ROB: That's definitely a very compelling challenge. I think one part of the journey that's worth underscoring for you is – we're always talking to the challenger, the independent agencies, not the holding companies. But you've got even a different perspective. Those are quite often typically operated by somebody who was there on Day 1. Talk about your own transformation from joining the agency to being the CEO now. SCOTT: There's been a lot of leadership and structural capitulations over the years. Let me start by saying, too, that while we were a small agency in New Orleans – at our biggest, we were under 50. We really enjoy remaining at about that 20-to-25-person range, because we focus primarily on creative and strategy and project management. We do not have PR and social media and media planning and buying under roof. Now, we have media planners, but they're working with external groups in our network to plan and buy media and reconcile and optimize and all that stuff. The reason for that is because every place that we've ever worked, when you have a media department, that media department's mentality is kind of what every client that we win gets. And while it might be appropriate for consumer packaged goods, it might not be right for pharma or a healthcare system. But tough; that's our media director and that's your plan. Not all flowcharts look the same, but they could. That's the risk. We don't think downstream execution is unimportant; we just don't want to subject a client we haven't met yet to a downstream execution philosophy. That's how you wind up becoming a categorical agency, and we're trying to avoid that in order to fully administer the perspective regardless of category. That said, when you see the agency that way, it's not like you have a CEO sitting atop all these profit silos, because the only silos that are at Trumpet are really creative and strategy, and then the execution that comes from our client services division, which is split between project management and relationship management. But regardless, it's not a very complicated business to run. That said, the leaders of these disciplines are really empowered. The distance between CEO and the leaders of the silos is not very distant. But in order for the vision to not be lost in day to day execution, that's really where my focus remains. Right now we're in the process of trying to extract ourselves to the degree that we can from the day to day so that we can focus on the collective vision of the day to day. I say, how do we think a little less about the busyness of the agency and think more about the business of the agency? Not to be cavalier, but clients come and go, but the agency is either going to be defined by our relationships and whether we're right about to get fired or our clients love us, or we're going to have an idea as an agency that clients are going to find valuable or they won't. That's really what we're shifting to: trying to make it very, very clear, inside and out – just like we profess to our clients – let's make Trumpet a place very clearly inside and out that our employees and our clients are all clairvoyant on our value. Because if they want it, we'll be around for a while, and our retention increases and our connection with our employees increases the more transparent and clear we are about what's different about working here and working someplace else. There's no greater commodity than an advertising agency. ROB: It doesn't take a lot of capital to stand up something. SCOTT: Yeah. It takes three people and a client, and sometimes not a client. And sometimes not three people. [laughs] But there's a lot of talk in our industry right now about purpose. This should not be the 75000th purpose podcast because there's plenty of that. What this should be is one of the few that says, what do you do with it once you've got it? If you take it and run it into brand ads that are beautiful but aren't what the company is really rallying around, I think you're frankly doing a disservice. You're probably better off sticking in promotion land. That's been around since the '50s. ROB: Oh yeah, that's a well-trod lane as well. I think what's interesting maybe also is stepping into that CEO role, what are some things you might wish you had done sooner stepping into that seat? SCOTT: Actually, I've thought a lot about this. I mentioned this to you, but there's a difference between showing up to work every day as an account person or a team member or director of a discipline and trying to do the whole. But I think what has happened successfully here, in my personal path and matriculation, is we didn't miss the opportunity to shift from being in the mailroom to being an account guy to being a strategist to now being CEO. It's not like strategy is king now, like the ops guy takes over the CEO role and now ops is king, or the marketing guy takes over the CEO role and marketing is king. We are being disciplined enough to have Trumpet become associated operationally with an idea. There is very intentional alignment between Trumpet as an organization and the products and services that we provide. So those products and services being rendered on behalf of this portfolio of clients does not wholly define Trumpet. There's an idea of Trumpet: how do we make companies more believable? Advertising has a role in that, but advertising is a very narrow solution to that. Brand consulting or internal operational consulting has a role in that, but operational consulting is a narrow solution to the complex problem of how you get the customer experience, separate and apart from the company culture, separate and apart from the communications from that company, aligned with not a product, but a belief. Product innovation: awesome, you need it. But it's a very narrow solution to the satisfaction of that complex problem. There's three legs to that stool. If you put purpose in the center, how do you get the company culture aligned with that purpose? How do you get the advertising and communications pieces aligned with that purpose, and how do you get the customer experience aligned with that purpose? That requires very intentional, top-down commitment from the organization, and in our case it requires us challenging those organizations to think that holistically. Advertising agencies typically just exist in that communications third. I think we have a responsibility not to take over the whole, but to understand or to be able to provide a perspective that not only should communications be tied, locked in with the company culture and the customer experience, but all three should really be driven by clairvoyance and purpose. What is the core belief? What would the world lose if this company went out of business? If the answer is a product, then you're a commodity and somebody else can do what you do. But how you bring that product to market and what you stand for more spiritually than practically – you get that right and you will be more successful. Ironically, you will sell more product by talking about what that product is a means to what end. Becoming the CEO of the organization of Trumpet has been a challenge to not just let this be, “Oh my gosh, what clients are we about to lose or which ones do we really want to get?” and more, how do we keep this idea clear and alive internally and externally so that everybody, from our employees to our partners, in whatever executional hallway we partner with networks, and our clients – that idea of Trumpet is alive in all of those conversations? So that you don't get lost in the execution and confuse successful execution and analytical awesomeness with the idea of the company. Because that's not the idea of a company. That's the commodity part of advertising agencies. None of us should be bad at creative, buying and measuring and optimizing media and reporting on results. We should all be good at that. But that's all short term. What's the long term? Long term comes from brand, and not the unmeasurable ads. ROB: Right, and it's at a fractal level. Most individuals don't want to just buy and sell ads and measure them, and most organizations would be better not to. There's an alignment from client to organization to person that is going to put off some people who want to go in a different vision, but at least you're not adrift without direction and just commodity all the way down. SCOTT: And look at what the industry has done relative to that mentality. It's why agencies have been complaining for years that they're being marginalized. I don't lament marginalization. I think frankly, our industry deserved it. We allowed ourselves to be commoditized. The media commission structure lived on way too long and was disproportionately beneficial to agencies a long time ago, and has just been eroding and eroding and eroding over time. Now bring in the democratization of media buying and content development and clients can internalize a lot of this stuff. That democratization of the ability to execute elements of communications through self-serve platforms, and you don't need IPG anymore to run national broadcasts. Ironically, the democratization of the ability to participate in advertising, from a local one-off car dealership to a global superpower, is moving businesses farther away from a focus on purpose. They're like, “Man, this advertising thing is something we can just do. Let's internalize it. Let's run this with greater control.” What winds up happening is that the distance, the separation, the space between consumers and companies is widening because there's just less and less focus on companies being clear about what they stand for. They're providing consumers fewer and fewer opportunities to have a referendum on whether or not they like them, so products get commoditized. You'd better lower your expenses if you hope for net profit. ROB: Thank you for all that, Scott. When people want to find you and connect with you and with Trumpet, where should they go to find you? SCOTT: The internet is an awesome place, so you can google Trumpet. If you just scroll past the instruments for sale, you'll find us. But we're not hard to find. We're in downtown New Orleans now. We love our hometown, but we just as much love airports. We do not restrict our client base to here or really even the region. Have perspective, will travel. We're really just looking for those types of companies that are interested in holistic alignment, if not holistic transformation from where they were to a much more intentional place of where they want to be headed, and then right size our relationship to what makes sense for the individual company. ROB: That is excellent. Scott Couvillon from Trumpet Advertising, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing the transformation of your firm and thoughts on how we can all be transformational individually, organizationally, and brand-wise. Thank you so much. SCOTT: Thanks for the time. Love what you're doing. ROB: Be well. Thank you. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
About ScottScott is a web developer who has been blogging at https://hanselman.com for over a decade. He works in Open Source on ASP.NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland, Oregon. Scott has three podcasts, http://hanselminutes.com for tech talk, http://thisdeveloperslife.com on developers' lives and loves, and http://ratchetandthegeek.com for pop culture and tech media. He's written a number of books and spoken in person to almost a half million developers worldwide.Links: Hanselminutes Podcast: https://www.hanselminutes.com/ Personal website: https://hanselman.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more, visit lumigo.io.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Scott Hanselman of Microsoft. He calls himself a partner program manager—or is called a partner program manager. But that feels like it's barely scraping the surface of who and what he is. Scott, thank you for joining me.Scott: [laugh]. Thank you for the introduction. I think my boss calls me that. It's just one of those HR titles; it doesn't really mean—you know, ‘program manager,' what does it even mean?Corey: I figure it means you do an awful lot of programming. One of the hardest questions is, you start doing different things—and Lord knows you do a lot of them—is that awful question that you wind up getting at cocktail parties of, “So, what is it you do exactly?” How do you answer that?Scott: Yeah, it's almost like, if you spent any time on Clubhouse recently, there was a wonderful comedian named Spunky Brewster on Instagram who had a whole thing where she talked about the introductions at the beginning of a Clubhouse thing, where it's like, you're a multi-hyphenate sandwich artist slash skydiver slash programmers slash whatever. One doesn't want to get too full of one's selves. I would say that I have for the last 30 years been a teacher and a professional enthusiast around computing and getting people excited about computing. And everything that I do, whether it be writing software, shipping software, or building community, hangs off of the fact that I'm an enthusiastic teacher.Corey: You really are. And you're also very hard to pin down. I mean, it's pretty clear to basically the worst half of the internet, that you're clearly a shill. The problem is defining exactly what you're a shill for. You're obviously paid by Microsoft, so clearly you push them well beyond the point when it would make sense to.You have a podcast that has been on for over 800 episodes—which puts this one to shame—called Hanselminutes, and that is, of course, something where you're shilling for your own podcast. You've recently started on TikTok, which I can only assume is what the kids are into these days. You're involved in so many different things and taking so many different positions, that it's very hard to pin down what is the stuff you're passionate about.Scott: I'm going to gently push back and say—Corey: Please do.Scott: That if one were to care to look at it holistically, I am selling enthusiasm around free and open-source software on primarily the Windows platform that I'm excited about, and I am selling empowerment for the next generation of people who want to do computing. Before I went to Microsoft, my blog and my podcast existed, and I was consistent in my, “Hey, have you heard the news?” Message to anyone who would listen. And I taught at both Portland Community College and Oregon Institute of Technology, teaching web services and history of the web and C# and all that kind of stuff. So, I'm one of those people where if you touch on a topic that I'm interested in, I'll be like, “Oh, my goodness, let's”—and I'll just like, you know, knock everything off the desk and I'm going to be like, “Okay, let's build a model, a working model of the solar system here, now. The orange is the sun.”And it's like, suddenly now we're talking about science, like Hank Green or whatever. My family will ask me, “Why isn't the remote control working?” And then I've taken it apart and I'm explaining to them how the infrared LED inside works. And, you know, how can you not be excited about all these things? And that's my whole thing about computing and the power that being able to program computers represents to me.Corey: I would agree with that. I'd say that one thing that is universal about everything you're involved in is the expression I heard that I love and am going to recapture has been, “Sending the elevator back down.”Scott: Oh, yeah. Throwing ladders, ropes, elevators. I am very blessed to have made it out of my neighborhood, and I am very hopeful that anyone who is in a situation that they do not want to be in could potentially use coding, programming, IT, computing as the great equalizer and that I can I could somehow lend my privilege to them to get the things done and solve the problems that they want to solve with computers.Corey: I'm sure that you've been asked ad nauseum about—you work in free and open-source software. You've been an advocate for this, effectively, for your entire career; did no one tell you you work at Microsoft? But that's old Microsoft in many respects. That's something that we've covered with a bunch of different guests previously from Microsoft, and it's honestly a little—it's becoming a bit of a tired trope. It was a really interesting conversation a few years back that, oh, it's clearly all just for show.Well, that is less and less obvious, and more tired and frankly bad take as time progresses. So, I want to go back a bit further into my own personal journey because it turns out that the number one reason to reach out to you for anything is tech support on various things. I don't talk about this often, but I started my career moonlighting as a Windows admin, back in the Windows 2003 server days; and it was an experience, and licensing was a colossal pain, and I finally had enough of it one day, in 2006, switched over to Unix administration on BSD, and got a Mac laptop, and that was really the last time that I used Windows in anger. Now, it's been 15 years since that happened, and I haven't really been tracking the Windows ecosystem. What have I missed?Scott: [laugh]. There's a lot there that you just said. So first, different people have their religions and they're excited about them, and I encourage everyone to be excited about the religion that they're excited about. It's great to be excited about your thing, but it's also really not cool to be a zealot about your thing. So hey, be excited about Windows, be excited about Linux, be excited about Mac.Just don't tell me that I'm going to heck because I didn't share your enthusiasm. Let's just be excited together and we can be friends together. I've worked on Linux at Nike, I've worked on Mac, I've worked on Windows, you know, I've been there before these things existed and I'll be there afterwards.Corey: Exactly. At some point being a zealot for a technology just sort of means you haven't been around the block enough to understand how it's going to break, how it's going to fail, how it's going to evolve, and it doesn't lead to a positive outcome for anyone. It fundamentally becomes a form of gatekeeping more than anything else, and I just don't have the stomach for it.Scott: Yeah. And ultimately, we're just looking for—you know, we got these smart rocks that we taught how to think with lightning, and they're running for loops for us. And maybe they're running them in the cloud, maybe they're running locally. So, I'm not really too worried about it. Windows is my thing of choice, but just, you know, one person's Honda is another person's Toyota; you get excited about the brand that you start out with.So, that's that. Currently, though, Windows has gone, at least in the last maybe 20 years, from one of those things where there's generational pain, and, like, “Microsoft killed my Pappy, and I'll never forgive you.” And it's like, yeah, there was some dumb stuff in the '90s with Internet Explorer, but as a somewhat highly placed middle manager at Microsoft, I've never been in an active mustache-twirling situation where I was behind closed doors and anyone thought anything nefarious. There's only a true, “What's the right thing for the customer? What is the right thing for the people?”My whole thing is to make it so developers can develop more easily on Windows, so I'm very fortunate to be helping some folks in a partnership between the Windows division and the developer division that I work in to make Windows kick butt when it comes to dev. Historically, the Windows terminal, or what's called cmd.exe which is run by a thing called the console host has sucked; it has lagged behind. So, if you drop out to the command line, you've got the, you know, the old, kind of, quote-unquote, “DOS shell” with a cmd processor—it's not really DOS—running in an old console host. And it's been there for gosh, probably early '90s. That sucks.But then you got PowerShell. And again, I want to juxtapose the difference between a console—or a terminal—and a shell. They're different things. There's lots of great third-party terminals in the ecosystem. There's lots of shells to choose from, whether it be PowerShell, PowerShell Core—now PowerShell 7.0—or the cmd, as well as bash, and Cygwin, and zsh, and fish.But the actual thing that paints the text on Windows has historically not been awesome. So, the new open-source Windows terminal has been the big thing. If you're a Machead and you use iTerm2, or Hyper, or things like that, you'll find it very comfortable. It's a tabbed terminal, split-screen, ripping fast, written in, you know, DirectX, C++ et cetera, et cetera, all open-source, and then it lets you do transparency, and background colors, and ligature fonts, and all the things that a great modern terminal would want to do. That is kind of the linchpin of making Windows awesome for developers, then gets even awesomer when you add in the ability that we're now shipping an actual Linux kernel, and I can run N number of Linuxes side-by-side, in multiple panes, all within the terminal.This getting to the point about juxtaposing the difference between a terminal and a console and a shell. So, I've got, on the machine, I'm talking to you on right now, on my third monitor, I've got Windows terminal open with PowerShell on Windows on the left, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the right, with the fish shell. And then I've got another Ubuntu 20.04 with bash, a standard bash shell.And I'm going and testing stuff in Docker, and running .NET in Docker, and getting ready to deploy my own podcast website up into Azure. And I'm doing it in a totally organic way. It's not like, “Oh, I'm just running a virtual machine.” No, it's integrated. That's what I think you'd be impressed with.Corey: That right there is the reason that I generally tended to shy away from getting back into the Windows ecosystem for the longest time—and this is not a slam on Windows, by any stretch of the—Scott: No of course. Sure, sure, sure.Corey: —imagination—my belief has always been that you operate within the environment as it's intended to be operated within, and it felt at the time, “Oh, install Cygwin, and get all this other stuff going, and run a VM to do it.” It felt like I was fighting upstream in some respects.Scott: Oh, yeah, that's a great point. Let's talk about that for a second. So—Corey: Let's do it.Scott: So, Cygwin is the GNU utilities that are written in a very nice portable C, but they are written against the Windows kernel. So, the example I like to use is ls, you type ls, you list out your directory, right? So, ls and dir are the same thing for this conversation. Which means that someone has to then call a system call—syscall in Linux, Windows kernel call in Windows—and say, “Hey, would you please enumerate these files, and then give me information about them, and check the metadata?” And that has to call the file system and then it's turtles all the way down.Cygwin isn't Linux. It's the bash and GNU utilities recompiled and compiled against the Windows stuff. So, it's basically putting a bash skin on Windows, but it's not Linux; it's bash. Okay? But WSL is actually Linux, and rather than firing up a big 30 gig Hyper-V, or VirtualBox, or Parallels virtual machine, which is, like, a moment—“I'm firing up the VM; call me in an hour when it comes back up.”—and when the VM comes up, it's, like, a square on your screen and now you're dealing with another thing to manage.The WSL stuff is actually a utility virtual machine built on a lower subsystem, the virtualization platform, and it starts in less than a second. You can start it faster than you can say, one one-thousand. And it goes instantly up, it automatically allocates and deallocates memory so that it's smart about memory, and it's running the actual Linux kernel, so it's not pretending to be Linux. So, if your goal is a Linux environment and you're a Linux developer, the time of Linux on the desktop is happening, in this case, on the Windows desktop. Where you get interesting stuff, and where I think your brain might explode is, imagine you're in the terminal, you're at the Linux file system at the bash prompt, and you type ‘notepad.exe.' What would you expect to happen? You'd expect it to try to find it in a Linux path and fail.Corey: Right. And then you're trying to figure out, am I in this environm—because you generally tend to run these things in the same-looking terminal, but then all the syntax changes as soon as you go back into the Windows native environment, you're having to deal with line-ending issues on a constant basis, and you just—Scott: Oh, yeah. All that stuff, where.Corey: And as soon as you ask for help because back in those days, I was looking primarily into using freenode as my primary source of support because I network staff on the network for the better part of a decade, and the answer is, “I'm having some trouble with Linux,” and the response is, “Oh, you're doing this within a Windows environment? Get a real computer, kid.” Because it's still IRC, and being condescending and rude to anyone who makes different choices than you do is apparently the way that was done back then.Scott: Well, today in 2020 because we don't want to just have light integration with Windows—and by light integration, like, I don't know if you remember firing up a virtual machine on Windows and then, like, copy-pasting a file, and we were all going like, “Oh, my God, that's amazing.” I drug the file in and then it did a little bit of magic and then moved the file from Windows into Linux. What we want is to blur the lines between the two so you can move comfortably. When you type explorer.exe or notepad.txt in Linux on Windows, Linux says no, and then Windows gets the chance, fires it up, and can access the Linux file system.And since Notepad now understands line endings, just happily, you can open up your .profile, your bash_profile, your csh file in Notepad, or—here's where it gets interesting—Visual Studio Code, and comfortably run your Windows apps, talking to your Linux file system, or in the—coming soon, and we've blogged about this and announced it at Build last year, run Linux GUI apps seamlessly so that I could have two browsers up, two Chromes, one Windows and one Linux, side-by-side, which is going to make web testing even that much easier. And I'm moving seamlessly between the two. Even cooler, I can type explorer.exe and then pass in dot, which represents the current folder, and if the current folder is the Linux file system, we seamlessly have a Plan 9 server—basically a file server that lets you access your Linux file system—from—Corey: Is it actually running Plan 9?Scott: It is a Plan 9 server.Corey: That is amazing. I'm sorry, that is a blast from the past.Scott: I'm glad. And we can run N number of Linuxes; this isn't just one Linux. I've got Kali Linux, two different Ubuntus, and I could tar up the user mode files on mine, zip them up, give them to you, and you could go and type ‘wsl–import,' and then have my Linux file system. Which means that we could make a custom Screaming in the Cloud distro, put it in the Windows Store, put it up on GitHub, build our own, and then the company could standardize on our Linux distro and run it on Windows.Corey: That is almost as terrible an idea as using a DNS service as a database.Scott: [laugh].Corey: I love it. I'm totally there for it.Scott: It's really nice because it's extremely—the point is, it has to have no friction, right? So, if you think about it this way, I just moved—I blogged about this; if people want to go and learn about it—I just moved my blog of 20 years off of a Windows Server 2008 server running under someone's desk at a host, into Azure. This is a multi-month-long migration. My blog, my main site, kind of the whole Hanselman ecosystem moved up in Azure. So, I had a couple things to deal with.Am I going to go from Windows to Linux? Am I going to go from a physical machine to a virtual machine? Am I going to go from a physical machine to a virtual machine to a Platform as a Service? And when I do that, well, how is that going to change the way that I write software? I was opening it in Visual Studio, pressing F5, and running it in IIS—the Internet Information Server for Windows—for the last 15, 20 years.How do I change that experience? Well, I like Visual Studio; I like pressing F5; I like interactive debugging sessions. But I also like saving money running Linux in the cloud, so how can I have the best of all those worlds? Because I wrote the thing in .NET, I moved into .NET 5, which runs everywhere, put together a Docker file, got full support for that in Visual Studio, moved it over into WSL so I can test it on both Windows and Linux.I can go into my folder on my WSL, my Windows subsystem for Linux, type code dot, open up Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code splits in half. The Windows client of Visual Studio Code runs on Windows; the server, the Visual Studio Code server, runs in WSL providing the bridge between the two worlds, and I can press F5 and have interactive debugging and now I'm a Linux developer even though I've never left Windows. Then I can right-click publish in Visual Studio to GitHub Actions, which will then throw it into the cloud, and I moved everything over into Azure, saved 30%, and everything's awesome. I'm still a Windows developer using Visual Studio. So, it's pretty much I don't know, non-denominational; kind of mixing the streams here.Corey: It is. And let me take it a step further. When I'm on the road, the only computer I bring with me these days—well, in the before times, let's be very realistic. Now, when ‘I'm on the road,' that means going to the kitchen for a snack—the only computer I bring with me is my iPad Pro, which means that everything I do has a distinct application. For when I want to get into my development environment, historically it was, use some terminal app—I'm a fan of Blink, but everyone has their own; don't email me.And everything else I tended to use looked an awful lot like a web app. If there wasn't a dedicated iOS app, it was certainly available via a web browser. Which leads me to the suspicion that we're almost approaching a post-operating-system world where the future development operating system begins to look an awful lot—and people are going to yell at me for this—Visual Studio Code.Scott: Mmm.Corey: It supports a bunch of remote activities now that GitHub Codespaces is available—at least to my account; I don't know if it's generally available yet—but I've been using it; I love it; everything it winds up doing is hosted remotely in Azure; I don't have to think about managing the infrastructure; it's just another tab within GitHub, and it works. My big problem is that I'm trying to shake, effectively, 20 years of muscle memory of wrestling with Vim, and it takes a little bit of a leap in order to become comfortable with something that's a more visually-oriented IDE.Scott: Why don't you use the VsVim, Jared Parsons Vim plugin for Visual Studio?Corey: I've never yet found a plugin that I like for something else to make it behave like Vim. Vimperator is a browser extension, all of it just tends to be unfortunate and annoying in different ways. For whatever reason, the way that I'm configured or built, it doesn't work for me in the same way. And it goes back to our previous conversation about using the native offering as it comes, rather than trying to make it look like something else.Scott: Okay. I would just offer to you and for other Vim people who might be listening, that VS Code Vim does have 2.5 million installs, over 2 million people happily using that. And they are—Corey: Come to find it only has 200,000 actual users; there was an installation bug and one person just kept trying over and over and over. I kid, I kid.Scott: No, seriously though, these are actual Vim-heads and Jared Parsons is a developer at Microsoft who is like, out of his cold dead hands you'll pull his Vim. So, there's solutions; whether you're Vim or Emacs, you know, we welcome all comers. But to your point, the Visual Studio, once it got split in half, where the language services, those services that provide context to Python, Ruby, C# C++ et cetera, once those extensions can be remoted, they can run on Windows, they can run on Linux, they can run on the cloud. So, VS Code being split in half as a client-server application has really made it shine. And for me, that means that I don't notice a difference, whether I'm running VS Code on Windows or running VS Code to a remote Linux install, or even using SSH and coding on Windows remotely to a Raspberry Pi.Corey: I love the idea. I've seen people do this, in some respects, back in the days of Code Server being a project on GitHub, and it took a fair bit of wrangling to get that to work in a way that wasn't scarily insecure and reliable. But once it was up and running, you could effectively plug a Raspberry Pi in underneath your iPad and effectively have a portable computer on the go that did local development. I'm looking at this and realizing the future doesn't look at all like what I thought it was going to, and it's really still kind of neat.Scott: Mm-hm.Corey: There's a lot of value in being able to make things like this more accessible, and the reason I'm excited about a lot of this, too, is that aligned with a generous free tier opportunity, which I don't know final pricing for things like GitHub Codespaces, suddenly the only real requirement is something that can render a browser and connect to the internet for an awful lot of folks to get started. It doesn't require a fancy local overpowered development machine the way a lot of things used to. And yes, I know; there are certain kinds of development that are changing in that respect, but it still feels to me like it has never been easier to get started with all of this technology than ever before, with a counterargument that there's so many different directions to go in. “Oh, I want to get started using Visual Studio Code or learning to write JavaScript. Great. How do I do this? Let me find a tutorial.” And you find 20 million tutorials, and then you're frozen with indecision. How do you get past that?Scott: Yeah, there is and always will be, unfortunately, a certain amount of analysis paralysis that occurs. I started a TikTok recently to try to help people to get involved in coding, and the number one question I get—and I mean, thousands and thousands of them—are like, “Where do I start?” Because everyone seems to think that if they pick the wrong language, that will be a huge mistake. And I can't think of a wrong language, you know? Like, what human language should I learn?You know, English, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese. Pick one and then learn another one if you can. Learn a couple. But I don't think there's a wrong language to learn because the basics of computer science are the basics of computer science. I think what we need to do is remind people that computers are computers no matter whether they're an Android phone or a Windows laptop, and that any forward motion at all is a good thing. I think a lot of people have analysis paralysis, and they're just afraid to pick stuff.Corey: I agree with what you're saying, but I'm also going to push back gently on what you're saying, as well. If someone who is new to the field was asking me what language to learn, I would be hard-pressed to recommend a language that was not JavaScript. I want to be clear, I do not understand or know JavaScript at all, but it's clear from what I'm seeing, that is, in many ways, the language of the future. It is how frontend is being interacted with; there are projects from every cloud provider that wind up managing infrastructure via JavaScript primitives. There are so many on-ramps for this, and the user experience for new folks is phenomenal compared to any language that I've worked with in my career. Would you agree with that or disagree with that assessment?Scott: So, I've written blog posts on this topic, and my answer is a little more ‘it depends.' I say that people should always learn JavaScript and one other language, preferably a systems language, which also may be JavaScript. But rather than thinking about things language-first, we think about things solutions-first. If someone says, “I want to do a lot of data science,” you don't learn JavaScript. If someone says, “I want to go and write an Android app,” yeah, you could do that in JavaScript, but JavaScript is not the answer to all questions.Just as the English language, while it may be the lingua franca, no pun intended, it is not the only language one should pick. I usually say, “Well, what do you want to do?” “Well, I want to write a video game for the Xbox.” Okay, well, you're probably not going to do that in JavaScript. “Oh, I want to do data science. I want to write an iPhone app.” JavaScript is the language you should learn if you're going to be doing things on the web, yes, but if you're going to be writing the backend for WhatsApp, then you're not going to do that JavaScript.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn't translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that's not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Corey: Yeah, I think you're right. It comes down to what is the problem you're trying to solve for? Taking the analogy back to human languages, well, what is your goal? Is it just to say that you've learned a language and to understand, get a glimpse at another culture through its language? Yeah, there is no wrong answer. If it's that you want to go live in France one day and participate in French business discussions, I have a recommendation for you, and it's probably not Sanskrit.At some point, you have to align with what people want to do and the direction they're going in with the language selection. What I like about JavaScript is, frankly, it's incredible versatility as far as problems to which it can be applied. And without it, I think you're going to struggle as you enter the space. My first language was crappy Perl—slash bash because everyone does bash when you're a systems administrator—and then it has later evolved now to crappy Python as my language of choice. But I'm not going to be able to effectively do any frontend work in Python, nor would I attempt to do so.My way of handling frontend work now is to have the good sense to pay a professional. But if you're getting started today and you're not sure what you want to do in your career, my opinion has always been that if you think you know what you want to do in your career, there's a great chance you're going to be wrong, but pursuing the thing that you think you want to do will open other opportunities and doors, and present things to you that will catch your interest in a way you might not be able to anticipate. So, especially early on in careers, I like biasing for things that give increased options, that boost my optionality as far as what I'm going to be able to do.Scott: Okay. I think that's fair. I think that no one ever got fired for picking IBM; [laugh] no one ever jeopardized their career by choosing JavaScript. I do think it's a little more nuanced, as I mentioned.Corey: It absolutely is. I am absolutely willing to have a disagreement with you on that front. I think the thing that we're aligned on is that whatever you pick, make sure it's something you're interested in. Don't do it just for—like, “Well, I'm told I can make a lot of money doing X.” That feels like it's the worst reason to do things, in isolation.Scott: That's a tough one. I used to think that, too, but I am thinking that it's important to note and recognize that it is a valid reason to get into tech, not for the passion because for no other reason that I want to make a lot of money.Corey: Absolutely. I could not agree with you more, and that is… something I've gotten wrong in the past.Scott: Yeah. And I have been a fan of saying, you know, “Be passionate and work on these things on the side,” and all that kind of stuff. But all of those things involve a lot of assumptions and a lot of privileges that, you know, people have: that you have spare time and that you have a place to work on these things. I work on stuff on the side because it feeds my spirit. If you work on woodworking, or drones, or gardening on the side, you know, not everything you work on the side has to be steeped in hustle culture and having a startup, or something that you're doing on the side.Corey: Absolutely. If you're looking at a position of wanting to get into technology because it leads to a better financial outcome for you and that is what motivates you, you're not wrong.Scott: Exactly.Corey: The idea that, “Oh, you have to love it or you'll never succeed.” I think that some of the worst advice we ever wind up giving folks early in their career—particularly young people—is, ‘follow your passion.' That can be incredibly destructive advice in some contexts, depending upon what it is you want to do and what you want your life to look like.Scott: Yeah, exactly.Corey: One of the things that I've always been appreciative of from afar with Microsoft has been there's an entire developer ecosystem, and historically, it's focused on languages I can barely understand: ASP.NET, the C# is deep in that space, F#, I think, is now a thing as well. There's an entire ecosystem around this with Visual Studio the original, not Visual Studio Code—turns out naming is one of those things that no tech companies seems to get right—but it feels almost like there's an entire ecosystem there for those of us who spent significant time—and I'm speaking for myself here, not you—in the open-source community talking about things like Perl and whatnot, I never got much exposure to stuff like that. I would also classify Enterprise Java as being in that direction as well. Is there a bifurcation there that I'm not seeing, or was I just never talking to the right people? All the above? Maybe I was just—maybe I had blinders on; didn't realize it.Scott: There was a time when the Microsoft developer ecosystem meant write things for Windows, do things on Windows, use languages that Microsoft made and created. And now, with the rise of the cloud and with the rise of Software as a Service, Microsoft is a much simpler company, which is a funny thing to say for such a complicated company. Microsoft would love to run your for loop in the cloud for money. We don't care what language you use; we want you to use the language that makes you happy. Somewhere around five to seven years ago, in the developer division, we started optimizing for developer happiness.And that's why you can write Ruby, and Perl, and Python, and C, and C++ and C# and all those different things. Even C# now, and .NET, is owned by the .NET Foundation and not by Microsoft. Microsoft, of course, is one of the primary users, but we've got a lot of—Samsung is a huge contributor, Google is a huge contributor, Amazon Web Services is a big contributor to .NET.So, Microsoft's own zealotry towards—and bias towards our own languages has, kind of, gone away because Office is on iPhone, right? Like, anywhere that you are, we'll go there. So, we're really going where the customer is rather than trying to funnel the customer into where we want them to be, which is a really an inverted way of doing things over the way it was done 20, 30 years ago. In my opinion.Corey: This gets back to the idea of the Microsoft cultural transformation. It hasn't just been an internal transform; it's been something that is involved with how it's engaging with its customers, how it's engaging with the community, how it's becoming available in different ways to different folks. It's hard to tell where a lot of these things start and where a lot of these things stop. I don't pretend to be a Microsoft “fanboy,” quote-unquote, but I believe it is impossible to look at what has happened, especially in the world of cloud, and not at the very least respect what Microsoft has been able to achieve.Scott: Well, I came here to open source stuff. I'm surely not responsible for the transformation, I'm just a cog in the machine, but I can speak for the things that I own, like .NET and Visual Studio Community, and I think one of the things that we have gotten right is we are trying to create zero-distance products. You could be using Visual Studio Code, find a bug, suggest a feature, have a conversation in public with the PMs and devs that own the thing, get an insider's build a few days later, and see that promoted to production within a week or two. There is zero distance between you the consumer and the creator of the thing.And if you wanted to even fix the bug yourself, submit a pull request, and see that go into production, you could do that as well. You know, some of our best C# compiler folks are not working for Microsoft and they are giving improvements, they are making the product better. So, zero-distance in many ways, if you look at the other products at Microsoft, like PowerToys is a great thing, which is [unintelligible 00:32:06] an incubator for Windows features. We're adding stuff to the PowerToys open-source project like launchers, and a thing called FancyZones that is a window tiling manager, you know, features that prosumers and enthusiasts always wished Windows could have, they can now participate in, thereby creating a zero-distance product in Windows itself.Corey: And I want to point out as well that you are still Microsoft. You, the collective you. I suppose you personally; that is where your email address ends. But you're still Microsoft. This is still languages, and tools, and SDKs, and frameworks used by the largest companies in the world. This zero-distance approach is being done on things that service banks, who are famously not the earliest adopters of some code that I wrote last night; it's probably fine.Scott: Do you know what my job was before I came here?Corey: Tell me.Scott: I was the chief architect at a finance company that created software for banks. I was responsible for a quarter of the retail online banking systems in North America, built on .NET and open-source software. [laugh].Corey: So, you've lived that world. You've been that customer.Scott: Trying to convince a bank that open-source was a good idea in the early 2000s was non-trivial. You know, sitting around in 2003, 2004, talking about Agile, and you know, continuous integration, and build servers, and then going and saying, “Hey, you should use the software,” trying to deal with lawyers and explain to them the difference between the MIT, Apache, and GPL licenses and what it means to their bank was definitely a challenge. And working through those issues, it has been challenging. But open-source software now pervades. Just go and look at the license.txt in the Visual Studio Program Files folder to see all of the open-source software that is consumed by Visual Studio.Corey: One last topic that I want to get to before we call it a show is that you've spent a significant portion of your career, at least recently, focusing on, more or less, where the next generation of engineers, developers, et cetera, come from. And to that end, you've also started recently with TikTok, the social media platform. Are those two things related, first off, or am I making a giant pile of unwarranted assumption?Scott: [laugh]. I think that is a fair assumption. So, what's going on is I want to make sure that as I fade away and I leave the software industry in the next, you know, N number of years, that I'm setting up as many people as possible for success. That's where my career started when I was a professor, and that's hopefully where my career will end when I am a professor again. Hopefully, my retirement gig will have me teaching at some university somewhere.And in doing that, I want to find the next million developers, right? Where are they, the next 10 million developers? They're probably not on Twitter. They might be a lot of different places: they might be on Discord, they might be on Reddit, they might be on forums that I haven't found yet. But I have found, on TikTok, a very creative and for the most part kind and inclusive community.And both myself and also recently, the Visual Studio Code team have been hanging out there, and sharing our creativity, and having really interesting conversations about how you the listener can if not be a programmer, be a person that knows better the tools that are available to you to solve problems.Corey: So, I absolutely appreciate and enjoy the direction that you're going in, but again, people invite you to things and then spring technical support questions on you. Can you explain what TikTok is? I'm still trying to wrap my head around it because I turned around and discovered I was middle-aged one day.Scott: Sure. Well, I mean, I am an old man on TikTok, to be clear. TikTok, like Twitter, revels in its constraints. If you recall, there was a big controversy when Twitter went from 140 characters to 280 because people thought it was just letting the constraint that we were so excited about—which was artificial because it was the length of a standard message service text—Corey: I'm one of those people who bitterly protested it. I was completely wrong.Scott: Right? But the idea that something is constrained, that TikTok is either 15 seconds, or less than 60, it's similar to Vine in that it is a tiny video; what can I do in one minute? Additionally, before they allowed uploading of videos, everything was constrained within the TikTok editor, so people would do amazing and intricate 30 and 40 shot transitions within a 60 second period of time. But one of the things I find most unique about TikTok is you can reply to a text comment with a video. So, I make a video—maybe I do 60 seconds on how to be a software engineer—somebody replies in text, I can then reply to that text with a video, and then a TikTok creator can do what's called a stitch and reply to my video with a video.So, I could take 15 seconds of yours, a comment that you made, and say, “Oh, this is a great comment. Here's my thoughts on that comment.” Or we could even do a duet where you record a video and then I record one, side-by-side. And we either simulate that we're actually having a conversation, or I react to your video as well. Once you start teaching TikTok about yourself by liking things, you curate a very positive place for yourself.You might get on TikTok, not logged in, and it's dancing, and you might find some inappropriate things that you don't necessarily want to see, or you're not interested in, but one of the things that I've noticed as I talk about my home network and coding is people will say, “Oh, I finally found adjective TikTok; I finally found coding TikTok I finally found IT TikTok. Oh, I'm going to comment on your post because I want to stay on networking TikTok.” And then your feed isn't just a feed of the people that you follow, but it's a feed of all the things that TikTok thinks you're excited about. So, I am on this wonderful TikTok of linguistics and languages, and I'm learning about cultures, and I'm on indigenous TikTok, and I'm on networking TikTok. And the mix of creativity and the constraint of just 60 seconds has been, really, a joy. And I've only been there for about a month and I've blessed to have 80,000 people hanging out with me there.Corey: It sounds like you're quite the fan of the platform, which alone in isolation, is enough to get me to look at it in more depth.Scott: I am a fan of creativity. I would also say though, it's very addictive once you find your people. I've had to put screen time limits on my own phone to keep me from burning time there.Corey: That is all of tempting, provocative, and disturbing. I—Scott: You should hang out with me on YouTube, then. I just got my 100,000 YouTube Silver Play Button in the mail. That's where I spend my time doing my long-form. I just did, actually, 17 minutes on WSL and how to use Linux. That might be a good starter for you.Corey: It very well might. So, if people want to learn more about what you're up to, and how you think about the wide variety of things you're interested in, where can they find you?Scott: They should start at my last name dot com: Hanselman.com. They used to be able to Google for Scott, and I was in an epic battle with Scott brand toilet paper tissue, and then they trademarked the name Scott and now I'm somewhere in the distant second or third page. It was a tragedy. But as an early comer—Corey: Oh, my condolences.Scott: Yeah, oh my God. As an early comer to the internet, it was me and Scott Fly Rods on the first page, for many, many years. And then—Corey: If it helps, you and Scott Fly Rods are both on page two.Scott: Oh. Well, the tyranny of the Scott toilet paper conspiracy against me has been problematic.Corey: Exactly.Scott: [laugh].Corey: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really do appreciate it.Scott: It's my pleasure.Corey: Scott Hanselman, partner program manager at Microsoft and so much more. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a crappy comment that starts with a comment that gatekeeps a programming language so we know to ignore it.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
Scott Strazzate is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist with more than 30 years of experience shooting for publications like the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. Scotts Book “Common Ground” is a 2 decades-long exploration of a piece of land that transitioned from Homestead Farm to Sprawling Suburbs. Today we talk about the long-term project, what to look out for, and ideas for you to start your own long-term project. Key Takeaways: Scott narrates his experience starting in photography, from his interest in childhood till he took up photography as a full-time job, rather than staying in the family business. Not having to face criticism in the early stages of his career was an advantage in a way, as Scott notes it may have discouraged him from pressing forward. On the other hand, less knowledgeable people appreciating his work kept him going. Studying the photography of other professionals also played a major role in keeping him motivated and inspired. The brightest spot of an image is usually where your eye goes first, and you can learn to control in a split second, how to compose an image that is pleasing to look at. Scott describes the importance of focusing on creating images after gaining in-depth knowledge about your gear, rather than always trying to get new gear hoping to become a better photographer. Having to overcome the fear of interacting with people became paramount, as this was a challenge that came with expanding from sports photography. Scott narrates in detail, events leading up to his "Common Ground" photography project, with no initial plan to create it, as well as the emotion and serendipity surrounding the project. He notes that to date, it is the major work he is known for, and was a personal project rather than a product of affiliation with any paper. I tell photographers that if they want to do a book that people would enjoy, they should take photographs of one block or storefronts, make prints of these, and put them away for years, when these come out later, they will be greatly appreciated. Repetition is something that I always look for in photography, I think it's fascinating, and a good way to make a compelling image. If you can have one of something, two is better. Three acts in a photo story: A beginning, a middle, and an end. When doing a photo story you want this: a cat climbs up a tree, someone shakes the tree, the cat gets out of the tree. Scott describes a major challenge with photojournalism being having to leave people's lives when the story is over especially because you may not be able to continue to just hang around, even if they would want you to. Resources: Scott Strazzante’s website Scott’s Prints for sale Scott Strazzante on Instagram Scott Strazzante on Twitter Join The Beginner Photography Podcast Facebook Community Standout Quotes: "I learned that the brightest spot of an image is usually where your eye goes first" - [Scott] "I don't like getting a new camera because I think the key for anyone as a photographer is you have to learn your camera well enough that you forget it... and just concentrate on making images" - [Scott] "So it's like time really has a way of improving old photographs" - [Scott] "Follow your own voice, follow what interests you because if it excites you, it will excite other people... but you have to be very organized with it" - [Scott] "That's the struggle sometimes too, you get so used to your surroundings that they don't seem interesting anymore, and that has been something that's been a challenge with the pandemic" - [Scott] "I think turning the camera on your family is the easiest place to start" - [Scott] "I can always go make a good photograph but it's going to take something that happens out of my control to elevate it to a great photograph" - [Scott] "There's two types of photography, there's Taking photographs and Making photographs" - [Scott]
2:07 - 2:13 Scott: “It was originally sort of a hobby and a marketing effort to develop a brand in health care.” 16:22 - 16:25 Scott: “So I understood the niche marketing concept, being in a niche within health care.”19:10 - 19:18 Scott: “It wasn’t until 7-8 years ago when we started, you know, really thinking about this as a serious business, where somebody said, ‘Oh, you’re in business-to-business media.’” 24:28 - 24:51 John: “I just get the sense that there’s still this antagonistic relationship between pharmacy and Pharma. … Pharma has not been able to demonstrate the value that they bring to the table.”26:02 - 26:14 Scott: “There’s this constant issue with pharmacy officers of, ‘Are we getting the right drugs, or ... is somebody pushing us drugs that don’t really make a difference but have a huge impact on the cost?’” 27:59 - 28:03 John: “I think people are willing to pay for the game changers, [but] not so much for the ones where there’s that marginal benefit.”32:58 - 36:16 Scott: "How do you mix in your strategy some of the things that were sort of ignored or not brought to the front as strong as they were before, like health equity and making sure that you’re a lead on health equity, not just in revenue on fee for service and your five great service lines?”Scott Becker is the publisher and founder of Becker’s Healthcare and Becker’s Hospital Review. He is also a CPA and a partner and former board member of the law firm McGuireWoods, where he served as chair of the national health care practice for more than 12 years. Scott is a graduate of Harvard Law School.John Marchica, CEO, Darwin Research GroupJohn Marchica is a veteran health care strategist and CEO of Darwin Research Group, a health care market intelligence firm specializing in health care delivery systems. He’s a two-time health care entrepreneur, and his first company, FaxWatch, was listed twice on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing American companies. John is the author of The Accountable Organization and has advised senior management on strategy and organizational change for more than a decade.John did his undergraduate work in economics at Knox College, has an MBA and M.A. in public policy from the University of Chicago, and completed his Ph.D. coursework at The Dartmouth Institute. He is a faculty associate in the W.P. Carey School of Business and the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University, and an active member of the American College of Healthcare Executives.About Darwin Research GroupDarwin Research Group Inc. provides advanced market intelligence and in-depth customer insights to health care executives, with a strategic focus on health care delivery systems and the global shift toward value-based care. Darwin’s client list includes forward-thinking biopharmaceutical and medical device companies, as well as health care providers, private equity, and venture capital firms. The company was founded in 2010 as Darwin Advisory Partners, LLC and is headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz. with a satellite office in Princeton, N.J.
Ken Wentworth is a best-selling author, public speaker, cash flow pro, 6-time World Record Holder, fractional CFO, and B2B Radio host. He has been advising businesses for more than twenty years across the financial services industry. Leveraging extensive experience with financial management, business development and operations, he has advised businesses from Fortune 15 companies to startups on how to establish a solid financial path. Ken's level of expertise includes revenue generation, financial excellence, strategic direction, operational efficiency, change management, and risk management. He is passionate about sharing his strategies that yielded consistent results for his clients. Listen in as they discuss:Who is a fractional CFODiversifying revenue streamsCreating passive incomeAssessing your business marginsAnd, more!Ken also shares some of the worst advice he has seen or heard given in his area of expertise.TIP OF THE WEEKMark: My tip of the week is learn more about Mr. Biz at mrbizsolutions.com, learn more about being a fractional CFO, and how it can help small businesses. He's got a lot of content: live streams, articles, books. Get smarter!Scott: There's this guy Ian Ray, he created this website called tvcharts.ianray.com; when you go there you can type in any show and it will show you by series and by episodes for the show.Ken: My tip is to take action, progress not perfection. Very important. The way I illustrate that is, and try to make this humorous, so people remember it and I say the road is riddled with a lot of flat squirrels who couldn't make a decision. Are you going to cross the road or are you coming back? Which one are you doing, commit to it, and make it happen. You got to take action and don't be a flat squirrel.Isn't it time to create passive income so you can work where you want, when you want and with whomever you want?
Achieve Wealth Through Value Add Real Estate Investing Podcast
James: Hi audience and listeners, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth True Value and Real Estate Investing Podcast. I'm excited to let you guys know that last week we had Mark Kenny from King Multifamily and we discussed a lot of interesting stuff about some of the different markets that he's been buying. They have been buying like in five different markets. Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and Florida. And it's very interesting to see, apart from Texas and Florida, which are, you know, more popular markets and how do they underwrite deals in Alabama and how they underwrite deals in Tennessee, you know. So it's a very interesting episode, I would encourage you guys to listen to that as well. This week we have Scott Hendricks from Current Investment LLC. Scott is a wealth manager and we're going to be covering different topics such as a DST or Delaware Statutory Trust, which is another alternative for 1031 exchange. You're going to be talking some things about 1031 exchange. And we're also going to be talking about qualified opportunity zones investments and some of the broker-dealer licensing such as series seven licensing, which is really important for people who want to raise money using broker-dealer license. Hey Scott, welcome to the show. Scott: Hi James. Thank you very much. James: Awesome. Awesome. So did I miss out anything? Do you want to fill in the introduction with anything else that I missed out about yourself? Scott: No, I, I appreciate that. I have been an Austin based wealth manager, financial advisor for about eight years now. I have a series seven, which is the general securities license and I have a series 66, which is called a combined uniform state license. I also am licensed with my clients in California and Arizona and Wyoming in addition to Texas. And I am affiliated with a broker-dealer firm known as Kelton and Associates. They're based in Tampa, Florida. But my business current investments are based right here in Austin. James: Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I really want to quickly get into the series seven being a broker-dealer because there's a lot of capital out there. There are very, very few deals nowadays. And what's happening is a lot of people trying to raise money, you know trying to be a money raiser, but there's a lot of advice that's coming from the SEC attorneys that, you know, you have to do it the right way. And there's a lot of discussion about why not I become a broker-dealer? So can you define what is a broker-dealer, which is basically a licensed person who's allowed to legally raise money? What is a broker-dealer? Scott: Sure. So a broker-dealer in my case is basically the...I think of it as kind of my back office. The back office that supports registered representatives like me with performing my transactions for my clients, maintaining regulatory oversight and supervision of my activities, ensuring that I receive ongoing training. They handle the registrations with the government entities that oversee all securities business in this country. And you're correct, there are a wide range of licenses that govern various aspects of all of this activity. They are now regulated by an organization known by its acronym, FINRA, which is simply the financial industry, regulatory authority and finra.org is the website where anyone who would be interested in learning about these licenses or possibly even obtaining one of these licenses could go and look at the menu of the different licenses that FINRA overseas. Some of which are for broker-dealers, some of which are for general securities representatives like myself, some of which govern the transacting in your liquid securities and private placements, which are often the kinds of opportunities that I believe you're describing where it is necessary to raise funds. I don't remember the specific numbers of all of those licenses. There are about two dozen types of licenses that FINRA supervises. And I would encourage your audience if they were interested to learn more about that to go to FINRA, finra.org. James: Got it. So how difficult is it to get a series seven license? I mean how long does it take? How difficult is the exam? What do you need to be good at kind of thing? Can you explain? Scott: Well, you know, interestingly I got my license eight years ago. I know some things have changed as far as the cost. The costs have gone up a little bit. They're still reasonable. Most of these licenses can be obtained for a few hundred dollars, a filing fee, purchasing the study materials, scheduling the exam. I would say the process takes anywhere from three to six months. There are no prerequisites so you do not have to have a finance degree from college, you don't have to work in the financial industry. You can simply if you purchase the application for the license, study the material, take the test and pass the test, you'll obtain one of these licenses. James: So do you need to know a lot of financial terms? Is there a lot of math? Is that calculus involved? Scott: I wouldn't have passed if there was very much calculus. No, there's no need to know a lot of math. It certainly helps to be familiar with, I would say intermediate financial concepts. Certainly, basic concepts like, you know, interest compounding, time of the value of money cost basis, rates of return; fundamental financial concepts that anyone who wishes to invest or is already an investor should be familiar with. But there's no set list of previous academic or experience requirements that one must have before taking one of these FINRA exams. James: Got it. So basically the cost is less than a thousand dollars. You say $300 eight years ago. Scott: Again, I'm a little out of date, but I would say yes, you can still apply for any of these federal licenses for less than I would even say, you know, three to $500. James: Got it. Got it. And so you say three to six months you go to the exam, it's not that difficult, you need to know basic financial concepts, which I think is important. You're going to be advising people about their money and what's the rate of return. Scott: It's a designed course of study to maintain the credibility of the industry, the level of professionalism and the basic knowledge base that the regulatory bodies in this country want professionals to maintain for the benefit of their clients. James: So when you are taking a series seven and becoming a broker-dealer, why would one person want to be a broker-dealer? Scott: If you want to oversee agents, if you want to essentially work with a group of agents, representatives, who will assist you in putting together investment opportunities and seeking investors, seeking clients, raising funds a broker deal or license, which I'm going to go out on a limb and say a broker-dealer license is probably more difficult to obtain, a little bit higher barrier because of that nature. That a broker-dealer is more of an office in charge of a number of representatives who then go into the field and work directly with clients. James: So are you saying broker-dealer has someone under them who works with the clients? Scott: They could. There's no reason why a broker-dealer could also not be an individual as well. But it is a different level of licensing required to have broker-dealer credentials than it is to have securities representative or securities agent credentials as I do. James: Oh, got it. Got it. So series seven will get you into the securities agent level and there's another level where you're to become a broker-dealer, I guess. Scott: That's reasonably accurate. Yes. So series seven, again, a series seven is called general securities license that enables me, authorizes me to transact in marketable securities for individual clients or businesses. So I am authorized to recommend and Franz deck that is initiate the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, registered private placements and in that last case to accredited investors. So it opens up a range of investment transactions that I am authorized to both recommend to clients and then assist them in transacting in those assets. A broker-dealer could essentially be in a position to put together deals, to put together or review outside deals that then they would approve an authorized to their representatives to go out and seek investors, recommend them to investors James: Got it. Great. I think the structure is similar to like in real estate agent versus broker, either the broker has somebody working for them. Scott: I wish I thought of that. That's a great analogy. I think that's very comparable. Yes. James: Got it. Got it. Very interesting. So I didn't even know that; I thought broker-dealer is a person, I mean, can be a person, but it's usually like a company where a lot of agents work for them and these agents get the series seven licensing. Okay. Got it. Got it. So I presume if you want to do fundraising for your lifetime, then you want to get a series seven licensing and be part of a broker-dealer. Scott: You know, I would advise anyone interested in being licensed in the securities industry to get a series seven. The series seven is almost the gateway licensed to a range of other licenses. Some of these other licenses do require that the individual have a series seven as a prerequisite. And as I mentioned earlier, there are licenses that are specific to illiquid private placement types of investments. So if I was interested only in raising money for let's say for startups or for venture funds or for passive real estate portfolios or deals, I would encourage that person to go get the series seven but then also look for one of the more specific licenses that delve more deeply into the specialized knowledge required for those kinds of specialized investments tailored to the accredited investor. James: Oh, got it. So series seven is just basic and then there's a lot more specific to the niche, I guess. Scott: Yes. Now, the series seven enables me to do both, but the accredited investor deals that I am able to recommend to clients must first be approved by my broker-dealer. James: Okay, got it. Got it. Scott: If I had one of these more specialized licenses, I might be able to go out and self approve or do my own independent due diligence and then recommend a particular investment to an accredited investor. James: Got it. Scott: As such, right now I need to go to my broker-dealer and say, Hey, here's a good deal. It looks like it would be right for one or several of my clients. And then asked my broker-dealer to scrub it, do their due diligence and then if they approve it, I would be authorized to go raise funds for it. James: Got it. Got it. So if one of our audience who wants to raise money for commercial real estate, you know, as syndication or multifamily, so they can get a series seven license and go and work for a broker-dealer. And in that while they work, they can propose to raise money on specific multifamily or any other commercials syndication, I guess to the broker-dealer and the broker-dealer needs to approve that, then he can go and raise money for that part of their syndication. Okay. Got it. And I mean, if it's not confidential, do we know how do these agents get compensated in terms of percentage? What is that range if it's not confidential? Scott: No, it's not really confidential. In my case, it's not confidential. In fact, it all has to be completely transparent and disclosed to the investor. So, for example, on a non traded REIT, if I was to recommend a real estate investment trust to a client that had previously been approved by my broker-dealer, I would earn a commission. In most cases where the investment is illiquid, I'm not gonna put that into a fee-based account. It's a standalone transaction that might complement that particular investor's portfolio. If they agree, I would disclose my commission and my commission generally runs between about four to 6% on the deal. Again, it's very comparable to what a real estate agent might earn on the sale of a property. But I'll disclose my commission, if the investor wishes to proceed, then I'll help them invest and I'll earn a commission on that transaction. James: So four to 6% of the money being invested, is that right? Scott: Correct. James: Got it. Got it. Scott: You know, four to 6% of the investor's contribution I would earn as a commission, a percentage of that, I would share with my broker-dealer, my back office. The way we think about it with these securitized real estate deals is if you invest $100, you know, $94 of your investment goes into the ground. James: Got it. Yeah, I understand. Scott: You know, approximately a 6% sort of transactional cost. Speaker: Got it. And do you get paid in the beginning or do you get at the end or during the transaction or how does that..? Scott: It really varies depending on how the deal is structured. It really varies. In many cases, my commission will be earned upfront, but there are certain deals where, where my commission may be considerably less upfront but I'll get an annual payout over the life of the time that the investor holds that deal. It really just depends from a deal to deal. James: And it's a one time commission. Right? That's it. Right? Scott: In most cases. James: Yeah. So I think what some people are doing is basically they're getting a GP percentage, which can be a lifetime, I mean, of that investment. But this is slightly different. Did you get a commission flat fee of 4-6% in the beginning? I mean, not at the beginning, in most cases. Scott: Right. Yeah. Most of my business James is fee-based portfolio management. So I may work with a client who has a portfolio of stocks and bonds and I'll earn a percentage of that account value over the time that I manage it on behalf of my client. It's in these cases of the one time a private placement transaction like a REIT or a Delaware statutory trust, where I'll simply earn a one-time commission. And then the investor will then own a passive property, a passive asset that will generate passive income for that client. But if they also have hired me so to speak or work with me to manage their other portfolio, that may be on more of a percentage-based or a fee-based relationship. James: Got it. Got it. So is it public information on which agent or which broker-dealer is doing better than others like the stock market, in terms of performing for their clients or is it all private? Scott: You know, that's one of those questions that can always only be answered with the words 'It depends.' It's really difficult when you come down to investing for individuals and let's say for business owner clients to compare performance. Because each and every investor has so many different goals and different risk tolerances and different timelines that it makes it very difficult. It really is apples and oranges to compare the performance of an entire book of business; either held by an advisor like me or overseen by a broker-dealer. It almost makes no sense to try to compare rates of return or performance simply because each and every investor has a unique objective. James: Absolutely. Absolutely. I agree. I mean, that's a really good comment. I mean, returns are one thing, right? But risk profile off the investors and you know, how risky is the deal itself is another factor. And everybody has their own taste or flavor that they want to take on when they want to invest. So, awesome. Awesome. And why does an equity investor want to come to a broker-dealer versus going to a private syndication model and invest privately? Scott: I think a lot of it has to do with the extra risk that you are mitigating by looking for investments that have already been registered with the securities and exchange commission and have been scrubbed; that is, have been researched thoroughly by a professional organization. And you know, there are certain things like just the credibility of the track record of successful deals that it has offered to clients that have exited; all the kinds of things you might look into with a private syndication deal. But for some investors that extra assurance of knowing that it has met the registration requirements of the securities and exchange commission and has been scrubbed and approved by a registered and licensed broker-dealer. James: Got it. Got it. Scott: That basically, that does that for a living. That does it, you know, hundreds of times a year looks at deal, memoranda and all of the documentation that goes into assuring investors that the deal is sound. And while you can never completely eliminate risk in any deal, I think that there's a certain risk premium that is reduced with registered and professionally researched opportunities. James: Got it. Got it. Got it. Although I think I want to just clarify one thing. So usually the investor's equity is paid out of their equity, right? I mean the broker-dealer or the agent fees in this model are paid out of the equity. Whereas in the syndication model, a lot of times people who you know will become part of the GPS as one of the functions to raise money. They get the money from the GP, not from the passive investor. So that's one big distinction, right, because... Scott: It is, that's correct. That's correct. James: It makes a difference as well. So, in terms of the profile of customers who come and look for broker-dealers and agents who work with broker-dealers, I mean, is it like a lot of family offices, a lot of institutions, or is it a lot of private equity investors? How would you say in terms of percentage? Scott: I think the answer is yes. And again, every wealth manager's business is different. In my case, I primarily work in the area of regulation D filed, liquid or a passive real estate and other types of deals. I generally am working with high net worth individuals. James: Okay. Scott: High net worth investors who are accredited and are simply looking to add or complement their existing portfolio with passive income through real estate, through business development companies. I also transact in oil and gas, master limited partnerships. So it's the investor in my case who is looking to diversify our portfolio and derive passive income at a rate that is more favorable than they would get in the bond market these days or certainly more favorable than they would get in something like a bank insurance CD or savings account. And perhaps doesn't have the inclination or the experienced to go in and evaluate real estate from private syndication that others might feel that they do have. So I'm able to offer for the less experienced real estate investor, the kinds of opportunities to derive passive income without the expertise that it might take to evaluate a syndication deal. James: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Yeah. The professionalism, of course, makes a lot of difference compared to someone you know, coming on from a weekend boot camp. So very interesting. So, yeah, I mean that's really good. Scott: There are always different paths. James: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And so coming back to 1031 and DSTs - Delaware statutory trust. So 1031 is, you know, a lot of people know what 1031; where it's basically an exchange mechanism within real estate to a much larger real estate offer, same kind where someone has to identify like three deals within 45 days of closing of the current deal. And they can defer the capital gain and they can defer the depreciation recapture back to the new deal which they should close within six months. Am I right? Did I miss out some? Scott: You know, that's pretty good. Everything you said is correct. I would simply add, and the way I like to describe it, a 1031 transaction is it's taking advantage of a section of the tax code and that's all 1031 is. It's simply a section of the internal revenue code that allows a real estate investor to sell a property or multiple properties and exchange the proceeds into other real estate, either a single property or multiple properties that can be either active or passively owned and differ all taxes that might be paid as a result of be the capital gains, depreciation recapture. There are a few other taxes that may come into play. For example, if you're in a state that has a state capital gains tax like California, that can also be deferred under the federal a tax code section 1031. But you're correct about the timelines there. There are pretty strict timelines that must be met in a 1031. And I often tell groups of real estate agents and investors that 1031 is widely known. A lot of people know about it, but it still kind of has some stigma or some intimidation factor about it that prevents it from being widely used. And so part of what I try to do is help my clients and others understand the 1031 process. The primary thing they're going to gain is what they might have otherwise paid in taxes, they can keep inequity and reinvest into other real estates. You mentioned that in many cases an investor will trade up with the 1031, going into the larger holding in real estate. I also see a lot of clients who spread out their investment and diversify into other classes o rfeal estate or into other geographic areas that they may not have owned previously. So it really is a wonderful way, four real estate investors to both diversify, expand, and differ the tax liability in the process of building a portfolio of real estate. James: Very interesting. But It's within the real estate asset class, right? Can they go from a real estate, you know, equity a 10 31 into something else other than real estate? Scott: Not as of the end of 2017. And this is something that may be new to your audience. So with the last tax bill, I think it was called the tax cut and jobs act passed by the government in Washington back at the end of 2017, the rules of 1031 were limited. Whereas, previously investors were able to exchange property in maybe in a non-real estate asset. For example, if you owned a, I like to use the example, if you owned a classic car collection, you could sell your antique automobile and exchange the proceeds into real estate or into more cars or fine jewelry and still do it under section 1031. All of that went away at the end of 2017 and left only real estate tangible property is now the only asset class that can be exchanged under the tax deferral section of 1031. James: Okay. So that's something new. I didn't even know that previously before 2017 you can exchange from other than real estate to other than real estate even though now you know, we all are real estate people so it's all within real estate, which is good. Scott: And you also hear another common misconception about 1031. The 10 31 exchange is also sometimes commonly called the like-kind exchange. Like-kind is a phrase that is used in the actual language of the tax code. And a lot of investors, and frankly a lot of real estate agents confuse the phrase like-kind as meaning that if you sell multifamily, you must buy multifamily. Or if you sell a commercial property, you must buy a commercial property. That is not the case. Like-kind is very broadly defined by the IRS. Meaning, if you sell anything that has a physical address, a tangible property, you can buy any other category of tangible property. So if you sell a block of single-family homes that you've held as a rental property, you can go buy a warehouse or if you sell a self-storage property, you can go buy a ranch. So it's really any kind of property. It can be exchanged for any other kind of property,[31:24unclear] since 2017, as long as we're talking real estate. James: Okay. So let me clarify that because we had some kind of sound issue there. So after 2017 we can go and exchange, even though it says like-kind, but you can go within a different asset class, like buying from single-family to a ranch or from multifamily to single-family. Okay. So if you still within real estate, you are good I guess. Right? Scott: That's right. James: Got it, got it. Got it. And I think one of the common strategies that a lot of you know, generational real estate investors use is basically to buy real estate and keep on exchanging until they die. And when they die, they gave it to their kids as a gift and where the cost basis starts all over again. And that's the generational wealth Passover, right? Is that true? I mean, did I say it correctly? Scott: Yeah, it is. And really the 10 31 exchange is, I believe a terrific way to build a real estate legacy. If the investor has heirs or hopes one day to pass a legacy of real estate on to their heirs, 10 31 exchange is an excellent way to do that. Because as long as you continue to sell and then buy real estate under the rules of section 10 31, there's no limit to the number of times you can do it. And as long as you continue to do it, you have deferred your tax liability each time. If at any time you chose to cash out and simply sell your holdings and take the cash and walk away, you're going to owe the tax and in fact, you're going to owe the cumulative tax that you have been deferring. So there actually is with 10 31 a fairly strong incentive once you've begun the process to just keep doing it. And if you keep doing it until your time is up and you have heirs waiting in the wings, you will upon the date of death of the original owner, that owner will leave to their heirs a legacy of real estate that upon the date of death is stepped up in cost-basis. That's the term that the auditors use such that the cost-basis will then become equal immediately to the market value as of that point in time. And as I like to say, the heirs, if they don't wish to hold on to the real estate, they conceivably could turn around the day after the funeral and go sell everything and pay virtually nothing in capital gains or depreciation taxes. James: Got it. So that is an awesome tip there. You can use real estate to not pay tax and make tons of money and, of course, your kids are your heirs, they inherited that and they will make the money. But it's a big way to give your wealth that you have created to your heirs, right. And without paying any taxes Scott: Right. And, again, it, it would then be up to that next generation whether they want to continue to own that real estate and continue to enjoy the benefits of passive income and all the other benefits of owning real estate in a portfolio. Or as I said earlier, if they chose to get out at that time because of the step-up in cost basis, it would potentially eliminate or virtually eliminate all of the capital gain tax liability. James: Got it. And also the depreciation recapture, right? Scott: The appreciation recapture as well. Now of course, if there's an estate tax, depending on the size of the portfolio that is inherited, an estate tax may still come into play. But that's an entirely different situation. James: Estate tax. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. So let's come to DST - Delaware statutory trust. And I know some people say this is similar to 10 31. Can you explain what this and why we should use this compared to the normal 10 31? Scott: Absolutely. So a Delaware statutory trust is not widely known. I've been familiar with these opportunities for about 4-5 years now and I've spoken to many real estate groups, investor groups, agents, attorneys, CPAs. The Delaware statutory trust, in short, is the only form of passive real estate that is eligible as replacement property in a 10 31 exchange. So let me expand on that. A Delaware trust is often compared to a REIT. It's very different from a REIT in many important ways, but it is a legal form of ownership set up around a property, around a physical property, and then offered to investors who may invest in a fractional percentage of the underlying property via the trust. Because a Delaware trust must own physical property, the IRS recognizes it as another way an investor could engage in a 10 31 exchange. In other words, the 10 31 is just the process of selling and then swopping or buying other real estates. You could either as an investor buy an active property or properties, you're going to be the landlord and hold the deed and be responsible for the rents and the tenants and the repairs. Or you could own a fractional interest in a Delaware statutory trust. You would be a passive investor. The sponsor of the trust would have all management and landlord responsibilities, but as a fractional investor, you would derive your proportionate share of the income. And because there is underline real property in a Delaware trust, the IRS allows these types of trust as an eligible investment via section 10 31. And so here's really how it works and this is kind of the main core, I think, of the benefits of the Delaware statutory trust, In section 10 31 exchanges, the investor sells a property that begins, as you alluded to earlier, that begins a 45 day calendar, a 45 day clock. That investor has 45 days to identify, in most cases, up to three properties that they intend to reinvest in. Now, they don't have to invest in all three. They could identify one primary property and two backups or two properties and one backup. But they've got to have those properties identified in the first 45 days. A Delaware statutory trust makes an excellent backup property because it's passive, for one thing. It's open to investment. It's not going to fall out of escrow during the first 45 days as sometimes real properties do. In other words, it's not going to go off the market. If that were to happen with the investor's primary or secondary property and the deals weren't going to close there, if they have named a Delaware trust as a third or as any of their backup properties, their money could then roll back into that trust as an investment and that would effectively secure their 10 31 transactions from start to finish. So Delaware statutory trust makes great backup properties in that first 45 day identification period. Secondly, in cases where an investor is selling a property and buying a property for less, or actually buying a less expensive property, maybe a value-add property that they want to improve and they're going to have some leftover cash from the deal that they sold, a Delaware statutory trust makes a great way to capture or invest that leftover cash and still secure 100% of the transaction, the 10 31 transaction, from tax. So as a simple example, if you're selling a million-dollar property and the property you want to buy is 850,000, you've got 150,000 leftover. It might be hard to find another real property for 150,000 in some markets. So a Delaware trust comes along as a great way to park or invest that residual leftover cash securing 100% of the 10 31 proceeds from taxation, at least deferring 100% of the tax liability and giving the investor now two different properties. One is the primary property for 850 that they wanted to buy and fix up or be the landlord over. The other is the 150,000 fractional interest in a passive investment that they will have no work responsibilities to maintain, but they'll be receiving a passive income from that trust. And then the final way that I think Delaware trusts are powerful is if the investor is simply wishing to continue to own real estate but really wants to get out the landlord business entirely. And that would be someone who maybe has been an active landlord for a better part of their investment career, wishes to continue to hold real estate because it's a great asset. Why not? But doesn't want to be a landlord anymore. So they may sell all of their active real estate properties, declare their intent to do a 10 31 exchange and then pick two or three Delaware statutory trust to put 100% of the proceeds into. They now have switched from being an active to a 100% passive investor. Someone else does the work of the landlord that is the sponsor of the trust. They began to receive the mailbox money or the passive income, still own real estate as part of their portfolio and they've effectively deferred all of what would have been their tax liability from selling their active holdings. And another wonderful thing about two more points about a Delaware trust. You can do a 10 31 exchange out of a Delaware trust. So when the underlying property in the trust sells, which signals the liquidation of the trust, the investor will be notified with plenty of time. They can then declare another 10 31 and take their proceeds out of the Delaware trust, which may have appreciated over that time and they can take those proceeds and swap them into some other property. They can either go into another trust or they can go back into the active real estate market if they choose to. Or of course they have the option to simply cash out, take the cash, and at that time they would incur the tax liability. And then the other benefit of a Delaware trust is you do not have to do a 10 31 exchange to invest in a Delaware trust. Delaware statutory trusts are open to cash investors. So it's a good way for an accredited investor, which you must be. In order to invest in a Delaware trust, you must be an accredited investor, but you do not have to be bringing money into the trust via 10 31, you could be a cash investor. But once you're in a Delaware trust as fractional owner with either your cash investment or your 10 31 proceeds, you can then when the trust liquidates do a 10 31 exchange. So a Delaware trust provides a good way for a real estate investor who wishes to be passive, doesn't have a property to sell but wants to in the future be able to do a 10 31 exchange. As long as they've got cash and they are accredited, they can invest in a Delaware trust. And then you know, three to five to sometimes seven years down the road when the trust liquidates, they'll be eligible to do a 10 31 exchange and defer any potential tax that they might have otherwise paid. James: Wow. I didn't know so many things about DSTs. This is very eye-opening for me. It's like a syndication but it's a tax-protected syndication, right? Scott: It's a way to take 10 31 money; money coming out of a 10 31 deal and put it into an investment open to up to 500 individual investors typically, which is far more than something like a tenant in common where you're limited to only 35 investors. Delaware trust, yes, you're a fractional owner of a real estate portfolio that is managed by a sponsor who acts as a trustee and you basically, your only job is to go to the mailbox and receive your checks. James: Got it. Got it. Yeah, I was trying to bring that up. Tenants in commons is another way I thought Delaware strategize is similar to tenants in common. Because in tenants in common is where everybody puts their 10 31, everybody has their own LLCs, all different entities, but they work as one. But you brought up a good point. There's a limit on 35 tenants in common that can be done but DST is 500 people. Scott: And an important distinction to make there is that with a much higher cap on the number of investors, you're able to fractionally own much larger institutional scale types of real estate. So you may be able to be a fractional investor in a downtown Dallas office tower that's in a Delaware trust, whereas 35 investors, it would be difficult to pull together the 35 investors who could afford to purchase a multimillion-dollar property. But with a Delaware trust, you often are a fractional investor in a property portfolio that could potentially be worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. So access to a larger scale institutional type of property is one of the benefits of what the DST has versus a tenant in common. And then the other one, now some will see this as a negative, some may see it as a positive. With a tenant in common, each one of the up to 35 investors has a vote. They have some control over the upkeep and the sale or the management of that property. And as you know, when the property is going to be sold, you've got to get the unanimous vote of all 45 investors. With the Delaware trust, the investor is 100% passive. They do not have any say, any control over the management of the property. That's entirely the responsibility [48:05unclear] of the sponsor. They also do not have any control or voice over when the property is going to be sold. So if that appeals to an investor, in other words, if they say, I don't want I have to vote or to have to go get the other 34 people to vote, I just want to be passive, a Delaware trust is a good option compared to [48:31unclear] James: But what is the average return of Delaware statutory trust? Scott: So again, that varies. It varies from you know, market conditions and from the difference of Delaware trusts that are available. Typically what I have been seeing lately are rates of return between about five and seven and a half to 8% and that's cash on cash. So cash on cash or nominal right of return is let's just say six to six and a half percent in the midpoint. So while that is not typically a strong rate of return compared to private syndication or even compared to a lot of tenant in common deals, you have to look at the other benefits. One, again, access to larger institutional scale properties. The fact that the Delaware trust is going to be a registered program, sponsored and regulated by oversight bodies. And then three, although this is also the case with the other types of real estate investment, the sponsor of the Delaware trust in rules similar to REITs. If they are taking depreciation on the underlying property, that tax credit has to be distributed to their investors. So while the nominal rate of return might be 6%, that is the cash on cash return, in many cases, the investor is going to see some portion of that cash dividend be already after tax. In other words, it's going to receive the benefit of that depreciation tax credit that the sponsor is taking. So depending on the investor's tax bracket, their effective rate of return is going to be higher than their nominal rate of return, given that some portion of that distribution is after tax money. James: Got it, got it, got it. But let's say for example 6% cash in cash, is it including the sale of the property or is there such thing called the sale because they are physical assets under this DST, right? Scott: Yeah, no, you're right and I thank you. I should be clear. That is the cash flow. Let's say that, again, rates of return I'm typically seeing now average, I would just say average around 6% for this example. That is the cash flow. So that's the annualized cash flow that the investor is going to receive in monthly checks. Obviously one 12th of that amount in monthly check is the underlying property where they have their principal. If that underlying property appreciates over the life of the trust and is sold at a value greater than it was acquired for, the investor is also going to receive their prorated share of that appreciation. So the aggregate return is, I like to call it, or the total return is if the property appreciates is definitely going to be higher than the cash flow rate of return. James: Okay. So do you have that kind of sample numbers on roughly what's a performer? Scott: I can refer generically to some of the deals that I've seen. So let's say if an investor puts $100,000 as, let's say in this scenario where I described leftover cash; if they've sold a million-dollar property and they want to do a 10 31 and buy a $900,000 property and put that residual 100,000 into a Delaware trust, I'm just gonna use a number typically four to five, six or seven years. And again, during this time, the investment is illiquid. The investor cannot get their money back on their own schedule. They have to wait until the sponsor finds a buyer and sells the underlying property. But most real estate investors understand the concept of illiquidity. So if they've put 100,000 into a Delaware trust and five years down the road, the sponsor finds a buyer for that property and sells it at 25% gain, 25% in an appreciation, the investor is going to get their 100,000 back, they're going to get 25,000 for their proportionate share of the 25% gain. And during the five years they've held it, they've collected, I'll use the 6% rate of return as an example, they've collected $6,000 a year in monthly distributions at a 6% rate of return. So they've in effect received in a very simple example, their $100,000 back. They've gotten $30,000 of cashflow over five years and they've received a $25,000 gain or appreciation on their original investment. James: Got it. Got it. Got it. Interesting. So, yeah, I mean, it depends on the structure of syndication, right? Usually, you know, like for me, we allow people to buy and sell their shares. You know, within the investment period, but it looks like DST doesn't give that flexibility. Scott: A DST and you know, again, it's important for me to also say that with DSTs, there are still risks involved. You can lose money as you can with any type of investment. The illiquidity of the investment is something that the investor has to be informed of and understand that if they are an investor in a DST, they're at the mercy of the sponsor for the holding period. Now, while the disclosures require that I tell investors it's a five to seven year hold time with no option to exit. Typically with the market right now being what it is, I have seen DSTs liquidate sooner then five to seven years. It's simply varies from yield to deal. James: And what is the fee that the sponsor takes in DST? Scott: That again, it varies from deal to deal. Typically there's a 1% a dealer or sponsor fee, at closing. And again, as I mentioned earlier, I do earn a commission on investment that goes into a DST, it can range from anywhere from four to 6%. And, again, it's in the same ballpark as if you were working with a real estate agent and buying the physical property or working with yield syndicator and buying into syndication. James: Very interesting. I mean, I didn't know this vehicle exists and this is very powerful in terms of 10 31 money specifically. Why? Because you know, and I was thinking that you always have to go in 10 to 200 to go to larger properties, but it looks like you can buy smaller properties and take the remaining and put into DSTs I guess. Right? Scott: Yeah. It's really a part of my message that using a DST is a great way for an investor to diversify if it is in their interest. First of all, the primary reason anyone would undertake a 10 31 is to defer the tax. But a DST allows that investor to diversify into different types of property, both in terms of asset class or asset and active and passive real estate. So they can begin to sort of put more chest pieces onto the chest board, I guess and look at passive investment, active investment, lodging, self-storage, multifamily, single-family industrial, commercial; build a real estate portfolio that is truly diverse in terms of geography, asset category and the active and passive of ownership status. James: Got it. So let's quickly talk about qualified opportunities zone. I mean, there's so much of details into opportunity zone. I don't think we have time to go into a lot of details there. But at a high level, what is qualified opportunity zones investment, how is that different from a normal 10 31 and DST and you know, investing into opportunity zones? Scott: So qualified opportunities zones were also part of this same tax act that passed at the end of 2017. They are a fairly new concept or fairly new opportunity for investors. And the case can be made that opportunity zones were written into law because investments that were not real estate were excluded from section 1031 eligibility. So an opportunity zone is a geographic region of the country and there are a thousand or more opportunities zones all over the country where the local authorities have designated a desire to have investment flow into those zones from investors. They may be, you know, below market regions of cities or communities where the thought being that if investment dollars float into these areas, we would have more healthy economic development. Qualified opportunity zone investors may use gains from a sale of an investment other than real estate, whereas with 10 31, all you can exchange is real property. So, for example, if an investor has a stock portfolio and it's gone up in value, they want to sell their stock portfolio, but they'd rather not pay the capital gains tax that that's going to incur, they could invest the gain from that sale into a qualified opportunity zone, differ the tax liability, invest in a a property or real estate or real estate fund that's building projects in that zone and then they would enjoy a certain tax benefits due to the deferral of their original gain. If they maintain that investment in the opportunity zone for 10 years, they could then cash out and take their money and pay no tax. So one of the important differences between a 10 31 exchange and an investment in an opportunity zone is to put it simply, you don't have to die in order to cash out tax-free. James: But do you get 100% tax being erased? Scott: Not in the first case. You're correct. It really is complicated and we could probably have a whole separate episode on all of that opportunity zones. There are really two appreciation events that are subject to favorable tax treatment when it comes to talking about opportunity zone investments. The first one is the gain that the investor realized on the sale of their asset, whatever it may be that they want to put into an opportunity zone. So if they sold real estate that had gone up in value or sold stock, or I'll go back to my classic car example, and had an investment sale that would have been subject to capital gains tax, they can defer that tax up to seven years by putting that investment into an opportunity zone. Now, it is only a seven-year deferral. So after seven years, the investor will owe a portion of the tax they would have owed on the original sale of their investment. It will only be, in the case of a seven-year deferral, it'll only be 85% of the tax they would have owed. So it is truly just a deferral. You do have to come up with tax payment, at least 85% of the tax you might have owed seven years ago. In year seven, that tax bill does come due to the IRS. But understand now we're talking about two different investments. The investment that was sold to make the original opportunity zone investment, the tax four, which is deferred seven years. So it might be a benefit to an investor's cash flow and then the investment within the opportunity zone itself. And if that investment turns out to have been a good one, and the real estate or the property or the project in the opportunity zone appreciates over 10 years -hold time- and the investor then cashes out of that opportunity zone investment that will be exempt from capital gains tax. So it's that second investment in the opportunity zone that if it is a winner, if it appreciates over 10 years, the investor has the potential to cash out with their gain and owe zero capital gains tax. James: Got it. Got it. Very interesting. So let me summarize. 10 31 DST and qualified opportunity zone. So 10 31 let's say I have a million-dollars, where I want to defer my tax and my depreciation recapture, I just buy another asset, right? A larger asset or multiple assets, but it should be a larger value than all of it get deferred. And to the next asset, if I don't want to pay tax, I have to, you know, keep on doing 1031 until I die and pass it to my heirs. That's the 10 31. So DST is basically you asked it's the same as 10 31, but it's more of passive investment. Scott: Let me, let me jump in there and clarify it. A 10 31 is just a transaction. It's a way to sell and then buy real estate and defer the tax, not pay tax during that transaction. A DST is an asset. It's a kind of an investment. It is a passive real estate investment that can be a part of the equation of the 10 31 transaction. James: Got it. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And qualified opportunity zone is basically, it's the same as 10 31, but you're deferring your tax for seven years and on the seventh year, your bill is due to the IRS, but you get 15% forgiveness. Scott: You basically get a discount based on discount on the tax that you would have owed in year one. You'll owe 85% of it by the time year seven comes around. And so again, that was the tax you would have owed on whatever it was you sold to make the opportunities zone investment. James: Got it. Got it. So the original tax difference, you only pay 85% after year seven, right? So you get 15% forgiveness. But I think the bigger thing in an opportunity zone is whatever deal that you're investing in an opportunity zone that's completely free in terms of capital gain after 10 years. Scott: Yeah. Right, right. If the investment you have made in the opportunities zone does well and it goes up in value and 10 years down the road you have the opportunity to exit, you'll owe no tax. James: Okay. That's very interesting because that's another investment where you don't pay tax at all. And if you're doing most of the time you definitely make money, right. If you go through the construction phase and you're past that I guess. Right. Scott: Well, I will say that opportunity zones are new. There are a lot of risks involved. We don't have time probably to go into them here, but yes, there are a lot more considerations to making a potentially successful opportunity zone investment, but in the basics, I think you've got it correct. James: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard about so much of details on opportunity zone that you're to be really careful whether it's a qualifies opportunity zone and, you know, there's so many things, right. So awesome. Scott: And you know, James, this is a good opportunity for me just to mention as kind of a way of a disclaimer. I am not an attorney and I'm not a CPA. And one of the most important pieces of advice I give to my clients is if you're doing any of these complicated real estate transactions, check with your lawyer, check with your CPA to make sure that you've gotten all your questions answered before you write the check. James: Yeah. I think the purpose of this podcast and talking about so many things of this is just educational and just letting people know there are options out there. Which is very important because I was not aware of DSTS and you know, there are so much of details of the, you know, opportunity zone. So it was very eyeopening for me, so thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not you tell our audience how to get hold of you if they want to get hold of you? Scott: You bet. Sure. again, I'm Scott Hendricks. My company is called Current Investments. My website is currentinvestments.net. That's all one word, current, like the flow of water and then investments plural.net. You'd be welcome to send me an email or give me a call. My email is Scott@currentinvestments.net. My phone number...Do you typically, do your guests share their phone number? James: That's up to you. Scott: Okay, well that's fine. I don't mind at all. My phone number in Austin is 512 563 2134 James: Awesome. All right, Scott, thanks for coming in. I learned a lot of things. I'm sure my audience and listeners learned a lot of things and that's it. Thank you. Scott: It was fun. James. Thanks very much.
Scott Meyers is a real estate investor based in Indianapolis. It all began in 2005 and since then he has grown in the self-storage industry as a developer, owner, syndicator, and operator. He has several multi-million dollar businesses under his belt but his favorite is self-storage and today he is in control of over 7,500 units. Scott started ‘The Self-Storage Mastermind’ to teach others about the self-storage business. In today’s episode, he discusses how he entered the real estate industry, why he’s chosen to grow with self-storage, and what one should keep in mind before investing in a facility. He gives us insight on one of his memorable deals over the years- what happened, what he learned and what’s going on with it today. Some Of The Episode Highlights: His Self-Storage Business His ‘Why’ in Self-Storage The ‘Boomerang Property’ Special Gift for Our Listeners Connect with Scott: Website: selfstorageinvesting.com - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - TRANSCRIPTION Intro: Hey guys, this is Don, your host. In today's episode, I will interview Scott Myers. Scott is an amazing investor and he specializes in one of the most interesting asset classes, self-storage facilities. Today, me and Scott will discuss the nature of this market. Also, as previously mentioned, I want to remind you that you have an opportunity to get a free 30-minute phone call with me and Eden if you review our podcast on iTunes. Simply rate the podcast and write a review of how you feel about the content and the show. To redeem, email us the content of the review to Hello@donandeden.com. You will then be contacted and scheduled for a 30-minute phone call with me and Eden, where you could ask questions or network about any subject or project that you would like. So, let's get started and I hope you guys will enjoy the interview. Lady: Welcome to the commercial real estate investing podcast with Don and Eden where we cover all aspects of real estate investing with special attention to off-market strategies. Don: Scott, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? Scott: Hey, Don, I am fantastic. How about yourself? Don: I'm great. How's the weather up in Indiana? Scott: Well, that depends. We had our first snowfall of the year last night. It had about three inches, which is a little bit more than we normally get this time of year. So, I think I'd rather be down next to you conducting this interview right now. Don: Yeah, I mean, we just got the best weather right now in Florida. It's been very muggy for November, 75 degrees all throughout. I used to live in the Midwest, and I know it kind of gets cold in that period of time of the year, right? Scott: Sure can. Yep. Don: Yes. You've been living in Indiana, all of your life, born and raised? Scott: Born and raised in Michigan. I went to the University of Michigan and after I graduated, I moved down to Indianapolis where I took a job. I was working in the telecommunications industry before I got involved in real estate. Don: Wow. Okay, so that's a pretty sharp transition. What made you move into real estate? Scott: When I began looking in investment books on ways to I guess diversify my retirement rather than relying on our 401k stocks and bonds and mutual funds ran across several books, one of which was Robert Kiyosaki's book terms in real estate and the more I looked at more I realized that I didn't want to put my money into the stock market as the poor dad did in Robert Kiyosaki's book 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad.' And so, I began investing in single-family homes and then it took off after that. Don: Yeah, let's talk about your initial investments in the single-family space. What did you do, fix and flip? Scott: Began to buy single-family homes, and then fix them up, refinance them and rent them out. And I did that for a number of years until holding. It's kind of a tough gig holding on as a landlord unless you're flipping some as well. So once the economy began to turn in 1999 and 2000 during that downturn, shortly after the government came out with the Community Reinvestment Act, and made it easy, a little too easy for anybody to own a home and so we began then turning around our houses to sell them. So, we became retailers in addition to landlords. Don: Nice. I know right now you're focusing primarily on self-storage. Tell us about the first time you got to learn about this asset class and this market in general. Scott: Began looking into self-storage because of, well, that wasn't the cash flow that I wanted to have in single-family homes and apartments on like I had intended. And then when I went back and looked at the business model, I realized that most of my expenses were a result of a related to tenants and toilets and trash. And so, we all love real estate and we love running real estate if it weren't for that. So, I began looking into what are the other asset classes in real estate that has the benefits of real estate, but without all the hassles of the three T's. And it's either parking lots or self-storage. And so, the more I begin to look into self-storage in the business model, yeah, I really liked what I saw. And began attending some industry trade shows, then dip my toe in the water by getting into a partnership with someone in a self-storage facility. And the rest they say is history. Don: Yeah. So, there is a question that I want to ask you. I know now that you're very big on the self-storage space and you own or you're in control of over 7500 units, I’m guessing in self-storage just since 2005. So, you've been a longtime player in that space, but I want to ask you more about the beginning because I remember I just recently did a transition from residential wholesale real estate into commercial real estate. And even then, being an experienced investor and owning a lot of properties and having capital, it's not easy. So, you said something about going to shows and learning about... So, tell us a little bit about that period of time where you did not make your first deal in self-storage yet, but very attracted to that asset class and what you did in that time period, how much time did it take for you to get your first deal? Scott: There weren't any resources. You found me, Don because we have an education company as well. We teach people how to go about and do this business and we've been doing that since 2008. But prior to that, that company was really born as a result of that. There wasn't a resource, there wasn't a Scott Meyers out there to learn from it. So, I attended the industry trade shows and those shows are primarily for the folks that are already in the business. So, I begin talking to the attendees and just asking them, "What do you like best about self-storage and what don't you like about self-storage?" just to get an understanding from several folks that before me and how to get into it. There still wasn't any way to learn the nuts and bolts, the A to Z or how to get into it. When I came home as I began to do more research on my own, I reached out to a consultant in the industry and I spent a day with him and drove around and taking notes and asking about it. He owned a management company as well. And he managed several facilities for other folks. I asked him as many questions as I possibly could to fill in the gaps and I filled up three notebooks full of paper, just answering the questions that I had about the business and I, like you, been in multifamily and apartments and I understood commercial real estate. But all the nuances and all the intricacies of self-storage to bridge that gap and fill in the gaps took me all day and a bunch of notes and even then there was no way to get it all but that's how I started. And then just sort of trial by the fire going out and talking to other owners and brokers and begin exploring and looking at several facilities to buy. Don: Okay, tell us a little bit about the market itself. So, what are the biggest players, what is considered a big property? I know so when you're looking at multifamily anything over 200 units is considered very big. Mobile home parks, anything over 150 is considered institutional. So, what would you say is a big deal when you talk about self-storages? Scott: Yeah, we're in that 400 to 450 unit range and which equates to roughly greater than 60,000 square feet. Those facilities that are larger than those are the ones that are going to be typically institutional, so those are the ones are going to be held by Public Storage or Extra Space or Bridge or CubeSmart number of the big players or reads in the marketplace. Now not all the time we own several facilities that are that size as well with the goal and the intention of eventually off to the reeds and that's what we're developing and building now. That's really what's considered the big boys. And so the reeds are the institutional properties and facilities that size you know, that only accounts for about nine to 10% of all the units and all the square footage of self-storage are below that and are owned by some regional players that own you know, 1, 2, 5, 7 properties. Some national players that aren't considered and then a lot of the mom and pops that we buy our facilities from that can go all the way down to as low as 15 between units per facility. Don: Okay. So, mom and pop are always good because you can get a pretty good deal. Somebody that owned the property for quite a while, they have a lot of equity typically and there is a lot of value-added. So, I would assume that the value adds basically comes to play when talking about raising up the rents, right? So, they're just not fulfilling their potential. Scott: Yeah, that's absolutely one of the ways that we look at. We're always looking at turnarounds and value adds and the first of which is usually what you just mentioned is usually poor management. They haven't raised rents in a while because they like to stay full, they have fallen behind on technology and we do utilize software and kiosks to manage these facilities or at least help to manage these facilities, which reduces our payroll, which is our second highest expense, line-item expense next to property taxes. In many cases, not all the cases many of the mom and pops didn't understand how to market their facility, therefore they suffer from a lower occupancy than if they were running very well and had a better website and then a means for people to rent a unit or reserve units online. Don: Yeah, what would you say are the biggest minds or the things you should be careful when you're buying a self-storage, especially when underwriting a deal? Scott: Well, the normal due diligence that we go through first the physical side, we hire an inspector, we do our site visits and we hire an inspector to look at all the physical aspects with the underwriting. As you know Don, that some in commercial real estate, you make a $10,000 mistake and underwriting and just at a 10 cap is $100,000 valuation mistake that you've made. But in today's seven or six cap environment, we're talking about $120,000 - $130,000 mistake. So, it's making sure that if we're buying it from a seller and individual seller, or if we're buying from a broker, we need to get the seller's numbers, and all of the expenses. So, it has an art and a science to it. But the science part is just knowing exactly what to ask for. And in self-storage versus apartments versus mobile home parks, there are expenses that are associated with each one of those asset classes. So it's important to know what are the expenses of running a self-storage facility and making sure that your account for that. And as I'm sure you're used to and telling your folks as well but just because the seller and the broker don’t include it has zero alongside an expense sentiment doesn't mean it's going to be zero for you. So, management of lawn care and landscaping and snow removal, if that manager does that, or their employer does that, well, they're not going to do it for you so you need to add those expenses in. So, I think that's one of the places where people get tripped. Another is the change in property taxes. If you run it for a million dollars, and the last time it was assessed was at $500,000 and in this county, they assess based upon a sale, you can expect your property taxes to double roughly and so you need to account for that and underwriting that you're different set of expenses when you buy it versus what is given to you by the seller. So you know, we can go through each and every one of those but just making sure that you pull all the bills and you all of the information in terms of all the income coming into the facility, as well as all the expenses of that underwriting based upon that to give your valuation and your offer. But then we always have two sets of numbers that we use afterward, which is how we're going to run it today meaning 30 days after we bought and then what does it look like in the next one to five years down the road once we have stabilized it and added more value. Don: Okay, and what does it look like as far as the demand and the supply for self-storage facilities across the United States when we're talking about late 2019? I know that people are buying and we're consuming a lot more than what we used to, especially those you can buy everything online right now. And I know people have a lot of things that they want to store. What is your take on this industry and the direction in which it's going in the future for 5 or 10 years? Scott: What we're seeing right now is a demand for self-storage. We always look at supply; supply and demand for a particular market. And the good news is that we draw a ring around a particular site if we have developed for an existing facility of about three miles, five miles as if it's rural or one mile if you’re in downtown Miami. But then we're looking at the amount of self-storage square footage already in that market in a three-mile radius, compared to the population in our industry is considered somewhere between six and a half to seven and a half square person. And it depends upon the market and there are some areas that are quite a bit different than that. But that's kind of a round number. And so, that alone gives us an idea of what the demand is. So, then we visit those facilities and determine if that truly is the case, if they have waiting lists, the rental rates in the market will also be an indicator of what the demand is, obviously. And so, then we base it upon that, but there's only four square foot of storage per person in this market, and the rates are considerably higher than we see around the rest of the country and all the facilities are full and have waiting lists, then there's probably a need for some storage there. In the case of development, we're also going to get a feasibility study on just like you do Don when your billing departments often saying, "Yeah, we think it's going to work, we have to get a feasibility study before the bank will give us money and private equity partners as well." But that's how we look at it in today, in real-time for looking at a facility to develop or even to turn around. Now in terms of moving forward or looking forward, we don't see a whole lot of changes being the demand for self-storage. And we don't have a crystal ball that is perfect, but we keep an eye on trends and we've seen in the past, we've seen that the baby boomers have created a huge demand for self-storage as they've been downsizing and moving into assisted living and then passing on. Their kids store their items in storage for the future. But then the concerned about the millennials that perhaps they wouldn't have the same demand and self overseeing just the opposite. Yeah, they're minimalists, they have smaller homes or apartments because they want to give them up and go travel instead of having a house or they want to live in a smaller home. But they like adventures and experiences and adventures and experiences require skis and gear and mountain bikes and camping gear and kayaks and all those other things. And they don't fit in in their tiny houses or apartments or condos. And so we've seen an even greater surge in demand for self-storage, and we see that happening in the foreseeable future. Don: So, you wouldn't think there are any major disruptors coming in the form of let's say, multi families that are being built with storage facilities inside them. Would you say that this is a disrupter? Scott: I don't think so. Because sometimes they are done either on the grounds and in the basement in some of those areas. For they're doing that to a degree but we haven't seen that effect because if you're going to build apartment and you already have construction crew on-site, you're going to maximize the living space because you're going to generate a heck of a lot more revenue per square foot in living space, and you are for storage. So it's an amenity that they can put in place, but not to the degree that it meets the demand for the entire area or the market. So, we may lose a few of those clients in a three-mile radius, but it certainly doesn't speak to the entire market that we're marketing to if that makes sense. Don: Yeah, it makes sense. So where are you focusing on buying these self-storage facilities? Are you buying across the country or you're looking at particular markets and then when you're looking into a market? I know when I'm looking for mobile home parks or multi-families, that I'm looking for job growth and population growth and understanding the environment of the market. Are you doing anything different when you're looking into a self-storage facility, are there different stats that you got to understand before moving in? Scott: When I was also in homes and apartments and we're always looking for the emerging markets that were always a buzzword and some of the guru's had created. And you always want to see where there's growth in those markets. And that's always like that as well. Because if you see, you see self-storage facilities going up. Typically, they're going out not too far from apartments in a growing market, we're not too far away, they go hand in hand or in step with one another. But the good news about self-storage, unlike apartments and single-family rentals is that in a downturn in the economy, or even in a market that is experiencing a little bit of a decline in population or maybe some job loss in self-storage, we're in the trauma and transition business. If there's trauma, people losing their jobs are having to move they need storage, and they're downsizing and moving back with their parents are moving in with somebody else. And so that creates a need for storage. We've seen during the last recession and everyone prior to that self-storage does extremely well because businesses are downsizing. So, as we head into a changing economy, we feel that we're in good shape. When we're in a growing market or growing economy, people buy more stuff or there are more people to store things therefore there's a need for storage. But even if there's a downturn in a particular market that is losing jobs, there's a need for storage and self-storage does extremely well. Now doesn't mean that we do great in every single market in every single economy. The one caveat or the one market in which we wouldn't do well, and as those in which there's just a new extreme blight or a flight. So, if there are several manufacturers are leaving, and there are thousands of jobs that are leaving a market. That there are some instances that we've seen that or even New Orleans when Katrina came through and wipe them out, there's lots of areas within a three-mile radius that the population is so low that self-storage facilities are struggling, same in Detroit and Flint, Michigan, exited as the auto industry has left, the same thing. So, we do have to be careful that there is an extreme blight in those markets but we like just about every market and every economy for storage. Don: Yeah, but I would think that whenever there's an extreme blight in the market, then it's not going to be just self-storage is not going to be affected. It's going to be all types of real estate... Scott: Exactly. And you're right. Don: It doesn't really matter. So, I want to ask you about a specific deal. One that you remember, one for the ages is what we call it. So that you can intrigue everybody that's listening to this episode about self-storages and is considering to get into space, something that you bought, made good money and it was interesting and intriguing. So, tell us about one of those. Scott: Yeah. So, this is a property, it was a larger property that I bought back in 2007, so just prior to the Great Recession. I bought the property for $1.5 million with no money down, I used seller financing and a bank and bank debt on it. And it was an industrial building that had offices in it and warehousing, but we converted a large portion of it to outdoor parking for storage is the indoor self-storage. So, we put about $400,000 with a bank loan into the project and we had $1.9 into it. Then in 2007, at the end of it, so about two and a half years later, we sold it prior to the recession of 2008 and we sold about a $2 million profit on that one. Then came the recession and the buyer went bankrupt because he was a developer out of California and had lost his portfolio, retain the rights to market some of those properties, this being one of them. So, he offered it to me several times over the next several years, and the price kept coming down, down and down and then finally I was able to buy it back for $545,000. And so that's when we get good at syndicating as we mentioned Don when you run out of cash. We've leased it back up again and we've rehabbed them and renovated several areas, leased up the storage, added more storage to it. And it's under contract to sell right now for just a little shy of $3 million. Don: So, you made $2 million the first time and then a little bit over $2 million the second time. It is coming back to you giving you $2 million whenever you work with it. Scott: We affectionately call it 'The Boomerang Property,' so yeah. Don: That is just great, that's phenomenal. Okay, that's beautiful. You bought the property, that was luck also buying it right on time and selling it just before the recession, won't you say? Scott: We had that thing leased up so that we really couldn't create much more value in it. It was at the top, it would have just been through some minor rate increases. And so, we didn't foresee the recession coming and certainly not the magnitude that it was. So, I absolutely will not pretend that I knew what was happening. So yes, we were fortunate enough to be able to sell it at that time when financing was plentiful, and he was able to buy it and that was really good timing. And boy, we learned a lot of lessons through that recession. Fortunately, we weren't holding that one during that time. Don: Okay. What market was it? Scott: That was here in Indianapolis. Don: Nice. Great. That's very interesting. And I'm sure everybody that's listening could see that you could make $2 million on a self-storage facility, one that you bought for $2 million or was in for $2 million. That's amazing! That's a 100% return on your investment. That's great. What book would you recommend for somebody to read in case they already read 'Think And Grow Rich' and 'Rich Dad Poor Dad?' Scott: Wow, let me see here. Don: Difficult question, huh? Scott: It is. I'm just looking at my bookshelf of the many things we’re utilizing our company right now as we scale and grow just depending upon where folks are at is 'Traction'. So, it's more than just a book. It's where Gino Whitman talks about the entrepreneur operating system and really how we as entrepreneurs need to handle and run our business and treat it as a business no matter what the size is. So, I would strongly recommend 'Traction' by Gino Wickman. That is the one that's probably had the biggest impact on us recently. This is for yourself as well as any staff that you may be bringing on are the Four Disciplines of Execution or 4DX all about just getting things done. Bestseller on our wall street journal number one, and again loads of information on how to, well, just how to get things done and how to not make excuses or procrastinate and move the ball forward in your business. Don: Yeah, it seems that procrastinating is always one of the keys to failure. Everybody's saying to never procrastinate, always take action and get things done. Amazing. Yeah. So Scott, what's the best way to connect with you in case anybody wants to learn more about self-storage is or invest with you or anything of that nature? Scott: Sure. Well, selfstorageinvesting.com is our website with all things self-storage, and lots of freebies to download and some videos. But I got a little something that I want to give to your folks done specifically for being on this podcast. If you want the beginning a roadmap or what we call the blueprint into self-storage, you'll go to that same site http://selfstorageinvesting.com/blueprint1/ the numeral one behind it. It’ll show you the steps that you need to follow to get involved in this incredible business that we call self-storage. Don: Well Scott, thank you very much for sharing that with our audience and I hope that you're going to have a great day and thank you for being on the show today. Scott: My pleasure. Thank you, Don. Don: Yes, you're welcome. You have a great rest of your day Scott: You too. Lady: Thanks for listening to the real estate investing podcast with Don and Ethan. Stay tuned for more episodes. Till next time.
As a career coach, author, and speaker, John supports individuals and teams in making more effective career choices and more sustainable career plans. John works across generations, from graduate students looking to land their first jobs, to GenX and Boomer workers over fifty looking to redefine and sustain their careers beyond traditional retirement. Starting with the notion that our ideal career is already inside us, John advocates a more personal-growth approach to career development, vs the traditional HR skills-based paradigm.John has a new LinkedIn Learning course, Connecting with Your Millennial Manager. Marc and John discuss the inevitability of your working for a Millennial as you age in the workplace and how you can make it a positive growth experience.Marc is asking for your financial support for the Repurpose Your Career podcast. Please donate at Glow.fm/repurposeyourcareer to support this Podcast. Key Takeaways: [1:38] Marc welcomes you to Episode 154 of the Repurpose Your Career podcast. [1:51] If you are enjoying this podcast, please share it with other like-minded souls. Subscribe on CareerPivot.com, iTunes, or any of the other apps that supply podcasts. Share it on social media or just tell your neighbors and colleagues. The more people Marc reaches, the more people he can help. [2:10] Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition is available at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, Powells.com, BooksaMillion.com and many other fine online retailers. The book has 30 reviews on Amazon platforms. Marc thanks everyone who has taken the time to review it. [2:36] After three years of doing the Repurpose Your Career podcast it is time for a change. Marc talks about the financial concerns around the podcast and Marc’s Career Pivot business. Marc’s business now focuses on the Career Pivot online membership community to help the most people at a lower cost to the people he helps. [3:15] 2018 was the year the Millers became expats living in Ajijic, Mexico, which greatly reduced their living expenses and helped finance the restructuring of the business. Career Pivot needed to be financially viable. [3:33] In 2019 the Career Pivot website was attacked. For the first time, the website traffic for the year declined from the previous year, though very slightly. [3:47] Marc recently posted about “A Redesigned and Refocused Career Pivot After Attack.” He discussed the website and why he recently changed it. [3:58] Because the business no longer supports the costs of production, Marc is making changes starting with the next episode. Marc will eliminate the time-stamped podcast show notes with a detailed write-up of the show. About half of Marc’s listeners read the show notes. Marc will provide dramatically reduced notes. [4:30] Marc acknowledges the production work of Podfly Productions, as he transitions the Repurpose Your Career podcast to in-house production. Marc recommends using the Podfly.net team if you want to start your own podcast! [4:54] Marc will move to scheduling an episode every other week instead of the weekly schedule he has kept for three years. If Marc gets ahead on episodes over the next few months, he may revert to a weekly schedule. [5:07] Marc will not publish an episode the week of the U.S. Thanksgiving and will produce two episodes in December. On January 6th, 2020 Marc will start the regular biweekly schedule. [5:22] If you would like to financially support this show, please go to Glow.fm/repurposeyourcareer/ to give. This link will be at the top and bottom of the show notes at CareerPivot.com/episode-154. [5:34] Next week’s episode will be an interview with Teresa Ferguson, Executive Director of AustinUP, a community alliance committed to making Central Texas a place where older adults live full and engaged lives. Teresa has a unique view of the fifty-plus employment world. [5:57] This week, Marc interviews returning guest, John Tarnoff. John just published a LinkedIn Learning Online course, Connecting With Your Millennial Manager. Marc thinks it is incredibly well-done. We may all work at some time for a Millennial Manager. Marc hopes you enjoy this episode. [6:24] Marc welcomes John Tarnoff to the Repurpose Your Career podcast and introduces John to the listening audience. [6:33] John has a new course on LinkedIn Learning, called Connecting with Your Millennial Manager. Marc comments on how well-done this course is. It is divided into short modules with a quiz after each one. If you miss a question it tells you how to find the right answer. [7:13] John gives credit to LinkedIn for ushering him through the process of designing an instructional course. [7:28] LinkedIn approached John a year ago about setting up a course on age-related issues. Managing Someone Older Than You came out in February 2019. John asked them about the “companion piece” of an older worker needing to relate to a younger, probably Millennial boss, and they agreed. That course came out in October 2019. [9:13] The first module is “Everyone’s Getting Younger.” John explains that means in the workplace. If we have children, they are probably Millennials. Boomers often perceive Millennials as entitled slackers. They change jobs often. However, this is also related to the economy being much different than the economy in which Boomers started working. [12:02] Statisticians are finding that by the time a Millennial is promoted to a managerial position, it’s because they are very committed, on top of their job and their responsibilities, and are likely a top contender to work for. [12:28] Millennials are working in a very different economic climate, with colossal student debt and depressed wages. Home ownership is harder for them to achieve than it was for Boomers. They don’t see getting to the American Dream. [13:29] In Marc’s Multi-Generational Workplace workshop, he talks about the Millennials being the echoes of the Boomers. [13:52] Ashton Applewhite was a guest on this podcast. She talked about our natural tendency to self-segregate by age group. [14:30] Marc gave a talk on ageism last year. Afterward, a Boomer walked up to him and said he had volunteered for the Beto O’Rourke for Senate Campaign. He said, “Boy, did my attitude change about the Millennials!” [15:09] John’s course covers common-sense business relationship-building practice. Look at working for a Millennial as an opportunity to be of service. Be ready to mentor; support the work that they do. You will have a lot more fun in your job, find your ‘fit,’ and inspire a closer working relationship with this younger person. [16:32] The course section, “Working for a Millennial Boss,” discusses being of service. One of the keys to mentoring is that it’s not teaching. It’s listening openly and offering suggestions for how that person can figure out how to do it for themselves in their own way. [17:13] As a mentor, you don’t want to tell someone how you did it; you want to listen to what they are going through and have them list the specific problems and tactically offer up possibilities for them to consider. Give them alternatives, perspective, and context. Let them come to the conclusion. [17:54] When you first come to your Millennial boss, be a really good listener. John quotes Steven Covey: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Be humble. The world is really different. Younger people have an understanding of how the pace of change is affecting business and technology is affecting management communication. [19:03] Stuff still gets done but now we talk of lean process, agile management, and design thinking. These are new trends in the past decade. A diligent Millennial Manager is going to be working overtime to understand how these processes can benefit their team. There’s a lot we have to learn to be part of that team. We also have a lot to offer. [19:57] Marc takes a break from the interview with John to talk about the Career Pivot Membership Community, which continues to help the approximately 50 members who are participating in the beta phase of this project to grow and thrive. [20:10] Marc reads a member testimonial from community member Scott: “There are multiple online Mastermind groups each week as well as experts speaking to the group on a regular basis. Better yet, the content is recorded in case you have other plans that day. If you are debating LinkedIn Premium or Career Pivot, go with Career Pivot. [20:33] “You get tons of access to Marc and the wisdom of the tribe. You’ll be glad you joined.” Marc hopes you liked what Scott had to say. Marc would like to highlight that the key piece is the wisdom of the tribe. [20:48] This is a paid membership community where Marc offers group coaching, special content, mastermind groups, branding sessions, Slack channels, and more importantly, it’s a community where you can seek help. Please go to CareerPivot.com/Community to sign up to learn more. [21:13] What makes us in the second half of life an asset to today’s workforce? John says it’s the wisdom and experience. We come up with methods that just work, based on what we already have done. Our neural pathways have become well-worn in this area and we come up with answers quickly. It’s not just experience but also context. [23:14] Don’t tell people how to do it, or what worked “in my day.” Never say, “in my day”! Always be in the present. Don’t invoke your experience. Talk about your suggestion on its merits. Justify your solution based on present conditions. [24:04] Marc shares an anecdote from his days at IBM in the 1990s, when he was training technical support people. They found that when you solve a problem in a specific domain, the next time you see a similar problem in a similar domain, you will solve it sooner. [24:32] Marc gave the technical support people opportunities to work with technology when the product was still immature, so they would encounter more problems quicker. Marc has things he learned in college as an engineer apply today when he fixes his car. [25:05] John warns to be careful about invoking past solutions just because they worked once in a different domain. The solution can be offered as an approach if it will work today. If it works, and your manager asks where the idea came from you can then admit that you’ve been doing it that way for years. Millennials are suspicious of the past. [26:14] The past is not relevant. Think about the solution in terms of what’s going to work today. Don’t use past success as your authority for a current application. [26:43] John wants the course to give people confidence about reporting to a younger person. Almost 60% of people over 55 are reporting to someone younger. As Millennials age into these positions of responsibility, someone two generations below you will manage you. [27:37] John also says we need to spread the word that reporting to someone younger can be very enriching and liberating. If you develop a good working relationship with someone who is 30 years younger think of how that will enrich your perspective and cultural influences. We stay young by the diversity of connections we make. [28:39] The more we spend time with people of varied backgrounds and ages, the more our lives are enriched and the more we discover inside ourselves we never knew was there, or that we had lost. It enriches our lives. Put aside the nostalgia and embrace new experiences. Continue contributing to work, life, and culture. [30:25] Boomers and Millennials are very compatible. They have the same activist tendencies for meaning, purpose, and social justice. There is a lot to be gained by forming close relationships with Millennials, especially in the context of work. [30:59] From developing these courses, John learned that his initial hypothesis was correct that the more time Boomers and Millennials spend together, the more they get from each other. All the research points in that direction. [31:43] John cites a study by Dr. Karl Pillemer at Cornell that says the more generations spend time together, the more age bias withers away. Familiarity breeds harmony, cooperation, and understanding. We just need to spend more time hanging out with, working with, people of different generations. That is the future. [32:27] Marc talks about the multi-generational families where he lives in Mexico. Marc notes that in all the ‘Blue Zones’ where there are more centenarians, a common trait is that there are multi-generational families. [32:53] Multi-generational family living keeps your brain growing because you are constantly learning and experiencing life with people that are not ‘like you.’ [33:23] You can take John’s course on LinkedIn Learning (originally, Lynda.com). Find him at JohnTarnoff.com. Find John on LinkedIn, or Facebook. A Google search brings up some of his links on the first page. [34:25] Marc thanks John for being on the Repurpose Your Career podcast. [34:37] Marc hopes you enjoyed that episode. Marc was impressed with this thought-provoking interview. [34:50] The career Pivot Membership Community continues to help the approximately 50 members who are participating in the Beta phase of this project to grow and thrive. This is a community where everyone is there to help everyone else. Marc is recruiting new members for the next cohort. [35:05] If you are interested in the Career Pivot Membership Community and would like to be put on a waiting list, please go to CareerPivot.com/Community. [35:20] Marc invites you to connect with him on LinkedIn.com/in/mrmiller. Just include in the connection request that you listen to this podcast. You can look for Career Pivot on Facebook, LinkedIn, or @CareerPivot on Twitter. [35:35] Please come back next week when Marc will interview Teresa Ferguson, Executive Director of AustinUp! [35:43] Please support the Repurpose Your Career podcast by going to Glow.fm/repurposeyourcareer. This link is also at the top of the show notes. [35:58] You will find the show notes for this episode at CareerPivot.com/episode-154. [36:08] Please hop over to CareerPivot.com and subscribe to get updates on this podcast and all the other happenings at Career Pivot. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, the Google Podcasts app, Podbean, the Overcast app, or the Spotify app and soon to be on Pandora!
Scott Thompson Show - with Anthony Urciuoli in for Scott – - There's been an alarming increase in the amount of STI's found across Canada, including anew surge in Syphillis. What's the cause and what can be done? Guest: David Brennan Associate Professor, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto - A story had made rounds last month in regards to a “Gamer Girl” who streams herself playing video games. She decided to sell her bath water for $30. Anthony Ucriuoli wants to know why people are buying it! Guest: Kristin Sunata Walker, CEO or everythingEHR and the MHNR Network, been working within the health care field for more than two decades. She started out in medical billing for an Urgent Care center in Southern California. Kristin is also the host of Mental Health News Radio. - Last night was the second half of the Democratic debate. Who actually came out on top? Who were surprise hits and who didn't do too well? Guest: Reggie Cecchini, Global News Correspondent based in Washington D.C. - The Surfer Bros are a (comedic) duo who attend municipal city council meetings, around California, pushing for controversial legislation. One of their latest battles is getting Nickelback diplomatic immunity in the U.S. Chad Kroeger and JT, Surfer Bros
There's something to learn by listening to any individual's success story, but when the story starts with being kicked out of high school at 15, one can get pulled especially quickly into hearing how it panned out. I found myself at the edge of my seat while sitting across from Pivotal Coaching Co-Founder Scott Hopson for the latest #WeGotGoals podcast episode interview because that was exactly how his story started. If you're in the training industry, maybe you've attended continuing education sessions through NASM, EXOS, The Gray Institute, or Power Plate International; if so, you've probably studied Hopson's material or done a workshop with him. He also helped launch Midtown Athletic Club, Chicago's first urban sports resort with 575,000 square feet of health and wellness amenities. And, as the co-founder of PTA Global, he's coached countless personal trainers in a unique approach focused on behavioral science. Essentially, Hopson has worked his entire professional life on becoming the best version of himself as a personal trainer, but he's also dedicated his life to the fitness industry from a practical coaching, educational, and business perspective. And with the prestigious laundry list of titles he possesses, you can imagine why I found it unbelievable that it all started with being kicked out of school. But, as Hopson told me during the interview, when he decided he wanted to turn his life around, he started at the source where he felt like he was always home, the one place where he felt "in flow" amidst it all - with his coaches when he was playing sports. He held onto the memory of being coached and let that passion drive him forward. Now, helping others achieve their movement goals makes him feel alive, and he's equally passionate about training other coaches to bring out their fullest potential and thus, inspire clients to become the best version of themselves too. The most interesting thing about our interview, though, had nothing to do with fitness and everything to do with the human behind the science of coaching. In order to go after the "what" (whether that's a specific fitness goal or any other transformational goal in your life), "you have to articulate the 'why,'" Hopson said. Ultimately, understanding that it's not about him as a coach at all when he's in a coaching session has helped him understand how to navigate every other kind of partnership and communication in his life. "If I'm going to coach you, I've got to create an environment for you to train yourself, because I can't do it," Hopson said. "That'd be quite arrogant and ignorant of me to believe I can. If I create an environment for you to change yourself, that affects how I communicate to you, how I listen, do I have empathy? And I apply that to my business relationships. Am I listening? Am I willing to consider the possibility that they don't only have a point of view, but they might actually change mine?" Hopson also mentioned that he leans into his intuition to help guide his unique, nonlinear career path and what big goals he goes after. "I'm at my happiest, and in flow, where nothing else matters than that present moment, when I'm being of service to someone as a coach," he said. I commented on how lucky he was to know that feeling - a feeling of just being in total flow. He replied that we all have it, in some way, shape or form. We just have to notice and be open to tapping into it. "It doesn’t happen every day, [but] there are things you can do to connect you back to it if you lose it – whether it’s prayer or meditation, or whatever it is that connects you to that thing," Hopson said. Listen to Scott Hopson's episode of the #WeGotGoals podcast to hear one success story you likely won't ever forget. You can listen anywhere you get your podcasts (did we mention, we're on Spotify now?) If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or a review! We'd really appreciate it. And stick around until the end of the episode, where you’ll hear a goal from one of you, our listeners. (Want to be featured on a future episode? Send a voice memo with a goal you’ve crushed, a goal you’re eyeing, or your best goal-getting tip to cindy@asweatlife.com.) --- Transcript: Jeana: Welcome to #WeGotGoals a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high-achievers about their goals. I’m Jeana Anderson Cohen. With me I have Maggie Umberger and Cindy Kuzma. Maggie: Morning Jeana! Cindy: Good morning Jeana! Jeana: Morning! Maggie, you talked to Scott Hobson this week, right? Maggie: I did! I spoke with Scott Hobson and he has a lot of roles which I will try to give you in the upfront here but he will do a better job of talking about the many companies that he has started. And from his career trajectory, he’s been a personal trainer, he has coached coaches. He still loves to coach people on how to help other people achieve their goals. He is the founder, co-founder of PTA Global as well as Pivotal Coaching. But essentially what he does, is he helps people move better. Whether that is individuals or people within big gyms or at really large conferences and for fitness professionals across the world. He’s been to 40 countries to teach. He’s also an author, a writer, and a speaker. And I was so lucky to get to speak to him about his goals of which he has many. Jeana: But he also failed big once, right Maggie? Maggie: I didn’t realize this. I didn’t know this until we were talking for this interview, but he was kicked out of high school. And he kind of tossed it out there and I was honestly shocked because he has done so many things. He is the co-founder of Pivotal coaching which is a world-wide coaching business now. And I was honestly surprised because he is so accomplished. He’s so well spoken, he’s so driven. But I learned that he did get kicked out of high school and it took something for him to realize that in order for him to turn his life around he needed to find the thing that made him feel like he was in flow, is what he calls it. And when he feels like he’s in flow, he knows he’s doing the right thing and the only thing that he felt that kind of sensibility around was when with his rugby team and when he was being coached by his coaches. He felt like he was at home and he wanted to do that more. He wanted to do that in any capacity he could, so he became a personal trainer. He kept going back to school, he kept learning more and his fervor for learning more about human movement and just how people behave around fitness. It’s a much broader topic for him then just like what happens in a coaching session. And he’s really turned that enthusiasm, is what he calls it. This spirit for understanding how people move into his life-long career. Which is huge leaps and bounds away from getting kicked out of high school years ago. Jeana: And he feels like it’s important to coach the humans who are doing the movement and not actually coach the movement. Which is an interesting semantic issue, it’s an interesting word choice. What does he mean by that and how does that fit into his overall philosophy? Maggie: So Scott has the wherewithal to know that what happens in the gym is only a tiny part of your day. And he knows that as long as you just throw anatomical cues at people it’s going to go over their head. They have to find their why. And so he’s become really, really passionate about helping other coaches learn how to speak to people to meet them where they are and to really influence and inspire change for people on a greater level than just going through the motions of a program, of going through the workout. We say this all the time at aSweatLife that fitness can be the catalyst to you living your best life and that what happens in the gym can absolutely affect you life outside of the gym if you let it. If you want it to and he has started to focus a lot of the training and the protocols within Pivotal Coaching around human behavior and how can what coaches do in your training sessions influence how that training session goes. It's so much more of an emotional thing than just a physical thing which is interestingly a large part of the conversation that we had was just about how connected to his own emotional well-being he is. Like when he’s not in flow as I was saying, he knows it and he needs to make a change. And that's what happened when he was director of a really large facility that he's still incredibly involved with and he loves it very much. But when he was doing a role that he could do but he felt a little bit more stressed by being in it. It was apparent to him that he needed to make a change and he could be a better asset in a different capacity. So that when he could actually get back to working with people, for people and helping. Really his passion is working with coaches then he could really feel, do better work, help people on a greater scale. And so that's been his guiding force, like getting within the process, finding the joy, finding the payoff in the process is what he says. Not just that the end goal or whatever the thing he's trying to accomplish gets checked off the list. It's about feeling the way he needs to feel all along the way. Jeana: What an incredible story of overcoming obstacles and finding your true path I can't wait to hear Maggie talk to Scott. And stick around at the end of the episode we’re hearing from you listeners. Maggie: Thanks so much for joining me Scott, on the We’ve Got Goals Podcast. Scott: I'm excited. Maggie: We're excited to have you! So Scott for the listeners at home I know that you do a lot of jobs and that they probably sometimes they overlap, sometimes they’re different. You're a one-on-one coach, your a group coach, you have managed big facilities, you also coached on a global scale and your a founder of a couple companies. For the listeners can you give a little brief description of, I know you said what you do on a daily basis is different, but how you spend your days and what your general title is? Scott: Yeah, it’s wonderful. Well I mean the single biggest thing right now is I’m a co-founder of Pivotal. We’re a development company. And our mission is really simple it's to empower people to fulfill their potential. And our clientele if you will is anyone that has a passion for movement. So what I do on a daily basis could be considered coaching - one-on-one, groups, and teams from everyday people at health clubs to Olympic-level teams I work with all of them. But my real passion is teaching and you could say I coach the coaches. So what I travel the world doing, I think I've been to about 40 different countries by now, I coach coaches on how to be a better coach. We can talk later about what that includes maybe. But I also consult. Having been an operator for 20 years building health clubs, big beautiful sports resorts around the world. I know what it takes to actually build facilities, operate facilities, manage people, sales marketing, membership and on it goes. But ultimately I think it all comes down to coaching. I’m in the people industry and my job is to build meaningful relationships and I think that’s what coaches do. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s kind of what on any given day one of those is what I’m doing or all of those is what I’m doing. Maggie: That’s fascinating. Not only the breadth of what you do but the depth to which you do it. So like you're talking about working on the business side of the athletic club and building out a club. And then also building out an amazing coaching staff and helping people become better coaches. And then helping individuals also reach their fitness goals. It just runs the gamut. Scott: Yeah, it does. Maggie: Did you start as a personal trainer yeah in terms of profession? Scott: Yeah, in terms of profession that's the first real professional job I had. But I've been in the movement industry my whole life the only thing that's really kept me sane through life's adventures that don't all start out the way you want them to. But that one kind of bedrock of always connecting to why I'm here has been either playing sport, coaching sport, moving, coaching people, something to do with this idea of I'm here to move and I'm here to help people move. Not just physically but towards their dreams in life, you know? So 1998 is when I became a personal trainer and fitness instructor in the UK, in London. But immediately, the minute I was in the industry I knew this was only part of what I was going to do here. And that's when I went back to school to become a physical education teacher. Which is the problem when you get kicked out of high school at 15. Maggie: Wait a minute, should we go back and ask about that? Scott: There would need to be some whiskey in the room. Yeah you're talking to a guy that didn't even graduate high school at 15. I left and then when I realized “oh, I probably should have stuck around” I was 24, 25 and I decided I wanted to go back and become a coach and a physical education teacher. So the problem is that you've got to graduate high school first. So believe it or not I was a 25 year old in school with a bunch of teenagers. Maggie: Wow! Scott: Yeah, that’s where it started for me. Actually, I answer it that way because that’s where it started, was the realization that I needed to do something different with my life. And I found out pretty quickly it was in this area of movement and coaching. That was my only real love in life, was playing sport and being coached. So how do I do that, Okay I'll go to university. Okay, how do you do that, you’ve got to graduate high school. Problem, big problem. So I had to go back in order to go forwards and then it's been an unbelievable journey since then just exploring all the possibilities in this industry, you know? And there's multiple Industries- it's not just fitness, it's not just performance, it’s wellness, it's all of it really. You know? Maggie: Oh, yeah. And it’s a huge world. And it can feel, it seems like you have this outlook that is just wide-eyed and excited versus daunted. You know, because you talk about there being so many facets to movement, and to health and wellness. That I can get intimidated by where do I spend my time? Scott: Where do I begin? Maggie: What to learn. Oh my god, there is so much to learn. Scott: There is. Maggie: But, based on what I’ve seen and how you have grown your career. You’ve just gone after the things you wanted to go after. And created your career based on what excites you. Scott: That’s probably quite accurate actually. For me we’ve also got passion. But I’ve kind of shifted. I think passion is a good thing. If you aint got it, it’s too darn hard to do anything. You know? Maggie: Yeah. Scott: But for me it’s become more enthusiasm. And it sounds like semantics but that word. When you’re enthusiastic about something. Like it literally means to be in spirit, right? It means to be, the payoff is in the process. I think you've got to passionately follow where the payoff is in the process. Whatever that is in your life. Like that burning desire to do something just because the act of doing it is the payoff. And that really sums up my career. Every few years there seems to be another door opens or something says no, you should take a left here. When my best laid plans said to take a right but something says in me says no, you’re supposed to follow that. It leads to failure, a ton actually but if your enthusiastic. The saying about enthusiasm, it's the ability to keep falling on your face and not care anyway. That’s a big part of enthusiasm. Maggie: Well, I think that kind of transitions to the question that we ask on #WeGotGoals, which is what's one big goal that you're proud to say you've accomplished and how did you get there? Scott: Wow, that's I knew you were going to ask it and it's surprisingly difficult to answer, right because you don't want to sound trite or have too much levity. But the reality is there's two things that all stand out. One is, one of the company’s that I'm a founder of is PTA Global, Personal Training Academy Global, we launched that out of nothing. We literally traveled the world. Me and my five brothers who created it. Not biological brothers and we asked every health club we had worked with in 40 different countries. What are your problems? What are your pains? And we built personal training certification to answer their problems. Not just based on whatever we thought was the best way to train. We actually tried to build something on what people needed rather than what we thought. Then we went out and recruited 26 of the best educators in our industry. Many of whom we were told they won’t even be in the same room as each other. They had conflicting opinions, philosophies, they argue. We got them all in the same room to write PTA Global. All of them in the same room and we launched it in 2009 which was the worst economic time. Little did we know what was coming. And now we're 35, 40 countries, you know? And it all just came from sharing a common purpose, you know what I mean? That drive, that desire to do something. So that stands out professionally as the best thing I've done in my career so far. Is to truly just go all in, we all quit our jobs with salaries and put all our chips in. And said it's this or nothing. Just once we have to try and do the right thing, rather than to do things right and it cost us everything we had. If we didn't sell, we didn't eat. If it wasn't successful, it was on us there was no one to blame, no corporate structure or nothing. It was incredible! I'll tell you that's the biggest achievement in my career other than being in it in the first place. Because it wasn't easy for me to be in it in the first place you know I talked about getting kicked out of school and I had to go back to college. I was the first person in my entire family history that has ever done anything outside of high school. And I think just having to pay for your own way you know what I mean despite life willingness to say you can't do it. Maggie: Where did you learn that? Where do you think that drive comes from? That just openness to enthusiasm and willingness to lean into it. Scott: Truthfully, I think for me it was just not failing a lot, but really discovering who I was in the first. I think some people it's wonderful they seem to have the playbook, they come with it. They can be like oh this is what it's like to be a good person. Or this is what it's like to follow your dreams. But that wasn't my experience. My experience was a lot of failure and a lot of pain and alot of looking at who I was at first. And then finally when you hit it enough bumps you say holy crap I’ve got to change something. The second part is you can’t do it alone. I've been very blessed to have people that showed up right on time. When I needed help so I think surrounding yourself with the people that you hope to become you know what I mean. I mean truly looking at people, I don't know what it is that you have but I want that. Whether it's their spiritual fitness, their ability to be kind, their ability to be successful in business. Like you clearly have something I don't, where I lack or and I'm unable to see. I should probably surround myself with people like you and try to learn it, you know? And it's really those two ingredients and that burning desire. For me to pick up a book and study coaching and movement or isn't a drudge, it's a joy. You know what I mean? When I'm bored it's the first thing I want to do. Wow I’d love to learn more about [...] or how did that Olympic coach win it for the fourth year in a row. Whatever. I'm fascinated with not just human movement but with the human being inside it. So I think when you're fascinated, I think that curiosity, that’s the word. Maggie: Yeah. Scott: You’ve got to have a relentless curiosity for whatever you’re passionate about. You know? Maggie: Yeah, absolutely! Did PTA Global come about, you said you visited countries you visited the big clubs that you worked with and answered some of their problems or their needs. Was it also an equal part you finding those extra elements that you were excited about. Like what's inside a human being and how can we help them feel their best while they're working out. Those little nuances, did that kind of come together as the marriage. Is that what PTA Global is? Scott: 100%, yes. if you're going to solve a problem, you’ve got to first know what that problem is. And the key to getting clarity is to ask better questions. If you keep asking the same questions, it doesn’t matter about how many ways you phrase it. So part of the fascination was what are the real problems of our industry. We’ve got 300 times more education than we’ve ever had, we’ve got more gyms and health clubs than we’ve ever had and we’ve got more billions of dollars invested in health and wellness than we’ve ever had. Yet we’ve got less human beings moving than anytime in human history. We’ve got more disease, disability and dysfunction than anytime in human history. And believe it or not we have the first generation of youth with a lower life expectancy than their parents. If that don't make you wake up like our kids are scheduled to die younger than we are. It’s supposed to be the opposite. We're keeping old people live longer and sicker and younger people are dying sooner with more sickness. So part of it was that we've got to solve this problem. But the other part wow I've got to go find something that maybe isn't there or I've got to find the missing link. There’s that journey of discovery, right? The merging of that and the guys and girls we did it with are geniuses in their respective fields. Nutrition, behavioral change, movement, anatomy, whatever it is. So to actually go to each of these leaders and get their take on how it answer that. It was, you don't get many opportunities in life to do that to. Say here are the problems let's go speak to the world's best and find out how they might solve it. And then bring it back to the people who asked for it. That really was the journey. Maggie: So for the listeners at home what does PTA Global do or what does that certification earn you? Scott: A couple of things. One, if you woke up today as a fitness enthusiast and said man I would love to become a professional coach, a personal trainer or a fitness professional, you have to get legally certified. Now you can do it the right way or the wrong way. The wrong way is you could go online trough some swipe your finger, take an exam, call yourself professional. Or you can go study, whether it’s 6, 9, 12 month program. Some of them are two years, actually study the human body anatomy, kinesiology, program design, behavior. Then you have to sit for an actual exam and there's a practical in a room. One of those companies is PTA Global, we created a brand new approach to becoming a globally certified fitness professional. So if you take our course whether you're in Dubai, London, Amsterdam. You are legally certified anywhere in the world to practice in this profession. So that's kind of a big deal. It very much a behavioral change approach, we say when you find the why, you find the what. Everyone’s got a what, weight loss, weight gain, whatever it is. Until I find the why, the chances are we aren’t going to get you there. So that's how our philosophy is meeting people where they need to be met. And then we have advanced curriculums. One of them is called Exercise and Stress Management. We are nothing but a bunch of cells that get stressed on a daily basis. And how I move today is as much to do with my nutrition, my sleep, my emotions as much as it is my posture and flexibility, you know? So we can go on a very deep journey with you. And that then that leaves into Pivotal, my company now, which is that my passion is to travel the world and connect those dots. With the operators, with the product manufacturers, with the educators, with the certification bodies. We work with all them to bring people together to connect dots. So we travel the world, me and Haley, creating partnerships between global leaders. Delivering education for these people, creating education for them. One of our biggest passions is to teach the teachers. When you're in a room of a hundred coaches you’re really touching hundreds of thousands of people, right? Maggie: Sure. Scott: But when you’re in a room of 50 teachers your reaching exponentially more. So that’s what Pivotal does. We’ve kind of gone even bigger, how do we touch the most people to empower and fulfill their potential. Whether it is the club operator, whether it is the coach, whether it is the educator. And that was really the birth of Pivotal. Was to take everything I learned at PTA Global and kind of go one layer deeper. Which is really connecting people. I can’t think of one single movement in human history that hasn’t come from those first followers finding their fanatical fans and on and on it goes. So that’s kind of our gig now. Maggie: Yeah. So this conversation that is generally focused on goals. Is interesting to me I think to ask this question about how you’ve worked with people in the fitness world, in the fitness realm about how to tap into their why by them articulating their what. And then going through the behavior change process to get them to meet their goals. And how has that potentially shaped the way you view goals? Scott: Utterly, completely. You know one of my most important values to me is authenticity. Sometimes I feel like saying no experience, no opinion, you know? How can you coach someone one-on-one personal training or in small group or large group and hope to not only inspire but guide them to transformation. Because really everyone is looking for a transformation. No one wants to be what they are. You want to be more than they are. You want to be the best version of yourself you can. So if I want to coach you my job really is to create an environment for you to change yourself because I can’t do it. It’d be quite arrogant and ignorant for me to think I can. So behavioral change, this whole view point is if I create an environment for you to change yourself that affects how I communicate to you, how I listen, do I have empathy can I be a GPS because you're coming today and you're stressed because you’ve had 15 coffees, you didn't eat, didn't sleep, you busted up with your partner. Okay that changed our program like instantly. How do I create on demand based on your behavior. So what that does authentically as coach for me. Man am I applying that to myself? Am I applying that to my business relationships? Am I listening when I’m speaking to my partners? Am I willing to consider maybe the possibility that they don’t really have a point of view but it might actually change mine. That’s empathetic listening. I'm going to listen at a level where I actually might realize that I'm wrong. Do you know how hard that is as a personal trainer because we always think we're right. Don’t eat this, do eat that. Stop doing that, go to bed on time., Okay, you just told them to change their whole life and you're there for maybe 3 hours a week out of the 168. So you're like 2% of their life but you've asked them to change a hundred percent of their life. That seems a bit drastic and you're not there to pick up the pieces because there's going to be a lot of falling pieces. When you ask someone to change everything. What if their partner doesn't like that? What if it means now, when everyone else is eating fried chicken. They’re saying “ugh, couldn’t we have grilled it?”. But no one else in the family likes grilled. And on it goes. So it's affected everything I do because it makes me stop and go am I applying that same principle to my life? And is what I'm asking them to maybe consider doing, have I consider the choices in my life today or this week? Am I making the right choices for myself? That's authentic. So when someone says I come in today Scott. No I didn't fix my nutrition plan, I didn't work out three times this week, empathy would say man I know how that feels. There’s no judgment. It’s just like I know how that feels. Now ask more questions. What would your block? What was your break? What do you want to do about it? That's shifted how I am in my relationships and life for the most part this aint about me, right? I wish it was. Then my script would work. Maggie: Well it's interesting because the world of fitness has like you said kind of blown up. And everyone has a place in it in a really cool way. Brands are part of it. Different kinds of fitness have become hybrids and people aren’t just one thing were multiple things. And I think that's an awesome thing that health and wellness has become a little bit more top of mind. But I also think that creates a lot more ego about who is right and who is wrong so the idea of taking it back, maybe I’m wrong is probably very slim to none in the health and wellness world. Scott: One of my favorite quotes I heard was in 2004, it was at a conference I was speaking at called Meeting of the Minds. And it was like TED talks back in the day every presenter got 20 minutes and they were leaders and what they did. It was incredible I got to ask to present, I was the new kid on the block. I heard this guy say, “I’m pretty sure standing here today, after 30 years as a world-class Olympic coach”, which he was and educator. “He said 50% of what I’m about to tell you is complete BS.” So everyone laughs. And he goes, “The real problem is I’m not sure anymore which 50%.” And it really struck me. That’s probably the wisest thing anyone in this room is going to say all day. There is what I think is right and there is what I know, I don’t know. Then there is what I don’t know, I don’t know. And in every area of research in every industry, every few years there’s like wow that changes what we think about technology or medicine. And yet our industry for the most part still wants to practice fitness the way we did 30 years ago. Even though what we’ve learned about the body and the mind is dramatically more evolved. So you go into these operators and you see them building clubs the same way they did 30 years ago. If medicine followed that it would be a problem, right? And so to your point, I think fitness itself needs to be dramatically redefined. Because fitness just means your fit to perform the task that you were here to perform. So what is that? Your a mum wants to pick up her kids is different from someone who wants to look better naked that’s different from someone. It’s just you know? So the industry itself could really do with redefining a little bit of its purpose I think. Because we are more wellness, we are more healthful. We should be. I think fitness itself is what could with a little bit of a tweak. Maggie: Yeah, yeah. So moving forward, as you look down the line. Whether it's tomorrow kind of goal or 10 years down the line. What is a big goal you hope to accomplish? Scott: I've got too many, I think. Maggie: That's okay. Scott: I think for me, I would love, love for us to get rid of names like personal trainer and instructor. And I’d love for us to get rid of the definitions of I’m a yogi, I’m a pilates, or I’m a [...]. We’re coaches, I know I keep saying it. We’re coaches and what’s fascinating about the word is it comes from the 14th century. Like the stagecoach, it was a vehicle of transportation that carries people from where they are to where they’re going. So I always like to say you can be a personal trainer, you can be an instructor but what people are looking for is to go from where they are to where they want to be. From who they are to who they want to become. When you’re a coach you’re this vehicle of transportation, you know? And you remember your coaches, the good and the bad. I think we’re bigger than just trainers and instructors. But what I would love to see, is if we could all come together to say this is what we agree on this is how we coach the human being inside the human body. These are our ingredients for human movement. The thing about ingredients are you can create infinite different recipes. But we’ve got to agree on the ingredients, surely. A world class chef can cook all different kinds of cuisines. But they know the food, they know the ingredients, they know their basics. And I don’t think we have that. So if I go to physical therapy [...], there’s not a lot of respect for the fitness professional world or the professional training world. There’s not a lot of respect for the group exercise instructor. You go into mind body and there is a complete dissonance between what you’re do in a yoga studio versus what you do in a swimming pool. Movement is movement. Coaching is coaching. And human beings are human beings, man. I would love for us to just have a commonality around those basic ingredients. I really would and that’s kind of what my journey now of Pivotal is about. Is because I can be in a room with physical therapists looking at movement assessments, joint mechanics, knee pain, back pain. The next day I’m at a conference with 300 people going through small group training. And [..] understand is I’ve actually given them the same ingredients, just a different recipe. It absolutely blows my mind sometimes. People go, “Oh yeah, you do the rehab stuff and you do the small group.” I’m like I do movement and coaching. Maggie: Yeah, and from the consumer side of it. Like, it can be taxing to go to so many professionals. Not only for your own dollar that you’re just doling out to hear the latest and greatest from this party and then you hear a contradictory thing from another person. Then you’re like where do I spend my money? But it’s also like how do I get better from this injury? Or how do I actually perform better in this goal that I’m trying to reach fitness-wise? That can be really hard on the just fitness enthusiast. Scott: Go back even more right. The person who’s not enthusiastic about it Maggie: Right. Scott: So your mom and dad passed away when they were say 55. You’re 53, 54. You’re one year away from the exact age where you might have lost your parents. Your sedentary, you're overweight, you're in pain, you don't move. It's not lack of information or lack of education. You need to move, everyone knows. Exercise is probably gonna do. Going to bed on time is probably a good idea. You pick up a cigarette packet it's got a picture of death on it with a cross. It's kind of very ignorant of us to think people need more education they don't they don't. They don’t need education. But they haven't found a meaningful and relevant reason to do it that outweighs the reasons not to do it. And so I would suggest that what we need to do as a movement and industry is get back to coaching human beings. Because when you find the what you find the why. But, we just got back from China, here’s my example. And it blows my mind. It's one of the hottest places to go and travel. I don't speak Mandarin. Very very to no English. Not that there has to be but it makes it hard to even get a cup of coffee let alone eat or move around. And loads of smoking. Loads of pollution. Crazy packed busy. But everywhere you go is movement. I’m not lying, there’s eighty, ninety year old people riding bikes in the middle of a busy cross-section. Music’s playing, you turn around someone’s just doing [...]. You walk to the nearest park, hundreds of old people dancing, doing pull-ups and then they drop, no lie. Light up a cigarette and get back on their bike. No obesity, I don’t see the diabetes. I see people moving in ways that make them feel good. It’s nearly always in a community. They’re not doing it alone. Maggie: Right. Scott: Do you know what I mean? I think we really need to look at that part of it. Is how do people want to move? What's their style of moment? What's emotionally attaching to them? Not just physically but emotionally attaching. And so we put people in boxes and there’s good to that. Chances are they've already had a bad experience most people have exercised their life. Most people have failed at it. It goes all the way back to that crappy gym teacher who told you we're good enough. There’s a lot of emotional triggers going on as soon as they walk through the door. And they're met by trainers that often are wearing shirts that are 3 sizes too small. It’s not the most enticing model of movement. And I think we can shift it. It wouldn’t take too much. The shift come from the neck up. Not the neck down. So I hope, my biggest goal coming is that Pivotal really, we just would like to leave the world a little bit better than we found it. And so if we could get more people moving more often that’s a win. But more importantly, in ways where the payoff is in the process. They move because it feels good. They move because emotionally connects them. Not, “Oh, I have to do it.” I've got to do it. Or I’m doing it just for an outcome - weight loss or whatever it is. We know that doesn't work, it never has worked. If it does is short-term. I move because I love to move. Some days I swing a tennis racket, some days it’s playing rugby, some days it’s lifting weights. I move because I just love to move. I think everyone is wired to move, we just haven’t worked out how they want to move. Maggie: So, if we were to imagine that I were coming in for a first time coaching session with you, And it probably begins a little bit more about the conversation and what's happening neck up versus alright let’s do this functional screening and figure out where your compensations are. What would be some of the questions that you’d ask me as the client to tap into something. Scott: Wow, wow, wow. Maggie: A reason for moving. Scott: I love what you said because let’s call that the client intake consultation, whatever it is. There is a movement screening involved. There is a nutritional screening involved. But it starts with a motivational interview. And so one of the first questions we’ll ask. Repeat the questions you feel comfortable with. Because if I create emotional insecurity right out the gate, I’m already a threat to you. So the first questions can’t be too deep or you’re immediately thinking I don’t know if I like you or trust you, why on earth would I tell you that. So we even teach, not just the kind of questions but the sequencing, the language, all of it. But one of the first things would be what is the single most important goal you would like to achieve in your time with me. Okay, there’s a couple of big words in there. Not all your goals, the single most important in your time with me. Another big question right out of the gate is what are your expectations of me in the next 60 minutes. Because I need you to know right out the gate that I am here for you, it’s all about you. But I’m accountable, right? If I go to the doctor and they misdiagnosis me or prescribe me to wrong medicine, I’m holding them accountable. What are your expectations of me. If I got type A directed, I like just tell them what to do and just make sure I know why we’re doing it and kick my butt. Okay. You’re not a high-five kind of guy. You just told me a lot of information on how to coach you. But someone else might say, I have no idea where to start. So giving you an entire game plan in 60 minutes is overwhelming, confusing and the opposite of what you asked for. The only thing I need to give you is the one next thing, then you do it and you’re going to feel like a success. Another question we might ask would be we get further into the questionnaire and we say 1 through 10, 10 is most important, 1 is least important. How important is it that you are successful moving toward your goal? We don’t judge it. If I say a 5 out of 10, that’s wonderful. Why is it not a 2? We don’t go to how can I make it a 10? Why is it not a 2? Because you’re already thinking that. Oh, it wasn’t a 2 so I’m not bad as I think. I’m not as behind as I think. Yeah, it was a 5 that is important to me. We’re reinforcing in your brain with your words. And you’ll get things, oh it’s not a 2 because if I don’t change now it could be too late. Or it’s not a 2 because I waited to long and my pain has gotten worse. They start to unravel the magic. But then another question and this will be the last example I give you. Will be 1 through 10, 10 is the most confident, 1 is the least confident. How confident are you, you can successfully achieve your goal? If someone says oh, I’m an 8 out of 10. Interesting, because it was only a 5 out of 10 for importance. But it’s nearly a 10 out of 10 on confidence. So you’re really confident about a goal that’s not that important. Or it could be opposite, it’s really important but I’m not confident. Two completely different people to coach. We literally have an entire script of motivational questions that are based in neuroscience and behavioral change. Not just the language but the sequence. So by the time you get to the end and you do a summary, they say how did you get all of that out of me. Number two, you clearly listened. But most important, they say I just admitted that to myself outloud and another human being. That is the start of a valuable change. Is getting clear on what you’re willing to do and ready to do versus not. So there’s not sets and reps, there’s no calories, or anything. What’s your why? And are you ready and willing to change at this time because if you’re not it’s a trainwreck. And I’d be irresponsible to offer you to do it, quite honestly. Maggie: What I think is really fascinating about everything that you just outlined and all the questions that you brought up the word goal with. Those questions could be transitioned from a pre-coaching session to a goal setting session for your career, for your family, for how you want to set up your life at home or whatever it is. It’s how you do anything is how you do everything. Scott: Yes. Maggie: And so I think, at aSweatLife we do really believe that like what happens at the gym is not just that little box of time in the gym and then you leave and your gone. It’s those things that come up in there can carry out to the rest of your life if you let them. And it’s just about. Scott: It’s supposed to, right? Maggie: Right. And it can in a really positive way if you’re open to it. And if you say. Oh yeah, this small victory I did do this thing that was awesome. I’m going to go carry it into my meeting at work. Then I’m going to do the next thing that’s awesome. So it’s really fascinating and really cool to hear because it is just a conversation around like how do we feel about goals, in general. Scott: Yeah. And what do I mean by goal? Is that just the outcome, is that the process. How will I know when I’ve got there. Measurably and subjectively. How do I know when I’ve actually got there. Most goals are subjective. I want to be in less pain, I want to feel better. That’s a subjective goal. How do we know when we’re there when you’ve arrived? And finally, how do you want to get there. Are you a kind of person who says I’ve got to get on the freeway and get there as quick as possible? Okay, but then it’s the freeway and it’s concrete jungle and there’s lots of in and out. No, I’d rather take the scenic route. I’d rather go slow and take in the sights. So there’s where you’re going and then there’s how you want to get there. But invariably there is going to be traffic and roadwork. So as a coach, you’ve got to be a GPS and recalculate the route. Which for me, in my experience is every session. You can just see it emotionally in people when you get used to coaching wise. Something just happened where you stopped enjoying this session, that didn’t feel good. Maybe I said something that wasn’t. You know? Or maybe I didn’t listen to something you needed me to listen. I saw something in my client, the entire posture changed. You better recalculate right now. And so for us, we’d say most people what they emotionally care about is outside the gym. There is very little emotional connection to the dumbell. So yes, in groups that’s different. Don’t get me wrong. That sense of tribe, community, relationships, being part of something bigger than yourself, agreed. But in one-on-one, I would honestly say that most people what they care about is outside the gym. They’re hoping what they transform inside the gym makes that better out. That’s what they’re trying to improve is their life outside the gym. And the people who care about their life inside the gym are the people who work inside the gym. Quite honestly most clients don’t. Maggie: So, I want to pull it back to you for a minute. Because you’ve talked about going from not finishing high school at first. To where you are now which is cofounder of multiple companies. And a huge contributor to what we know about modern fitness today. You’ve written 50 or more accredited courses that people now go through to get their own certifications. And how you’ve gone from one step to the next. When you look back on it now, what do you think was your guiding force throughout? Or has that changed? Scott: That’s a really great questions. Today, looking back I’ve got a different lens than if you had asked me a year ago or ten years ago, right? But the common thread is to truly be of service. I know it sounds really cheesy but from PGA Global to Pivotal to coaching people or teams or kids. And a lot of what I do is volunteer work in the community. A lot of the teams that I coach, the high schools and the local soccer leagues. It’s all volunteer work, right. I find that I’m at my most happiest, in flow. When you’re not thing about the bills or the money. When nothing else matters in that present moment is when I’m being of service to someone as a coach. Whether it’s the teacher coach, the sports coach, as a coach. And it could be 4:00 on a Friday night, pouring rain on Foster Lake shore where I coach soccer. And we’ve got out ten year old kids, our eleven year old kids, our sixteen year old high school girls and it’s pouring with rain and it’s 25 degrees. The time just flies. And you get home soaked and cold and you think I want to do it again. It’s those moments where you feel that in flow there is something going on in you. You know what I mean? There’s an internal something directing you. So the single biggest directive force is that, I find that when I’m of service to people, selfishly it seems to make me feel really great. So maybe that’s one good use for being selfish [...]. And I really do want to know that it mattered, to be honest mate. I want to know that the work I do matters. I guess I can only speak for myself but man some many times you go through life and you think did anything I do today make a blind bit of difference. Do you know what I mean? Or, in some cases made it worse. But at the end of the day you want to know that your life made a difference. To someone or something bigger than yourself. I think that’s the biggest directing force I’ve had is the sense of I think this makes a difference. I just have a feeling this makes a difference. I don’t know if that answered your question or if it was too esoteric. I can make it more pragmatic if you want. Maggie: No, I think that it gives me goosebumps because I think that’s what everyone wants to some degree. And that’s a really special thing to find your flow. I don’t know that we can all say that we have it enough. We have probably been in flow at some point in our lives. But maybe we’re not attuned enough to saying this is it, how do I recreate this. It seems like you do have that awareness sort of around what is the secret sauce to when you’re feeling in flow and how you can keep doing it. Or keep bringing it back as much as possible. Would you agree? Scott: Yeah. I think the struggle for all of us, myself included is I think we do know what that is. There’s just an innate knowing, you know? It like saying I don't know if I love my kids. You know you love your kids. You can’t find the words. You know, right? But life, we allow ourselves to be distracted by what’s urgent rather than important. By what’s demanding. So I’ve often taken jobs that didn’t feel good. Because the money was a safety net. Or the benefits were a safety net. Or whatever it was, even though I knew there was a big [...] I would love and yeah it’s in my industry. And then a year in you’re like, this is not me. But you go along because now you’ve got bills and kids. We do and that’s real man. But at some stage you know you can’t die with your music in you. That’s for sure. Maggie: Yeah. Scott: You know what I mean? Maggie: Right. Scott: It’s like being in flow is when you sit down and you’re writing. I write alot for work and also non-work stuff. And you’ll just be in flow and you have it going you don’t realize 3 or 4 hours are gone and it’s 20 pages on the floor. And you realize crap, I didn’t number them. Because you’re just in flow. It doesn’t happen every day. It doesn’t and there’s things you have to do to reconnect to it when you lose it. You know, there’s prayer or meditation, whatever it is that connects you to that thing. For some people, it’s playing sport. It’s dance. Maggie: Yeah. Scott: When you feel disconnected, you better reconnect. You know. You have to because that is really painful being constantly disconnected from your source, your flow. That’s a really painful existence, for me it was. Often, what sparks me into reconnecting is how much more miserable do I have to get before I reclaim happiness, you know? How much more self-pity, wallowing. Sometimes you have to say hold on, there’s what happens to you and then it’s how you react to it. And sometimes you have to say stop that’s enough. I’m going to reconnect to what makes me feel good. I’m going to go back to where I’m in flow. And it requires a leap very often. And Pivotal started when, two years ago. I had been at Midtown Athletic Club as their national director for five years rebuilding the facilities, re-recruiting the coaches, developing Midtown University, it was huge projects. And I realized I was getting more into operations again. More into PNLs and that’s what the job deserves and that’s what they deserve. But in my mind I thought maybe I could manipulate it to be more education so that wasn’t fair. So I had a wonderful chat with an incredible COO, John Brady. And [...] changed. It was like I need to reclaim and he said Scott just do what you love and you’re great at. That’s why I recruited you in the first place. And I went home and I realized I need to make a change. Loved the club, loved the people but I wasn’t in flow anymore. I made two phone calls on the way home that day to two leaders in the industry that I hadn’t spoken to in years. I said what would you say if I said I was available to write education, deliver education, and teach teachers again. Within 24 hours, I had a plane trip to China and I was in boardrooms speaking to these leaders. And I came home to Haley and I said I think we need to start a company. But you honestly need to stop doing one thing that wasn’t making you happy but do it the right way. Don’t just cut and run. Consider other people. And then took this leap of faith, like these two names came to me and it was like wow, they’re leaders man. Should I really call them. They picked up immediately and said I want you on a plane. And it was that reminder light that when you say yes to life it conspires to help you, you know what I mean? That’s my experience but you’ve got to do the work. It doesn’t just come. It’s not Mary Poppins sitting around and hope that if I meditate good things come. No, you’ve got to meditate but then you’ve got to take action, right? It takes a lot of work. Relentless effort, actually. Relentless effort and I think that’s the final piece. For successful people I see is, if it sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is. Maggie: It’s probably ten times more than it even sounds like. Scott: Success is always hard work whether in love relationships, raising your kids, business life. To be good at anything is probably going to take a bloody lot of work. But if you’re enthusiastic and you’re in flow more often than not, even on the bad days it’s like you know what, I can do that. Maggie: Well this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Scott. Scott: Thanks for having me! I hope the listeners get something out of the crazy stuff that comes out but it was an honor. It was really nice. Cindy: He goal getters, co-host and producer Cindy Kuzma here. Just letting you know that we have coming up for you now a goal from one of you, our listeners. This is another one recorded live at the Michelob Ultra Sweatworking Week Fitness Festival last month. If you want to share one of your goals with us, whether it’s a goal you achieved, a goal your setting up to achieve, even a piece of goal-getting advice that you’d like to share you could do that and you could be featured on this very podcast. All you have to do is record it and email it in mp3, wav, whatever kind of file you want to Cindy@aSweatLife.com. Thanks and here is you and one of your goals. Speaker: So I set a couple of goals earlier this year and I noticed that one thing I didn’t do was have accountability in a plan. So I find myself now it’s June and I haven’t accomplished the goals that I set for myself. Because I haven’t set those checkpoints to say, hey, you know how are you going to get there? Have you been doing everything on a daily basis, on a weekly basis? And then just that accountability. So whether that’s telling someone and having them check in with you, or just saying by first quarter I’m going to accomplish this and then next quarter I’m going to accomplish that. And then I just found myself not having achieved anything. So, for the second part of the year I’m going to reset and visit some different goals and create strategies that are more focused around holding myself accountable for those specific plans. Cindy: This podcast is produced by me, Cindy Kuzma and it’s another thing that’s better with friends. So please, share it with yours. You can subscribe pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts including now on Spotify. And while you’re there if you could leave us a rating or review we would be so grateful. Special thanks to Jay Mono, for our theme music, to our guest this week, Scott Hobson, and to TechNexus for the recording studio. And of course, to you our listeners.
Scott Vaughn is an intuitive healer, who specializes in helping others see through old belief systems that no longer serve them and empowering them to take charge of their own lives through recognition of their spiritual gifts. Scott shares a supernatural event from his family history — the story of his great, great grandfather Parks, a preacher who floated to the ceiling of his church and stayed there. MENTIONED ON THE SHOW DUNE by Frank Herbert Bene Gesserit LITANY AGAINST FEAR I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. Bene Gesserit "Litany Against Fear" from Frank Herbert's Dune Book Series © 1965 and 1984 Frank Herbert Published by Putnam Pub Group ISBN: 0399128964 GUEST LINKS - SCOTT VAUGHN www.scottdouglasvaughn.com www.scottvaughnphotography.com The Grandpa Story Scott's original post about the levitating preacher HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Scott: I'm Scott Vaughn. You got that part right, I know that. I'm a professional intuitive in Johnson City, Tennessee. I do a lot of work, a lot of readings. When I first began my work, I was doing a lot of healing work. I'm sort of a, was a reiki practitioner who sort of woke up one day, and, not that all reiki practitioners need to wake up, that isn't what I'm trying to imply. I was going along about my married life and, this stuff has always been in the background for me. I was always, probably a little bit more claircognizant I would say, if I was putting a term on it, than I could have recognized at the time. I always seemed to know some things that I was not supposed to know and it seemed to make people more uncomfortable, now that I think about it, than I was able to access at the time. But somewhere around 2012, I think it's in the summer that I actually met you on the street side in Chattanooga, I ended up having a health issue and turns out I had had some elevated liver enzymes. I went to the doctor about it. That this is a theme. I've had elevated liver enzymes for a long time. So I went to the doctor and she said, We're gonna send you and get you an ultrasound of this liver. So they did an ultrasound of my liver. She said, We didn't find anything. I'm going to send you to a gastroenterologist. And of course, I was a really great hypochondriac in those days so that just absolutely fed those wonderful impulses and urges that I had going on at the time. So she sent me to a gastroenterologist and he said, We're going to do a CAT Scan of your liver. This was around, I think, maybe Memorial Day of 2012. That's 6 years ago now. Hard to believe. But they call me back, the nurse, she says, Hello, we have found something on your liver and we're definitely going to need to take a look at it. We're going to have to schedule you in for an MRI. And as you know, medical tests always... you don't get them the next day. It was like, 5 weeks out. So of course I was scared shitless. What I had to do at that point, I was working a fairly rigorous spiritual program, and I had to really put myself back into that, because I had, not really thrown that out. I just wasn't as rigorous in my practice as I had wanted to be. And as I began to do that, I don't know what happened. I began to wake up, and went to the local metaphysical shop, which was not really a place that I hung out, to be honest with you, at that point, and had a chakra alignment. I don't exactly know what happened there but I began to... He put some sto... This is how I would have described it then. He put these rocks on me and he left the room. And then I started seeing all these dead people. So that's how I talked about it then, so that's how I'll talk about it now. I started hearing, I mostly hear things, rather than see things, although I do see things in my mind's eye as well, but my mind's ear is, I think, more developed. I began to hear these conversations with people who had passed and favorite aunts were coming by, my grandfather was coming by, my father was, had not passed yet but he came by later. We can talk about that later. And after that, just began to start having what I call.. just sort of mind-blowing awarenesses. Began realizing that I needed to follow a slightly different path for my life, and I'd been working, and did until fairly recently, in higher education, in academic advising and higher education administration. I was at the point in my life where I was really ready to go very heavy into that conference-going world and writing articles and all that stuff that people do in the academic world. It sort of just really called all that into question for me and... This is not what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to do something else. So... took a few classes here and there. I enrolled in a ministerial program that was being offered out of our local metaphysical shop that's named Atlantis here in Johnson City, and the teacher, my teacher, who was offering it, just... I happened to be in there one day, probably buying a stone because I was getting an interest in crystals and things like that. And she said, Hey, I'm teaching this class. I don't know if you might be interested in it. And for some reason, which was very seemingly out of character for me, I said, Yeah, I'm interested in doing this! It was the Alliance of Divine Love, it's a metaphysical, ordinational ('ordinational' is not a word), but it's a metaphysical sect, it's not really a sect either, but it's a metaphysical type of ordination, with 3-years long course, and that was a really good experience for me. And the only reason that I really want to mention that is if you had, if she had come to me a year before, maybe 2 years before: I never would have encountered her. That's one thing. I would've just been like, No! Hell no! Like, You're crazy. I don't want anything to do with... No! It wasn't that I had anything against it from a religious standpoint. It's just that I thought, I thought people who are like who I've turned out to be were absolutely crazy. Funny the way things shift over time for you, and... So, went through that, and it became very apparent that I needed to... It was just time for me to start working with people and I kept hearing this strong message: You need to work with others. And I'm like, Wow, I don't know, I'm like, Why? I'd taken a reiki class several years before and that was a lot of fun. I did it, and work on, you know, put my hands on some people, did it for myself. Thought it was a real neat experience. That summer I also felt the need to take that second level of reiki and... so I opened up the following year. Just started seeing folks in my house, in my living room, as a matter of fact. I put up a massage table in my living room and started working with folks. One of my very first clients was a guy named Dennis (if you're listening Dennis, Hey!) turned out to be a very dear friend over time. I performed at his wedding last summer to his partner. I was working with Dennis and I was doing all the stuff. And in those days, it was a very formal preparing the space and making sure everything was very quiet and very sacred and taking it with just the utmost seriousness. I had these agate wind chimes that were really pretty, but when the air conditioning would blow, it would sound, clink clink clink. It was annoying. I resist the word cacophonous because that's really pretentious, but they're... I had to call it out and say it was pretentious, but it was cacophonous. It was annoying. And I remember saying, just looking up, Can't you do something about these horrible wind chimes? I can't focus on Dennis. And I got a very, very clear message back, and I still laugh about it. You don't need to worry about the wind chimes because you're not doing any of this anyway. Slade: Ooo... Scott: And I was like, Shit. But that was a very strong message for me, very early in beginning to do my work. And then, and just logically followed, I knew that I was also supposed to do readings as well but didn't know how that would work. But I knew that was coming for me. I remember one of the, the very first psychic fair I participated in, I didn't know what to call myself. I was more in the room with the healer folks, but towards the end, I was like, I'm really here to do readings. I ended up doing a couple of readings for folks and it seemed to... I don't remember them very well, which I usually consider that a pretty good sign that something decent happened, if I'm staying out of the equation and not screwing it up with my conscious mind, and everything sort of logically followed after that. I felt like I just needed to probably stop seeing people outside of my office or outside of my house, because I live in a condo and it was just... went and had to keep it clean all the time and I didn't like to do that, so decided it was probably a good idea to open up an office that was right over the hill from where I was living at the time, and began to do readings, mostly I used to be doing healing type work and it wasn't exactly reiki that I ultimately began to do that I am doing now. I don't exactly know what I would call the methodology that I have but it's not a lot of hands on. It's a lot of chanting, it's a lot of frequency, and just sending energy back and forth for folks. It's a lot of Spirit Guides. It's a lot of calling in the Medicine People from other cultures, and allowing them to hold the space and allowing that work to continue. But began doing readings. Primarily my work now consists mostly of doing readings instead of doing healing work. That's sort of not the focus as much now. It's just turned out more that I'm doing readings. And, I was told very early on that, the people that I would end up working with were probably going to be people who were not necessarily always sold on the new age path, the whole metaphysical thing. That the person I was going to be working with, you know, anyone who seeks me out, I feel like I work with whomever I'm supposed to work with, but the majority of the people who come my way are folks who are disappointed in organized religion and in the church and things like that. But they haven't been able to find a way to replace that with anything that's meaningful. These are folks who are sad sometimes and disillusioned about the way they've seen spiritual matters handled. And folks who really want to... They know there's something more but they may have been taught all their lives it was not okay to seek those things. Because that was not allowed. There's a strong threat of that, especially here in this culture in east Tennessee. So that tends to be a lot of the people who come my way. One of the things that I feel very strongly that I'm supposed to do is sort of, the Hermit card in the tarot is one that I sort of embody. Just sort of holding the light up for folks. Slade: Mmm... Scott: You know? Standing there, along the path. The nice thing about that card is, you don't know what's in front, you don't know what's behind. But there he is, holding the light. And that's sort of what I've been feeling lately, that I'm supposed to embody. Is holding the light up for people and interpreting the things that are given to me to offer to them as insights for them along their path. Slade: You're a Lantern Bearer, Scott! Scott: A Lantern Bearer - that's cute. I love that. Slade: I actually have an episode about the Hermit tarot and how I re-named it the Lantern Bearer, because... yeah.. Scott: You know what? I may have stolen that. That may be where I've heard that. I may be stealing from you and I don't - Slade: I stole it from someone else. Scott: Okay. Slade: There was a, I don't know if there's one of those decks floating around out there where the Hermit card is actually called the Lantern Bearer, or someone somewhere has used that term, and I was like, Ooo, I like that! Scott: I'm sure Hay House has put it out somewhere, you know? Slade: Right. Yes. Copyright whoever said it! But I do have an episode about it and the episode's mine. I want to talk to the audience for just a second and let them know that, for those of you listening to this conversation, Scott is a friend of mine and he's an honorary member of the Automatic Intuition community because he was sort of teaching himself while being friends with me, but yet I still needed him to be a part of that group. I've wanted to interview him since day one of this podcast but here's the thing with interviewing your friends. We could talk for hours about anything, and it may or may not necessarily be fun or interesting to anyone listening. So far I think you're doing pretty good, but... So the challenge was to find the right focus topic, and with so many of the guests on the show being intuitives and healers and peers, Scott and I were kind of brainstorm texting about this for months, like, What should we do an episode about?? And then I see this post on Scott's Facebook wall titled, "Concerning The Time My Great-Great Grandfather Floated to the Ceiling of the Church—And Lingered.” I read the story and I lost my mind over it. I told Scott “THIS” this is what I want to talk to you about. Nobody else has this story. This was months ago. Scott: Great! Slade: Go ahead and say something while I clear my throat. Scott: One of the things about the story is that, a lot of times I'll re-run myself on Facebook. You know. Nobody really notices that much about that as the person doing it. People think, Oh this is great, you just put it together now. No, this is a re-run from last year. You liked it then too. But I think the first time I put that out there, maybe 2009, I was in a much different head, I was in a much different heart space than I am now, okay? So there was a lot of, the original version of that, if it's still out there and I don't think I went back and edited it, really conveys a lot of the skepticism I had at the time with it. And then the latest version comes from what I would say is a more heart-centred, really knowing, just from a much more knowing place and much more loving place and a much more... I'm very open to the possibilities of everything that could have happened when he floated to the ceiling of the church and lingered. Slade: Okay, so... let's just... You've got to tell us this story. Your great-great-grandfather floated to the ceiling of the church. I'm just going to let you tell us... Like I've never heard it before. Tell it to me. Scott: Okay. Like you've never heard it before. Because a lot of times when I'm talking about this story, I'm talking about the story itself, which is different than telling the story. It's the story about the story. It goes that my great-great-grandfather had started out, I think, in the hills of Tennessee and then south eastern Kentucky of a town Jellico, Tennessee. That's about two hours above, maybe an hour and a half, an hour above Knoxville, if you take Interstate 70. A very remote mountain area. If you were writing a book about Appalachia and you really wanted to find something that seemed almost cliche it was so realistic, you could find that. And so, in the back woods, probably a Baptist minister, okay, and my understanding at the time is that he was a very straight up and down Baptist minister, very read-the-scripture, the talk-a-lot kind of guy and was making a pretty good living as preacher back in the woods. Around the early 20th century, this wave of Pentacostalism started sweeping through the country, hitting about, in the mountains (my electricity just went out as we're talking about this - Hello, great grandpa, great great grandpa Parks). So (electricity's back) so this wave of Pentacostalism starts sweeping through the country, probably hits the area in the early 20th century in Jellico, and... So he began to preach... I don't know how familiar you are with some parts of the Bible. Over in the book of Corinthians, it talks about the spiritual gifts of healing, of prophecy of times, of people being able to interpret speaking in other tongues and people being able to put their hands on other people and they be healed from things. He began to preach those things and a lot of people followed him as he started a new congregation. He took his congretation with him and they moved and started something else. The people who went with him were all into it, but a lot of people in the community, it was heresy to them. So, the story goes that three men, allegedly from the Baptist church, came in to break up the service. They had guns and they appeared in the very back. My great-great-grandfather, I'm going to start calling him Grandpa Parks, or grandpa. Grandpa Parks was up there preaching and he saw the men and he said, If you come one step closer, I pray the devil smite you. And they walked closer. And of course, people in the church were starting to really panic and get nervous. My great-great-grandmother, Grandma Parks is sitting there thinking, she starts to pray, and at that moment, the Spirit of God picks him up from the pulpit and he rises to the ceiling of the church, and of course, Grandma Parks is there and she's like, Oh God, he's about to be 'transa-lated', was the word I heard. He's about to be transa-lated, just like Enoch. He's about to be transa-lated just like Enoch. She thought he's gonna... People are like, He's gonna go through the ceiling! He's gonna go through the ceiling! And, of course, you know, he's just as surprised as anyone, right? So the look on his face... really, you know, he's described as looking like he was scared, because, not because of the men at the back at this point, because he really just didn't know what was happening. And moved him through the congregation, through the middle of the congregation. You know, there's the rows on either side, right through the middle of the church and put him down right in front of the three men with the guns. Thus, after that, he was left alone. Now the story also goes that the three men, one of them, shortly after went blind. One of them dropped his gun, took his place in the church service and shut up. Okay? He joined up. And the other one, at some time later, you know, who knows, history tends to conflate times, he killed himself. Yeah, so, sort of like the three men on the cross maybe, or the Holy Trinity there, I don't know. But there were three of them. Outside of that, this entire denomination in the mountains, they call themselves The Church of God of the Mountain Assembly in Jellico. They're still there! There are still... You can look them up on Google. The Church of God of the Mountain Assembly headquarter in Jellico. That's one of the things that they talk about in some of their literature, was the time when Brother Parks was lifted to the ceiling of the Church, and that was a sign that they were doing the right thing. They were on the right track and that their message had weight and that began to grow and spread. There are quite a few, interestingly enough, Jellico's in the coal mining area and as the mines dried up, people went north. So a lot of my family, as well, went to Michigan. I have quite a bit of family in Michigan, or had been in Michigan at the time. So there's quite a bit of that church now in Michigan as well, which is interesting. And so, the amazing part of that story for me in that whole thing is it's sort of like a litmus test to my own spiritual development for me, when I look back. I was told the story as a kid. I was always fascinated by family stories. I know this is not the focus of what we're talking about, but I have equally interesting stories from... Nobody levitated, but people getting, sticking knives up their nose and dying from that, the other side of my family. I'll talk about that later. It's my uncle, Hugh Ballard, on my dad's side, who stuck the knife up his nose and died. But, I was always fascinated somehow, I sort of became like R2D2 for my family. They implanted stories within me as a small child and it tended to speak to me in the wrong way and I just start projecting holographs of stories that make people uncomfortable, I suppose. I don't know. Slade: I'm kind of that person in my family as well. Scott: You're a storyteller, so... Slade: Well, I think that... It's weird because I had aunts that would do genealogical research and stuff like that. And they would always give the stuff to me. Like, they didn't give it to their own kids. For some reason, people identified that I was the one to give it to. They felt like it would get told somehow, or it would be preserved, or just cared about, in a way, by me, that other people wouldn't. And it's true! I do care about all that stuff more. But I do wonder, what would possess you to think this, like, 7 year old boy wants to know about all this stuff? Scott: I've often wondered that, but it came to me from my mom's side of the family and my dad's side of the family. I've ended up with all of the family pictures. I've ended up with all of those things. But my ancestors, 'ancestors' is using that term broadly, my family members who have passed, my ancestors, some of them were alive when I was alive, they figure very prominently in the work that I do too. So that's another matter entirely that we can talk about in a minute. Slade: Here's something I want to ask you about, because... Scott: Please do! Slade: And I have to say, all the months that we tried to think of a reason for you to come on the show, and then all the months since we decided what the reason was, interestingly, two days ago in real time, I interviewed Ian Allen, who is a friend of yours, who also lives in Johnson City, and part of our conversation was about how supernatural, mystical, what we consider new age topics were viewed through the filter of Christianity. So you have some crazy, I mean, full-blown witchcraft going on, but it was all in the name of Jesus, you know what I mean? So I was wondering what your perspective is on that sort of weird mishmash of Christianity and the supernatural stuff which is not traditionally thought of as everyday Christian. Scott: Right, you know, I've been thinking that you were going to ask that question. I've not had an answer for it all week. Because I've had that in mind as well and I think that I was raised in a very traditional Christian family environment, and those kinds of things, though it's very conservative religion, a very evangelical religion, generally speaking, the belief was, a lot of those things that happened in, you know, the early church, we didn't have access to them in the current church. So the idea that, Can people be healed? Yes they can but God uses doctors. That's why God created doctors. Whatever, right? But... I've had to look further back into my family to be able to find some of those things, and that's in my Pentecostal relatives, right? Some of my mom's family, they still follow that path, and a lot of my family doesn't. But they're always the ones at the family gatherings I'm gravitating towards, because they're talking about prayer and things that have happened as a result of prayer. They're talking about warts falling off people. They're talking about somebody who had cancer who doesn't have cancer now. Somebody who was a drug addict one day and suddenly had an experience and they've not used drugs in 25 years. Those kinds of things. All kinds of ways of having miracles. And I don't really have an answer to your question. I have just a lot of experiences, a lot of things I believe have happened but I don't really know why that is. So thank you for asking - it's a great question! Slade: Do you believe in miracles? Scott: Yeah, of course! Now, I used to - For many years, I considered myself an atheist, okay? And so I didn't believe in anything. And it took a lot of work for me to not believe in anything, which tells me I wasn't a very good atheist. The kind of work that I'm doing now certainly was off the table because it was deeply buried. And, I think, you've heard that there are no atheists on the front lines of battle. I don't know. No atheist in the foxhole? I don't know about that, but I do know that some things that happened to me in my life forced me to really reconsider there was something out there that was bigger than me, and that wasn't me. Otherwise I would really be dead or worse... So if you can think of yourself being dead or worse, the worse part means that you're probably not an atheist. Because you tend to believe there is something going on out there that doesn't line up with your belief system, being an atheist, or at least as I understood it. For many years, I've used, I was an alcoholic. I'm a recovering alcoholic now, drug addict, those things. It's been many years since... I've been clean and sober for many years. Slade: Was that the result of anything spiritual? Or was it more of... from that atheist time period? Scott: It was probably from all that. I was a very bitter guy, a lot of bitterness against, and rebellion against religion, and those kinds of things, and with the family history, I suppose, that's always a part of it. Just poured alcohol onto it and pills and just went through a period of my life where I really wasn't there for it. As I got sober, that's sort of the beginning of my re-awakening. I believe we're all born awakened, right? Then I think, our families, our society, etc., I think we just get closed up and closed up. And in the end, we buy into that belief that we're closed up so much and we just continue to add to it, and alcohol was my way of adding to it, and not being here for my life. As I began to show up more for my life, I began to see, at least for me, there's a lot more than what I'm willing to admit is out there and in here, right? There a lot more and I don't have to be shut off from it. As I began to realize that I'm not shut off from it, I started awakening. I won't say that I'm awakenED. I will say that I'm awakenING, if that makes any sense. I've been sort of thinking that some of these things might come up over the course of us talking today, and in some ways, I think I am baffled that I'm doing this and I'm grateful that I am doing this, but... If you had met me 10 years ago, and you had told me... If I had come to you for a session 10 years ago, of course I wouldn't have come to you for a session 10 years ago because I wouldn't have dared to 10 years ago, based on where I was, and you had told me that I was going to be doing this kind of work and all of that, I would have laughed. I would have thought, Boy, he has confirmed that he is just as crazy. I went in here and paid him money, you know, that kind of thing. So yeah. Slade: I probably would have told you. Scott: Yeah, I know. And I would have been like, You're crazy! Slade: I would be that person people always tell me about. I hear this all the time, 'A psychic told me once' and I'm always in the chain of... I'm never the first one to tell them, which is probably cool. Scott: Correct. Slade: I'd rather be at the end of that line of... Just to go back to this miracle for a second, with your great-great-grandfather... Scott: Absolutely. Slade: You know what, if it's okay with you, I'll post a transcript of your Facebook post so everybody can kind of read some of that detail, because it's different every time you tell it, right? There's a different perspective. Scott: It is! Which tells me it was different every time it was told to me so who knows exactly. There have also been members of my family who've worked really hard at debunking the story too. We'll talk about that in a minute if you like, but yeah... Slade: Well tell me, did you ever speak to anyone who actually witnessed this? Scott: Okay. The first family reunion, and it's interesting that all this is coming up, because in two weeks, I will be at the site of all this again. Okay? In two weeks, my family is having a reunion in Jellico. Because I'm the person who knows the stories, and knows where all the people are buried. I'm probably the last person alive, at least in this branch of my family who could take you to the graves of everyone who has come before us. Anyway, I don't know where I was going with that, but the first thing at every reunion, I take my tape player and I, because when I was a kid, my parents for my 5th birthday, my parents bought me a tape recorder, okay? So I was always just recording things and I knew that some of my older family members were going to be there, and I knew I wanted to get some things on tape. I also knew that my grandmother was toward the younger end of the family. So my grandmother, and even her mother who passed away, who died really young, she probably wasn't there for what happened either. But I was there. My grandmother's best friend, Helen Seal, who she grew up with, came down from Michigan to be part of the reunion because: She and my grandmother were like sisters and, The coal-mining camp where everybody was originated there in Tennessee and Kentucky. Everybody was very much like family so Helen came down. Helen was still part of, she's passed now, but she was part of the Church of God of the Mountain Assembly in Michigan. So she still attended the church but in Michigan. You know I said a lot of people went to Michigan to work in the automobile factories when the coal mines dried up. Slade: Right. Scott: So Helen was also just a great storyteller. She had long grey hair that she wrapped up in a bun. She was just a spitfire of a woman so I knew I wanted to talk to her about it. And I wish I could find the tape. It's going to be that mythical tape that's lost, that I can't find now. Sort of like Nixon's tape that's missing from Watergate. Yeah, but she's telling me, and it starts out, she says, 'I know you want to talk about the time Brother Parks was lifted to the ceiling church, and many years ago, I asked Sister Parks what she thought about it.' So she goes into this story, okay, and she wasn't there, but she was getting it, she was telling me her version of Sister, of my great-great-grandmother telling her the story. Okay? Slade: Okay. Scott: Then Helen's husband, Oble, he, I don't know how he knew this, because he didn't live there, but he said that there was an old lady living in the community, Granny Mobely was her name, Granny Mobely (sounds like a Lee Smith novel)... Slade: It does. Scott: It does! Granny Mobely, who was there at the time, right, and I said, Where does she live? And he said, Well I don't know. It's , I don't know, or I didn't know to just go down to the grocery store and ask people where Granny Mobely lived, but I never investigated that any further. I was into college and changing schools and all of that. So I never got any first hand account. I do know that the church has some official records and there have been two books that they have put out, two little books, where they tell the story. Also, he kept a journal as well that one of his other descendants has. I was thinking, How many descendants must he have? My great-great-grandparents had like, 8 children. And so, if you think about probably... There are probably thousands of people now who are descended from them, living today. But one of my cousins' distant relatives, probably what I would call a 5th cousin, in Michigan, who's the pastor of one of the churches there, oddly enough, has his journal, where he wrote some things down. I've never been able to get ahold of that. I've wanted it. I've sent requests. I've asked for copies of it. I've tried to communicate with people about it and that's never been... No one's ever been able... No one's ever been willing to communicate with me about that, which just adds to the mystery and tells me that one day I will see it. You know how that goes. He used to prophesize well too, about great birds with people in them flying through the air. That one day, people would be, one day, this is Oble Seal told me this, that one day he was out preaching, he said, One day, there'll be people on the moon. And this was in the 30s, right? And I don't know what we were talking about in the 30s. I don't know about... I mean, I'm sure there were, certainly there were aircrafts in the 30s. I don't know how many he would have had access to, but there certainly had not been astronauts in the 30s yet. Slade: We had Jules Verne and we had, I don't remember if that... What was it that Hans Fritz movie, Metropolis, or... There's some really, really old creepy black-and-white movie I think that might portray people travelling on rockets to the moon, right? Scott: Yeah, so maybe that's... I don't... Who knows if he had access to seeing those... Slade: Umhmm... Oh yeah! Scott: You know, probably not. So I don't know. And I wish that I could find that tape. I know it was in the attic where I used to live, and then I've moved since then. I don't know where that box of tapes went. You know how that kind of thing goes. Slade: It's a great set up for a novel. Scott: Yeah, I know. It is! Slade: Someone finds the box of tapes in the attic and then, you know. Of course, in the story, you're both your 40-year old self and your 95-year old self so we can switch back and forth between time periods. I can see the whole thing right now. Scott: Absolutely. Yeah, that's very good. Thank you very much! That's good inspiration for that. Slade: Yes! Scott: Reverend Parks also is part of my work that I do here today too. He's one of what I call my 'assistants' and my 'guides'. Slade: So he's like an ancestor guide? Scott: He's an ancestor guide and when I'm working with someone specifically in a healing type session, he very strongly appears. Slade: Interesting! Scott: A lot of really tuned-in people say, Who is the bearded man here who is not you? Slade: Ooo! Scott: That's Grandpa. Pay him no mind. He's very much who I call in to help when, you know, need a space cleaned out, he's very helpful with those kinds of things. He's very good at removing what I call, reptilian type energies from folks as well. Slade: You know, I have to say, it just occurred to me as I was asking you that question about the whole connection with Christianity versus this kind of supernatural stuff, one of the things that became really apparent to me, because I always thought of myself as very much sort of against fundamentalism, still do... Scott: Same here. Slade: Very anti-Christian, all that kind of stuff. But one of the things that I have observed, kind of begrudgingly in the beginning, was that the people who are more open to talking about mysticism are by nature people of faith. And so, if you go to an older generation of people and you want to talk about supernatural stuff, there's a lot more little old church ladies that want to talk about spirits and healing and communication from the dead and all that kind of stuff, and are a lot more open to it than, certainly than an atheist is going to be, or an intellectual from our generation is going to shut that down much more quickly too. And so I learned very quickly to kind of have this universal translator running in my mind and to realize that that was the language they were given to speak with, you know, was the language of the Bible in the culture that they grew up in and so, that's what they had to work with. But some of the things that they will tell you and some of the things that they will describe are just straight up like, Well this is total paranormal investigation! Scott: This is straight up like off Sylvia Browne. Slade: Totally, totally! Scott: Yeah. Slade: So it's made me a little bit more open-minded in myself. I have had to be more open-minded about the fact that when you strip away the vocabulary and you strip away whatever theology's comfortable and whatever symbolism is used, in both camps, or in any camp and all the camps, you'll find that there are people who are extremely plugged in and sensitive and aware and awakening and all that kind of stuff. And then you will find people who are going through the motions and claiming to get it when they don't and then you have people who are just completely tuned out. But that idea of who that someone is who is plugged in transcends everything else. And so when I recognize another person who's 'plugged-in', I don't care. All that other stuff is transparent. You see through it. And so I had these experiences where I have talked to these little old ladies who use the Jesus vocabulary through the whole thing, but meanwhile, they're the most likely to get what it is that I do and to be accepting of it. Scott: I had an aunt who was, she always used to like to renounce the spirit of fear. That was one of her big things that she liked to do. Slade: Ooo I like that. Scott: Renounce the spirit of fear, you know. Here, 25 years later, I start into A Course in Miracles and talking about love and fear and all of those things, and I'm like, Good grief Rita, you were onto it all along. Slade: It reminds me of the Bene Gesserit Litany against fear from doom. Do you know it? Scott: No, I don't. Slade: Okay. I'll put it in the show notes. Fear is the mind killer. Anyway. It's a little litany that the nun-like witch organization in that world.. It's a chant that they do when facing fear. It's a way of, kind of like... Scott: Fair enough. Slade: ...allowing the fear to pass over and through you. I can't recite it off the top of my head right now but I'll put it in the show notes for your sake if no one else's. Scott: For my ADD's sake, I'm trying to sit here not get on my phone and look it up while we're talking. Slade: I know! Don't do that in the middle of an interview! Scott: Yeah, I'm not. I'm definitely not doing that. I'm thinking, he'd never know. This is audio, but you'd know, because you're you! Slade: The litany against fear. It's really good. It's up there with the Serendipity prayer, and, you know, it's one of those tools for me. It's a mantra for sure. So I gotta ask you this. Scott: Please. Slade: Given your perspective and where you are in everything, I see you as someone who is kind of an archivist in a way, of all this old knowledge and old wisdom. You've got pieces of it, more so than others might. And so, as you think about how you are breaking that all down, sort of processing it and then putting it back together and give it new life and new form, what do you most hope to contribute to the conversation about spirituality? Scott: You know, it's to really... There's so many trappings that folks put on it. And just let go. That's one thing that I'm always telling folks. Just let go and stop trying to control absolutely everything. Just allow. Seek the truth for yourself and allow it to come. You can study whatever you want to study, but be open to the sources that the truth might come to you. Be open to what speak to you. Be open to what doesn't speak to you. Sometimes what doesn't speak to you speaks to you more than... because it doesn't speak to you, if that makes sense. In the 12-steps circles, people talk about 'let go and let God', you know, let go and let Spirit do Spirit's work, and realizing that a lot of that happens in a very subtle way in that it often times doesn't happen very instantly. It's a process and also that just because we're spiritual, just because we studied the Law of Attraction, which is great, you know, it's fine. It's not the only law there is though. Just because we've read this and watched the latest YouTube video, just because we've done this or this or this, it doesn't absolve us from doing the work on ourselves. And from taking, you know, sometimes I tell the folks that I'm working with, if nothing else, I'm gonna be able to, hopefully, with some assistance here, provide you at least some kind of mirror so that you can see yourself honestly, and see your path in a way that you've not seen it before. At least as honest as I can convey it to you, as honest as you're able to see it, but to look very closely inside for the answers and not externally. Because the answers for me are not the answers for you, and there's certainly some universal truths, but the path for everybody is slightly different. And each person has his or her own expression. And I just feel like I'm babbling, Slade. I love that question. Slade: It's meant to be a stumper but it's also meant to be a prompt to... Well, I used to ask people what really bugs the shit out of them in all this crap. And then I realized, Heather O'Shea I think was the person who was like, 'I'm going to reframe that, make it more positive'. And I was like, 'Okay, that's a good idea'. And so, going forward, I try to re-frame that as a more positive thing. Scott: One thing I would say is, this is not a cake mix. Okay? This is not... You realize there are certain... We don't have as much control over things in our world as we do over baking a cake. It's a good analogy, but again, it's not the best analogy. Okay? I do believe that the new thought community talks about planting seeds and watering seeds and all that, but the idea is that you've got to plant the appropriate seeds for the thing that you want. Right? And... Slade: And you have to do it. You have to tend it. Scott: YOU have to tend your garden. Remember, from Candide, and he goes through all that and Candide at the end: All of this is well and good. All of this is well and good. I've encountered the woman who had her ass eaten because of steak or something, but I still had to cultivate my own garden. You know? I still had to cultivate my own garden. And Pangloss is saying, 'All is well and good in this best of all possible worlds.' And Candide's saying, 'Yes, thank you, but I still have to cultivate my own garden', and that is me planting the appropriate seeds and doing the literal work of putting the thing together. Keep seeing things. If you can think it, you can be it. If you can dream it, you can be it. On one level, that's certainly true. You know? I know that there's a lot of hope for people in that as well. But if it were that simple, we wouldn't have any problems. If it were that simple... I hear a lot of talk about... Everything's all the Law of Attraction this, and the Law of Attraction that, and that is certainly all well and good and there's so much truth there, right? But it's not simply just thinking happy thoughts all the time and everything will be okay. It's about embodying a new way to be, and truly, not just sprouting affirmations (hehe, 'sprouting'), not just spouting affirmations at yourself. Sprouting - I'm using that seed metaphor. Slade: Right. Taking it all the way through Scott: Yeah, taking it all the way through. Thank you! It's... You can't just say, 'I am at peace with myself' and 'today's going to be better' and everything just work out. You have to go a little bit deeper than that. You have to do what affirmations really do. You have to... The nice thing that I love, because I deal with a lot of affirmations with folks that I work with is to say, 'Use this as an affirmation.' And 'You'll know it's working if, after you've done this for a couple of days, you feel worse.' Because that means it's lodged itself in those deep recesses of the things that you don't want to have to deal with and it's bringing it all to the surface. It's going in there and it's sort of destroying the energy of the thing you no longer want, and it's just all bubbling up like stomach acid, right? In that way, you know you're on the right track. Slade: Interesting... Scott: There's always that thing is, I want to feel better and I want to feel better NOW. And I'm always like, we can all feel better, but we still have to do something. You know? We still have to take a look at our ourselves. Slade: Well, you know, and you don't just do it once either. I think the... If I was answering your question with the way that you're answering it, I would say that, the thing that really kicks you in the gut when you realize that you have to get up and re-do it every day. You have to start over and over and over again and every day. I mean, some things might carry you through longer arcs of time, but really, it's not A decision. It's thousands of decisions. It's thousands of times making the same decision over and over again. Scott: It's a whole spiritual practice. It's not just a set of isolated things. It's a whole spiritual practice, you know? Like yoga is a spiritual practice. It's a whole thing. It's not just going to a class now and then. Although I love going to yoga classes, but it's a whole spiritual practice that I have to embody. And I have to figure out a new way to BE, not just a new way to think, not just a new way to act, but a whole new way to BE if I want some results in that way. But certainly I know inside of me, given, left to my own devices, I'll always usually pick the easy way out. Slade: Scott, it's so good to capture one or maybe a handful of your stories. I know that we still have so many others that we could do, but I'm glad that we finally got one in the can. I really want to appreciate you for coming on and telling your story. Tell everyone where they can go find you online. Scott: Yeah! It's sort of the entrepreneur phase of my life right now but ScottDouglasVaughn.com is the website for my spiritual work. Also I'm a photographer! I take pictures of abandoned buildings and things like that. And all of this grew out of that same summer, summer of 2012 that I was talking about a little bit earlier. That's ScottVaughnphotography.com My website, ScottDouglasVaughn.com is pretty good insight into what I'm doing right now.
Similar to outsourcing fulfillment, today's podcast guest says for many entrepreneurs, it may be best to outsource the collection, management and disbursement of sales taxes with the new Economic Nexus ruling by the Supreme Court. In this podcast, first we cover what the decision means to online entrepreneurs, and how it will impact the average business. For some no action needs to be taken. For others a lot of action must be taken. And ignoring the details is not really an option. Sometimes the least interesting subjects and work as an entrepreneur bring the most value. Well-managed financials are one such thing. Held within the broad “financials” umbrella is now sales taxes. While the answer to the questions, “should I collect” used to be grey. Everything is fairly black and white now. And the subject is never going away. Episode Highlights: Don't geek out on Sales Taxes. Outsource it. See SALT experts below. If you have Nexus it means you have an obligation to potentially register and collect sales taxes or income taxes in a given state. Physical Nexus is where you are, where your business is, where you are storing inventory or where Amazon is storing it. Economic Nexus is the change with the Supreme Court decision. The states could define other ways to define Nexus. For instance either $100,000 in sales or 200 transaction in the last 12 months – and you could be required to collect sales taxes on those revenues that occured within their state…regardless of Physical Nexus. Economic Nexus takes effect immediately for the 24 states that already have them on the books. (Links below will lead to finding the 24 states) Notice and Reporting are other ways to determine Nexus. It's really confusing! You MUST register to collect sales taxes. If you collect and do not remit, it is CRIMINAL. Hire an expert to register to collect sales taxes. There are 45 states that require it. Only register where you have to if you are a small seller. But if you are doing 10-20 million in revenue, “suck it up” and register everywhere. SALT experts can handle almost everything for you. See notes and links below. SALT is an acronym for Sales and Local Tax Experts Use www.WhereStock.com to determine where Amazon is holding your inventory. Seel link below. Taxjar is a good option if you wish to take on managing this yourself. Scott & his outsourced accounting team at Catching Clouds use Taxify (but recommend both options) The Supreme Court Decision may not increase a buyer's liability in an asset sale. Transcription: Joe: So Mark Jason got an e-mail this week and he had a question and it was “What makes Quiet Light different?” And Jason gave it an interesting answer and I want your feedback on it. It says “Well the formal answer is that we're all entrepreneurs but that's not really it. The difference is that Mark … you Mark Daoust is one of the best human beings on earth and that permeates everything we do. As a result, he attracts good people that are always doing good work with the best interest of others even if it's painful for the broker we ignore our own incentive to do what's right.” Did you pay him to say that? Mark: Yeah … well, I'm not going to say exactly how much but he got paid for that. I think it's a little over the top. I mean really. Joe: But he didn't write that down. He said it to someone and someone wrote it down and shared it with me. And I … look I shared this to put you on the spot. You look by the way very much like an internet entrepreneur today. You've got a t-shirt with some ducks on it, a little duck, duck going on there. Mark: Duck, duck, gray duck. I'm from Minnesota and I [inaudible 00:01:53.2] I'm going to put this out there, it's a more sophisticated game. All you parents out there stop this duck, duck, goose crap. It's all duck, duck, gray duck; that's what we're doing here. Joe: Don't know if we have time to go into what the heck you're talking about with duck, duck, gray duck. Well just … I thought you were going into hockey or something like that. I wanted to touch on one more thing you know Jason talks about that and you and the environment that you've created here and the caliber of entrepreneurs and advisors that you brought on. I listened to a podcast last night with Chuck Mullets and for those that are the buyers in the audience today, if you have not listened to the 27 tools for due diligence I think it was, listen to it. Because some of the tools in there were just amazing and I've been doing this for a long time and I haven't heard of any of them. I have to take my hat off to Chuck and give him some compliments for the job that he did there. I was really really impressed. He's a … I'll say it, he's a lot smarter than I thought he was. Mark: Ah, you know the bar was pretty low, to begin with. Joe: But I want to just raise myself up a little bit and show you something. Mark: What's that? Joe: I have on- Mark: Oh you have on Chuck's shirt that he made for you. Joe: I have my Quiet Light logo shirt on. So there you go. Mark: While I'm wearing ducks. Joe: Oh I didn't shade you there. Okay, listen this podcast is about something that's really important. It's about the Supreme Court decision to change the way that sales taxes are to be collected. Let's not get into details, let me just tell you that we had Scott Scharf on again. We specifically talked about the problem and the solution. What does this mean to e-commerce entrepreneurs and how do you solve it? I can tell you right now when you get three quarters of the way through the solution is … if you are up for it just like you outsource your fulfillment to a 3PL you can outsource your sales tax collection and distribution and management. And if it were me that would be my recommendation but it's absolutely there and you don't have to deal with all that little detail and there's a lot of it. Mark: Yeah and I like to say a word to people that share a person holiday with me, and when I read and hear about some of these red tape sort of restrictions that are coming down, I have a tendency to plug my years and go la-la-la-la I don't want to hear it. Joe: Right. Mark: I like the days of the free open web when it was just easy to do things. But the fact of the matter remains this is the direction we're going. Joe: Right. Mark: Restrictions, regulations are going to come into play more and more frequently and these aren't necessarily bad things we just needed to understand how to navigate them. And so an episode like this is timely, I'm glad that you got Scott on the line to do this episode because this is the [inaudible 00:04:34.0] time the episode given that this decision just came down a few weeks ago. Joe: Yeah some of the things that we talk about here on the Quiet Light Podcast are painful as entrepreneurs. Particularly those that don't love this detail, they love the excitement of driving revenue and the marketing aspect of it. These painful things when you pay attention to them will make your business more valuable if and when you ever decide to sell. So again listen to the whole thing. Get through it, he talks about it in detail point by point. But I try to keep him on track so it's not … he doesn't geek out too much. Scott loves this stuff. Mark: Scott? Never. Joe: He calls it geeking out himself. So we try to get on track to … okay how do … how does a guy like me, how does a guy like Mark, like an entrepreneur listening, how do they overcome this giant massive ball of red tape? And really, I think the answer is, outsource it. And we're going to give all of the ability to do that down there in the show notes. Mark: Sounds great. Joe: Let's go to it. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe from Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got Scott Scharf on the line with me from Catching Clouds. And we're going to talk about the Supreme Court decision that's come down regards to sales taxes, define what the problem is, and then give you a solution to it in the second half of the podcast. Scott welcome … welcome back actually right? Scott: Yeah it's great to be back. Joe: All right so you know we don't do fancy introductions. Tell these folks who you are and what you do at Catching Clouds so they understand what level of expert you are here. Scott: Yeah at Catching Clouds we're e-commerce accountants who are really experts in the accounting e-commerce businesses and of course sales tax management; which is why we can talk about this topic. We've been doing this for the last seven years and we love solving problems for e-commerce, sellers, anybody that we interact with it. And this Quill decision is definitely one of those things. Joe: Quill decision, that it that's the name of it? Q-U-I-L-L. Scott: Well, yeah so Quill was a decision from what 26 years ago that the Supreme Court overturned their own finding that really delimited what states could do to go collect sales tax from small businesses that are selling across state lines. Joe: Good. Okay, so they overturned it. So, folks, you heard Scott say that they're e-commerce accountants and I just want to reiterate … and you know my little soapbox here. E-commerce accounting, accounting, good financials, clean documentations, it's one of the four pillars to get maximum value for your business. So if you're using anything other than Xero or QuickBooks seriously consider talking to Scott if you want to get maximum value for your business. Because Excel spreadsheets for a 20 million dollar company or if you're doing a half a million in revenue doesn't matter, you're going to lose value in the sale of your business if and when some day you decide to sell. So there's my little pitch, definitely- Scott: [inaudible 00:07:24.7] Joe: these services. Okay so if I understand this correctly this is no longer physical nexus which I think everybody that's listening knows the definition of it; what it means. Is economic nexus, can you tell us what the heck that means for these folks? Scott: Yeah so actually physical nexus still applies so it's not that they got rid of physical nexus it's just not the only consideration deciding if you have [inaudible 00:07:52.0] of fancy. Joe: So let's say what physical nexus is anyway then, go ahead. Scott: Okay. Well, physical nexus … well, first nexus is if you cross a threshold and you have nexus based on some parameters means you have an obligation to potentially register and collect sales tax or income tax or other things in a given state. So if you don't have nexus you don't have to do these things. Okay, that's the first part. So there are different types of nexus, the first one is physical. It's been around for quite a while. It's where you are, your business is, your business is founded, you have employees, you have property. Okay for an e-commerce business, it's wherever you're storing your inventory. If it's at a 3PL on either coast you have a nexus where you're storing your inventory. If you're an Amazon FBA seller, when you send inventory to three or five warehouses they'll move it to up to 26 states that's your inventory and it creates nexus. There are a few other ones out there but from a physical perspective … I've been around for a while, there's like affiliates and other things. But the main thing it's where you are and your property is. Joe: Physical nexus, okay. And now we've got economic nexus, what is that? Scott: So economic nexus what states have determined and the brakes were taken off with the Supreme Court decision that they could define other ways to determine nexus to basically either require your business to do reporting and other function or register and collect sales tax in those states. So what they've done is said hey if you're doing over typically in the standard is based on the Supreme Court decision $100,000 in sales or actually more importantly 200 transactions either in the last calendar year or in the prior 12 months and that would mean that they're expecting you if you're a larger business to register and collect sales tax from there … of any consumers buying products you're shipping to into that state. Joe: How many transactions do you say? It was 200? Scott: 200. Joe: So if it's a $20 sale it's only what 1,000? Scott: $1,000. So $100,000 people see the $100,000 and think that oh God there's no way I didn't know you'd do $100,000 in any states last year, but it's totally based on your average. So if you take your average sale price and multiply it times 200, if you've done more than that revenue in any states that have these laws you're over that threshold. Joe: Okay so economic nexus passed by the Supreme Court, when does it take effect is it immediate or is there-? Scott: It's immediate for the roughly 23, 24 states that already had these laws on the books. And the only thing that was holding them back were these court cases that were just … was decided a week and a half ago. Joe: Okay so there's 24 states, not all 45 that collects sales taxes but that is 24 of them. And for folks listening, we will add a list of those 24 states but there'll be a lot of resources in the show notes that we'll give you that through their software as well. Scott: Well and it's not just economic nexus, you have to remember there's now notice in reporting states that aren't doing economic nexuses but have set thresholds for doing notice and reporting. They're basically two different new ways of determining nexus and they're both in effect now and there are other states that have them starting later this year and more. So it's multiple ways of nexus that might impact your business. Joe: Okay so I'm just going to say a few years ago I did a presentation at Rhodium Weekend all about e-commerce selling and part of it was sales tax collection accounting. So I wanted to say to Yana if you're listening I was right. She came after me after that now that's never going to happen. It's right. So really just don't even worry about the 24 states I think physical nexus, economic … basically get prepared to collect and remit sales taxes everywhere and use a special service that can allow you to do that. First though … and we'll get to that but first do you have to register to collect sales taxes? Scott: Yes. You have to if you are not registered you don't have a license and a number from the state, it's criminal to collect sales tax and not remit it and not have a license. It's also criminal to collect sales … have a license to collect sales tax and not give it to those state. Those two things have additional penalties and they'll come after the business owner's criminally. So you need to have a license before you start collecting sales tax and then once you start collecting sales tax you have to give it back to the state either monthly, quarterly or annually; whatever they say. Joe: Okay just to clarify, you used the word criminally three times. That's a little scary. Scott: Well it's … but unfortunately both Amazon and Shopify and these other sites, I mean literally there's a button in Shopify that you can click that says collect sales tax in all states. And it's easy to start collecting sales tax in the 45 states that have sales tax. So technically it's very easy to hit these buttons and not realize and you just want to be careful. And in difference between criminal is there's additional by jail. Everything else related to sales tax is expense and cost which is more likely to happen but maybe not as painful but can be pretty painful based on penalties and interest and other things. Joe: Right. Okay, so first and foremost let's just define and answer this simple basic question that some folks have been asking, does this mean … and I know the answer to this thus do you, does this mean quote unquote I have to start collecting sales taxes? The answer is yes. The answer is you should have been collecting them before, you had to before. Correctly? Scott: Well correct, if you have physical nexus that goes back in time. Okay, most of these economic nexus laws are new. And the way they're currently written is if you pass the threshold then the expectation is you register and start collecting sales tax going forward. So there's going to be nuances and changes but in general, if you exceed most of these thresholds for economic nexus or notice in reporting basically the expectation is you go out, you register now, and you start collecting forward. And there's no … depending on the state but for most states, there's no real risk of you owing money or have not done whatever in the past, you can go forward. But when you have physical nexus because of Amazon FBA or a 3PL then you need to consider if you register and collect going forward where you still have a risk of any previous outstanding liability which I know within a sale you're very aware of to make sure you know both the seller and the buyer are aware of any business liabilities or do you go back in time and pay anything that you didn't collect in the past; which isn't fun. Collecting sales tax or paying in sales tax you didn't collect from the consumer on each individual sale. Joe: Yeah because that's directly coming out of your profits now instead of collecting and just passing it through. Scott: Yup. Joe: Okay, so let's jump to making this easy for people that are listening. The bottom line is that they need to start collecting sales taxes and remitting them. Obviously, get registered to collect sales taxes. There're software out there that does this right? Because you're talking about you need to do this, you need to do that, and for me as a former physical products e-commerce seller, my eyes would roll into the back of my head, I would [inaudible 00:15:15.0] more and I'd never wake up again. Can't … Can I just pay somebody to do this for me and if yes what are the options and how much would it cost me annually or monthly? Scott: Well the first part, so you don't pull out your own hair, is there are multiple services out there that will help you with the registrations and register you in multiple states because it will drive you crazy. Every state is a little bit different. On average I'll pay about $100 per registration plus $20 to $50 in registration fee for some states, that's the first piece. So if you've decided to register in two, five, ten, whatever number of states you need to get registered first and I suggest … it'll just drive you crazy, is would be to get registered and there are a number of services out there that can do that for you. Joe: Okay and we'll put those in the show notes but why Scott only five or ten whatever you decide to get registered? And why wouldn't you register for every state that requires you to collect sales taxes? I guess maybe because you never sell any … somebody in the state of- Scott: So one it's just that overhead in the cost of doing business. So the first thing there are 45 states that have a sales tax and we are all heading sometime … I would have said three to five plus years that we're going to collect sales tax on every e-commerce sale, it's now probably two to four years or two to three years. It's going to happen a lot faster but there is a cost even on the low cost tool or outsourcing it … and I'll talk about some of those numbers in a minute, but you really only at this point want to register for sales tax where you have to. You shouldn't have to if … now if you're already a 20 or 30 million dollars e-commerce business just suck it up and go to all 45. Joe: Right. Scott: Anybody else below there, you're paying more money for compliance and tools and registrations. And in some of these states when you register for sales tax nexus you are in some ways volunteering to pay income tax. Potentially depending on the state and the situation; minimum franchise tax like in California which is $800 a year, and then additional fees, and not only the sales tax cost but paying a CPA to file and deal with franchise tax returns and income tax returns. So you want to as a small business or even a medium sized business minimize that overhead and only do this in the states you need to but you definitely want to start the big states where the population are. California, Florida, Texas, and those other bigger ones is the basics to get that going but you would want an easier way in. So figure it out for the first batch that you're doing and then do another batch and another batch. So you just can't stop your whole business to do sales tax and you just have to balance those things out. But at the same time, you don't want to show this huge [inaudible 00:17:52.3] selling and talking to Quiet Light. This huge compliance overhead and its overkill and it's going impact your own profitability and the money you're taking out of the business. So just want to find a balanced approach as you get there. Joe: How do you determine that? Is there a tool or process inside of Shopify or if you're an Amazon Seller that tells you that you know what sales you have by state? Scott: Yeah so there are two … for sales price there's a couple of ways to do it. So the first if you're an Amazon FBA seller there's a great tool called wherestock.com you pay him $30 and they'll log in … we'll get you the link, and they'll connect your Amazon site and they'll … it'll take them about a day and they'll give you a report showing you all the warehouses where you have inventory and when it started. How far back in time if you had inventory in the Michigan warehouse and if you go through that list and you don't see North Carolina or some states because of the type of your products it'll tell you, you might have had or five of these main states that you've never had inventory in and you don't have nexus there; which is great news. The next piece is really a matter of downloading all of your orders out of Shopify for the previous 12 months or the last year and then just pivoting the data or doing a total if you know how in Excel to show you your sales; both the number of sales in each state and the total dollar volume in each state. So you want to know your own numbers and any that you're over $100,000 in sales or unfortunately $10,000 in Washington State, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma starting on Sunday I think. I think it just started Sunday. I think it was July first and it's happened right before it. Those are $10,000 in sales which is really low, everybody else is 100,000. So that'll … you'll go through those states and add up the ones that you have, look at the ones that you have the most amount of sales and income in and start with those. You want to know your own numbers and work through your own list. The other option is and I can provide a link to our tax calculator that we have in there … bunch of other people putting them out there that basically take your average sale amount enter it and it will total all those things up. But those are the two things; one, all of your income across all of your sales and then this Amazon wherestock report to let you know what's going on in FBA and that'll be in your information and then you just build a list and you work your way through your own priorities on how many you want to do; all at once or a few at a time. Joe: Okay so just to dumb it down a little bit. If you're doing 20, 30 million dollars just suck it up and do all 45 states. But if you're doing maybe just a million dollars in revenue, which is fantastic, do this report because you don't want to have to register in 23 states that instead of all 45 if you don't have to. Scott: Right. Joe: Someone else talked about it in this way. I mean that registration alone is going to cost you $100 to $150 so maybe $3,000 or so for 23 states that you don't have to register in. But if you're only doing $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 in revenue in the state of Montana it doesn't make any sense to register because a. you're not going to hit that threshold and b. realistically Scott is if someone in the state of Montana that works in- Scott: Montana is a bad example they're not on sales tax. Joe: Okay. Scott: So pick one of the few states that doesn't have one but Nevada or however else- Joe: How about Maine? Scott: So it's always a risk man, your question is so should you or not you … are you going to, can you fly under the radar- Joe: Yeah. Scott: Are they going to find you tomorrow and what's going on? So it's a risk management decision between the cost of compliance to your business versus the overhead and the cost of compliance and then the chance of being caught. There are four million Amazon sellers, there's between five and ten million businesses doing e-commerce these days. The states just had their handcuffs taken off and they're all going to go woohoo let's go get this money from out of state sellers. It's going to take them a while to ramp up and the chances of getting caught are very very low and they have been low and they're still very very low okay? But there isn't really no ambiguity now; there's no more well, maybe, or there's this court case, or whatever else. Joe: Right. Scott: So until now and whenever possibly the Congress does something or more lawsuits happen which take time this is the way things are today and you just have to make that decision of a risk management. So you never want to mess around with the IRS when it comes to payroll taxes or W-9s and contractors but for sales tax, you're going to have to balance those out. But the chance of being audited or being notified by the state is significantly higher than it's ever been in the past. Joe: Okay let's talk about the services that are out there; as in the software or services that you recommend for listeners just … you can do your download calculator that I'm going to provide in the show notes to determine the revenue by state and things of that nature to decide where they want to register. But what softwares or service programs do you recommend that folks check out that you have seen people use consistently that make this a whole lot easier? Scott: Yeah for people doing it themselves I would start with TaxJar it's by far the easiest to use most straightforward they … not only do they pull in all the data but they process the filing for sales tax and the payments in all 50 states. It's both the easiest and I, from what I've seen the lowest cost. They're a great tool. They have a great blog and a ton of information and support and it's the best way to do it yourself. The next one that's a little more powerful- Joe: Hold on a second. Scott: Yeah? Joe: In terms of a TaxJar thorough cost ballpark if someone's to put in all the states what would the overall cost be to … and do they do registration or just compliance? Scott: Okay so TaxJar does not do registrations. Joe: Okay. Scott: It's only the sales tax data aggregation to pull it all together from channels. Pull everything together. One note is if you have sales that are outside of Amazon, Shopify, or BigCommerce you have to import that data into TaxJar so that you have the complete thing. From all the sales so your filings are accurate. But in general, you're going to pay a monthly fee between I think 29 and up to 500 depending on the number of sales. Whether it's a thousand per month, 5,000 you know … in larger apps you're going to pay a base monthly fee no matter what; totally reasonable wherever your SaaS thing. And then you're going to pay a per-filing transaction. So if you're paying filing quarterly you're going to pay four times somewhere between $21 and $30 per filing. I don't have their pricing memorized. Joe: Sure. Scott: So if you're filing quarterly your costs are going to be lower. If you're filing annually it's going to be these monthly fees. So if you're a smaller seller the pricing can work out to be fairly affordable. They also have kind of an unlimited filing piece so if you get over a certain level … and I haven't done the math whether it's 20 states or 30 states but there's a certain point where you can pay it for kind of an unlimited plan and get to a max price. I think that's in the 4 to $6,000 for the year kind of total. But you can using that tool max that out and really lock that compliance cost in. Not counting your time making sure it's being done right. Importing data, dealing with notices, and just making … keeping an eye on it, it's not a set and forget process. Joe: So, on the high side it sounds like maybe $500 a month and your maxing out the services there, on the low side $29 a month so it all depends upon the size of the seller and how much you do. Okay, you are about to mention another- Scott: So the next one I would say is Taxify and that's what we use because we're doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of returns every month. It's a little more powerful in certain ways. They have integrations. It can handle a wider range of different businesses and there's … it's just they're really kind of head to head but for DIY most people go with TaxJar just because it's easier to use. TaxJar is more powerful if you have a more complex business. You might want to consider it or compare the two. Pricing is pretty similar between those two and- Joe: Those using TaxJar you said TaxJar, not Taxify. Scott: No we're using Taxify. We are using Taxify. Our accounting practice for us to file we use Taxify but I've known the TaxJar guys for six years now and they really do have a great solution. And any of our stuff we talk about those two is really the primary ones to consider third one is- Joe: Hold on I want to just interrupt again sorry. On this option, you're saying you already use it which means that with your accounting services for sellers of a certain size I assume, the collection, the management, and remittance of the sales taxes are part of your services as well. Scott: Correct. Joe: So I don't have to learn the software, I can hire you guys to do it. Scott: Correct. Joe: Okay. Scott: Well and I'll talk about some other … outsourcing is absolutely a viable, just like you outsource fulfillment to a 3PL or to Amazon FBA, sales tax is something you don't want to geek out on. I've done it for the last six years, it drives me crazy but I geek out on it. It just … it will distract you from listing products and buying products and designing new products and all the front end stuff to generate more income. That is absolutely something you want to … you might like that we look at here's how you do it yourself and you should understand anything you outsource but we do that. We offer the service but we also do notice management. The states send all kinds of notices. Even if you pay on time they'll send you a notice but if you don't respond to the notice they'll fine you for not responding to the notice. So there's more to it than just a set and forget tools. These tools are phenomenal as they deal with the complexity. Because every return is different, they have 50 different fields. They really aggregate the data and reduce the complexity of filing and paying which is awesome which is why we use automation. But then there's there is more to it. Joe: Okay, you're about to mention a third option for folks. Scott: Yeah third option is Avalara TrustFile. Now if you really are already a 20 or 30 … so Avalara has two products, they have a smaller and a lower end one which I don't think is as powerful as TaxJar or Taxify called TrustFile which you can use. They've cleaned up their pricing but it's still a little confusing but they're a viable tool. If you're already let's say five or really 10 million and you're doing more than just e-commerce you can consider Avalara AvaTax which is their higher end tool which will give you more control automated. If you have an accounting department it is definitely a tool you would consider. Quite a few CPA's and accountants use AvaTax as well to do more complex larger sales tax across multiple businesses. So those are really the key players, there are other smaller players out there but those are really the key players that are really focused and understand what's going on out there. Joe: Okay. I was listening to your better half Patti on your YouTube channel. She does a great job, by the way, great Q and A's there. I think she mentioned SALT experts and what they do and what not. Can you define what a SALT expert is and why someone listening might want to consult with one of them? Scott: Absolutely so a SALT; Sales And Local Tax expert, these are people that will do one, they can do a nexus study which tells you where you have nexus and it'll tell you whether your products are taxable or not, are they a food, are they a candy, do they have flour in them, are they clothing or … they can go look at all that. You can all interpret what the states say but these are people that do it all the time and will contact the state anonymously or you. The next thing they will do is what's called a voluntary disclosure agreement. If you owe a state tens of thousands of dollars of back tax and you want to come clean because you want to clear out your liability to sell your business and just make sure everything's done right, they'll go to the states anonymously and say I have this seller and they'll represent you. And in some cases get penalties, sometimes interests, and can potentially get a payment plan if you're cleaning up historical sales tax. And you want that person representing you a SALT expert, not your CPA. Unless they've done it multiple times in their own state you really want to talk to someone that's an expert. They're the people you want to call if you're audited to represent you and help you get through an audit. So those are the unique things we haven't talked about but the main thing is you can outsource your sales tax compliance to them. They will do the registrations and most in almost every case they will set things up. Most of them are very technical … in our case we at Catching Clouds we're really great at setting up Shopify to collect sales tax right and Amazon and eBay and in the more technical configurations. So we're very technical accountancy but they will help advise you on those things. They're all over it. They talk to me about the technical stuff, we're really good friends. It's a great community. I'll try to just solve this for sellers but then you can pay them a monthly fee or a per-state fee to take care of the data collection which you have to give them. The filing, the payments, notices, and kind of provide a complete service to outsource your sales tax. You can go to one person, pay them to take care all of your sales tax that's going on and advise you and then they're the ones that are keeping tabs on all the changes that happen every week; every month if that's the route you want to go. Which is a good way to go, in general, I'll give you a safe number, you really want to budget at least $50 per state per month. So you're looking at between $600 and $1,000 per year for this to not be an issue to worry about but you need to budget the right amount. Plus you want to have that same space because everyone's … Arizona's awful that they'll come back the second year and hit you with hundreds of dollars additional fees per county and everything else that you didn't count on and you can't get around and they'll deal with these random issues. Joe: Okay, great. I have a list of those from your website for those listening again in the show notes SALT experts will be available. Sounds like a one stop shopping place to go and just outsource all of this. Of course, some people that want to do the work themselves will have those calculators that you talked about there as well Scott and the links to the Taxify and TaxJar and Avalara. A couple of quick questions before we wrap this up, and maybe they're not quick questions but historically when someone sells their website … their physical e-commerce business in this case, the question of liability for past sales taxes that should have collected is really really gray, right? Scott: Yeah it is. Joe: And only once for those listening how do you solve that problem as a buyer? In most cases, most buyers don't worry about it. They really never have and these are people that are a lot smarter than you and I combined. They don't worry about it; pretty high level folks. In one case I had and think about this as a seller, I had someone that it was … the business sale total value was around $758,000 but they did the math and they said look in the 24 months that you've been around you should have collected X amount of sales taxes and let's call it $50,000 in that purchase price, in that $750,000 in the asset purchase agreement $50,000 was set aside in Escrow for potential sales tax liability purposes. And when the buyer went out to register to get their sales tax in the state of California, Texas, whatever if that state said yes, of course, we'll register you but we know that you owe us from this brand, you didn't own the company but from this brand you owe us $17,000 then that money would have come out of that 50,000. For the record, the buyer was able to register in all the states that he wanted to register and not a single state said okay great but you owe us money hence all 50,000 was released. How does this Supreme Court decision in economic nexus change that liability moving forward for the buyers of these businesses? Scott: I don't think it … I think it only increases the chance of the state contacting you and having to either answer the questions or go through an audit and all of these things are moot until you're actually audited. And you're at that point where you're dealing with an auditor and then then they ask for historical records and financials and everything else. Up until then, it's not really an issue. Unfortunately, though it's the decision of that state; are they going to hold the new business and whoever bought that Amazon seller account? They want to attach the liability to the Amazon account where it was being sold that you buy a continuing Amazon account which is what most people do or is it tied to the prior business and the business owner? The people selling you need to be concerned when you get that big chat to set some of this money aside if the states come after you historically because if you've spent it all, it really … in most cases tends to tie to the original business owner of the business. So I would say that there's … it's really if you're buying [inaudible 00:34:44.4] sale you have to be worried about it more than anything else. If it's an asset sale you're buying this asset, starting a new business, you've got to register fresh and move forward. There's a small risk but only after you've been audited. So it's just a couple of nuances there. Joe: So very very small risk and only after you're audited and the odds of being audited again, incredibly small. Scott: Correct. Joe: Okay. Let's talk about those out there that are wholesaling. They're buying products and wholesaling them, they don't have to collect these sales taxes is that correct? Scott: They don't but you have to follow the rules. The first is and what really does this finding really change is instead of collecting tax exemptions certificates; so for every B2B sale you have to get a tax exemption certificate and it's not just a picture of the sales tax license on the wall of someone's cell phone. You have to have something that has your business name on the top that other companies who you sold it to their tax licenses whether it's one state or multiple states. And it doesn't matter which states they are and an owner or a business manager an approved person of that company signing at the bottom saying they're responsible for the sales tax. Okay? Joe: Is it on a form? Is it an official form that they would fill out? Scott: There's a form per state and there's a great multi-state form. I can get you all of the links and if you want to have a process that you have them and keep in mind that they pretty … a lot of them expire every year. So you want to have all of these forms from your five or 10 or 50 or 500 B2B customers on file. And if you get audited by any given state then you need … then you have these to say hey I didn't have to collect sales tax but if you don't have the forms or they're expired or you're missing them that … then they can say all of that was taxable and you owe the sales tax. Even if the other company sold it and collected sales tax they can double dip and come after the information. What this decision really changed was two things related to B2B sellers. But first, as most people tend to collect tax exemption certificates for their own states where they're filing where they would expect their own business to get audited. Now that it's kind of every state can look at all this information, B2B sellers should start collecting tax exemption certificates on every sale. And if you have your top five or ten B2B customers, go back and get them from those ones and … to make sure you've got this filed. And then just set it aside in case you're audited. The second big impact of this for B2B sellers is now your B2B sales, number of transactions, and dollars volume count towards these economic nexus thresholds. It's all of your sales. It's your B2C sales and B2B. And even if you're 100% B2B and you have no tax you're still going to cross this threshold. And the states are still going to expect you to file a return. And it is going to cost you the same amount in compliance for you as it does. Even if you give them no money like every number is zero. Joe: That's really important for people that are doing both B2C and B2B. I was thinking just wholesale B2B but we have a lot of clients that they'll sell to let's say for instance chewy.com they're selling their own website but they wholesale to Chewy. They need to pay attention to this stuff as well. That's great information. Scott: It's all of their sales. It combines both and it's looking at all of your sales. Because what the really the states are doing and all these laws are meant to do is to get to the point where every transaction is taxed and they get a sales tax from every sale. That's what they're trying to do so pretty much most of the pain goes away if you register and collect in a state. You don't have to worry about different fines and fees or other unknowns, you can start defining your cost of compliance but that's really where we're going. Joe: Okay. Do you think this Supreme Court decision is good or bad? Overall for the individual states that are going to be applied this collect and collect is what I'm saying. Scott: I think it's bad for e-commerce sellers. I really do. The compliance costs just went from an unknown maybe I can avoid them to … and we're heading that way so I think it's bad for e-commerce sellers. Of course, it is great for the state bureaucracies that are going to go out and collect a bunch of money from other states until something else changes to back it down. I think it's going to increase the risk for smaller sellers and even mid-range sellers of having more unknown's that could impact your business. From us, as consumers, we're really getting to the point as a company … a country since we're so consumer based, it's all about products and services and things along those lines that we're really heading to the point where we're going to pay a sales tax on everything. It's just that the cost and the complexity and potential risks to all small businesses, not just e-commerce businesses, anybody that has a product and ships it out of state or does anything else now has to be concerned about that much more in running a business that you know e-commerce businesses are 24/7, running really fast, the rules are constantly changing, you just didn't need this additional in my opinion large overhead of cost of doing business to really impact them. Joe: Right at the end of the day hopefully it would be great for states and the roads and highways and schools in the state in which you live. But for now, it's a major complexity that you as an e-commerce owner have to deal with. Scott, as always you're fantastic. These details are great … for me personally they're overwhelming many times but that's the point of the show notes and simplifying it and really … perhaps hiring that SALT expert to do the vast majority of this work for those listening that choose to go that route. Scott before we depart any last thoughts or recommendations for people that are listening; both buyers and sellers? Scott: Yeah. Just take a deep breath plan out time once a month or a quarter to focus in on this. Add up your numbers, decide your risk tolerance, and then move on. And then don't worry about it for that month or quarter. And then when you decide to do it, think about what it is you're doing and make a decision and move on. You don't have to stop all your business or sales or everything else. Just take a practical approach. This is one more thing that has to be on your regular process; like checking your insurance or other things that you're validating. And just keep moving; keep selling and growing. Balance the risk and then just move on. Joe: That's great thanks, Scott. As always appreciate it look forward to seeing you at the next event and hopefully lots of folks will reach out to you here. And be at peace of mind here with what you've shared. Thanks so much, Scott. Scott: Well, thank you. Links: Catching Clouds eCommerce Accounting Patti's Q&A about Sales Taxes and the new SCOTUS Ruling Catching Clouds Academy Fox News Supreme Court sales tax ruling: The winners and losers MSNBC Supreme Court Rules States Can Require Shoppers To Pay Online Sales Tax Internet Sales Tax | What Online Retailers Need to Know Sales Tax Nexus Threshold Calculator Sales Tax Permitting with SalesPermitted.com Get your FBA stock locations summarized and delivered to your inbox. Sales and Local Tax (SALT) Experts – Outsource Everything Cathie Stanton and Lauren Stinson, Cherry Bekaert ► http://cherrybekaertsalestax.com/ Michael Fleming ► www.salestaxandmore.com ► https://www.salestaxandmore.com/chart… Diane Yetter ► www.salestaxinstitute.com ► https://www.salestaxinstitute.com/res… SaaS Sales Tax Apps: TaxJar ► https://www.taxjar.com/ Taxify ► https://taxify.co/ Avalara ► https://www.avalara.com/us/en/index.html
In this episode of Bloody Angola: A Podcast by Woody Overton and Jim Chapman we bring you an amazing interview by our friends at The P2P Podcast (Penitentiaries to Penthouses)At 16, Kiana was convicted & sentenced to 2 life sentences without parole. While physically he was incarcerated, mentally he was FREE. Resilience is his name and after 17 years of living in the can God made a way for him to be in physical freedom.#formerlyincarcerated #prisonstories #redemption #secondchances #bloodyangolapodcast #woodyoverton #jimchapman #truecrime #realliferealcrimeBREAKING THE CHAINS - FULL TRANSCRIPT - BLOODY ANGOLA PODCASTJim: Hey, everyone, and welcome to Bloody Angola. A podcast 142 years in the making. The Complete Story of America's Bloodiest Prison. And I am Jim Chapman. Woody Everton cannot join us today. He is on assignment. But we're bringing you something different today. We did a two-part series, if you haven't checked it out yet, it's called Second Chances. It features a former inmate at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. He was actually the first juvenile released when the Supreme Court passed a law making it possible for juveniles who were sentenced to life in prison without parole to get a parole hearing after 25 years. If you haven't seen that episode yet, go check it out.This week, we have a very special episode. The guy we brought you the story of and who actually joined us for the two episodes of Second Chances, we met through our friends at Penitentiaries 2 Penthouses. It's a podcast known as P2P, and they interview formerly incarcerated people that are doing well as they acclimate back into society. When we did the Second Chances episodes, they were a big part of that, certainly a big part of making the introduction to the gentleman that came on the show. So, thank you so much to P2P.And they have an amazing podcast. So, we have decided that we're going to bring y'all one of their episodes and we're going to share it on our feed. We thought y'all would really enjoy it. We have some really, really big stuff about to pop off for Bloody Angola. I know that y'all are going to be real excited as we go through that process, but I think y'all will love this episode. It is with a gentleman by the name of Kiana Calloway who was in Angola for a very long time and has quite a story that you need to hear or that you will enjoy hearing. Without further ado, here's the P2P Podcast in their interview with Kiana Calloway. [P2P theme]Scott: Welcome, everybody. This is Scott with Penitentiaries 2 Penthouse Podcast. Shane: Yes, sir.Scott: I'm your host. To the left of me, we got Mr. Beatty.Beatty: Your best friend in real estate. Scott: To the right of me, we've got our guest, Mr. Kiana Calloway. Kiana: Swag out. What's happening? Scott: Special gentleman he is. And then, we got my partner over here to the left, Mr. Shane Johnson. Beatty: Big Shane.Shane: Yes, sir. 24 years successful now. Scott: There you go. We look forward to digging into today's message. Kiana, man has a powerful story. How I know Kiana is we work on a project together through the Justice and Accountability Center of Louisiana. Basically, that's nonprofit organization full of attorneys and policy people who march down to the state capitol every year.Kiana: Shoutout, JAC.Scott: JAC. And they do legislative work, so they propose bills, work with lobbyists, senators, representatives to pass criminal legal reform bills. The specific focus though is usually expungement legislation. For those of you who don't know what expungement legislation is, expungements are the things that guys like myself, Kiana, Mr. Shane over there need once we come home for opportunities. Whether it's employment, housing, life insurance, you name it, there's hundreds of things that we get denied for on a regular basis based on the fact that we made some mistakes in our lives and we've paid our time, we've paid our debt, and we're trying to get past that. So, the work that we're doing revolves around expungements. A, changing expungement law, but B, getting the knowledge and information out there because the average Joe that comes home from prison-Kiana: Don't even know about it.Scott: -don't know about expungements, don't know how to go about getting expungements. Furthermore--Shane: I am one.Scott: Yeah, exactly. And they're expensive as hell. You could easily rack up if you have multiple felonies, several thousand dollars just in paying the state, the district attorneys, and the clerks of court's office, not even including legal counsel. That's the work that the Justice and Accountability Center does. Me and Kiana are working on a project to get the expungement app through Justice and Accountability Center, the information there out. So, we're going to be traveling, presenting workshops, getting the information out there so that people can access expungements equitably.Kiana: Plug in, man, we're going to be in your areas very, very soon. Just being able to alleviate one of the collateral consequences that come after incarceration, I think that we're doing our part. And we'll be doing ourself a disservice, God, if we're not traveling, educating people about the work that we're putting in the state capitol. Keeping them informed that there's issues that you can get plugged into, but you just need to reach out. We can't do this in our silos. It's an honor to have run into a like-minded brother that's putting in work outside the bars because you are what you do, even when the camera is not on. [chuckles]Scott: Yeah, for sure. It's easy to look good on camera. It's harder to make it happen on the outside. But that's what I like to do. I'm just passionate about-- and just like you, passionate about making sure that people have opportunities, man, because I was given opportunities and I've had a lot of challenges, man, and I just want to see people be able to breeze through that process instead of getting caught in the hiccups.I do want to highlight a very successful human being today. As I said, I had the fortunate privilege of watching Kiana's documentary that's coming out real soon on a very, very national level. I told him today, and it's hard to get me to break down. And I told him, man-- [Shane laughs] Man, I watched it, dude, and they had some parts in it, I was just like [inhales deeply] and it'll really hit you. He's had a very, very challenged life, a lot of injustices, and I'm going to let him explain that. A lot of people see the part of the justice system that WAFB, whatever your local news channel post out there about people who commit crimes and their wrongs or whatever, but they don't talk about all those mugshots that they post where guys really didn't do what they were being accused of.I'm going to let Kiana take it from here, but if you don't mind, could you just kind of share a little bit about your upbringing and then what caused you or what led to the prison? And then we'll just kind of take it from thereKiana: Well, actually, the system led me to prison. Scott: Right. Kiana: We have to understand that the system was built to do exactly what it's doing. People say the system messed up. No, it's not messed up. It's doing exactly what it was scripted to do. We must always bring that energy back into the space. Just so happened that I have been resilient enough to really surpass the test that the system has caused upon my life. I've seen individuals in the same space, same situation, same cell, and six months later, they hung themselves because they can't handle the stresses or the traumatic expressions about being, one, either fomerly accused and convicted of a crime, or, two, just trying to figure out, like, "Man, is this my life? Is this what I'm supposed to be?" Not to get too deep into that, because my documentary, it basically shows resiliency. It shows the true test of time. Like, you can go through these hard spaces, but you have to be prepared to bounce back because everybody bounces back. Shane: Amen. Scott: What you're referring to is the school-to-prison pipeline? Kiana: Yes. Scott: Okay. Got you. Kiana: Everybody bounces back. Beatty: Explain the school-to-prison pipeline. Kiana: School-to-prison pipeline. Okay, I'm going to give it to you in layman terms. Beatty: Let's go. I am layman.[laughter] Scott: That sounds like a good movie title. [crosstalk] Beatty: I am he.Kiana: Okay, definitely. So, school-of-prison pipelines. I went to prison at 16 years old. If I was tested in the second or third grade and I read below a certain level, they built another cell for me. Just the way that it planned out, I ended up in that cell, that school-to-prison pipeline. If we understand the way that our America is functioning, three main attributes of human survival. Education, travel, and should I say-- I'll throw manufacturing and the building. Planes, the way planes first started, it crunk up, but now the evolution of planes is that it just takes off. They could probably put it on autopilot, ain't got nothing but to do the landing. And it's crazy, man. The car, it crunk up. Now, you pushed on. Why? Education is still the same. You sit in a single-file line. They teach you ABC, one, two, three and it never gives the whole individuality of the person. So, when we speak about school-to-prison pipeline, I walked through a metal detector when I was going to elementary school. If this is an educational institution, they should be focused on my education and not my protection or not my apprehension in so many different ways. We learn how to stand in a single-file line, walking to child hall, cafeteria. What did you do? You stood in a single-file line, and you walked to the child hall. I understand the level of control, but that's how institutionalized that we can be. People never have been to prison and are more institutionalized than someone that spent 50 years in the junk. Beatty: Concrete walls, fluorescent lighting. Kiana: Hey.Scott: Colors.Beatty: White, blue. Scott: Light blue. I guess to give that short synopsis of school-to-prison pipeline, at a young age, you experienced that-- we all do-- Kiana: It's a program. Scott: And then, which eventually led to? Kiana: Even since those days of single-file lines, straight line education, as today, we pump 72% of our state's budget into incarcerating someone instead of the education precinct. Only 13% or sometimes 7% of the budget goes to the adequate education of our youth. That shows the level of, should I say, support--Beatty: Focus.Kiana: Dependence, codependence, any word that we want to put into that space, because we must understand that it's systems that we're dealing with. These systems that we're dealing with has to be dismantled and it has to be dismantled from the inside. Scott just said that we have the privilege of working on the new task force, the Safe and Alternative Task Force, which is a governmental task force that was structured through last year's legislation, which gives us the opportunity to properly plan the effects of not only expungements, but the use of solitary confinement inside of our jails and prisons in the state of Louisiana.And sitting at these tables with the state attorney, with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Department of Corrections, I really start to understand that we are the experts in this field. Like, people are holding these positions and really don't know.Unison: Mm-hmm. Kiana: They really don't know the outlook of putting a face to incarceration. That's what we need to try to understand. Who are we incarcerating? How can we lead the nation in crime, but we have--Shane: The highest incarceration rate.Kiana: Yeah. Let me kind of bring this back. How can we be less in the nation in education, but highest in the nation in crime and incarceration? Scott: Going back to you being sentenced at a young age or going to jail or prison at a young age, can you share with us what happened and then jump into your experience? Kiana: I'm going to XYZ it because a lot of it is in the film.Scott: Yeah, don't spoil it.Kiana: Yeah, I don't want to do a spoiler alert, but, man, I look at my life as not a needle in the haystack. Yes, I was falsely apprehended, falsely accused, falsely convicted, sentenced to two lifes without the possibility of probation, parole, or suspension of sentence. Was said in the trial for my life to be deliberated on, like, "You either going to get life in prison, or we're going to send you to death row." Shane: Wow. Kiana: This is at the age of 16, just making 17.Scott: Swallow all that at the age of 16?Kiana: I had to swallow all of that, and now I have the opportunity to regurgitate that because now my pain is turning into passion. It's turning into my why. That's why I love waking up every morning. That's why I love opening my refrigerator. That's why I love playing with my daughter. Shoutout to my baby mama. Shoutout to my fiancé. I definitely got to say, what's happening T? I love you. A lot of these things that's taking place right now, I wouldn't do it without you on my side. Shane: Amen. Kiana: Yeah, definitely throw that in the space. The evolution of life sometimes, like even riding up here today, I've never been to Denham Springs a day in my life, but it felt like an epiphany. Getting off of this bridge, making this exit, I'm like, "Dang, they got a Cane's right here." [laughter] Kiana: I was tasting Cane's. It's basically trying to figure out, I am walking in the steps of my higher power, my divine energy. When I was laying in the cell, and I was like, "God, man, something got to happen." I woke up the next day, and I woke up the next day, and I woke up the next day. So, I'm looking at that right now, if we can kind of just think back to our prophetic literature that's in the books, and I'll say the Bible, Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, that's the acronym that I placed on it. Inside of this book, they have stories of great men. I placed myself inside of these great men while I was in that cell looking at these cinderblock walls, I had a 55-inch TV, so I read the story of Paul. Paul was a gangster. Paul wrote probably 85% of the book. Scott: And he marked a whole lot of people. Kiana: Man, he was a gangster. Paul used to rob, Paul used to steal, Paul used to kill, Paul was taking lives. That's for me. Let me get that move around. [laughter] Shane: He was more definitely--[crosstalk] Kiana: Move around, let me get that. Let me get that. Paul was incarcerated over 75% of his existence.Shane: Yes. Scott: And wrote a good portion-- Shane: And he was a great man.Kiana: Paul was incarcerated 75% of his existence.Shane: He was a great man.Kiana: He wrote books that stand the test of time till today. Prophetic hymns, metaphorical narrative that any culture can take and put it into their own existence. Every line, every piece, every scripture, every sentence, every dot, every comma means something. That's what we need to pay attention to in life. Every comma means something. If I had to trade my chicken plate so I could get on the phone, see people don't understand that type of narrative though. People don't understand that type of narrative. You see what I'm saying? Beatty: Tell everybody-Scott: Tell the laymen.Beatty: -what that means. Kiana: I spent 18 months in one of the most dehumanizing places that ever could have been created for a human being, and that was Camp J. Shane: Angola, Louisiana. Kiana: Angola, Louisiana. The Farm. Yes. So cooler one, cell 11. They got cell 10. Cell 11 was the last cell. They had a guy named Money that slept on side of me for 10 months. Every morning, he woke up singing, [in a singing tone] "It's been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change gon' come." Scott: Is that Money from RCC? Kiana: No, not that Money. This is the old Money--Scott: [crosstalk] Kiana: Yeah, I know who you're talking about. Money name was Alfred Baker. When I went to Camp J, Money had all been in Camp J for like 14 years at this time. Shane: Wow. Kiana: He got caught up-- [crosstalk] in that same cell. In that same sale. That's why I fight for solitary confinement today. Scott: Talk a little but about that, because I did hear you'd mentioned about solitary confinement kind of messed you up, so make sure touch on that. But solitary confinement, man, you'll go crazy sitting in--[crosstalk] Kiana: I've seen it. Scott: How did it affect you? Shane: Hold on. Chicken for the phone.Scott: Oh, yeah. Kiana: Okay. Shane: Keep us on point right there.Beatty: No. Are we talking trades? What are we doing?Kiana: So here we go, we're talking trades. So, I was in Camp J. The man come down, shift change, 6:00 and 6:00. We know shift change. 06:00, man come down. "Who wants to use the phone?" Friday, what's on Friday? In Unison: Chicken. Kiana: Exactly. Who wants to use the phone? Everybody hands coming out the bar. "Okay. Let me get them plates. How many people are not getting the chicken plate?"Beatty: [laughs] Kiana: Listen, I didn't talk to my-- Beatty: This is the guard?Kiana: This is the guard.Scott: He's trying to eat. Kiana: He's getting chicken so he could swing it on the other side of the town. Shane: You have to make an executive decision. Kiana: They got Joe's around the corner. So, you know it's a whole situation here. You only get one phone call every 30 days in Camp J at this time. Scott: Really? Kiana: I haven't talked to mom then. This was in '98. My mom got diagnosed with breast cancer. You've seen the space, my mom got diagnosed with breast cancer. I didn't know for like two and a half years that she was even-- She comes to see me one time, and her head was bald. I didn't know what was going on. Scott: Wow. She didn't tell you then?Kiana: She still didn't tell me. She just broke down crying. I'm like, "Baby, don't worry about it. We got this. I'm going to be able to give you your roses while you're still here." Shoutout, mom, she's still home. Every day, yes, I give her roses while she's still here. Scott: [crosstalk] -strong woman.Shane: Big love. Kiana: As you can see, my life revolved around the strength of this queen, and it shows. I'm going to try to amplify that to the best of my ability. Shoutout, mom, I love you. Anyway, I haven't talked to my mom in like three months at this time. What's going on? Every time I call, now I know that she was going through chemo, so she didn't even want to get on the phone weary. So, I'm talking to my sister, I'm talking to my brother, talking to my nephews. I'm talking to everybody but mom. I know, I know something ain't right. Something ain't right. She never did this. I was blessed my entire 17 years. Well, I spent 17 years in prison as a result of that conviction and still have 17 years on parole. I'm currently on parole.Scott: Unjustly.Kiana: Unjust. And currently on parole. Have 6 years remaining, been home 11 years. That was my main source of everything. Every month, Molly Diggs sent $100 to my account. Every month for 17 years. Man, if that's not a blessing, you know what I'm saying? Within itself because I used to take my $100 and split it down the middle so I could feed-- you were on the dome, you know what's happening.Shane: Yeah. Kiana: You know how'd that go. Shane: Believe me, I do.Kiana: This work that I'm doing out here, this is work that was prophetically distributing and manifesting itself in a can. I love brothers, I love you. It's how we do this. It's work that we got to do. But I'd be damned if I trade my chicken plate again though.Shane: That's right. [laughter] Kiana: I'd be damned if I traded that chicken plate again. Scott: Since we're talking about solitary, man, if you don't mind just kind of sharing a little bit about, A, how it affected you, how long you stayed in solitary, and then kind of tell the folks out there what solitary does to the mind. Because I have my own personal experience, I spent 11 months in solitary myself, sitting in cells. But I want to hear your take on it, and then I'll kind of chime in with mine.Kiana: Okay, so you want my professional take, or you want my personal experience? Scott: Personal experience.Shane: Personal. And keep it for the who? Layman?Beatty: Yeah, laymen, please. Name of the next movie, Only for the Layman. Kiana: When we're speaking about solitary confinement, let me put a definition to that first. Solitary confinement is a person placed in the one- or two-man cell for 23 hours or more without the ability of education, personal contact, air, exercise, everything that you are being deprived of. I'll just say deprived of all liberty and growth with no access to human contact. Basically, the first time that you are apprehended, when you get into a police car and they put the handcuffs on you and you go to a holding tank, let's call that solitary confinement. Some people may be placed in the cell with 14 people. Some people may be placed in the cell with two. Some people may be placed in the cell with one. Okay, so the effects of solitary confinement, what we're triggering here in Louisiana is the term "post-incarceration syndrome", and that is when a person who have spent a long time inside of any incarcerated state has mental transformations that may impede the normal ways of thinking.Now, that's where the tunnel comes in. It could be a mental disorder. It could be some similar to posttraumatic stress disorder. You could deal with insomnia, you could deal with claustrophobia, you could deal with depression, you can deal with-Scott: Anxiety. Kiana: -anxiety. There's so many different-- [crosstalk] yes. There's so many ways that you can kind of figure it out. So, when I first came home, I knew what I experienced personally. When I go to the bathroom, I take one leg on my [crosstalk] to take me a crap. Why do I do that? Because when I was in prison, I knew I had to be on guard at all times. Shane: All the time, every day. Scott: You can't stand up and fight with your pants down.Shane: No. Scott: [crosstalk] -free access to move around.Kiana: The thing about it is, when I came home, I still was continuing those traits until I realized, "Man, I could take my pants off. I could just slide them down right here. Nobody's going to come in the door and do me nothing." When I sit down to eat, my arm's on the table, and I'm doing what I'm doing because I know I got to be finished before this last dude is sitting down. That's a trigger for us. We all eat fast. Shane: I suffer from it right now.Scott: I still do. I've been home nine years, and I eat faster than most people. I'm in and out like that. Shane: [laughs] Kiana: So, I kind of compiled a lot of triggers that I identified as being posttraumatic effects of incarceration. Scott: From your stints in the cell blocks--[crosstalk] Kiana: Yes. Smell, sounds, certain things that I touch, certain things that touch me. Certain people that get around. I can't let nobody sit behind me while I'm in the car, if I'm in a movie theater. I can't go to a club. Like, a lot of those things were affecting me. During COVID-- this is when my father came into place. During COVID, I said, "You know what? The only way I'm going to understand my problem--" because I know it's a problem, but when I look around, I'm like, "Well, shit. What is normal? I'm not normal, but I see this dude here. He never been nowhere, but he more fucked up than me. He got issues. He got problems. You've been on here forever, and you calling me every day asking me for $20, $15, your daughter need shoes." Scott: Not Shane. Kiana: No. I'm just saying in general.Scott: I just want to clarify in case--[crosstalk] [laughter] Scott: Shane is a mooch. [laughs] Damn.Kiana: Just kind of figure it out, I traveled around Louisiana, I talked to over 275 individuals, and we talked about anything from-- and all of them were formerly incarcerated people.Scott: That's when 40--Kiana: That's when 40 for 40 Worldwide came into, during COVID.Shane: That's dope. Kiana: I knocked on doors. I took the camera to meet them where they were. We're going to talk about where you came from to become who you are today. Every individual that I talked to, they talk about every situation that I've experienced, situations that I may stumble across in the future. They gave me possible solutions that I could pull logic from. I'm like, "Damn, what can I do with this project? Okay, we're going to name it 40 for 40 Worldwide because I'm going to pull 40 of the most influential pieces out of this space, and I'm going to build a campaign in Louisiana that will allow people to come home and holistically heal." Whether it be through arts, whether it be through song, whether it be through poetry, whether it be through broadcast, whether it be through construction, whether it be through welding, whether it be through any mechanism, I feel we can do that as a channel. We can do that as a body of individuals. 40 for 40 Worldwide was to amplify the voices of formerly incarcerated people that have been through horrendous events in their life while serving time, ultimately gaining momentum to build 40 other individuals in 40 other states to implement some type of federal legislation that will add people returning home from incarceration into a protected class. Because there are over 40,000 collateral consequences that stop you from getting a job, from going to school, from getting insurance, from going to real estate school. There's so much that hinders you. It seems like people returning home from incarceration is the only social group that America still has permission to openly hate. Scott: I got denied for life insurance. Can't even get life insurance. Kiana: You see what I'm saying?Beatty: Yeah.Kiana: So, how can we humanize this space? In Louisiana, one out of every three individuals have been impacted by incarceration.Shane: Yes. Kiana: And we right here, three out of five, I don't know if the cameraman has a buddy or sister or brother or even if he'd been to prison. Cameraman: I'm just lucky I ain't been. [crosstalk] [laughter] Scott: Going back to the solitary thing, how long would you say in your 17 years that you spent just in solitary? Not in dormitories, but solitary. Kiana: Solitary confinement, out of 17 years, I've spent probably eight and a half. Close to nine. Scott: In solitary? Years? Kiana: Yes. Scott: Damn.Kiana: In Camp J, I spent close to 19 months. That was just from 1998 to 2000. When I first made it to Angola, me being a juvenile, they put me in the cell, they let me out to go into the dog pen for a while, and that was basically for a year. After that, minor offenses, because now I'm a boy transforming into a man in the man institution.Scott: You've got prove something.Kiana: It's not really proving it. It's just making sure that they don't prove me. I'm not here to prove who I am. Beatty: Preventive maintenance.Kiana: Yes. That's the type of person that I have been, is that I'm not here to prove that I'm a man. I'm here to prove that you're not going to fuck with me.Beatty: Yeah. Kiana: You know why? Because much respect is given, much respect is required. That's how I walk in life. I can have a relationship with Shane, and I can have a relationship with Scott. At the same time, my relationship with Shane and Scott is going to be identical because y'all deal with me identical. You feel what I'm saying? I'm not going to differentiate anything dealing with any situation in life. When I first went to Angola, my first time in the field, they called me Looney Tune. My number was 372220, I'll never forget it. I was at the end of the line. We in a line of 375 people do stuff with tools on their hand, and every time that man look around, they was [mimicking a shotgun] because I'm in the back trying to keep up. "Man, that dude crazy. Come here, Looney Tune. They're going to shoot you." Scott: Oh, the guards [crosstalk] shotguns--[crosstalk] Kiana: Yeah, because I can't keep up with the hose. I got locked up, every day is my first out in the field, I can't keep up with the hose. Shane: What did you say, Deuce Deuce? Kiana: That mean they lined up in tools. Beatty: Okay. I knew that. Kiana: You're not that lame. Scott: For the viewers.Kiana: For the viewers.Scott: For the viewers out there that don't know, when you go to Louisiana Department of Corrections State Penitentiary, you go onto the field when you get there.Kiana: You're picking cotton, man. Scott: Actually, we got Fat on here the other day, and he told his story about how they tried to make him go out there and pick cotton. Kiana: You're picking cotton, man, or you're going to ride like Fat.[laughter] Kiana: I'm telling you.Shane: As a [crosstalk] you're the number one.Cameraman: Camp J was so brutal.Kiana: That they shut it down. Cameraman: Yes. They closed--[crosstalk] Kiana: I had a hand in that.Scott: Talk about it. Kiana: I had a hand in that, man. So, it was a campaign. That was in 2013. Beatty: We're talking about the shutting down of Camp J if you didn't hear.Scott: Camp J is solitary confinement at Angola.Shane: It started in 2008. Kiana: Yeah. The campaign started in '08 but it actually got shut down in '13. Basically, man, just being able to lay in those cells and be like, "Man, this shit ain't right. I wish I had some people standing out fighting and fussing for me." When I came home, my first objective is, how can I get engaged? How can I get involved? What can I do? Man, I really would like to salute again. It's going to be a shoutout hour. You heard me shout out VOTE, Norris Henderson. Matter of fact, Norris's brother just got killed, man. So, we're going to lift him up, little daddy, man. Salute the little daddy. We lost a soldier. We lost a soldier, man. Definitely, I would like to give VOTE a shoutout in the space. They've been holding it down.Scott: Long time doing fighting work that most people, A, don't want to do, but, B, they can't do. Those guys, all formerly incarcerated, are leading the pack on criminal legal reform work in Louisiana. They got their hands in every-- dang, every piece of legislation that goes in front of state capitol for--[crosstalk] Shane: They're built to do that. Kiana: Definitely. Scott: They just opened up the little building too, right? Kiana: Yeah, definitely this year. I was a volunteer for VOTE when I first got into the game. Like in 2012, 2013, we did a lot of work around restoring the voting rights for formerly incarcerated people in Louisiana. Act 636.Scott: Then, they had a campaign to end solitary confinement in Camp J. Kiana: Well, no, this was kind of before. The Camp J space, I was on some freelance stuff. I partnered with The Village Keepers. That was the name of Jefferson Parish. I partnered with The Village Keepers, and they were doing some work around solitary confinement in Jefferson Parish. The work that I did toward Camp J was basically I told my story twice, how it was inhumane and how I laid in the cells and really like phantom and wondered if people were really out there putting in work. I didn't have the opportunity to speak at the capitol, but I knocked on some doors and passed out some flyers, got people involved, did a lot of work toward that end, but that was basically a backend thing because DOC was ready to kind of make amends with that space. Man, it was a dungeon.Shane: [crosstalk] -reparation for people. Kiana: Yeah, it was hell. What they did in '08 was they shut down the Boot tiers in 2008, they shut down the Shark tiers. The Shark tiers, they were like cells inside of a cell. You've got the cells and then you had had the big old Boot that slammed-- boom, slamming the front with the little trace slot right there. That's all you had to really move around. In 80--Scott: Wait, wait. Shane: In other states.Kiana: Oh, yeah, definitely. Scott: I'm trying to picture my own experience in solitary. When I've been on it, it's a cell block-- Is it something different than that? I haven't been on Camp J--[crosstalk]Kiana: This is the view. A lot of people may not picture this, but you can get it. If you're walking down the Beavers working cell block, imagine you take half of the hall out, where the cell doors are originally there, you take half of that tier out and you bring that out further with concrete blocks. Like a concrete steel block will come all the way out. On that concrete block, you have a steel door that slams, boom, with the [mimics locking]. You come through that door, and then you walk down that narrow hall, maybe halfway from here to like that door, and then the cells open and then you go on the cells. So, they lock the cells. Scott: So, they don't rack them back--[crosstalk] Kiana: No, they don't rack them back until they come to the cell and then handcuff and shackle you. Then, they come step out of that boot door and rack them back close, now you just in the space and then they open up the big door. Shane: In other states, states like Illinois and Chicago, Indiana, they call them two-door cells, because you have your first door, open that up. When they walk in, it's like maybe 6ft of space, officer walks to that cell, handcuff you, shackle you and everything and then leaves you out. Scott: Mind you, if something were to happen in your cell, whether it's medical or if you're sharing, I don't know how Camp J is, do they share [crosstalk] space?Kiana: That's one-man cell. Scott: If something was going down in the cell and not only are you behind bars, but you're also behind this barricaded force, you have no way of getting in touch with the guards to come, "Hey, I'm having a heart attack."Kiana: Can't even hear you. Scott: They can't hear you. So, you're just left to die. A lot of people that are on Camp J are awaiting trials. Especially if they're high-profile cases and different things like that, they might not necessarily be guilty of the crime, but they're sitting back there and they can possibly die because, A, all types of things happen medically when they become incarcerated.Kiana: Oh, man. They were coming through the walls. Shane: Breaking cinderblocks. Kiana: Coming through the walls. Busting through the walls.Scott: Who was? Kiana: The inmates. They bust through, they could bust through the walls. Scott: They come get you? Kiana: Yes. Scott: Oh, wow. Kiana: If they want you, they bust, they coming through the walls. I'm talking about there's so many times that they had to replaster the cinderblocks. Scott: So, they just going to get moles coming through?Kiana: Moles? Shane: No.Scott: How they getting through--[crosstalk] Kiana: You can use--[crosstalk] Shane: [crosstalk] Scott: Oh, you're talking about the guy on the side--[crosstalk] Kiana: In 1998, they took the block-- you know in the cellblock, they have the flap where you put your stuff in there? You take that up out of there, and you can go through the wall. Scott: No shit. Kiana: Yeah, you can go through the wall. Scott: Dudes are getting jugged up.Kiana: Going through the wall. Shane: Getting raped.Kiana: Listen to me, going through the wall.Scott: That's wild, man. Kiana: Listen, man, that is a world inside of a world, man. So, being mindful enough, and that's what I mean by, you guys are survivors. I didn't acknowledge my self-worth. I didn't acknowledge my value. But I think my job now is to pump that into you guys, because y'all are survivors, and y'all are experts in the way that this criminal justice world is about to be reformed. We cannot continue to allow people to plan meals for tables that they never slid a seat under. How can you give me cheese and I'm lactose intolerant? I don't eat cheese and ice cream. I can't deal with that. But you're still putting that on my table, and you wonder why I got diarrhea. Shane: Because you just don't know.[laughter] Kiana: You wonder why I got diarrhea. Scott: That's a nice analogy. Kiana: You wonder why my communities are underresourced. I got to go find it. I can't buy toilet paper, so I'm going to come shit on your lawn. [laughter] Kiana: I'm just trying to figure like that, because that's what we got to understand, man. Life is about who we are. We are life. We are the movers and shakers. We create every sphere, every business. Like the United States of America is a 501(c)(3) organization. It is a nonprofit. We bought into that. When we were born, our family signed our birth certificates and Social Security cards and put us into this entity. We have to understand, we need to pull control of that entity. Use our democracy, get out there and vote and put people in positions who have your best interests at heart.Don't just come to my house [chuckles] and shoot me some sugar. And now I'm walking, I've got a banana in my tailpipe. I'm blowing up every time I go somewhere. It's crazy. And that's what we're allowing, that's what we have been allowing. And I hope that people understand that this work I do, I can't put a tag on it, bro. I do everything. I do reform. I do litigation. I do policy. I do programs. I do training. I hold peer support groups, like the same groups that we held inside with Project Detour. Beatty: Shoutout.Kiana: Shoutout Project Detour. That was started in RCC. Scott: Turn around, show the back. Can you turn around?Kiana: I could, but we're going to wait [crosstalk] shot at the end.Beatty: We'll put that later. Scott: Like a whole baseball player. Kiana: Definitely, man.Scott: He did homerun.Kiana: But, yeah, this was an organization that we started in Rayburn, man, in RCC. Scott: Okay. Kiana: We started this in RCC, and we've seen the impact on the individuals on the tier with it.Scott: RCC is Rayburn Correctional Center in Angie, Louisiana. It's a state penitentiary. Kiana: Yes. We've seen the impact on individuals on the compound, people that didn't give a rattin' ass about nothing. Scott: Give us an example of one of the guys.Kiana: Reggie. Scott: Quetan?Kiana: Yes. Reggie was in the block. As a matter of fact, Reggie is in Austin right now.Scott: Okay. I knew he moved out there.Kiana: Yeah, he's staying in Austin. I've seen him when I was on a fellowship with REDF. Shoutout, REDF, that's my accelerator teaching me how to turn my business into a business. Yeah, I needed that. Just floating on the wings, man. I want to say, yeah, man. Ooh. I did like 80 hours of training in like four days. But anyway--Scott: Who is this?Kiana: REDF Accelerator. Scott: Is that a program or a guy? Kiana: That's a program. My fellowship. I'm part of a fellowship. REDF Accelerator. Scott: Okay, cool. Kiana: So, yeah, definitely. Partnering with 18 other entrepreneurs across the state. They chose us out of like-- 500 employment social enterprises is what we're calling our business at this point. Just trying to figure out how can we figure out those key performance indicators, man, and make sure that double line bottom is on point. Scott: You said you ran into Reggie.Kiana: Yeah, I ran into Reggie, man. And Reggie now is a photographer. He's doing some great work. Shane: Wow.Kiana: He's doing some great work, man. Reg is really holding it down. Scott: You ran into Reg at Rayburn.Kiana: Reg was an asshole. Scott: Yeah. Kiana: You know, Reg stayed in and out the blocks. Reg will fight. Reg will curse you out. Reg will jump on the free man. He'll end up on Snow when he's housing on Wind.Scott: Snow is the working cellblocks. Kiana: Yeah. Shoutout Rayburn. But, yeah, definitely. Once we started Project Detour, started with Pat, Vladi, all of us was the board in that space. We've seen how Reggie-- there was countless other Reggies that was a part of that. We've seen a development in that space. Once we start showing them that they can take ownership in their own personal development, we've seen it, understanding that we're not just going to talk about Sigmund Freud and Eric Burns. We're not going to talk about the three personality traits. We know you understand what they are, but this is who created them and this is how they created them. And we can do the same.Once we've seen that, built that brotherhood, and Reggie's turned from a writeup every week to a writeup and no writeups in two, three years. So, we see that it's working. We see that they start taking ownership and accountability for their own actions. Why can't that be replicated out here? Scott: That's what you're doing now.Kiana: I came home in 2011, man. Project Detour was founded in 2013, once I figured out how business was supposed to look.Scott: So, you came home in 2011. Tell us about your transition out, some of the challenges you had, and then let's kind of talk about all of-- this dude's got his hand in 100 different pots that he created. I'm not talking about pots that other people created that he's jumping into. He created those pots. So, let's talk about that. Tell us about the challenges you faced coming home. Kiana: I always was a smart guy, I could say. I know how to read and write. So, the challenges that I faced were systemic challenges because the physical challenges, I was able to maneuver around them. For an example, I came home on a Wednesday. Friday, I was working as a crane mechanic. Never touched a crane a day in my life. Don't know what a crane looked like, but I was hired as a crane operator. Riding down Fourth Street, turned down Engineers Row, see [unintelligible 00:45:21] "crane operators, hiring now. Crane operators, hiring now." I pulled into H&E. Shoutout to H&E Equipment. Pulled into H&E parking lots, sat down. One guy comes out, I said, "Hey, man, what do you do?" He said, "I'm a crane operator." I said, "What y'all operating?" And he said, "Man, [unintelligible 00:45:38] it's a walk 7200s, 41000s, 4000s." [laughter] Kiana: I'm like, "All right, cool." Scott: I got that. Kiana: I go home--Scott: I got my driver's license. [laughter] Kiana: I just got my driver's license. I'm 34 years old, man, I just got my driver's license for the first time in my life. I'm happy. So, I go home, YouTube University. YouTube University. I jumped on YouTube.Beatty: Shoutout to YouTube University. Kiana: Jumped on YouTube, man. Put in "manual to [unintelligible 00:46:03] 4100s, 41000, 7200s, 72,000s." They told me, man, like, "This is what you do. This is how you start it. This is how you grease your lines. Check your lines before you get in there." Next day, I went over there. I went back to H&E, filled out an application. Have you ever been convicted of a felony? I checked no. If I check yeah, they're not even going to talk to me. Right? Scott: Right. I don't blame you.Kiana: Yeah, I check no.Scott: I'm all for it. I support it. Kiana: I check no. They took my application that day, they called me back the next day. Actually, I was at the head, because minority crane operators are nine and void. Scott: High demand. Kiana: Yes, nine and void. Really, really nine and void. I ain't no shit about no crane. I know you can make $50 to operate the crane for 10 minutes. Shane: Yes, sir. Kiana: I didn't know that. $50 an hour, and you up there 12 hours a day, but you're only working for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. They called me, and I went in the next day. I had my nice shoes on, my suit, I'm job ready. I'm ready for this. I'm prepared. And that's what a man like-- you could start at 41? I'm like, "Yeah, I can start." He said, "Come on, let's go. We don't need the interview. I just want to see if you could do it." So, we went out there, I walked around the crane, looked up under it, popped the bottom where the lines were at. I always checked the grease lines. When I did that, said, "Hey, man, we're going to get you trained."Scott: We got one professional. Kiana: That was basically all it took. I worked there for my first two and a half, three years.Scott: Let me ask you a question. The no box on the application, that never came up?Kiana: It never came up until my passion of what I wanted to do in life. It started really burning me because I started getting frustrated with waking up in the morning.Scott: Working for somebody else?Kiana: Not really working for somebody else. I'm not aligning myself with what I'm supposed to be doing. Scott: Okay, I feel you. I understand that.Kiana: I'm making good money. At this point, I'm a crane mechanic. I went to training. I just started getting some things to really put me in a position to be this operator. But I'm waking up in the morning and I'm like--Shane: You're not happy.Beatty: Yeah.Scott: You don't feel like you feel--[crosstalk] Kiana: I'm in the tool room and the conversations that I was having a year ago, I'm not having these conversations with these people. I'm not feeling it. I'm starting to see myself drift more into Project Detour, because now I'm starting to take my check, and I'm taking young kids in my community, and we go and get some chicken and sit under the park and talk for 45 minutes, asking them what they need. Now, I'm taking my check, and now I'm helping them get school uniforms and putting shoes on their feet and attending the football games and trying to help out with the coaches and talking to the students.Then, I started actually getting in tune with the courts because a lot of my young brothers had records. I had to sign them off on my [unintelligible [00:44:53] because their daddy in jail and their mom out on drugs. So, I started seeing that I was needed in the space that I wasn't occupying. I was getting money. I'm straight. I'm driving a Range Rover, this is in '13, I got a 12 Range Rover, just came out, of BMW. I'm doing good. Scott: Bought by H&E crane money? Kiana: Yes, definitely. Shane: Mechanic money that is.Kiana: But when you're not aligned with your values in life, man, you can have all the riches in the world, it's not going to sit right with you. It's not going to feel because right now, man, I feel I'm in the best place in my life that I have been in my life, and I look at every day as me getting better than I was yesterday, because my worst day out here subsides the best day I had inside of there. Shane: That's right. Kiana: It oversees, it just demolishes. Scott: From H&E, you just said, "Hey, look, I'm going to--" [crosstalk] Kiana: Yeah, I've got to go. I've got to start what I want to do. I want to start my passion. Scott: So, what was next? Kiana: So, Project Detour was next. Project Detour, full-fledged. Got the board, got the bylaws, got the policies and procedures in order, got everybody on the card. We just started doing a lot of mentoring in the city, and then I went back to school. Now, it's me running the organization, attending Delgado Community College full time. Shoutout Delgado. Shane: Big shoutout--[crosstalk] Scott: What's their mascot?Kiana: The Patriot. Scott: The Patriot. Kiana: Yeah, they're a patriot. Scott: Delgado Patriot. Kiana: If I got you wrong, shoutout Delgado. [laughter] Kiana: Something like that a buccaneer or a patriot. But, yeah, definitely I'm getting my criminal justice degree. Actually, I have eight more credits that I need, so I'll be graduating next year. Scott: Are you still going right now? Kiana: Yeah, I'm attending SUNO right now. Shoutout SUNO. It's a lot that I'm doing, man. I'm trying to better myself in all aspects, not just my personal outside life, but my internal being. All of that comes into the space, and I don't think that I'm going to be fully, fully healed until I get exonerated. So, that's what I'm working on right now.Shane: Fulfilling that passion, that burning desire. Kiana: I'm working with the district attorney now with Jefferson Parish. We've been having maybe a few meetings, a couple of meetings, and that's how I want to close the film with him saying, "Yeah, Kiana, we think that you have done everything that you've need to need to do in the course of your life, man, and we want to honor your wishes." [crosstalk] Scott: Are you working with--? Kiana: Paul Connick? Scott: No, the organization that does the--Kiana: The Innocent Project? Scott: Yeah.Kiana: Funny story about that, man. The Innocent Project, they don't work with individuals who's free. Scott: Oh, they only do incarcerated.Kiana: Yes. That was a problem that I really didn't understand when I went to them, because, trust me, I probably ruffled every feather in the state of Louisiana trying to see what can I do, until I was just like, "You know what? Just keep walking in your purpose. It's not what you're doing, is where you're going." That's the overall piece of this entire synopsis, man. I think that's when I'm going to get completely holistically healed. Well, I could be able to get exonerated. I've done a lot of work and then once I get exonerated, I want to continue to be a force. Scott: I want to ask you this. I'm completely guilty of all the crimes that I committed. So, when I was in prison, I had to-- go ahead.Beatty: Allegedly committed. [laughter] Scott: No, I did all that. Kiana: He was convicted, so it's over. Scott: It's over. I was in prison, and I had to swallow the pill, "Okay, you've done a lot of dumb shit and I'm paying for it." But I can't imagine the mental that a person must go through in your situation that spent 17 years in prison and not have done the crime. Dude, I don't want you to go into great detail because I know, but what's the mental process for that? Kiana: It was basically piggybacking what you just said. I have done a lot of shit in my life. I wasn't a choir boy when I was out here. A lot of things that I didn't do, it shouldn't have amount to that sentence, that such severe sentence. But just being open minded, you can imprison me physically, but you can't entrap my mind, that was kind of like the cage bird sings. I strive myself on education because I was so uneducated sitting in this trial. Only thing I could understand is objection, overrule, sustained, objection, overrule, sustained. What does that mean? I know when they say that, the judge say something that counters what they say. So, I felt stupid. It felt like I was in Charlie Brown. [onomatopoeia] That's how my entire trial felt. And my trial was like nine days, the first one. Might I add that it was a non-unanimous jury? Shout out to the UJC. Scott: [crosstalk] -nonunanimous jury. You want to explain what that means real quick for our layman? Kiana: Yeah, for the laymen. Non-unanimous jury, I was found guilty on two counts of first-degree murder, non-unanimously, meaning that 1 person out of the 12 said that I was innocent, saying that the state did not prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, which the law states that you should be judged by a jury of your peers and unanimously deliberated upon. Louisiana and Oregon were the last two states that upheld the non-unanimous jury pool, which means that 10 people can say that you're guilty, and two people can say that they don't believe that you're guilty, and you still can be sent to prison for life. And that happened to me twice. My first trial was 11-1. I was found guilty and sentenced to life. In 1998, with the great help of Christopher Aberle, my appellate attorney, shoutout Chris, He put together a wonderful brief, and my case was remanded and set aside for further proceedings.I was sent back to Jefferson Paris, tried again for second-degree murder, and I was found guilty again. That jury deliberations were 10-2. Two people said this time that, "Oh no, he didn't do that." And 10 people said, "Yes." I was found guilty again on a lesser charge, which was manslaughter. They sentenced me to 34 years under Act 138, which gave me 17 years inside of a penal institution and 17 years remaining on parole. Honestly, we have right now currently over 5700 people that are incarcerated, serving life or high numbers on a non-unanimous jury. That PJI, shoutout PJI, Promise of Justice Initiative, they're working closely trying to get those individuals home on that. In 2018, I had the-- man, that was one of the peak campaigns in my existence. Scott: I do want to talk about the documentary that I had the fortunate privilege of watching.Kiana: Kiana's Mission. Scott: Yeah, man. I said at the beginning of this podcast, it takes to make me cry. My wife would say different. She says I'm a big teddy bear. I don't believe that. I believe I'm a big lion. But I did, and I teared up and it touched me on multiple spots in the documentary. I want you to talk about that a little bit and then talk about 40 for 40 and then Roots. Just tell everybody about what inspired the documentary and how long you've been doing it. Kiana: Definitely. Kiana's Mission is a documentary, like I said a little bit earlier, it's a story about resilience. It's a story about overcoming the hurdles of life and coming out the end still feeling prosperous. I've been shooting this documentary maybe about-- what we in '22 now? So, maybe about nine years, having the ability to get introduced to a camera. When I came home, I learned that the camera is therapeutic, being able to sit down and tell pieces about you and not feel vulnerable, because eventually somebody may see this and it may help change their lives.What I did was I just walked around with the camera with me all day taking basic photos, and then I was like, "You know what, bro? I think it's time that you start putting your life in perspective. How can you get your story heard?" Because everybody has a story. Not everybody makes it to cable. Everybody has their intention. So, just having the ability to be in a position to where my life work, it needs to be televised. So, I'm working with Roots of Renewal. Shoutout Roots. Shane: Shoutout big Roots.Kiana: I'm the ED over there. Scott: What's Roots? Kiana: Roots is a reentry organization geared to our young men, 18 to 26, reentering home from incarceration. Scott: Is that in New Orleans? Kiana: Yes, New Orleans. Actually, we're in three different parishes. We're in New Orleans. We're in Jefferson and we're in Terrebonne. Just being available for those young men. What we do is we purchase blighted properties throughout the city's area, rehab them, give the guys job skills so that they may be productive in the construction field if they choose to.Beatty: That's awesome. Kiana: Yeah, definitely. Scott: They get any type of certification? Kiana: Yes, definitely. So, I pride myself on training.Scott: Okay.Kiana: I think that we can't go through life without the proper tools. Once they come to Roots, what we do-- In the documentary, you can see that I have that camera setting up, interviewing my young men, because that's the first initial engagement. I want you to understand that I want to know how you were when you first came to me. And then throughout the middle course of this pace, we're going to do another one, just to do a recap, a summary on what you have done. I use the Poverty Stoplight method. Shout out Dr. Martin Burt. He's running for president of Paraguay. Man, I got you, you're my dog. I'm on your team. Beatty: You've got my vote.Kiana: You already know. I was introduced to the Poverty Stoplight, Dr. Martin Burt, maybe in about 2017. Scott: Is he from New Orleans? Kiana: No. He's from Paraguay. Scott: Oh, Paraguay. That's the country?Kiana: Yeah. Scott: Where is that at? I'm geographically challenged. Kiana: That's like in the Middle East over there by Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, but not in that area. Scott: Oh. He's running for the president of that country.Kiana: Of that country, yes. He's already the secretary.Scott: Hey, my boy got president friends. Kiana: Yeah, definitely. I'm actually in his book. You could go check it out Who Owns Poverty. Kiana Calloway is in that space. He's a professor at Georgetown University. Scott: I'm going to get your autograph before you leave.Kiana: Oh, man. I got some things--Scott: [crosstalk] -now before you blow really big.Kiana: I've got something on the horizon, man.Scott: I bet you do.Kiana: So, working with Dr. Martin Burt, we sat down, and he told me about how broke poverty down into six dimensions. Income and infrastructure, education and employment, housing and motivation, and integrity and insurance. It shows how we can put these indicators into a life map so that you can actually see what poverty looks like. Instead of feeling it, now you can see it. Scott: How does it work as far as showing the guys? Is it a progress chart or something? Kiana: Yeah, definitely. It gives back in data on-- it comes into the red, yellow, and green. What I did was I restructured that model because the way that poverty looks in Paraguay, it don't look this way in Uptown New Orleans.Shane: That's right. Kiana: What we did was we developed the New Orleans spectrum, I'm the parenting hub here in the United States that had this data tool. Anyway, so what we did was we identified, if you're coming home from incarceration, it's practically like you're bankrupt. You're coming home after filing bankruptcy. You have nothing. Income, transportation, housing, internet access, a clean bed to sleep in, all of those are indicators of poverty, but we don't understand that, so when we come home--Shane: And it's vital.Kiana: Very vital. They're vital to you reentering, and they're vital to recidivism. If you start with Roots of Renewal in the 26 survey, and out of the 26 questions, you have 25 reds, we got work to do. Like, we got work to do. Scott: So, they fill out an assessment. Kiana: Yes. Scott: And then, you track their progress based on that assessment. Kiana: As we work forward, the tools that they need.Scott: [crosstalk] -red to yellow to green. Kiana: Reds to yellows to greens. Scott: Nice. Kiana: We try to achieve that in four months because Roots of Renewal is a 16 week job training program. Inside of that program, which Project Detour, is over the programming side of it, it gives personal development courses, financial literacy courses. It gives critical thinking, transaction analysis. We deal with the rehabilitation of the being because--Shane: Of the individual.Kiana: Of the individual. We need you to be in the right space if we want to send you to this job. So, we've got to help you build this resume. We partner with local construction companies throughout those areas so that long-term employment is definitely in the realms.Scott: After the program.Kiana: Exactly. Along with lifetime membership, alumni perks, because once you get in the Roots, man, you're a brother now. It's not that you just come through a program or a project. No, you got my seven numbers. You could call my seven numbers at any given time, and they do that right now. Scott: It's awesome, man. Kiana: Yeah, definitely. So, that's Roots of Renewal. I began to be the ED at Roots of Renewal in 2019. I started there as the programs manager, just dealing with the programs with Project Detour. I was contracted in through Amy and Brendan, who were the actual founders of this space, as the programs manager. I definitely just dealt with peer support groups. Like, how can we develop a curriculum that's going to show the impact of these individuals actually reentering? We got a non-recidivism rate of 98.9%. Only one brother, and that's Javelle. He comes home next month, I believe. Shoutout, Javelle, we got you when you get out here, man. Just trying to stay active, implying myself into a space the way I know that I'm desperately needed. Scott: Man, you're doing it. Also, an Instagram page that caught my eye that you also set up, and it's a project that you work on 40 for 40. Tell the audience about the 40 for 40, A, what they need to look up, and then, B, what prompted it and how that went.Kiana: 40 for 40 Worldwide. Definitely, man. Like I said, during COVID me, Durado Brooks-- Shoutout, Durado. Mark Kerry. Shoutout, Mark. We traveled Louisiana, man, and we had an opportunity of interviewing over 400 individuals that's formerly incarcerated. Over 400 formerly incarcerated entrepreneurs. A lot of these individuals have their own businesses, started their own businesses. We went to donut shops, we went to sandwich shops. We went to Twisted Wings, Twisted Burgers. We went out there while people were cutting grass and washing cars. Everywhere that they were, when we say we were in their space, we were pulling up on them for like an hour. We had the conversation, man. "Tell me what it's like after incarceration?" Man, the stories were beautiful. I just had to try to figure out how can we take that collage and turn it into power because our stories are powerful within themselves. So, during COVID, me, Durado, Mark, we sat down on the videos, we kept going over them. Actually, this year, I said, "Man, we need to do something with this. Let's drop a Black History Month project." So, that's where the Instagram came from. We drop one story every day of Black History Month-Scott: For 28 days. Kiana: For 28 days, you're going to see 28, and we're going to do the same thing next Black History Month. We're going to try to replicate that. Scott: It's like an annual thing. Kiana: Yes. It don't make sense to just have it once. We correlated stories, we drop one every day, and we correlated these stories of impacted survivors today. If you could read the actual captions, we're putting them in the spaces of W. E. B. Du Bois. We put them in the spaces with Medgar Evers. We put them in the spaces with Fred Hampton. Like, we're putting them in the same energy to let them know that man, the narrative that our ancestors were speaking-- and I don't say ancestors, I'm talking like, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, 60 years ago. The same narrative that they were speaking, we're still saying that same narrative. I think that we need to wake up and understand, how can we put a face to pain? They went through a lot, but they're overcomers. They're survivors. So, yeah, go punch into Instagram, 40 for 40 Worldwide. If you are in any other state that has a jail, contact us, because we're coming into your state. Jim: All right. I don't ever do this, by the way. I normally sit back behind that camera unless I'm running my podcast. But I'm going to tell you what you inspired me--Scott: What's your podcast?Jim: Local Leaders: The Podcast, Bloody Angola. I produce Real Life Real Crime with Woody Overton and got a bunch more coming out. I've listened to everything that you said, and inspiring. Inspiring shit. I'll tell you-- Kiana: Appreciate it.Shane: Real shit too. Jim: Yes, exactly. What impresses me the most about you is you said something a few minutes ago. You give back a lot. A true leader gives back. We are raised in our lives to believe being first in anything is the leader, winning. No, giving back is winning. You have done nothing but have people-- in my opinion, people try to hold you down, and it seems like the harder you get held down, the harder you push back. And that's an innate quality. It's rare and impressive, man. I want to obviously shout you out for that. But I have one question. Before all this happened in your life, we
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